Maybe it's because I've always driven a manual, but to me it would be instinctive and not something I'd have to be clear headed and think about.
Changing gears isn't something you even think about a while after you start driving, it's just something that comes naturally and you just automatically change to the correct gear.
This is why the parent is correct- not necessarily because people who drive manual understand the gear system better, but simply because they naturally and instinctively will change gear to the situation without a thought.
How can you proven something as arbitrary as common sense is a poor decision making tool?
Do you have any links to these studies?
Common sense is just a term used to describe using the most obvious, sensible solution that may have been overlooked in the face of alternative, more stupid solutions. Quite how you can prove that is a poor decision making tool I'd love to know.
No, if you receive an attachment that really could potentially be a threat then you just scan that file. You don't need a real time scanner for that.
But most of the time you don't need to even do that, very few common file formats have vulnerabilities in every application that can open them and even those that do like Office documents and macro viruses have the option to be run without macros enabled and whilst there are vulnerabilities in some applications that open certain file formats such as buffer overflows that can be exploited, these issues are nearly always found and patched long before there's ever an exploit in the field.
I wont pretend I'm invulnerable, I'm sure if someone knew every precaution I did and what applications I ran then they could possibly target a specific attack directly at me, but the reality is in the grand scheme of things I'm just not that important. Not to mention that someone performing such a targetted attack against an individual will also likely leave clues that'll make them an easy target for law enforcement to pick up anyway. Just as with disease, it's much easier to trace the source of an attack when you have access to the first infected victim.
Of course the question then is so what if I do get infected? My data is backed up, I keep an eye on my router and download speeds so would know if something is going in and out of my system that shouldn't. What's the worst that can happen? I have to reinstall my software from scratch? Big deal.
No, people who run shit they shouldn't are asking for what they get.
I don't run a real-time scanner, it's too much of a resource hog, I do let AV do an overnight scan once a week though. I've done this for years and never had a virus. Why? Because I don't run shit I know may not be safe to run. I do not open attachments I was not expecting to recieve.
It's not as if AV software is even that effective anyway, even when it does detect threats half the time it fails miserably at dealing with it and just gives the option of deleting, and sometimes some AV software doesn't even manage that. The paradigm used for AV software is that which has been used for a couple of decades, and it never even worked particularly effectively back then, let alone now that viruses have evolved whilst AV software really hasn't. Again, the best option is really to cover all the attack vectors - don't run executables you don't trust, don't have Javascript enabled on sites you can't be sure are safe, don't open attachments you weren't expecting and so on.
Yes, the crux of the issue is that for the most part, if politicians were smart people, they wouldn't be politicians, they would be out doing something useful instead.
You become a politician if the only thing you can really offer the world is your own personal point of view, coupled with an insistence that this is the only point of view worth implementing.
Well the deal with Sarkozy and Berlusconi is that they are declining in popularity themselves, they see Obama's great international popularity as a way to increase their popularity by piggy backing off his success.
Blair to be fair, was close to Bush because they shared similar policies and whilst there were jokes about Blair being Bush's lapdog, it was at least based on that shared political view, rather than extremely false looking attempts at showing how they're both "Mr Cool" because they hang around with Obama. Our PM in Britain now, Gordon Brown is just a miserable old sod who doesn't really hang around with anyone if he can help it and Obama seems to have a personal distaste of Britain which sours the relationship also, that's why our PM isn't really hanging around with Obama like other European leaders are and like Blair used to.
Unfortunately though, whilst we have politicians in Europe who want to be celebrities first and politicians second you can expect to continue to see leg humping of US presidents from European leaders I'm afraid. Luckily the EU doesn't depend on this Celebuticians or whatever the fuck they think their actual role is however, because there are 20+ other leaders and 100s of other politicians who are busy actually doing work rather than leg humping.
Long enough that plenty of people kept buying them for years after their initial popularity - again, see the figure sold to date, 110 million. If it was that bad it would never have continued selling.
Similarly though, what does that say about Apple's product with their fixed batteries and hence planned obsolescence? Sure you can replace batteries in them if you risk opening them up and pay a fair bit for the new battery, but then the same could be said for fixing a Motorola RAZR- if you've got to open it up and do surgery to keep it going, it's past it's intended lifespan.
Us Brits were already aware that Obama follows Bush era policies.
One of the Britons detained in Guantanamo bay, Binyamin Mohamed, was finally released to the UK earlier this year. Since then he's been trying to prove that he was tortured by, or at the behest of British agents. The courts recieved documents from US intelligence that would back his claim, however their release was blocked by our foreign secretary.
Now, our foreign secretary is an idiot, and part of it is ass covering for sure, but the reason he has cited for blocking their release is that the US has threatened to cut intelligence ties with the UK meaning we could be left vulnerable to attack (as could the US) if this data were released. Originally this threat came from the Bush administration, but it seems since then the Obama administration has been asked with the same threats. Journalists and politicians here have contacted the white house to confirm this and have found that the Obama administration does in fact support this policy.
The fact is, the Obama administration has no interest in accountability for it's security services, it knows and has admitted they were complicit in torture, but it seems the extent to which they were is such a problem that they are willing to put the national security of an ally and their own national security at risk to cover this up and keep that evidence secure.
It's not like we're not used to this attitude from the US, as when a US airforce pilot was guilty of strafing British troops in an A10 in a friendly fire incident in Iraq they refused to release the pilots name for questioning and the gun camera videos etc. (which were later leaked anyway) for our enquiry into how it happened. We expected this kind of attitude of coverups from the Bush adminsitration, but the Obama administration? It did come as a suprise I'll admit.
An update is here, the court reversed it's decision and stated the documents can be released pending the outcome of an appeal by the British government. Hopefully they'll lose it and we'll be able to see if Obama really is willing to do as he says and damage security of both countries over it:
Change? Not from what we can see over this side of the Atlantic, the only difference here in Europe is instead of a US president having his leg humped by Tony Blair, we've now got a US president having his leg humped by Sarkozy and Berlusconi instead.
It wont displace the Blackberry as much as the iPhone because RIM gets most of it's sales from business. Businesses who buy Blackberrys buy them because they already have an investment in BES, and Droid needs more than simply exchange integration to convince companies to ditch that investment.
Droid is more of a direct competitor to the iPhone than the Blackberry for exactly this reason, the iPhone makes it's sales from standalone users and whilst exchange integration is fairly standard with handsets now not many handsets have a strong fully integrated solution for syncing between mobile devices and the office like BES.
As long as RIM keep doing what they're doing and focus on the enterprise and providing a full solution to the enterprise, and whilst other manufacturers fail to do this, RIM will continue to retain exclusivity with this sizeable set of business customers.
In contrast, the market for standalone phones for end users is becoming more and more crowded. This is why I'm suprised we're seeing so much focus on new standalone handsets, and so little focus on new handsets that integrate well with the enterprise outside of a messy mismatched bunch of individual applications that sync with individual different parts of the enterprise. Until other companies start paying attention here, RIM will continue to be the only ones laughing all the way to the bank in this sector.
Yes, that's why it sold 50 million units in it's first 20 months. For reference, the iPhone sold around 21 million in the same period, the N95 sold 10 million in it's first 12 months, however I'm unsure how many past that, there doesn't seem to be clear figures anywhere.
The Razr has sold a total of 110 million units through it's lifetime.
Now, I've never owned a RAZR, I've always had Nokia handsets, although that'll probably change with my next phone as I want an Android handset, but come on, let's be realistic, the RAZR is one of the biggest cell phone successes of all time, bigger than even the iPhone by a massive margin.
Moral of the story? Don't assume how successful some device was based on word of mouth or something equally arbitrary, take a look at real performance figures.
So don't worry, it's apparently not just the US that builds websites and creates "new media" for bridges.
I mean, come on, it's a bridge, it's used to cross something that would otherwise be difficult / impossible to cross. Does it really need to be anything more than that? As you say, it all seems like quite a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Even if the bridge has some historical element to it wouldn't it be better to let a museum central to the whole of the city handle that?
Yeah exactly, so what if I have to have my arm amputated because of an agressive cancer caused by these scanners, at least it means I wont have to lose my arm to a terrorist!
Nope, Sweden was neutral. There were issues similar to Switzerland that made it's neutrality questionable though like selling arms to the Nazis, although it did turn a blind eye to allowing the Norwegian resistance and such refuge there also.
The general consensus from a couple of Swedish friends I have though (although to be fair that doesn't mean this is the national view or anything) is that Sweden took the wrong course of action in the war and should've sided with the allies and that even if it's neutrality was to save it from being dominated by the Nazis like Norway was it should at least have been more neutral and less helpful to the Nazis.
I think that's another area where students are quite fortunate in the UK, whilst they complain about student fees the majority of their degree is still subsidised. The average student debt is around £15,000 but they don't have to start paying it back until they earn a decent wage.
What most students seem to miss though is that even if they worked part time they could actually come out of uni with zero debt by paying off their loan whilst they do their degree- unfortunately that means less partying and more hard work and most of them would rather just party lots, work little and then moan about the loan afterwards when they have no choice to pay it back!
It's always hard at first, but as I say even then in the UK the average national starting salary for a graduate is £25,000 which is above the national average wage which IIRC is around £21k to £23k so students oddly aren't actually the worst of in the UK at least. I don't know how the stats compare for average graduate starting wages vs. national average wages in the US though, any idea if it's quite different? Is the average graduate starting salary below the national average wage over there?
I didn't, as I say, he made it quite clear he didn't like it which is fair enough, but he also made it clear he didn't "get" war either because he tried to suggest that the other elements to the show had nothing to do with the theme of war which is completely and utterly false, and one of the things the show did right.
People not liking it is fair enough, but to suggest it wasn't one of the best portrayals of modern war and the effects it has that we've had on TV is rather stupid. Whilst we've had things like Band of Brothers to give a fairly good portrayal of war from that era, what war dramas are supposed to have done a better portrayal of modern war? I'm hoping people aren't going to seriously suggest things like Ultimate Force or The Unit as being more true to life portrayals of war because that really would show how ignorant people are to the effects and brutality of war. These both lasted far far longer on TV however- again the reason is simple, people don't want to see the reality of war (again, as the person I was responding to proved), they want to see more Rambo-esque type shit. I'm not saying we shouldn't have shows like The Unit and 24, I'm just saying Over there is one of or the most accurate portrayal of modern warfare we've had, which ironically was it's downfall- no one wants to see marines lose their limbs, see the journalist get beheaded, know that sometimes their soldiers just can't face going back, but the fact is, that's what war does.
"Unison, mentioned by the poster, are very moderate. It's accepted the minute pay rise offered by management - which is fair enough given the economic situation"
But if Unison had been offered no increase at all or even a decrease like over half of the rest of the country? What would Unison's reaction be then? What exactly have staff done to warrant a pay increase that everyone else in the country that's had to settle for a pay decrease or risk losing their jobs done? Why should these people fund your pay increase when you've done no more to warrant it than they have and when they're taking a decrease? The fact there was expectation of pay rise at all is in itself disgusting in the current climate and with such high public sector debt.
Public sector should not be receiving a pay rise at all this is the point- it has not acted in an extraordinary manner through the financial crisis to warrant reward, public sector debt is at an all time high and needs to be cut somehow, yet you feel public sector employees deserve to keep on taking pay increases in this climate?
I don't disagree with your sentiment on managers, directors and so forth getting bonuses that are often entirely undeserved don't get me wrong, but I also don't understand this sense of entitlement that people have where they feel they're owed a payrise each year just for turning up and doing their job. If you work somewhere and go well above and beyond and they still don't give you a rise, then quit and go elsewhere as you did. The public sector way is a farce though where people get annual payrises and scale increments just for turning up and half of them don't even do that half the time yet still get their guaranteed raises. Sure you may be one of the few hard workers that does go well above and beyond, but this far from describes all public sector workers, due to the inability to get sacked for all but the most horrific screw ups in public sector most people get away with not even fulfilling the basic criteria of their job description let alone going above and beyond that.
You can survive on that, although you're certainly not going to live an extravagant lifestyle- you wouldn't expect a nice detached house or annual holidays. Surely though that's the price paid for never bothering to learn any skills other than the absolute basic minimum?
For reference the average wage of a graduate is £25,000 in the UK- I don't really think that's out of touch for the additional 3 to 6 years additional education they may have done and hence the higher level of ability they will have likely achieved. There's an argument the poor can't afford education, but that's certainly not the case in the UK, if you're on that wage and don't have a degree you can get financial support to do an entire degree with the Open University. There are also a lot of shorter free courses for people in that situation too. Effectively, being low skilled and hence low paid is a choice these people make as there are options to change that if they wish.
Now you mention it I do recall reading about the idea of printing multiple layers to produce 3D devices that are still essentially almost flat because of how thin the layers are, although I can't remember where from!
As you say, being able to print full blown working circuits would open up a lot of new doors!
That really is quite cool then, if you can print a full blown working circuit onto any printable surface that really does open up a lot of doors for new technology.
Being able to print the circuit is all well and good, but presumably it's literally just the underlying circuit and components still need to be attached? I'm guessing you can't just print a resistor, a transistor, an IC chip or something?
If I'm correct in this assumption, presumably this technology doesn't really open any new doors in terms of what can be created, only makes the process for testing and eventually producing circuit designs cheaper and possibly quicker?
Cheers for proving my point- many people like yourself seem entirely oblivious to the fact soldiers lose limbs in war and have to deal with it, soldiers go AWOL, and other pressures exist on soldiers from their family when they're away from home. Saying he didn't stay on point because he covered things is evidence enough that some people, like yourself, simply don't understand that these are facets of war, it isn't all shooting and calling in airstrikes.
Real war is not like Call of Duty, it's not like running round shooting continuously, you don't respawn with your limbs intact when you get shot or blown up, you're not immune to pressure from family back home.
Again, I guess the idea of a war drama that covers all aspects of war is too much for some. They'd rather watch Rambo, or as you say, The A Team.
We have working hour limits in the UK (you can opt out of them in Britain) and a minimum wage. The working hour limits cover the maximum amount of hours you're allowed to do in a week, state that you must have at least I think 8 or 10 hours time between shifts, and must have a day off at least once every x amount of days- I can't remember the exact number but it's quite low.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and it's now happened twice in 2 days, the world is falling apart, run for the hills!
Maybe it's because I've always driven a manual, but to me it would be instinctive and not something I'd have to be clear headed and think about.
Changing gears isn't something you even think about a while after you start driving, it's just something that comes naturally and you just automatically change to the correct gear.
This is why the parent is correct- not necessarily because people who drive manual understand the gear system better, but simply because they naturally and instinctively will change gear to the situation without a thought.
How can you proven something as arbitrary as common sense is a poor decision making tool?
Do you have any links to these studies?
Common sense is just a term used to describe using the most obvious, sensible solution that may have been overlooked in the face of alternative, more stupid solutions. Quite how you can prove that is a poor decision making tool I'd love to know.
No, if you receive an attachment that really could potentially be a threat then you just scan that file. You don't need a real time scanner for that.
But most of the time you don't need to even do that, very few common file formats have vulnerabilities in every application that can open them and even those that do like Office documents and macro viruses have the option to be run without macros enabled and whilst there are vulnerabilities in some applications that open certain file formats such as buffer overflows that can be exploited, these issues are nearly always found and patched long before there's ever an exploit in the field.
I wont pretend I'm invulnerable, I'm sure if someone knew every precaution I did and what applications I ran then they could possibly target a specific attack directly at me, but the reality is in the grand scheme of things I'm just not that important. Not to mention that someone performing such a targetted attack against an individual will also likely leave clues that'll make them an easy target for law enforcement to pick up anyway. Just as with disease, it's much easier to trace the source of an attack when you have access to the first infected victim.
Of course the question then is so what if I do get infected? My data is backed up, I keep an eye on my router and download speeds so would know if something is going in and out of my system that shouldn't. What's the worst that can happen? I have to reinstall my software from scratch? Big deal.
No, people who run shit they shouldn't are asking for what they get.
I don't run a real-time scanner, it's too much of a resource hog, I do let AV do an overnight scan once a week though. I've done this for years and never had a virus. Why? Because I don't run shit I know may not be safe to run. I do not open attachments I was not expecting to recieve.
It's not as if AV software is even that effective anyway, even when it does detect threats half the time it fails miserably at dealing with it and just gives the option of deleting, and sometimes some AV software doesn't even manage that. The paradigm used for AV software is that which has been used for a couple of decades, and it never even worked particularly effectively back then, let alone now that viruses have evolved whilst AV software really hasn't. Again, the best option is really to cover all the attack vectors - don't run executables you don't trust, don't have Javascript enabled on sites you can't be sure are safe, don't open attachments you weren't expecting and so on.
"Who are the idiots who keep tagging everything idiocracy?"
Ironically, probably the people Slashdot's idiocracy is comprised of.
Yes, the crux of the issue is that for the most part, if politicians were smart people, they wouldn't be politicians, they would be out doing something useful instead.
You become a politician if the only thing you can really offer the world is your own personal point of view, coupled with an insistence that this is the only point of view worth implementing.
Well the deal with Sarkozy and Berlusconi is that they are declining in popularity themselves, they see Obama's great international popularity as a way to increase their popularity by piggy backing off his success.
Blair to be fair, was close to Bush because they shared similar policies and whilst there were jokes about Blair being Bush's lapdog, it was at least based on that shared political view, rather than extremely false looking attempts at showing how they're both "Mr Cool" because they hang around with Obama. Our PM in Britain now, Gordon Brown is just a miserable old sod who doesn't really hang around with anyone if he can help it and Obama seems to have a personal distaste of Britain which sours the relationship also, that's why our PM isn't really hanging around with Obama like other European leaders are and like Blair used to.
Unfortunately though, whilst we have politicians in Europe who want to be celebrities first and politicians second you can expect to continue to see leg humping of US presidents from European leaders I'm afraid. Luckily the EU doesn't depend on this Celebuticians or whatever the fuck they think their actual role is however, because there are 20+ other leaders and 100s of other politicians who are busy actually doing work rather than leg humping.
Long enough that plenty of people kept buying them for years after their initial popularity - again, see the figure sold to date, 110 million. If it was that bad it would never have continued selling.
Similarly though, what does that say about Apple's product with their fixed batteries and hence planned obsolescence? Sure you can replace batteries in them if you risk opening them up and pay a fair bit for the new battery, but then the same could be said for fixing a Motorola RAZR- if you've got to open it up and do surgery to keep it going, it's past it's intended lifespan.
Us Brits were already aware that Obama follows Bush era policies.
One of the Britons detained in Guantanamo bay, Binyamin Mohamed, was finally released to the UK earlier this year. Since then he's been trying to prove that he was tortured by, or at the behest of British agents. The courts recieved documents from US intelligence that would back his claim, however their release was blocked by our foreign secretary.
Now, our foreign secretary is an idiot, and part of it is ass covering for sure, but the reason he has cited for blocking their release is that the US has threatened to cut intelligence ties with the UK meaning we could be left vulnerable to attack (as could the US) if this data were released. Originally this threat came from the Bush administration, but it seems since then the Obama administration has been asked with the same threats. Journalists and politicians here have contacted the white house to confirm this and have found that the Obama administration does in fact support this policy.
The fact is, the Obama administration has no interest in accountability for it's security services, it knows and has admitted they were complicit in torture, but it seems the extent to which they were is such a problem that they are willing to put the national security of an ally and their own national security at risk to cover this up and keep that evidence secure.
It's not like we're not used to this attitude from the US, as when a US airforce pilot was guilty of strafing British troops in an A10 in a friendly fire incident in Iraq they refused to release the pilots name for questioning and the gun camera videos etc. (which were later leaked anyway) for our enquiry into how it happened. We expected this kind of attitude of coverups from the Bush adminsitration, but the Obama administration? It did come as a suprise I'll admit.
The original story is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/guantanamo-torture
An update is here, the court reversed it's decision and stated the documents can be released pending the outcome of an appeal by the British government. Hopefully they'll lose it and we'll be able to see if Obama really is willing to do as he says and damage security of both countries over it:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-gitmo17-2009oct17,0,2433061.story
Change? Not from what we can see over this side of the Atlantic, the only difference here in Europe is instead of a US president having his leg humped by Tony Blair, we've now got a US president having his leg humped by Sarkozy and Berlusconi instead.
It wont displace the Blackberry as much as the iPhone because RIM gets most of it's sales from business. Businesses who buy Blackberrys buy them because they already have an investment in BES, and Droid needs more than simply exchange integration to convince companies to ditch that investment.
Droid is more of a direct competitor to the iPhone than the Blackberry for exactly this reason, the iPhone makes it's sales from standalone users and whilst exchange integration is fairly standard with handsets now not many handsets have a strong fully integrated solution for syncing between mobile devices and the office like BES.
As long as RIM keep doing what they're doing and focus on the enterprise and providing a full solution to the enterprise, and whilst other manufacturers fail to do this, RIM will continue to retain exclusivity with this sizeable set of business customers.
In contrast, the market for standalone phones for end users is becoming more and more crowded. This is why I'm suprised we're seeing so much focus on new standalone handsets, and so little focus on new handsets that integrate well with the enterprise outside of a messy mismatched bunch of individual applications that sync with individual different parts of the enterprise. Until other companies start paying attention here, RIM will continue to be the only ones laughing all the way to the bank in this sector.
"The Razr was a disaster."
Yes, that's why it sold 50 million units in it's first 20 months. For reference, the iPhone sold around 21 million in the same period, the N95 sold 10 million in it's first 12 months, however I'm unsure how many past that, there doesn't seem to be clear figures anywhere.
The Razr has sold a total of 110 million units through it's lifetime.
Now, I've never owned a RAZR, I've always had Nokia handsets, although that'll probably change with my next phone as I want an Android handset, but come on, let's be realistic, the RAZR is one of the biggest cell phone successes of all time, bigger than even the iPhone by a massive margin.
Moral of the story? Don't assume how successful some device was based on word of mouth or something equally arbitrary, take a look at real performance figures.
I was going to say:
"As a Brit, I have to ask. Why the fuck does a bridge need a website?"
Then I found this:
http://www.towerbridge.org.uk/TBE/EN/
So don't worry, it's apparently not just the US that builds websites and creates "new media" for bridges.
I mean, come on, it's a bridge, it's used to cross something that would otherwise be difficult / impossible to cross. Does it really need to be anything more than that? As you say, it all seems like quite a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Even if the bridge has some historical element to it wouldn't it be better to let a museum central to the whole of the city handle that?
Tell me about it, it's nasty stuff. I carry my cell phone in my pocket all day every day and sometimes I get this growth between my legs.
Yeah exactly, so what if I have to have my arm amputated because of an agressive cancer caused by these scanners, at least it means I wont have to lose my arm to a terrorist!
Nope, Sweden was neutral. There were issues similar to Switzerland that made it's neutrality questionable though like selling arms to the Nazis, although it did turn a blind eye to allowing the Norwegian resistance and such refuge there also.
The general consensus from a couple of Swedish friends I have though (although to be fair that doesn't mean this is the national view or anything) is that Sweden took the wrong course of action in the war and should've sided with the allies and that even if it's neutrality was to save it from being dominated by the Nazis like Norway was it should at least have been more neutral and less helpful to the Nazis.
I think that's another area where students are quite fortunate in the UK, whilst they complain about student fees the majority of their degree is still subsidised. The average student debt is around £15,000 but they don't have to start paying it back until they earn a decent wage.
What most students seem to miss though is that even if they worked part time they could actually come out of uni with zero debt by paying off their loan whilst they do their degree- unfortunately that means less partying and more hard work and most of them would rather just party lots, work little and then moan about the loan afterwards when they have no choice to pay it back!
It's always hard at first, but as I say even then in the UK the average national starting salary for a graduate is £25,000 which is above the national average wage which IIRC is around £21k to £23k so students oddly aren't actually the worst of in the UK at least. I don't know how the stats compare for average graduate starting wages vs. national average wages in the US though, any idea if it's quite different? Is the average graduate starting salary below the national average wage over there?
I didn't, as I say, he made it quite clear he didn't like it which is fair enough, but he also made it clear he didn't "get" war either because he tried to suggest that the other elements to the show had nothing to do with the theme of war which is completely and utterly false, and one of the things the show did right.
People not liking it is fair enough, but to suggest it wasn't one of the best portrayals of modern war and the effects it has that we've had on TV is rather stupid. Whilst we've had things like Band of Brothers to give a fairly good portrayal of war from that era, what war dramas are supposed to have done a better portrayal of modern war? I'm hoping people aren't going to seriously suggest things like Ultimate Force or The Unit as being more true to life portrayals of war because that really would show how ignorant people are to the effects and brutality of war. These both lasted far far longer on TV however- again the reason is simple, people don't want to see the reality of war (again, as the person I was responding to proved), they want to see more Rambo-esque type shit. I'm not saying we shouldn't have shows like The Unit and 24, I'm just saying Over there is one of or the most accurate portrayal of modern warfare we've had, which ironically was it's downfall- no one wants to see marines lose their limbs, see the journalist get beheaded, know that sometimes their soldiers just can't face going back, but the fact is, that's what war does.
"Unison, mentioned by the poster, are very moderate. It's accepted the minute pay rise offered by management - which is fair enough given the economic situation"
But if Unison had been offered no increase at all or even a decrease like over half of the rest of the country? What would Unison's reaction be then? What exactly have staff done to warrant a pay increase that everyone else in the country that's had to settle for a pay decrease or risk losing their jobs done? Why should these people fund your pay increase when you've done no more to warrant it than they have and when they're taking a decrease? The fact there was expectation of pay rise at all is in itself disgusting in the current climate and with such high public sector debt.
Public sector should not be receiving a pay rise at all this is the point- it has not acted in an extraordinary manner through the financial crisis to warrant reward, public sector debt is at an all time high and needs to be cut somehow, yet you feel public sector employees deserve to keep on taking pay increases in this climate?
I don't disagree with your sentiment on managers, directors and so forth getting bonuses that are often entirely undeserved don't get me wrong, but I also don't understand this sense of entitlement that people have where they feel they're owed a payrise each year just for turning up and doing their job. If you work somewhere and go well above and beyond and they still don't give you a rise, then quit and go elsewhere as you did. The public sector way is a farce though where people get annual payrises and scale increments just for turning up and half of them don't even do that half the time yet still get their guaranteed raises. Sure you may be one of the few hard workers that does go well above and beyond, but this far from describes all public sector workers, due to the inability to get sacked for all but the most horrific screw ups in public sector most people get away with not even fulfilling the basic criteria of their job description let alone going above and beyond that.
You can survive on that, although you're certainly not going to live an extravagant lifestyle- you wouldn't expect a nice detached house or annual holidays. Surely though that's the price paid for never bothering to learn any skills other than the absolute basic minimum?
For reference the average wage of a graduate is £25,000 in the UK- I don't really think that's out of touch for the additional 3 to 6 years additional education they may have done and hence the higher level of ability they will have likely achieved. There's an argument the poor can't afford education, but that's certainly not the case in the UK, if you're on that wage and don't have a degree you can get financial support to do an entire degree with the Open University. There are also a lot of shorter free courses for people in that situation too. Effectively, being low skilled and hence low paid is a choice these people make as there are options to change that if they wish.
Now you mention it I do recall reading about the idea of printing multiple layers to produce 3D devices that are still essentially almost flat because of how thin the layers are, although I can't remember where from!
As you say, being able to print full blown working circuits would open up a lot of new doors!
That really is quite cool then, if you can print a full blown working circuit onto any printable surface that really does open up a lot of doors for new technology.
Being able to print the circuit is all well and good, but presumably it's literally just the underlying circuit and components still need to be attached? I'm guessing you can't just print a resistor, a transistor, an IC chip or something?
If I'm correct in this assumption, presumably this technology doesn't really open any new doors in terms of what can be created, only makes the process for testing and eventually producing circuit designs cheaper and possibly quicker?
Cheers for proving my point- many people like yourself seem entirely oblivious to the fact soldiers lose limbs in war and have to deal with it, soldiers go AWOL, and other pressures exist on soldiers from their family when they're away from home. Saying he didn't stay on point because he covered things is evidence enough that some people, like yourself, simply don't understand that these are facets of war, it isn't all shooting and calling in airstrikes.
Real war is not like Call of Duty, it's not like running round shooting continuously, you don't respawn with your limbs intact when you get shot or blown up, you're not immune to pressure from family back home.
Again, I guess the idea of a war drama that covers all aspects of war is too much for some. They'd rather watch Rambo, or as you say, The A Team.
We have working hour limits in the UK (you can opt out of them in Britain) and a minimum wage. The working hour limits cover the maximum amount of hours you're allowed to do in a week, state that you must have at least I think 8 or 10 hours time between shifts, and must have a day off at least once every x amount of days- I can't remember the exact number but it's quite low.