Posts by tranquil 29 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2007
I always like "United Statesmen" as the term for a citizen of the USA.
I seem to remember reading that the lack of a proper name for the country now known as the USA was raised very shortly after the formation of the country (especially as, at the time it referred to a much smaller proportion of the continental Amereicas).
It's really pretty simple; does he have a right to free speech - damn right he does. Does he have a right to keep his place as a moral leader? we'll that's up to the CoE, but if they say yes, then the I for one, wouldn't accept the word of the CoE.
Humour has never been an excuse - if it is, I've got some amazing joke about religion.
Marcus came up with 'David Blain: Freek Dangle' as alternate name for 'Above the Bellow' or whatever it was called, when he was hanging over the thames.
It was on The Now Show on Radio 4, and is available as part of the 'best of' compilation that I brought on 7Digital a couple of years back.
I think the ad makes a strange amount of sense; Bill Gates was popular as the geek done good, the guy with bad glasses and no dress sense who changed computing (whether that's true or not, that was the perception).
He became less popular when everyone had been using Windows and Office for so long that they forgot the improvement on what came before (once again, down to perception, maybe MS weren't so innovative, but that's irrelevant if MS is where you saw it first).
I think what they're trying to do is make people thing of him as anything other than the heard of a large faceless corporation, who everyone moans about, and he's so associated with Microsoft, even in his new slimmed-down role, they start to look better a result.
Although, @Matthew White, a sea of kittens? that'd be awesome. You could sell me anthrax with that.
Well putting someones hamster outside could be part of an elaborate campaign of torture, but you'd imagine the a caller would mention this.
Its also possible my mind has drifted beyond the point of sanity, what with it being Friday and all.
I propose a solution were people who make crank calls to 999 are automatically added to cold-calling call-centres marketing lists. Many, many times.
This is mostly comment bait, right? happy to help. love the phrase 'prototype onion'.
"We anticipate that the health and flavour profiles will actually be enhanced by what we've done."
- This reminds me of a scary-go-round comic: "Electromagnetism is a benign force. I am 85% sure it would make the robot's brain EXTRA nice"
Precede.
I'd actually be pretty happy with that list; mostly because my only Apple product is an iPod Touch, which appears to be a major fucus, and I adore last.fm. Ability to submit plays, and receive radio streams would finally start to make use of the device's capacity.
Getting The Orb on the device would be a pretty awesome too, and I imagine someone will design an app (although I understand this is possible already with a hacked software).
First Apple product I've ever brought mostly because I always said that I'd never buy an ipod when it didn't do anything I could get on another companies machine for less.
It is a lil bit awesome, its hard to over-state how good the web-browser works, I use it when I don't have time for my PC to boot-up, to check how late my trains going to be, for example. But more and more I use it when I don't want to exit out of a game or a film, and this is after a week and a half, I'm sure it's usage will only increase.
Apple have undeniably crippled it, and should feel ashamed of themselves. But every feature they've not thought of, or shamelessly deliberately denied, will be added/re-added by third parties until Apple has no choice but to add them in a firmware update.
Maybe it is a little style of substance, but go-darn it, I'm hooked.
My legal music collection is well over 25GB, around 150GB I believe, because its not stored in 128kbs mp3, its store on my PC in 1000kbs+ lossless files (and on the original CDs).
The idea of being able to back-up my entire CD collection (300 or so disks), in lossless formats, on a couple of disks, is quite appealing, actually.
I was affected, got flagged as running pirated Vista on Monday, lost the pretty stuff, and had "this copy of windows is not genuine" embedded in the bottom left of my screen, was able to verify on Sunday.
What upsets me here, is that In the mean time I logged a complaint by email and the response I got (on Monday) made no mention of there being an outage at there end - this is the first I'm hearing about it.
In the end theres no harm done, and I'm a little surprised as too how much of the OS worked for a non genuine version, but it was annoying to get a "you may be a victim of software counterfeiting" pop-up every time I loaded anything.
I also bet a lot of PC manufactures (as advised on the MS website) got inundated people complaining they'd been sold a PC with a fake OS.
I don't mind MS having these kind of controls, I accept its necessary for closed source software, but it has to work.
Remember that the QWERTY keyboard was specifically designed to slow down typing speeds in order to prevent typewriters jamming, and it becomes obvious how out of date it is.
I'll admit that I sill use a QWERTY but that has lot to do with it being good enough, rather than being good. That and the fear of the unknown.
"Of the 81.3m units sold, Nvidia took 43 per cent of the desktop market and Intel claimed 38.5 per cent. The real gap came between the quarter’s two leaders and third position AMD though, which JPR recognised with the significantly lower market share of 23 per cent."
43% + 38.5% + 23% = 104.5%
I used to get 10s of these a day, a few (5?) years back - or at least I assumed at the time that were something similar, and that Microsoft weren't actually sending out hundreds of security updates a week (Unix users should feel free to use that as a set-up for a joke).
It's potentially a very effective avenue of attack as many users don't expect the "from" address to be spoofed - although one would hope their email client would pick up on this.
Being as this is the first game to be banned by the BBFC in 10 years (and that, Carmageddon, was overturned on appeal), I suspect two things; 1) this probably isn't an assault on freedom of expression, and 2) I really don't want to play this game.
Which isn't to say I'm not afraid of the precedent this sets, but I'm prepared to believe the BBFC when they say that this game was an exception.
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