"Why are you wearing a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like that?"

"Oh no, it's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future."

I think the recent habit of posting under your real name comes from naivety and ignorance. Do I want my employers to know my political and religious leanings? Where I was last night? I think not.

I actually think Shadowfirebird was my first internet handle. I don't use any other ones.

Two very pedantic points:

1) The ark is not seaworthy. It's mounted on a series of iron barges in order to make it float.

2) It's "the River Thames", not "the Thames river" -- although I have no idea why it should be so.

Forgive me for being pedantic, but that's not a solar-powered bikini. Bikinis do not require a power source.

@ Mr "Awesome":

Err, mate -- they're not doing it so you can oggle them. They're doing it because they don't want to wear clothes.

If you don't like naturism, next time you're near a naturist site, don't look through your binoculars...

I don't have enough information to know whether this was appropriate or not. The article says "racial slurs and body parts". If this list he circulated was really unpleasant, then it would justify arrest.

OTOH if it was just a "hot list", then, obviously not. We don't know.

The fire.

(With apologies to Terry Pratchett.)

Serious answer: once I'm sure my family is safe, i grab the go-bag from my office and sweep as many books from the shelf above into it as i can. Then before i leave I pull the hard disk from the hotswap bay in the server.

Yes, I've thought about this...

Unfortunately, I can think of a reason. Psi Ops.

Specifically, deafening terrorists/whoever with loud music that they won't like to demoralise them.

@Hmm

Yes! Thank you!

It really does look as if there is nothing more going on here than it seems -- a dolphin petting a cat.

That's just brilliant.

All I see is "this video is private".

Which is a shame because from the screengrab I think this is the vid where the dolphin appears to go to some lengths in order to gently pat the cat on the head.

I would *love* to hear the story behind that.

We didn't call it cosplay then (at least, we didn't here in the UK).

Lovely costume. Reminds me of a few con moments of my own.

* The twin sisters in matching (but mirror reversed) body paint -- both painted by the same off-duty BBC Cameraman.

* The absolutely *stunning* Dr Who Leela costume, the wearer of which I completely failed to get the name of.

* (My wife's story) "The lift opened and there was an 7-foot wookie and a woman wearing the snake-dancer costume from Blade Runner." (We became good friends with the latter years later and I was always sort of glad I'd not seen that costume because my eyes would have impolitely bugged six foot out of my head....)

Google should take them at their word.

How is anyone going to read their site at all, unless it's linked to? You think anyone types in URLs any more? LOL.

Who's Adam Smith?

Probably not going to be famous in 10,000 years if he's not famous now -- although I suppose that's not always true.

The Klingons are wrong. Kirk-era Klingons didn't have the silly foreheads and impractical ironwear -- and that is a matter of cannon, too. ("More troubles, more tribbles", I think, although I'm not an expert.)

As for which side I'd be on -- frankly, I'd be the one hiding as far away from that mess as possible. Especially that new Doctor; he's got the competancy-level of an ISP support line person...

I hope there will be a follow-up study where the men have to do math test while a woman stares at his crotch.

I'm guessing the results will be similar.

Sorry to be picky, but the table is meaningless. What do the numbers represent? Because the time to crack will certainly depend on whether my string of six lowercase letters is a word rather than, say, 'xxsdty'.

Also, just adding uppercase letters and characters will make no difference at all if you change 'password' to 'P4$$word', for example. Cracking programs are not that stupid.

My personal advice? Pick three unconnected words and seperate them with a weird character: for example 'ocelot-mango%envelope' Easy to remember, pretty difficult to crack.

Of course a string of ten random characters is much, much harder to crack - but impossible to remember, so almost useless as a password.