Kind of a weird story, implying that the UK is unusual in this regard. In reality the UK is the tenth-worst in the OECD, and currently outperforms France, Belgium, Canada, and the USA in this metric. Japan has the highest government debt, as usual, at 228% of GDP.

I get the impression that LBJ was the one causing stress for other people! He had a fierce reputation for a personally aggressive approach to politics.

They're wrong, of course; it's obviously the boogie...

I think you've misunderstood the sense of the "cave" - it was the US government that was pushing for the more draconian measures (the RIAA/MPAA line), not for sanity and consumers' rights in the first place. The "cave" is in fact an acceptance that the rest of the world thinks that the DMCA-like measures etc are dangerous/stupid.

In other words, this looks like a (partial) victory for the people.

The implication that the EU is spending billions of euros on a program to study 3-legged dogs is completely misleading. The fund in question appears to be FP7 (Wikipedia article), which funds a huge variety of researchers on many differnet topics.

If you look at what I think is the relevant EU site, the project received EUR 2.7 million from the 'Embodied intelligence' Initiative within the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Thematic area of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Which wouldn't make much of a story I guess - "multi-billion" sounds waaay more impressive.

-Chris

Yes - occasionally. -C

It probably wasn't a "customer survey", it was a sales call to sell the phone package. They wrap it up with the survey stuff to make customers feel warm and fuzzy and listened-to.

In a sense, it does make Staph less problematic, in that, for serious infections, antibiotics can still be used effectively - unlike against resistant strains. In order to avoid resistance evolving, antibiotics should be used with maximum effect (killing the infection before any resistance occurs), or not at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glass

Newfoundland is one possible site - there are a number of proposed locations in that area, down to Massachusetts. In addition, Newfoundland island is only 17 miles off the coast of Labrador, so it's not really relevant - if they'd explored Newfoundland, or sailed round it, they would clearly have been aware of the much larger land mass.

Anyway, even though the map is not to a fixed scale, the 'island' couldn't really be Newfoundland - it's the size of most of western europe!

Vinland is recognised by most historians as being a short-lived Norse ('Viking') colony in the Newfoundland area, probably on mainland North America (though the exact location and extent is very unsure). See the Wikipedia article.

The map shows it as an island presumably (assuming it is genuine) because the area was explored to a very limted extent and the explorers were unaware that it was part of a much greater land mass.

I'll keep my castle secure primarily by engendering fear, awe and respect from my opponents, who will never dare challenge me! Muhahaha! Oh, and by following the official guidelines.

There is clearly enough gravitational pull from the galactic centre to keep the milky way together, despite its spin - so presumably this would have a considerable effect on other smaller galaxies passing through it, especially if their relative velocities were low in relation to their size.

The Milky Way swallows a galaxy, and the swallowed galaxy's stars get added to the milky way, orbiting the galactic centre in the usual way. Presumably the same happens to the black hole - there's no reason why it should be sucked into the middle. Black holes will happily orbit around each other, as long as they're outside each other's event horizons.