On the contrary; it's the most entertaining thing to happen to the show in years and has everybody talking about it. I bet the show's producers love him.

And as if that isn't enough, I've just noticed my beer's on the other side of the room.

Depends what kind of tinnitus you have. I have a 16KHz whine in my left ear that I can tune out during the day with music but is intolerable at night. A loop of crickets/cicadas/running water helps mask it (partly because you're concentrating on a noise outside your head), but it'll still take me several hours to get to sleep and I'm tired all day. I haven't had a decent night's sleep in 20 years. One of my favourite things used to be sitting in a quiet room, now it's torture.

snowmen "worked" there for 3 months

But he got a frosty reception and was given the cold shoulder.

You really think women and the lower classes have inferior brains to upper class men? White upper class men are responsible for many inventions but it's not because whites, the upper classes, or men are inherently more intelligent - it's because historically they were the ones in the positions of privilege that gave them the education and time and resources to be able to invent. Women and the lower classes had no opportunity to be inventors - their lives were controlled and they had no access to scientific education or resources - until recently when that changed and we started seeing an explosion of inventions and discoveries by women, and the lower classes could go to university and become scientists, for example.

It arrived today! It's a really nice sturdy hardback book, could probably whack nails in with it.

Just ordered mine - after fighting with the Lulu website.

For anyone in the UK having trouble registering with the Lulu website it turns out your postcode needs a space in the middle or it won't be accepted as valid, i.e. "LP6 7GH" instead of "LP67GH".

Looking forward to it.

Eh? Over 15 minutes? Are you backing up to an AirPort Disk rather than a wired disk? The bottleneck there would be the wireless, not your computer.

I backup a 2012 MacBook Air every evening to a 1TB 5400RPM USB drive - plug it in, it detects it, and the backup is done in 3 minutes.

No they won't. In the future there will be superintelligent ants and they'll have ant passports and ant driving licences and ant credit cards and they'll be tied in to the same mortgages and travel restrictions and limits on their freedom as we have now. And the ant queen will be a figurehead and the real power will lie with the spiders.

So be nice to your spiders.

itself

Literally. It doesn't mention it in the article but on the BBC teatime news it said Yahoo had paid "dozens of millions of pounds" for the app, as well as hiring the kid. So somewhere over 24 million pounds, or 36.5 million dollars.

I'll just spell that out: THIRTY SIX AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS.

Words fail me.

With your name, have you considered becoming a crime-fighter, or super-hero?

You know by acting that way you're creating a situation you obviously hate - sitting in a dark, silent room hoping nobody rings your doorbell. Fuck that. Buy a bowl of sweets & a gorilla mask & have some fun when the Trick or Treaters come - RAAAAaaaar! - you'll end up looking forward to the doorbell ringing instead of dreading it. And after it's over - hey, you still have a gorilla mask! Everybody wins. Were you never a kid?

The Police, that's who.

Some busybody laid an official complaint and the police had to follow through

No, they didn't. Any rational human being would have laughed them out of the station. People say tasteless things. Move on.

It's not counterproductive as they see it. They want you, the public, to know that if they want to get you they will get you. They are being bullies, not custodians of the law. They already got their intended chilling effect by making an example of this guy, and now everyone will be a little more nervous about what they post online - they don't need to prosecute you as well. But they might, and if a law is being applied selectively it should not be applied at all.