Regardless of your personal opinion of the artistic merits of Jackson's work, there's no denying he had a massive effect on American pop culture, and tens of millions of Americans.
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
(Yes, when I first heard, I thought it was a variant on the classic Stephen King troll.)
I keep on getting portscans from Iran, perhaps they are about to attack!?
Well, if I was an Iranian student, I'd be continually portscanning most of the free world looking out for any open ports that might turn out to be web proxies running on non-standard ports to evade filters.
And if I was the Iranian government, I'd be doing exactly the same thing - and blocking them whenever I found them.
Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?
If you truly care so much about anonymity and freedom, put your money where your mouth is. Have a second connection installed and use it exclusively for your TOR exit node. Then you won't get b& from anywhere on your main connection.
Remember that any anonymising service worth using will not censor. Anybody can use it for whatever internet uses they have which they want to be untraceable. Your TOR node is helping Iranian students organise demonstrations. It's also helping Anonymous raid furry webforums. It's also helping your friendly local paedophile get his jollies. It's helping griefers all over the world spoil everybody else's fun without fear of being identified. And of course it helps spammers send from IPs that have nothing to do with them. Small wonder you're getting banned from many websites: chances are, by means of your TOR exit node, you are abusing them.
The night sky is difficult from a photography point of view; stars are terribly faint objects and are hard to image, especially since if you take a long exposure you get streaks instead of points. The Martian moons are tiny and unimpressive compared to Earth's moon, which is larger than most dwarf planets.
However, this Martian sunset makes a very nice wallpaper.
ESR is a hacker of the old school, and his material may be a little dated. For a more contemporary thesis on how a geek might successfully run social skills under emulation, try The Well-Cultured Anonymous, a compendium of all the little details that we might otherwise miss. Written by and for the anons of/b/, so in places it's pitched somewhat towards the underage b& crowd, and it tends to assume an American cultural context, but still a lot of helpful material there.
But why should it be up to the Americans on their own to put human beings in space? Yes, Russia and China have done it, but I'm very ashamed that ESA hasn't done it yet.
ESA have kicked the idea around from time to time, most notably with the Hermes project of the 1980s to build a mini-shuttle to launch on an Ariane V, but politics got in the way. The Germans got quite irate about being asked to fund far more than their share, especially with the costs of reunification with the East. The British wouldn't pay anything at all towards any manned project. And since Russia was opening up, it made more sense just to pay for Soyuz flights as needed.
There's probably a better chance now of a European manned launcher than at any time before. ESA have the ATV, a cargo carrier for supplying the ISS: this does not carry crews, but is man-rated and acts as extra inhabitable space while docked, and there's a possibility it might form the basis of a manned spacecraft, should it prove necessary in case of an extended American failure to replace the Shuttle. Sadly, it's not just a matter of adding an independent life-support system; the ATV is meant to burn up on re-entry and take all the accumulated rubbish and waste from ISS with it. Not a feature you really want in your crewed spacecraft.
Also, is there anyway to make sure that donated bandwidth is helping Iran rather than getting diluted by use from others?
Not really. If your Tor relay can tell where a communication originated, then Tor is failing to provide anonymous communication. If you run a Tor relay node, you'll be helping Iranian dissidents communicate untraceably and anonymously. You'll also be helping your friendly neighbourhood paedophile ring do the same. And the white supremacist clan up the road.
Twelve regenerations, thirteen lives. The Thirteenth Doctor was last seen frightening the hell out of the government in the company of a large number of Gurkhas. Of course she was the Doctor from a rather different part of the timey wimey ball, so it's anybody's guess whether she's actually going to have will been existing now.
(Thanks to Dr. Streetmentioner for that last bit of grammar).
And to my way of thinking, if we take 600 million years of trapped solar radiation and release most of it over a paltry couple of centuries... well, I reckon that would have an effect too.
That's not really what it's about. The waste heat from our industries isn't heating the Earth significantly; according to Wikipedia the total world electricity generation is 6.3*10**19 J. The total energy input from the Sun is 1.5*10**22 J. All our industries add up to about half of a percent of the Earth's heat budget. A 31st-century fusion-based economy might run into waste heat problems, but not us.
The problem is infrared opacity of carbon dioxide. Energy comes in from the Sun in the visible spectrum (black-body temperature 5500K or so). It's absorbed by the Earth, which warms up, and re-radiates in the infrared (black-body temperature 300K or so). Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared photons in that frequency range. Of course it re-radiates infrared photons out again soon enough, but when it does so, it doesn't necessarily radiate them up. Result is, the more carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere, the more any given quantum of energy leaving the Earth can expect to hit on a random walk through the atmosphere before escaping into space - and so the longer it takes. But the incoming visible photons aren't delayed at all. Final result, whole system shifts to a higher temperature equilibrium.
Now there are any number of complications. The Earth isn't a black body, it's all sorts of colours, and there are many other mechanisms also in play: some that absorb carbon dioxide, some that release more. So it's hard to put a definite figure on the expected warming. And suppose you do: suppose you say 'We predict average global warming of n Kelvin in the next hundred years'... what effect will that have? Will it dry out forests, which burn to the ground? Or will the jungles expand? Will southern Europe become Sahara North? Will Siberia defrost and become farmland? What about all that methane under the permafrost? How much glacier melt can we expect, and which cities need to be evacuated? Suddenly it's a colossal multivariable nightmare.
You're not all that far off in your thinking, though. Consider the climate when all that carbon was being turned into coal and buried. It was called the Carboniferous Era, and it was a good deal warmer than it is today - until the very end. Funnily enough, once all that carbon dioxide was taken out of the air by plants, which then got buried and turned to coal... the climate cooled quite a lot, and the Permian began with the planet in the grip of a massive ice age.
The word 'soccer' is certainly of 19th century origin: it comes from public school slang, where it apparently derived from 'Association football', by analogy with 'Rugby football' which is often nicknamed 'rugger'.
It was used from time to time in the UK, although generally less frequently than 'football'; the best measure would probably be to dig up some Roy of the Rovers back issues and count the relative frequency of each, and I'm pretty sure 'football' would be far away in the lead. Thing is, it's only been in the last decade or so with the rise of the Internet that the majority of English-speaking football supporters have had any regular day-to-day contact with Americans, so it's only in that time that 'soccer' has been seen as an Americanism rather than as a nickname for 'football'.
It's still used, normally now for alliterative purposes when composing a headline for a newspaper, or a title for a TV show: 'Soccer Superstar Sold for £stupid money' perhaps, or the highlights show 'Soccer Special' - on Sky. You definitely don't see it as often as you used to though.
If I promise to drive 20 MPH on the wrong side of the road in the game, will they buy me a copy of Grand Theft Auto?
Funny thing is, Grand Theft Auto is a British game. Made in Scotland, from girders. It's just set in America - or rather, in the distorted image of America we get from gangster movies and crime TV shows.
But apparently, instead of encouraging British developers to produce games that sell bazillions worldwide, they'd prefer to encourage... well, I'm not sure. The most culturally British game I've played lately was Professor Layton on the DS, an entirely Japanese production. Other than that, culturally British... well, there was Bully, Rockstar again, set in America but in a school which was a bizarre hybrid of an expensive boarding school and the worst ever borstal, and in which the hero fights with weapons taken straight from the pages of the Beano. And there was Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, which had a much improved model of imperialism where you just forced people into vassalage rather than outright annexation.
Was Planescape: Torment culturally British? I mean, nearly everyone in it spoke eighteenth-century Cockney thieves' slang... How about World of Warcraft? - I mean, not that they're blatantly ripping off any well-known British roleplaying and wargaming setting or anything.
According to Ray Jastram's "The Golden Constant," the purchasing power of gold has remained relatively stable over the last 300 or so years.
Relative to what? Suppose I was in London with ten sov'reigns bright in my pocket in the year 1709. What could I buy with them? Suppose now I am in London with ten sovereigns in 2009. What can I buy?
One thing hasn't changed: London was and is a colossal trading centre, so if it exists and I have the money I can buy it. But everything else is completely different. What if I want a passage to Boston, in the colonies - and back again? Well, in 1709, my sovereigns might buy my passage, several weeks on a sailing ship in dubious conditions. Just. The cost of such a trip was many months' pay for a labourer - people would indenture themselves for years in exchange for their passage. What if I want the same in 2009? Why, I can get from London to Boston and back again the next day if I wish it, and I'll have ample change left over for shopping while I'm there.
The same goes for almost everything I might seek to buy. What if I desire personal transport? How many horsepower can I get for ten sovereigns in 2009? A hundred or so? How many horsepower can I get in 1709? One or two? Or contrariwise: what if I would hire myself a servant? Ten sovereigns will get me a labourer for six months or so in 1709. In 2009, ten sovereigns for even two months' work would be a low wage.
Economy and society and technology have changed so much: how do you compare the value of those sovereigns across the centuries?
Oh, of course: some things don't change so much. Always there is demand for beer, and beer changes little enough. When I go into an alehouse, and order whiskeys and wines of the best, what can I have? Well, a pint of London porter was 3d a quart, or a penny and a half for a pint, or 160 pints for a sovereign (this being back when a sovereign really was worth a pound, not just having that nominal face value). Nowadays, a sovereign sells from the Royal Mint for £200, and a pint of porter - Dublin porter more likely nowadays - is something like £3. That's 67 pints for a sovereign.
So to my mind, where it really counts, on a London street buying beer, the value of that sovereign has fallen substantially in the three centuries gone by.
But the people who hoarded and hid away gold during the war would've come out.... golden.
If I remember my history, quite a lot of people did hoard and hide gold during the war. It benefited them very little. A stash of gold may protect you for a while, but sooner or later someone comes along that you can't bribe to look the other way, and then you're dead.
Much of the gold belonging to those cautious investors ended up looted, and traded to the Swiss for foreign exchange to finance the Reich's war effort. The rest probably ended up lining assorted SS pockets.
3. I run into issues when trying to sell the gold after I've taken possession because how can anyone be sure that I haven't tampered with the gold? How do they know that 1oz is still 1oz? What if I drilled and filled it?
Shit, you're right. Someone could have tampered with the gold - alloyed it with some cheap metal perhaps, taken the rest of the gold for themselves. How can we tell whether the gold is in fact truly gold?
I'm going to have to go and think about this. It's time for my bath anyway...
Depending on how the dollar is faring, some months they take a big hit in pay and are only able to afford the basic necessities after conversion. Other months they fare better. Instead of having their savings in either US dollars or Euros, if they buy gold during the good months, they could then cash it in when the dollar is weak and be able to maintain their quality of life.
You take a 30% hit when you buy the gold, you carry the risk of storing the stuff in the meantime, and then the cash-for-gold dealers rip you off again when you change it back.
I'm not seeing the benefit of this plan over, you know... just buying euros.
It's been, what, 25 years since the CD came out? If digital distribution is to be the new standard, surely we can reasonably expect there to be some improvement in sound quality over the previous technology?
Wouldn't most people sign up for 1 month, download everything they want, and then cancel?
Debatable.
It's easily said: download everything they want. Maybe quite a few people will do that: sign up, binge on free mp3s, save them, then quit. But it seems to me that the people who would do that are pirates already. They've already downloaded everything they want.
Meanwhile, if you're Joe Average, can you enumerate all the tracks you want, such that you could grab the lot of them in one mass download? It's a hell of a job. You'd always forget some band or other, then months later slap your head in frustration and go 'Oh... I knew I should have downloaded more of the back catalogue of Oingo Boingo!'
I don't view the service here as 'pay to download music'. It's not really a sale thing. Why would I buy what I can have for free? This service is pitched at the lost generation, at the people aged 30 and down who have completely lost touch with the idea that music is something you pay for and then keep. We now treat music differently. Music is free - and I don't want to hear about copyright: maybe music SHOULDN'T be free, but that doesn't change the fact that it IS free.
What I'll pay for is the service of organising music. My music collection is a total shambles. It's inconsistently tagged. It's encoded at a variety of bitrates and in a variety of formats, such that no MP3 player made since the glory days of iRiver will play them all without a Rockbox hack. And it occupies disk space that could be used for anime or porn. Frankly it's a mess.
So that's what might attract me to Virgin's offering. If it's as complete as The Pirate Bay or more so, and the music is consistently tagged and encoded at a high quality, then a monthly fee is eminently fair to have access to that resource. Why would I download and keep any of it? Why should I go to the bother of maintaining my own collection? It's right there on a service run by my own ISP at the other end of a 20 megabit connection. Music on demand. The colossal cloud jukebox.
Nuclear sanity is not to be found in the summary, anyway. Nothing in the article mentions anything about a meltdown, full-scale or otherwise.
This water, it seems, runs into a pool in which spent fuel rods are kept; the water's purpose being to keep the rods cool - being radioactive, they tend to become hot. Should that pool run dry, the rods could catch fire, and thus a radioactive release is possible.
Except that the pool wasn't going to run dry anyway, according to the chief of the inspectors who actually investigated the leak. That it might have run dry is apparently speculation by an 'independent nuclear consultant' working for the 'Shutdown Sizewell Campaign'.
Idle is the best place for this nonsense - and I'd have thought better of the Torygraph, who normally pitch their articles at a fairly intelligent level; this kind of sensationalism is beneath them.
If I were the head of Microsoft I'd be tempted to simply say, "Fine. Goodbye" and pull all Microsoft products off the shelves permanently.
Then you'd be an idiot. One of the nice things about sovereignty is you can do whatever the fuck you like. Like, say, declaring certain formerly copyright software to be public domain.
Hint: the 'green' one is the one with the enormous profit margin.
60W-equivalent (actual rating 11W) fluorescents are frequently on offer at ten for a quid: I've seen that deal twice in different stores in the last few months. Given how long they last, you could get yourself a lifetime's supply for the price of a decent round of drinks.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
(Yes, when I first heard, I thought it was a variant on the classic Stephen King troll.)
Well, if I was an Iranian student, I'd be continually portscanning most of the free world looking out for any open ports that might turn out to be web proxies running on non-standard ports to evade filters.
And if I was the Iranian government, I'd be doing exactly the same thing - and blocking them whenever I found them.
If you truly care so much about anonymity and freedom, put your money where your mouth is. Have a second connection installed and use it exclusively for your TOR exit node. Then you won't get b& from anywhere on your main connection.
Remember that any anonymising service worth using will not censor. Anybody can use it for whatever internet uses they have which they want to be untraceable. Your TOR node is helping Iranian students organise demonstrations. It's also helping Anonymous raid furry webforums. It's also helping your friendly local paedophile get his jollies. It's helping griefers all over the world spoil everybody else's fun without fear of being identified. And of course it helps spammers send from IPs that have nothing to do with them. Small wonder you're getting banned from many websites: chances are, by means of your TOR exit node, you are abusing them.
However, this Martian sunset makes a very nice wallpaper.
ESR is a hacker of the old school, and his material may be a little dated. For a more contemporary thesis on how a geek might successfully run social skills under emulation, try The Well-Cultured Anonymous, a compendium of all the little details that we might otherwise miss. Written by and for the anons of /b/, so in places it's pitched somewhat towards the underage b& crowd, and it tends to assume an American cultural context, but still a lot of helpful material there.
ESA have kicked the idea around from time to time, most notably with the Hermes project of the 1980s to build a mini-shuttle to launch on an Ariane V, but politics got in the way. The Germans got quite irate about being asked to fund far more than their share, especially with the costs of reunification with the East. The British wouldn't pay anything at all towards any manned project. And since Russia was opening up, it made more sense just to pay for Soyuz flights as needed.
There's probably a better chance now of a European manned launcher than at any time before. ESA have the ATV, a cargo carrier for supplying the ISS: this does not carry crews, but is man-rated and acts as extra inhabitable space while docked, and there's a possibility it might form the basis of a manned spacecraft, should it prove necessary in case of an extended American failure to replace the Shuttle. Sadly, it's not just a matter of adding an independent life-support system; the ATV is meant to burn up on re-entry and take all the accumulated rubbish and waste from ISS with it. Not a feature you really want in your crewed spacecraft.
Not really. If your Tor relay can tell where a communication originated, then Tor is failing to provide anonymous communication. If you run a Tor relay node, you'll be helping Iranian dissidents communicate untraceably and anonymously. You'll also be helping your friendly neighbourhood paedophile ring do the same. And the white supremacist clan up the road.
(Thanks to Dr. Streetmentioner for that last bit of grammar).
That's not really what it's about. The waste heat from our industries isn't heating the Earth significantly; according to Wikipedia the total world electricity generation is 6.3*10**19 J. The total energy input from the Sun is 1.5*10**22 J. All our industries add up to about half of a percent of the Earth's heat budget. A 31st-century fusion-based economy might run into waste heat problems, but not us.
The problem is infrared opacity of carbon dioxide. Energy comes in from the Sun in the visible spectrum (black-body temperature 5500K or so). It's absorbed by the Earth, which warms up, and re-radiates in the infrared (black-body temperature 300K or so). Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared photons in that frequency range. Of course it re-radiates infrared photons out again soon enough, but when it does so, it doesn't necessarily radiate them up. Result is, the more carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere, the more any given quantum of energy leaving the Earth can expect to hit on a random walk through the atmosphere before escaping into space - and so the longer it takes. But the incoming visible photons aren't delayed at all. Final result, whole system shifts to a higher temperature equilibrium.
Now there are any number of complications. The Earth isn't a black body, it's all sorts of colours, and there are many other mechanisms also in play: some that absorb carbon dioxide, some that release more. So it's hard to put a definite figure on the expected warming. And suppose you do: suppose you say 'We predict average global warming of n Kelvin in the next hundred years'... what effect will that have? Will it dry out forests, which burn to the ground? Or will the jungles expand? Will southern Europe become Sahara North? Will Siberia defrost and become farmland? What about all that methane under the permafrost? How much glacier melt can we expect, and which cities need to be evacuated? Suddenly it's a colossal multivariable nightmare.
You're not all that far off in your thinking, though. Consider the climate when all that carbon was being turned into coal and buried. It was called the Carboniferous Era, and it was a good deal warmer than it is today - until the very end. Funnily enough, once all that carbon dioxide was taken out of the air by plants, which then got buried and turned to coal... the climate cooled quite a lot, and the Permian began with the planet in the grip of a massive ice age.
It was used from time to time in the UK, although generally less frequently than 'football'; the best measure would probably be to dig up some Roy of the Rovers back issues and count the relative frequency of each, and I'm pretty sure 'football' would be far away in the lead. Thing is, it's only been in the last decade or so with the rise of the Internet that the majority of English-speaking football supporters have had any regular day-to-day contact with Americans, so it's only in that time that 'soccer' has been seen as an Americanism rather than as a nickname for 'football'.
It's still used, normally now for alliterative purposes when composing a headline for a newspaper, or a title for a TV show: 'Soccer Superstar Sold for £stupid money' perhaps, or the highlights show 'Soccer Special' - on Sky. You definitely don't see it as often as you used to though.
Wait, China joined NAFTA? Did I not get a memo or something?
Funny thing is, Grand Theft Auto is a British game. Made in Scotland, from girders. It's just set in America - or rather, in the distorted image of America we get from gangster movies and crime TV shows.
But apparently, instead of encouraging British developers to produce games that sell bazillions worldwide, they'd prefer to encourage... well, I'm not sure. The most culturally British game I've played lately was Professor Layton on the DS, an entirely Japanese production. Other than that, culturally British... well, there was Bully, Rockstar again, set in America but in a school which was a bizarre hybrid of an expensive boarding school and the worst ever borstal, and in which the hero fights with weapons taken straight from the pages of the Beano. And there was Civ IV: Beyond the Sword, which had a much improved model of imperialism where you just forced people into vassalage rather than outright annexation.
Was Planescape: Torment culturally British? I mean, nearly everyone in it spoke eighteenth-century Cockney thieves' slang... How about World of Warcraft? - I mean, not that they're blatantly ripping off any well-known British roleplaying and wargaming setting or anything.
Relative to what? Suppose I was in London with ten sov'reigns bright in my pocket in the year 1709. What could I buy with them? Suppose now I am in London with ten sovereigns in 2009. What can I buy?
One thing hasn't changed: London was and is a colossal trading centre, so if it exists and I have the money I can buy it. But everything else is completely different. What if I want a passage to Boston, in the colonies - and back again? Well, in 1709, my sovereigns might buy my passage, several weeks on a sailing ship in dubious conditions. Just. The cost of such a trip was many months' pay for a labourer - people would indenture themselves for years in exchange for their passage. What if I want the same in 2009? Why, I can get from London to Boston and back again the next day if I wish it, and I'll have ample change left over for shopping while I'm there.
The same goes for almost everything I might seek to buy. What if I desire personal transport? How many horsepower can I get for ten sovereigns in 2009? A hundred or so? How many horsepower can I get in 1709? One or two? Or contrariwise: what if I would hire myself a servant? Ten sovereigns will get me a labourer for six months or so in 1709. In 2009, ten sovereigns for even two months' work would be a low wage.
Economy and society and technology have changed so much: how do you compare the value of those sovereigns across the centuries?
Oh, of course: some things don't change so much. Always there is demand for beer, and beer changes little enough. When I go into an alehouse, and order whiskeys and wines of the best, what can I have? Well, a pint of London porter was 3d a quart, or a penny and a half for a pint, or 160 pints for a sovereign (this being back when a sovereign really was worth a pound, not just having that nominal face value). Nowadays, a sovereign sells from the Royal Mint for £200, and a pint of porter - Dublin porter more likely nowadays - is something like £3. That's 67 pints for a sovereign.
So to my mind, where it really counts, on a London street buying beer, the value of that sovereign has fallen substantially in the three centuries gone by.
If I remember my history, quite a lot of people did hoard and hide gold during the war. It benefited them very little. A stash of gold may protect you for a while, but sooner or later someone comes along that you can't bribe to look the other way, and then you're dead.
Much of the gold belonging to those cautious investors ended up looted, and traded to the Swiss for foreign exchange to finance the Reich's war effort. The rest probably ended up lining assorted SS pockets.
Shit, you're right. Someone could have tampered with the gold - alloyed it with some cheap metal perhaps, taken the rest of the gold for themselves. How can we tell whether the gold is in fact truly gold?
I'm going to have to go and think about this. It's time for my bath anyway...
You take a 30% hit when you buy the gold, you carry the risk of storing the stuff in the meantime, and then the cash-for-gold dealers rip you off again when you change it back.
I'm not seeing the benefit of this plan over, you know... just buying euros.
It's been, what, 25 years since the CD came out? If digital distribution is to be the new standard, surely we can reasonably expect there to be some improvement in sound quality over the previous technology?
Sure, but you could do that right now on TPB. What's stopping you?
Debatable.
It's easily said: download everything they want. Maybe quite a few people will do that: sign up, binge on free mp3s, save them, then quit. But it seems to me that the people who would do that are pirates already. They've already downloaded everything they want.
Meanwhile, if you're Joe Average, can you enumerate all the tracks you want, such that you could grab the lot of them in one mass download? It's a hell of a job. You'd always forget some band or other, then months later slap your head in frustration and go 'Oh... I knew I should have downloaded more of the back catalogue of Oingo Boingo!'
I don't view the service here as 'pay to download music'. It's not really a sale thing. Why would I buy what I can have for free? This service is pitched at the lost generation, at the people aged 30 and down who have completely lost touch with the idea that music is something you pay for and then keep. We now treat music differently. Music is free - and I don't want to hear about copyright: maybe music SHOULDN'T be free, but that doesn't change the fact that it IS free.
What I'll pay for is the service of organising music. My music collection is a total shambles. It's inconsistently tagged. It's encoded at a variety of bitrates and in a variety of formats, such that no MP3 player made since the glory days of iRiver will play them all without a Rockbox hack. And it occupies disk space that could be used for anime or porn. Frankly it's a mess.
So that's what might attract me to Virgin's offering. If it's as complete as The Pirate Bay or more so, and the music is consistently tagged and encoded at a high quality, then a monthly fee is eminently fair to have access to that resource. Why would I download and keep any of it? Why should I go to the bother of maintaining my own collection? It's right there on a service run by my own ISP at the other end of a 20 megabit connection. Music on demand. The colossal cloud jukebox.
This water, it seems, runs into a pool in which spent fuel rods are kept; the water's purpose being to keep the rods cool - being radioactive, they tend to become hot. Should that pool run dry, the rods could catch fire, and thus a radioactive release is possible.
Except that the pool wasn't going to run dry anyway, according to the chief of the inspectors who actually investigated the leak. That it might have run dry is apparently speculation by an 'independent nuclear consultant' working for the 'Shutdown Sizewell Campaign'.
Idle is the best place for this nonsense - and I'd have thought better of the Torygraph, who normally pitch their articles at a fairly intelligent level; this kind of sensationalism is beneath them.
Then you'd be an idiot. One of the nice things about sovereignty is you can do whatever the fuck you like. Like, say, declaring certain formerly copyright software to be public domain.
One square kilometre to begin with, although the rate at which it will be expanding is yet to be measured to sufficient accuracy.
60W-equivalent (actual rating 11W) fluorescents are frequently on offer at ten for a quid: I've seen that deal twice in different stores in the last few months. Given how long they last, you could get yourself a lifetime's supply for the price of a decent round of drinks.
Quite right. The unit of measurement is the 'metre'.
Well, then good luck borrowing money from anybody ever again, after a default on that scale.