In the UK we have letter boxes, which are slots in the front door, all of your post just gets pushed through the slot. The wonders of a system where you don't have to go out into the cold to get your post. The only downside is that if it doesn't fit through the letter box the postman will knock on the door and wake you up.
I can't imagine having all of my post left in a box next to the street its seems like an incredible liability. Not just for someone stealing your post but also for random idiot kids taking it for fun.
I am so glad that in the UK we don't all have a magic number which identifies us and has to be filled in on every form. The closest here would be the National Insurance number, which is not used for identification and is hardly ever asked for by anyone but the government.
I mean having one number which isn't kept at all secret but is used as the equivalent of a password for everything from CC applications to health insurance. Yes you aren't obliged to give it out to anyone except certain specific parties, but if they demand it at a job interview and you say no, then you aren't going to get the job.
I mean, how realistic is a stump of a neck, with blood squirting out of it?
Quite realistic I imagine. If you were decapitated your heart wouldn't stop beating straight away as the heart beat is autonomic (not controlled by the brain). If the heart was still beating then blood would still flow. Blood is normally very much played down in movies, in the human body there is a lot of blood at quite a high pressure, if you cut through a major artery then you will get some serious spray.
It isn't daylight though as Sauron has darkened the skies, this is mentioned several times during the film. It was shot quite light though but then a huge battle in pitch darkness wouldn't have been very cinematic.
The simple answer to this is to release movies at the same time in different countries. This is actually one of the benefits of movie piracy, movies are starting to be released simultaneously around the world to maximise profits before bootlegs appear.
There is no real reason to have staggered releases, all it does is annoy people who have to wait for movies which makes them more likely to buy a bootleg copy. Region coding prevents consumers from importing DVDs that havn't been released locally which again makes them more likely to turn to piracy.
The reason the movie companies won't abolish region codes is that it allows them to price fix for different countries. They can set prices differently in different regions and prevent consumers importing the cheaper other region discs. This has no benefit for the consumers and is a massive inconvenience especially in countries where multi-region players aren't freely available.
I can understand staggered cinema releases for films - the cast/crew can be at each premiere in each country sequentially.
They could do this by just having the premieres on different days. The premiere is normally weeks before the film actually opens to the public so there is no reason why it would affect the general release.
Play.com actually only sell Region 2 discs now, they have a spin off site PlayUSA.com which sells Region 1 discs, still in GBP and still with free shipping. Another one would be CdWow.com who sell Region 1, 2 and 3 DVDs.
If the total length of an "hour long" show is around 42-43 minutes and the credits are part way through then it was made for the US market orignally.
Ah yes like the dvds of '24' which are only 18 hours in total. Some channels cut shows down even further though, I have noticed Sky One and E4 (in the UK) both cut 'offensive content' from friends episodes often completely ruining jokes in the process. Nothing like a joke with no punch line is there.
This isn't limited to the UK either, watching Buffy episodes on US Sky was always annoying as hell as they cut them mercilessly so they could show them during prime time. Someone really needs to explain artistic integrity to these people.
I have several region 1 DVDs protected with RCE and they play just fine on my multiregion player. And I don't know how they have the audacity to call copy protection a 'digital enhancement'.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off,
Yes but my electricity company don't offer me unlimited electricity for a fixed price, I pay for how much I use. ISPs offer unlimited access, then they hide caps in the ToC. If they didn't claim it was an unlimited service then I wouldn't mind but there is nothing like signing a 1 year contract with an ISP and them introducing 1gb a day caps 2 weeks later.
The reason they do this is liability. If you make money from your connection and it goes down for 3 hours then Speakeasy could be held liable for the money you lost due to the outage.
There is nothing in the ToC of my ISP that stops me using my connection to look at porn. If I choose to use my 'unlimited' connection to surf for porn 24/7 then thats up to me.
No goatse though as I think that would fall under 'offensive content'.
They are big corporations. They could redefine 'unlimited' as 'up to 1GB of traffic per month', and frankly, none of us on here have a snowflake's chance in Hell of seriously combating it.
Actually we do have a chance, NTL in the UK tried to impose bandwith caps last year on their 600kpbs and 1Mb connections. After a petition with thousands of signatures and vast uproar about their supposedly 'unlimited' service they suddenly stopped talking about it. They never admitted to dropping the caps but they certainly stopped enforcing them.
It shows that if enough people complain then you can change things. I believe one of the most persuasive things done was someone finding out the e-mail addresses of the NTL board of directors who were swamped with complaints about the caps. Don't complain to the support people, they don't care, hit as high as possible.
I've personally seen just as many--if not more--bad drivers driving smaller cars than SUVs. But when they do it you just honk your horn and flip them off and forget about it. When it happens with an SUV all the sudden it's some crusade.
Yes but when a bad driver in a small car hits you it results in whiplash and some minor damage. When a bad driver in an SUV hits you it results in your car being crushed and your body parts spread over the road.
Which would you prefer?
Of course you could protect yourself by driving an SUV, but this will prompt the bad driver to buy a tank, you know because they need the extra boot space for their golf clubs.
Bleh, hooray for the pirates and those who help them!
Are you suggesting that region coding of DVDs is an anti-piracy measure? The reason discs are region-coded is to allow the prices to be fixed in each region, and to allow staggered releasing. It has nothing to do with piracy.
Do you really think people would choose to be sleeping on the street at christmas, when it is below freezing outside. Most homeless people are victims of circumstance, they aren't all alcoholics who drank away the rent money. It comes as a shock but most people are about 2 pay cheques away from being homeless. If you lost your job suddenly how long would your savings last?
With the rise in 'credit culture' most people don't have large savings and they are usually tied into all kinds of credit agreements, credit cards, car loan, mortgage. Once you start missing payments its a very slippery slope. Before you know it your house and car have been reposessed and you are on the street. There may be jobs available but no-one will employ you if you don't have a permenant address, or if you can't prepare for an interview because you have no clean clothes.
Benefits and welfare don't help much either. 'Job Seekers' in the UK is 40 pounds a week, which isn't even enough to cover a weeks rent, you would be eligible for 'Housing Benefit' but the present time between application and a decision is 9 months. Oh and you have to already be in housing, how many landlords do you know who would wait 9 months for you to pay the rent? Once you are homeless kiss goodbye to any benefits as you need a permanent address to claim them.
Most homeless people were normal hard working citizens at one point, its only when they lost everything and society turned its back on them that they turned to drink and drugs. Normally because of the depression and mental illness that is so common on the streets.
Next time you see a homeless person in the street don't think 'drunken bum' think 'that could be me' and give them that pound you were going to spend on an extra cup of coffee. Or if you think they would waste it on alcohol or drugs then go and buy them a cup of coffee or bring them a blanket. Once you are at the bottom its very hard to climb back up, all most homeless people want is help with the first step.
Plus a good pair of leather boots will last a lot longer than Gore-tex ones costing the same. With enough Nikwax leather boots keep your feet dry in anything short of water deep enough to go over the top and of course thats why what gaiters are for.
The only real advantage of Gore-tex boots is that they don't take as long to break in. But then how often do you buy new boots?
When I was in the states I picked up a Micra which came with a Maglite Solitaire attached on a lanyard. Perfect combination, small enough to carry anywhere, all the useful tools of the Micra and you can actually see what you are doing too!
You just wait until you have guests and your corkscrew breaks, these 'useless' additions always come in handy eventually. Of course the other use is when your roomate goes on holiday and takes the damn corkscrew with him without telling you!
(Tip for when this happens to you: If you take a thick pen or something else thats the same diameter as the cork, you can hammer the cork into the bottle. It requires a bit of finesse not to spray wine everywhere but it certainly beats searching for a shop thats open at midnight!)
Consider, too, that many people don't particularly enjoy being interrupted by a waiter every five minutes so that he can pour two sips worth of Coke into each person's glass.
Very true, I hate it when I am trying to eat and every time I take a sip of my drink the waitor runs up and refills it. It really isn't necessary, yes if it is almost empty then come and refill it but my enjoyment of a meal isn't reliant on how full my glass is.
Oh and you should try living in the UK where no-one will come and fill your glass, at all, ever. Free refills are mainly an American thing, here most restaurants and cafes will charge you per glass/cup. Yes it is ridiculous and money grabbing. One of the best things I found about eating out in America was that you didn't have to shell out another 1.50 just because you wanted another mouthful of coke.
Waitors tread a very fine line, if they buzz around the table all the time it is annoying, but there is nothing worse than spending your whole meal trying to catch a waitor's eye. The trick to being a good waitor (and earning a good tip!) is only showing up at the table when they want something.
I generally tip based on how friendly the server is, I am willing to put up with slow service and mistakes if it is obvious that they are trying their best. I wouldn't give someone a crappy tip because they were rushed off their feet serving 10 tables but I would if they were rude, or slow even though the place was empty. Of course the best reason to tip well is that when you come back you will be remembered and will get better service. Everyone remembers a good tipper.
Which is exactly my point, as a non-owner you don't need to know. I paid a lot of money for my iPod I don't want the front of it cluttered up with labels that I don't need for the convenience of everyone else.
Of course you were sitting next to the owner so you could just have asked:)
I imagine when they designed the iPod they decided that a clean simple layout was more important than having seperate buttons for each feature and labeling them all. Anyone who owns an iPod would know that you hold 'menu' to switch on the backlight. I know when I bought mine I really wasn't concerned whether other people could work out how to use it. Intuitive pick up and play interfaces are only necessary for devices that will be used by lots of people with no training/instructions. That hardly applies to the iPod.
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In the UK we have letter boxes, which are slots in the front door, all of your post just gets pushed through the slot. The wonders of a system where you don't have to go out into the cold to get your post. The only downside is that if it doesn't fit through the letter box the postman will knock on the door and wake you up.
I can't imagine having all of my post left in a box next to the street its seems like an incredible liability. Not just for someone stealing your post but also for random idiot kids taking it for fun.
I am so glad that in the UK we don't all have a magic number which identifies us and has to be filled in on every form. The closest here would be the National Insurance number, which is not used for identification and is hardly ever asked for by anyone but the government.
I mean having one number which isn't kept at all secret but is used as the equivalent of a password for everything from CC applications to health insurance. Yes you aren't obliged to give it out to anyone except certain specific parties, but if they demand it at a job interview and you say no, then you aren't going to get the job.
I mean, how realistic is a stump of a neck, with blood squirting out of it?
Quite realistic I imagine. If you were decapitated your heart wouldn't stop beating straight away as the heart beat is autonomic (not controlled by the brain). If the heart was still beating then blood would still flow. Blood is normally very much played down in movies, in the human body there is a lot of blood at quite a high pressure, if you cut through a major artery then you will get some serious spray.
It isn't daylight though as Sauron has darkened the skies, this is mentioned several times during the film. It was shot quite light though but then a huge battle in pitch darkness wouldn't have been very cinematic.
The simple answer to this is to release movies at the same time in different countries. This is actually one of the benefits of movie piracy, movies are starting to be released simultaneously around the world to maximise profits before bootlegs appear.
There is no real reason to have staggered releases, all it does is annoy people who have to wait for movies which makes them more likely to buy a bootleg copy. Region coding prevents consumers from importing DVDs that havn't been released locally which again makes them more likely to turn to piracy.
The reason the movie companies won't abolish region codes is that it allows them to price fix for different countries. They can set prices differently in different regions and prevent consumers importing the cheaper other region discs. This has no benefit for the consumers and is a massive inconvenience especially in countries where multi-region players aren't freely available.
I can understand staggered cinema releases for films - the cast/crew can be at each premiere in each country sequentially.
They could do this by just having the premieres on different days. The premiere is normally weeks before the film actually opens to the public so there is no reason why it would affect the general release.Play.com actually only sell Region 2 discs now, they have a spin off site PlayUSA.com which sells Region 1 discs, still in GBP and still with free shipping. Another one would be CdWow.com who sell Region 1, 2 and 3 DVDs.
If the total length of an "hour long" show is around 42-43 minutes and the credits are part way through then it was made for the US market orignally.
Ah yes like the dvds of '24' which are only 18 hours in total. Some channels cut shows down even further though, I have noticed Sky One and E4 (in the UK) both cut 'offensive content' from friends episodes often completely ruining jokes in the process. Nothing like a joke with no punch line is there.
This isn't limited to the UK either, watching Buffy episodes on US Sky was always annoying as hell as they cut them mercilessly so they could show them during prime time. Someone really needs to explain artistic integrity to these people.
I have several region 1 DVDs protected with RCE and they play just fine on my multiregion player. And I don't know how they have the audacity to call copy protection a 'digital enhancement'.
If you put up enough XMas lights to be seen from the moon and get a huge electric bill next cycle you most likely wouldnt get off,
Yes but my electricity company don't offer me unlimited electricity for a fixed price, I pay for how much I use. ISPs offer unlimited access, then they hide caps in the ToC. If they didn't claim it was an unlimited service then I wouldn't mind but there is nothing like signing a 1 year contract with an ISP and them introducing 1gb a day caps 2 weeks later.
The reason they do this is liability. If you make money from your connection and it goes down for 3 hours then Speakeasy could be held liable for the money you lost due to the outage.
And those picture/video intensive sites are porn.
There is nothing in the ToC of my ISP that stops me using my connection to look at porn. If I choose to use my 'unlimited' connection to surf for porn 24/7 then thats up to me.
No goatse though as I think that would fall under 'offensive content'.
They are big corporations. They could redefine 'unlimited' as 'up to 1GB of traffic per month', and frankly, none of us on here have a snowflake's chance in Hell of seriously combating it.
Actually we do have a chance, NTL in the UK tried to impose bandwith caps last year on their 600kpbs and 1Mb connections. After a petition with thousands of signatures and vast uproar about their supposedly 'unlimited' service they suddenly stopped talking about it. They never admitted to dropping the caps but they certainly stopped enforcing them.
It shows that if enough people complain then you can change things. I believe one of the most persuasive things done was someone finding out the e-mail addresses of the NTL board of directors who were swamped with complaints about the caps. Don't complain to the support people, they don't care, hit as high as possible.
I've personally seen just as many--if not more--bad drivers driving smaller cars than SUVs. But when they do it you just honk your horn and flip them off and forget about it. When it happens with an SUV all the sudden it's some crusade.
Yes but when a bad driver in a small car hits you it results in whiplash and some minor damage. When a bad driver in an SUV hits you it results in your car being crushed and your body parts spread over the road.
Which would you prefer?
Of course you could protect yourself by driving an SUV, but this will prompt the bad driver to buy a tank, you know because they need the extra boot space for their golf clubs.
Bleh, hooray for the pirates and those who help them!
Are you suggesting that region coding of DVDs is an anti-piracy measure? The reason discs are region-coded is to allow the prices to be fixed in each region, and to allow staggered releasing. It has nothing to do with piracy.
Or to yourself, all those poor /. readers just print out some certificates saying:
'A donation has made on your behalf to pay for my rent and food over the christmas period.'
People love to give.
Should have said marker, as in the big fat felt tip ones.
Do you really think people would choose to be sleeping on the street at christmas, when it is below freezing outside. Most homeless people are victims of circumstance, they aren't all alcoholics who drank away the rent money. It comes as a shock but most people are about 2 pay cheques away from being homeless. If you lost your job suddenly how long would your savings last?
With the rise in 'credit culture' most people don't have large savings and they are usually tied into all kinds of credit agreements, credit cards, car loan, mortgage. Once you start missing payments its a very slippery slope. Before you know it your house and car have been reposessed and you are on the street. There may be jobs available but no-one will employ you if you don't have a permenant address, or if you can't prepare for an interview because you have no clean clothes.
Benefits and welfare don't help much either. 'Job Seekers' in the UK is 40 pounds a week, which isn't even enough to cover a weeks rent, you would be eligible for 'Housing Benefit' but the present time between application and a decision is 9 months. Oh and you have to already be in housing, how many landlords do you know who would wait 9 months for you to pay the rent? Once you are homeless kiss goodbye to any benefits as you need a permanent address to claim them.
Most homeless people were normal hard working citizens at one point, its only when they lost everything and society turned its back on them that they turned to drink and drugs. Normally because of the depression and mental illness that is so common on the streets.
Next time you see a homeless person in the street don't think 'drunken bum' think 'that could be me' and give them that pound you were going to spend on an extra cup of coffee. Or if you think they would waste it on alcohol or drugs then go and buy them a cup of coffee or bring them a blanket. Once you are at the bottom its very hard to climb back up, all most homeless people want is help with the first step.
Someone drinking all day at Christmas, how awful!
Plus a good pair of leather boots will last a lot longer than Gore-tex ones costing the same. With enough Nikwax leather boots keep your feet dry in anything short of water deep enough to go over the top and of course thats why what gaiters are for.
The only real advantage of Gore-tex boots is that they don't take as long to break in. But then how often do you buy new boots?
When I was in the states I picked up a Micra which came with a Maglite Solitaire attached on a lanyard. Perfect combination, small enough to carry anywhere, all the useful tools of the Micra and you can actually see what you are doing too!
$20 from Costco if I remember rightly.
You just wait until you have guests and your corkscrew breaks, these 'useless' additions always come in handy eventually. Of course the other use is when your roomate goes on holiday and takes the damn corkscrew with him without telling you!
(Tip for when this happens to you: If you take a thick pen or something else thats the same diameter as the cork, you can hammer the cork into the bottle. It requires a bit of finesse not to spray wine everywhere but it certainly beats searching for a shop thats open at midnight!)
Very true, I hate it when I am trying to eat and every time I take a sip of my drink the waitor runs up and refills it. It really isn't necessary, yes if it is almost empty then come and refill it but my enjoyment of a meal isn't reliant on how full my glass is.
Oh and you should try living in the UK where no-one will come and fill your glass, at all, ever. Free refills are mainly an American thing, here most restaurants and cafes will charge you per glass/cup. Yes it is ridiculous and money grabbing. One of the best things I found about eating out in America was that you didn't have to shell out another 1.50 just because you wanted another mouthful of coke.
Waitors tread a very fine line, if they buzz around the table all the time it is annoying, but there is nothing worse than spending your whole meal trying to catch a waitor's eye. The trick to being a good waitor (and earning a good tip!) is only showing up at the table when they want something.
I generally tip based on how friendly the server is, I am willing to put up with slow service and mistakes if it is obvious that they are trying their best. I wouldn't give someone a crappy tip because they were rushed off their feet serving 10 tables but I would if they were rude, or slow even though the place was empty. Of course the best reason to tip well is that when you come back you will be remembered and will get better service. Everyone remembers a good tipper.
Which is exactly my point, as a non-owner you don't need to know. I paid a lot of money for my iPod I don't want the front of it cluttered up with labels that I don't need for the convenience of everyone else.
:)
Of course you were sitting next to the owner so you could just have asked
I imagine when they designed the iPod they decided that a clean simple layout was more important than having seperate buttons for each feature and labeling them all. Anyone who owns an iPod would know that you hold 'menu' to switch on the backlight. I know when I bought mine I really wasn't concerned whether other people could work out how to use it. Intuitive pick up and play interfaces are only necessary for devices that will be used by lots of people with no training/instructions. That hardly applies to the iPod.