In the UK "Socialists" would have come round and put rock salt on the road while you were asleep, thus saving you from making this Bad Analogy.

They irony is that Google IS paying AP for their content. Millions of dollars according to the BBC news article

The other three factors mentioned are economic, are poor people more likely to have vinyl flooring than, say, wood flooring? Anecdotally it would seem so to me...

Anyone who manages to get funding to attempt to falsify this theory will be onto a good thing...

Skype for business is truly awful. There is no support , their software locks users out of their accounts randomly along with their credit, it also blocks them from the business account randomly, oh and did I mention there is no way to contact skype?

I can deal with the lack of support and dropped calls in their free version, but as soon as I start paying them money I expect to at least have some level of contact with the company and people who are paying a considerable amount (and there are people spending thousands complaining in their forum) will expect personal contact. If they ever want to turn a profit I suggest they get this part of their business sorted or they are boned.

The BBC calls them narcissists: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7943906.stm

Yes, a generation of self centred jerks who've never been told they're wrong; I look forward to the bright new future...

That only proves that they're *not* rapid free marketeers, not that they *are* left wing. Every government around the world has effectively nationalised its banks, N Rock was the very first and they obviously decided that the political ramifications of using the N word were too much to bear. Of all the banks only Lehman was allowed to collapse and, once again, that was soon considered A Bad Thing. Now they are all just nationalised, no sorry, "bailed out".

Proof that they are not lefties? The privatisation of Royal Mail. Not even Maggie, in her wildest fantasies, dreamt of doing that. It doesn't make sense even to them, but they desperately want to do it no matter what.

Please point me to some (real) evidence that New Labour is left wing in any way whatsoever...

Can we now stack people more efficiently so they take up less space?

You are kidding right? This is some form of humor? Altavista at the end was a very lame joke. Yes google is poor if you happen to be searching for ring tones or asbestos lawyers but 99.9% of searches are very good. With altavista you were lucky if you got ANY genuine results.

Based on what? There might have been more porn as a percentage of all web pages, but I can GUARANTEE there is absolutely more out there now. Also what on earth are you looking for that you can't find right now in two clicks from google?

Things move on; embrace change. Although it makes people really angry chnage is rarely bad and the past is always viewed through a lameness filter.

heh, that's funny, 7 years ago Windows 98 was the best operating system that anyone had ever used and XP was the unstable new PoS that no-one was ever going to use and was going to be Microsoft's death knell. How times change...

They couldn't make ships that would routinely survive the antarctic sea until about 1750. How could they be be maps of antarctica in 1500?

The iphone is very pertinent. Because it happens to be much better than the compeition it is becoming a defacto monopoly. At some presumably the eu will make apple offer IE on it and open up the app store to all comers? I know if i was MS i'd would be having my lobbyists pointing this out rather forcefully.

It's somehwat ironic that safari is by far the worst thing about the iphone.

Actually that was one of the things we were looking at (without the electric arcing); there ARE very few low angle impact craters. There are a range of reasons but the largest is that an impact crater looks round even for pretty low impact angles. It has to be like 75 degrees from perpendicular to show any serious deformation (IIRC). On mars you also have an atmosphere to deal with and any body coming in at that kind of angle will just skip off, so only the ones relatively close to perpendicular will get through.

I am not. I am however frustrated by the singular lack of real progress that anyone's made in the 15 years since I was involved. Most of the Spirit/Opportunity mission seems to be mainly about confirming stuff that we were already pretty sure of, plus getting a few more pictures.

Which is not to say driving a buggy around mars is not pretty cool, but it's not really going anywhere.