Look, kids --- I have here the amazing piece of technology for which Harry Potter was created. It's like an ebook, but it's made of paper!

Really, did the publishers not notice the months and months of version 1.2 betas/release candidates? It's an impressive trick of scheduling to have a book on 1.1 released on practically the same week as 1.2.

Oh jeez, I smell another cheap cross-over...

Sorry, when I say "cut power to the engine" I mean cut the power from the engine, i.e., the link between the engine and wheels. Also, to clarify, the instruction was to stamp the brake as a first priority and, having started to apply maximum force, hit the clutch with the other foot. The optimal solution is to hit both together, but this introduces additional thinking time.

When I discovered the existence of automatic transmissions as a child (we Europeans primarily use the more efficient manual transmission), I asked how it stopped the engine from stalling when the brake pedal was applied. My father told me that the brake pedal was also connected to a clutch. This would obviously cut power to the engine when the brake was in use.

The force from an idling 1580cc turbodiesel, even without a stuck accelerator, extended the emergency stop distance of my learner car by a non-negligible distance, at least a couple of metres. This is why my driving lessons included engaging the clutch after the brake when performing emergency stops.

Now I have recently learned from Slashdot that, seemingly, in most automatics the brake pedal doesn't even cut the throttle. Given that many automatic cars in the US seem to be connected to 3000cc six-cylinder behemoths, I am sure this worsens the stopping distance for those cars a great deal more than a couple of metres. How many people has this particular design flaw killed over the last fifty-odd years?

A new study says that illiterate people overgeneralise more easily: we'll have the full story and the latest news and weather. Join Fiona Bruce and I with the News at 10.

He is studying at the University of Warwick, which is near Coventry. It is far away from London. He is "studying in London" in the same sense that all Californians are residents of San Francisco. Has FOX News' target audience never heard of any English city besides London?

Those "lots of people" don't count, the government counts. Let's not kid ourselves here --- democracy in the UK means choosing between a discredited Thatcherite party (red logo) and an undirected Thatcherite party (blue logo) as our preferred autocratic rulers for the next five years.

They don't need to do anything to regain power. Gordon Brown is the best thing ever to happen to the Conservative Party.

one cannot, for instance, easily say, "Sharia law is sexist" without inciting any kind of Muslim action

There, fixed that for you.

We've dramatically cleaned up our environment, achieved energy independence, freed ourselves from the political constraints of fossil fuels and massively bolstered our economy with a whole new class of green businesses.

What planet do you live on? I'll take the next hyper-shuttle there.

It doesn't "start up" like a fossil-powered car. The motor idles at 0 rpm, rotating only to drive the wheels. Further, on similar cars (Volvo S80, etc) the doors will re-lock when you move away from them, and the car won't be driveable for very long without the key inside it either. I imagine the makers of this car, having previously engineered a virtually brand-new powertrain, will be able to properly implement keyless entry.

"What? It competes with our own services!? Delete it from the Store! Then bring me the developers' ashes on a plate with a glass of red wine..."

I honeslty don't know when exactly Linux added the feature to let you swap desktops easily.

That would be about 1965, or whenever it was that UNIX was conceived. UNIX has had the capacity to support thousands of users simultaneously since the beginning of time (literally). When X appeared in the late 80s, very little changed in this regard.

Since Windows 95, Microsoft has been trying very very hard to add sensible multi-user facilities to Windows. The fact that consumer releases prior to XP were unable to prevent users logging in without a password, let alone prevent users from having full write access to each others' files, is perhaps irrelevant considering those users each had permission to delete the Windows kernel as well.

The NT kernel supplied XP with the capacity to handle multiple users securely and XP introduced fast user switching, but the damage was done --- most of the apps available by that point had to be run as root, and the attempt to bring the system a tiny fraction further along its long journey to UNIX-level user security was one of the more significant nails in Vista's coffin.

I reckon MS will eventually (too late) do what Apple did (also too late) and replace the entire thing with a bastard UNIX system running the shell from the previous system, and provide a compatibility layer. Indeed, it might be the only way to save it. Meanwhile, Wine continues to make it increasingly obsolete.

for a Google router there's no particular business model other than spying on the owner

You are aware of the idea of selling routers, right?