Re: Singapore?

Singaporeans have exceptional English already lah, but the country itself is duller than a weekend in Bognor Regis.

Still, it's definitely worth a visit if you didn't spend most of your formative years hopping around SE Asia. (Malaysia,Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia: jungles Mountains, ruined temples, orangutans! Singapore... Oh look an electronics store.)

Re: $100 Nexus?

If there's a nexus 10, I would be sorely tempted.

So very sorely.

Re: Silly Question...

Nothing, you don't lose experience, gold or even get repair costs (beyond those you'd get for being in any fight and not dying) when you PvP in WoW.

All you need to do is run from the graveyard, back to your body and you're good to go again.

How long? Not long.

I saw a guy do it in about 12 minutes last week.

He was using recruit a friend though (bonus levelling).

Just normally? A month, maybe 2, playing pretty casually, (no more than an hour at a go, perhaps 3 sessions in a weekend). It's nothing like a grind now. Which is good in some ways, but I did kinda like it the old way.

Re: challenge accepted

World Of Warcraft

Diablo 3

Diablo 2

Warcraft 3

Starcraft 2

Starcraft

you get the idea, Blizzard release everything on Mac and Windows. Which is great because on Mac it uses OpenGl rendering so it works a treat on Linux too.

Re: Sounds even worse than durian fruit

Durian is delicious, so delicious that I am actually scheduling my holiday next year to Malaysia to coincide with the Durian season.

God I love that fruit. The smell actually makes me hungry now.

Re: Bag Selection.

My Wenger bag has a chest strap but no waist strap.

It's not a great issue for me, though I appreciate the chest strap when I stop off to get some milk, beer, wine other heavy grocery on the way home.

My hiking rucksack has a waist strap, but it's a lot larger than my backpack.

Re: I love my Wenger Backpack

I just realised I'm a Wenger backpack fanboi. Oh well.

Re: New Meaningful Register Units of Battery Capacity Needed

Oh it's a fine normal measurement, but we need some kind of reg measurement.

So standard light up santa hours, for example, or perhaps an equivalent such as "That's as much energy as eating X fruit pastilles per minute for Y hours" or the like.

Actually fruit pastilles per minute for so many hours sounds like an excellent unit of measurement.

Re: Don't care.

Yeah, those fools being born in a country like that!

We should completely ignore their rights because they chose to be born in an islamic country. Clearly everyone in said country is 100% behind such actions.

Yup, gotta be the case, right?

Re: "And relieve stress"

Ah I missed the alu bit.

Spend too long working with steel pipes and look where it gets you.

Re: So what does American spelling of LASER stand for then

And size of course.

Re: "the chair is baked slowly at a low temperature to purify it"

And relieve stress in the heat affected zone too.

Re: Will every milk bottle

No, but the milk might well become wee.

Those signs mean nothing.

If I want to find oriental/indian food supplies in my local Tesco, I head to the aisle marked "Polish" ,"World foods" (can't remember the actual name, something on those lines) is only Fajitas and Mexican food.

If I want ingredients for a cake, flour is under "ingredients", caster sugar is under "Eggs" and baking powder is also under "Eggs", the flour is about 8 aisles from the sugar and baking powder.

If I want tapas, it's under "Sausages and Bacon"

The signs are not there to guide you, they're there to confuse. This is why people ignore them. They impart absolutely no useful information in the vast majority of cases.

I hate supermarket signs.

Re: Kings Cross

No, it's actually in the middle of the tracks.

Platforms 9 & 10 face each other, though the half cart has been shifted to the concourse.

Re: Oh FFS

Yup, (ex)astrophysicist here and I never heard a physicist ever call it the god particle.

It doesn't even make sense as a name. Might as well call photons the Lucifer particle, it makes more sense.

Re: Who will buy them?

I was actually looking at one of them, packed to the gunwales with music, as a travel phone with a cheap PAYG SIM in.

My travel phone (nokia E65) is getting somewhat long in the tooth, and I expect the battery life to be better on a new phone with a lower spec.

Re: Darwin rules

As a cyclist, I quite agree that there's a lot of awful cyclists out there. Last Friday I had no fewer than three of them cut me up or pull out without warning when I was cycling home.

I tried to explain to my missus that the fine for pulling into traffic without looking should be a limb, but she thought that was harsh.

Re: rewards

Quite.

We're not great at converting our massively important research breakthroughs into profits sadly.

Oh well, it'll keep the kebabs cheap.

Re: I still don't know

Hmm, I'd probably just use my phone for that, (well I have Spotify premium).

At work so far the results have been "as a remote control" and "to read comics on."

Honestly, the comic book argument is the one I've found most compelling so far. I just need to work out how to hold one for more than 30 minutes without it hurting.

Re: How did they spot two worlds orbiting each other without a star?

If the planets pass between us and any star we're looking at, there's a chance we can see them. Doesn't necessarily have to be their own star, they could just pass in front of us like ET in front of the moon.

Re: Automation?

http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/11/gizmo_week_feature_beginners_guide_to_home_automation/

That's the actual automation article, this article is just the victim of an incorrect link.

Re: Probably going to sound like a new age person here

True, computers make us dependant, which is why I said that the basics should remain in place.

But is the dependancy really any greater when it's to a computer than to a book?

I use google, wikipedia and the like extensively in my everyday life. I regard the knowledge of how to intelligently and accurately use these tools as a skill in and of itself. Yes, I grew up having to look in books to find out what I needed to know, did it make it stay in my head better? I honestly couldn't say.

What I can say is that I have a much broader knowledge of things I learnt since I left formal study and started just looking into things that interested me on the web. True, it mightn't be as detailed but largely I would say that's my fault rather than the medium from which I learn.

We have so much knowledge now, so much data in existence, that aside from your specialist area(s) a broad and shallow knowing is about all you can expect. With that I have to say that the internet has massively increased the scope and depth available to anyone connected to it (who reads the appropriate language)

By all means keep teaching arithmetic, literacy and the basic sciences as we've done for years, these methods work. But when it comes to humanities and to a lesser extent higher sciences (though I can see a tablet being extremely useful when learning physics, part of the reason I hated using a laptop in lectures was because I couldn't lob a quick diagram in), take advantage of the fact that we have much better technology and better resources available to us now.

I have a rose-tinted dream of history projects about the second world war being created with interviews from survivors, video of the events and the like interspersed between the text. Of lots of young children thinking of tablets and PCs the way I think about pens and paper. Your school work would be stored on the school servers, so the actual machine you used to access it would be nearly irrelevant. Though the kids could be encouraged to personalise their machines so they have a proper link to their achievements, a better link than covering a book in leftover wallpaper like I used to! Almost makes me wish I was back at school again now.

Re: Probably going to sound like a new age person here

Actually now I think about it, I was writing and playing Space Invaders on my ti-83 at 14, so technology misuse was already in force!

Didn't do me any harm etc.

Re: Probably going to sound like a new age person here

I would say year 9 (that's 14 right?) is a lot too late to get children to start using laptops in lessons, by about 9 years.

Probably at the wrong stage in development too, when I was 14 I regularly used my pens to doodle instead of write, or play battleships with the boy I sat next to. I don't think teenagers are generally much good at concentrating anyway.

Re: Damm

I did study astronomy,

Here I am, writing scripts.

So yeah, it's much of a muchness.

Have you used cable?

Aside from throttling (A sin in and of itself), I've never had it not run at the stated speed, within a couple of hundred Kb/s and I've been on Virgin/Telewest since 1999 or so. Generally it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Full disclosure, I used to work for Virgin, in a call centre (which would make me hate them you'd think.)

It doesn't matter that they are uninhabitable at all.

What matters is that we have detected a planet of a size similar to our own, instead of the much larger ones we've been seeing until now. This means that we could start to detect planets of the right size and composition in the goldilocks zone of other stars.

That's when the fun begins.

I would guess it's from facebook coins and their gaming networks.

Facebook take a nice slice of every transaction in a game now (much to the chagrin of my dev friends), so there's a lot of money falling into their laps from games and apps. While I don't much like Facebook, I can happily admit that they know how to make a couple of quid.

In lakes.

Close but no cigar.

It was arsenical DNA where arsenic replaced (some of?) the phosphorus that is normally present. Carbon would still be needed.

If they don't use carbon to make their long chains, they would need to live on a world with a massively different chemistry, and temperature, to ours. We look for life like us because it's most likely that we would be able to understand, interact with and recognise such life. If there were life that was completely alien, how would we know it was alive?

If you can effectively answer that question a lot of people would be very interested to hear that answer.

I try and hum it through my nose, which sounds nearly the same to me.

Damn it, I need to re install it and dig out my floppies... oh balls. I don't have a floppy drive any more.

Do they even make them any more?

KHAAAAAAAN!