It is not true that the Sherlock Holmes line is actually a misquote. It is just not a quote from the original stories.

When people watch a Bond film, for example, do they care that much of the dialogue did not appear in the books. Indeed what most people consider to be Bonds best lines do not appear in any of the books.

The same can be said of Holmes. When people quote Holmes as saying "Elementary, my dear Watson" do they actually say that it's a quote from one of the original stories? Don't assume that they believe it to be the case.

I sometimes use the phrase myself, even though I have an in depth (and rather sad and geeky) knowledge of the canon. And indeed a lot of the stuff written since. I don't think any single character has ever inspired quite so much fan fiction.

I ride a bike because it's a thrill in an extra urban environment and extremely practical for cutting through urban traffic. This thing will lose out on both those things. The stabilization system and the body word will take away the thrill. It will also be less maneuverable in urban traffic. You simply will not be able to chuck it about. Apart from the constrictions of the bodywork and riding position preventing the use of body english the gyro system will act like a fly by wire system in a jet taking the edge off the rider's extreme inputs.

In taking away one perceived problem the designer has taken away the two biggest advantages of a bike. The designed has however failed to address several one of the biggest disadvantages of a bike. That thing will be no more visible to other road users than any other bike. This means the rider will be involved in as many accidents as a normal bike, in fact probably more so since the restricted maneuverability will prevent some evasive action. The primary risk to motorcyclists has always been that other road users choose not to see them, or perhaps more accurately choose not to look properly.

The rider may well be shrouded in bodywork but I suspect that this will give little more than the illusion of protection. There simply isn't room for crumple zones front and rear. And as for side impacts, if the doors were as heavy as car doors have to be to offer protection then the thing would hardly move. Sometimes in an accident a rider can protect themselves from the worst injuries by parting company with their steed. Ever pushed the bike away when it was heading for a wall? No chance of that with this thing, if the bike is going to hit something solid then so are you.

In short I believe that this is one of the technically clever inventions that nobody actually wants or needs. It's been said many times before, but what inventors need more than ideas is the skill to recognize whether there is a market for their invention. And at that sort of wedge I suspect there is none.

I'm afraid that there have been many people over the centuries who have claimed to have been cheated out of the crown. They are all, however, wrong. The fact is that whoever takes the crown is fittest to rule. That's how it's always worked. If it can't be decided by direct descent, then things get more complicated but it is still through familial relationships. Sometimes however it must come down to a fight an whoever happens to win is king or queen it's that simple. Nobody ever cheats anybody. It's a complicated game and one in which it's impossible to cheat.

The arguments used by Will above could equally have been used against the Stuarts. When Liz I died she had no descendants. So the thrown fell to the great grandson of her aunt Mary Tudor - I think that makes him her cousin twice removed.

There are always those who will claim that the throne has been stolen. Before Elizabeth I came to the throne her elder half sister Mary I reigned. Mary was second in line to the throne after Henry VIII, so when Henry's son Edward VI died it should have been a simple matter for Mary to become queen. However Edward was protestant and his half sister catholic, so Ed attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession so that Lady Jane Gray, a cousin, would become monarch. Mary deposed Jane by force after only nine days and was crowned. There were those (mostly protestants) who claimed that Mary had stolen the crown. Equally there were those (mostly catholics) who claimed that the crown was never Jane's to claim in the first place. Who was right? Well Mary's supporters of course. Why? Because Mary won.

And what exactly is English or British anyway? Celtic? Jute? Saxon? Angle? Viking? Norman? Remember that King Harold was a Saxon (and there were several other claimants to his throne) but he was deposed by William I (the Conqueror or the Bastard) by invasion.

If we're going to start talking about the right to the throne where do you draw the line. Was William the rightful king or should it have been Edgar? Was Harold the rightful monarch in the first place? Such disputes go right back to Egbert in 802. If you go back over all the disputed monarchs in the last 1,210 years the number of descendants with some sort of claim to the throne must run to six figures.

One thing is for sure, however, the rightful monarch is the one with the crown.

Real, talented, educated musicians playing real music. If that's a little too challenging for you, Joe, I'm sure Simon Cowell has something that would suit you right down to the ground. Although maybe in a few years he'll get one of his "artists" to do a sanitized cover version.

Obviously you're no judge of music, but if you don't like it you don't have to comment. The people who like it think you're a jerk and for the people who don't like it you are preaching to the converted. Nobody is forcing you to listen, just get back to listening to the stuff you like.

The van names are far from unique, they have several vans with each name. See? Even the contention ratio for the vans is rubbish.

One story about Vic that always amused me was from when he was accepting an award in the New York. Somebody suggested that he give his acceptance speech at least in part in his native language, because there were a lot of people in the audience who also spoke the language. Clearly the advisor assumed from Vic's name that he was Italian. Vic however was surprised that there would be many speakers of his native language so far from home and began speaking in Welsh.

It's been done many, many times before. A friend used to have one made using two 1275 A-Series blocks back in the eighties. He thought he'd done something original until somebody showed him a photograph of one in a custom car magazine from the seventies.

BTW I'm pretty sure the Top Gear table was in new top gear, not the original (pre 2002) show.

So Mr Coward are you saying that the Pirate Bay, Twitter,
Reddit, Gawker, StumbleUpon, Yelp, FourSquare, LinkedIn, and Meetup all located all their servers in a single data centre that went down at midnight as the result of a storm? Or are you saying that all of these companies a single datacentre each in completely different physical locations which were all hit by storms bad enough to take them down at exactly the same time? Whatever you're saying it doesn't make sense.

Actually TBP went down three hours before midnight, so it wasn't caused by the leap second. It was actually caused by a rack being moved.

Reddit attributed their outage to Casandra not coping with the leap second. Mozilla confirmed that Hadoop had problems with the leap second. It's been confirmed that debian.squeeze servers all over the place died as a result of the leap second, the workaround apparently was to disable ntpd. So it looks like the stories are true.

Why is it that whenever a problem arises with anything to do with Linux there's always some sad fanboi desperately trying to blame something, anything else?

Looks like an old R50e to me. Useless heap of junk, most of them are long dead by now.

What's that Blake? A bass with a 23.5" scale? I wonder how slack those light gauge strings would need to be to produce a bass tone. The neck, pickup, bridge, strings and tail piece are guitar items. Just because it has four strings, that doesn't make it a bass. It's a guitar on an unusual tuning. You wouldn't call a ukulele a bass just because it has four strings would you? I have guitars with five, four, three and two strings. They are still guitars.

Oh and when you say "bass" I presume you mean "bass guitar". A bass is something different altogether. A bass in your terms is still a guitar anyway.

All of which gives me an idea. I was thinking of building an unusual uke, but all the normal silly ideas have gone. Solid bodies, flying V, strat, you name it there's a uke that shape. I do however have an old ammo box out in the garage doing nothing on top of the beer fridge.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to go into beer geek mode. Follow the link and you'll see the bride referring in her vows to a "tall black IPA". A black IPA how is it possible to have a black India PALE Ale? If you're going to try to out geek everybody then you'd better be sure you're geeky about everything.

Hold on! $66,000 for a car that goes, stops and handles like a nineties MR2? I don't care what it looks like, you could buy a genuine Lambo of a similar age to the Toyota for that sort of money.

Having said that it seems this sort of idiocy is rife. There are a couple of Lambo lookalikes on ebay.co.uk for similar money. One is a Murcielago lookalike, but weirdly the other is a Diablo replica. That's right you can buy a Diablo lookalike for the same sort of money as you would pay for the real thing. Better yet the lookalike is powered by a Rover V8 engine. Yup, a 1960s Buick 215 being used to "replicate" a 6 litre (ish) quad cam V12 producing 500 or more horsepower. Makes sense. Not.

Fine, but it's well to remember that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle is not, in and of itself, usually considered an accurate record. In particular given that it was written over a hundred years after the events under discussion here.

The usual story. Half an hour before the party and he re-reads the invitation and realizes for the first time it's a costume party. Panic sets in, he sees his daughter's cuddly koala and a pair of scissors...

Damn. In your post Shatner aged two years in the space of two paragraphs. That's pretty impressive in itself.