threegee

Take a look at the video: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england...ire/7883819.stm One dumb kid larking on slips and loses a bit of skin. Old days: school matron (often doubling another job) dabs a bit of TCP on it and a sticky plaster; admonishes kid to be more careful. Life (and education) continue. Today: Paramedics called at considerable expense - eeeaww eeeaww eeeaww. Conference on on-going situation. TV news crew alerted to news-worthy critical situation. Health and Saftey officer consultation. School must be closed for H&S reasons. Thousands of people and business disrupted. Thousands of additional journeys (on icy roads) putting even more countless thousands at risk. More conferences, lots of form-filling, written reports, recommendations (need to order road salt before Winter?), targets set, performance monitoring. What a total load of cobblers! What a message to the kids about facing up to risk in the real world; taking responsibility for your own actions; taking individual initiative; employing elementary common sense! Ship a few head teachers out to Gaza to see what risk is all about. Is it that the generation that lived through the blitz are gone? In the rather cushioned '60s I drove a motor scooter through 20 foot snowdrifts to get to school. And you know we were handed strange things called shovels, which were great at moving snow and ice. The exercise was quite good for our health, and the resulting paths through the school yard were equally good for our safety. Unfortunately we didn't have pretty strips of flourescent plastic to cordon off the snowfall and ice, you just sort-of kept to the cleared bits using your own powers of observation.

Don't know, but you've only got to eyeball the vast amount of parked-up new cars to realise that somehow they have to be turned into cash by increasingly cash-strapped manufacturers. Some industries can turn off the tap much more quickly. But with computers you have to commit to lots of high value components well in advance, and if you don't keep the development effort going you're out of the business. A lot of well-known brands use contract manufacture to keep their costs down, and those contractors will just keep going until the minimum contract is fulfilled as their payment is guaranteed. The computer industry has never experienced this scale of downturn before, so there are a lot of buying mistakes in the pipeline. If I had to guess on houses I'd say that they have a lot further to go. It's going to get a lot worse than even I imagined it could. There will be false dawns. The trick is not to get sucked in by the industry propaganda that the market has bottomed. As any experienced stockmarket trader will tell you, the time to buy is when even the super-optimists have given up - it's called market capitulation.

There are some huge bargains on the way. Why? A combination of things; particularly an unprecedented depression in the industry is starting to take hold. Firms will need to clear current inventory and get cheaper better value product to the market just to survive. Hold off that purchase for a while, and make do with what you have - things can only get cheaper! Advice offered by someone who has been in the business since year one.

Good on you - but you shouldn't have to exercise some common sense when people are paid very good money to get the message out. BTW the plans reminded me of something but I couldn't say what - until it suddenly came to me. Beamish! All that's missing is the cast iron band stand. We really do need this feature - for the buskers, come the next phase of Gordo's world-saving economic miracle. Anyway, why not go the whole hog and turn the entire town into a "living" museum, instead of doing it on the instalment plan?

http://brightkite.com/

And, once again the Banks lose in Court. If they don't appeal to the House of Lords we'll have a final decision from the regulator by year-end. Of course a lot of people will say that compared with their other problems it's just a drop in the ocean to them now. As a good part of them are already in de-facto nationalisation it could well be the taxpayer who has to fork out.

A lot of people - especially in the Linux community - would like it that way, but the migration onto the desktop is inevitable. Support from MS and Apple! When was the last time you rang the MS support desk?

Surely the "main stream" on gaming is consoles? Well there's the disagreement you see. It has nothing to do with elitism. Either you are willing to turn your brain on or not. Either you are willing to try something different (and give it a fair chance) or not. Microsoft are assured of their continued gigabucks from the people that aren't, but they won't stem the slow but steady rise of open source. Being dumb, and stubbornly maintaining your ignorance, is expensive. BTW lots of people use Linux but don't even know they do. It's turning up in lots of domestic appliances - and phones quite soon now.

Compatibility with what? I know of a couple of people who also installed XP on netbooks. I also know of a couple of people who were converted to Linux trough them. The dumbed down interface provided on the eee's can be broken out of, but many people install Ubuntu. There's now a special distribution for them, and it's much better tailored to running out of flash than XP is. The people who went the Ubuntu route were the more computer literate, and generally get much more out of their machines. In the long run they are the people that matter. The new Toshibas already have Ubuntu installed. There's only one bit of paid-for design software I was keeping an XP boot partition for, and it took me by surprise the other week to see it's now released for Linux. When I come to upgrade that software to the next major release I will of course be opting for the Linux version. Installed the demo version and it works great. The Mac is a great help for this kind of expensive paid-for application, because when it's made to port to a Mac then there's very little development effort to release a Linux version too. The rapid rise of portable APIs like Qt are helping this process along. That said there's oodles of things you can do on a Linux machine (and for free) that it's often awkward and/or expensive to do with another OS. I can read and write legacy FAT and NTFS drives with Linux, and connect to a Windows (SMB) LAN, but the reverse isn't true with Windows, at least not without a lot of expense and hassle. Thus Windows will shortly be history here.

It wouldn't be an exception then; this is the way MS has always worked. One lousy major release followed by one quite stable one. You sucker folks into installing an upgrade then you make sure that they have to move on again. After another couple of years, and when they've forgotten the bad experience, knock out another bad experience dressed up as a major advance. The point is that all these releases, and near empty fancy boxes, are totally unnecessary. The OS could be continuously updated. But, if you do that, you lose the opportunity to sell the same old code time and time again to the same purchaser. Selling the same products to OEMs at a fraction of the price you or I can buy the shrink-wrap is another strategy. There's no need to charge three figures, it's just they've locked you in to their proprietary data formats, and their way of doing things. So you meekly shell out another wodge of cash, rather than make the effort to break out of the exploitation cycle. When they have to slash prices drastically to keep users they do; witness the competition Linux was giving them on netbooks and their knocking out XP to the OEMs for a few dollars a throw just to stem the rise of Linux on that class of machines. But, just so long as there's a dumb following, they will play it for every billion dollars it's worth.

As an amusing addendum to our discussion on the crafty right-wing Dutch MP - Mr VanWilders: The Muslim lord who was railing against the 14 minute film, but was forced to admit by Kirsty Wark he hadn't actually seen it (because he didn't have to), also didn't have time to stop on the motorway to send extended text messages. And, as a consequence... No doubt he will appeal on the grounds that his conviction is racially motivated, and that if he isn't released pronto civil disturbance will inevitably result. Well, there is a precedent for the home secretary intervening on those grounds!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7910110.stm First rational thing I've seen this government do in a long while! Give that minister a knighthood. And while you are at it give him a sensible job title; Minister for Digital Engagment sounds like he's running a computer dating agency!

Because you make the selections yourself. And, as I said, the sub is only to get rid of the ads every 15 minutes. That's how it's both legal and free.

http://www.spotify.com/en/ The subscription is only if you don't want an ad every 15 minutes.

A picture would help a lot. I think at this stage the owner has probably abandoned it.

I must own up to the same confusion a while back - which is how I recognised the cause!

In the Options drop down at the top right of the thread select Standard Mode. You've got Outline Mode selected. Nothing to do with which browser you are using.

The last (and only) time I was asked for any input was in the mid-70's. By one of the come and go firms of consultants. They listened, even agreed as the report seemed to echo some of what I'd written. Then zilch! I've never been consulted, written to, circularised, or had my attention drawn to any other form of meaningfull consultation since. Not long ago WDC were offered a platform for public notices here - totaly free of course. They simply ignored the offer. I wasn't even consulted about major changes outside my own house in Wansbeck! They just went ahead and did what suited them. The first I knew about this was when I heard the road drills. A chance to have input? Some chance! The brief time I lived in Blyth Valley the difference in attitude could't have been more marked. We were invited to the planning dept for a little soire to discuss future plans. Ever since the inception of Wansbeck there's been near total disconnection between local goverment and the local people who can make things happen. The reason for this only became entirely clear to me in my chance conversation with you-know-who. Councillor I'm greatful for that moment of candid honesty; formerly I thought you to be total fools. Now we both know who the fools are!

Come on Malc, you know it's just monopoly money now. The pretence of balancing budgets and "prudence" went out of the window long ago. The printing presses are about to start rolling - in the next few weeks we're told. We are going to attempt to print and borrow ourselves out of the biggest debt in all of history. All that's needed is coordinated action to see that all three major currencies fall at more or less the same rate, so nobody notices terribly much. The Yen is now out of play: they are now admitting to full-bown depression. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this but: Buy Gold! When the ship is going down break out the expensive cigars and the vintage port!

Yes, but it sometimes isn't as plain as it seems. A bit over a year ago I bought a new "English Language" Nokia N73 from an That online auction site that is in no way as good as Free Bedlington.co.uk Classifieds trader with stacks of ++++ feedback. It turned out to have a Chinese box and instructions and a non-standard data lead. Some sort of cheap version for the Asian market. Wouldn't even talk to the Nokia link software or re-flash - just identified itself to the PC as storage. Probably was "genuine" Nokia but nothing you'd buy from a proper phone shop. Seller ignored first complaint and I had to complain to That online auction site that is in no way as good as Free Bedlington.co.uk Classifieds. Even when I was promised a refund and returned it promptly they took weeks refunding and I had to complain again. Never refunded shipping and I had the return postage and insurance to pay to boot! Thing was it wasn't particularly cheap either. I could have bought good second hand for less. You don't have to; there are plenty of traders who will do it for you.

The best time to take photos is when you are ready to leave. All they can do about it is.. err.. ask you to leave!

I call it my Brown-Devastation Period. Another budget to spend - another reshuffle of the Titanic's deckchairs. Half the money spent on encouraging in-town small business, half the regulatory !*!@#, and we might start to get back some of the sense of community that has been lost through one thorougly bad planning decision after another.

A new £460 Nokia e90 smartphone for £100. What a bargain! http://www.tootoomart.com/product-1260176-...+Game+Function/ But look closely and you'll see it's a cheap dual band GSM phone dressed up to look like one. Does it even work as well as your £30 budget phone of reputable make? There's a million such cons. Beware of what you buy out there - especially on That online auction site that is in no way as good as Free Bedlington.co.uk Classifieds!

.. that it's historically bloody cold at the moment! The real question is why has it been so cold for so very long. And, as we can easily see, the Earth self-regulates to about 25c, even following some utterly cataclysmic random event. About five or six degrees warmer than it is today seems about average, but there's some hope of that in the next few hundred thousand years!

You are right, it's partial data, so a cunning deception of the global warming industry. Here's the full map over the past 30 years: The Orange areas are warming where the ice is thinning, and the Blue areas cooling, where the ice is thickening. As you'll observe in equatorial regions (where we are told people will roast to death/die of starvation over a couple of fictitious degrees change) there is in fact virtually no change at all. They have to sucker us on that score, and appeal to our concern for others, because a degree or two in Northern latitudes can only be good. We'd produce more food, use less heating, burn less fosil fuels, etc.