Re: I better have a go with a neighbours guns then

That's not what the study tested: the study found that experienced shooter players are better at playing shoots than the average person, and play it in ways that in some games score more points (headshots vs bodyshots).

The study hasn't even shown that people improved through playing (though that is obviously true): in this study, people without interest in shooting games are seen to be worse at it than those who like them. So, have the non-players given it a pass long ago when they found they had no talent at their first tries, being untalented? Are the uninterested players not paying as much attention as those engaged by the genre? Etc. All hypotheses to reject before you conclude anybody has learned anything.

"compute it from your relatives"

Or conversely, we'll let you know that you're unrelated to your dad (like you always suspected).

"How we used to code"

... Simon's BASIC.

Re: Long-known

It's clearly fit-for-purpose, as Corbin is one of the biggest aftermarket motorbike saddle manufacturers in the world.

Made-to-measure (for bike, not rider) -- with one unhappy client for thousands sold? I wonder how his lawyer talked him into this money (and face) losing attack of legalitis.

Errr.... vote for the Transcendental Meditation candidate then?

It's not such an easy choice. If you actually were Red, you'd despise Ken "I'm the 1%" L... And if you were a reasonable person, you'd vote for Mad Boris nor Red Ken either.

So remind me, how's this easy? One represents London as a Gilbert & Sullivan-esque ship of fools, the other as living under a split-tongue principle-free demagogue.

------

"400,000 UK Chinese speakers, a large proportion of which will be voting in the London election": what are the actual numbers? Yes, a large proportion is entitled to, but what fraction actually will?

Campus here is full of Chinese speakers, most of them doing a business degree, short-term visitors and often struggling with English. I wouldn't bet many campaign on them in the local elections.

And call me back when it's an actual emergency...

If it's a horde of RABID ZOMBIE SKUNKS for example.

Re: I like the way these articles are getting less accusatory,

Mwah, it was just the less-palatable home truths that had to be said once and be done with...

No, actually, it is a perspective thing: the first ones were written from the recruiters' point of view and that cheesed off the majority. The writer showed recruiters' "thinking" in as blunt a way as possible. Someway somehow code monkeys lacked the empathy to follow that kind of logic (surprise!). They got hung up on the fact that the speaker clearly belongs to the lower steps on the evolutionary ladder (somewhere below the slime moulds, probably near the amino acids). They had a problem taking advice from an entity like that, or to check their planned steps from that viewpoint.

This article though is written from the employee's viewpoint, and people easily relate to that (surprise!).

Re: "will be tripe, recycled or not."

Tripe is by definition recycled.

But I'd cast a half eye on the trailer (as shown on Beeb site in context of the razzies), and I thought it was Sandler done up as Pacino, I and thought it quite well done.

Poor Al. He was looking quite bad last time I saw him (but then again, he was dying of aids, in "angels in america")...

Re: "Academic" publishing?

And if that's giving you faux choque at the state of academic publishing, have for example a look at the series containing "The philosophy of Harry Potter". Written by actual academics, not flack...

http://www.opencourtbooks.com/categories/pcp.htm

The thing is, "impact" is the metric-du-jour for academics, and an interview on local radio gets you further than most serious journal papers. So popsci dumbed-down and misrepresented beats quality any day.

"And yet /she/ is losing her license over all this? What kind of nonsense is that?"

Losing your license at that point is a moot point --- incident in 2004, convicted in 2008, so she's 4years not teaching anyway. The tragedy to me seems the four years of this creeping nightmare thing (neighbours and acquaintances don't tend to like people accused of this sort of thing), on top of all the costs and unemployability, with no sympathy from most people you'd ask for assistance.

From where I'm sitting, I'd never [falsely!] admit fault & pay the $100, even if that's a cheap and quick stop to haemorrhaging thousands. But after a year or two of this torture, I bet most people's self-respect and lives would be already destroyed so far that they'd sign anything.

A bit like the incredible confessions at witch trials.

Re: another day

That was Nokia's strategy, and see how big they became!

(/whisper)

Oh, I see, FIRST Nokia was big, THEN they invented this a-model-a-week strategy, THEN they collapsed and almost went bankrupt. Sorry, move along...

Anyway, naming your phone "The One" paints yourself a bit into a corner. What then "The disciple", "The disciple's follower", "The disciple's follower's manservant"?

Re: Great advertising

How does "interesting" to someone living in their parents' basement in Oklahoma translate into sales in that particular Chinese store? And if someone wants to flaunt around in their expensive western designer clothes and go to the Starbucks to unpack their new Apple gear, will they go to a place where scuffles are expected carried out by two large armies of guards in ill-fitting PLA-uniform knockoffs?

I'd at least hoped for turtlenecked goons.

Re: Top speed assistance?

It would seem stupid to use the assistance to reach a higher top speed --- it means you have to peddle more when going slower (typically: uphill), and extra speed when you have to soon brake (downhill, typically).

Here in hilly Exeter I'd pay good cash for this kind of bike: a battery-charging brake to make the inevitable downhill braking less of a waste, and an assist to get up the steepest bits (with a toddler and luggage on the back).

It doesn't seem to be that difficult to limit the electric engine to sub-15mph speeds.

"you would just have good small icons and make them bigger if required."

No.

You would need different images to look best at different sizes. You notice this for example easily if you try to scale a logo down to 16x16 for a favicon on a website: if the original image is quite complicated (many colours, especially gradients, a thin black line around a coloured field like the icon on this post, etc etc) then you may well have to first simplify, then increase the contrast and only then scale the image down --- otherwise it's just a drab mess.

Re: who?

Not even the usually-so-gullible-on-pseudoscience Beeb believed it! Their clip ended with the voiceover saying it looked more like computer generated than real footage.

So yes, who on earth believed it??

I like it that it boils down to "Dutchman admits physics laws still hold".

You mean one-eyed Leela from Futurama?

Now there's a cross-over.

Alternatively, they could out-engineer Apple...

Where the iMac has pushed the idea of all-in-ones onto the world, quite successfully, HP could do them one better and make all-in-one desktop/screen/scanner/printers. OK maybe leave out the scanner (or make it side-feeding) to stand it closer to the wall...

In my experience both HP pc's and printers break down after about 3years, so that's the synergy they were looking for.

Re: The perfect logo .....

And where are the other two androids, so together they can hold hands and play the Ubuntu logo (while petting a chameleon)? Can't be all pet penguins.

Re: Frustrating

"If any of this really were dangerous, planes would crash on a daily basis. They do not so let's stop worrying about it."

Thirteen months ago you would have argued living next to a Japanese reactor has never shown any bad consequences so it's 100% safe.

Not argueing that ipads could cause problems, just that your populist argumentation is a strawman.

Bad, weak troll.

"Anything on at X" being "the absolute worst ever in this galaxy"? Sad.

90%?

I give this proposal 85%.

[Arbitrarily, you lost the 5% from "perfect"(i.e., 90%) for punctuation.]

True dat,

and that's why you're an avid reader of the unbiased Conservapedia.

Re: Bus-powered?

all of 'em?

Speaking of Cool...

So what are the energy costs?

It's a bit silly to go to all these efforts for calculating cost of performing, but skipping the energy cost? Especially as you note that the seemingly-well-performing ones (wife's desktop, hydra-with-cooler) are clearly power hogs.

It is probably easy to get figures for the home computers (go to Maplin's/Radio Shack, buy power monitor for 15 or so quid), but the larger ones may be tricky to find? If not, it's an easily added column that would actually tell us something. The rest of the TOC (maintenance personnel + parts, expected lifespan) are too vague to add.

Re: "The cops out here have a carpenter on staff to replace doors they mistakenly kick in. "

It's skilled trade jobs. Also, maybe a bootmaker for cops who mangle theirs in the process.

Because he had his gills stuck inside the larger shark?

True.

"Metre is used as the standard spelling of the metric unit for length in all English-speaking nations except the USA, which uses meter" dixit fiddlepedia.

Alternatives?

Please list those alternatives to Mathematica's symbolic computing engine again? R? Gnuplot?! Octave!? "even emacs calc-el can do more"?? Ah, indeed, Macsyma is in your list, and does part of what Mathematica can on that topic.

The simple statement is that you need to have the entire above list to cover most topics handled by Mathematica. So it's all different interfaces and languages, and on the whole each to less depth.

R would be a possible exception, but then R is an emulation of S.

MB Air copy? Not the keyboard though!

The black-on-metal keys are what a PowerBook G4 looked like...

Wasn't that the nineties?

I remember in the late nineties a spate of wooden computer attributes --- keyboards, monitors, mice etc. Expensive-ish, low four figures for keyboards (peanuts compared to ugly bling-encrusted ones).

backwards music?

What happens if you switch earbuds? The music sounds as played behind you instead of in front of you -- so what? That happens anyways in many cases (see: car stereo).

It's not as if the music will suddenly play backwards (revealing satanic messages, unavoidably).

You can also play it for real instead.

I once encountered a moose running on the motorway just S-W of Stockholm.