Yeah. A minute is pretty pathetic. OT I know, but on my Macbook, with a puny 512MB of RAM, OS X loads in 22 seconds (average), yet windowsxp takes on average 1 minute 32 seconds. That's sodding ridiculous. And OS X shuts down, on average in around 12 seconds from the confirm dialog to the hardware off. Windows takes over a minute, varying wildly. Maybe this MRAM will be the magic bullet that makes windows look usable, like the pentium 2 was, then the pentium 3 & 4 were supposed to be, making windows 'faster than ever'. Strangely, just seems as slow as ever.
Veering for a moment back on-topic, this MRAM thing does look real cool though, however I'd guess due to fabrication costs and the chip's size vs. capacity, that MRAM will be mostly used in places that flash is today, mp3 players, flash-drives etc. I doubt it'll ever really be used as a hard drive, just as flash chips aren't used as hard drives. Cool if it were though.
Okay, so you ay Windows has 90% marketshare (I'd dispute that; marketshare isn't where that figure comes from, usually from sales shares, and it's a well known fact that Mac users keep their machines for longer but hey). Settling on that for arguments sake, and say linux has 4%, so Mac OS X has 5% and the rest 1%.
So there are 150,000 computer viruses known about, (depending on who you ask, some say as many as half a million, some as little as 10,000, but the average is around 150,000).
Of these, roughly 149,000 are for MS Windows/DOS. There are around a hundred for Amiga, another 100 or so for the Acorn, a few dozen for linux and about 50 for Mac OS 1 through 9.
As of yet there are 0 for Mac OS X. Zero. Nil. A few (5 I can find) proof-of-concept trojan have been reported, but these cannot truly be considered viruses, as to be infected one must input your administrator password at least once.
Now, I'm not much of a mathematician, but if your marketshare thing were true, then surely windows viruses would make up 90% of all the known virii, and Mac OS X would have 4%.
Last time I looked (and I'll even count them 5 pseudo-trojans), 5 or 6 is not 4% of 145,000.
Windows is more insecure than Mac OS X, by whole sodding leagues. Anyone trying to deny this or FUD it is living in a bill-gates'-acid-trip fueled loud cuckoo land.
Whoops, my bad. My standing as a slashdot grammar Nazi may suffer due to this, but I do avow that the misspelling in question is because my Apple iMac tangerine keyboard is a fair few years old, and whist I have a spiffy new MacBook, with a spiffy new keyboard on it, when at my desk, the old tangerine gets a hammering. Probably due for a replacement. Some of the hammers don't always connect, even if my fingers hit the key.
You're right to a degree on the minimal standards. But the EU's bureaucracy is well known. A lot of their regulations exist solely because certain failed politicians who get sent to the EC as an easy-life 'reward', wish to have a legacy, and see easily voted-in pointless legislation as their ticket into the history books. See Neil "Babies? Love 'em. Vote for Me! Terrorists? Lovely, Vote for Me!" Kinnock and his wife, Ugly as an example of the EU gravy train and it's embarrassing catalogue of legislative mistakes.
The truly sad thing is, it takes one a minute or so to digest the above comment and realise it is in fact a joke and not actually true.
That's how bad the EU can be. We're talking about the drones that actually put down on the books a statue on how bendy a banana has to be before it's eligible to be sold.
It was wrong; there is.
IANAN (I am not a neuroscientist) but I recall reading an article a while back about a man who after a minor head accident, would have a severe reaction to any form of mild electrical stimuli;
He would immediately become sexually aroused upon a small static shock, and anything more than a few volts of a zap would get him to spontaneously ejaculate. They believed that a 'short-circuit' was occurring in his brain making a wrong connection every time some electrical input was felt in his body.
There is a pleasure centre in the brain, but from what I recall, it's not in any one place, but spread out in little areas all over the shop.
And for what it's worth, I'd assume although IANAMLE (I'm not a military lawyer either), addicting PoW's to this treatment then threatening to remove it would indeed constitute torture, and as such be forbidden by the Laws of Armed Conflict, and the Geneva Convention. Not that the USA would care, given recent history, but hey.
As someone else has mentioned, whilst americans don't like the fact, the EU is the worlds largest economic unit. It's just counted as separate nations (because it is...at the moment) usually. Not sure if Microsoft is bigger here than in the US. I'd say it is, but the Germans really really like linux.
As absurd (and humorous) as your idea is, there is a grain of possibility in what you propose: Instead of mice and cheese, how about you engineer a bacterium that particularly loves the material the platters are made of, then surround the platters with little vials of the bacteria. As soon as you hit the 'magic-smoke' button, the bacteria are released and wham, no more platters. If you make them impervious to water, they can't even be washed off, and whilst it won't be instant (say, maybe half an hour) once it starts you can't use the hard drive and they can't be stopped. After all, there are bacteria that like iron and petroleum. Why not the cobalt-based alloy the media layer is made of?
It won't. Haven't tested this (mine is getting ordered on Monday, but my pal in the Apple Store borrowed one for the day to come show me! Sweeeet), but I can tell you now it won't, by default. The reason? The trcakpad special features, unlike the sudden-motion-sensor, are not hardware based, they're software. There's a HID.kext in/System/Library somewhere that handles the trackpad and it's abilities. Hence why you can already do this on the older iBooks. I already do on my one. It's not new hardware at play here, merely new drivers.
So unless you know someone who can write you a Windows trackpad driver, it won't have two-fingered scrolling, nor two-fingered tapping. Shame. What the review doesn't mention is that the right-click action actually works by just tapping he pad itself with two fingers. You don't need to click the button as well. Which is mighty sweet, I can tell you.
Overall, I be impressed. Impressed enough to run out and buy one before the sale of my iBook is complete....
p.s. Wanna buy a 1.2GHz G4 12" iBook? £500. One careful owner....
Sigh. This is clearly not trolling. Someone please meta-moderate the above post up. Over zealous moderators are becoming a real problem around here....
aye, but the display is the same res, you don't need more than 2 Gig of ram (although I agree it is nice..) a tuner, yeah, fair enough if you want one.
Bigger hard drive, yeah.
But it's not a mac. It's like saying you could have a car with a much bigger engine instead of a Lotus. It's not a Lotus.
Besides (I haven't _read_ the link, no time, but I am assuming), the toshiba will not be the same standard of apple engineering. This isn't just fan-boying. Apple stuff really is superb engineering. Great Design. Like the optical in/out being in the same physical ports as the analogue in/out to save space. Most pc laptops have 30 odd ports and look clunky and heavy to boot. The MacBookpro is like one inch thin! You can pay less for similar tech specs, but not similar quality. I suppose you pay for what you get. If you want a cheap mac, get the MacBook (replacing the iBook soon) or a Mac Mini. Besides, the toshiba can't legally run Mac OS X. For a Mac-only shop, this is essential.
I call bullshit.
My pal has a MacBookPro. It's damned cool. If I had £1500 I would have one too.
It runs every game you can think of for Windows very well. Doom 3 plays flawlessly at native res, with all the options. So does HL2, GTA3, Tomb Rider Legend, and a whole shitload of older games. I don't think it can currently play older DOS-based games, but that's more that XP can't do them old games, and the MacBookPro won't run anything older than Win2k.
No matter whether you love or hate Mac's, or your opinion of the switch to Intel, there is no excuse for the FUD you spouted.
Now, the old PowerPC macs, yeah, due to the limitations of virtualisation couldn't do 3D, but that wasn't Apple's fault. They didn't write VirtualPC. Microsoft and before them Connectix did. But the new Macs run games exceptionally well. So much so that when the MacBookPro was launched, it was (famously) the fastest windows laptop you could buy! Please get it right in future!
Well, you see there would be the problem. The reason why I wrote to my MP, MSP and MEP's, demanding all of them to have this man denied extradition was very simple. He's a moron, probably slightly deranged, and uses 'hacking tools' that even 12 year-old script kiddies would reject. But here's the point: We have an extradite treaty with the United States of America. We've signed it, ratified, enshrined it in law and everything.
You didn't.
Tomorrow morning, a hacker in Florida, or New York or anywhere in the US could hack into the MoD's system, launch some nukes maybe, or send some troops to invade China or something (well, the hacker couldn't really, since our SysAdmins have a deep and arcane knowledge of something called a "password"), or maybe bomb London, and legally speaking, there ain't a damn thing we could do to have him extradited, cause you didn't sign the treaty, Why should we honour a treaty you can't even be bothered to sign? Then of course there's the issue that we have a law that says we're not supposed to extradite people to countries where you aren't guaranteed a fair trial (Guantanamo!), or where we aren't assured the suspect won't face the death penalty (normally not a problem when we deal with the USA, even for murderers, yet interestingly, the State Dept haven't given us that assurance in this case.)
Basically, this is more about the US having dubious fair-trial practices, dodgy military trials, the possiblility of a media show-trial for a foreign 'terrorist' and all that sorta thing than it is about a sad loner in a London bedsit wanking off to the idea of finding "alien" shit inside a US defence network. Maybe he did. I'd assume it was filed in the same archive as other 'secret' hidden or forgotten data, like the US Constitution and the right to a fair trial......
No, they couldn't. I am a trombone player. A fairly good one. I can't play bugle, and if I wanted to, I would have to give up playing trombone for a year or so to learn, because the mouthpiece on a bugle is vastly smaller than on a trombone or most other brass instruments, the only exceptions being the trumpet, cornet, and flugel horn. Not only that, but even for players of those three instruments, the bugle doesn't have any valves, meaning you only have a set limit of notes that can be played. That said, most trumpet, flugel horn and cornet players should have little difficulty playing the bugle for a funeral. But then, as other people have mentioned, there just aren't many trumpet, cornet and flugel horn players in the military. You can't just get any 16-year old hippy with long hair that reeks of pot to do this; it has to be a member of the service of the deceased. Having being to and participated in military funerals (needless to say Rememberance Day parades as well) here in the UK, I can tell you that if an air force member is buried, and the bugler is army or navy, relatives get pissed, and rightfully so. How pissed would they be if some ganja smoking rasta-man comes waltzin along, plays the last post (or taps in the USA) -probably badly, then goes off to take a joint. It just ain't that simple.
I have a patch that gets rid of virtually every single problem in Windows. It goes like this:
First, boot your pc from a linux live cd. I recommend Ubuntu. Next, make sure your windows hard drive is mounted properly (at, say/mnt/windows). Now, open up a terminal window (logged in as root, natch) and type: "rs -rf/mnt/windows" After this, all your windows woes are at an end......
As I posted above, the christian part of easter is christian. But Easter is a pagan festival. Easter, from Eostre, a saxon Goddess of spring and fertility. Also ties in well to Beltane, the celtic festival that's pretty similar in purpose. The church nicked it because it was handy, at about the right time of year, and since the Saxon's didn't keep a very good calendar, could be made to fit the ressurection festival. Same deal with Yuletide and Xmas, since Saturnalia, Yule, Homanay and a fair few other winter festivals all occurred around the same time, and Christmas could be made to fit it. The easter bunny, again, pagan, since Eostre came to earth in the form of a hare. The eggs, a sign of renewed life, clearly a fertility symbol, ditto wheat dollies (which most americans haven't even heard of). Wrapping eggs in coloured cloth and leaving as libations, again a very saxon pagan thing to do. Pretty much the entirety of the festival is pagan. The christian bits are plainly added on at a later time, about the same time Rome was wanting to convert the 'heathens'. They're as recognisable as the Abba bits in Madonna's 'HungUp' or the Queen riff in VanillaIce's "Ice Ice Baby". It's not the only thing the church did it to either. If you've read any of the mabinogi from the Mabinogion (or even heard of it), you'll see songs and passages of text that break off from what they're talking about, suddenly shifting to a badly written poem about the virgin mary, or some stuff about the wonder of the church's work. Painfully obvious to anyone who can look objectively, yet most 'believers' are totally nieve about it all.
Oh, and all them easter eggies too. Please? I think that between us, the half million odd pagans in the UK could probably snarfle the lot. Although methinks I may not have room for the sacrificial goat afterwards......
Please read above comments with SenseOfHumour.plugin loaded....
Well. Much as I hate to burst yer wee bubble, there was that time we were holding an open ritual in a nature-reserve/park (permission applied for and duly granted) and we got a load of "christian" protestors show up, demanding we take our satanic(!!) and ungodly ways away to whatever heathenistic place we came from (Boy, weren't they shocked when we said "we're from here. It's the native religion of Scotland" and then invited them to take their uno-godly and monotheistic ways back to Nazareth). Then there was the time I was accosted in the street by one of the christian clergy for wearing a pentacle and shouted at for being "evil and satanistic" (for the record, as a pagan, I acknowledge a number of deities, but Satan and Jehovah aren't among them). Then there's the numerous official slurs against us (we're all either tree-hugging pothead hippes, or evil sex-offenders that lure in young women for naked orgies in the woods. Naked indeed. Have these people never been to a Scots moor in October? Mmmpphh!!!) and the attention of the mass-media every time a sheep dies and gets eaten by a fox.
But all that aside, it's more the tone of the parent to my little comment above that gets my goat. They can believe in whatever they want for all I care; vampire-cultism, talking incendiary shrubary, and virgin-birthing. I don't mind. As you said, freedom of religion. But when they come along and steal our festivals, even down to the name, and we;re mostly ok with that, then try to harass the secularites about stealing 'their' festival, because, you know, Easter is all about the "empty tomb of Jesus", it kinda takes the biscuit, no? Freedom of Religion would be lovely. Truly. Alas, since the english hold sway in Scotland, we don't have that. Defender of the Faith and all that....
Happy Eostre anyways, whichever Gods you hail, and try not to eat too much chocolate.
Hey hey hey.
Religion is one thing, and I've had a fair few arguments with regards the rights of religious tolerance versus certain faiths that think it's ok for us to be tolerant of them, but them to burn us. That's one thing.
But, I will NOT just stand by and watch you say KDE is the same as Gnome. I mean, come on. KDE is so obviously superior in every way to that pos Gnome. Hell, the thing was only brought into existence to support GIMP. KDE Rocks....please read the above comment (and the parent I wrote above that) with the command-line argument SenseOfHumour.plugin=1 engaged.
Actually, nothing quite symbolises Easter than the acknowledgement of Eostre, the welcoming of spring, and the fertility rites therein contained that nourish the hope of a forthcoming warm summer and good harvest. Hence the bunnies/lambs/eggs/wheat dollies symbology; after all, what could possibly symbolise fertility more than bunnies (as in "at it like bunny rabbits") or a good harvest like wheat dollies from the last harvest. And of course, since sheep give birth in spring (or 'lambing season') all of these references are absolutely spot-on. In fact, I can't see anything about Easter, symbolically, that's representative of Christianity. Wonder why that is? Oh, yeah, that's why. It's NOT CHRISTIAN!!!
Just because the Church of Rome, 'back in the day' needed to convert the masses, and thought that they'd do it by slowly nicking all the pagans' festivals, and putting a thin veneer of christianity on them, doesn't make it so.
Just once, I would like to revere my Gods, in my people's time honoured fashion without a bunch of dead-jew-worshipping nut-jobs coming in and spoiling it by claiming it as theirs. At least Christmas-nee-Yule has become so crass and commercialised that religion has very little to do with it all now, so we can hold our own, private religious rituals on Dec 21st then get down to the serious nature of Christmas/Hogmany; heavy drinking.
The views expressed in the article are part of the reason why the rest of the world regards the average American as at best ignorant and naive, and at worst simply lame. I sincerely hope the writer was below the legal age to vote.
Don't worry. As far as I understand your constitution, your President isn't eligible to vote whilst he's in office.
Dude, relax, there's no point. As the para-phrase goes, "You're preaching to the satanists". These cattle aren't going to change their mind. Their (really suspiciously elected) president said it was an Act of War, and that it's time for America to fight back against these Terrorists(tm). They've had constant propaganda thrown at them for nigh on five years now. What makes you think a little thing like the truth stands a dog in hells chance now? Most americans (I'm saying most, since not all are swallowing it) don't know, and probably don't care about their 'liberties'. As long as they can get that feel-good factor when they hear on Fox-Propaganda that the mighty US Govt has arrested another one of those godless-terrorists that's trying to kill every american on earth because of what they stand for, they don't give a shit. I bet if you asked most average americans, they don't even know why Al-Q-Ada performed (if they did, that is) the 11/9/2001 bombings. They don't know nor care how it's all an inter-tribal squabble between two of the Arabian tribes in Saudi (House of Saud and the House of Laden, IIRC).
I don't know how this thing has been played out over in the US, but most people here in the UK, as well as a lot of my buddies in Australia and NZ think that "Department of Homeland Security" is at best an incompetent knee-jerk reaction, and at worst represents the same sort of agency as "Ministry for Information" represents in middle-eastern nations, and the Gestapo* did in Germany 1934-45. Surely the defence of the Homeland should reside with the Department of Defence? Or am I confusing real-speak with good-speak again. Of course, these terrorists are just that; people who wish to break the laws of a country and instil terror in the hearts of it's citizenry in order to further a political or criminal aim. In this case, get US troops and involvement out of Saudi Arabia and stop the international support for the House of Saud so they can have themselves a little civil war. Their actions are criminal. The US Govt saying it is an act of war is semantics pure and simple. The only driving motivation for that one was the ability to stand up in the UN with at least some credibility and invade Afghanistan. I know for fact that a lot of that huge multi-national force that helped the US invade Afghanistan was not there because it believed that the taliban where part and parcel of Al-Q-Ada, merely that the taliban were a ruthless evil dictatorship that could do with being taken out of action, and here's as good a time as any. All the US has succeeded at doing in the last five years is pissing off a lot of otherwise friendly nations by kidnapping their citizens, stamping down on freedom-of-speech and civil liberties in he Fatherland, breaking a few international agreements (like the Law of Armed Conflict, the Geneva Convention), and destroying any credibility the UN had in claiming that all nations are equal and have equal rights. That war in Iraq was illegal. No doubt about it. As illegal as Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990. Even the (very) shaky argument that the US was doing it out of some preposterous defence in case Saddam used his NBC capability against the US is totally gone, since Saddam had no NBC capability. Even if he had of, he had no way of getting it to the US, in less he'd started putting it on passenger jets. Now the US Govt itself has admitted there were no "wmd's, nor was there any connection or involvement between Iraq and Al-Q-Ada. There is now, of course, since insurgency is rife in Iraq. Now they're going after Iran. Syria after that if I had to guess. Anyone who swallows the party line back in the USA deserves neither argument nor discussion. They're obviously too easily lead and stupid to understand the truth.
*Not trying to invoke Godwin's Law here, since the comparison is fair.
You know, I think it's a strangely USA-ian thing of throwing papers at people's doors. Here in the UK, we actually have paper-boys(or girls) that go up to the door and put it through the letterbox. But then again, we're really uncivilised as we have letterboxes, as opposed to the USA, where you can't put post through someone's door, you have to put it in a post-box thing on the very edge of their property, in case some redneck psycho (so, Texas pretty much) starts shooting paper-boys and postmen with his M60 machine-gun*. Aren't we odd.
*Which he absolutely must possess and have the right to carry around with him as part of his constitutional rights, you know, for err....hunting. Yeah, hunting...really big ducks in Texas, I gather....
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Yeah. A minute is pretty pathetic. OT I know, but on my Macbook, with a puny 512MB of RAM, OS X loads in 22 seconds (average), yet windowsxp takes on average 1 minute 32 seconds. That's sodding ridiculous. And OS X shuts down, on average in around 12 seconds from the confirm dialog to the hardware off. Windows takes over a minute, varying wildly. Maybe this MRAM will be the magic bullet that makes windows look usable, like the pentium 2 was, then the pentium 3 & 4 were supposed to be, making windows 'faster than ever'. Strangely, just seems as slow as ever. Veering for a moment back on-topic, this MRAM thing does look real cool though, however I'd guess due to fabrication costs and the chip's size vs. capacity, that MRAM will be mostly used in places that flash is today, mp3 players, flash-drives etc. I doubt it'll ever really be used as a hard drive, just as flash chips aren't used as hard drives. Cool if it were though.
But wait, you mean you're a GIRL??? Sorry, you must be new here. Perhaps you joined on April 1st and saw a OMG Ponies thing?? :)
Just kidding.
Okay, so you ay Windows has 90% marketshare (I'd dispute that; marketshare isn't where that figure comes from, usually from sales shares, and it's a well known fact that Mac users keep their machines for longer but hey). Settling on that for arguments sake, and say linux has 4%, so Mac OS X has 5% and the rest 1%. So there are 150,000 computer viruses known about, (depending on who you ask, some say as many as half a million, some as little as 10,000, but the average is around 150,000). Of these, roughly 149,000 are for MS Windows/DOS. There are around a hundred for Amiga, another 100 or so for the Acorn, a few dozen for linux and about 50 for Mac OS 1 through 9. As of yet there are 0 for Mac OS X. Zero. Nil. A few (5 I can find) proof-of-concept trojan have been reported, but these cannot truly be considered viruses, as to be infected one must input your administrator password at least once. Now, I'm not much of a mathematician, but if your marketshare thing were true, then surely windows viruses would make up 90% of all the known virii, and Mac OS X would have 4%. Last time I looked (and I'll even count them 5 pseudo-trojans), 5 or 6 is not 4% of 145,000. Windows is more insecure than Mac OS X, by whole sodding leagues. Anyone trying to deny this or FUD it is living in a bill-gates'-acid-trip fueled loud cuckoo land.
Whoops, my bad. My standing as a slashdot grammar Nazi may suffer due to this, but I do avow that the misspelling in question is because my Apple iMac tangerine keyboard is a fair few years old, and whist I have a spiffy new MacBook, with a spiffy new keyboard on it, when at my desk, the old tangerine gets a hammering. Probably due for a replacement. Some of the hammers don't always connect, even if my fingers hit the key. You're right to a degree on the minimal standards. But the EU's bureaucracy is well known. A lot of their regulations exist solely because certain failed politicians who get sent to the EC as an easy-life 'reward', wish to have a legacy, and see easily voted-in pointless legislation as their ticket into the history books. See Neil "Babies? Love 'em. Vote for Me! Terrorists? Lovely, Vote for Me!" Kinnock and his wife, Ugly as an example of the EU gravy train and it's embarrassing catalogue of legislative mistakes.
The truly sad thing is, it takes one a minute or so to digest the above comment and realise it is in fact a joke and not actually true. That's how bad the EU can be. We're talking about the drones that actually put down on the books a statue on how bendy a banana has to be before it's eligible to be sold.
It was wrong; there is. IANAN (I am not a neuroscientist) but I recall reading an article a while back about a man who after a minor head accident, would have a severe reaction to any form of mild electrical stimuli; He would immediately become sexually aroused upon a small static shock, and anything more than a few volts of a zap would get him to spontaneously ejaculate. They believed that a 'short-circuit' was occurring in his brain making a wrong connection every time some electrical input was felt in his body. There is a pleasure centre in the brain, but from what I recall, it's not in any one place, but spread out in little areas all over the shop. And for what it's worth, I'd assume although IANAMLE (I'm not a military lawyer either), addicting PoW's to this treatment then threatening to remove it would indeed constitute torture, and as such be forbidden by the Laws of Armed Conflict, and the Geneva Convention. Not that the USA would care, given recent history, but hey.
As someone else has mentioned, whilst americans don't like the fact, the EU is the worlds largest economic unit. It's just counted as separate nations (because it is...at the moment) usually. Not sure if Microsoft is bigger here than in the US. I'd say it is, but the Germans really really like linux.
As absurd (and humorous) as your idea is, there is a grain of possibility in what you propose:
Instead of mice and cheese, how about you engineer a bacterium that particularly loves the material the platters are made of, then surround the platters with little vials of the bacteria. As soon as you hit the 'magic-smoke' button, the bacteria are released and wham, no more platters. If you make them impervious to water, they can't even be washed off, and whilst it won't be instant (say, maybe half an hour) once it starts you can't use the hard drive and they can't be stopped.
After all, there are bacteria that like iron and petroleum. Why not the cobalt-based alloy the media layer is made of?
It won't. Haven't tested this (mine is getting ordered on Monday, but my pal in the Apple Store borrowed one for the day to come show me! Sweeeet), but I can tell you now it won't, by default. The reason? The trcakpad special features, unlike the sudden-motion-sensor, are not hardware based, they're software. There's a HID.kext in /System/Library somewhere that handles the trackpad and it's abilities. Hence why you can already do this on the older iBooks. I already do on my one. It's not new hardware at play here, merely new drivers.
So unless you know someone who can write you a Windows trackpad driver, it won't have two-fingered scrolling, nor two-fingered tapping. Shame. What the review doesn't mention is that the right-click action actually works by just tapping he pad itself with two fingers. You don't need to click the button as well. Which is mighty sweet, I can tell you.
Overall, I be impressed. Impressed enough to run out and buy one before the sale of my iBook is complete....
p.s. Wanna buy a 1.2GHz G4 12" iBook? £500. One careful owner....
Sigh. This is clearly not trolling. Someone please meta-moderate the above post up. Over zealous moderators are becoming a real problem around here....
aye, but the display is the same res, you don't need more than 2 Gig of ram (although I agree it is nice..) a tuner, yeah, fair enough if you want one. Bigger hard drive, yeah. But it's not a mac. It's like saying you could have a car with a much bigger engine instead of a Lotus. It's not a Lotus. Besides (I haven't _read_ the link, no time, but I am assuming), the toshiba will not be the same standard of apple engineering. This isn't just fan-boying. Apple stuff really is superb engineering. Great Design. Like the optical in/out being in the same physical ports as the analogue in/out to save space. Most pc laptops have 30 odd ports and look clunky and heavy to boot. The MacBookpro is like one inch thin! You can pay less for similar tech specs, but not similar quality. I suppose you pay for what you get. If you want a cheap mac, get the MacBook (replacing the iBook soon) or a Mac Mini. Besides, the toshiba can't legally run Mac OS X. For a Mac-only shop, this is essential.
I call bullshit. My pal has a MacBookPro. It's damned cool. If I had £1500 I would have one too. It runs every game you can think of for Windows very well. Doom 3 plays flawlessly at native res, with all the options. So does HL2, GTA3, Tomb Rider Legend, and a whole shitload of older games. I don't think it can currently play older DOS-based games, but that's more that XP can't do them old games, and the MacBookPro won't run anything older than Win2k. No matter whether you love or hate Mac's, or your opinion of the switch to Intel, there is no excuse for the FUD you spouted. Now, the old PowerPC macs, yeah, due to the limitations of virtualisation couldn't do 3D, but that wasn't Apple's fault. They didn't write VirtualPC. Microsoft and before them Connectix did. But the new Macs run games exceptionally well. So much so that when the MacBookPro was launched, it was (famously) the fastest windows laptop you could buy! Please get it right in future!
Well, you see there would be the problem. The reason why I wrote to my MP, MSP and MEP's, demanding all of them to have this man denied extradition was very simple. He's a moron, probably slightly deranged, and uses 'hacking tools' that even 12 year-old script kiddies would reject. But here's the point:
We have an extradite treaty with the United States of America. We've signed it, ratified, enshrined it in law and everything.
You didn't.
Tomorrow morning, a hacker in Florida, or New York or anywhere in the US could hack into the MoD's system, launch some nukes maybe, or send some troops to invade China or something (well, the hacker couldn't really, since our SysAdmins have a deep and arcane knowledge of something called a "password"), or maybe bomb London, and legally speaking, there ain't a damn thing we could do to have him extradited, cause you didn't sign the treaty, Why should we honour a treaty you can't even be bothered to sign? Then of course there's the issue that we have a law that says we're not supposed to extradite people to countries where you aren't guaranteed a fair trial (Guantanamo!), or where we aren't assured the suspect won't face the death penalty (normally not a problem when we deal with the USA, even for murderers, yet interestingly, the State Dept haven't given us that assurance in this case.)
Basically, this is more about the US having dubious fair-trial practices, dodgy military trials, the possiblility of a media show-trial for a foreign 'terrorist' and all that sorta thing than it is about a sad loner in a London bedsit wanking off to the idea of finding "alien" shit inside a US defence network. Maybe he did. I'd assume it was filed in the same archive as other 'secret' hidden or forgotten data, like the US Constitution and the right to a fair trial......
They'll both be beaten to the punch by: The Year that Duke Nukem Forever Shipped!!!
No, they couldn't.
I am a trombone player. A fairly good one.
I can't play bugle, and if I wanted to, I would have to give up playing trombone for a year or so to learn, because the mouthpiece on a bugle is vastly smaller than on a trombone or most other brass instruments, the only exceptions being the trumpet, cornet, and flugel horn. Not only that, but even for players of those three instruments, the bugle doesn't have any valves, meaning you only have a set limit of notes that can be played. That said, most trumpet, flugel horn and cornet players should have little difficulty playing the bugle for a funeral. But then, as other people have mentioned, there just aren't many trumpet, cornet and flugel horn players in the military. You can't just get any 16-year old hippy with long hair that reeks of pot to do this; it has to be a member of the service of the deceased. Having being to and participated in military funerals (needless to say Rememberance Day parades as well) here in the UK, I can tell you that if an air force member is buried, and the bugler is army or navy, relatives get pissed, and rightfully so. How pissed would they be if some ganja smoking rasta-man comes waltzin along, plays the last post (or taps in the USA) -probably badly, then goes off to take a joint. It just ain't that simple.
I have a patch that gets rid of virtually every single problem in Windows.
/mnt/windows). /mnt/windows"
It goes like this:
First, boot your pc from a linux live cd. I recommend Ubuntu.
Next, make sure your windows hard drive is mounted properly (at, say
Now, open up a terminal window (logged in as root, natch) and type:
"rs -rf
After this, all your windows woes are at an end......
As I posted above, the christian part of easter is christian. But Easter is a pagan festival. Easter, from Eostre, a saxon Goddess of spring and fertility. Also ties in well to Beltane, the celtic festival that's pretty similar in purpose. The church nicked it because it was handy, at about the right time of year, and since the Saxon's didn't keep a very good calendar, could be made to fit the ressurection festival. Same deal with Yuletide and Xmas, since Saturnalia, Yule, Homanay and a fair few other winter festivals all occurred around the same time, and Christmas could be made to fit it. The easter bunny, again, pagan, since Eostre came to earth in the form of a hare. The eggs, a sign of renewed life, clearly a fertility symbol, ditto wheat dollies (which most americans haven't even heard of). Wrapping eggs in coloured cloth and leaving as libations, again a very saxon pagan thing to do. Pretty much the entirety of the festival is pagan. The christian bits are plainly added on at a later time, about the same time Rome was wanting to convert the 'heathens'. They're as recognisable as the Abba bits in Madonna's 'HungUp' or the Queen riff in VanillaIce's "Ice Ice Baby". It's not the only thing the church did it to either. If you've read any of the mabinogi from the Mabinogion (or even heard of it), you'll see songs and passages of text that break off from what they're talking about, suddenly shifting to a badly written poem about the virgin mary, or some stuff about the wonder of the church's work. Painfully obvious to anyone who can look objectively, yet most 'believers' are totally nieve about it all.
Can we have the name back then?
Oh, and all them easter eggies too. Please? I think that between us, the half million odd pagans in the UK could probably snarfle the lot. Although methinks I may not have room for the sacrificial goat afterwards......
Please read above comments with SenseOfHumour.plugin loaded....
Well. Much as I hate to burst yer wee bubble, there was that time we were holding an open ritual in a nature-reserve/park (permission applied for and duly granted) and we got a load of "christian" protestors show up, demanding we take our satanic(!!) and ungodly ways away to whatever heathenistic place we came from (Boy, weren't they shocked when we said "we're from here. It's the native religion of Scotland" and then invited them to take their uno-godly and monotheistic ways back to Nazareth). Then there was the time I was accosted in the street by one of the christian clergy for wearing a pentacle and shouted at for being "evil and satanistic" (for the record, as a pagan, I acknowledge a number of deities, but Satan and Jehovah aren't among them). Then there's the numerous official slurs against us (we're all either tree-hugging pothead hippes, or evil sex-offenders that lure in young women for naked orgies in the woods. Naked indeed. Have these people never been to a Scots moor in October? Mmmpphh!!!) and the attention of the mass-media every time a sheep dies and gets eaten by a fox. But all that aside, it's more the tone of the parent to my little comment above that gets my goat. They can believe in whatever they want for all I care; vampire-cultism, talking incendiary shrubary, and virgin-birthing. I don't mind. As you said, freedom of religion. But when they come along and steal our festivals, even down to the name, and we;re mostly ok with that, then try to harass the secularites about stealing 'their' festival, because, you know, Easter is all about the "empty tomb of Jesus", it kinda takes the biscuit, no? Freedom of Religion would be lovely. Truly. Alas, since the english hold sway in Scotland, we don't have that. Defender of the Faith and all that.... Happy Eostre anyways, whichever Gods you hail, and try not to eat too much chocolate.
Hey hey hey. Religion is one thing, and I've had a fair few arguments with regards the rights of religious tolerance versus certain faiths that think it's ok for us to be tolerant of them, but them to burn us. That's one thing. But, I will NOT just stand by and watch you say KDE is the same as Gnome. I mean, come on. KDE is so obviously superior in every way to that pos Gnome. Hell, the thing was only brought into existence to support GIMP. KDE Rocks. ...please read the above comment (and the parent I wrote above that) with the command-line argument SenseOfHumour.plugin=1 engaged.
Actually, nothing quite symbolises Easter than the acknowledgement of Eostre, the welcoming of spring, and the fertility rites therein contained that nourish the hope of a forthcoming warm summer and good harvest. Hence the bunnies/lambs/eggs/wheat dollies symbology; after all, what could possibly symbolise fertility more than bunnies (as in "at it like bunny rabbits") or a good harvest like wheat dollies from the last harvest. And of course, since sheep give birth in spring (or 'lambing season') all of these references are absolutely spot-on. In fact, I can't see anything about Easter, symbolically, that's representative of Christianity. Wonder why that is? Oh, yeah, that's why. It's NOT CHRISTIAN!!!
Just because the Church of Rome, 'back in the day' needed to convert the masses, and thought that they'd do it by slowly nicking all the pagans' festivals, and putting a thin veneer of christianity on them, doesn't make it so.
Just once, I would like to revere my Gods, in my people's time honoured fashion without a bunch of dead-jew-worshipping nut-jobs coming in and spoiling it by claiming it as theirs. At least Christmas-nee-Yule has become so crass and commercialised that religion has very little to do with it all now, so we can hold our own, private religious rituals on Dec 21st then get down to the serious nature of Christmas/Hogmany; heavy drinking.
The views expressed in the article are part of the reason why the rest of the world regards the average American as at best ignorant and naive, and at worst simply lame. I sincerely hope the writer was below the legal age to vote.
Don't worry. As far as I understand your constitution, your President isn't eligible to vote whilst he's in office.
Dude, relax, there's no point. As the para-phrase goes, "You're preaching to the satanists". These cattle aren't going to change their mind. Their (really suspiciously elected) president said it was an Act of War, and that it's time for America to fight back against these Terrorists(tm). They've had constant propaganda thrown at them for nigh on five years now. What makes you think a little thing like the truth stands a dog in hells chance now? Most americans (I'm saying most, since not all are swallowing it) don't know, and probably don't care about their 'liberties'. As long as they can get that feel-good factor when they hear on Fox-Propaganda that the mighty US Govt has arrested another one of those godless-terrorists that's trying to kill every american on earth because of what they stand for, they don't give a shit. I bet if you asked most average americans, they don't even know why Al-Q-Ada performed (if they did, that is) the 11/9/2001 bombings. They don't know nor care how it's all an inter-tribal squabble between two of the Arabian tribes in Saudi (House of Saud and the House of Laden, IIRC).
I don't know how this thing has been played out over in the US, but most people here in the UK, as well as a lot of my buddies in Australia and NZ think that "Department of Homeland Security" is at best an incompetent knee-jerk reaction, and at worst represents the same sort of agency as "Ministry for Information" represents in middle-eastern nations, and the Gestapo* did in Germany 1934-45. Surely the defence of the Homeland should reside with the Department of Defence? Or am I confusing real-speak with good-speak again. Of course, these terrorists are just that; people who wish to break the laws of a country and instil terror in the hearts of it's citizenry in order to further a political or criminal aim. In this case, get US troops and involvement out of Saudi Arabia and stop the international support for the House of Saud so they can have themselves a little civil war. Their actions are criminal. The US Govt saying it is an act of war is semantics pure and simple. The only driving motivation for that one was the ability to stand up in the UN with at least some credibility and invade Afghanistan. I know for fact that a lot of that huge multi-national force that helped the US invade Afghanistan was not there because it believed that the taliban where part and parcel of Al-Q-Ada, merely that the taliban were a ruthless evil dictatorship that could do with being taken out of action, and here's as good a time as any. All the US has succeeded at doing in the last five years is pissing off a lot of otherwise friendly nations by kidnapping their citizens, stamping down on freedom-of-speech and civil liberties in he Fatherland, breaking a few international agreements (like the Law of Armed Conflict, the Geneva Convention), and destroying any credibility the UN had in claiming that all nations are equal and have equal rights. That war in Iraq was illegal. No doubt about it. As illegal as Iraq invading Kuwait in 1990. Even the (very) shaky argument that the US was doing it out of some preposterous defence in case Saddam used his NBC capability against the US is totally gone, since Saddam had no NBC capability. Even if he had of, he had no way of getting it to the US, in less he'd started putting it on passenger jets. Now the US Govt itself has admitted there were no "wmd's, nor was there any connection or involvement between Iraq and Al-Q-Ada. There is now, of course, since insurgency is rife in Iraq. Now they're going after Iran. Syria after that if I had to guess. Anyone who swallows the party line back in the USA deserves neither argument nor discussion. They're obviously too easily lead and stupid to understand the truth.
*Not trying to invoke Godwin's Law here, since the comparison is fair.
You know, I think it's a strangely USA-ian thing of throwing papers at people's doors. Here in the UK, we actually have paper-boys(or girls) that go up to the door and put it through the letterbox. But then again, we're really uncivilised as we have letterboxes, as opposed to the USA, where you can't put post through someone's door, you have to put it in a post-box thing on the very edge of their property, in case some redneck psycho (so, Texas pretty much) starts shooting paper-boys and postmen with his M60 machine-gun*. Aren't we odd.
*Which he absolutely must possess and have the right to carry around with him as part of his constitutional rights, you know, for err....hunting. Yeah, hunting...really big ducks in Texas, I gather....
You're asking americans to think, in the hopes that they might "get" something that is blatently obvious and simple to grasp.
Oh the irony....