I don't think the ability to climb an icy hill has much to do with the engine. Usually more to do with driver skill. Or if you have an automatic it's more in the transmission.

We actually found a faulty transmission to be good on ice and snow and when fixed it was hopeless.

He wants to try that in Glasgow. He'd only do it once. Followed by a trip to A&E.

@Jami, sure you didn't read that on popbitch? Sounds like one of theirs.

I think these guys are on a hiding to nothing here. Nikon already do touchscreen cameras. Nikon already do EVIL cameras. I doubt there's anyting that these guys could patent that Nikon couldn't claim to have prior art.

Yup it's all in the feeding bar. However mature ducks definitely do that sort of thing for fun. I can think of a few locations round here where wild ducks will shoot the rapids then go straight back round for another go.

Time And Relative Dimensions In Squash?

@Jim Why not just keep the clocks as normal in summer and play golf before work?

My personal gripe is that DST messes with my surfing. Often depending on the swell and the state of the tide the best surf of the day might come before work. There are times of the year in spring and autumn when there isn't enough daylight in the morning to get in a session before work when there would be if we stayed on winter time all summer. What I want is a window before and after work so I can get more chance to benefit from the optimum swell/tide conditions to give the best surf.

There is a popular myth in the UK that daylight saving time exists to aid scotish farmers. Obviously being in the north the winter days in Scotland are shorter than in England (or indeed Wales). The myth has it that changing the clocks gives the farmers more daylight in the morning. The myth misses two important things; firstly that farmers will when daylight is limitted work to the daylight, not the clock; and secondly that daylight saving works on summertime when there is plenty of daylight about, the clocks are "normal" in the winter.

Another version of the same myth claims that road accidents in Scotland are reduced by DST since it is lighter in the mornings in winter. Again this fails to work for two reasons; firstly in that the days are so short in the north of the country that the morning and evening rush hours happen in the dark in winter anyway; and secondly again the clocks are changed for summer not for winter.

Quite why these myths exist I don't know, but they do.

@Bill and it wasn't like they hadn't seen a few Mig25s before. I think it got transported to the US for potential propaganda purposed. Basically on the grounds that it was the nearest thing to WMD that they could find. "OK so we didn't find any WMD, but we did find this MiG25 (mutters) that everybody knew they had anyway."

I don't know of any urban legends which I could prove to be true, but a good few years ago I was involved in creating an urban legend. I won't tell the legend here because it is somewhat obscene in its nature, but involved a beautiful woman and a man in fabcy dress outfit.

One lunch break at college we were discussing urban legends (down the pub of course) when somebody suggested that it should be possible to create an urban myth. We realised that just so long as it was outrageous enough while still being believable then we should be able to get it into the public consciousness.

So we invented, by twists and turns a story where a man meets a beautiful woman and things build up until they go horribly wrong. By it's nature it had to be a FOAF tale. Nobody would want to tell this story in the first person. Indeed that was the least believable part of the story that the subject of the story would ever have let the story get out.

The deal was that we would all spend the next week telling the story to as many people as possible and then would not mention it again and see if the story developed a life of it's own. A few months later one of our number was three hundred miles or so from base when he was told the story in a bar. Over the next few months we heard the story several times again. The interesting thing was that when we were initially spreading the tale there had been slight variations in the telling, particularly with respect to the costume that the subject's nemesis had been wearing, but whenever the tale came back to us it was always the same very specific version of the story right down to the way the woman was dressed and the costume worn by the "bad guy". There must have been something about those details that made the story more memorable.

Bear in mand that this happened years before there was a WWW, so the stories would mostly have spread by word of mouth.

This has been done so many times before. And various items of furniture too. I know several people who've built wine racks from engine blocks - and probably a sight cheaper than Porsche will do it for you. I've lost count of the number of petrolhead houses I've visited where an engine block is the base of a glass topped cofee table.

@Jdoozie just how bored is everybody with that question?

@robynlicious I sort of agree with you, but the statement "I will never understand why white people's response to People of Color asking to be treated with dignity and respect is to vehemently defend their right to say and do whatever they want with claims of OMGcensorship." Is in and of itself racist.

The majority of white people are not racist, but people like you want to occupy the moral high ground by assuming that they are. There are bigots of every race, creed, colour, religion and sex and we need to deal with all of them. Not just the white ones. If you live in a predominantly white society then most of the racism you encounter will be practiced by caucasians against others. Move to a community where the majority population in not white and you will find racism heading off in another direction.

I live near a city where fifty years ago an asian population was begining to move in and there was a lot of racist feeling against them. Mostly of the kind that managed to accuse those people of being lazy good for nothings who were coming over here to live on benefits while somehow at the same time stealing all the jobs. Wind forward fifty years and some 10% of the population of that city is east european. Travel to one of the asian neighbourhoods and you will find plenty of asians willing to tell you that the easy europeans are lazy good for nothings who were coming over here to live on benefits while somehow at the same time stealing all the jobs. Plus ca change.

It doesn't stop being racism because its practitioners have dark skin and its targets generally white.

All bigotry is bad. Period.

@Jon A nobody said this is the worst that racism has to offer, but all racism and indeed bigotry of any kind, is bad. As for many things in life if you deal with the little stuff, the big stuff just goes away.

In many countries they have outlawed discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or religion, and also incitement to hatred on those grounds. This means that all bigots have left to them is either minor stuff (like dressing up in stupid costumes) or picking on other social groups. Hey it's OK to pick on the Irish because they're not a race! Err, no it isn't. Just because it's not illegal doesn't make it right or even OK. It's just as wrong on picking on people of another race.

However anybody who finds this sort of stereotyping amusing is probably of limitted intelligence. I can think of few better ways of testing. As such it would be all but impossible to reason with them. It always amuses me the way bigots get so upset by humour that pokes fun at bigots. The Simpsons is a good example of that sort of humour that travels well and yet so many bigots (aka right wingers) are offended by it.

Basically the bigots crede is that it's OK to make fun of anybody that's not like me, but it's not OK to make fun of me or people like me.

@soubriquet many early potters wheels used a simple rope pulley. One person turning a large wheel with a rope driving the pivot of the small wheel so that the wheel would turn at the necessary high speed. This is what's known to engineers as "gearing".

Anybody who doesn't understand that probably can't be trusted.