You're only against nominative determinism...
...cos you'd get bored making honey all day.
1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Aaaaaaaaaaaargh.
Mephedrone is plant food. Plant Food. If they want people to stop taking it, they should stop calling it a drug and start calling it plant food. PLAAAAAANT FOOOOOOOOOD.
Then we might start comparing it to lighter fluid and glue, which are also sometimes used to get a "legal high" (another term the press should ditch as counterproductive).
Did we ban glue? No, we stopped kids buying it.
Have internal storage that we can install games on.
My MP3 player doesn't need different cards for different albums.
My eBook reader doesn't need different cards for different books.
I try to buy PC games that can do a 100% install, no run CD required, because my PC is supposed to be portable.
So give me a games console that lets me carry all my games without some silly pack of cards and I'll think about it. Right now, the only thing that fits the bill is the iPhone/iPod touch, and that has a silly control system.
The market's open if someone wants to jump in....
$3,500 a week for a total of $100,000 mens that they were at it for about 6.5 months before the broadcast.
If they stopped after the TV prog, they would have spent a combined 13 months stealing/fencing, and are due to spend a total of 39 months between them in "chokey".
52 months is 4 1/3 years, $100,000 for that is over 23 grand a year. Not bad.
"It took the police a further year to move against the couple"
...and if they carried on at the previous rate, that's a further $182,000, making $282,000 for 5 1/3 years. Annual wage: clear of 50 grand.
OK, the custodial sentence has very long "work days", but who said crime doesn't pay...?
"The one's in rural Britian pay for it themselves! They don't moan when we get Gas piped to our houses and they have to have it delivered..."
Yes we do, but there's damned little we can do about it.
But let's look at electricity. Imagine if the electricity companies were allowed to skip rural houses just to save a few quid. Imagine if a rural village dweller had to pay thousands in initial setup costs to get the electricity companies to extend the cables out by 5 miles from the nearest town.
Or roads. Imagine if the rural dweller had to pay a grand in road tax to have his road "upgraded" from cracked tarmac to the latest shiny surface, because "it's too far".
That's what we're talking about -- the internet is now a part of essential public infrastructure like roads and electricity. It is now far more important than the land line phone ever was -- just ask the Inland Revenue, they want the farmers to do their tax returns on line.
The debunking doesn't examine the other, less contentious threat: water.
Whether anthropogenic or merely part of the Earth's natural cycle, the climate is changing and water is becoming harder to get in many parts of the world (just ask a Cypriot). (Of course, a lot of our water use is again for everyday things like washing and healthcare...) Anyhow, the water cost of livestock rearing is higher than the producing the equivalent amount of edible vegetable matter.
I'm not a veggie and I don't intend to turn veggie, but I do recognise that our meat consumption is much higher than in previous generations. Some people now even have meat in every meal -- sausages for breakfast, burger for lunch, lamb curry for dinner. I don't consider it turning "part veggie" if I have a bowl of porridge for breakfast and a pasta salad for lunch. I don't consider it turning "part veggie" if I go for a whole day -- or even two days, or three -- without meat.
Sustainability is not a matter of forcing ourselves to underconsume, but rather a matter of not allowing ourselves to overconsume.
No-one is advocating stopping washing, just not having two or three showers a day.
Very few people advocate not having cars, just not using them to go half-a-mile down the road for a carton of milk or on a route with a perfectly good bus or train service.
Same should apply to meat and dairy.
It must have been awful for the Daily Mail hacks. How do you report this? Is it a victory against corrupt perversions or is in the wanton destruction of our natural heritage by nanny state gone mad?
They were pulled so hard both ways that they couldn't even bring themselves to write an article and had to resort to stapling a dozen quotes together.
Oh, the humanity!
Won't somebody think of the Daily Mail hacks?
" Probably just a poorly thought out job advert, although you would have thought this kind of thing would be picked up before publication in this day and age. "
This is precisely the day and age when this sort of thing *wouldn't* be picked up. The immediacy of technology and the false assurances of spell checkers mean there's far more written material out there that hasn't been through the hands of a professional proof-reader.
In a previous day and age, there would have been some sort of "costumer service" between the advertiser and the press and they might have queried the wording.
Not today. Not this day and age.
"All that means Microsoft could take Linux, GNOME and GIMP and sell it as proprietary software - the GPL is unenforceable without the courts' recognition of copyright. But it's all for the best."
I thought the courts were going to recognise copyright in Pirate Cuckoo land, albeit only up to 10 years?
You confuse me.
The terms of the competition are cunning enough that they're protected by the law of averages.
You get to keep the device whatever happens, so there is no disincentive to stop non-hackers turning up. This will effectively crowd out the hardcore crackers, who would have been hampered by the unrealistic restrictions. Real-world hackers get more than two hours, and clearly don't play within the law, after all.
So you plug it into someone's PC forgetting about the self-destruct. But he's not got an internet connection. What now? Immediate wipe? Grace period?
The "unknown computer" thing is stupid -- if I want to restrict my data to a single "known good" computer, well I'll use the hard drive in my "known good" computer.
And if I was a data courier transferring secure data between two "known good" computers, I don't think I'd need a pen knife. No-one who genuinely needs this level of data security wants it in a penknife.
It's just cynical headline fodder.
"To distinguish the the police depts apart , the state appointed police dept wore copper badges . Hence the term coppers ."
No, a large portion of the NYPD were immigrants from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was at the time) where police were commonly called coppers, and many people still do.
You misunderstand.
The federal judges didn't uphold that sexting was protected by free speech, but that the DA's deal violated their free speech, as it amounted to a gagging order on protesting their innocence. The judges ruled that as this amounted to coercion to forego their constitutional rights, the entire prosecution was invalid.
Cases get thrown out of court all the time for police procedural errors (failing to read rights, mishandling of evidence etc) and this is the same thing, but with the mishandling at the level of the judiciary.
I love how the "Irish" Americans are defining themselves by the same hateful bigotry and mistrust that everyone in Ireland (save a minority) is desperately trying to put behind them.
The deluded lunatics will probably start using car bombs next as a way to express their "ancient Irish culture and heritage". And for full authenticity, their cars will be green and have the ancient blessing "Kiss Me I'm Irish" on a bumper sticker on the back.
And as others have said -- there's orange on the flag. It's a call for unity, not discrimination.
In my day, kids engaged in totally legal play. We had wholesome games like "plundering apples", "lifting stuff from Woolies", "running on the railway tracks", "crawling under the security fence", "building-site hide-and-seek". Some of my favourite toys were obtained in the course of that last one.
Kids today just don't have the same respect for the law.
So, they took a bunch of kids who didn't have consoles, gave half of them consoles, that half did worse at school, and they gave the other half consoles at the end.
The problems:
1) It is morally indefensible to conduct a study that has a good chance of having detrimental effects on a child's development. No matter what the results do to better the lot of future generations, harming a child mentally or physically is child abuse. Even assuming they didn't expect to see any obstacles to development, the risk was always there. Morally unacceptable.
2) Having proved the detrimental effects of games console, they still proceeded to issue more free consoles, so they were consciously causing harm to more children. Morally unacceptable.
3) All children entering the study were being offered a console, whether they were the console sample or the control sample. Paying research subjects is considered exploitation as it encourages vulnerable people to subject themselves to harm out of desperation. To a child without a console, a console is the equivalent of a payment of several thousand pounds to an adult. And it gets worse. There are two types of houses without games consoles or gaming PCs: type A is where the parents doesn't want them, and type B is where the parents can't afford them. Type A would not have been agreed to be involved in the experiment... unless the offer of the free console gave the child the leverage to badger the parents into allowing him to take part. The study overturns parental choice and causes harm to the child. Type B are the vulnerable people we're not supposed to pay as it encourages them to put themselves or their children in harm's way. And they have paid them to harm their children. Morally unacceptable.
No child should be allowed to be harmed in the pursuit of knowledge for the greater good, and just because they've not been dissected doesn't mean they haven't been harmed.
Really, this is what I wanted before the eeePC came out, but I wanted it with some kind of network connection. Now I've got an MP3 player with 2" screen, 7" eeePC and 6" Elonex/Hanvon eReader with QWERTY keyboard. If there was a network port, they might just have a sale, but there isn't, so I'll wait for the Openinkpot project to get my Elonex supported (and work out how to use the USB host socket on the top) and I'll use that for my command line needs.
Command line + ePaper = L337.
Why do the Register's camcorder reviews never discuss compression ratios and the potential for editing and processing?
Telling us it's MP4 is all well and good, but how heavily compressed does it go? Will the video degrade into a hellish series of blocks if we run it through Final Cut and reencode it to any form of MPEG? HD's all well and good, but right now I don't know if any given HD device is going to give me better results than an old SD tape camcorder in terms of final picture quality.
I look at the "pocket" HD camcorders and the handheld HD camcorders and despite the big price difference, they seem to have very similar recording times -- are they using the same compression ratios? Are they *good* compression ratios? I don't want to shell out £500 to get superior optics only to find that the software cheats me out of picture quality so that I'd be as well off with a £100 pocket model.
Enquiring minds need to know!
" In case you have not read a newspaper, listened to the radio or looked at the interwebs for a few years, Twitter is the latest stage in the progression of web formats. It is essentially a type of personal website so easy to update that users are often tempted to do so even when they don't really need to. "
Or in other words, it's like TheRegister, but for people who aren't tech journalists....
What's the Paris Hilton angle?
Health and safety has two problems here:
1) Inherent danger involved in the activity.
Not a biggie. Some people climb hundreds of metres up without safety equipment. Their life, their choice.
2) Overcrowding.
When the event draws too many people, individual risk gives way to collective risk. This event has got so big that one person's slip could hurt a lot of people. This event was originally a small local gathering, and would have happened in many places around the area. It did not evolve for the scale presented now. Marathons have large numbers of participants. Sprints do not. Nature of the game.
If people want to take part in cheese rolling, they should organise their own local event.
Lots of small ones is safer than one big one.
So what you're saying is "I am Welsh, I don't speak Welsh, therefore Welsh people don't speak Welsh?" I think you'll find that some actually do. No-one in the UK believes all Welsh people speak Welsh.
And as for less languages...
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
"The welsh language is a luxury that the country ... can ill afford in these straitened financial times"
I would like to extend this argument to English. The grammatical irregularities, lunatic spelling system and strangulated pronunciation make it a massively inefficient medium of communication, and a luxury we can ill afford. Switching to Esperanto would allow us to get our kids out of school and into the workhouse by the age of 12.
In these straitened financial times, these are the sorts of measures we must take....
The BARB FAQ says that the panel is 5,100 homes, so if they've been selected in a statistically sound manner, we're looking at 51 households.
However, I can't find the "20 cell matrix" that BARB use to check demographics on their website, so there's not even any guarantee that they have properly accounted for Welsh speakers in the survey.
I've frequently heard the criticism that both BARB and RAJAR are devalued by the requirement to be owner occupier in order to participate in the survey, which means the results are biased to middle class viewing habits, and in the case of rural Wales this often means "white settler".
The only way for anyone to fully understand these figures is with confirmation that Welsh language is proportionally represented, and with a plot of viewing figures for all Welsh-language programmes (which will reveal the bias in the sample set -- I'm guessing that we could determine pretty quickly where only one household has a child in a particular age range, for example).
"According to The Guardian, Microsoft plans this year to make programmes and films available in high definition based on its Silverlight tech. But Redmond clearly isn't brave enough to apply its own proprietary software to the rest of its MSN video estate yet."
So the plan is to use well established technology so that people can use the site immediately, so aren't scared off. Then use enhanced content as an incentive to install the otherwise-unnecessary Silverlight player.
Increased complexity in the server farm, but it will drive uptake.
When there's two people in a call, lack of video is no problem. When there's half-a-dozen people in a call, not being able to see each other really gets in the way of conversation. Yet perversely, Skype only lets you video conference in one-to-one calls, because of bandwidth constraints.
I'm studying with the OU, and the online tutorials really are badly hampered by the lack of visual cues (such as "confused face" and "general eagerness to say something"). I also do day work in a virtual team and there's similar problems, coupled with the risk of seeming aggressive when asking something due to lack of facial expressions.
Video will be big once the pipes big enough to cope with multiple streams simultaneously.
Well you know what? I started cycling last year and I bought a map produced by a local cycle advocacy group and it has been invaluable -- it highlights all the hidden back-street cut-throughs that aren't signposted (cos they're not suitable for cars), it highlights all the cycle lanes and dedicated cycle paths that you might miss if you were cycling up a parallel street instead.
It even makes it clear when a footpath isn't open to bikes (information sadly missing from most maps)... or it did before the council changed a lot of routes.
The reason that this is a problem is that Internet Explorer has a very poor record on standards compliance.
The dominance of Windows leads to a dominance of IE, precisely because of the "don't care" crowd.
The dominance of IE (not standards compliant) leads to coding of sites for IE, leading to lock-out of other browsers.
If IE was free for all platforms, this would not be a problem.
However, IE is not available for PS3, Wii, Symbian, Linux, etc etc etc, and this means that IE dominance perpetuates the tying of the internet to Windows PCs.
Mobile technology has made great leaps in recent years, and home TVs are now of a sufficient resolution to cope with a rich browsing experience. Ubiquitous internet is finally becoming a reality, but it is not to Microsoft's commercial benefit to allow this to happen -- WinCE failed to make a solid dent in the set-top-box market, and DTV and Blu-ray technology have introduced an MS-free software stack into the living room. Windows Mobile can ape much of the non-compliant functionality of full fat Windows, so why encourage people to use iPhones, Android phones and the like?
The ballot screen is a clumsy hack, but it is necessary to allow the internet to break free from the desktop and realise its full potential.
Have you seen the Ploenulus yourself? The text you quote is quite different from the version on Google Books:
" Byth ilymmoth ynnocho thuulech antidamaschon
Ys sidobrim thyfel yth chyl ischon them liful "
What is the provenance of the version you quote, and are you aware how the purported meaning of the Phoenician fits into the context of the surrounding Latin?
Or are you merely parroting a largely discredited 18th century fetish that many nations had for the idea of being "the lost tribe of Israel"?
I appreciate that a transflective screen is effectively a single sheet, hence the e-paper tag, but when you talk about e-paper, most people think of persistent e-ink. I certainly did, right up until you started talking about LCDs.
It sounds like a great technology (and I'm hoping they'll release a kit for the original eeePC as I'd love to eke a few more hours out of my battery), but I don't think the term e-paper helps to clarify things for the reader, and incorrect user expectations could lead the tech to a premature grave....
" WRT DRM - why is having a permanent net connection such a trauma now, with always on ADSL? "
You're not a mobile worker, are you? Some of us find that the odd game installed on the company laptop is a good way to while away a couple of hours in a soulless hotel on the edge of a business park. Two days of always-on hotel internet is the same as a month of always-on home internet.