Idea for your next "ask the readers" column Patrick --- what are the world's "most improved" airports?

I nominate Beijing's Capital Airport for that one. Used to be a push'n'shove scratch'n'sniff nightmare, but is now not bad at all.

And that's even before the entirely new Olympic terminal opens next year...

You've missed the elephant in the corner of the reviewing room, Farhad!

Time was, someone recommending a novel to you would give you a summary of their tastes into the pitch "Well, I liked it a lot, but I'm into pulpy detective fiction..."

Or for a restaurant "I like it because it's Italian your Italian grandmother would make if you had one, not regional-Italian-as-interpreted-by-a-bored-chef, but I know that last is what a lot of people besides me like".

In a word, what I'm talking about is calibration. Reviews bv fans of the author/cuisine/director/suburb will be, obviously, a totally uncalibrated 5 stars out of 5.

Some sites attempt to provide post-hoc calibration: "3 stars means 'a good solid product of its type'"; "1 star means 'might have one decent feature but a fatally flawed package'"; etc.

But most ratings systems don't even try to do this, as they find it lowers the number of responses they get. Make it "harder" for people and they often don't bother.

For me, the way around this flaw is to read the comments and ignore the star-system. In that way an "OMG!!!! Manjoo does it again!! BEST POST EVAR! 5 stars!!" becomes "Fans liked it, 3 stars" in my private calculations of "Will I like this?"

But I admit that this takes me longer, and is often enraging the way reading comments on any website can be. But I've gotten to the stage now where a quick skim of a page of comments will quickly provide the necessary calibration to make a decision.

Oh, and Fred's is ok. Not the best breakfast in Sausalito, not the worst. I'd say you must have got the relief cook, or something similar. If your "calibration" was "places within a mile of Fred's" you might give it 5 stars... heh!

Drudge polls, Paglia asserts, are accurate. Realizing almost everyone will balk at this, she adds, as if she knew what she was talking about:

(Drudge polls are keyed to cookies, permitting only one vote per computer.)

Alas, her computer "skillz" seem to be as lacking as the science behind her global warming "agnosticism", as cookies do no such thing.

Cookies, at best, provide a tiny impediment to multiple voting as fast as you can click. The fact that Drudge holds them up as doing otherwise could show a gaping lack of basic internet knowledge, contempt for his readership, willful deception, or all three.

There are systems that would allow secure internet polling; ad hoc "polls" by their very nature can use none of them; Drudge is certainly using none of them.

People in 2007 continuing to believe ad-hoc internet poll numbers are exactly like people continuing to believe there is credible science behind global warming deniers --- willfully ignorant, flailing blindly and asserting wildly.

For every household like mine (2 people, 5 computers, I work in software!) there must be 20 households where 1 computer is shared between 2 - 4 people.

Even if we go nuclear on the numbers (2 parents, 1 child, 1 PC) for a mere quarter of those 1 billion PCs, it brings the number of users up to near 2 billion.

It would seem to me that the "1 billion extra PCs" are most likely to go to families, most likely in the BRIC zone, further pushing the user numbers.

Add that to cellphones becoming serious computing devices, and "always on always connected" devices like MITs "$100 computer" becoming reality, and multiplying Forrester's PC numbers by one to get user numbers appears conservative at best.

If every man, woman, and child on this planet doesn't have access to a "general computing and connection device" by 2015 (I hesitate to refer to such a thing by the "monitor/case/keyb/mouse" term "PC") I will be very surprised.

A summary that picked up a lot of little things you can miss when you're "experiencing" your way though drama as finely crafted as this.

Not a summary actually, more an amplification, as neat in its way as the lovely, lovely ambiguous ending of this excellent series.

Thanks Heather, thanks David!

NEWSFLASH: terrorists use toothpaste, shoelaces, and paper. These are some of our most commonly used products. Oh the horror.

Every single thing about the JFK plan reeked of a couple of dreamers who couldn't plan and execute ruining a 2-year-old's birthday.

So they browsed Google Earth? Yet another indication they didn't have any clue.

Here's a quick list of the things you can't see from a top-down photograph:

*security patrol routes

*security cameras

*doors in the _sides_ of buildings (where they usually are)

*locks on aforementioned doors

*the depth/height of security ditches/fences

*underground pipes (a vital part of this so-called "plot")

And that list is just off the top of my head.

There's nothing REMOTELY creepy or ironic or even particularly interesting about this -- unless you are also horrified that terrorists occasionally have to go to the bathroom just like you.