There is only multiplayer pn your own, which isn't quite the same thing."
Not having purchased or played the game I'll have to take your word on this, but it is rather stupid of Blizard to not have a true single player mode, which does not require constant internet access.
There are many thousands (millions?) of games players who just like to spend around an hour or so playing games then save and leave it for another time/day/week. These types of players tend to have full time jobs and other responsibilities like families and definately do not live in mum's basement.
For these types of players getting an “error ###” message because; the servers are down, too busy, or the Internet performance dropped due to it being “peak time” are all unacceptable if you only have a short time window to play.
Just as pressed the submit button I realised my initials L.B. are the same as those of the author of that book series I referenced to. I assure you I just enjoy reading them (book 4 has to wait until I finish "Matter" by Mr I.M. Banks) and I had nothing to do with creating them.
... the Kobo store has loads of "Previews" of latest release (typically the 1st chapter) so you can just try any you like in the comfort of your own home.
Up until last year I was definitely on the "real books are often cheaper and less liable to break" side, but once the price came down to a reasonable amount (they start at ~£60 now) I decided to get one as I spend a couple of hours a day on the bloody train commuting and the Metro/Ev.Stanard are getting more full of celebutard crap by the week.
I'm a convert; my Kobo (even with a nice leather case) is lighter that all but the slimmest paperback. When I take it too lunch and forget to pick my glasses up of my desk (I'm well and truely middle aged), being able to make the font bigger and increase the line spacing is great. As a result of getting this new toy I've read more books in the last 4 months than I had in the last 3 to 4 years, a lot of that is due to the free books and previews.
I would still always prefer to use real books for reference material or guides (eg: programming languages, cook books, etc...), but for a simple good read they are excellent.
There are also a lot of good cheap reads out there (not just all the classics) where new authors are able to self publish (a good example being the "Emperor's Edge" books, the first book was a free download from Kobo, the following 3 novels I was more than happy to pay for).
I had similar thoughts about B&N, I suppose they didn't go with Kobo as W.H.Smiths have been there for years now.
I got the Kobo Touch from WHS last February £89; unfortunately it died on me after just 2 months, but the free telephone and email support direct from Kobo was excellent. Their staff actually read the emails I sent and answered each question specifically, not a single "generic"/useless response.
They offered a direct RMA/replacement when we couldn't even get it to factory reset, but I just went back to WHS. My local store didn't have a black one in stock (pink's not colour) so I got a full refund and drove to another nearby town for a new one which was ten quid cheaper at £79 (and a new full years warranty). Took about 5 minutes for the new Kobo to be registered, updated to latest firmware and have my entire library downloaded again.
IMHO £79 for the Kobo Touch version is a lot better than £109 for the Kindle version and they all use the same ARM chip + e Ink screen.
PS: Does anyone else thing the Amazon TV ads showing someone using a Kindle floating in a swimming pool is an attempt to sell more devices, they are not water proof after all!
Well the other great thing about e-Ink over pads/phones is that it uses naff all battery power, meaning recharges are only needed every 3-5 weeks with daily use.
Adding a LED light will bring that down a lot if it's used often just as it does for backlit LCD screens.
Plus a clip-on led light with its own battery can be purchased very cheaply (less than a fiver) for any e-book and they can even be used with real books!
My first reaction to this article was bullshit, but then I read it.
The players doing the shooting games were using controller designed to be held and used in a similar way to real hand guns.
As such they got out of the chairs and used muscles they would not normally use in that way, it is often referred to a muscle memory by sportsman.
This is almost certainly the only reason for them to be better (and also they defectively practised doing nothing but head-shots) than those doing the Mario games who were probably just sitting down fiddling with a joypad.
Remember they said nothing about them being "good shots", just better. The article never stated the range they shot the real guns over, so scores are meaningless. Shooting a stationary manikin in the head at say 10 yards is a lot easier that at 25 yards.
You are mistaking a terrible legal system with a specific argument for or against capital punishment.
In the US many people are sentenced to death as much for a plea barganing chip by the DA as anything. A typical example being offer them the choice of the death sentence or confess and only get 20 years when they are not certain of a win.
Most advocates of the death penalty would want a system closer to that of Japan, and the better states in the US, where the death sentence is only applied to the worst cases.
These typically being where the perpetrator is exceptionally viscous, serial killers or killing for profit, though I would also add those indiscriminate killers like those who shoot into shops or crowds of people and those with previous convictions for assault and BGH.
RE: Re: Anybody fancy trafficking drugs to Singapore?
For most people who have jobs and live a (mostly) law abiding life any jail term is too long.
But there are those who will commit crimes or just do really stupid things if given enough motivation.
If you put a revolver with one round loaded on a table and offered £100 to anyone to stick in their mouth and pull the trigger and survided, you would not likely get any takers.
Make that a £1000 and you may get some try it, as to some a £1000 is a lot of money.
Make that £10,000 and you’d like get more and by the time you offered £1m you’d probably be surprised at the number of takers (there are lot of stupid people out there).
The death penalty in Singapore almost certainly does deter some, but as with any system of prohibition all that happens is the supply gets reduced and the profit potential increases to the point that someone will take the risk.
This is why all drug prohibition is futile, when the local plod catches some and advertise how they have stopped £n million of drugs hitting the streets, all that happens is the street price goes up.
The police know this and the politicians know this is true. The politicians are just scared of the mass media morons and the public not voting for them.
Perhaps if you tried getting the story from someone less biassed it would help. This is typical Lewis crap reporting, only printing the fragments that he agrees with and ignoring the rest.
A small excerpt from another source of this story (BBC web site):
"A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass.
The reason is unclear, as glaciers in other parts of the Himalayas are losing mass - which also is the global trend."
So they state categorically that the trend is for global glacial melting, and that this is an unexplained event in a one region.
As opposed to the nay sayers who just think: F*ck the world anyway I'll be dead anyway by the time it really matters, and will grasp at any tiny little bit of data (usually out of context) to back them up.
Think (I know you find it difficult) but:
- If you're wrong and nothing is done, millions could suffer from a screwed up climate.
- If I'm wrong, but people try to stop adding vast amounts of CO2 by wasting energy and resources, there is still the benefit of having a less polluted planet for those that come after us.
If we are truely honest Hollywood has always prduced 98% crap.
It just that when we look back we mostly only remember the (averaged) 1.2 decent films that come out each year.
Though is seems worse these days as many of the truely awfull films being made are remakes of what most people regard as classics.
I can understand doing this if the original was a foreign film and they just want to make an English version, but when the originals were made by and started the Hollywood greates, it makes no sense at all.
If you're going start counting SyFy TV movies, we'll be here all day!
They are cheap and the effects are nasty, but at least they don't expect you to hand over £~10 to watch it, at least after a few beers they are good for giggle.
Or perhaps those who voted against AV are the smart ones, that can see how corrupt all the governments are in the rest of Europe. YES, EVEN MORE THAN OURS!
A perfect/worst case example: Silvio Berlusconi, kept in power by a corrupt "AV" voting system where you have absolutely no say in who actually gets elected at all, you just get to choose the proportion of MP's taken from each party.
Only the brain dead hypocrites of the liberals could think a system where; those who vote for iffy/unpopular candidates should get second, third,... vote when their first choice get eliminated, yet those who vote for the most popular candidate only ever get one!
You point out a number of failings and gripes yet still give it 80%.
So its got a metal back plate, but the extra £40 over the Kindle or Kobo-Touch could buy yourself some nice accessories those others. If you don't want a touch screen, buy the Kobo basic at £70 (I always add the penny to these prices).
A question about accelerometers, the only feature this has that the others don't bother with:
What do they do when your being bounced around on the train?
PS: I finally gave in and got a Kobo-Touch a little over a week ago (from WHSmiths £89), works very well. The only niggles that I would say could be better are:
You can only display PDF's in landscape, not a problem for books but it would be a good addition for the browser as most non-mobile sites expect users to have wider screens.
Sometime the touch screen is a little slow and you end up turning two pages.
The web browser sometimes does not react to clicking links (not a big deal as this device is WiFi only so it's not going to be used extensively)
I ask this as a number of bods at work have the HTC/iPhone/whatever... smart phones and when they are in a noisy environment (like being on the street with traffic or in a comm's room with lots of fans), they sound like they are talking while standing on their head in a bucket of water.
Most real telephones and mobiles of the non-smart veriety don't seem to suffer from this.
I remember using it in the 80's on VMS with just dumb terminals. On the VT420 terminals you could even get a "print preview" display by using the downloaded character/bit-maps.
The idea of having 20-30 users all working on documents, software development and such on a single machine about as powerful as a 20MHz 80386 with 20MB memory is something people today cannot even comprehend.
The fact that actual productivity was about the same as today without everyone having multi-GHz PC's with x1000 times the RAM (and power use) is ridiculous.
As was pointed out these magical system don't work or have very bad effects of other areas.
For example from Central_Valley_Project link you provided:
"Despite the benefits of the Project, many CVP operations have resulted in disastrous environmental and historical consequences. The salmon population in four major California rivers have declined as a result, and many natural river environments, such as riparian zones, meanders and sandbars no longer exist."
In other words to live one lifestyle, others had to pay. This will eventually cause enough trouble to trigger wars or the collapse of societies. Man has been changing his environment for millennia, but the repercussions are only now being felt in some areas.
Go back a few centuries and the vast majority of Europe was covered in forests as dense and diverse as those in the Amazon, our ancestors got away with deforesting a continent as most of the planet was still mostly untouched. If that gets repeated in South-America, Africa and Asia the effects could be devastating all round.
Going purely by what I see as your incredible naivety on the real world issues, I assume you also believe in the Sky Fairy and/or Intelligent Design. Where as in reality; humans are just animals, a few slightly more intelligent than most other species, but the same basic rules apply. When the resources needed to live run low we either kill or steal from our neighbours or die off.
The one difference between us and the other species, is that we should be smart enough to stop breeding beyond what can be sustained, and before we need to fall back and act like all the other critters on this planet.
Those of you who don't shoot will never appreciate the time spent training newbies down the range or in the field on how to hold fire arms safely and never, ever point it in the direction of anyone.
It doesn't matter how many times you think it has been checked as been cleared, you never do it! Guns should always be treated as loaded at all times.
The problem is some people are just dim, and bad habits picked up playing with "toys" can be hard to break. Likewise those of us who do shoot will react badly when anything gun shaped is pointed in our direction, it's become an instinct for self preservation.
In the UK; shooting shorts are among the safest activities you can partake in, and it is a very popular activity (despite what our exceedingly liberal media may tell you). Taking part in football, fishing, or ballroom dancing are far more likely to cause serious injury or death.
@DJ Smiley - we should have to live in a sh!t hole like London to get what we pay for..
I live in a Kentish village, with one telephone exchange (closed to other suppliers) providing services for approx 1500 homes and 90 non-residential premises. No cable alternatives.
In the middle of the night and most of the working day my ADSL can provide the good 6 to 8Mb that I pay for, as my house is about 200m from the exchange. (FireFox downloader shows rates of over 800KB/sec). Problem is that like most people I'm at work during the "working day" and asleep most of the night.
From about 17:00 to 22:00 my ADSL will slow down to around 0.3MB (FireFox dowmload reporting between 26 to 40 KB/sec).
That's not enough to use iPlayer (or equivalents) without constant pauses every vew seconds, and all but the most basic browsing is slow, and there's only so much time spent online banking and looking on amazon...
Considering most ISPs cap bandwidth (last time I looked at BT is was a few GB/month) prividing massive speeds that mean you reach that cap in a few hours seems pointless.
Providing a decent service to thousands of customers by upgrading the back haul to the nearest major exchange would be better that fiber to each and every a tower block.
I liked the cooking, cultural, and other factual programs, along with added world news events not covered by the likes BBC/Sky.
Unlike the BBC (and a slightly lesser extent Sky News) they do report what happing in the world even if there is no video for the morons to oggle at, and they have professional reporters rather than idiots on twitter/facebook to supply their content.
I absolutely agree we need to start reducing the population...
...there are just too many of us for the world to sustain.
This can only be done on a regional basis (country by country), but we (as a race) need to start somewhere.
I would for a start stop all forms of child credits/support in this country with the proviso that:
- Anyone who requests state help to bring up baby is admitting they have bread beyond their means.
As such, both parents should have to "see the vet" before getting any money to assist looking after their current offspring.
It's about time we got shot of the "I've got rights" crap, where every moron expects everyone else to pay for their "rights" to have babies, IVF and much, much more. Everyone needs to be forced to take responsibility for their own choices and actions.
Some will undoubtedly say I'm just a cold heartless bar-steward (and they may be a little correct), but that's because I don't have problems with basic logic. That is why I will never give money to charities for "saving the starving babies". It's not because I don't care, it is because it solves nothing, every baby you save this year is just another mouth to feed next year, plus all the new babies.
Any society that breeds beyond its means (1st or 3rd world) is doomed to reach a point were starvation and very low living standards become the norm.
It is only about 100 year ago that in Britain the norm was to have 4 to 5 children, as 3 to 4 were expected to die due to disease and lack of food. better medicine and vastly improved agriculture made it possible to massively increase population since then, but the limits have been reached and exceeded.
but with ARM the phone manufacturers have dozens of chip supliers all producing dozens of variants. If one starts charging too much or failes to deliver then there are lots of other companies ready, willing and able to privide an almost identicle part.
With an Intel x86 phone chip, who do you go to when the prices jump, or the part does not perform as stated.
It's not like AMD are in this field (yet) to make Intel honest. Remember before AMD and the K6 and later K7 CPUs, Intel was charging $1000+ for mid range x86 CPUs.
There are some channels on sky that are very low bit rate; but avoid the god/shopping/bingo/etc...channels and the bit rates are far better than freeview.
As for HD, it will never make a bad movie/program good, and apart from a few things that are specifically visual (eg: frozen planet) it does not add much of anything. Seeing Cameron Diaz (and others) spotty faces covered in pancake makeup or pointless exploding car #12 in HD really adds nothing.
A good script works on radio, a not-so good script works better with pictures, a cr*p script will always be cr*p.
Just about al the kernel features of NT where copies of what VMS had been doing since 1978, the only big difference being that VMS didn't go multithreaded until Version 7, on Alpha's (not on VAX hardware).
If anyone wants to read how a truely secure kernal/OS should be implimented look around for a copy of the (Open)VMS "Internals and Data Structures", it covers everything from boot sequence onwards.
For those that think not doing multi-threading is bad, they need to realise probably less that 1% of VAX's made had more than one CPU so there was no benefit to be had, and the OS used AST's (Asynchronous System Traps) that made writing software where one process could handle 100's devices, timers, etc... all at once was so simple you wouldn't beleive (plus it's much more efficiant than threading on 1 cpu).
The UAV is not a fighter, so it does not need massive engines to fly, it does not need or want high speed.
It will not be making 9G turns so will not need those extreamly strong wings and heavy engines and everything else needed for a heavy plane.
It will not be carrying the meat and its life support equipment.
All those thing do not exist in the massively successful UAV's in service today.
The weight savings are huge, that is why a the Predator only weighs in at just over 1 metric ton fully laden. Also the Predator has a range of over 600 nmi, and can stay aloft for 24 hours.
Something like that with a catapult system for takeoff would be ideal.
The F/A-18 on th other hand weighs in at around 10 metric tons (empty) and 16-23 loaded.
The Super Hornet takes that up to 14.5 tons empty and 21-30 tones loaded.
remember the vast pollution created extracting those highly toxic metals out of the ground that are needed to make those batteries, and massive amount of resources needed to to mine the ore and refine it.
Also the fact that most electricity is generated by coal, oil, gas and nuclear (no specific order implied).
The levels of respiratory disease caused by tailpipe fumes is utterly irrelevant compared to smoking tobacco (or any other organic weeds), which kills millions every year.
Compared to friction and hot, high pressure gasses the case is not very relevent.
There is a 5.56 NATO (aka: .223 Remington ) cartrige that is "mostly" plastic, and it has been around for a few years. The base is still brass (about 6mm for the bolt/ejector) but the rest is a plastic, with a standard 69 - 70 grain* bullet up front.
They shoot exactly like regular 5.56 NATO ammo, they are just a little cheaper to make (less metal) and lighter to carry. The brass case of a 5.56mm cartridge makes up approx 30-50% of the total weight.
Simple: Energy of the round; the lighter it is the faster it has to go to have sufficient energy to penetrate the target, and it would slow down quicker.
Also accuracy is a problem at longer ranges as light bullets get blown about in the wind making them less accurate.
They have had 64bit cores since the 90's, it was not that long ago that SGI were still making workstations with them.
Though they may just be waiting for the Chinese to do all the work for them, they have new MIPS derived coresboth 32bit & 64bit. They have versions for embedded to servers and they are already quite low wattage (4cores @ 1GHz using about ~15W using 65nm chips).
When the Chinese are manufacturing these by the billion Intel, AMD, and ARM could be in trouble.
For those unaware of any of this try looking up "Loongson" and "Godson".
They have absolutely no comprehension of what they are ranting about, and have no idea what could be done differently.
They complain about capitalism yet totally rely on it for their Starbucks coffee, pizza delivery and smart phones, without realising they are total hypocrites.
If they had any real sense of what the world was like, they would stop buy produce that is made in china by factory workers who are treated more like slave labour compared to the conditions of western workers.
Yet most are sponging off society complaining how unfair it is – they're nothing but parasites.
Under no circumstances can a tube driver be called a skilled worker.
It may require some knowledge that you or I don't have, but that is true of almost every occupation be it a street cleaner or security guard all the way up to lawyers, accountants and surgeons.
It takes a course of just few weeks to take a pleb off the street and fully train them as a tube driver. For people with a little intelligence that course could probably be done in as many days.
Skilled work takes many weeks to get just the basics, and months and more often years to master. In some jobs you never stop learning.
I agree with everything you wrote, but the same "entitlement" issues apply to the UK and most of the Europe.
In fact I would say it's even worse in the UK; particularly with those people who went to great effort in avoided getting an education, then expect the state to just hand them loads of money to live in houses that people who actually work for a living could not afford.
All because they are a poor, “hard done by” waist of space.
A British based company is making very low end tablets for India, the Indian gov. are going to subsidise them, but the cost of manufacture was stated in the region of £35.
The device shown may look a bit clinky conpared with a Galaxy, but the designers specificaly built it with the Indian market in mind, so it has 2 full sized USB ports for starters making it possible to use standard USB sticks or as the guy showed, add a full keyboad/mouse to make it a postable PC, not just a tablet.
They didn't say what CPU (just hinted it was slow by most standards) and ran Android 2.something, but for £35 what do you expect.
Anyway from that; I would not be so sure that a "book-read" from Amazon was not making a profit.
That's not the basic package, so why are you paying for what you don't like!
I pay £20.50 a month to Sky (just enternatment +discovery packs), and for that I get:
SkyOne (aka The Simpsons Chanel), SkyAtlantic, Living, Syfi, FX, Alabi, an dozen or so Discovery channels, with the +1Hour options of all of those and the ITV's, Channel 4 & 5, and Film4. There are lots of other channels that get used now and then (Comedy Central, Halmark,etc...), basically not bad value.
There are also lots of radio channels and the picture quality is usally better than freeview.
For the £12 TAX I get:
Repeats of Dad's Army, New Tricks, Dr Who (I cannot think of anything else I've watched for about 4 years). PLus a hugh mass off utter crap designed for the consumption of the dumbest members society, with the likes of Eastenders, Holby, Celebrity(Dancing,Skating,Crapping in the woods...) and CGI Dino-twaddle. Plus a news service that is about on par with FoxNews with its in depth reporting or wahtever advertising was passed its way and re-reporting what was on SkyNews the day before.
Register
48 posts • joined Friday 7th October 2011 11:12 GMT
Re: Eh?
"There is no single player Diablo 3.
There is only multiplayer pn your own, which isn't quite the same thing."
Not having purchased or played the game I'll have to take your word on this, but it is rather stupid of Blizard to not have a true single player mode, which does not require constant internet access.
There are many thousands (millions?) of games players who just like to spend around an hour or so playing games then save and leave it for another time/day/week. These types of players tend to have full time jobs and other responsibilities like families and definately do not live in mum's basement.
For these types of players getting an “error ###” message because; the servers are down, too busy, or the Internet performance dropped due to it being “peak time” are all unacceptable if you only have a short time window to play.
Re: RodB
Perhaps your reading comprehension is not that good, as from the link you used:
"For scientific use, "Celsius" is the term usually used with "centigrade" otherwise continuing to be in common use."
Note the last part.
PS: In case anyone is a suspicious as me.
Just as pressed the submit button I realised my initials L.B. are the same as those of the author of that book series I referenced to. I assure you I just enjoy reading them (book 4 has to wait until I finish "Matter" by Mr I.M. Banks) and I had nothing to do with creating them.
Though I generaly agree...
... the Kobo store has loads of "Previews" of latest release (typically the 1st chapter) so you can just try any you like in the comfort of your own home.
Up until last year I was definitely on the "real books are often cheaper and less liable to break" side, but once the price came down to a reasonable amount (they start at ~£60 now) I decided to get one as I spend a couple of hours a day on the bloody train commuting and the Metro/Ev.Stanard are getting more full of celebutard crap by the week.
I'm a convert; my Kobo (even with a nice leather case) is lighter that all but the slimmest paperback. When I take it too lunch and forget to pick my glasses up of my desk (I'm well and truely middle aged), being able to make the font bigger and increase the line spacing is great. As a result of getting this new toy I've read more books in the last 4 months than I had in the last 3 to 4 years, a lot of that is due to the free books and previews.
I would still always prefer to use real books for reference material or guides (eg: programming languages, cook books, etc...), but for a simple good read they are excellent.
There are also a lot of good cheap reads out there (not just all the classics) where new authors are able to self publish (a good example being the "Emperor's Edge" books, the first book was a free download from Kobo, the following 3 novels I was more than happy to pay for).
Re: Cutting their own throat?
I had similar thoughts about B&N, I suppose they didn't go with Kobo as W.H.Smiths have been there for years now.
I got the Kobo Touch from WHS last February £89; unfortunately it died on me after just 2 months, but the free telephone and email support direct from Kobo was excellent. Their staff actually read the emails I sent and answered each question specifically, not a single "generic"/useless response.
They offered a direct RMA/replacement when we couldn't even get it to factory reset, but I just went back to WHS. My local store didn't have a black one in stock (pink's not colour) so I got a full refund and drove to another nearby town for a new one which was ten quid cheaper at £79 (and a new full years warranty). Took about 5 minutes for the new Kobo to be registered, updated to latest firmware and have my entire library downloaded again.
IMHO £79 for the Kobo Touch version is a lot better than £109 for the Kindle version and they all use the same ARM chip + e Ink screen.
PS: Does anyone else thing the Amazon TV ads showing someone using a Kindle floating in a swimming pool is an attempt to sell more devices, they are not water proof after all!
Re: Re: Welll duh....
Well the other great thing about e-Ink over pads/phones is that it uses naff all battery power, meaning recharges are only needed every 3-5 weeks with daily use.
Adding a LED light will bring that down a lot if it's used often just as it does for backlit LCD screens.
Plus a clip-on led light with its own battery can be purchased very cheaply (less than a fiver) for any e-book and they can even be used with real books!
@Ac 12:31
My first reaction to this article was bullshit, but then I read it.
The players doing the shooting games were using controller designed to be held and used in a similar way to real hand guns.
As such they got out of the chairs and used muscles they would not normally use in that way, it is often referred to a muscle memory by sportsman.
This is almost certainly the only reason for them to be better (and also they defectively practised doing nothing but head-shots) than those doing the Mario games who were probably just sitting down fiddling with a joypad.
Remember they said nothing about them being "good shots", just better. The article never stated the range they shot the real guns over, so scores are meaningless. Shooting a stationary manikin in the head at say 10 yards is a lot easier that at 25 yards.
If it was offset to the right side that would work for the majority of people, this device was obviously designed by someone a bit sinister.
Lester
You are mistaking a terrible legal system with a specific argument for or against capital punishment.
In the US many people are sentenced to death as much for a plea barganing chip by the DA as anything. A typical example being offer them the choice of the death sentence or confess and only get 20 years when they are not certain of a win.
Most advocates of the death penalty would want a system closer to that of Japan, and the better states in the US, where the death sentence is only applied to the worst cases.
These typically being where the perpetrator is exceptionally viscous, serial killers or killing for profit, though I would also add those indiscriminate killers like those who shoot into shops or crowds of people and those with previous convictions for assault and BGH.
RE: Re: Anybody fancy trafficking drugs to Singapore?
For most people who have jobs and live a (mostly) law abiding life any jail term is too long.
But there are those who will commit crimes or just do really stupid things if given enough motivation.
If you put a revolver with one round loaded on a table and offered £100 to anyone to stick in their mouth and pull the trigger and survided, you would not likely get any takers.
Make that a £1000 and you may get some try it, as to some a £1000 is a lot of money.
Make that £10,000 and you’d like get more and by the time you offered £1m you’d probably be surprised at the number of takers (there are lot of stupid people out there).
The death penalty in Singapore almost certainly does deter some, but as with any system of prohibition all that happens is the supply gets reduced and the profit potential increases to the point that someone will take the risk.
This is why all drug prohibition is futile, when the local plod catches some and advertise how they have stopped £n million of drugs hitting the streets, all that happens is the street price goes up.
The police know this and the politicians know this is true. The politicians are just scared of the mass media morons and the public not voting for them.
Re: Watch the excuses come out
PS: Yes the quote is from the BBC, but it is reporting the scientists views not the journalists!
Re: Watch the excuses come out
Perhaps if you tried getting the story from someone less biassed it would help. This is typical Lewis crap reporting, only printing the fragments that he agrees with and ignoring the rest.
A small excerpt from another source of this story (BBC web site):
"A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass.
The reason is unclear, as glaciers in other parts of the Himalayas are losing mass - which also is the global trend."
So they state categorically that the trend is for global glacial melting, and that this is an unexplained event in a one region.
@AC 06:52
As opposed to the nay sayers who just think: F*ck the world anyway I'll be dead anyway by the time it really matters, and will grasp at any tiny little bit of data (usually out of context) to back them up.
Think (I know you find it difficult) but:
- If you're wrong and nothing is done, millions could suffer from a screwed up climate.
- If I'm wrong, but people try to stop adding vast amounts of CO2 by wasting energy and resources, there is still the benefit of having a less polluted planet for those that come after us.
Re: Basically...
If we are truely honest Hollywood has always prduced 98% crap.
It just that when we look back we mostly only remember the (averaged) 1.2 decent films that come out each year.
Though is seems worse these days as many of the truely awfull films being made are remakes of what most people regard as classics.
I can understand doing this if the original was a foreign film and they just want to make an English version, but when the originals were made by and started the Hollywood greates, it makes no sense at all.
If you're going start counting SyFy TV movies, we'll be here all day!
They are cheap and the effects are nasty, but at least they don't expect you to hand over £~10 to watch it, at least after a few beers they are good for giggle.
I got lucky with Unbreakable...
The projector broke down about 2/3rds through and I got my money back!
I eventually watched it a few years later on TV just to see if it got any better after that point; It didn't.
Whenever I read a Lewis article I typically could sum it up thus:
Paraphrase Lewis: "Fuck the planet, I all right jake!"
Ditto for the likes of Clarkson and many commentard on here.
Re: @ Mahatma Coat
"Unfortunately the Sheeple voted against AV."
Or perhaps those who voted against AV are the smart ones, that can see how corrupt all the governments are in the rest of Europe. YES, EVEN MORE THAN OURS!
A perfect/worst case example: Silvio Berlusconi, kept in power by a corrupt "AV" voting system where you have absolutely no say in who actually gets elected at all, you just get to choose the proportion of MP's taken from each party.
Only the brain dead hypocrites of the liberals could think a system where; those who vote for iffy/unpopular candidates should get second, third,... vote when their first choice get eliminated, yet those who vote for the most popular candidate only ever get one!
Why such a high score!
You point out a number of failings and gripes yet still give it 80%.
So its got a metal back plate, but the extra £40 over the Kindle or Kobo-Touch could buy yourself some nice accessories those others. If you don't want a touch screen, buy the Kobo basic at £70 (I always add the penny to these prices).
A question about accelerometers, the only feature this has that the others don't bother with:
What do they do when your being bounced around on the train?
PS: I finally gave in and got a Kobo-Touch a little over a week ago (from WHSmiths £89), works very well. The only niggles that I would say could be better are:
You can only display PDF's in landscape, not a problem for books but it would be a good addition for the browser as most non-mobile sites expect users to have wider screens.
Sometime the touch screen is a little slow and you end up turning two pages.
The web browser sometimes does not react to clicking links (not a big deal as this device is WiFi only so it's not going to be used extensively)
Re: Perfectly readable
"Feersum Endjinn" the only Banks book that have I put down (2nd or 3rd chapter) and never, ever contemplated picking up again.
Was it worth the effort?
The big question for a "phone"
Are they any good for making telephone calls?
I ask this as a number of bods at work have the HTC/iPhone/whatever... smart phones and when they are in a noisy environment (like being on the street with traffic or in a comm's room with lots of fans), they sound like they are talking while standing on their head in a bucket of water.
Most real telephones and mobiles of the non-smart veriety don't seem to suffer from this.
So smug
I think you will find many use the term "Virus" for any software that installs itself without the users knowladge/permission.
Just like every one refers to "Anti-Viris" software; which also includes code to detect duff scripts, trojens, root-kits, etc...
Re: Anonymous because this wont be popular, but...
Probably on my own here, but my fave bond was George Lazenby.
He played Bond well, help significantly by having the best leading lady played by Diana Rigg and a decent villain played by Telly Savalas.
Plus, probably best theme music of any film made, performed by Louis Armstrong.
plus WordPerfect was multi platform.
I remember using it in the 80's on VMS with just dumb terminals. On the VT420 terminals you could even get a "print preview" display by using the downloaded character/bit-maps.
The idea of having 20-30 users all working on documents, software development and such on a single machine about as powerful as a 20MHz 80386 with 20MB memory is something people today cannot even comprehend.
The fact that actual productivity was about the same as today without everyone having multi-GHz PC's with x1000 times the RAM (and power use) is ridiculous.
"Bain and Landau always seemed to come as a matched pair "
People seem to have forgotten that Mission Impossible was TV series long before the short arsed one made very bad films with that title.
Bain and Landau came as pair from that series.
Perhaps a century or two from now, the later 20th and start of the 21st centuries will be refered to as the Second Dar Ages.
@Symon
As was pointed out these magical system don't work or have very bad effects of other areas.
For example from Central_Valley_Project link you provided:
"Despite the benefits of the Project, many CVP operations have resulted in disastrous environmental and historical consequences. The salmon population in four major California rivers have declined as a result, and many natural river environments, such as riparian zones, meanders and sandbars no longer exist."
In other words to live one lifestyle, others had to pay. This will eventually cause enough trouble to trigger wars or the collapse of societies. Man has been changing his environment for millennia, but the repercussions are only now being felt in some areas.
Go back a few centuries and the vast majority of Europe was covered in forests as dense and diverse as those in the Amazon, our ancestors got away with deforesting a continent as most of the planet was still mostly untouched. If that gets repeated in South-America, Africa and Asia the effects could be devastating all round.
Going purely by what I see as your incredible naivety on the real world issues, I assume you also believe in the Sky Fairy and/or Intelligent Design. Where as in reality; humans are just animals, a few slightly more intelligent than most other species, but the same basic rules apply. When the resources needed to live run low we either kill or steal from our neighbours or die off.
The one difference between us and the other species, is that we should be smart enough to stop breeding beyond what can be sustained, and before we need to fall back and act like all the other critters on this planet.
But it proves Orlowski is real journalist...
...being able to write about something, yet avoid the basic relevent facts so as to enable coming to a self serving conclusion.
In defence of the NRA Member.
Those of you who don't shoot will never appreciate the time spent training newbies down the range or in the field on how to hold fire arms safely and never, ever point it in the direction of anyone.
It doesn't matter how many times you think it has been checked as been cleared, you never do it! Guns should always be treated as loaded at all times.
The problem is some people are just dim, and bad habits picked up playing with "toys" can be hard to break. Likewise those of us who do shoot will react badly when anything gun shaped is pointed in our direction, it's become an instinct for self preservation.
In the UK; shooting shorts are among the safest activities you can partake in, and it is a very popular activity (despite what our exceedingly liberal media may tell you). Taking part in football, fishing, or ballroom dancing are far more likely to cause serious injury or death.
@DJ Smiley - we should have to live in a sh!t hole like London to get what we pay for..
I live in a Kentish village, with one telephone exchange (closed to other suppliers) providing services for approx 1500 homes and 90 non-residential premises. No cable alternatives.
In the middle of the night and most of the working day my ADSL can provide the good 6 to 8Mb that I pay for, as my house is about 200m from the exchange. (FireFox downloader shows rates of over 800KB/sec). Problem is that like most people I'm at work during the "working day" and asleep most of the night.
From about 17:00 to 22:00 my ADSL will slow down to around 0.3MB (FireFox dowmload reporting between 26 to 40 KB/sec).
That's not enough to use iPlayer (or equivalents) without constant pauses every vew seconds, and all but the most basic browsing is slow, and there's only so much time spent online banking and looking on amazon...
Considering most ISPs cap bandwidth (last time I looked at BT is was a few GB/month) prividing massive speeds that mean you reach that cap in a few hours seems pointless.
Providing a decent service to thousands of customers by upgrading the back haul to the nearest major exchange would be better that fiber to each and every a tower block.
I'm with you Armitage...
I'm peeved that it's gone HD only.
I liked the cooking, cultural, and other factual programs, along with added world news events not covered by the likes BBC/Sky.
Unlike the BBC (and a slightly lesser extent Sky News) they do report what happing in the world even if there is no video for the morons to oggle at, and they have professional reporters rather than idiots on twitter/facebook to supply their content.
I absolutely agree we need to start reducing the population...
...there are just too many of us for the world to sustain. This can only be done on a regional basis (country by country), but we (as a race) need to start somewhere. I would for a start stop all forms of child credits/support in this country with the proviso that: - Anyone who requests state help to bring up baby is admitting they have bread beyond their means. As such, both parents should have to "see the vet" before getting any money to assist looking after their current offspring. It's about time we got shot of the "I've got rights" crap, where every moron expects everyone else to pay for their "rights" to have babies, IVF and much, much more. Everyone needs to be forced to take responsibility for their own choices and actions. Some will undoubtedly say I'm just a cold heartless bar-steward (and they may be a little correct), but that's because I don't have problems with basic logic. That is why I will never give money to charities for "saving the starving babies". It's not because I don't care, it is because it solves nothing, every baby you save this year is just another mouth to feed next year, plus all the new babies. Any society that breeds beyond its means (1st or 3rd world) is doomed to reach a point were starvation and very low living standards become the norm. It is only about 100 year ago that in Britain the norm was to have 4 to 5 children, as 3 to 4 were expected to die due to disease and lack of food. better medicine and vastly improved agriculture made it possible to massively increase population since then, but the limits have been reached and exceeded.Not only that...
but with ARM the phone manufacturers have dozens of chip supliers all producing dozens of variants. If one starts charging too much or failes to deliver then there are lots of other companies ready, willing and able to privide an almost identicle part. With an Intel x86 phone chip, who do you go to when the prices jump, or the part does not perform as stated. It's not like AMD are in this field (yet) to make Intel honest. Remember before AMD and the K6 and later K7 CPUs, Intel was charging $1000+ for mid range x86 CPUs.That must be just you then.
There are some channels on sky that are very low bit rate; but avoid the god/shopping/bingo/etc...channels and the bit rates are far better than freeview.
As for HD, it will never make a bad movie/program good, and apart from a few things that are specifically visual (eg: frozen planet) it does not add much of anything. Seeing Cameron Diaz (and others) spotty faces covered in pancake makeup or pointless exploding car #12 in HD really adds nothing.
A good script works on radio, a not-so good script works better with pictures, a cr*p script will always be cr*p.
Don Mitchel: not quite
Just about al the kernel features of NT where copies of what VMS had been doing since 1978, the only big difference being that VMS didn't go multithreaded until Version 7, on Alpha's (not on VAX hardware).
If anyone wants to read how a truely secure kernal/OS should be implimented look around for a copy of the (Open)VMS "Internals and Data Structures", it covers everything from boot sequence onwards.
For those that think not doing multi-threading is bad, they need to realise probably less that 1% of VAX's made had more than one CPU so there was no benefit to be had, and the OS used AST's (Asynchronous System Traps) that made writing software where one process could handle 100's devices, timers, etc... all at once was so simple you wouldn't beleive (plus it's much more efficiant than threading on 1 cpu).
PS: The "Open" seen with VMS is silent.
don't forget the big difference though.
The Mythbusters crew were being supervise by the county sheriffs dept.
They are responsible for granting access and approving the use of the range for these tests.
Pointless comparison.
Comparing a F/A-18 to a Radar UAV is pointless.
The UAV is not a fighter, so it does not need massive engines to fly, it does not need or want high speed.
It will not be making 9G turns so will not need those extreamly strong wings and heavy engines and everything else needed for a heavy plane.
It will not be carrying the meat and its life support equipment.
All those thing do not exist in the massively successful UAV's in service today.
The weight savings are huge, that is why a the Predator only weighs in at just over 1 metric ton fully laden. Also the Predator has a range of over 600 nmi, and can stay aloft for 24 hours.
Something like that with a catapult system for takeoff would be ideal.
The F/A-18 on th other hand weighs in at around 10 metric tons (empty) and 16-23 loaded.
The Super Hornet takes that up to 14.5 tons empty and 21-30 tones loaded.
If they're going to include Apple's toys what about the rest...
Just about every electronic device made these days has a computer in it, many will have little arm cores.
So while they are counting Apple media devices; why not count all the web enabled televisions, phones, games consoles, and NAS boxes.
I'm with you TeeCee
Ever since AMD bought ATI, the drivers have been quite excelent and better and less buggy than any I ever had on my old NV cards.
They even started producing Linux drivers for those that care about that.
Also...
remember the vast pollution created extracting those highly toxic metals out of the ground that are needed to make those batteries, and massive amount of resources needed to to mine the ore and refine it.
Also the fact that most electricity is generated by coal, oil, gas and nuclear (no specific order implied).
The levels of respiratory disease caused by tailpipe fumes is utterly irrelevant compared to smoking tobacco (or any other organic weeds), which kills millions every year.
Compared to friction and hot, high pressure gasses the case is not very relevent.
There is a 5.56 NATO (aka: .223 Remington ) cartrige that is "mostly" plastic, and it has been around for a few years. The base is still brass (about 6mm for the bolt/ejector) but the rest is a plastic, with a standard 69 - 70 grain* bullet up front.
They shoot exactly like regular 5.56 NATO ammo, they are just a little cheaper to make (less metal) and lighter to carry. The brass case of a 5.56mm cartridge makes up approx 30-50% of the total weight.
* "grain" there are 7000 to a lb (pound).
Simple: Energy of the round; the lighter it is the faster it has to go to have sufficient energy to penetrate the target, and it would slow down quicker.
Also accuracy is a problem at longer ranges as light bullets get blown about in the wind making them less accurate.
The big question I have is...
...why haven't MIPS got their act together.
They have had 64bit cores since the 90's, it was not that long ago that SGI were still making workstations with them.
Though they may just be waiting for the Chinese to do all the work for them, they have new MIPS derived coresboth 32bit & 64bit. They have versions for embedded to servers and they are already quite low wattage (4cores @ 1GHz using about ~15W using 65nm chips).
When the Chinese are manufacturing these by the billion Intel, AMD, and ARM could be in trouble.
For those unaware of any of this try looking up "Loongson" and "Godson".
The St Paul's lot are the epitome of sheeple!
They have absolutely no comprehension of what they are ranting about, and have no idea what could be done differently.
They complain about capitalism yet totally rely on it for their Starbucks coffee, pizza delivery and smart phones, without realising they are total hypocrites.
If they had any real sense of what the world was like, they would stop buy produce that is made in china by factory workers who are treated more like slave labour compared to the conditions of western workers.
Yet most are sponging off society complaining how unfair it is – they're nothing but parasites.
Under no circumstances can a tube driver be called a skilled worker.
It may require some knowledge that you or I don't have, but that is true of almost every occupation be it a street cleaner or security guard all the way up to lawyers, accountants and surgeons.
It takes a course of just few weeks to take a pleb off the street and fully train them as a tube driver. For people with a little intelligence that course could probably be done in as many days.
Skilled work takes many weeks to get just the basics, and months and more often years to master. In some jobs you never stop learning.
RE: Just different problems
I agree with everything you wrote, but the same "entitlement" issues apply to the UK and most of the Europe.
In fact I would say it's even worse in the UK; particularly with those people who went to great effort in avoided getting an education, then expect the state to just hand them loads of money to live in houses that people who actually work for a living could not afford.
All because they are a poor, “hard done by” waist of space.
On Bloomberg News this morning...
A British based company is making very low end tablets for India, the Indian gov. are going to subsidise them, but the cost of manufacture was stated in the region of £35.
The device shown may look a bit clinky conpared with a Galaxy, but the designers specificaly built it with the Indian market in mind, so it has 2 full sized USB ports for starters making it possible to use standard USB sticks or as the guy showed, add a full keyboad/mouse to make it a postable PC, not just a tablet.
They didn't say what CPU (just hinted it was slow by most standards) and ran Android 2.something, but for £35 what do you expect.
Anyway from that; I would not be so sure that a "book-read" from Amazon was not making a profit.
That's not the basic package, so why are you paying for what you don't like!
I pay £20.50 a month to Sky (just enternatment +discovery packs), and for that I get:
SkyOne (aka The Simpsons Chanel), SkyAtlantic, Living, Syfi, FX, Alabi, an dozen or so Discovery channels, with the +1Hour options of all of those and the ITV's, Channel 4 & 5, and Film4. There are lots of other channels that get used now and then (Comedy Central, Halmark,etc...), basically not bad value.
There are also lots of radio channels and the picture quality is usally better than freeview.
For the £12 TAX I get:
Repeats of Dad's Army, New Tricks, Dr Who (I cannot think of anything else I've watched for about 4 years). PLus a hugh mass off utter crap designed for the consumption of the dumbest members society, with the likes of Eastenders, Holby, Celebrity(Dancing,Skating,Crapping in the woods...) and CGI Dino-twaddle. Plus a news service that is about on par with FoxNews with its in depth reporting or wahtever advertising was passed its way and re-reporting what was on SkyNews the day before.
A complete wast of money!