Re: I'm not sure what the point it.

What's the point? What's the point of anything new and untried? Usually something useful comes of it. People ask what was the point of the Apollo programme, but it led to modern CNC machining, fire-retardant paint, cordless drills, and so on.

And, no doubt, people enjoy doing it, which is worth far more than any useful tech spin-offs.

Re: Maybe

Yes, we do try to accomodate other peoples' cultures. That's what makes us a more attractive target for immigration than most other places, and why we, with the help of immigrants, do so much better than most other places, attracting the best, brightest, most driven people from those other places.

Re: The welsh lobby

I'm sorry but it's absolute bollocks to say that there are any significant number of Welsh people who have difficulty with English. Welsh monolingualism has been rare since the 50s, so any that are left will be very old indeed. The best thing that those who love the Welsh language can do is to let it die with dignity instead of bleating and whinging.

Re: Why don't you...

I was born in the UK in 73 and had never heard of this programme. I suppose I just had good parents who made sure that I didn't need to take the advice of a piece of furniture if I wanted to know how to amuse myself.

Re: Vaporware

Yes, this would produce more kinetic energy than the electricity put in, when in use. Whether there's a net energy gain I don't know - you have to consider the energy cost of manufacturing the fuel pellets, and of boosting them out of the atmosphere so that you can use them without all those pesky NIMBYs getting cross about the thermonuclear explosions.

Re: Vaporware

They talk about pellets the size of a grain of sand. At that sort of scale, it's not difficult <handwave handwave> to make solids behave like fluids. Or to transport them in a fluid.

Re: The most amazing thing about this....

No customers for months? Back in 1999 in the dot-com boom that described an awful lot of people who were very happy in their not-jobs!

Re: I upvoted you

Being able to play offline matters, because although people might have broadband at home, they don't have it all the time. For example, people might want to play while travelling.

Re: If Mobes and fondleslabs

Waddaya mean that there are no other commercial entities that could offer you an alternative service? The service is the games. If the console is unlocked, you can run a game from any publisher who cares to support your platform, not just Nintendo.

Re: Are you kidding?

and pass the savings on to people who don't want to attach their phones to a projector or TV. ie, most users. Seems sensible.

Re: Tongues untied

We can know how Latin was pronounced by reading descriptions in Latin of how it's pronounced, and can also get useful information from poetry - some pronunciations work better than others to fit the metre, for example.

Re: Re-ThornH

An iPad might be the modern equivalent of the back of a fag packet, but back when I worked in metal bashing, just about all my employer's products started off as rough sketches on the back of a fag packet, either in a meeting room with our customers, or on the shop floor to fix a production cock-up. Being able to easily transfer sketches from fag packet to CADDS would have been Quite Handy.

Re: Surprise, surprise

And also unsurprisingly, almost all the games available, including those from the big companies, are shit.

The good games are those made by one or two people just to earn a bit of beer money. Thus it has always been.

Re: No, not exactly

The iPhone options are more expensive than a stand-alone unit? Really? Are you sure? You're looking at about 80 quid for a stand-alone TomTom device, according to Amazon, or 40 quid for the TomTom app.

Re: Kristian Walsh

Christina Aguilera might not be going hungry, but the session musicians who appear on the record might. And if you pirate Skyfall, Daniel Craig and Judi Dench won't go hungry but Lara Dunleavy (trainee hairdresser) and Joe Cassar (carpenter) might.

Re: Jason Hindle Couple of $$$?

No, it wasn't $20 for one person. It was $8, plus a $12 fine for being a big fat porker.

Re: One hour

Well, it is in the French half of the country, not the hard-working German bit.

Re: wow...

Diesel doesn't go boom, but a big tank full of the stuff is bloody heavy, so you don't want it very high up.

Re: No shuffle?

It does? Does this mean that they finally fixed that bug in iOS 6?

Re: @JDX

> Amazon seem to want to get out of the e-Reader market

No, they are maybe getting out of the bit of the market that you are interested in, because hardly anyone apart from you is interested. If you want to look at large pre-formatted documents, then other solutions to the problem are available, namely some random cheap Android tablet. You can get something second-hand off ebay for nearly free as you hardly need the latest and greatest for looking at documents.

You might not like it, but the profitable bit of the market is cheap devices with long-lasting batteries for people to read novels on. The profit, of course, coming from the books, not the device. I, like you, sometimes use my Kindle to look at data sheets and papers. But I don't get those from Amazon, so there's no profit there for them, so there's no motivation for them to produce special hardware for me.

Re: @sabroni (was: @Flocke Kroes: Religious truth depends on faith)

It's important to separate the practices of Buddhism from Buddhism. You can have either one without the other - you can practice without believing, you can believe without practicing, or, of course, you can do both or neither. Buddhism, as opposed to the practices of Buddhism (mindfulness, meditation, giving up worldly attachments etc), is incompatible with Christianity, because of the belief in multiple bodily reincarnations (Christians get at most one, IIRC, at judgement day), because of salvation (enlightenment) through neither faith nor works, and because of personal responsibility for your deeds (no repentance and absolution, just karma).

Terminator, because judgement day.

> I come from a parish where the average level of education is a PhD...

There are some really fucking stupid PhDs out there ...

Re: Not So

> bum book

Oh you're a card you are. Have you considered a career as a comedian?

Re: Meanwhile, in the real world...

I wanted to become a cricket umpire, but to even sign up for training you need to be CRB checked. That's something I refuse to do because I don't want busy-bodies prying into my life and I refuse to co-operate with stupidity. So I'm not a cricket umpire, and English cricket suffers from a desperate shortage of qualified umpires.

Why is the CRB check even needed? It's not as if umpires, standing out in the middle of a large flat field where everyone can see them, are going to indulge their wicked fantasies in a bit of kiddy-fiddling.

Re: What to do with it?

butcher it, eat it.

Re: Why?

Who cares about longevity when the things are so cheap? Yer average geek - the only ones who will actually overclock, because people using them for things that *matter* like education are more conservative with their hardware - can afford to replace the things every week or two.

Re: "You are just whining because you can't afford shiny stuff."

We're talking about Microsoft tablets here, not shiny stuff. Shiny stuff is cheaper.

Re: And?

This does *not* look like a good upgrade from my 3GS. Just about the only feature of any interest is the extra row of icons on the screen, and that, my friends, is not worth several hundred quid.

Re: "content"? discontent

With a little bit of shell scripting anything can be turned into a podcast!

Tromeo and Juliet is surely the best they ever did

Re: MySQL was faster in the early days.

" It's just that as soon as you need Real Guarantees it drops the ball. You can shuffle backends around a bit, but that just makes it more of a hobbyist jumble "

This used to be true, maybe a decade and a bit ago, but MySQL has grown up and is a Proper Database now. It is the back end for an awful lot of *very* big systems that deal with huge amounts of traffic. iPlayer, for example, uses MySQL databases, and I've used it for everything from medical systems to telecoms billing.

These days, it's just another database. It has its idiosyncracies, like all complex software, but it's a damned useful tool in a lot of cases.

Re: Sorry ...

It can't raise revenue for the treasury, as booze tax is levied based on the amount of alcohol, not on the price.

Re: 500-1000??

Probably the same morons who send 500 or more illiterate text messages a month

Re: Praise tapes

No mechanical problems on tapes? are you having a laugh? have you ever actually used tapes for backup?