1078 years does sound really short.

Do you mean "refutes" or just "denies"?

I've passed on loads of older PCs and laptops to non-tech-savvy users. I simply install the latest Debian, set it to auto-update, add a couple of shortcuts on the dock and away they go. Most of them aren't even aware that they have a different operating system apart from the fact that it gives them far less trouble. All they want to do is access the web and their e-mails and compose the odd letter.

So no change there then. Nuclear fusion has been a rolling 25 years away for decades.

The space equivalent of the hand reaching out of a car window and casually dropping a McDonald's box.

Now they need to find not only a replacement chip of the same type but also a field service engineer willing to go out on a Saturday.

Two megawatts of energy Doesn't anyone proofread this kind of thing?

Yes, I can see that having people fail to queue in an orderly fashion for the train would be even worse than being mugged.

Clearly you have never been on a French train - much less a TGV. They are very comfortable and pleasant and the French on the whole are civilised people.

I doubt it will "premiere on the Paris rail network". There would be no point in a TGV if it just ran around Paris. Their whole purpose is to cross France in as short a time as possible and the French government aims to eliminate short-haul flying in France.

It might premiere on routes to and from Paris, but then most TGVs are on those routes anyway.

Is that right? Whilst they were certainly in the same address space ISTR that the ROMs ran at only half the speed of the RAM. One speed-up technique was to copy crucial bits of the ROMs into RAM.

This reminded me of something which I read in the regulations about storing fuel in the UK the other day. There have been reports of people filling all sorts of containers with petrol at filling stations so I was checking up how much you are allowed. The answer is up to 30L in suitable containers (metal or plastic) but although you are allowed to store it you are not allowed to "dispense it into a vehicle".

Makes me wonder what you are allowed to do with it. Throw it over a bonfire perhaps? (My grandmother used to do this.)

Not particularly. My house is over 100 years old. Probably when built it didn't have much if any electrical wiring. It has however been steadily upgraded over the years. We moved in 25 years ago, at which point we had it completely rewired. 10 years ago we had the consumer unit replaced to bring it up to modern specs. The oldest thing is probably the connection coming in from the road, but that's still rated at 100A.

To have a 7kW car charger installed simply involved putting another breaker put in the consumer unit and then a cable from there to the car charger. (Although the installer did express unhappiness with the main board fuse - probably 1950s vintage - so that was replaced too.)

I find it very hard to believe that Samoan DST was proposed for the convenience of one person. In any case, it makes absolutely no difference to one person. If he wanted to get up earlier to study insects in daylight he could just have done it.

DST is just a convenient way of getting *everyone* to get up an hour earlier in the summer to make more use of the fact that the day gets longer at both ends but our natural habits aren't conducive to making use of it.

What's really loony is the idea of places stating on DST right through the winter. The UK tried it in the late sixties and it was a disaster. If you don't want DST then just stick to UTC+/-N.

Re-writing 10^82 as 1 followed by 83 zeroes does not "put that into context" - it's simply a different (and incorrect) way of writing it.