"They are young girls, we can see from the photos. We think that perhaps they are not well informed about the rules," he said.

People are almost never well informed about the rules. When I left school, I didn't get a book of laws that informed me I'd have to pay tax (and how). The only reason I knew what to do was because I took advice from other self employed family members, so I've paid all my taxes throughout the years, no problems.

But.. a lot of people sell things at casual sales, barter services, and do things online without paying tax. It's wrong, but I have a little sympathy for them, because this stuff just isn't taught in schools and the authorities don't go to any lengths to inform people about taxation issues. I mean, how many regular folks who barter things pay the tax on those transactions? Most people I know wouldn't even realize they have to!

Sim City 4 is a great game, I still play it once and a while. They need something that had the gameplay of Sim City 4, but with some improvements in gameplay and real 3D rendered buildings.

Agreed, although to be honest, something like Sim City 4 that actually works would be a start. Sim City 4's Mac port is a shameful piece of software engineering - unstable, buggy, slow as molasses (on an octo core Mac Pro, no less). The PC version is better but has a tendency to fall over when your city gets really large.. and this is a 5+ year old game.

All that said, I'd definitely put down even, say, $250 for a Sim City 5 that delivered, but I doubt we'll get one any time soon.

I agree, and when that occurs there'll be a lot more payola, bribed reviews, and "product placement" directly into content than there is now. Sure, it already goes on, but it'll be rife if advertising revenues dry up.

Thanks ad blockers for making content even worse than it already is. Congrats!

All dynamic scripting languages are "uber ultra slow" then, by your measure. Ruby 1.9 betters or equals the performance PHP, Perl and Python 3 in the latest Alioth Shootout.

You replied to this twice over the span of a week? People.. :)

IBM is already a huge company. Market cap of $124bn. Sun won't make a dent. Market cap of less than $4bn. Yep, Sun is only 3% the size of IBM - it'd be like a dog eating a fly.

A Levels are a form of qualification that are typically earned after two years of study from age 16 to 18 (although they can be taken in later life, as necessary). Coupled with GCSEs (qualifications you receive when you finish high school at 16) they're the qualifications you use to apply to university.

The key point is that (until some recent law changes) high school (or secondary school, as we tend to call it) finishes at age 16 in the UK. I left school at 16 and went straight out to work, for example. It gets a bit confusing though because I have no A Levels (having left school at 16) but I could probably get on to an undergraduate course as a "mature student" due to the experience I have in my fields.

Definitely RTCW. Best online game I've played bar none - I got hooked into it for about a month solid. Sadly when I went back after several more months, it'd pretty much died. I've not found anything to come close to the gameplay (well, except Battlefield 2) and the way you get teamwork even from random folks on a public server.

Bad metaphor. You don't automatically buy anything by seeing an ad.

A better metaphor is going into a museum or similar tourist attraction (cathedral, art gallery, etc) and NOT putting any money in the donations box. It's not illegal, and it's not even going to get you kicked out, but it's rude, disrespectful, and will show up just what sort of person you are.

Funny when one looks at the statistics, but being that so many, many more people die of preventable car accidents and of heart attacks from eating too much junk food, why is it that the same expenditures aren't lavished on those areas?

You go on to say that it's based around the government's desire for "authority" but I don't think this is true - the government is not incompetent or evil enough for this.

I think people are genuinely more fearful of being knifed in the street, intimidated by threatening teenagers, and suffering burglaries, etc, than they are of dying of being obese or in a car crash. You're more likely to die of a heart attack or a car crash than getting knifed by an unruly mob, but it's the fears and desires of the populace that drives policies, not logic or statistics.

I am a big fan of CCTV and the like, but I have more immediate fear for the security of my family on the streets than I do for their health thirty years down the line (sure, I care about that too, but it's not such an immediate "we must do something" type threat).

This picture of Woz practicing doesn't show him as being particularly large. You get +100 virtual karma points from me for that Fantasia reference though.

In the original UK show (that Dancing With The Stars is derived from) last year, "Strictly Come Dancing", they had a rather old and none-too-thin political correspondent called John Sergeant on the show. No idea why, but the reaction to it was a bit of a surprise.. more people tuned in, and people really got behind the guy even though his dancing wasn't too good.

He got through week after week just because of the overwhelming number of public votes. I guess people really love a cute (old) underdog. And.. so perhaps it'll go with Woz. People like to see regular joes (as much as Woz is a regular joe) rather than glossy celebs all the time. Perhaps Woz will resonate with America the way John did with us.

(John eventually quit the show because he thought he was taking the attention away from those who could actually dance well each week.)

As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.

Are you serious? Is hip-hop and R&B the only form of music? Most modern folk, rock, and classical recordings have far more fidelity (thus more authentic to the original sound of performance) than those made twenty or fifty years ago.

Someone defecating or urinating is usually totally nonsexual too, but we shouldn't be allowed to put pictures of it up on Facebook if it contravenes their rules.

So this is why Mac users have such larger brains than Windows users!