Because space-age technology may be able to give them clean drinking water?

British police will call off a pursuit if is it deemed to be too dangerous. And I don't think that it has increased the number of people attempting to escape. However, I don't know either way.
Personally I value my life, and the life of my family and friends, over ensuring that every person who runs from police is caught.

What if someone's clock is 5 hours out? Either because they set it that way, or they've travelled through time-zones without updating their clock, or their clock is borken and is reporting the wrong times.
What if they're not adjusted for summer/winter time? What if they are? What if the time is right, but the date is wrong?

This is not a simple problem and there is no simple fix.

And useless for 100% of the day too.

So what? Why should religious beliefs be respected?

All religions are made up.

Are you agnostic about Santa?

Atheism is a religion like turning the TV off is a channel.

I would argue that many of the people who get married in religious ceremonies are not of 100% faith. I know a couple of atheists who married Christians in Christian ceremonies, is that "disrespectful"? What is the difference between using one made up fantasy over another?

In the UK (I don't know about the rest of the EU) an individual can send a subject access request to a company or organisation and that organisation has 40 days to send you all the information they have on you. Companies have been doing this for years now. It doesn't seem so hard to change the query from a SELECT to a DELETE.

Now the paper in the article talks about how publicly available information may be copied (via the web) without the original author/organisation knowing, e.g. you could copy this post and store/publish it else where and neither slashdot or I would know, so you can't guarantee that the data will be completely deleted. But personally I don't think this is that big of a deal. If I want company Foo to remove all the information they have on me, for whatever reason, what do I care that company Bar also has information on me?

I think, to a point, an individual should be responsible for tracking all the information that they want removed, and companies/organisations should be responsible for acting on legitimate requests to remove the information.

Pirates of Monkey Island
Captain Sparrow meets Guybrush Threepwood.

Joe Kittinger was the only one Felix would talk to.

This. A thousand times this.

Wow nostalgia trip. It's been years since I saw this form last.

It wasn't Joel it was Jeff :)

That is a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

I thought it was Bananaman from the street name, but the rest doesn't match up.

In the UK it is the retailer, not the manufacturer, that has to cover the cost of replacement or repair of products that are sub-standard. I imagine the consumer laws are similar in the rest of Europe. My friend returned 5 PSPs to the shop he bought it from before he got one without a dead-pixel, and they didn't argue with him on any of the occasions.

Some people play games, some watch TV, others have model railways. This story is like that. It's not a story about a man taking 7 years to dig out a basement. That is just a nice side-effect.