Brett
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Posts posted by Brett
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Yeah it is an excellent series and apparently the date for the second series has been brought forward from October to July
Movies Online - Walking Dead Season 2 coming July
The Walking Dead Season 2 was supposedly going to be arriving next October but it seems that AMC is preparing to unload the new season on us fans much sooner then we all expected. Emmy Award winning actor Bryan Cranston told New York Magazine ( via The Daily Blam ) that Walking Dead season 2 is coming in July, 3 months earlier then we all expected saying quote;It was a decision from AMC that they wanted to position us in July… They want to attract as many eyeballs as possible, away from the heavy competition of the September, November (or) January start.â€I watched the american broadcasts and the channel 5 show and unfortunately there are small portions missing on the channel 5 episodes, nothing major but enough to make you notice that there were bits missing, like when the motor home broke down and they dropped the infected person off at the tree. There was a bit where one of the characters drove away to find something to fix the motor home so in the 5 version it looked like they broke down, dropped the infected bloke off and then left without fixing the vehicle.
I am pedantic when watching films, programmes
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I flicked it on for Caged the Elephant on Saturday then resorted to my own music as it got tedious and annoying.
Not many acts that I would have liked to have seen to be honest.
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ATTORNEY: What was the first thing your husband said to you that morning?
WITNESS: He said, 'Where am I, Cathy?'
ATTORNEY: And why did that upset you?
WITNESS: My name is Susan!
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
WITNESS: Gucci sweats and Reeboks.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep,
he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
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ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the 20-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's 20, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?
WITNESS: Are you !*!@# me?
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ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a
new attorney?
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about medium height and had a beard
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_____________________________________
ATTORNEY: Is your appearance here this morning pursuant to a deposition
notice which I sent to your attorney?
WITNESS: No, this is how I dress when I go to work.
______________________________________
ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead
people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK? What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral...
_________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 PM
ATTORNEY: And Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you qualified to give a urine sample?
WITNESS : Are you qualified to ask that question?
______________________________________
And last:
ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a
pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began
the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and
practicing law.
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I would be very interested in reading what people thought about how the Job Centre interacted with them, especially if you wanted/needed some form of training or advice on employability.
If you don't want to make your comments public send me a PM but it would be handy to have some real anecdotal evidence to back up my claims that Bedlington needs some innovative employability solutions.
Are you wanting specifically about Bedlington job centre or other job centres included.
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Will any of this work be going on at a weekend John. Afraid I'm not around much during the week but more than willing to participate at the weekend when not at work.
Tuesday May 17th provisionally booked also.
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Good luck with the new job mate, was out of work for bloody ages not too long ago and it's so demoralising.
I also know what you mean about the Job Centre not being the most helpful of people but if you look at it from their angle and the people that they have to deal with on a daily basis (not jobseekers, the people who are going in just so they can get their money and have no intent on looking for a job). Can be quite patronising.
Just in time for summer :-)
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osama was just the fall guy, a figurehead for americas hate. in reality he only has a small band of 'warriors'.
Plenty more people who believe in the same ideals. Extremists aren't just going to give up because they have lost him, it's not a vampire story where everyone changes back if you take out the head vampire.
Bet the Americans are pleased that they got him, if we had got him we would have put him in Belmarsh, worried about his human rights and apologised to Pakistan for trespassing...
Nice to see that the conspirisists are already on the case too.
Hitler Confirmed Dead May 1, 1945, Osama Confirmed Dead May 1st 2011, 66 years gap...
Can't say that I'm happy he's dead to be honest but it will give closure for alot of families that have been directly affected with the loss of loved ones. I'm going to remain undecided about my thoughts on this until more details have been revealed.
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Thanks folks, turns out I was violently ill with some 24 hour bug the night of my birthday so just tucking into some cidre now :-)
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Thankyou all, I shall be investing my birthday money into a somerset company that presses apples to make some delightful drinks.
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Thankyou kind sir
Although I must have entered my DOB incorrectly when signing up and it's not my birthday until tomorrow so your actually early.
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Interesting read from another forum
Electoral dysfunction: Why democracy is always unfairIN AN ideal world, elections should be two things: free and fair. Every adult, with a few sensible exceptions, should be able to vote for a candidate of their choice, and each single vote should be worth the same.
Ensuring a free vote is a matter for the law. Making elections fair is more a matter for mathematicians. They have been studying voting systems for hundreds of years, looking for sources of bias that distort the value of individual votes, and ways to avoid them. Along the way, they have turned up many paradoxes and surprises. What they have not done is come up with the answer. With good reason: it probably doesn't exist.
The many democratic electoral systems in use around the world attempt to strike a balance between mathematical fairness and political considerations such as accountability and the need for strong, stable government. Take first-past-the-post or "plurality" voting, which used for national elections in the US, Canada, India - and the UK, which goes to the polls next week. Its principle is simple: each electoral division elects one representative, the candidate who gained the most votes.
This system scores well on stability and accountability, but in terms of mathematical fairness it is a dud. Votes for anyone other than the winning candidate are disregarded. If more than two parties with substantial support contest a constituency, as is typical in Canada, India and the UK, a candidate does not have to get anything like 50 per cent of the votes to win, so a majority of votes are "lost".
Dividing a nation or city into bite-sized chunks for an election is itself a fraught business (see "Borderline case") that invites other distortions, too. A party can win outright by being only marginally ahead of its competitors in most electoral divisions. In the UK general election in 2005, the ruling Labour party won 55 per cent of the seats on just 35 per cent of the total votes. If a candidate or party is slightly ahead in a bare majority of electoral divisions but a long way behind in others, they can win even if a competitor gets more votes overall - as happened most notoriously in recent history in the US presidential election of 2000, when George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore.
Borderline caseIn first-past-the-post or "plurality" systems, borders matter. To ensure that each vote has roughly the same weight, each constituency should have roughly the same number of voters. Threading boundaries between and through centres of population on the pretext of ensuring fairness is also a great way to cheat for your own benefit - a practice known as gerrymandering, after a 19th-century governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who created an electoral division whose shape reminded a local newspaper editor of a salamander.
Suppose a city controlled by the Liberal Republican (LR) party has a voting population of 900,000 divided into three constituencies. Polls show that at the next election LR is heading for defeat - 400,000 people intend to vote for it but the 500,000 others will opt for the Democratic Conservative (DC) party. If the boundaries were to keep the proportions the same, each constituency would contain roughly 130,000 LR voters and 170,000 DC voters, and DC would take all three seats - the usual inequity of a plurality voting system.
In reality, voters inclined to vote for one party or the other will probably clump together in the same neighbourhoods of the city, so LR might well retain one seat. However, it could be all too easy for LR to redraw the boundaries to reverse the result and secure itself a majority - as these two dividing strategies show.
The anomalies of a plurality voting system can be more subtle, though, as mathematician Donald Saari at the University of California, Irvine, showed. Suppose 15 people are asked to rank their liking for milk (M), beer (
, or wine (W). Six rank them M-W-B, five B-W-M, and four W-B-M. In a plurality system where only first preferences count, the outcome is simple: milk wins with 40 per cent of the vote, followed by beer, with wine trailing in last.So do voters actually prefer milk? Not a bit of it. Nine voters prefer beer to milk, and nine prefer wine to milk - clear majorities in both cases. Meanwhile, 10 people prefer wine to beer. By pairing off all these preferences, we see the truly preferred order to be W-B-M - the exact reverse of what the voting system produced. In fact Saari showed that given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire.
In the example above, simple plurality voting produced an anomalous outcome because the alcohol drinkers stuck together: wine and beer drinkers both nominated the other as their second preference and gave milk a big thumbs-down. Similar things happen in politics when two parties appeal to the same kind of voters, splitting their votes between them and allowing a third party unpopular with the majority to win the election.
Can we avoid that kind of unfairness while keeping the advantages of a first-past-the-post system? Only to an extent. One possibility is a second "run-off" election between the two top-ranked candidates, as happens in France and in many presidential elections elsewhere. But there is no guarantee that the two candidates with the widest potential support even make the run-off. In the 2002 French presidential election, for example, so many left-wing candidates stood in the first round that all of them were eliminated, leaving two right-wing candidates, Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, to contest the run-off.
Order, order
Another strategy allows voters to place candidates in order of preference, with a 1, 2, 3 and so on. After the first-preference votes have been counted, the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated and the votes reapportioned to the next-choice candidates on those ballot papers. This process goes on until one candidate has the support of over 50 per cent of the voters. This system, called the instant run-off or alternative or preferential vote, is used in elections to the Australian House of Representatives, as well as in several US cities. It has also been suggested for the UK.
Preferential voting comes closer to being fair than plurality voting, but it does not eliminate ordering paradoxes. The Marquis de Condorcet, a French mathematician, noted this as early as 1785. Suppose we have three candidates, A, B and C, and three voters who rank them A-B-C, B-C-A and C-A-B. Voters prefer A to B by 2 to 1. But B is preferred to C and C preferred to A by the same margin of 2 to 1. To quote the Dodo in Alice in Wonderland: "Everybody has won and all must have prizes."
One type of voting system avoids such circular paradoxes entirely: proportional representation. Here a party is awarded a number of parliamentary seats in direct proportion to the number of people who voted for it. Such a system is undoubtedly fairer in a mathematical sense than either plurality or preferential voting, but it has political drawbacks. It implies large, multi-representative constituencies; the best shot at truly proportional representation comes with just one constituency, the system used in Israel. But large constituencies weaken the link between voters and their representatives. Candidates are often chosen from a centrally determined list, so voters have little or no control over who represents them. What's more, proportional systems tend to produce coalitions of two or more parties, potentially leading to unstable and ineffectual government - although plurality systems are not immune to such problems, either (see "Power in the balance").
Power in the balanceOne criticism of proportional voting systems is that they make it less likely that one party wins a majority of the seats available, thus increasing the power of smaller parties as "king-makers" who can swing the balance between rival parties as they see fit. The same can happen in a plurality system if the electoral arithmetic delivers a hung parliament, in which no party has an overall majority - as might happen in the UK after its election next week.
Where does the power reside in such situations? One way to quantify that question is the Banzhaf power index. First, list all combinations of parties that could form a majority coalition, and in all of those coalitions count how many times a party is a "swing" partner that could destroy the majority if it dropped out. Dividing this number by the total number of swing partners in all possible majority coalitions gives a party's power index.
For example, imagine a parliament of six seats in which party A has three seats, party B has two and party C has one. There are three ways to make a coalition with a majority of at least four votes: AB, AC and ABC. In the first two instances, both partners are swing partners. In the third instance, only A is - if either B or C dropped out, the remaining coalition would still have a majority. Among the total of five swing partners in the three coalitions, A crops up three times and B and C once each. So A has a power index of 3 ÷ 5, or 0.6, or 60 per cent - more than the 50 per cent of the seats it holds - and B and C are each "worth" just 20 per cent.
In a realistic situation, the calculations are more involved. This diagram shows how the power shifts dramatically when there is no majority in a hypothetical parliament of 650 seats in which five voting blocs are represented.
Proportional representation has its own mathematical wrinkles. There is no way, for example, to allocate a whole number of seats in exact proportion to a larger population. This can lead to an odd situation in which increasing the total number of seats available reduces the representation of an individual constituency, even if its population stays the same.
Such imperfections led the American economist Kenneth Arrow to list in 1963 the general attributes of an idealised fair voting system. He suggested that voters should be able to express a complete set of their preferences; no single voter should be allowed to dictate the outcome of the election; if every voter prefers one candidate to another, the final ranking should reflect that; and if a voter prefers one candidate to a second, introducing a third candidate should not reverse that preference.
All very sensible. There's just one problem: Arrow and others went on to prove that no conceivable voting system could satisfy all four conditions. In particular, there will always be the possibility that one voter, simply by changing their vote, can change the overall preference of the whole electorate.
So we are left to make the best of a bad job. Some less fair systems produce governments with enough power to actually do things, though most voters may disapprove; some fairer systems spread power so thinly that any attempt at government descends into partisan infighting. Crunching the numbers can help, but deciding which is the lesser of the two evils is ultimately a matter not for mathematics, but for human judgement
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That's assuming everyone else wants Parma Violets, the rest of the world hates eating flowery girl sweets and couldn't give a monkeys about Parma Violets. It'll make no difference to the !*!@# we're expected to vote for. They're all products of the same public school system.
We're better off voting smarties to save eating dog !*!@#, which is why conservatives got in, the public don't really want them but couldn't stomach another 5 years of !*!@# and voting orange is a waste of a vote
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It used to be a massive event where pubs throughout the north east used to collect donated easter eggs on the route and the bikers would stop at each pub and collect the eggs on the way often going through seaton sluice to the Melton Constable and stop at the church along the south beach road and so on. Always a really good day out and attracted hundreds from all over.
Seen an advert in the Ashington Extra for it but wasn't sure if it was the same organisers with the route being different.
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Surely this can be more contained that what Cherynobl was though???
Still think the media hype about the whole situation has made people think that the effects of nuclear energy are devastating. The BBC reports were rediculous about it.
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A 2.2 million pothole plague has spread across the UK as a result of three cold winters and cutbacks in road maintenance.
Specially equipped AA patrols will be repairing potholes between breakdowns Now AA patrols with specially equipped vans will be tasked with filling in any potholes they come across when travelling between breakdown jobs.
AA Pothole Assist is a new service following in the footsteps of AA Fuel Assist and AA Battery Assist.
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I for one would not be travelling to the depot in Gateshead to pick anything up!
Just use private delivery for the extra £2.49, cheaper than the petrol....
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Bob walked into a sports bar around 9:58 PM.
He sat down next to a blonde at the bar
And stared up at the TV.
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*The 10 PM news was coming on.
The news crew was covering the story
Of a man on the ledge of a large building
Preparing to jump.*
*The blonde looked at Bob****and said,
"Do you think he'll jump?"
*
*Bob said,
"You know, I bet he'll jump."*
*The blonde replied,
"Well, I bet he won't."*
*Bob placed a £20 note on the bar and said,
"You're on!"
*Just as the blonde placed her money on the bar,
The man on the ledge
Did a swan dive off the building,
Falling to his death.*
*The blonde was very upset,
But willingly handed her £20 to Bob.
"Fair's fair. Here's your money."
*Bob replied,
"I can't take your money.
I saw this earlier on the 5 PM news,
So I knew he would jump."
*
*The blonde replied,
"I did, too,
But I didn't think he'd do it again."
*
*Bob took the money.*
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Hover over to see before and after shots....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm
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hmmmmm trust the scientists
Letter To Cameron
in Chat Central
Posted
Which, given the following assumptions.
The payment for a house is £238,874 (the current asking price average according to Rightmove.co.uk)
The car costs £25,000 and everyone would be driving chinese built MG's!!
The univesity fees remain unchanged at £9000 a year for a 3 year course
and they take a pension of £25,000 above their statutory requirement of £5200 a year on booze and fags.
See's them quite happily through until they reach the age of 76 before they get into debt.