There used to be a UNIX program called ‘spook’. You could get it to run each time you sent an email message and it would append a signature with phrases like ‘kill the president’, ‘bomb’ and other things like it, in order to distract any security services that were reading your email.

Perhaps we should all get that again.

*waves to the CIA* 😀

Nah you need this.[/url]

Mind, you may end up dissolving your way down to Australia! 😀

The 53Mb/s is the standard 802.11g connection.

The questions to ask are:

1. Do you have more than 1 computer in the house and do you talk to them a lot? (Apple TV, PS3, XBox with media)?
2. Is your house connection flakey?

If you only have limited devices in the house then you are limited speed-wise by your internet connection. On ADSL you’ll get a maximum of 24Mb/s on ADSL2+ which means that if you had an internal terabit connection to your PC then it would still receive data at the same as the ADSL connection. To increase the speed of t’internet I guess you’d need one of the Virgin cables to go up to 50Mb/s.

If you want more than 54Mb/s in your house then you’re looking at 802.11n which gives 108Mb/s (IIRC) and that would require a new router and PC interface.

OR put a wire in from the router to your PC. That could go to gigabit if you have the right bits either side or at least 100Mb/s.

And for the record, I’m reasonably anti-microsoft. If I were creating a large scale environment I would make it as Unix/linux based as I could but i’d be the first to admit the failings that those OS’s have and would have to include windows for all the same reasons I’ve highlighted above.

While I get your thrust, Samuri, and I can agree with some of what you are saying, I disagree with this. I do support a humungous number of UNIX servers and clients and, with some well thought out scripts and set-ups managing a large estate of linux/UNIX is a hell of a lot easier than managing a large amount of Windows machines (and *much* cheaper!). If anything adding a Windows machine into a large group of Linux/UNIX machines would increase support requirements exponentially.

Adding Mac/UNIX/Linux to a large base of Windows would incur some skills (though usually large organisations have a UNIX team already). Adding Windows to a large base of UNIX/Mac/Linux would do exactly the same. If you have a mix then there is nothing to worry about, and this looks as if where the OP is coming from.

If I was to create a large scale environment there would be a large sticker on every door with a ‘No Windows’ sign on it. Save me a massive amount of moolah in software fees and support!

What I always have trouble with is rice. I always find no matter what I do, change water volume, chuck in a bit of salt, oil, etc I still get stodgy rice. Ive countered it by draining it two to three times to get rid of the starch, rinsing the rice through with hot water and chucking back on heat but its a faff. I dont buy cheap rice either and I dont boil the hell out of it, just a small simmer. Any suggestions Mrsflash?

I have tried the Delia method and it does work every time for me:

Take a volume of rice that you want and put it in a pan.
Take twice that volume of boiling water and add.
Turn gas to lowest setting and leave the lid on, only peeking towards what you think is the end.
DO NOT STIR – that will release the starch causing it to get sticky.
When the water has been absorbed it is ready.

Oi mt, work out how to spell ‘indefensible’.

There. Grammar Nazi started. Please continue…. 😆

The third rule of fight club is always warm the pot before you make tea.

That is why I went for IDNet. I *know* that they don’t do packet shaping (though I don’t download torrents and stuff) and I pay for a limit of 30GB/month.

If an advert says ‘unlimited’ it should mean ‘unlimited’. If there is a fair usage policy then what that is should be defined and not left to the imagination, else when the networks get more and more congested the ‘fair use’ definition becomes tighter and tighter.

Each firm should define what the fair usage policy means. It is only fair.

We get 50p per day if we commute in by bike/motorbike or car share. I started commuting last year and go in a couple of times a week (Its quite a distance for me!) and have made £25 so far. We get given ‘bonus bonds’ or equivalent to spend in the canteen.

Maybe not working harder but possibly contributing more benefit to society – hard to tell which is why we allow market forces to dictate salaries. Except for firemen…!

I am not sure I agree with you here. I suppose it gets to the semantics of ‘contributing more benefit to society’. And that assumes a completely free market and no employment laws. A true Darwinian ‘dog-eat-dog’ scenario which is always trumpeted by governments/right-wingers but never really happens.

If some of the bankers decided that they were acting immorally, and causing problems for the economy, there bank would just have gone bust wouldn’t it?? who would invest in a bank making half as much as all the others?

Some if not most of the banks would have gone bust if we – the taxpayer, including person-on-a-very-low-wage – hadn’t bailed them out. The money they were making at the time was monopoly stuff.

As far as I’m concerned:

I don’t really care. I would love to “earn” > £150k pa. Of course it is obvious that someone who “earns” that much is working at least ten times harder than someone who earns £10k pa.

Hopefully some of the eejits in the banking sector that helped cause this issue (admittedly with the numpties that were greedy for mortgages) will take heed and leave.

Not forgetting Danny Cipriani….

Here’s some more rugby players. Excuse my slobbering.

Claudio Capelli, Swiss gymnast!

Now I thought about posting on this for a little while. Then annoyance got the better of me. I find it quite staggering that a group of people I would ordinarily consider to be fairly well-rounded and analytical can come up with such a bunch of reactionary toss. The fact is none of you categorically know what the police based the decision to arrest on, but are quite happy to assume they were wrong because there were no charges? It demonstrates a quite staggering misunderstanding of the issues, and that guff about it being linked to G20! Gimme a break! It’s like reading the Daily Mail in reverse.

Fair enough. But if they have not been found guilty of anything then they should be released. The efforts to deport smack of someone attempting to cover up embarrassment. To say otherwise would be reactionary toss of the Daily Mail variety.

As they try and sort out the mess currently being swept under the carpet by the current Labour fools, so pretty much the same as last time Labour were in power….

In reality though, it is all bollox though, isn’t it? Labour has turned into Tory and both sides have fallen in love with what they call ‘free trade’ and market liberalisation. They both talk the same rubbish, hold up a Rizla paper between themselves and say they have the best management. They’re in love with the fat cats and don’t give a damn about anyone outside their magic circle.

When Labour came in (after inventing themselves to be the New Tories) people thought this ‘middle way’ crap was going to be about capitalism and liberalism working hand-in-hand. Nah, it was just pure unfettered capitalism and look where that has got us.

As a way of looking at it think of both parties from, say, 25 years ago. Labour has changed massively (in the wrong direction IMHO) but the Tories look more or less the same.

Still, we get the governments we deserve.

I’m really fond of Hopscotch but I’m a silly old sod.

Most products these days do AAC (better than MP3, sound-wise) and iTunes store is now all DRM-free so check the codecs of your player, it may play out of the box just by importing or drag & drop.

Don’t re-encode to MP3 if you don’t have to as it will strip more out of the music! If you must do this then re-encode as MP3.

All long-term unemployed under 25s to be offered job or training

Hmm, how’s that going to work? Where are the jobs coming from?

What about if you are over 25? Do you no longer need a job?

I’m seriously miffed that we had the chance to do a lot more stuff like encouraging people onto bikes and not put so much money into cars but didn’t. The money for the cars will mainly move abroad. We’ll be giving people in Germany and the US money.

I’m trying to commute as much as poss (18 miles each way). I find that once I have gone to work and back on the bike and had tea etc. the next morning my body feels like lead and I am so tired I can’t get up and out. The morning after though, I am fine.

I want to try and break this habit. Any ideas?

Dunno. Can you singlespeed it?

Website that’s good for this kind of thing:

Thinkbroadband[/url]

don’t be so picky. Religion isn’t really something you can define, you just have to do a lot of handwaving and point out it’s obvious really…

Ah, I see. A bit like that chap Magnus Pike but in a dress?

Define what you mean? I’m not sure I understand the question.

Some people may say X is a positive for religion whereas others would say that the same X is negative.

I’m off to look at bikes. More interesting.

This could be the problem. I put in a ‘mac.com’ address in the admin email address and yahoo/mail systems didn’t like it – it had to be an address that was in the domain that the forum was in (in my case yahoo.co.uk). Don’t set-up an SMTP gateway unless you have been told to do so; let PHP sort that out itself.

Which ISP are you with? I run natsmtb.com on yahoo and every so often you will get mail failures.

Have you managed to get rid of the spammers yet? If you drop me a message I’m happy to chat. It took me a while to stop porn filling up the forums!

Doesn’t bother me too much (Safari 3) but on my MacBook I found that coming to the forums drained my battery much faster than normal. Then I counted up to six flash videos on each page. One or two I’ll ignore or read, but six were causing the fans to kick in and the machine CPU got hot all the while. Hence ClickToFlash on Safari and Flashdance on Firefox.

If they were static images then no probs, though.

Have I missed something in my life? I always thought homosexuality was a state of mind or cant think of the word, inate or hard wired whateverNOT an act?

Damned right. Looks folks, hard as it is to understand on times – I never ever ever made a choice one day “Oo, I think I’ll be gay from now on.” I grew up fancying my sisters’ boyfriends thinking that everybody was the same as me. I thought the reason that boys made out they liked girls was a front, exactly what some people think about gay people. But fortunately I looked about and grew up, realising that we’re all different. And that is good.

Women are wonderful people. I like them loads. I just don’t want to go near their bits! Sooner kick-start a jumbo jet! 😀

see, that seems to be a common misconception. Not sure where you get the idea that Christianity supports conscription.

To be fair, activeDuty:

From google –

Results 1 – 10 of about 1,220,000 for evangelical church. (0.22 seconds)

I know someone in an evangelical church. Scary. From ‘evangelicalchurch.org’ (the top hit on google):

The Evangelical Church is a movement of “Harvest-focused, Holiness-fueled” churches committed to establishing healthy multiplying churches that proclaim the Gospel of free and full salvation from all sin for all people. It is our intent to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus Christ to make disciples of all nations.

I don’t see this as a misconception. Could you tell me how this is not true? I thought the 1990s were to be the decade of evangelicalism according to the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time?

And don’t start on the ‘Jesus Army’. If he existed and was a nice bloke he would be rotating in his grave at a high speed with that bunch…

househusband banned for having cats. Ewww.

Go on, I dare you……

I don’t consider religionists ‘fruityloop’ but I find it very hard to understand them. Still, if they want to believe in the christian/muslim/chinese/hindu/aztec/martian gods then that’s their business. Just leave me out of their faith until I come calling (the number of times I have been ‘invited’ to go the ‘Alpha course’ [read: very poor brainwashing attempt]….).

While others would consider me a hard-core atheist I believe I am omni-agnostic. You cannot prove a negative (i.e. there is/are *no* god(s)) so there must be an infinitesimally small chance that any of them exist. Therein lies the rub – it is *any* of them. Zeus/Apollo/Flying Spaghetti Monster/Invisible Pink Unicorn/Christian god/Muslim god/Hindu gods. I believe in them all to exactly the same extent!

Which bring up something else – a person of religion X, while themselves consider themselves of faith, are usually much more vehemently atheist about god Y, which isn’t in their pantheon. Odd that.

One more interesting thing is the concept of the devil/beezulbub etc. You could argue that the abrahamic faiths are not really a monotheistic faith but a duo-theistic faith with the ‘good’ god being ‘god’ and the evil god being ‘the devil’. Still, the devil isn’t discussed much in the bible but so much is made of it. Stick, I guess as opposed to the carrot of ‘heaven’ (which could bring us into the ‘pure-land’ view of some buddhist branches but lets not go there!).

What percentage of suicides/attempts are from children raised in religious homes? What percentage from secular homes? Where’s the evidence that religion leads to suicide? Britain has one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, I believe, yet it is arguably the most secular country.

Source please? I’d say that France is a more secular state – look at the hoohah regarding the wearing of islamic dress…

As a source on my behalf (though not looked at in detail):

religioustolerance.org

But, looking at extremes and then using extremes to characterise all religion is not helpful, useful or constructive.

That is a poor attempt to avoid answering a question. I was not using extremes to characterise all religion. I was asking a specific question, which you attempted to broaden and hence ignore. You asked me if bringing a child up in a religious household could be deemed abuse. I answered ‘sometimes’. I take it then that in extreme cases such as this you must agree with me but didn’t want to actually say it. Unless you mean that bringing up a child in a religious household – regardless of the religion or extreme within – is good?

And I repeat. You can believe anything you want. Just don’t ask me to either agree with you. (you meaning ‘anyone’ – English is crap at only having one ‘you’!). And if it impinges upon human rights (pope/condom etc.) then I will make my political stand against you.

And I still stand by my point. A foetus cannot be of a certain religion. A small baby cannot be. Only when a person has reached a level of maturity to question, analyse and accept/reject views could they in all honesty be called of a certain religion.

I was asked to be a godfather for a child. I agreed with the caveat: “I will not teach him only about christianity as you know I don’t believe, but about *every* religion, including none. When he’s old enough to make up his own mind then fine.” They agreed. I did. Hopefully the young man will grow up questioning everything until he forms his own opinions.

it’s funny though, I find most of the spouting is done by the evalgelist atheists on here.

I guess that will be a backlash to what has happened previously. I’ve been spouted at for most of my adult life because of my sexuality, just not on here.

Someone writes something innocuous on a bus and the world is up in arms, yet you go past many CoE churches and they have (really bad pun) shouts to believe in their story. I’ve been accosted on the street to talk about Jesus (I politely decline the invitation) and you get nutters on the street shouting that we should believe in god or burn in hell. Or people trying to push tracts into your hands with quotes in from their particular book.

Then, from the outside I see the argument forming. I’ve read the bible. I’ve read the Dhammapada. I’ve tried the Koran but it gave me a headache. I’ve also read Hitchens and Dawkins. Dawkins is not ‘shrill’, a ‘messiah for atheists’ or any other claptrap like that (usually shouted by journalists who wish to sound right-on or trendy). He puts forward an argument, not a lot more, with the statement “Prove it and I’ll believe it and I’ll join you.”. If people *really* want to get knickers entwisted I suggest you read the serious of tracts published by Bertrand Russell, entitled “Why I Am Not A Christian”. Quite deep. As I recall he believed the only positive thing that Christianity has done was to align calendars.

What I have noticed is the labelling of anyone who has the temerity to question any religion as ‘New Atheists’ (their caps). It is a convenient thing to do – group people you don’t like under a label not of their choosing so you can then attack it. Human behaviour, eh?!

Oo, just as an aside question, Miketually – would you believe that a child being brought up in the Phelps family with their strange religious views – ‘godhatesfags’ I believe the website is called – is not abuse also?

Unfortunately there are arguments when you get to extremes or very ingrained dogma!

You agree that bringing a child up within a religious home is tantamount to child abuse?

From the number of suicide attempts I had to deal with when in Switchboard from catholics the only answer I can give – which will get you upset is: ‘sometimes, yes’.

Try and live with yourself when some silly sod in a frock is telling you that what you are is evil, vile, despicable and you will rot in hell for it. To ask you conversely: you think that is not-abuse?

I went to religious school. The *amount* of times we had to pray every day. Good grief, if that wasn’t enough to turn me against religion then nothing would. I can still remember the creed – we had to spout this every day – without even understanding what it meant, never mind agreeing. It was like the times tables we had to do!

I see darrel’s point to a certain extent.

I respect the person, but refuse to respect the religion. If a person believes in the Christian god, Zeus, Apollo, the Hindu/Chinese/Martian gods then I really don’t care. Happy Christmas/hanuka/barmitzvah, whaever. Live and let live. If, however, they then start spouting their ‘stuff’ at me (usually: gay=go to hell, pass go, don’t collect £200 or telling me how to live my life) then I let at ’em with both barrels as they have crossed the line. It usually ends with me asking ‘Well where did your god come from then?’ and them storming off.

Also where politics is concerned if religious groups want to advise governments – as non-governmental organisations (note: not within govt itself) then fair enough. Just expect me to stand against you when you want to affect *my* rights.

As for the kids thing – I do agree with Darrell. How can a 2 year old be a Christian when they cannot even read the book? Let the child grow up, give all the information and let him/her choose for themselves. I have seen a serious number of gay people (usually catholics, for some reason) really screwed up by they way they were brought up.

Got a DC04 and after a single issue with the tube it is still going strong after 6 years.

Vendor told me that he was fixing a lot of dysons. He also, after a lot of prodding, told me he SOLD a lot of them. As a result he’s more like to fix them. If you only sell one Miele a year then it is unlikely you’ll need to fix it. If you sell a bazillion dysons then you’re more likely to seem ’em back. Simple statistics really.

Music, programming and, erm, **** I s’pose! 😀

So xherbivorex let me get this straight:

You don’t get smashed out of your brain and act like a d*ck.
You don’t get skinned up and act like a d*ck.
You’re a vegan Iyou are difficult to cook for you know, I’ve got a mate like that!) which means you value life.
You’re 40+ – you are mature.
You like playing on bikes – you still have a fun side.

F*cking hell man, what is *NOT* to like for a woman? Stop putting yourself down. Kick her into touch. She may be somewhere else but she’s USING YOU as an end-stop. Get on the interweb thing, at least three of my mates have met their wives through that!

Christ man, if I weren’t married to my bloke I’d be after you like a shot*!

* – for the humour impaired, yes I know he’s straight and therefore not interested.
– for the humour impaired who understand the internet: 😀