El Reg a few years back had a story that in the nineties, one of the big four banks in the UK had its security team compromised. New cards had a PIN set from only one of three choices. That meant that anyone intercepting a card who knew the three could go haywire with the account. The customer wouldn't know and the bank couldn't explain it.

Could have been cock and bull, but it's a possible small source of non-randomness.

Oh for mod points. Amen.

"Non-technical users"? Fuck off. It's an OS that is designed to be used, not endlessly fiddled with. But for some self-appointed gatekeepers, that's somehow become an unbearable eternal-September thing for linux.

No. The UK's regulator is the first in the world to give permission.

Absolutely. In the TV series "The World at War", the producer's aunt, who he was close to and conversed regularly, had worked at Bletchley Park and she never even hinted at its work. The series, filmed in the early seventies, made a programme on the Battle of the Atlantic and put the British success down to radar and better training.

You can be absolutely sure that he runs Adblock on all his machines.

Copyright would cost too much (I kid you not).

Only time I've felt terror from above was glancing up and seen five of these flying in close formation. It turns out their air base was having a long [runway] overhaul and they did a little tour of nearby cities as they departed. Had some evolutionary flashback to being some meerkat-like creature. Also appreciated why civilian jets are called 'wide-bodied'.

If Soviets hit first, then they'll aim for the missile bunkers that are scattered all over the Mid-west. They'll also lob in a load at 'Command and Control' centres (cities). The nukes hitting the midwest will create enormous amounts of radioactive fallout as they're aiming for hardened bunkers so nukes won't be airburst, CONUS is uninhabitable.

A retaliatory strike means only cities are hit, with air bursts. Result, devastation, but not complete annihilation. The remaining 10-20 million could plan WW IV with bows and arrows. So it's 'better' to strike first.

There's a great clip of Tsara Bomba I've only seen once. It's taken from a building in a town at the end of a street of wooden houses. A Russian/Siberian old man is walking down the dirt in the centre of the road towards the distant mushroom cloud and is blown off his feet (more surprised than hurt). My memory says the footage was something like 100 miles from detonation. Love to find that again, mainly as it's the only filmed example I can remember a civilian hit by the power of an atomic weapon, even this lightly (which in itself is telling).

One thing Slashdot provided and I've lost was a link to some Usenet posts from the mid-nineties by an ex-RAND guy. In four pages, he chillingly outlines the most cynical decision possible in humanity; a first strike on Soviet cities would then lead the USSR to blow up 80% of the US popl, but crucially not hit the now empty bunkers in the dirt of Montana et al., so making the smoking ruin of the USA at least partially habitable through massively reduced levels of fall-out.

Another one to add to the list of great euphemisms.

Plutocracy at its best.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...

""The passengers who fly on airlines and the airlines are paying for projects at airports where we don't fly," [Air Transport] association CEO James May says"

Nope, it's for the visitors to the park to enjoy the peace and quiet. I'd be happy to let planes fly over, as soon as the planes carry enough sound-proofing to make them inaudible from the ground.

Last time we were in Sequoia National Park, we climbed Moro Rock. Apart from our fellow tourists, the only sounds were natural. As we stood on the top, a couple military jet fighters flew west-east at very high altitude (guesstimate FL300) and they were still intrusively audible.

Imagine if the yahoos in small private planes were allowed to buzz around the parks? "Let's go circle General Sherman. Look, it's that one! Not that one, that one. No, that one. I'll go around again. It's that one. That one. No, that's General Grant, it's that one! I'll go around again..."

A paradigm doesn't have to make people scrap their core textbooks (such as the big daddy example of the acceptance of continental drift theory). Seemingly small developments can produce enormous change. The creation of vulanised rubber, so allowing pneumatic tyres, saw a paradigm shift in road transport, but it can also be seen as just an incremental shift in technology. The development of the route to the moon through enormous rockets and very complex orbital rendezvous became redundant after the LEM plan was adopted.

This is also an example of where there was significant agreement between The Experts that a similarly qualified, but not so senior, expert was wrong.

There are also things called paradigm shifts- where the vast majority of the experts are wrong. Here's a neat example from the history of space exploration, the development of the lunar lander concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...