I can offer my UK perspective (yes, "the plural of anecdote is not data", but parent post asked for anecdotes!) as a basically healthy 25-year-old male.
Anecdote #1: January of 2001, I developed appendicitis. I got an urgent appointment to see a GP (General Practitioner, "regular family doctor") at my local GP clinic. They took a bit of a history, quick manual exam of my abdomen, found the telltale "rebound pain" and immediately referred me to hospital. As my mum had taken me to the docs in the first place, she drove me to the hospital and generally did all the thinking for me.
Arrived at hospital, went to the MAU ward (Medical Assessment Unit - for GP referrals, as opposed to Accident&Emergency which = "the ER"). I threw up I think 15 times in total (I kept count purely by the number of little press-board "kidney dishes" I got through!) before they managed to hit me with a strong enough anti-emetic to stop that. I had been scheduled to be the last surgery of the evening but I got "bumped" because a major emergency case came in - so they stuck me with some sweet sweet morphine to enable me to sleep. (Oh, and they put me on IV fluids as soon as they'd managed to stop the puking. Pissing like a racehorse when you know you've not been drinking that much is one of the weirdest body-things ever!)
Come the morning, I got my surgery spot and swapped my appendix for a nifty well-stitched abdominal wound. I believe I had another day or two in hospital to keep an eye on me (check the wound was starting to heal and that the main symptoms were clearing, I guess). I did that recovery time in a single-sex part of the ward (but not a private room - they're not the norm in the NHS).
*Up-front* cost of all of the above: Nothing. No itemised bill, listing every dish I puked in and every injection I received. At the point I needed it, the care was there, it was entirely adequate, and the only concerns I had were boredom and recovery. Of course we know this isn't free, it gets paid for by the comparatively high levels of taxes on things. Also, the local Health Authorities in different areas sometimes differ in terms of what sort of treatments they will pay for (not offering certain very-expensive drugs on a purely cost-benefit basis, causing the so-called "postcode lottery" effect).
The thing a great deal of Americans seem not to know about the UK setup: There IS private, pay-for healthcare over here *as well* as the NHS. For less-urgent stuff, waiting lists on the NHS can be significantly bothersome - it can potentially take many weeks to get something done. There are some private hospitals around, and some consultants only do NHS work part-time and also see private patients. To pay for this, you can take out private health insurance which will hopefully pay for that sort of thing.
Anecdote #2: When I was 16, there were some concerns about potential blood-sugar weirdness - so my GP suggested I have an Extended Glucose Tolerance Test done (eat nothing for 12 hours, go to hospital and drink a glass of sugar-syrup and then give blood/urine samples over the course of a few hours - checking for sugar spike/crash stuff). It would've taken quite a few weeks to get that sorted under the NHS, but my dad had extra private cover at the time (it's not uncommon for it to be offered by employers) which covered family too - so my NHS GP referred me to a local BUPA private hospital, where the test was booked and done much more quickly (and I had a really nice private room, hotel-quality). Upfront cost: Whatever the "excess" was on my dad's medical insurance - in the region of 50GBP I think.
Anecdote #3: Turned out, one of my good friends I made at university has a peanut allergy. His first ever proper reaction (not "choke and collapse", but certainly "go very blotchy and itchy") won him a nice ride in an ambulance and spending the evening in Accident & Emergency. I went along for the ride and to keep him company. Direct cost of ambulance: Nothing. Number of times ambulance crew mentioned money: Zer
Even Wii uses WEP. What's up with that? Saving cost for Nintendo? The Wii is entirely capable of using WPA - provided you don't use any super-badass characters which you can't enter using the on-screen keyboard, naturally (but it does support upper+lowercase, numbers and basic punctuation).
However, as far as I can tell, the Nintendo DS is utterly incapable of WPA.
In fact... *fiddle, taptaptap, *poke*. Yep, since I moved my wlan over to WPA (I used to use a cruddy old.11B wifi adaptor, which only supported WEP - the recent "sub-1-minute" developments spurred me into buying a new.11G dongle to fix that), the WFC Settings menu in MarioKart DS just throws a "The access point's security settings are not supported" error.
But, as I said, the Wii supports it with zero issues whatsoever.
Pegasus handles my secondary email, and my parents' primary email. It's always suited us, becase we're juggling multiple mail accounts and identities, but don't need to be "locked apart" from each other (sometimes it works nicely that my dad can read my mum's emails - she's happy for him to do so, etc.).
Can anyone offer any insight on exporting the masses of back emails out to some other client? (We can probably switch to Thunderbird I guess, if we can take our old emails with us)
No need to bother with that - if you're staying within "reach" of internet connectivity, just delete the game. When you've got the space available later, just download it again - your purchase is associated with your specific console and you can re-download later for free.
(and yes, there is apparently the ability for Nintendo customer services to transfer that to another unit in the event that yours dies and can't be repaired)
50,000 AU$ equates (based on Google's AU$->US$ conversion, and the current Purchase Rate estimate from the offical Lindex US$/L$ exchange) to somewhere over 10 Million L$. Figure is subject to drift of those exchange rates, but it gives you a decent enough yardstick.
That is a very, *very* non-trivial amount of in-game cash. You would have to be doing a massive number of sales, or selling insanely high-ticket items, to meet that sort of level of income. As a comparison, the most expensive "sensible" items I've seen might go for L$15,000 for a big multiplayer "Event Game" system (along the lines of Tringo / Slingo / Pizzeria and the like). You'd have to sell somewhere over 650 of those (presumably annually, if that's the reporting period for the initial AU$50k) to be in that sort of level of income - and the market for them just ain't big enough to sustain that, IMHO.
It could quite conceivably impact on professional "land barons" who deal in renting/selling large amounts of land, depending on the scale of their business. Anshe Chung's business/easily/ turns over that much, I'm sure.
According to Versu Richelieu's SL profile, "Please contact Rodica Millionsofus regarding access to 72 hour build sim."
Basically, they're building it in a closed sim to stop the General Public turning up and somehow spoiling their Media Event. (shame, I was going to go buy an XCite just for the occasion!)
It's in the same category as Sun's PR thingy of earlier in the week - not properly open for all SLers to visit/attend, therefore just using SL as a cute 3d vr platform buzzword on which to do "closed" things.
Good work on the summary here - your pages as linked have already convinced me to withdraw my modest financial support of Greenpiss (I'd been giving them 5 GBP a month for the past 5 months or so, after allowing myself to be convinced by one of their street fundraisers). Not only have I stopped giving them my money, but I also had a damn good whinge at them by email to tell them exactly why.
Move to Europe. The Paypal ToS are better over here, they are subject to regulation (as an "issuer of electronic money") and are answerable to the UK's Financial Services Authority. They can't lock your entire balance due to a dispute over part of it, and you have the right to appeal over their heads to the regulators if they mess you around.
Alternatively, pester your elected representatives for some legislation compatible with the relevant EU stuff. Get some proper Data Protection laws while you're at it.
Nope - if you take one apart, the tamper sensors go off, the pinpad shits itself and voids the crypto keys that it requires to talk to the chip on the card (there's a little processor in that chip remember - it's NOT just flash memory on proper EMV chip+pin cards). The pinpad is now a total techno-vegetable and will have to be returned to manufacturer for a re-flash of the keys.
Any pinpad which does not do the above will not pass EMV (Europay/Mastercard/Visa) type approval and thus will not get *given* the all-important crypto keys necessary to talk to the chip.
A "totally fraudulent" fake pinpad is highly unlikely, as it would only be of use for fraud - the shop would not be able to complete any transactions through it.
UK local telephone calls were not free/unmetered. (there may be some service arrangements which change this now, I've not kept up with that). This meant that going modem-to-modem cost money. Because of some flexibility/complication in the UK phone system, there's a bunch of dialling codes which are non-geographic - 0845 numbers were originally "local rate" (but now the effective cost of a real local call has dropped, whereas the rate to call these has not), 0800s are free to the caller, etc.
(This means that customer services sort of numbers are either 0845, or 0870 "national rate" lines - they cost more to call, aren't typically included in cellphone package minutes, and creates a token revenue stream for the company you're calling while you're on hold!)
In the super-early-days, you paid your ISP and then paid to dial in to their 0845 local-rate POP line.
Then Freeserve (now Wanadoo) and co turned up - they realised that if you worked with a telecoms company, you could receive a slice of the per-minute fee that users paid for calling in to your 0845 number. Thus did Pay-As-You-Go dialup arrive in the UK; you paid your phone bill, the ISP took their cut from that - no monthly fee. (note: unlike netzero and similar in the US, there was no adbar or weirdy crap - straight PPP dialup.)
Some technical change happened which made it possible for ISPs to offer flat-rate access, without them having to pay the high costs of letting heavy users dial in to real 0800 lines for ages on end. I'm not entirely sure what this change is, but it was reliant wholly on you having a BT landline (it was some hack with trick numbers in the local exchanges, turning the call into data earlier or somesuch.). Now, you could go back to paying a monthly fee, but not pay for your calls (as the access number was now free to call).
Aaah yes, must clarify the whole "having a BT phoneline" thing. It's *not* a given in the UK that the RJblah phone jack in someone's house is necessarily hooked up to the local BT phone exchange (or wiring cabinet, or whatever). In the UK, the cable TV companies also provide telephone service over their own kit - right down to running new copper in to your house and adding a new socket. When they launched this, they offered cheaper call prices than BT (and you could port your number the way the developed world can with cellphone numbers), and eventually got round to offering PAYG and Unmetered dialup roughly when BT customers got it (but you have to use the Cable company as your ISP to have Unmetered Dialup). Nowadays the UK broadband services say "must have a BT line" because the cable companies won't/can't/don't DSLify their POTS loops (they don't need to, they offer cable modem broadband). If you really want DSL, you can have a BT landline alongside a Cable-company one, or in place of it.
(this is all from memory, at time of posting it's about 6am in the UK and I need some sleep. I've not put in a specific timescale since I'd be guessing entirely - Unmetered dialup has been around here a good few years now, easily.)
In the UK, the Royal Mail holds a trademark on their favourite shade of red (according to the small print I saw on one of their leaflets about something-or-other).
(link is to a plain, Safe For Work GIF - just in case the hosting server regards that link as being a leech-type deeplink you might need to copy+paste the URL)
If all you're doing is flying round in spaceships in SL, you only need the $10 once-off membership - unless you like buying lots of spaceships or dislike having to save up much, in which case the greatly increased stipend ("virtual allowance", if you like) might be of value to you.
I'm enjoying having a wander round SL so far, but I really need a better graphics card before I move over to Premium membership and find some land to play with (my old geforce4 isn't really cutting it any more). I'd quite like to try making some custom flat/spin-and-spew theme park rides at some point.
Re:Pac-Man affected us as kids?
on
Pac-Man Turns 25
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· Score: 1
As has been pointed out already, this was a joke written by British comedian and satirist Marcus Brigstocke, way later than the "80s-ish" date that keeps getting hung on it.
Fans of BBC Radio 4 will probably know him from his contributions to The Now Show (which has just ended its current series run). He's great, and I trust him over "argumentum ad URL" on the matter of where the infernal pacman joke came from - a lesser man would never have owned up to writing that;)
The trick in the UK is to buy a really cheap DVD player. Asda (now owned by Walmart, but not occupying the same sort of super-dominant market position) have them for about £30 or so; generic no-name ones with no surround-sound outputs, and the remote control magic code to switch the player to Region 0 (or to a specific region, for RPC movies) is easily found by Googling.
For your PC's dvd drive, go get an RPC1 firmware, then add DVD Genie to solve any software-type region coding.
The article (haven't clicked, I'm a PC Pro subscriber so I have the Dead Tree Edition next to me) does indeed compare digital "print it at home" to digital "get it printed at a photo lab" (both "high-street" services and online offerings).
Their double page "longevity comparison" feature goes into great detail on the before-and-after survival of every combination of inks and papers under test, both unprotected and in glass frames, left in direct sunlight in their office window for 3 months. Apart from Lexmark's 19+90 inks (or Kodak Ultima paper on quite a lot of inks), they all survived well in frames, generally not so well in the open air.
Bit of a pity they only included one commercial photo-processor's prints in those fading/survival results (Snappy Snaps, silver halide on to Kodak Royal Paper) as I would've liked to see some better quality comparisons in that field. (faded in open air, didn't degrade noticably under glass, btw)
They also borrow (and credit) some stats from Cockeyed.com to point out that Scorpion Venom pwns all opposition in the expensive liquids stakes - £5532.18 per millilitre.
You can slipstream the service pack in to your install files (and then re-burn the "slipstreamed" installation to CD if you like). Installing from that source will make you SP2'd from the get-go.
It requires the "complete" SP2 installer (rather than the smart-downloading of SP2 that Windows Update offers). I can't recall the precise how-to right now (you copy contents of windows cd to hdd somewhere, then run the Service Pack installer with a couple of switches, and it integrates the changes in to the windows install files). I'm sure a little bit of Googling will find the specifics for you.
Re:One thing that's always bugged me ...
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: 1
It's always been my firmly-held belief (that I came up with 30 seconds ago) that the justification for the HUD in Half Life is that it's actually displayed on Gordon's glasses by means of integrated LCD (or whatever) screen stuff. Some of the Wearable Computing pioneers have the basics of that sorted already.
Slashdot Mirror
Crap, undoing mis-clicked moderation by replying.
(and I was even using a regular PC and mouse, not an iPhone).
Please imagine an extra +1 of funny
You linked to Gandhi's wikipedia entry but still couldn't be bothered to spell his name correctly?
I can offer my UK perspective (yes, "the plural of anecdote is not data", but parent post asked for anecdotes!) as a basically healthy 25-year-old male.
Anecdote #1: January of 2001, I developed appendicitis. I got an urgent appointment to see a GP (General Practitioner, "regular family doctor") at my local GP clinic. They took a bit of a history, quick manual exam of my abdomen, found the telltale "rebound pain" and immediately referred me to hospital. As my mum had taken me to the docs in the first place, she drove me to the hospital and generally did all the thinking for me.
Arrived at hospital, went to the MAU ward (Medical Assessment Unit - for GP referrals, as opposed to Accident&Emergency which = "the ER"). I threw up I think 15 times in total (I kept count purely by the number of little press-board "kidney dishes" I got through!) before they managed to hit me with a strong enough anti-emetic to stop that. I had been scheduled to be the last surgery of the evening but I got "bumped" because a major emergency case came in - so they stuck me with some sweet sweet morphine to enable me to sleep. (Oh, and they put me on IV fluids as soon as they'd managed to stop the puking. Pissing like a racehorse when you know you've not been drinking that much is one of the weirdest body-things ever!)
Come the morning, I got my surgery spot and swapped my appendix for a nifty well-stitched abdominal wound. I believe I had another day or two in hospital to keep an eye on me (check the wound was starting to heal and that the main symptoms were clearing, I guess). I did that recovery time in a single-sex part of the ward (but not a private room - they're not the norm in the NHS).
*Up-front* cost of all of the above: Nothing. No itemised bill, listing every dish I puked in and every injection I received. At the point I needed it, the care was there, it was entirely adequate, and the only concerns I had were boredom and recovery. Of course we know this isn't free, it gets paid for by the comparatively high levels of taxes on things. Also, the local Health Authorities in different areas sometimes differ in terms of what sort of treatments they will pay for (not offering certain very-expensive drugs on a purely cost-benefit basis, causing the so-called "postcode lottery" effect).
The thing a great deal of Americans seem not to know about the UK setup: There IS private, pay-for healthcare over here *as well* as the NHS. For less-urgent stuff, waiting lists on the NHS can be significantly bothersome - it can potentially take many weeks to get something done. There are some private hospitals around, and some consultants only do NHS work part-time and also see private patients. To pay for this, you can take out private health insurance which will hopefully pay for that sort of thing.
Anecdote #2: When I was 16, there were some concerns about potential blood-sugar weirdness - so my GP suggested I have an Extended Glucose Tolerance Test done (eat nothing for 12 hours, go to hospital and drink a glass of sugar-syrup and then give blood/urine samples over the course of a few hours - checking for sugar spike/crash stuff). It would've taken quite a few weeks to get that sorted under the NHS, but my dad had extra private cover at the time (it's not uncommon for it to be offered by employers) which covered family too - so my NHS GP referred me to a local BUPA private hospital, where the test was booked and done much more quickly (and I had a really nice private room, hotel-quality). Upfront cost: Whatever the "excess" was on my dad's medical insurance - in the region of 50GBP I think.
Anecdote #3: Turned out, one of my good friends I made at university has a peanut allergy. His first ever proper reaction (not "choke and collapse", but certainly "go very blotchy and itchy") won him a nice ride in an ambulance and spending the evening in Accident & Emergency. I went along for the ride and to keep him company. Direct cost of ambulance: Nothing. Number of times ambulance crew mentioned money: Zer
Hey, dumbass - it's not Blair any more.
Do try to keep up. A little search-and-replace could keep your batshit insane rantings looking nice and fresh.
However, as far as I can tell, the Nintendo DS is utterly incapable of WPA.
In fact... *fiddle, taptaptap, *poke*. Yep, since I moved my wlan over to WPA (I used to use a cruddy old
But, as I said, the Wii supports it with zero issues whatsoever.
Pegasus handles my secondary email, and my parents' primary email. It's always suited us, becase we're juggling multiple mail accounts and identities, but don't need to be "locked apart" from each other (sometimes it works nicely that my dad can read my mum's emails - she's happy for him to do so, etc.).
Can anyone offer any insight on exporting the masses of back emails out to some other client? (We can probably switch to Thunderbird I guess, if we can take our old emails with us)
I just lost the game, you insensitive clod!
No need to bother with that - if you're staying within "reach" of internet connectivity, just delete the game. When you've got the space available later, just download it again - your purchase is associated with your specific console and you can re-download later for free.
(and yes, there is apparently the ability for Nintendo customer services to transfer that to another unit in the event that yours dies and can't be repaired)
Except in the UK, where the limits are defined in MPH, signed with a plain number-in-a-red-circle, with no unit indicator.
50,000 AU$ equates (based on Google's AU$->US$ conversion, and the current Purchase Rate estimate from the offical Lindex US$/L$ exchange) to somewhere over 10 Million L$. Figure is subject to drift of those exchange rates, but it gives you a decent enough yardstick.
/easily/ turns over that much, I'm sure.
That is a very, *very* non-trivial amount of in-game cash. You would have to be doing a massive number of sales, or selling insanely high-ticket items, to meet that sort of level of income. As a comparison, the most expensive "sensible" items I've seen might go for L$15,000 for a big multiplayer "Event Game" system (along the lines of Tringo / Slingo / Pizzeria and the like). You'd have to sell somewhere over 650 of those (presumably annually, if that's the reporting period for the initial AU$50k) to be in that sort of level of income - and the market for them just ain't big enough to sustain that, IMHO.
It could quite conceivably impact on professional "land barons" who deal in renting/selling large amounts of land, depending on the scale of their business. Anshe Chung's business
According to Versu Richelieu's SL profile, "Please contact Rodica Millionsofus regarding access to 72 hour build sim."
Basically, they're building it in a closed sim to stop the General Public turning up and somehow spoiling their Media Event. (shame, I was going to go buy an XCite just for the occasion!)
It's in the same category as Sun's PR thingy of earlier in the week - not properly open for all SLers to visit/attend, therefore just using SL as a cute 3d vr platform buzzword on which to do "closed" things.
Good work on the summary here - your pages as linked have already convinced me to withdraw my modest financial support of Greenpiss (I'd been giving them 5 GBP a month for the past 5 months or so, after allowing myself to be convinced by one of their street fundraisers). Not only have I stopped giving them my money, but I also had a damn good whinge at them by email to tell them exactly why.
Nonono, you misunderstand...
A flame retardant actually makes the flames even more retarded!
(Radio 4 FTW)
Move to Europe. The Paypal ToS are better over here, they are subject to regulation (as an "issuer of electronic money") and are answerable to the UK's Financial Services Authority. They can't lock your entire balance due to a dispute over part of it, and you have the right to appeal over their heads to the regulators if they mess you around.
Alternatively, pester your elected representatives for some legislation compatible with the relevant EU stuff. Get some proper Data Protection laws while you're at it.
Nope - if you take one apart, the tamper sensors go off, the pinpad shits itself and voids the crypto keys that it requires to talk to the chip on the card (there's a little processor in that chip remember - it's NOT just flash memory on proper EMV chip+pin cards). The pinpad is now a total techno-vegetable and will have to be returned to manufacturer for a re-flash of the keys.
Any pinpad which does not do the above will not pass EMV (Europay/Mastercard/Visa) type approval and thus will not get *given* the all-important crypto keys necessary to talk to the chip.
A "totally fraudulent" fake pinpad is highly unlikely, as it would only be of use for fraud - the shop would not be able to complete any transactions through it.
UK local telephone calls were not free/unmetered. (there may be some service arrangements which change this now, I've not kept up with that). This meant that going modem-to-modem cost money. Because of some flexibility/complication in the UK phone system, there's a bunch of dialling codes which are non-geographic - 0845 numbers were originally "local rate" (but now the effective cost of a real local call has dropped, whereas the rate to call these has not), 0800s are free to the caller, etc.
(This means that customer services sort of numbers are either 0845, or 0870 "national rate" lines - they cost more to call, aren't typically included in cellphone package minutes, and creates a token revenue stream for the company you're calling while you're on hold!)
In the super-early-days, you paid your ISP and then paid to dial in to their 0845 local-rate POP line.
Then Freeserve (now Wanadoo) and co turned up - they realised that if you worked with a telecoms company, you could receive a slice of the per-minute fee that users paid for calling in to your 0845 number. Thus did Pay-As-You-Go dialup arrive in the UK; you paid your phone bill, the ISP took their cut from that - no monthly fee. (note: unlike netzero and similar in the US, there was no adbar or weirdy crap - straight PPP dialup.)
Some technical change happened which made it possible for ISPs to offer flat-rate access, without them having to pay the high costs of letting heavy users dial in to real 0800 lines for ages on end. I'm not entirely sure what this change is, but it was reliant wholly on you having a BT landline (it was some hack with trick numbers in the local exchanges, turning the call into data earlier or somesuch.). Now, you could go back to paying a monthly fee, but not pay for your calls (as the access number was now free to call).
Aaah yes, must clarify the whole "having a BT phoneline" thing. It's *not* a given in the UK that the RJblah phone jack in someone's house is necessarily hooked up to the local BT phone exchange (or wiring cabinet, or whatever). In the UK, the cable TV companies also provide telephone service over their own kit - right down to running new copper in to your house and adding a new socket. When they launched this, they offered cheaper call prices than BT (and you could port your number the way the developed world can with cellphone numbers), and eventually got round to offering PAYG and Unmetered dialup roughly when BT customers got it (but you have to use the Cable company as your ISP to have Unmetered Dialup). Nowadays the UK broadband services say "must have a BT line" because the cable companies won't/can't/don't DSLify their POTS loops (they don't need to, they offer cable modem broadband). If you really want DSL, you can have a BT landline alongside a Cable-company one, or in place of it.
(this is all from memory, at time of posting it's about 6am in the UK and I need some sleep. I've not put in a specific timescale since I'd be guessing entirely - Unmetered dialup has been around here a good few years now, easily.)
In the UK, the Royal Mail holds a trademark on their favourite shade of red (according to the small print I saw on one of their leaflets about something-or-other).
Alternatively, we could learn Chicken.
(link is to a plain, Safe For Work GIF - just in case the hosting server regards that link as being a leech-type deeplink you might need to copy+paste the URL)
If all you're doing is flying round in spaceships in SL, you only need the $10 once-off membership - unless you like buying lots of spaceships or dislike having to save up much, in which case the greatly increased stipend ("virtual allowance", if you like) might be of value to you.
I'm enjoying having a wander round SL so far, but I really need a better graphics card before I move over to Premium membership and find some land to play with (my old geforce4 isn't really cutting it any more). I'd quite like to try making some custom flat/spin-and-spew theme park rides at some point.
As has been pointed out already, this was a joke written by British comedian and satirist Marcus Brigstocke, way later than the "80s-ish" date that keeps getting hung on it.
;)
Fans of BBC Radio 4 will probably know him from his contributions to The Now Show (which has just ended its current series run). He's great, and I trust him over "argumentum ad URL" on the matter of where the infernal pacman joke came from - a lesser man would never have owned up to writing that
The trick in the UK is to buy a really cheap DVD player. Asda (now owned by Walmart, but not occupying the same sort of super-dominant market position) have them for about £30 or so; generic no-name ones with no surround-sound outputs, and the remote control magic code to switch the player to Region 0 (or to a specific region, for RPC movies) is easily found by Googling.
For your PC's dvd drive, go get an RPC1 firmware, then add DVD Genie to solve any software-type region coding.
The article (haven't clicked, I'm a PC Pro subscriber so I have the Dead Tree Edition next to me) does indeed compare digital "print it at home" to digital "get it printed at a photo lab" (both "high-street" services and online offerings).
Their double page "longevity comparison" feature goes into great detail on the before-and-after survival of every combination of inks and papers under test, both unprotected and in glass frames, left in direct sunlight in their office window for 3 months. Apart from Lexmark's 19+90 inks (or Kodak Ultima paper on quite a lot of inks), they all survived well in frames, generally not so well in the open air.
Bit of a pity they only included one commercial photo-processor's prints in those fading/survival results (Snappy Snaps, silver halide on to Kodak Royal Paper) as I would've liked to see some better quality comparisons in that field. (faded in open air, didn't degrade noticably under glass, btw)
They also borrow (and credit) some stats from Cockeyed.com to point out that Scorpion Venom pwns all opposition in the expensive liquids stakes - £5532.18 per millilitre.
You can slipstream the service pack in to your install files (and then re-burn the "slipstreamed" installation to CD if you like). Installing from that source will make you SP2'd from the get-go.
It requires the "complete" SP2 installer (rather than the smart-downloading of SP2 that Windows Update offers). I can't recall the precise how-to right now (you copy contents of windows cd to hdd somewhere, then run the Service Pack installer with a couple of switches, and it integrates the changes in to the windows install files). I'm sure a little bit of Googling will find the specifics for you.
It's always been my firmly-held belief (that I came up with 30 seconds ago) that the justification for the HUD in Half Life is that it's actually displayed on Gordon's glasses by means of integrated LCD (or whatever) screen stuff. Some of the Wearable Computing pioneers have the basics of that sorted already.