If you were English then you’d be laughing like a drain right now!

Looks like recent developments vindicate plumbers’ insistence on keeping water pipes ready to use in waterless urinals, eh?

If I told people I was white and then found I had ‘black blood’ in me would that make me a liar?

Better than letting the imagination run wild, concentrate upon building a world that works. Bladerunner, for example, stuffed with ‘anachronistic’ tech but it doesn’t matter because the world created works. I can imagine a world where some technology is more advanced than now but in some ways is regressive.

On one level, funny, har, har. But more seriously, as China successfully integrates robots into service roles and gains expertise at building these systems while the US larfs at them then a real knowledge gap is being created and the last preserve of ‘non-exportables’ - services will prove to be exportable.

Anyone remember Volvo: Boxy but good!

As a depression sufferer, but not a scientist, here's a thing. I have been through depressive periods with and without anti-depressants. For years I did not even know that sometimes I had depression.

Agreed. That's the point really. How many carriers can the US afford to lose? In a real war the only carriers that'd ever be available to the US would be the ones already in service at the start of the war. The lead time is too huge and the cost too high for it to be otherwise.

Are you certain that Hitler, for example, was not helped into power by time travelers hoping to influence the future?

English!

Yes, years ago I got music from filesharing networks because there was no legitimate service offering. Then came allofmp3.com and I happily paid them because they offered what I wanted, or near enough, and gave me a fig leaf of legitimacy. Then after a hiatus during which torrenting became my friend I became an early…

The magic of remarketing! I am inundated with booking.com ads for all the places I visited on my recent European invasion tour. But that's OK I use booking.com a lot and their ads block out others. ;) But Amazon, why oh why try to sell me Fujifilm X10 cameras when I bought two X20s off you a few months ago and…

Is nobody going to mention Sigourney Weaver? She turned me from a boy into a man in that movie. That movie affected my sexual life for years.

You are not alone! Merrell get my money these days!

Black, leather and not making me look like a twat! They used to make them but now is self destructing fabrics designed to look good for 6 weeks.

One reason that some people are poor is because they borrow money to buy deprecating assets. Your choice of words is appropriate as a general rule.

Hear, Hear! Still using JR150 speakers from the late 1970's. No need to change them and like the Sonabs were a little unusual in design to enable a small speaker to sound great with wonderful stereo imagery. They were a 3 way unit in a cylindrical aluminium pressure vessel.

Related to the describing of concrete items around oneself, I was taught to count things. The number of tiles on a wall, the number of chairs in a room.

Hear, Hear!

I backed nobody. Unlike some I see no 'side' here. Just a very bad situation not helped by a choice of many to not rely upon fact. Here's a couple to help you. The planes shot down by the rebels in Ukraine were shot down by battlefield man held systems. Those units can not reach the altitudes at which commercial…