So, could I pay you to 3D model my house then I could change the colours of the walls and floor coverings, and see what they look like?

There are actually quite a few home design programs (IMSI Floorplan 3D, Punch, several others that I can't remember right now) that you can use for this, that will be cheaper and perhaps easier to use than a full CAD modeller.

I'd have more time for Claire Short if she'd resigned at the same time as Robin Cook instead of voting for the war and then resigning after the event.

how do i clear that out porterclough (on FF)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

Most decent banks only ask for particular letters/numbers of your password so that a keylogger only gets part of it and also has to analyse the web page to figure out which part.

A spoof site only has to ask for 2 digits of your 4 digit security code twice… two other bits of information as well and they're away. I can't understand why all banks aren't providing card readers, it can only be because paying out after fraud is cheaper for them.

One nasty one that a virus checker may miss is to overwrite your hosts file – if that contains a lot of banking URLs all pointing to the same IP address then DO NOT go to any banking site until you clear that out (as you'll actually go to a spoof site that will ask for your login info, possibly more than once claiming there was a problem, then pass you to the real site when they've harvested the info they need.

he could walk faster than that thing!

Once you've got the hang of it you can turn off the limiter and it will easily do 15mph

She's just exerting control, 'cos she can. She'll do this less over time as you all get used to the new situation (though new partners on either side can often lead to more difficulties, for example there'll be some spurious reason why you can't go on holiday to some place when the real reason is because your new partner will be there).

I've been on a Segway in Vilnius, good way to get around the town, they're a lot of fun. Not legal here IIRC – looks like this 'Lakeland tour' is all on private land.

Nice off-road tyres though, would love to give that a go…

Crikey, it's grim down south…

Hmm…. a number of points occur to me

1) Some of the complaints seem to be from people disappointed that Apple didn't announce cold fusion or perpetual motion or something

2) If you can't see why you'd want one, maybe you're not the target market

3) I've upgraded the OS on my iPod Touch with no probs (other than the cheek of Apple wanting money for it) so it will be precisely the same on the iPad, OS upgrades will be via the App Store, and will just work

4) I've spent the last 2 hours trying to get my son's Windows 7 laptop to connect to the internet, it won't, it comes up with some stupid 'DNS not responding' error all the time – it worked at xmas, it worked at his mum's, but not now. Web search suggests M$ recommend upgrading Windows – not easy with no internet access (my MacBook is working fine luckily, and my Vista machine had the same issue but fixed itself, which WIn7 will not).

5) I have a computing degree and I can't be bothered with all this computer fiddling crap. If the iPad just works (which it will, 'cos iPhone OS does just work) then it will be fine for loads of people who either are not very computer literate, or like me can't be arsed with it all any more

6) Basically, who cares anyway? In a year it will either be the thing everything is buying for xmas, or it won't. Unless you have shares in Apple, what's the beef?

Is downstairs at casbah aka wapentake still going?

Upsetting to hear that 29 is old nowadays…

Don't do it. It's worse than a laptop for using in the house (underpowered, limited iPhone-ish OS), and it's worse than an iPhone for walking around with (waaay too big). It makes no sense.

Don't get a car. A car will be worse for carrying passengers than a bus (not enough seats, limited engine size), and it will be worse than a motorbike for driving in traffic (too big and too slow). No-one will want one.

There isn't an STW App yet – so no, you cannot access this forum. Only Apple Approved (R) web sites can be browsed through Apple Approved (R) Apps.

Well I'm writing this on an iPod Touch with no trouble at all…

Jimbo – in my experience the most likely cause of such panic inducing compatibility issues would be if you saved a .docx from your new version of Word at home and found the college/school computers had an old version of Word that only understands .doc…

OpenOffice should suffice for homework purposes…

TBH I'd rather he was singleminded and focussed on winning tennis tournaments rather than being a media darling, and speaking as a northern English person, I can relate to him more than I could to Henman and all the "Tiger Tim" nicey nicey Pimms and middle aged posh ladies getting overexcited about "Wimbers" each year.

Might be worth checking out something like Ruby or Python too.

You'll all be wanting one come Christmas! ;-)

I can't quite work out whether you need a PC or Mac to connect your iPad to – it seems a shame if you do, because otherwise it would be ideal for people who don't really want / need / know how to use a computer but do want to do some simple web surfing, email, sort out their photos and music (i.e., about 90% of computer users).

Just to clarify, the original question, though asked about C++, was actually simply about C, since it contained no object oriented stuff. C++ is just C but with object oriented syntax bolted on, in quite a messy way.

C# is probably a better way to get into object oriented programming (not that I've done much, but anything would be better than C++) since it will force you to learn to do things the right way. If you're not careful you can get in a right tangle with C++ IMHO… it makes no effort to save you from yourself.

As above, or if you can't be bothered with separate declarations, then you are right, your main() would be the last func in your file and the functions it calls above – i.e., upside down to what you have done.

Friendly Fires – Friendly Fires. A strange mix of synthpop and shoegaze, with bits of Talking Heads-yness thrown in for good measure. Download from itunes, I didn't pay for any plastic circles.

To clarify then – the Tories want to encourage more 'free schools', i.e., state funded but independently run. Some of these may be run by churches or other faith groups, or set up by parent coops, or something else.

I haven't looked into it in massive detail but I understand it's based on a model from Sweden.

The New Labour version of this is to hand control of 'academy' schools to creationist nutters like Peter Vardy (of the Reg Vardy car dealership family).

So, not much to choose between them if you think religion should be kept out of state schools, like in that hotbed of atheism, the USA.

It seems to me that one problem that is overlooked with talk of reducing energy usage is that there are so many societal factors that would make this difficult. To take just one, the high level of family breakdown leads to a demand for more housing, at a lower occupancy level (i.e., the average UK child has two bedrooms, one at mum's and one at dad's), with all the extra travel that that incurs. What are environmentalists doing to ensure that families find it easier to stay together in one household?

You may think this sounds like a daft question, but really it's not. There are any number of external factors driving people's life choices which lead to energy consumption (why is it that so many people need to commute so far to work for example), and no amount of turning off video recorders or wifi routers at night is going to address that.

I have seen people from the nuclear industry and lobbyists claiming nuclear is carbon neutral which clearly is nonsense.

On the basis of including construction and removal, wind farms or tidal barriers aren't carbon neutral either.

The point is that saying "building a nuclear plant uses HUGE amounts of concrete and steel etc." is no more meaningful than saying "building a tidal barrier / wind farm / solar array / magic bean farm uses HUGE amounts of concrete and steel". You need to quantify what you mean by 'HUGE'.

MacKay's book isn't pro-nuclear, as he says in the last sentence of the bit I quoted. He is trying to get some actual FACTS into the debate though, as they are strangely lacking. Again, I thoroughly recommend reading it.

remember nukes are not carbon neutral – they produce one heck of a lot of CO2 in building them

Not really.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c24/page_169.shtml

Mythconceptions

"Building a nuclear power station requires huge amounts of concrete and steel, materials whose creation involves huge CO2 pollution."

The steel and concrete in a 1 GW nuclear power station have a carbon footprint of roughly 300 000 t CO2.
Spreading this “huge” number over a 25-year reactor life we can express this contribution to the carbon intensity in the standard units (g CO2 per kWh(e)),

carbon intensity associated with construction = 300× 109 g / 106 kW(e) × 220 000 h

= 1.4 g/kWh(e),

which is much smaller than the fossil-fuel benchmark of 400 g CO2/kWh(e).

The IPCC estimates that the total carbon intensity of nuclear power (including construction, fuel processing, and decommissioning) is less than 40 g CO2/kWh(e) (Sims et al., 2007). Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic.

The point is, no-one claims that Bhopal means we shouldn't have a chemicals industry.

I think some people are still thinking that "nuclear accident" = "nuclear explosion", and that makes it impossible for them to think clearly.

Which was the worse industrial accident, Chernobyl or Bhopal?

Cutting down on booze is one effective method IMHO – 1000 calories every time you go to the pub…

Plusnet are owned by BT but cheaper for the same service…

Reduce consumption which can be done with the political will. Our current lifestyle is unsustainable and to pretend we can carry on using energy at the rate we do is humbug. This has to change and simple measures with existing tech could reduce energy consumption significantly. we must change our lifestyles

There's a hefty dose of wishful thinking in there I'm afraid. Also, either "simple measures with existing tech could reduce energy consumption significantly" OR "we must change our lifestyles", which is it? I'm afraid the answer in terms of meaningful, rather than at the margins, energy usage will mean radical changes to our lifestyle that will be extremely difficult to achieve.

I really, really, recommend the David MacKay book that has been linked to already above, and in other similar discussions. He carefully adds up all the numbers for how much we use, how much could be saved in various ways, and how much could be generated sustainably in various ways. The numbers are scary, and there are NO easy answers.

to say nothing of the radiactive soup that is in the Irish sea now.

Now, on reflection, isn't that just an itsy teensy bit of an exaggeration?

Strangely nobody seems to say that Nuclear power needs, electrical power to power the pumps and all the lights etc,this comes from, coal, gas and oil fired station

What?

We've been through this all before several times haven't we?

Still,

There's a very limited supply of useable Uranium.

500 years or so at current usage levels…

Extracting/transporting uranium uses lots of oil.

Please think before typing. It clearly uses way less oil to transport uranium than it does to transport, for example, oil.

Atomkraft, ja bitte.

I have a cheapo phone and an ipod touch – which camp does this put me in?

(At first, I didn't really rate the touch as it seemed an overcomplicated ipod – but guess what, once I got to understand it I understood it was a first rate PDA with ipod attached.)

I don't remember any nonsense about banning photography when we had proper terrorists in the 70s and 80s. Why on earth would a terrorist need to photograph a building or station anyway? Is there any evidence that they have?

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, should be required reading. Favourite quote, "Gillian McKeith, or to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith.."

Just finished Feet in the Clouds, a surprisingly readable book about fell running, and before that American Gods by Neil Gaiman. All highly recommended.

When I saw this I thought the police were investing in some vehicles to provide a free uplift service for local mountain bikers.

Which would be more useful than parking on double yellows blocking the road outside my local chippy while the (quite rotund) officers get their tea – which is the only time you see them round here.

5thElefant:
Cunning. Thanks for that. It took me all day to figure out you could scroll with two fingers (actually all day plus a phone-rant).

You could have looked at the video tutorials on the page that safari opens to by default:

http://www.apple.com/startpage/

To be honest I struggled to work out how to operate the multi-touch track pad on the new MacBook while I was in the shop, but soon got the hang of it. The other one to look for is to use the cmd key instead of the ctrl key if you want things like ctrl-z undo, etc.

One past such trivia, I haven't looked back, and am a convert. I have a nice Sony laptop with Vista as well, but I reach for the MacBook by default now, it's just easier and nicer to use – and boots up way quicker.

Ezekiel 25:17