I perfectly agree. The only borrowed money I have at the moment is a ~£10k student loan, which has the interest rate matched exactly to inflation, and repayments are automatically taken out of my paycheck before I get it. I believe that I could choose to pay back more than I'm forced to if I wanted, but thanks to the stupid-low interest rate I actually earn money by keeping it and sticking it in a savings account.
If I buy anything under a few grand I'll pay for it then and there instead of using store finance or a loan, because in a year it will have already cost me less.
The only loan I plan on getting in the future is a mortgage, because I don't expect my bank account to ever have enough in it to buy a house.
Presumably, the more violent the video game the less unstable someone needs to be before it completely destabilizes them and they kill someone.
Essentially: A game fighting "monsters" with little blood and no decapitation would only make an already very unstable person into a killer, but a game that portrays violent killing as it is in reality could make someone much less unstable (someone still unstable but not enough to not seem normal) go and kill someone.
Hopefully someone with psychological knowledge will confirm or deny this.
From the Wikipedia article for Manhunt:
In the UK, the game was linked to the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, 14, by his friend Warren Leblanc, 17. Giselle Pakeerah, the victim's mother, claimed that Leblanc had been 'obsessed' with the game after the former pleaded guilty in court. During the subsequent media circus, the game was removed from sale by some vendors, such as the UK and international branches of GAME and Dixons, leading to "significantly increased" demand both from retailers and on internet auction sites. The police denied any such link between the game and the murder however, citing drug-related robbery as the motive. The presiding judge also placed sole responsibility with Leblanc in his summing up after awarding him a life sentence. GAME have since returned Manhunt to their shelves, after it transpired that the murderer did not even own or ever play the game. It was apparently the victim who owned a copy of Manhunt, even though he was under 18.
His comment about PAL having a better picture quality than NTSC isn't just the improved resolution (which makes little difference), but more the colour encoding method. PAL stands for "Phase Alternating Line" (or something), which means that every second line of the image is in inverted phase, cancelling out most transmission errors. NTSC on the other hand doesn't do this, and a transmission error will cause the image to change colour. Wikipedia has more info.
We also have something called "PAL60", which is a combination of the NTSC resolution and refresh rate with the PAL colour encoding, which most games consoles are capable of outputting. We get quite a few games from lazy American companies that don't release a proper PAL version, resulting in a game that will ONLY play in PAL60 mode, and not be able to display on about half of British TVs.
Regardless, I'm not planning to get a HDTV any time soon, a good PAL SD TV is plenty good enough for me.
Makes you wonder if these "extra" female children are actually male genetically, just with the Y chromosome so damaged it's being overwhelmed by the X from the mother.
Or whether the damage to the Y chromosome is simply killing the sperm carrying it, making it more likely for an X-carrying sperm to fertilise the egg.
Where is the power supply? Where is the storage? What is the processor? How much memory... etc... Small computing already exists. What we need is less shitty small computing.
Get a processor in the MIPS rating of say a 500MHz AMD K8 processor on a credit card device, with self-contained power, decent memory [say at least 128M], etc. Then we'll chat.
Until then my Gumstix 400MHz ARM with 64M of ram will do fine for small time computing [albeit slowly...]
Tom From TFA:
The mobile-ITX board that Chen demonstrated this morning appears to be based on a 1GHz "C7-S" processor -- apparently a standard Via C7-M shoe-horned into a 9 x 11mm package. The chip had not previously been announced. The mobile-ITX board also apparently uses an "S" (small) version of the CX700 integrated north-/south-bridge chipset. And, it appears to have an on-board DC-DC converter. Additionally, according to Via, the board includes a CDMA baseband processor chip, suggesting that the mobile-ITX board could be used as the basis for x86-compatible smartphones.
According to a brief item at EpiaCenter, Via's mobile-ITX board will be available with 256MB or 512MB of RAM soldered on-board, and will run Linux or Windows XP Embedded. Even an embedded version of Windows Vista may be too much for the little board, however, a Via spokesperson admits.
What you have to remember is that even though bittorrent may be the most common peer-to-peer system, it's difficult to target because it IS being used for legal stuff (at least 0.5% of the time!).
On the other hand (nearly?) every other p2p system is completely illegal, often sharing anything you happen to have on your pc, in some cases including stuff you don't want to share, and as most of them are stupid enough to use unencrypted packets and the same port every time, they are stupidly trivial to block.
Add a little marketing spin (99% of illegal p2p = 99% of illegal p2p networks instead of 99% illegal p2p traffic for example), and a cool name and you have something you can sell to the government.
You forgot: Feisty: - Have to manually edit xorg.conf to get resolutions above 1280x1024 - Have to manually edit xorg.conf to use more than 3 buttons on your mouse
Other than those (which there are guides on the net to sort out) I've had little trouble with Ubuntu Feisty and haven't booted into Windows since I installed it. I do miss a lot of my games though, wine's not too great (Counter-Strike Source runs in direct-x 7 mode) and few games have linux ports (I've got NWN and UT2004 working).
"Her" is both possessive and non-possessive. To get around this there's another possessive version "Hers". "It's her" and "It's hers" have completely different meanings, similar to "It's it" and "It's its". Not sure why we have "your" and "yours" though, I can't think of a sentence where both make sense but with different meanings.
Yeah, possessive "it" is "its" like "yours" and "hers", not "it's" like "John's" or "the table's".
The confusion comes from the use being more like the second case: "Its appearance", like "The table's appearance", not like "Your appearance", which has no "s" in this case.
E.g. Ubuntu 7.04 still requires you to use sudo and edit xorg.conf to use more than 3 buttons on your mouse.
And after doing that I have the problem that until I middle click focus is locked to one thing and clicking on anything else does nothing. Not to mention that the extra buttons don't do back/forwards in the file browser.
I had a VCR that blinked 12:00 over and over, but only because I'd got sick of setting it. It had no battery and would reset every power cut. And living in the middle of the Norfolk countryside, power cuts happen in every half-decent storm. We were without power for nearly a week once. Good job we had a gas oven, or the food wouldn't have been very good. At least the VCR didn't blink.
Normally though, people who "can't figure out how to set the clock" just can't be bothered to look in the manual under the section "setting the clock". Nine times out of ten it involves a button with a picture of a clock and the up/down buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it's much more difficult to unlock a hard-disk...
Hmm, seems you may not have been replying to me. Slashdot reparented the comment. I apologise if what I said is irrelevant.
Interest rate on a student loan: http://www.slc.co.uk/statistics/facts_figures.htm
2004/05 : 2.6%
2005/06 : 3.2%
2006/07 : 2.4% Inflation: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=19
I can easily get more than 5% interest rate in a decent savings scheme (2-year bond or whatever).
It would be different if it was a bank loan, but it's not.
I perfectly agree. The only borrowed money I have at the moment is a ~£10k student loan, which has the interest rate matched exactly to inflation, and repayments are automatically taken out of my paycheck before I get it. I believe that I could choose to pay back more than I'm forced to if I wanted, but thanks to the stupid-low interest rate I actually earn money by keeping it and sticking it in a savings account.
If I buy anything under a few grand I'll pay for it then and there instead of using store finance or a loan, because in a year it will have already cost me less.
The only loan I plan on getting in the future is a mortgage, because I don't expect my bank account to ever have enough in it to buy a house.
Presumably, the more violent the video game the less unstable someone needs to be before it completely destabilizes them and they kill someone.
Essentially: A game fighting "monsters" with little blood and no decapitation would only make an already very unstable person into a killer, but a game that portrays violent killing as it is in reality could make someone much less unstable (someone still unstable but not enough to not seem normal) go and kill someone.
Hopefully someone with psychological knowledge will confirm or deny this.
Well, he did "make us in his image" apparently. Surely that means that he's as human as us?
His comment about PAL having a better picture quality than NTSC isn't just the improved resolution (which makes little difference), but more the colour encoding method. PAL stands for "Phase Alternating Line" (or something), which means that every second line of the image is in inverted phase, cancelling out most transmission errors. NTSC on the other hand doesn't do this, and a transmission error will cause the image to change colour. Wikipedia has more info.
We also have something called "PAL60", which is a combination of the NTSC resolution and refresh rate with the PAL colour encoding, which most games consoles are capable of outputting. We get quite a few games from lazy American companies that don't release a proper PAL version, resulting in a game that will ONLY play in PAL60 mode, and not be able to display on about half of British TVs.
Regardless, I'm not planning to get a HDTV any time soon, a good PAL SD TV is plenty good enough for me.
Been a few years since I read those books.
*Dives into bookcase looking for "Foundation".*
Ever played Defcon?
It's a game on Steam, modelled after "Global Thermonuclear War".
Micro was used by the ATX line: Micro-ATX.
Fairly sure they're using magnetic fields/induction and not EM radiation.
Well, the coils probably produce a lot of EM radiation, but that's not the point.
I'm shocked that out of all the people complaining about "lite"/"light", none noticed you changed "bulb" to "bult".
I mean, what kind of spelling nazis are they?
Makes you wonder if these "extra" female children are actually male genetically, just with the Y chromosome so damaged it's being overwhelmed by the X from the mother.
Or whether the damage to the Y chromosome is simply killing the sperm carrying it, making it more likely for an X-carrying sperm to fertilise the egg.
Get a processor in the MIPS rating of say a 500MHz AMD K8 processor on a credit card device, with self-contained power, decent memory [say at least 128M], etc. Then we'll chat.
Until then my Gumstix 400MHz ARM with 64M of ram will do fine for small time computing [albeit slowly...]
Tom From TFA: The mobile-ITX board that Chen demonstrated this morning appears to be based on a 1GHz "C7-S" processor -- apparently a standard Via C7-M shoe-horned into a 9 x 11mm package. The chip had not previously been announced. The mobile-ITX board also apparently uses an "S" (small) version of the CX700 integrated north-/south-bridge chipset. And, it appears to have an on-board DC-DC converter. Additionally, according to Via, the board includes a CDMA baseband processor chip, suggesting that the mobile-ITX board could be used as the basis for x86-compatible smartphones.
According to a brief item at EpiaCenter, Via's mobile-ITX board will be available with 256MB or 512MB of RAM soldered on-board, and will run Linux or Windows XP Embedded. Even an embedded version of Windows Vista may be too much for the little board, however, a Via spokesperson admits.
You're citing a Hollywood movie as an authoritative source?
Because those are so good with facts...
What you have to remember is that even though bittorrent may be the most common peer-to-peer system, it's difficult to target because it IS being used for legal stuff (at least 0.5% of the time!).
On the other hand (nearly?) every other p2p system is completely illegal, often sharing anything you happen to have on your pc, in some cases including stuff you don't want to share, and as most of them are stupid enough to use unencrypted packets and the same port every time, they are stupidly trivial to block.
Add a little marketing spin (99% of illegal p2p = 99% of illegal p2p networks instead of 99% illegal p2p traffic for example), and a cool name and you have something you can sell to the government.
I had mod points a week ago, I wish they hadn't expired.
This is an awesome idea, and we need it!
You forgot:
Feisty:
- Have to manually edit xorg.conf to get resolutions above 1280x1024
- Have to manually edit xorg.conf to use more than 3 buttons on your mouse
Other than those (which there are guides on the net to sort out) I've had little trouble with Ubuntu Feisty and haven't booted into Windows since I installed it. I do miss a lot of my games though, wine's not too great (Counter-Strike Source runs in direct-x 7 mode) and few games have linux ports (I've got NWN and UT2004 working).
"Her" is both possessive and non-possessive. To get around this there's another possessive version "Hers". "It's her" and "It's hers" have completely different meanings, similar to "It's it" and "It's its". Not sure why we have "your" and "yours" though, I can't think of a sentence where both make sense but with different meanings.
Yeah, possessive "it" is "its" like "yours" and "hers", not "it's" like "John's" or "the table's".
The confusion comes from the use being more like the second case: "Its appearance", like "The table's appearance", not like "Your appearance", which has no "s" in this case.
You're assuming that said site knows that email addresses containing a + are valid.
Lots of places check for alphanumerics, dot and @ and reject anything else.
E.g. Ubuntu 7.04 still requires you to use sudo and edit xorg.conf to use more than 3 buttons on your mouse.
And after doing that I have the problem that until I middle click focus is locked to one thing and clicking on anything else does nothing.
Not to mention that the extra buttons don't do back/forwards in the file browser.
If you go into network connections and ask for the status of any of your network connections it's in there.
I had a VCR that blinked 12:00 over and over, but only because I'd got sick of setting it. It had no battery and would reset every power cut. And living in the middle of the Norfolk countryside, power cuts happen in every half-decent storm. We were without power for nearly a week once. Good job we had a gas oven, or the food wouldn't have been very good. At least the VCR didn't blink.
Normally though, people who "can't figure out how to set the clock" just can't be bothered to look in the manual under the section "setting the clock". Nine times out of ten it involves a button with a picture of a clock and the up/down buttons.
They'd rather complain about it than do it.