Posts by Zog The Undeniable 275 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2008
until you make a working prototype. Otherwise I can dream up some desirable concept like an implantable web-enabled orgasmatron and watch the IP dollars roll in in 25 years' time. The fact that medical science and computing wouldn't know how to construct one has to be significant, surely?
Most employers have a provision allowing them to sack employees who are convicted of a criminal offence if it has any relevance to their job (otherwise everyone who had picked up a speeding ticket would be out of work). There are ACAS guidelines around this.
I would expect a member of teaching staff convicted of looting, or in fact of almost any non-motoring offence, to be summarily dismissed due to their influence over children. And yes, they are CRB checked to the hilt, including members of their family, and this has to be renewed every (I think) 3 years, or whenever they move to a different school.
You can't allow them to starve, but you could certainly downgrade anyone on the sick to standard JSA (fit enough to loot, fit enough to work) and take benefits away from any younger people living with family.
Ironically a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and *start* claiming benefits as a result of being convicted. I don't think that 31-year old teaching assistant's feet will touch the floor once his headmaster sees the news.
Surely the shops have a record of, and the networks can just block, the IMEI numbers? Then the phone is worthless. I don't think we're seeing the greatest criminal minds in history here.
A few vigilante groups hanging rioters from the nearest lamp-post seems to stop the problem elsewhere in the world. Now that's a Big Society.
Does anyone remember the experiment where bride and groom photos from 10 different weddings were cut down the middle? The brides were given to a panel of men to rank in order of attractiveness, and the grooms were given to a panel of women. When the ranked photos were put alongside each other, guess what? The couples all matched up. Basically, unless you have Mick Hucknall's money, it comes down to looks.
From the manual:
As it would take the light from the headlights twice as long to travel to any obstacle and be reflected back as it would to crash into the obstacle, headlights are disabled by the onboard computer at c/2.
Thankyou for choosing the Vauxhall Astramax van.
Pressure would be transmitted at the speed of sound in the rod, which depends on the material but is much slower than the speed of light. When the other end hits "something" the pressure wave has to travel back down the rod. Obviously a 186,000 mile rod can compress by quite a long way.even under mere finger pressure - probably many yards (well, you used imperial units).
FOTR, top right of the screen, just after Sam says to Frodo (or is it the other way round?) that he's never been so far out of The Shire before. Dust cloud and brake lights.
Tom Bombadil is indeed a tedious character*, but the episode with the barrow-wights is how they get the special swords that can kill a fell beast; a bit of a plot hole in the movies, clumsily addressed by Aragorn saying "hey, here are some cool swords I happened to be carrying".
*although Goldberry sounds like a right goer and I don't know why she hangs out with him
RFor the sake of diversity, you can't have robotic Midlands PMBs* winning two series in a row. In her favour, Helen came across as being quite nice, although probably terribly boring. Melody was the bitch queen from hell, just like Arnold Rimmer's mum.
*Project Manager Barbies
this doesn't work for me. It seems to be the spiritual successor to the Minilux, a brilliant 35mm compact that was let down by reliability issues (you can still buy new boxed ones for a fraction of the original price because everyone's scared of the "E02 error" which costs as much to fix as another Minilux).
The main problems are:
1. The price. if you want digital, that's not far off a Nikon D700 with a 35mm lens (Nikon lenses being cheap as chips compared to Leica, and not significantly worse in quality). The D700 is, of course, full-frame which makes it a zillion times better for creative photography. You can blur the background properly and the huge photosites will give clean images at pretty high ISO.
2. The APS-C sensor. Good bokeh isn't going to be seen very often with a 24mm f/2.8 lens. With a FF sensor and a 35mm lens you can use bokeh a bit for creative effect, but even then you really need f/2 to reliably blur the background, unless you're very close to the subject and giving them a big nose as a result. Obviously APS-C is going to be better at high ISO than a little digicam sensor but not as good as a FF sensor.
A secondhand M6 (actually, I'd have an M2 at half the price) and a new Zeiss 35mm lens seem like considerably better value for £1500. OK, you have to load ithe M6 with this stuff called film, but if you want to buy into the Leica myth and lore, you may as well go the whole hog.
always seem to driive in a non-eco style, i.e. 85mph on the motorway. You don't get any benefit from the hybrid stuff at constant speed (although the Atkinson engine helps a bit) and 85mph uses a lot more fuel than 70mph.
I bet they're getting worse real-world mpg than almost any diesel car (excluding Wilmslow panzers, obviously).
You can't eat an iTunes app or heat your home with it, which is what concerns many people right now. All iTunes stuff is discretionary spending, which by all accounts is going down the toilet due to inflation, wage freezes and fear. Except $ky Sports of course, which is unaffected by a recession because it seems to be regarded as a utility bill.
The original Athlon scared Intel and Opteron/x86-64 really made Itanium look stupid. Intel, though, have always caught up quickly and crushed them with brand strength (like no-one ever got fired for buying IBM or Microshaft). I suspect Intel's fabrication plants also have far better economies of scale. AMD frequently makes losses whereas Intel keeps on coining it.
Not likely, I'd say, since senior members of that government reckon they were hacked* as well. Now...if someone could prove a link from Prescott's voicemail via Andy Coulson to Conservative Central Office, that would be the most fun since Watergate.
*a bit of an inflated description of guessing voicemail passwords
Amazon has lost the plot. Searching for a product name brings up too many links to other sites, auctions etc and often these are displayed before the actual Amazon price. They're trying to grab every piece of the market and it's a mess; Amazon is becoming a tacky shopping search site like Kelkoo and the like.
I tried to buy a camera for my daughter yesterday and prices ranged from £79 to over £200 for the same item. In the end I gave up and ordered it from a different retailer; I don't like confusopolies.
£3 eBay cable FTW. And don't get me started on hi-fi interconnects; there may be some justification when you're dealing with a weak phono signal, but a one-volt line level signal over a very short piece of copper isn't going to be noticeably degraded by a cheap interconnect. As long as the plugs are properly connected, anyway.
There is a vague justification for half-decent speaker cable as thin bell wire can suppress bass frequencies, but the sort of 99.999999% pure, hand-rolled on the thighs of Swedish virgins stuff you can pay £30,000 for is about as honest as a 419 scam.
Rumour has it that someone accidentally released one of the modified Hasselblads while space walking a few decades ago, and it's still up there. Now that would sting if it caught you in the soft bits at 4 miles per second.
They also commissioned a space Leica but AFAIK that one never made it off Earth; they probably auctioned it to pay for a new Shuttle.
An outfit with which I shall never fly - I'd rather walk and swim to my destination - charge this fee* PER PERSON, which really is double- or quadruple-dipping. Michael O'Sweary has proven that you can build up a successful business by treating your customers with contempt, so I blame the customers for lying back and taking it. Last time I flew short-haul, British Airways (not a paragon of customer care themselves, but a darn sight better than Ryanair) came out as the same price as the budget airlines after adding all the silly charges.
*actually, it can be avoided if you have an obscure type of card owned by a miniscule percentage of the population, just so they can claim it's avoidable..
've just remembered another reason why downloads suck: try downloading an album where the tracks run into one another, and you normally discover that the tracks aren't gapless even when played on a compliant player. My home rips from CD will play gaplessly in Winamp although the CD in the car still can't cope.
Any Doors fans who like the way "Peace Frog" segues into "Blue Sunday" will know what I'm talking about. A careless commercial rip that leaves a gap or even a stutter ruins the whole piece. I can see where Pink Floyd were coming from when they opposed downloads for so long.
Oh, and once you've paid for a gappy download, try getting a refund. No chance.
Uncompressed, no DRM, harder to lose in a HDD crash or PC upgrade, cover art, no chance of a dodgy rip (the prize for this being some mp3s on Amazon that were so badly ripped from VINYL that you could hear the end of the previous track, as well as all the crackles).
Plus CDs are dirt cheap on fleaBay if you don't even want to pay one of the Jersey-located warehouses.
I have an Acer Aspire One D260. It will take 2GB instead of the supplied 1GB but Acer make this as hard as possible. You have to take the machine apart (remove keyboard and then uncrew the back, the screw heads being on the inside (!), just to use the memory slot provided. I did it, naturally invalidating the warranty in the process.
There's something going on with netbook specifications and it's not for the customer's benefit; they just want you to buy a laptop like a good boy. Oh, and Windows 7 Starter sucks a very large one; it's put me off "upgrading" to Windows 7 on the upstairs PC, anyway.
and we sometimes get astroturfers. In fact, we love them. Their clumsy efforts are very quickly spotted by the other members and we then have a lot of fun at the astroturfer's expense (e.g. posting photos of real astroturf, sock puppets, belittling whatever product they're trying to pimp) before we kick them out. Sometimes we leave the discussion there for all time as a warning to others, while carefully deleting any URLs to avoid the astroturfer benefiting from a higher Google PageRank.
Astroturfing on a moderated and vaguely intelligent forum is counter-productive. It might work in an anarchic environment like Usenet, but it just vanishes amid the noise.
The shift to digital photography is finally coming home to roost. There's not much of an ongoing income stream from digital unless the manufacturers can come up with a "must-have" polycarbonate wonder every couple of years, and in with the current plunge in disposable incomes no-one is interested in another metering mode and a couple more megapixels. In t'olden days people kept buying film and having their photos processed, because it was a small ongoing cost.
I wouldn't be sorry to see Dixons go under because of their high prices and abysmal service, though.
Or are all MINIs driven by cretins? It's one of those cars, like the Audi A3, to which you give a very wide berth. Junior management types with more testosterone than concentration, airhead secretaries and Foxtons estate agents.
Paris, because she's probably have one if it were pimped up a bit with diamonds and a fur interior.
You may sneer, but putting the milk in first means the milk can never get hotter than the final mixed temperature. Putting milk into hot tea overheats the first part of the milk which goes in and gives a less creamy "UHT" taste. Try it and see.
Obviously you must use a teapot, and take the bags out of the pot as soon as it's brewed. Loose-leaf tea is also good, but you must (a) pour the whole lot at once; (b) use a very fine strainer and (c) give it only 1 minute or so to brew, because it goes waaaay faster than teabags.
New keyboard icon, because tea is responsible for most such incidents.
Possibly the biggest load of bloatware in history. It's grown to the size of an entire 1990s operating system, updates for it frequently require kernel changes (and therefore a reboot) and it has far too many exploits aimed at it because of holes like the one this month's patch is supposed to address. And all it does is display miserable PDF dpcuments.
I really need to dump it and get one of the free PDF readers.
