Maximum speed of a B-52 is about 600 miles per hour - maybe 650 in a dive - well below the speed of sound. Sorry, Cusco, but the booms you heard were definitely not from B-52s. You might have been hearing a Convair Hustler B-53 bomber, whish was supersonic-capable

Monarchy? Oh! You mean to a single over-arching flag Yes. I found that strange too!

Of course, if you're an Australian and come to the USA to play baseball (rounders for those outside the US), then you risk being shot to death from behind by some bored teenagers who've just decided that they felt like killing someone because they've nothing better to do, and that it would be "fun". (ref: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/20/213781714/australians-shooting-death-echoes-from-oklahoma-to-melbourne) The US is "the best" ? hmmmmm.

"they" being United Statesians in search of a history to claim as their own.

Probably a good point. However, now that they've started outsourcing Sys Admin tasks to Russia ..... :)

Another true one - my cell phone is from Utah (came with the wife) while my address is in New Jersey (about 2,500 miles apart, for those unfamiliar with US geography). I was filling in an insurance form online and had completed my address. Then it wanted my phone number. Fine. Except it wouldn't accept it because the area code for the phone was too far from the zip postal code!

Read the article! In a country where the constitution (sixth amendment) apparently guarantees a speedy public trial for criminal offenses, this guy has been in gaol for three months! Apparently he has not appeared in trial yet ... speedy?

And I'm sure that they were happy to be able to ask their friends in the NSA for a backup copy of all their data for restoration :)

I work with MS SQL Server, so I work on Windows (Win7 on my desktop, Win2012Server remotely). Win7 is, mostly, a big improvement over WinXP (Win2K was an improvement over Vista!). At home I moved to Linux about 15 months ago (Ubuntu with xfce on my main machine and Mint elsewhere). I also work from home, so I use Oracle's VirtualBox quite extensively. Aside from work-related things I operate pretty much entirely in Linux, and am very happy. Had MS offered Win8 with a choice of interfaces (a clone of Win7, for example, and Metro) then I would have pushed it at work. Instead, I recommend retaining Win7 for as long as possible, virtualising it if necessary. We are getting new test machines at work and they will be System-76 machines ... not natively running Windows, that's for sure!

doing it slowly might be good ... otoh, Sweden moved from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight! People just drove cautiously for awhile, knowing full-well that lots of others were even more uncertain than they themselves!

""55 MPH" seems fine to me" Please don't encourage the bureaucrats! Living in the USA with a 55 mph limit was excruciating. I moved here from Germany, and had difficulty not falling asleep from boredom on long drives. A journey I would expect to take maybe 2.5 hours took almost 5. Arrrrgh!

It may well be all that everyone has said, but I just went to the page, opened one other PDF forms, filled it out, and went all the way to almost submitting it ... with Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04. Didn't seem too hard. Maybe it's the new browsers that are at fault, not the old systems!

"Most people don't even know what a rootkit [networkworld.com] is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse (Sony BMG" That one will go down like a lead balloon with the EU! Europe is where Sony put a rootkit onto their CDs so that if you tried to play/copy them in Windows you had a good chance of infection! I thought that they'd learned their lessons with that one, but apparently not! Reference: http:/// en. wikipedia. org/wiki /Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal (remove the spaces to get the link)

"cheap cars with excellent roads" cheap cars ........ well yes. excellent roads ....... Where? I must have missed those!