Errrmmm... yes!

But it was unrelated - a big US company bought the business, then immediately closed it down and laid off everyone, leaving them with no UK competitors.

This is one of the best points on here. For 90% of the people who could benefit from programming knowledge, the question of whether to learn Java, or C, or Ruby is ridiculous. Many office workers have to deal with spreadsheets quite a bit, and VBA is the thing they often need.

My wife used to be a team leader and she had to submit various reports on a weekly basis, through a process that took about 2 hours of copying and pasting between various spreadsheets. One day she was doing it from home and I saw she had got rid of about half the work using more complex formulas instead of copy/paste. I showed her how to add a button to run a VBA macro that did the rest, and reduced it to a 10 minute job, collating the data from a few sources, and then hitting a button.

Within a few months of that she had rewritten most of the standard procedures for how most of the management reports were created (by herself) and automated most parts of it.

You're misunderstanding his point. At high g's you're accelerating very quickly, that's a given. It won't take long until you're being accelerated into something. For a fighter pilot that would be the seat or harness. But if the acceleration is sub millisecond, you've barely even begun to be pushed against the seatbelt, so you don't really feel the 40g acceleration.

It all depends on what you hit. If it's a head on collision with a tree, it doesn't budge, and you stop dead. If it's a glancing blow that sends you flying / skidding to a stop over a distance, it isn't really that bad. Richard Hammond survived a crash caused by a tyre blowout at 288 mph ...

For most cars? I've got a little Citroen C2, a 1.4 diesel that I commute in, and that only goes safely to about 80, but that is definitely a very low-end car. I have had the opportunity to take a hire car down an empty toll road, and hit 130mph. I chickened out at that point because I could finally see a car in the distance going quite a lot slower, but as I was slowing down, a BMW came flying past, that was almost certainly going above 150mph.

My big family car is a Ford Mondeo ST220, which I have taken on a track, and it will happily, and safely, go round a decent corner at 80, but no idea how fast it could go on a long straight.

Same thing going on here. My desktop and media centre used to be always on. Now I've sorted out standby mode properly (3W in standby, wakes in about 4 seconds), and just the server stays on permanently.

My server was at its peak using 11 drives: 5 x 400GB, 6 x 500GB, which made quite a bit of noise, and used quite a bit of power. When I worked it out, I reckoned there was about 50W power to be saved. I decided to get rid of the RAID configuration, and replaced them with a pair of 1.5TB greenpower discs. A small cut in capacity (3.6TB down to 3TB), but it cut the machine power usage by nearly 60W - over £60/year.

I've got a box of 14 discs that are now just offline backups, although the server now also has a pair of 2TB greenpowers also.

Given that it's £20, it's the UK and the GP is correct. Retailers try to get out of it / say that it is a manufacturer issue, but of course they would. It is still down to the retailer to sort out the problem with the manufacturer on your behalf.

Agreed. Last night I tried to watch a Blu-Ray I had ripped to a plain image (I do usually use MakeMKV, but this was the 'Life' documentary series with various features that don't quite get captured right in MKV). First, PowerDVD insisted I needed to update it, which took a while. Then it told me a variety of error messages before crashing. In the end Blu-Ray is just such a pain to use on a PC that I can imagine why no one wants a disc loader type system.

Rip everything to MKV - it is way easier.

Remember though, the team who have discovered this effect have pointed out as much, and are also still skeptics of their own results. I don't mean to sound unskeptical of the result, but I think it is possible that neutrinos can under differing circumstances travel at different speeds.

You're assuming that in all cases there are no alternatives to using lots of energy, and that is completely invalid.

Tying in the London congestion charge just gives a great example for a rebuttal. London does have a decent public transport system - the tube is the quickest way of getting around. Commuting journeys across London do not need to be made in a car. The congestion charge has been effective: people go to work on the tube, or a bike.

A generic carbon tax will promote efficiency and lower consumption of carbon, but just increase costs.

> Kids these days don't know the meaning of a kilobyte.

Shouldn't that be a kibibyte?

I just don't believe that jobs are 'opened up' by older workers retiring. When people have more money, and can buy more stuff, jobs are created. If old people stop retiring, they have more money, and therefore create extra demand.

In the short term, what you say is true, and it may take a couple of years before companies see the demand trending higher, and choose to employ more people, but longer term, there isn't an economic problem in people living longer.

I can't completely agree with this. I'm pretty sure Intel would love to get rid of a lot of the cruft in the X86 ISA, and release a properly new product. Partly because they've tried it once already. The reason they can't is that so much software is compiled to work well on X86.

And in the end, when people are buying a PC, they expect to get a PC that does everything they want of it. ARM are doing very well, as smartphones become better and so bought by more people, and tablets take off. But in the end, there aren't full fledged ARM based PCs. That line is going to be incredibly difficult to cross. Maybe tablets will blur the lines - a tablet with a docking station providing keyboard, mouse and full-res monitor, might for instance create demand for desktop-style software recompiled for ARM ISA, but it is very far from a sure thing.

The real farce has been that they were allowed to tell people everyone was naming him on Twitter, and the woman's name is Imogen Thomas. If the injunction had blocked her name, it would have got rid of the obvious search on Twitter. If the injunction also prevented referring people to somewhere that the information was available, it would have left people googling searches for injunctions.

If you're going to bother with an injunction, don't let people with internet access have the search term and website surely!

Really?? Last night I just copied the last batch of photos off my camera, and it's upto 2,800 photos. I'm sure it's within a couple of years old, since my old one broke. That one had been on 4,500 photos. Admittedly, about 1000 of those photos were taken while snorkelling in the Maldives, and since I couldn't see the screen underwater, I just kept hitting the shutter and hoping!