Surely this isn't a good reason for needing more than one vaccine? Whatever proves to be the best vaccine should be manufactured by all the capable companies. If someone then comes up with a better one, production should switch.

Now it might be that some vaccines turn out to be more effective than others in differing situations, and vice versa - now that's a good reason to need more than one.

Now who does that remind me of?

Several responses to my posting seem to have missed the point. The travel agent didn't say, "Sorry, did you say Brussels or Bristles or Bristol?" which would fit with the hypothesis that she just wanted to check that she'd heard correctly and wasn't booking tickets to a similar sounding place. The words used make it clear that, despite working in a travel agency, she wasn't familiar with Brussels as a destination, had done a bit of research, and wanted to make sure she'd found the right place. You have to be a bit special to live and work in Yorkshire and yet not know where Brussels is.

Of course, once you have to explain humour, it does rather cease to be funny.

Bill Bryson tells of an incident in one of his books where he was living in England and phoned his local travel agent to book a ticket to Brussels. The agent phoned him back a few minutes later to ask, "Would that be the Brussels in Belgium, Mr Bryson?".

There is little if any point in 5G for the average end user. All the drivel about "you'll be able to download an HD movie in 3.7 seconds" is just marketing people trying to think of a reason to persuade you to part with more money. How often have you actually downloaded an HD movie to your phone? You can get 40 Mbps over 4G. No-one needs more than that.

The real reason for 5G is that it lets the providers serve more customers at potentially less cost. All the advantages are for the infrastructure providers - they just would quite like you to pay for it.

Ah, bless. In an ideal world, perhaps; in this world, definitely not.

ISPs very much rely on *not* providing enough capacity for the peak speed of all their customers. That's how they manage to sell services for apparently a lot less than they would cost to provide.

I have difficulty making sense of those figures. According to the site linked, well under 1 in 100 of the population of the USA dies in any given year. That means that on average you're going to have to wait for over 100 years for your turn to come around.

Is the average age at death in the USA about 110? If not, how do you square the figures?

Any colour you like, as long as it's grey.

Possibly where you live, but not in France. The Vehicule Sans Permis (VSP) occupies a small but significant market sector already in France. They are generally made of fibreglass and powered by a tiny internal combustion engine. You often find yourself driving behind one pootling slowly along the road into town (to get the bread of course).

The classic market for them is the driver who has lost his or her licence due to following the (alas, now outdated) advice of limiting themselves to "An aperitif, half a bottle of table wine and then a digestif". You can literally walk into a shop, buy one and then drive away in it with no further paperwork.

I remember some years ago travelling from Paris to Baden Baden by train. In Paris (at least back then) drivers seemed to think the black and white stripes were painted on the road just to look pretty. They would never even consider stopping for pedestrians on one. In Baden Baden by contrast, you only had to look vaguely like you might be thinking of crossing the road for both directions of traffic to screech to a halt in front of you. On more than one occasion, I had to try to convey with sign language, "Sorry, I wasn't actually wanting to cross the road - just stopping to look at that building."

In recent years though, something odd seems to have happened in France. They now stop for pedestrian crossings. Takes all the fun out of it.

I'm intrigued - how many tabs do you have open? My venerable laptop (Lenovo T420) has 8G of RAM and I never hesitate about opening another tab - nor does Chrome. Normally I have no more than a dozen open, but sometimes when I'm researching something it can get to over 20. It never seems to be a problem.

How many does one have to get to before Chrome struggles?

The trouble with this approach is there's no way one should go through any kind of proof-of-identity process for a call originated by the bank/business/government/scammer. The most I'll do in those circumstances is ask for a name and department at the organisation, then say I'll call them back on a published number (not one given by the caller) and ask to be transferred within the organisation.

No security conscious organisation would ever call you, then ask you to reveal your security information.

The headline is more than a little misleading. It completely forgets that not every CPU is in a desktop PC.

Possibly, "In the desktop PC market, one retailer reports..."

Seems like breaking a date is expensive in the USA.

What about Wales?