Pointless
Another pointless peice of kit, only useful for fighting the kind of opposition that the US isn't planning on fighting (i.e. people who can actually shoot back).
17 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Micro-generation with wind is an idiotic idea anyway. rather than pay $10k for a small, inefficient turbine that sits on my roof, I'd much rather pay my money, and have it lumped with another few hundred people's money, to pay for a much more efficient bloody great turbine that sits in the middle of a field, on the top of a hill, somewhere where I don't have to look at it. As long as I get my share of the money/power it generates, what does it matter?
JBuilder was better for GUI development than Visual studio, almost ten years ago, and still is better. Netbeans is better, and has been steadily improving.
The fact is, Visual Studio's dominance owes more to corporate inertia and risk aversion than it does to any failing of alternatives. It'd be a cold day in hell before most companies would switch from using a product that they understand, and all the staff have years of experience using, to anything else, no matter how good it is.
University software engineering degrees certainly don't produce good software engineers; indeed, many people manage to obtain a 2:1 or better degree in software engineering without knowing the basics of object oriented design, and with no real experience of programming. I recently interviewed three people with 1sts in software engineering from leading universities, none of whom could tell me how to extract a byte of data from a 32 bit integer.
Having said that, by all accounts the games industry is badly paid, has long hours, and treats its staff like turd, so it's probably for the best if naive graduates don't get suckered into it.
It is debatable whether images of computer generated scenes generated by 3d engines are protected by copyright, when the viewpoint is free to move, since the creator of the 3d engine is clearly not artistically involved (though, the model itself is protected). Of course, you'd need to go to court to argue this, and there's a fair chance you'd lose :P
John Carmack has been complaining about the PS3 only having 256 Megs of main memory, so I don't think they're gonna much like the wii's 88 megs - not so good for the "Mega texture" technology they've devloped :P Having said that, if anyone can make a 3d shooter that runs smooth and looks pretty on the wii, it would be ID.
Complete garbage.
AU are never used for serious scientific measurement, and anybody who does should be sacked.
They exist for illustrative/comparitive purposes, i.e. Mars is aprox 1.5 AU means it orbits 50% further form the sun than the Earth. Mars orbitting at 220 billion meters from the Sun doesn't mean anything to anybody.
Iran is a relatively democratic and westernized nation, with an educated urban population.
The US wants to attack them, because they still bear a grudge for having their puppet dictatorship overthrown, and replaced by a popular regime that is prepared to stand up for itself against continuing US/Israeli economic and military imperialism in the region.
It would be perfectly reasonable and understandable for Iran to want to possess a nuclear capability - it will garauntee it's security and lift the ever-looming threat of attack or invasion posed by Israel and the US.
It would be very surprising if Iran was not building as heavily fotified a position as possible, since an attack by Israel is almost certain should they get near a position of possesing a nuclear capability.
...that in the past, only a priviliged and talented few went on to study A levels and go on to university. Many people left school without any, or with very few, qualifications.
Since then, the general populace hasn't gotten any smarter, but now the majority of children go on to study A levels, and most expect to attend university.
As a result, A levels and GCSE's have had to get 'easier', so that they remain aimed at the level of the average student who takes them.
If, as these people are suggesting, the qualifications were set-back to the difficulty level of the past, consider what the result would be - 80% of students failing, with only a small elite of children achieving passing grades.
The truth is that the majority of children find today's GCSE's reasonably challenging - even if they are not particularly taxing for the brightest students. The only way to fix this would be to move over to a two-tier system, with more challenging courses for brighter pupils; exactly what the comprehensive system was meant to eliminate!
The crime that would have been considered is aiding and abbeting/incitement. It is a crime to encourage someone to do something illegal, in the UK (even if they don't actually go ahead and do it).Suicide is illegal - hence encouraging someone to commit suicide is illegal.
However, criminal intent would have had to be shown, which is probably why the CPS would probably have given up on securing a conviction; generally one wouldn't expect a prosecution to be succesful unless someone actually profitted (i.e. there would have had to be a motive, other than chatroom boredom).
It seems to me that the site was blatently breaking the relevant law, by assisting/allowing/encouraging illegal discrimination. Rather than acting as a 'billboard' owner, the site was prompting users for information which could then be used to discriminate automatically - hardly an activity deserving legal protection.
The site should have removed the requirement to enter gender/sexual preference/race information, and the ability to filter based on it, to meet the standards set by the law.