No, YOU edit it. I'm intelligent enough to but can't be bothered.

Huh? If you're cruising at some useful speed (possibly on the leftmost lane), hit the clutch and you'll still have a few hundred yards to get over onto the emergency lane. Add hazard lights and most other drivers will even free the room you require.

Going at 70 (the speed limit over here) in the right lane (the left lane over here ;-) and taking my foot off the throttle would result in my slowing down pretty quickly... I know if someone did that in front of me at that speed I don't think I'd crash into them, but would be rather taken aback and have to have quick reflexes to slow down, assuming they couldn't pull out of that land because of heavy traffic. I can imagine a worse driver hitting the back of them.

Also, in both cases: Turning your motor off and on again should not take more than a few seconds.

That's one of the things I've always been taught explicitly NOT to do whilst driving. :-) You lose power steering, the brakes will quickly become less effective, and expecting people to turn their car off and on again with very little notice in the middle of driving (a sudden loss of throttle because of this problem they've probably never even heard of) seems like a bizarre suggestion to me.

If a fault is detected the throttle goes completely off and the car has to be turned off and turned back on to recover.

That sounds pretty dangerous if you're on a motorway (highway).

the Terminator in it wasn't really likable (T1's was an unstoppable killing machine; T2's was an unstoppable killing machine with a heart of gold; T3's was just a dick)

Actually, the one thing T3's didn't have was a dick.

Absolutely. This is exactly what I was going to respond to the GP with. Diversity is generally only a good thing if those diverse parts can interract with each other well; that goes for human diversity, by the way, as well as application platform diversity. If you want to get your app working with the iPhone and other devices, you'll need to write it AT LEAST twice, because the iPhone's ObjC and unique APIs are utterly nonstandard, and this should be condemned, not praised.

I have direct experience with this. My company has written a Flash app (please, don't lynch me too much) that allows live streaming video to mobile devices via Flash Lite 3 or later, and it works with nearly all modern advanced mobile devices... except the iPhone. If we were to try and create a similar app for the iPhone, we'd have to pour massive resources into learning how to do it (we don't have any in-house knowledge of how to do iPhone apps) and so we're probably not going to do it. iPhone users miss out on something, because of Apple's stubbornness.

Please, have diversity, but do not forget to emphasize the importance of interoperability. When it comes to that, the iPhone sucks donkey balls.

As has been said by others, you'll almost certainly get the good old form letter and the MP being written to won't even see your words. Want to really hit them where it hurts? Vote for someone else. And join a party that isn't one of the big three... we need to make sure their time is passed.

I'd suggest the Pirate Party UK. All new members welcome. :-)

Microsoft is unlikely to ever regain the position of dominance they had on 2000-01, so it's only a matter of time.

Painful as it is for me to say, this is nonsense. With even techies saying Windows 7 is good, Microsoft will make 10s of billions of profit from it. They will have 95%+ of the PC market for the forseeable future.

Frankly, Linux companies dropped the ball. I have Ubuntu installed on my 2nd machine. It is a piece of shit (GUI-wise, I'm not interested in fucking around on the commandline thanks) compared to even XP.

Now, you can't even buy a CRT computer monitor because LCD quality caught up and surpassed CRTs for most purposes while price plummeted.

Although I do now have a couple of LCDs sitting here on my desk, I still take issue with the idea that they have surpassed CRTs, qualitywise... I doubt that will ever happen. I'm not sure what the phenomenon is called (it's not the same as ghosting, I think), but fast-moving objects don't work well on LCDs. They darken. Try playing emulated Sonic The Hedgehog on a CRT (if you can find one) vs on an LCD and you'll see what I mean. It's virtually unplayable on the latter.

*sheds a tear for the fall of CRTs*

We've already passed the visual resolution where porn becomes gynaecology. Even lust has resolution limits.

Maybe so, but we haven't reached them yet. I wanna know what bacteria and fungi she's carrying.

The thing is, that's just basically subscription. That's the abandonment of the licence, because when everyone starts using the net to watch video instead of TV, the licence becomes a subscription you pay to get access to the online content.

I'm fine with this system, I just wish governments would realize it's by far the fairest way and scrap the TV licence laws too.

That should've said 'subsidization' via income tax.

I have a simple solution: make the BBC subscription-only, and STILL force them not to show adverts. Fair? Not really. I don't care. They're loved by enough people in this country that they will get enough subscription money to survive, and you'll still have your beloved ad-free TV... but I won't have to pay for it. Maybe a little subscription via income tax for TRUE public service broadcasting, like BBC Parliament, but that's it.

Full disclosure: I'm a songwriter and a member of a PRS. The money I make a year on songwriting could maybe buy a nice dinner. Without someone looking out for my interests, I'd make nothing.

So you think it's worth making people's lives a misery and giving the PRS superpowers in law, to justify your getting enough money a year to buy a nice dinner? Why don't you stick to your day job? I'm sorry to say it, but you don't seem to be a good enough songwriter to earn a living that way.

Basic email and office apps, what more do you need?

I dunno about need, but there's a hell of a lot of stuff that wouild be desirable. I knew Ubuntu wasn't really finished, but I decided to check just how far along it had gotten by installing it a couple of months ago to function as my home network's router. It could do with huge improvement, to say the lease. Here's just a tip of the iceberg:

- There are two separate clipboards, a mouse one and a keyboard one. Middle-click will often paste something different to ctrl-v. In this day and age, I'm sorry, I can't be generous - this is fucking retarded. Fix it, Canonical.
- Sometimes selection copies stuff, sometimes it doesn't. Be consistent. I'd say make it never copy stuff.
- This bug meant that I had to hack an init.d script by adding 'sleep 5', just to get a DHCP server working on the Ubuntu box because of the way dhcp3-server assumes interfaces will be immediately available and NetworkManager makes them available asynchronously. Ubuntu enthusiasts tell me NetworkManager is pretty much only good for wireless, and disable it for wired connections. Utterly pathetic. We desperately need Canonical to get this done - and competently.
- Make up your mind as to what one should use to install packages. There's an add/remove software GUI, but there's also Synaptic Package Manager. Make up your mind, Canonical!!!!!
- Better firewall configuration. I know I've been told a million times that you can't make a GUI for iptables because it's too complex, but I beg to differ - at least you can make a GUI for it that implements a decent swathe of its functionality. No, ufw doesn't cut it, it sucks. Not enough functionality. And how about a firewall that scans app binaries, and gives access on a per-binary basis?

These are just some of the problems I've noticed, off the top of my head. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see Linux be a viable alternative, but it can't beat Windows 7 yet... and TBH I was amazed that some of these problems still existed, given how long Canonical had been at it.

The TLD is essentially totally insignificant, and would have to be typed every single time if the order were reversed.

Only if you were using an autocompleter that relied on stored URLs beginning with what you typed, rather than any part of the URL (and even the page title) containing what you typed - a la Firefox 3.