Posts by No, I will not fix your computer 708 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
>>Simply put... all things equal, the simplest answer is the most likely one.
I think you're missing the point of "conspiracy" it's deliberately constructed to make the incorrect answer appear more likely.
The conspiracy theorist requires Occams Razor, it's not the bane, it's because of Occams Razor that the conspiracy theory exists, in the same way as the Police need criminals.
The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of mental disorders is generally regarded as "the bible" when it comes to mental disorders, to have a diagnosis of sociopath you need to have at least 3 of the following traits;
A. Repeated acts that could lead to arrest.
No (and yes) - He has always believed that the leaks are legal
B. Conning for pleasure or profit, repeated lying, or the use of aliases.
No
C. Failure to plan ahead or being impulsive.
No - The releasing of an encrypted bundle of documents as "insurance" is definitely well planned
D. Repeated assaults on others.
No
E. Reckless when it comes to their or others safety.
Yes - A matter of opinion perhaps
F. Poor work behavior or failure to honor financial obligations.
No
G. Rationalizing the pain they inflict on others.
Yes - I'm sure he does
So, if DSM is to be trusted and assuming you agree with the above then he is not a sociopath, however, lets say for arguments sake that we could stretch a couple more into "yes", well actually I probably meet at least three (and I'm sure that most "normal" people meet some).
>>So its not coincidence that he faces charges in Sweden and possible charges in connection with the US. (IMHO I believe he did cross the line and did break the law.) But there is no conspiracy.
I love you assume that anyone without a perfect home-life becomes a sociopath, not that it could make you stronger.
You do understand that a citizen of one country living in another potentially breaking the law of a third doesn't mean anything, after all you have probably broken other countries laws without even knowing (Sharia law for example).
When you say "But there is no conspiracy" you may be right, however it is interesting how there is not another single case of Sweden extraditing a foreign citizen for these charges; and look at the charges, even if he did what is alleged, it's not "rape", certainly not in the english version of the word anyway.
>>They never nailed multi-cpu the way Apple did (good cross platform dev tools, fat binaries, good emulation and multiplatform install media), and the cpu support was dropped one by one.
Eh? Until the G5 (in 2003) Apple didn't have a multi cpu machine, and even at 10.5.2 the system spends so long in zero fill VM faults you get a 25% performance hit (you can't saturate all the cores), basic multi CPU function is faster on Linux and Windows (it's because malloc uses vm_allocate).
I was running two overclocked celerons on a BP6 back in 2000, NT4 was lovely (once I installed the correct HAL, doh!), later, W2k was even better, dual proc quake played well (before all hard-core processing was shifted to the GPU) - might bung the mobo on eBay in a few years as it's a bit of collectors item now!
>>None of they key apps (including microsofts!) ran on the other architectures, so no one bought them, so no one ported their apps.
Not true, I have used both Word and Excel ('97?) on an Alpha (Alpha binaries, obviously), woudn't say they were popular, but the definitely existed.
It great to see a cutting-edge hard hitting, unbiased news organisation blowing the cover of this sordid affair, hopefully they won't end up having to apologise or losing another libel case.
Of course the fact that Vanity Fair is own by the same people that own The Republican may lead one to wonder if there's any kind of political motive behind it, nahhh.... I'm sure that the US press isn't biased at all (what was I thinking).
If there is any truth in the report and assuming that it happened exactly as reported I suspect that (regardles of motive), if Assange had an agreement with a newspaper which they broke (or appeared to break) then it does more damage to the trustworthness of the newpaper (yes, ironic and funny but like being burgled by a policeman it does damage the industry).
It's unclear from the article;
The "downgrade" option is only available from a later operating system with more or similar features.
The only supported version of XP was XP Professional, this posed a couple of issues for Microsoft, because, although it is an older revision of the OS it has some features better than the entry-level version of vista, multi CPU support (multi core is a different issue), ability to log on to a domain etc.
I think that you have hit the nail on the head when you used the term "valuable", not better or more advanced, imagine if you could (for free) downgrade from Vista Basic to XP Pro, to the home user there's pretty much no loss there (they probably wouldn't use the professional features), however, imagine the corporate businesses that would prefer to buy Vista Basic licences and get XP Pro instead, Microsoft would probably lose out big time because they make a lot of cash from corporations (and they are typically slower to upgrade because of the potential business impact, just look at the Reg surveys).
The logic goes, Vista Basic is not as feature-rich as XP Professional and therefore the "downgrade" is a feature upgrade, so if you upgrade to an equivalent or higher version-level of Vista or Se7en (Buiness/Professional/Ultimate) then go to XP Pro will be free.
She believes that "downgrading" from Vista Basic to XP Pro should be free (regardless of the fact that you get more features).
I'm not saying I agree or disagree, and if M$ still supported XP Home then offering XP Home as a free downgrade woud be reasonable alternative, perhaps they should have extended support and made that a free downgrade, but they obviously decided not to (probably because of cost), however legally (not morally!) M$ are probably OK given XP Pro was the only supported option.
@El Reg - probably would have been a good idea to specify the XP version in the article (and the reasons for using XP Pro)
Well.....
In the UK, If there's oncomming traffic then it can only be a maximum of 60Mph speed limit (you need a central reservation/dual carrageway for 70) so, already being 10Mph over the limit *should* be enough to get past safely, after all, if speeding by 10Mph isn't enough*, where do you draw the line? (it would be similar but different in the US, 55/65Mph limits and any lane overtaking)
*Not forgetting that it's an offence to accelerate whilst being overtaken if the action could prevent a safe overtake, secondly you may even be contributory liable if you were maintaining your speed whilst being overtaken if decelerating could have prevented an accident (yes, if a twat overtakes you with not enough room and you didn't let him in, you could be liable, the thought of someone driving into the back of you is *not* an excuse).
It *may* depend on FWD/RWD/4WD and also the type of traction control, in the case where TC actually retards the wheel with most grip in an effort to slow down assuming that you want to slow the vehicle because one wheel has no traction and you could shortly be out of control, so if it's TC without electonic stability on a front wheel drive car you may find that you cannot get sufficient speed to get up slopes on loose snow from a standing start.
It's a pretty specific example (and generally I would agree with you), but (I suspect) in North America with snow for 4-5 month of the year you won't generally drive the same type of vehicles as the UK when you have expensive petrol and snow 1 week a year (i.e. SUV vs 2WD compacts).
10% of the driving population is 20 or under but make up 12% of the fatal accidents in the UK, I'm not sure that this 2% uplift really justifies the venom in your post.
Oh, and before you say "statistics can say anything", go to ONS and see the data, while the 21-60 aged drivers are "safer" than 17-20 the 17-20 are significantly "safer" than 61+ who end up causing more deaths (and dying more), it's like people who bang on about how dangerous motorcycles are (6.5% of all accidents) but over 80% are as a result of "other driver, almost exclusively a car driver".
I suspect that those who have made mistakes in their teens and lived are now better drivers for it, our children that get past the early years, finding their feet as young adults, learning from their mistakes moving on and growing into adults may forget how they learned their lessons but some of us won't.
Phat exhaust, plastic covered, cap on backwards, chav drivers get up my nose, but I look at them and laugh, they are stupid, noisy, have the innocence and ignorance of youth that I don't have anymore, they will look back and think how stupid they looked (to be replaced by the next generation, which no doubt they will sneer at), I wish they didn't rip around at 1am waking me up, but I don't wish them dead.
What does RAID give you? it might save you from a single drive failure, that's all.
An accidential delete, theft, water, power surge and both mirrors are gone, but use an (additional) USB drive to backup the data, lock it away (pref in a fireproof box), or a second box on the network (in the garage/loft) that rsyncs overnight and (for less than the price of building your own dedicated NAS box) you have something far more robust.
Seriously, a single drive is (like you say) scary if your data is important, but having known a company that went under (pretty much because) they naively relied on RAID only to have the entire server and backup USB drives stolen, when 1Tb USB drives can be had for £50 and a fire resitant box for £30, just thinking RAID is all you'll ever need will disappoint when you could have had a cheaper and better solution, if you're going to do something to prevent loosing [:-)] your data don't do something half arsed.
>>For this to work, average speed check cameras would have to be installed over the whole of the country - expensive. then they would all have to be networked up in a way that didn't fail - expensive.
GPS in all cars, dumping the locations and speed to collection points, automatic tickets when you're over 10% +2 and automatic removals if you're constantly under the speed limit, it would work in a 2000AD Judge Dredd world, but until then it won't.
>>The days of old style spinning hard drives are numbered. I reckon within 2-5 years they will be slmost completely obsolete.
Floppy drives have only just gone, CDs are still sold, DVDs are still sold, BD is too expensive.
It's always changing, but, it's down to capacity/cost, tapes are still used (LTO etc.), 2-5 years is very broad, but you won't see mechanical hard drives disappear until you can get 4Tb SSD for < £100 which of course will happen, but I wouldn't like to predict when (and of course, as manufacturing technology shifts it will be cheaper to fab chips than moving glass/ceramics and that will speed it up)
Personally I only shop there when I have to (vouchers, dire need), I've had the people telling me that things don't exist (not that they don't have it, but it's existence is impossible, in that case a multi-port serial card), they don't the difference between types of RAM, and I have witnessed an oversold laptop because you "can't use the internet properly on that cheap one" and this was to an old chap who "just wanted it for email", I tried to tell him that the extra £400 wouldn't give him anything extra.
>>Why not t'internet. Time. I needed to archive over a hundred GB of data and send it by close of business today. So, my only option was a new drive and a couple of BD-R DL discs.
Obviously don't know your situation but my local techie shop has BD-RE drives in stock and £10 cheaper than PCW and with 250Gb external drives for £35 a one off 100Gb backup possibly has other options (compared to 50Gb BD-DL disks at £14 a pop from PCW), I'm guessing you dished out £120, would have been £100 at my local shop or (like I said) get a 2.5" external 250Gb unit for £35, even comes in a nice protective box perfect for posting (and doesn't need a BD drive the other end to read), just talking through my hat, I'm sure there's other reasons why you went down the BD route.
>>Apparently Wikileaks inc income was $1.3M last year. Assange paid himself $86K, $130K total for the rest of the staff.
How dare he pay himself for working! let's pretend that the Wall Street Journal has no axe to grind against Assange, lets also forget that Assange has had £200,000 ($300,000) in legal costs so far, this pales into insignificance for the $1.5m book deal that he has got (and, depending on the outcome a film in the offing, but probably not funded stateside).
OK, £50k is a lot of money, and when this comes from donations you have to question if it's appropriate, notwithstanding it's a fraction of a CEO salary (and less than an IT contractor), and lets face it the sort of grief (and legal costs) he's facing it's not very much reward, if it wasn't for his profile and distributed, encrypted files as an insurance policy, he could very well have ended up dead (and of course he has had death threats from people who don't care about his "insurance").
You don't have to hate him or like him to know that what he was paid is pretty much irrelevant.
A man walks up to a woman in a bar and says, "I'll give you £1,000,000 to sleep with me", the woman is startled, however she's single, he's attractive and assuming some basic rules are in place, she'd bet set for life, so after consideration she says "OK", the man immediately replies "How about £10 then?", the woman is now afronted and says "What kind of woman do you think I am?", and sho he replies "Oh I think we established what you are, we're just agreeing a price".
And there lies in the rub, if the Kindle was the same price as an iPad and you needed a contract for the 3G version then it would be dead in the water, the iPad is technically a much better beast, however, the battery life, e-ink, free 3G queer the milk a bit for the iPad winning hands down.
If you have £109 and only £109 then the iPad is a no go, but you can have a Kindle on your doorstep for this small amount of money, if you want to add a 3G global browser for another one off £40 charge then again the Kindle is for you, but lets say you have £429 sitting around so the entry level iPad is now an option, applications, colour touchscreen, 16Gb, there's just so much more technology in it, and for an extra £100 you can get 3G and all the joy of Google maps etc. (with the additional monthly cost of a contract, but maybe a lower initial cost, tomarto, tomayto - for argments sake, best part of £1000 over two years)
One may say it's apples and oranges, it's perhaps stupid to compare a one off payment of £149 for a Kindle with £529 iPad (plus contract), of course the iPad is "better" technology - yes you can argue about battery life and whether e-ink is nicer than lcd but the Kindle is possibly the best eReader for £109 and for £149 with free (at least for the moment) 3G web browsing.
My preference is the Kindle, I couldn't justify iPad money (you get a lot for your money, but I wouldn't use it), and I'll read two or three books on holiday on one charge, maybe do a little surfing, it's a little more holiday firendly (fits into my poacher jacket I take on planes), and lets be honest who's going to mug me for my Kindle?
Maybe, but one has to remember that it's hardly his fault that people want to pay him lots of cash for appearances - what would you do?
Q. Mr Fry, you are very popular at the moment would you like lots of employment for lots of cash?
A1. Yes please, who knows when I'll be out of favour, and I would like a comfortable life please.
A2. No, I don't need the cash, unemployment is far more respectable for a celebrity.
So, those who might dislike his "over exposure" try and put yourself in his shoes, it's not really his fault, and turning things down could be career suicide, turn stuff down and they will stop asking (is he overexposed? perhaps you watch a bit too much TV? but I'm not one to judge, I don't have a TV).
Another thing to remember, as a bipolar sufferer, external validation can be important to his state of mind, and feeling wanted (and accepting the jobs) might not just be about the cash.
Personally I'm biased as I think he's a gem, British humour and intelect at it's best.
I too have friends an family who are and have been in the forces abroad, I hope that they come back safe, I also hope that they don't find themselves in a position where they kill innocent people, unarmed reporters, throw dogs off cliffs. I hope if they do, through mistakes or because of the psychological pressure they are under that they get support to allow them to re-engage into society and live their lives, they are victims too and will need support. Depending on who you believe, between 100,000 and 500,000 people have been killed in recent years, the people on the ground killing each other (in a somewhat one-sided war) are not responsible.
Assange did not create the environment, he has been passed factual information from people who know who's responsibility this is, he is not risking anyones life, the reason why only a fraction has been released is because of the filtering that has taken place.
"Your Retarded"
Is indicating that Retarded is a pronoun as in "Your Retarded Cousin", "Your Retarded" is not a valid contraction for "You are retarded" however as a handle or a nickname it's perfectly valid, in the same way "50 Cent" is perfectly valid.
So, just for the Pedantic Grammar Nazi, your wrong*
* as in "it's your wrong assumption"
Toby, Toby, Toby......
Mr Webb is making lots of cash (from a bigger pile of cash), and it's getting harder and harder to make the same amount of cash, he knows that other people are doing the same and soon the income vs effort ratio will fail (and catastrophically if the bookies find a legal way of closing the loophole), for these sorts of things you need to get in early and have an exit strategy, why not make money from the people entering the game? if he doesn't then someone else will, I'm sure this is part of his exit strategy.
>>Back in the nineties contractors would quite legitimately lower their tax bill by employing themselves and paying themselves dividends rather than income. Then every idiot started doing it and the most stupid of them would crow about it, forever telling you how clever they were. They shouted until the Government introduced IR35 and stopped the practice.
I think when you say "quite legitimately" I think you mean "quite legally", legitimately would imply some moral correctness, in the same way as I couldn't "quite legitimately" take the last seat on the tube when there's some poor OAP with a heart condition standing, although I could "quite legally", remember taxes don't go to the government just to pay civil servants wages, they go to education, health, roads (and it's safe to walk the streets - (c)MP), besides just move your company to an IOM umbrella and the most you'll pay is around 5% (people with lots of money like to keep it), don't get me wrong, if I was a contractor who may or may not be working, no sick leave, shoddy credit rating, no company pension, limited working life etc. I'd want to make the most of it.
Oh and of course, IR35 was introduced because the revenue was perfectly aware of what people were doing after getting the accounts from the accountants not because the "loads of money, look at my new BMW M3" brigade were telling their mates about it. And of course some of it wasn't legal, often a company employed a specific person, not a company as part of their contract but on the tax forms was the company being employed to supply a person, many cases of tax avoidance were in fact evasion just hard to prove, unless you got the contracts out of the compan(ies), which without a court order were rarely forthcoming.
>> suspect that any rules will catch the people, like Mr Webb, who are taking the piss out of gambling
Imagine two companies that do currency exchange, imagine the currency exchange market was really competitive, so much so that occasionally if you bought some dollars from one of them and sold to the other, you would make a tiny profit (say 0.001%). This is exactly what is happening in gambling, Mr Webb is exploiting the bookies greed for your money (lengthening the odds as much as they can to be attractive) and only betting when the result of laying two bets (sometimes multiple) will give him an overall gain (after fees), but what he does is "gamble" large amounts of money for a guaranteed profit, he is no more taking the piss than the house having a '0' on the roulette wheel (which you might consider taking the piss too).
Personally, good luck to Mr Webb, the only ones losing (overall) are the bookies (and the bookies are still paying the taxman so the people still win), it would only take them offering less enticing odds to stop the practice dead.
Stuck a couple of 20dB dishes on them, OK a tad more expensive and lining up would have been more of a pain (use GPS for height and a simple compass for direction or use your OS map), but the extra 4dB and reduced frenzel would have been more than worth it maybe even the magic number 2Mb you're looking for (and still legal... just).
When you use a credit card the seller has to give a cut to the credit card company, to get you to use their cards these companies will give points or cashback to the customer (out of this cut), so if you can avoid all other charges by paying it all off within the payment date, not going over your limits, not doing cash withdrawls etc. then it's free money (for you), of course the seller is losing out by you using a credit card and the credit card company is still getting something out of it (not exactly free money and you might be better getting a cash discount).
So if you were going to spend the money anyway, AND there's no fee for using a card AND you avoid all credit card charges then pick a card that gives you something back, either cash, airmiles (or in my case) Tesco points (I saved mine up for free holidays to Switzerland/Maldives/New York x2 and Egypt).
You do know that networks preceeded the TRS-80? (even ethernet is about 5 years older)
I wrote a small network daemon and client back in '90/91 that let you remotely execute commands via a "path", you could even pass parameters and it would pass back the output of the command (which would include new "paths" to follow), does this mean I invented WWW and CGI?
The Amiga OS back in 1985 (designed in '82) was so far ahead of windows at the time it's ridiculous, but it wasn't that different from GEM, what set it apart was the hardware, but it was just so good you couldn't really change it quickly without breaking it, so with the PC from multiple manufactures, generic (not good, not clever) interfaces meant flexibility and scaling was easy, the x86 beat the 68k by numbers.
Part of Windows success was all the hardware manufacturers getting a slice of the pie (and a route that Jobs decided not to take, which carves a niche but means that Mac hardware will never be cheap as Windows, enter the Hackintosh which isn't ever as stable or supportable as a Windows PC).
When the standing army was small and mostly made up of civilians then the ability to overthrow an oppressive government was valid (and more importantly possible).
If the right to bear arms to enable overthrowing the government was still valid then there would never have been any sedation acts (the Patriot Act is just the newest and most far reaching).
People like guns;
1. They are fun for various reasons
2. They make you feel safe (regardless of whether they make you less safe or not)
3. Hunting is very primal (we are animals after all)
4. Shooting well is a skill (like any other sport)
And of course there's a whole bucket of other reasons like empowerment and collecting but at the end of the day owning a gun it nothing to do with overthrowing the government, given the degree of gun crime in the US and the number of fatalities it's in a different scale to Canada (which has a similar level of gun ownership) so there's probably other reasons that people own guns which is unique in the states.
>>Could somebody tell me what the rationale is for ever fining a public body?
Because, like any organisation they are run by people, people with budgets and the people who work for those with budgets are in fact real people, you might think that people who work in the public sector are sitting around, being paid above average to fill in the time between when the tea trolly woman comes round with a fresh supply of biscuits but the world has moved on since then, public sector workers are under the same constraints as private sector, the bosses really don't like finding a big hole made in thir budgets because an employee has done something they shouldn't have, and if they didn't tell the employee not to do it then they are vicariously liable, so if some tool loses an unencrypted mem stick and they were allowed to have then it's not their liability, if they lose an unencrypted mem stick that they were not allowed to have then they are liable for gross misconduct.
Put it this way, the money being moved by the fine will never directly help anyone, as you say it's just moving it from one part of the government to another, but inflicting bugetary pain really pisses off the directors and the potential (or actual) of this should make them put procedures in place to protect data (or punish the actual rules breakers themselves).
>>Any sanctions should surely be against the miscreants
Yes, but who are the miscreants? are they the people who lose the stick? well, not if you "allow" them to hold data in this way and the only people who can create an enforce the rules are the directors, this is all about vicarious liability, by default those liable are the directors unless they have done everything they can to prevent their employees doing something wrong.
It seems like the answer should be simple, but it aint.
@ a) It's a feature not a bug? you sound like M$, the same could be argued on the Android bug/issue/flaw/feature as it's using a valid function for an invalid purpose
@ b) No it wouldn't (did you read the article?) it can call a 3rd part app (any of http://handleopenurl.com/scheme?page=1) and get it to do things you may not want, and example would be to call a premium rate number or spam people adverts on skype.
@ c) No it wouldn't (did you read the article?) it exploits Safari iFrames just by visiting a website which has arbitary html on it, although I completely accept that you'd need to visit a compromised or malicious website (which are to be fair all too common)
>>But more importantly - what relation has this got to do with Android being root-kitted, or un-vetted apps being installed without user permission? Because ios is "bad" makes it's ok for Android to be *even worse*???
These are not identical platforms, therefore it's not a comparison of better or worse (and that is in fact a matter of opinion) what it highlights is that all OS's have potential issues, of varying degrees, the iPhone and iOS is an exceptional combination with a solid support base, but it's not perfect, with issues around antenna, ability to make unauthorised calls on a locked handset, safari issues etc. (and of course the premium you pay for it) what is an absolute fact is that if the iPhone was more "open" it would have more issues, this is where Android is, being more "open" it has the potential for more issues, although long-term, Android should be better, it just doesn't have the benifit of security through obscurity that a closed source (like iOS) has.
Don't forget the iPhone design dates back to 2006, the 4G is basically the same phone as the very first iPhone, they've had a lot of time to get it right, just imagine how far Android phones will advance in 5 years.
With the Windows flavours around 90% and MacOS/iOS/Linux making up the other 10%, even the "evil" Vista is 3x more popular than OSX not sure if "main rival" is really appropriate when there really isn't any competition.
Besides if she wanted to put "spin" on it she would have said, "We don't restrict our children at all, if they want an iWhatever that can have an iWhatever, we think children should be able to make their own choices even if it's a mistake and they end up with an inferior product to a Microsoft one".
While it isn't news it does give a credibility to iWhatever products that isn't there, besides, my Galaxy is better for me than an iPhone, my Zen Vision was better than an iPod and my Vista Business does everything I need (and my hacked 32Gb iPod mini running Linux still rocks).
Actually it's only illegal if it's "interception", the camera was in plain view with the intention to record himself, and his intention was not to record the police, he only recorded dialogue he was involved with (i.e. no interception) he was also aquitted of possessing a "device primarily useful for the purpose of the surreptitious interception of oral communications". Incidentially, "public" doesn't really mean anything, so if you delberately leave a microphone in a public place you *can* be arrested for "interception" under Maryland law if the purpose is to hear a conversation that you otherwise would not be able to overhear (and it's irrelevant if you record it or not, it's the interception which is illegal). There's a few incorrect assumptions about Maryland law and it's not as mental as people think.
Interestingly enough, I'm assuming that the off duty cop was driving his own, personal car, that tint on the windows is definitely more than 35% which is illegal in Maryland.
Having watched the video now (you tube is blocked at work), I think the biker wasn't actually driving stupidly, if you see how his head nods about he is checking every single manouver, not just mirrors but distance and some shouldering too, slowing down for traffic and accelerating cleanly, nothwithstanding it wouldn't take much for another road user to be breaking the rules or not paying attention to end up with a big mess and a long red streak of biker all over the road. Have a look on youtube for ghost rider and you'll see some scary shit.
1. When I do something stupid either for fun or without thinking, I don't want any evidence, that said for every ghost rider who films himself there's some numpty who drops off the back of a clutch wheely, all these end up on youtube, there's skillful clowns, clownful skills and just clowns.
2. If he mushes himself it's likely (but not definite) he won't take anybody else with him, so it's stupid in the same way as nose studs, smoking dope and pink hair is stupid (why not if you not affecting anyone else, it's not for everybody but hey!) - note, most fatal bike crashes are caused by "other driver", so car drivers take note, by all means call bikers stupid for popping the odd wheely or misplacing the speed limit, but also remember to look both ways when you pull out, use your mirrors when changing lanes and maybe indicate a bit more, your stupidity may not be as in your face, but it does prove to be more fatal.
3. Assuming that cop #1 was responsible for the charge he went from being over cautious possibly to the point of inappropriate intimidation to a twat (probably out of embarassment), everyone of my engagements with the boys in blue has been respectful and honest in both directions (UK).
1. I rarely use public transport for my office journey (push bike), so I'd object to subsidising other people too lazy or too far away.
2. MOT - road worthyness, one test a year, £55 for a car over 3 years old and that's if you pay full price, it's not a lot of money considering it's to make sure you're safe!
3. Tax - mine is £20 a year for one car and £0 for the other, if you're paying £400 a year for tax then perhaps you should consider replacing it with something more socially responsible.
4. Insurance - Seems expensive to me, but again I pay less than £200 so fuel and parking is my most noticeable cost but at 60mpg and less than 4000 miles a year that's less than £350 so my car ownership for the year is £600 + maintanance .
Free public transport would be great, and being a bit of a socalist I probably would support it (even if I was out of pocket), but we can't expect everybody to agree, and lets face it, people won't want to give up their comfy fat smelly (on the outside) cars so thay they can be squashed into some overcrowded smelly (on the inside) public transport.
It's a catch 22, public transport needs to be clean, efficient, on time, but these things cost, in the end you end up with the bare minimum service that people put up with for the maximum cost, but that's democratic capitalism for you, democratic socialism however.....
So you have your stolen credit card with a proximity chip, you wave it through, not only [does|will] the CCTV hi-def take a snap of everybody swiping in and out, but the system knows exactly where you are and it's an enclosed environment with limited exits, most of which you have to swipe out of, to use a stolen card in this way would be really thick, as we slowly move to minority report-esque surveillance this is just another step, don't get me wrong, the no2id/no2rfid crowd are on the money, and I might sound paranoid, but the end-point is enevitable it's just how long we take to get there.
Nahh... never heard of them, I think this whole "good clown" movement has been made up, they are obviously just pretending, just trying to get accepted into society.
The only time you'll find a clown with a soul is shortly after a kill and they have sucked the soul out of some defenceless child.
http://www.stampoutclowns.org/index.htm
(OK, I made upi the URL but it should exist, for the sake of humanity)
But the hi-fi "elite" is exactly what Oracle is trying to avoid, the all in a box solution is to guaranteed to work, using a hi-fi analogy is, on the face of it an error as all you're dealing with is sound going from A to B so it should be simple, but even that isn't true in the hi-fi world, appropriate levels of pre-amp, do you use coax or digital, internal or external D2A, bi-wire speakers and that's before we start getting into surround sound, SACD/DAT etc. etc. etc. building a true hi-fi system was far more complex than popping down to Currys and picking out what looked nice, there were only "broad" standards.
Your point however is a valid one, if there were standards that everybody agreed then you could mix and match, but, apart from a few well-known (and old) standards, people don't get together in a room, design it all then start building, they prototype it, then define a standard based on their build, then they propose a new standard (after building it) to fix and enhance what they ahve built, this is because the place this technology is used is a comercial one and you have to have products out there as fast as possible.
The four network standards you mention have had huge numbers of revisions, taking FTP for example RFC114 was the original proposal (oddly enough older than the network to support it), but since then it's gone through versions 1,2,2.1,3,3.1,4,5,5.1 each of these have had multiple RFCs associated and of course it is still developing, we have proposals (pre FRC) that handle new char sets, encryption, hashing etc.
So, you have a valid question, but it's based on a false assumption that there are simple (single) standards all developed and agreed which a supplier can stick to, in reality the goalposts are moving all the time, and of course on top of that is the proprietry stuff like load-balancing communication (VRRP and open standard, HSRP cisco, ESRP extreme, FSRP foundstone, there's a great story in there about manufacturers pissing contests if you want to do some research), the same is true for routing protocols, auto negotiation etc. the history of Ethernet and what was lumped on top of it is actually a great read, I suspect there's a "Biography of Network" book out there, if not it would probably be a good one to write, full of intrigue, back-biting and scandal (OK, maybe just geeky but surprising).
In summary, limit the hardware combinations and it's more likely to "just work" because you have less unknowns in the mix (like a Mac with very few combinations compared to Windows which is expected to work on any hardware, you've got no-one to complain to when your Hackintosh has a driver issue), and assuming you make good choices on the initial hardware i.e. it can do the job then no issue.
In addition, having a single vendor for your stack prevents the (all too often) blame game when e.g. the supplier of storage blames the supplier of server (and vice versa) for issues such as performance (I can't understate how much of an impact this can be).
These aren't corn snakes, and different snakes have different habits, I suspect that wild snakes are more likely to eat whatever they can find that smells about right, the big problem with domestic (captive bred) snakes is that their instincts are dampened by regular and unchallenging feeds, I never feed my snakes the same amount on the same day of the week, sometimes I let them gorge and sometimes I let them fast, this maintains their "strike" and you have to brumate them properly, taking the temp down during winter and feeding them less often rather than a steady temp all year and constant feeding (this is doubly important if you want to breed from them, I had 60 babies one year). My snakes (especially the anerythristic corns for some reason) would hapily eat a defrosted mouse just chucked in the viv, any movement and they'd have your arm off, but also they are OK to handle, as long as I don't smell of dead mouse (no big pointy teeth in the traditional sense, but fine razor sharp "ratchets" that can draw blood), so I assume the smell (taste) of the mouse is more important for a corn.
I guess what I'm trying to say is not that this will work, but it's wrong to say it isn't going to, after all, the feeding habits of king snakes (which are close enough to a corn to interbreed) prefer lizards to mice and other snakes only eat birds, there's some very good reasons why it will work, I suspect that it will as wild snakes are not as fussy (fussy snakes starve to death in the wild), oddly enough if it works this will wipe out the snakes which eat carion, leaving the fussy ones, so it will be a bit of selective breeding and not a complete solution anyway.
>>Charles Darwin didn't actually deal with the origin of new species (in spite of the book's title). It was the evolution of existing species, which isn't incompatible with Creationism.
He actually said neither "new" nor "existing", he made no such distinction, if you want to infer that because he observed existing species his conclusions were only about existing species then that's your choice, but it is an error to imply it.
>>Relatively recent genetic evidence doesn't actually support the central idea (theory) of Evolution with regard to the origin of new species. i.e the idea of a "tree of life" starting with tiny organisms and evolving into more sophisticated species.
Again you are implying something which is not, that the central idea must be a clean "tree" with distinct "forks", implying somehow that this "tree" is somehow completely different to similar (enough) species interbreeding, this shows a common ignorance of evolution, here's a seed of an idea for you (lets see if you can allow it to grow);
I am human, my parents are human, their parents were human, their parents were human and so on going back thousands of years, but after a while there are some slight differences, maybe it's lifespan, height, go back a few more thousand years, they are shorter still and perhaps have a little more hair, are they still human? the only problem with the fossil record and evolution is the perceved need to define ancestors, ask every successive generation back and they will think that they are the same species as their chldren (and so they are), but make the gaps bigger and you'll have different species down the same bloodline, when did my ancestors cease to be human? but their children looked the same as them (and so on...)
You need to try and understand evolution if you genuinely want to debate it (perhaps read "The greatest show on earth" by Dawkins), or you can continue with your strawmen if you want an easy target.
>>Of course scientists who have "believed" in the Tree of life idea for so long are reluctant to change their minds in spite of the scientific evidence.
All recent evidence, and I would say *all* genetic evendence (period) support evolution and gives a better understanding of the mechanisms, your unrefrenced "evidence" and unnamed "scientists" mean nothing, because you've presented nothing except yet another made up strawman.
Doesn't make it not funny.
A 2008 Gallup poll said, 44% of US adults agreed with the statement "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
Now, that, *is* funny (and unfortunately, not a joke), it sets the tone for the application.
Ohhh... I thought the I in ID was "Inelegant", in that case why don't I live to 1000, why does food sometimes go down the wrong hole, why did god place a pleasure park next to a sewerage outflow? not to mention the abscence of a built-in jetpack that runs on water, feet that don't smell, bogies etc.
....will give you "a credible, unbiased source of information and analysis"
Or you can find out how they used forged documents to report that George Galloway was corrupt, of course the "Christian" in the title is more historical than anything, having it's roots way back when Mary Baker Eddy founded it, I'm not sure if her precription to have at least one religious article is still in force but it is decidly more secular in content these days, one would have to ask, why have something in the name that has no relevance? So either there is still some association with the modern healthcare deniers "Christian Science" (which has directly caused untold deaths) or there is no longer any association, in which case surely a name change is in order?
You can also debate whether their tax free status is appropriate (given it's secular nature), whether sister publications such as the Hearald, Sentinel and Journal have bias are a different matter, and where they get their funding, it's roots and title are definitely misleading.
>>Now you just look like a lazy bigot, fixating on the word "Christian".
I'd have to agree with this statement, however if I set up a sandwich shop selling "Nazi Hollocaust Panini" I suspect that there would be an obvious reaction, even if that particular roll had nothing to do with Nazis, I myself am bigotted against many Christian views, but for rational, justifiable reasons, it is a natual assumption to assume the title bears some association to the product, and a newspaper with "Christian Science" in the title would be expected to have a "Christian Science" slant.
I'll leave you with a final thought, if you ordered "Bombay Duck" in a resturant, not having heard of it before would you be surprised to be served fish? or would you be a "lazy bigot" for assuming that you would in fact be getting duck?
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