What country allows you to be tried again after you win an appeal? That seems rather odd to me. IANAL but it depends on the grounds. If you win the appeal on grounds like the conviction being fundamentally wrong for reasons external to the trial process -evidence fabricated, police failed to disclose pre-trial that they had a witness supporting your albi etc. then that's probably it. If the appeal suceeds on grounds relating specifically to the trial process (judge's remarks biased etc.) then you've not really been cleared, it's just that that particular trial was flawed and needs to be redone with a new judge and jury.
Well - I currently have 80Gb+20Gb hard drives. I like to do a full backup of all the 'useful' data every 2 months - about 40Gb say. This would take about 10 single layer DVDs, i.e. about 100 minutes at 8x, so cutting this to 50 minutes or 25 minutes would be useful. It wouldn't matter if I could do it unattended overnight, but obviously I have to swap the discs... Or - is it possible to get reasonably priced CD/DVD 'loaders' capable of holding at least 10-20 blanks?
This is why no one in the UK trusts labour anymore. The sooner GW's lap dog is kicked out of office the better.
And the alternative is what? Michael Howard's Tories? Don't make me laugh. Judging by their record they'd be at least as bad as Labour on civil liberties *and* completely stuff the economy as well. I remember 14% mortgage interest rates when I had my first mortgage under the Tories (oh, and 3-4 million unemployed, and the recessions) even if you've forgotten.
BTW this is not a pro-Labour rant - I'm probably going to vote Lib Dem and hope they can replace the Tories and eventually challenge Labour in 2-3 elections time.
I already have an ID that I carry everywhere. It is called a driver's license.
Well I don't. I don't drive and don't want to drive. Currently it is perfectly legal for me to leave my house and walk, get a bus or get a train and go anywhere in the country with no documents whatsover. I think if this changes, there will be thousands of people delibrately breaking the law by not carrying their id card.
However, at present the id card proposals don't go beyond possibly having to *own* an id card - there is no proposal to have to carry it at all times. I'm not saying this won't change, but I think it would encounter massive resistance.
Huh? Strong encrpytion has never been illegal in the UK. In France (until relatively recently) it was illegal for example to have >40 bit SSL encrpytion without a govt. license. I know this for a fact since I read the IBM documentation relating to this when setting up SSL on an IBM mainframe for webserving a few years ago (I've also just rechecked the documentation). There is a parameter to indicate the SSL encrption strength with three values - WEAK, NORMAL and STRONG corresponding to 40,56 and 128 bit. In 1999, WEAK was the only one supported in the French version. Initially STRONG was not supported in the UK but that was due to US export restrictions, not UK law. All these restrictions are gone in current versions.
Question: Is it true or is it now discredited that there is some sort of correlation between near-sightedness and some measures of intelligence, which is believe to be due to the relevant genes being related or something?
If you're bothered about such things (which I assume you may be since your spelling and grammar otherwise seem to be excellent), it's spelt 'traits', not 'traights'.
The double entendre has been used for over a hundred years by performers, including the late 19th-century vaudeville act, the Barrison Sisters, who performed the notorious routine "Do You Want To See My Pussy?" (see entry for more), the Funkadelic song "Pussy", as well as a character (Pussy Galore) and a title (Octopussy) in the James Bond series.
And us oldies in the UK will never forget the interminable series of jokes about Mrs. Slocombe's 'pussy' in the crap British sitcom 'Are you being served'...
E.g. "Oh no, I can't come out tonight, I'm washing my pussy."
Having had real experience, no you cannot tell a cat what to scratch on. The cat would rather shred your furniture and drapes than scratch the three, expensive, super-fuzzy scratching posts laced with catnip distributed around the house.
We have a really simple solution. Buy used furniture etc. E.g. our last sofa/couch cost the equivalent of about $60 including delivery and is incredibly comfy and virtually mint condition. The cats can happily scratch it to pieces for the next few years, then we'll just get another one. Saves us loads of money and keeps the cats happy.
Sticking my head in the microwave won't work as you've got to close the door before the magnetron can power up...
If you're that keen to try the experiment, I'm sure a screwdriver in the lock mechanism will allow you to microwave your head with the door open. Please set up a webcam first though so we can all watch (purely in the interests of science of course).
For my final CS project in high school, we had to basically write an interpreter for a small set of assembly instructions.
For my Numerical Analysis module project at Uni, I was allowed to write any code I liked to do anything, as long as the code was in Fortran. I guess they assumed people would write Numerical Analysis related programs, but they didn't state this so I wrote an 8088 processor emulator. The professor who graded it said it was 'outside his area of understanding' and gave me about a 90% mark! I did cheat slightly. The emulator basically worked, and ran real 8088 assembler programs in fortran on a Multics system. It ran slowly, but faster than a 'real' 8088. However, there was a hard to trace bug causing stack corruption in certain cases, and I just didn't have time to track it down before I had to hand in my assignment - so I just edited the output script to remove those pesky rogue values...
That leaves him with at most 70% righteousness - which is shit;-)
This is based on the unlikely assumption of an equal 10% 'righteousness weighting' for each commandment. I'll bet God intended (for example) murder to have a weighting of at least 20% and Ox-coveting less than 5%...
Firstly I assume you're ignoring the ads for other books etc. at the end of many books (not exactly intrusive).
But actually, I remember there was a fairly sucessful 'shopping and fucking' novel a few years ago, which was sponsored and full of product placement (can't remember the title/author - the brands were things like Armani, Chanel, BMW etc.).
But thankfully the idea doesn't seen to have caught on.
The UK is a European country. It has a (slightly) 'socialist' government. Before this it had a quite right wing government for 18 years which maintained the NHS throughout (not very well admittedly). The UK has a growth rate similar to the US; it also has universal healthcare provision which costs about 2/3-3/4 of the US system. Waiting times for non-urgent operations were very poor a few years ago but are now typically 2-3 months (depending on area etc.). A good indicator of the state of the NHS is that demand for directly paid for private operations has dropped to the extent that some private hospitals have closed and been sold cheap to the NHS due to lack of demand. Others are occupied mostly with cheap bulk buy contracts to do large amounts of specific operations for the NHS.
However, I don't see having good quality universal healthcare as being a socialist/capitalist issue; to me it's a basic service like the police, army etc. and a matter of human decency. The army defends the nation against 'foreign enemies', the police against 'criminal enemies of society' and the NHS against 'threats to the nation's health (and thus its economic efficiency)'. Or do you consider all taxation to be stealing, including provision for army/police etc.? After all, why should I pay for the police out of taxation when I have all the weapons/alarms etc. I need to defend myself? If you believe in taxation for any reason at all then surely that's a form of 'socialism' by your arguements. The NHS is sufficiently popular in the UK that no party of left, right or centre dares to interfere with its basic principles (universal, generally free at point of use and paid for from general taxation). All the arguements centre around how to get best value for money out of it.
Perhaps we just need to agree that in the US, ensuring universal healthcare is socialism; in Europe it's a basic government function for left and right wing parties. Neither definition is 'correct' - it's a cultural difference.
Fine. Europe gets all non-MS software, USA gets *only* MS software. We'll see who's living in the stone age after 20 years of MS monopoly and lock-in.
Honestly, are you serious? MS's duty is to make money for its shareholders. It does this by trading profitably in as many countries as possible. In order to do this it must obey the relevant *local* laws in each and every country it trades. The position that MS would be made completely unprofitable in the EU by complying with the law is ridiculous (even MS haven't advanced this arguement). Therefore MS ceasing trading in the EU would be the equivalent of it just having a corporate hissy fit. The shareholders would have an extremely strong legal case that the company was acting directly in opposition to their financial interests. Therefore MS has one option if all appeals fail. Obey the law of the countries it is trading in. And get over it.
I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends.
I believe I've seen references to MS extenting 'activation' to Office. In time this will at least stop people just passing round the install discs (I guess they can do this at present? I've never installed MS Office myself...)
I don't agree that XP is always 'better' than 98. XP has activation - a definite minus. I know a lot of people say that it's not really a problem in practice, but the idea of having to 'check in' with MS when I change certain bits of hardware, and rely on their activation system always working correctly really sticks in my throat.
XP is (supposedly) more stable than 98 but since the only significant crashes I've ever had in 98 were due to a dodgy DRAM that's not an issue for me (I don't run loads of crapware).
XP is usually installed with NTFS and a friend of mine finds that nearly every time he has a power outage his file system is so hosed he can't even get the 'recovery console' CD to attempt to repair it. FAT32 may not be very robust in some ways but I've never had problems like that, and it's now a 'de facto' open standard with full stable read/write support from non-MS platforms.
All the "extra" features in XP that I might want are available for 98 from other sources.
Obviously this is just mine and my friend's personal experience, but if there were no other options in the world and I had to choose between XP and 98 (with XP provided free), I would stick with 98 and only move to XP if (for example) there was some new device I had to have which had no 98 driver.
As it is, luckily there's another choice so I'm half way to Linux (dual booting, about 50/50 win/lin at present).
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What country allows you to be tried again after you win an appeal? That seems rather odd to me.
IANAL but it depends on the grounds. If you win the appeal on grounds like the conviction being fundamentally wrong for reasons external to the trial process -evidence fabricated, police failed to disclose pre-trial that they had a witness supporting your albi etc. then that's probably it.
If the appeal suceeds on grounds relating specifically to the trial process (judge's remarks biased etc.) then you've not really been cleared, it's just that that particular trial was flawed and needs to be redone with a new judge and jury.
Well - I currently have 80Gb+20Gb hard drives. I like to do a full backup of all the 'useful' data every 2 months - about 40Gb say. This would take about 10 single layer DVDs, i.e. about 100 minutes at 8x, so cutting this to 50 minutes or 25 minutes would be useful. It wouldn't matter if I could do it unattended overnight, but obviously I have to swap the discs...
Or - is it possible to get reasonably priced CD/DVD 'loaders' capable of holding at least 10-20 blanks?
So you advertise your *competitor's* products in spam emails. They get arrested, jailed, fined, put out of business, and you...profit!
This is why no one in the UK trusts labour anymore. The sooner GW's lap dog is kicked out of office the better.
And the alternative is what? Michael Howard's Tories? Don't make me laugh. Judging by their record they'd be at least as bad as Labour on civil liberties *and* completely stuff the economy as well. I remember 14% mortgage interest rates when I had my first mortgage under the Tories (oh, and 3-4 million unemployed, and the recessions) even if you've forgotten.
BTW this is not a pro-Labour rant - I'm probably going to vote Lib Dem and hope they can replace the Tories and eventually challenge Labour in 2-3 elections time.
I already have an ID that I carry everywhere. It is called a driver's license.
Well I don't. I don't drive and don't want to drive. Currently it is perfectly legal for me to leave my house and walk, get a bus or get a train and go anywhere in the country with no documents whatsover. I think if this changes, there will be thousands of people delibrately breaking the law by not carrying their id card.
However, at present the id card proposals don't go beyond possibly having to *own* an id card - there is no proposal to have to carry it at all times. I'm not saying this won't change, but I think it would encounter massive resistance.
Huh? Strong encrpytion has never been illegal in the UK. In France (until relatively recently) it was illegal for example to have >40 bit SSL encrpytion without a govt. license.
I know this for a fact since I read the IBM documentation relating to this when setting up SSL on an IBM mainframe for webserving a few years ago (I've also just rechecked the documentation).
There is a parameter to indicate the SSL encrption strength with three values - WEAK, NORMAL and STRONG corresponding to 40,56 and 128 bit. In 1999, WEAK was the only one supported in the French version. Initially STRONG was not supported in the UK but that was due to US export restrictions, not UK law.
All these restrictions are gone in current versions.
The Sony Aibo has been out for several years. And it does require 'feeding' on electricity.
You could get that pet cloning company to clone your GM cat, then breed from the unneutered clone.
(I'm not saying this is a good idea, just that it could be done).
To a cat, a full bladder or stomach is like a comfy water-bed.
Question: Is it true or is it now discredited that there is some sort of correlation between near-sightedness and some measures of intelligence, which is believe to be due to the relevant genes being related or something?
If you're bothered about such things (which I assume you may be since your spelling and grammar otherwise seem to be excellent), it's spelt 'traits', not 'traights'.
The double entendre has been used for over a hundred years by performers, including the late 19th-century vaudeville act, the Barrison Sisters, who performed the notorious routine "Do You Want To See My Pussy?" (see entry for more), the Funkadelic song "Pussy", as well as a character (Pussy Galore) and a title (Octopussy) in the James Bond series.
And us oldies in the UK will never forget the interminable series of jokes about Mrs. Slocombe's 'pussy' in the crap British sitcom 'Are you being served'...
E.g. "Oh no, I can't come out tonight, I'm washing my pussy."
Having had real experience, no you cannot tell a cat what to scratch on. The cat would rather shred your furniture and drapes than scratch the three, expensive, super-fuzzy scratching posts laced with catnip distributed around the house.
We have a really simple solution. Buy used furniture etc. E.g. our last sofa/couch cost the equivalent of about $60 including delivery and is incredibly comfy and virtually mint condition. The cats can happily scratch it to pieces for the next few years, then we'll just get another one. Saves us loads of money and keeps the cats happy.
Sticking my head in the microwave won't work as you've got to close the door before the magnetron can power up...
If you're that keen to try the experiment, I'm sure a screwdriver in the lock mechanism will allow you to microwave your head with the door open. Please set up a webcam first though so we can all watch (purely in the interests of science of course).
For my final CS project in high school, we had to basically write an interpreter for a small set of assembly instructions.
For my Numerical Analysis module project at Uni, I was allowed to write any code I liked to do anything, as long as the code was in Fortran. I guess they assumed people would write Numerical Analysis related programs, but they didn't state this so I wrote an 8088 processor emulator. The professor who graded it said it was 'outside his area of understanding' and gave me about a 90% mark!
I did cheat slightly. The emulator basically worked, and ran real 8088 assembler programs in fortran on a Multics system. It ran slowly, but faster than a 'real' 8088. However, there was a hard to trace bug causing stack corruption in certain cases, and I just didn't have time to track it down before I had to hand in my assignment - so I just edited the output script to remove those pesky rogue values...
British buttocks are growing rapidly and should overtake the size of American buttocks by 2015...
That leaves him with at most 70% righteousness - which is shit ;-)
This is based on the unlikely assumption of an equal 10% 'righteousness weighting' for each commandment. I'll bet God intended (for example) murder to have a weighting of at least 20% and Ox-coveting less than 5%...
Not wishing to be picky, but there *is* an 'Internet2' you may have heard of...
http://www.internet2.org/
So I Guess 'Internets' is accurate (not that I'm suggesting GWB knew this...)
Firstly I assume you're ignoring the ads for other books etc. at the end of many books (not exactly intrusive).
But actually, I remember there was a fairly sucessful 'shopping and fucking' novel a few years ago, which was sponsored and full of product placement (can't remember the title/author - the brands were things like Armani, Chanel, BMW etc.).
But thankfully the idea doesn't seen to have caught on.
to inject their fecal matter into your eyeballs
eww! I was just about to eat my lunch of pickled rats' testicles and cat vomit but you've put me right off...
No European country has a GDP growth rate of more than 1.6%; some have *negative* GDP growth.
Slightly out of date but basically still the case http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3852949.stm
The UK is a European country. It has a (slightly) 'socialist' government. Before this it had a quite right wing government for 18 years which maintained the NHS throughout (not very well admittedly).
The UK has a growth rate similar to the US; it also has universal healthcare provision which costs about 2/3-3/4 of the US system. Waiting times for non-urgent operations were very poor a few years ago but are now typically 2-3 months (depending on area etc.). A good indicator of the state of the NHS is that demand for directly paid for private operations has dropped to the extent that some private hospitals have closed and been sold cheap to the NHS due to lack of demand. Others are occupied mostly with cheap bulk buy contracts to do large amounts of specific operations for the NHS.
However, I don't see having good quality universal healthcare as being a socialist/capitalist issue; to me it's a basic service like the police, army etc. and a matter of human decency. The army defends the nation against 'foreign enemies', the police against 'criminal enemies of society' and the NHS against 'threats to the nation's health (and thus its economic efficiency)'.
Or do you consider all taxation to be stealing, including provision for army/police etc.? After all, why should I pay for the police out of taxation when I have all the weapons/alarms etc. I need to defend myself? If you believe in taxation for any reason at all then surely that's a form of 'socialism' by your arguements.
The NHS is sufficiently popular in the UK that no party of left, right or centre dares to interfere with its basic principles (universal, generally free at point of use and paid for from general taxation). All the arguements centre around how to get best value for money out of it.
Perhaps we just need to agree that in the US, ensuring universal healthcare is socialism; in Europe it's a basic government function for left and right wing parties. Neither definition is 'correct' - it's a cultural difference.
You mean you haven't got an armchair with built-in commode for just such occasions? No interuptions and no nappy rash!
Fine. Europe gets all non-MS software, USA gets *only* MS software. We'll see who's living in the stone age after 20 years of MS monopoly and lock-in.
Honestly, are you serious? MS's duty is to make money for its shareholders. It does this by trading profitably in as many countries as possible. In order to do this it must obey the relevant *local* laws in each and every country it trades. The position that MS would be made completely unprofitable in the EU by complying with the law is ridiculous (even MS haven't advanced this arguement). Therefore MS ceasing trading in the EU would be the equivalent of it just having a corporate hissy fit. The shareholders would have an extremely strong legal case that the company was acting directly in opposition to their financial interests. Therefore MS has one option if all appeals fail.
Obey the law of the countries it is trading in. And get over it.
I advocate OO.org every time I can, but it's harder when people are used to get MS's software for free from their friends.
I believe I've seen references to MS extenting 'activation' to Office. In time this will at least stop people just passing round the install discs (I guess they can do this at present? I've never installed MS Office myself...)
I admit XP was better than 98
I don't agree that XP is always 'better' than 98.
XP has activation - a definite minus. I know a lot of people say that it's not really a problem in practice, but the idea of having to 'check in' with MS when I change certain bits of hardware, and rely on their activation system always working correctly really sticks in my throat.
XP is (supposedly) more stable than 98 but since the only significant crashes I've ever had in 98 were due to a dodgy DRAM that's not an issue for me (I don't run loads of crapware).
XP is usually installed with NTFS and a friend of mine finds that nearly every time he has a power outage his file system is so hosed he can't even get the 'recovery console' CD to attempt to repair it. FAT32 may not be very robust in some ways but I've never had problems like that, and it's now a 'de facto' open standard with full stable read/write support from non-MS platforms.
All the "extra" features in XP that I might want are available for 98 from other sources.
Obviously this is just mine and my friend's personal experience, but if there were no other options in the world and I had to choose between XP and 98 (with XP provided free), I would stick with 98 and only move to XP if (for example) there was some new device I had to have which had no 98 driver.
As it is, luckily there's another choice so I'm half way to Linux (dual booting, about 50/50 win/lin at present).