It’s boring in this country, we need Café con piernas

They already do this in Starbucks in Portugal, causing bewilderment and confusion when there are two baristas on, each serving someone with the same name.
They just can’t handle it.
Oh, I’d be Screenplay writer. It’s all I go in there for, sitting on my Macbook writing a screenplay. I’m writing a screenplay you see.

Feeling the STW Love already!

In the bank.
“Who is your home insurance provider?”
Excuse me?

Miles Platting if you like daytime drunks on the bus.

Start paying council tax

You can make a lot of money, tens of millions over a period if you are really good and in the right sectors

This is the line that all of my Uni friends repeated to me before they all lost their souls to recruitment. They’re now all overworked and scrape by financially.

Yeah, how dare they try and find out what’s causing premature deaths!

When are you meant to die?

People still earn wages? How quaint.

but there’s no need to the level of aggression or speed at which some people do it.

He did it like that because he wanted to.
(I know this is obvious, but a lot of people’s frustration seems to come from not appreciating that other people like to do things differently. In cases where there are no significant or obvious risk to third parties, I heartily endorse people’s freedom to do things the way they want to, providing it is legal)

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

If I had an additional £5.6m to spend on running it, sure.

Gold is recession proof eh?

The Gold Reserve Act

In early 1933, in order to fight severe deflation Congress and President Roosevelt implemented a series of Acts of Congress and Executive Orders which suspended the gold standard except for foreign exchange, revoked gold as universal legal tender for debts, and banned private ownership of significant amounts of gold coin.
;)

Too much time on facebook… Clicked the report button thinking it was a ‘like’!

I don’t really know where to start with that.
But I want to point out:

those taking a BA in English Language/Linguistics at my uni would earn £24,000 more than an A level leaver over their entire working lifetime.

On average.

Having a degree does not automatically entitle you to any more earnings than not having a degree. A degree is neither sufficient nor necessary.

00-00-00-00-14-00
00-00-00-FE-00-D4
00-00-B5-00-00-D4
00-36-00-00-00-D4
AB-00-00-00-00-D4

Mac numbers aren’t a very good way of drawing pictures I could only do one curve sorry

I reckon when the Olympics is all done and dusted then it will all kick off get privatised.

I stopped smoking recently with help from the Stopping Smoking thread on here. When I first stopped, I kept going outside of pubs or clubs whenever my mates went out for a smoke as I didn’t want to modify my behavior too much, or miss out on the social side. After a couple of weeks I didn’t feel the need to do that anymore, it’s bizarre the excuses you give yourself to stop yourself from giving up.

Wonder how many people reading this thread know what /.ed is….

:-)

So, anyone here operate an HPC?

Linking the Metro? Really? You know it’s the Daily Mail, right?

:lol:

Proper: to suit.
Sitting in a dark room with your DACs, Quads and KEF references is wonderful. It is not the only way to listen to (or enjoy) music. While it’s horrible listening to low-bitrate, loudness-war’d to hell modern tracks on laptop speakers with onboard sound, it is suitable for a LOT of situations.

While I agree that people who haven’t heared what music CAN sound like may be missing out, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they aren’t doing it ‘properly’. MP3s suit their needs, and as such are ‘proper’.
Some people genuinely don’t care and are just enjoying listening to their music.

By listening to an MP3, you’re only listening to a fraction of the sound that was produced by the artist. Ergo, you’re not listening properly. to all of the sound produced by the artist. Though as has been discussed, the only real way to listen to music the only way to listen to all of the sound produced by the artist is live, but as much as I’d like to have The Arcade Fire in my living room, I think they’d get in the way a bit after a while….

Fix that for you. To say anything more than that is snobbish.
Is-ought, Hume and all that.

Well, for balance, flawless service for me.

320D. The estate is good, too.

The “vinyl is better” argument is pretty simple really, if the music was mastered, mixed etc. analoguely, then the groove on the vinyl gives you an analogue of the sound the musicians made in the studio.

It’s like the difference between having an original painting / drawing or a print. Yes, your print could be a very high quality reproduction, but it’s not the same thing.

Or, think about a simple diagonal line drawn on a piece of paper, and the same simple line drawn in MS Paint on your PC – if you zoom in far enough on the digital version and see the pixels, it’ll not look like a diagonal line, it’ll look like a set of stairs. The hand drawn line will still look like a line when magnified. A slide guitar lick will be the same – it’s a slide on vinyl, it’s ultimately a coded set of downwards steps in digital.

However, for reasons of practicality and having lost all my vinyl a few years ago for reasons too convoluted and dull to go into, I’m now an exclusively digital consumer. Damn.

The perfect philosophical appreciation, delicate and easily lost when considering the technicalities.
Dobedoooo

I’m unsure if, when lie derivatives vanish, it means something special, or whether it means the lie derivatives are equal to zero.

If the latter, imagine you have a curved surface with water flowing across it. You know the velocity of water at every point on this surface. You want this velocity to be zero, everwhere. The velocity you have to add, or take away, to make it zero, at every point, is your ‘holomic basis’ or ‘basis vector’ for your curved surface (or ‘manifold’).

Maybe. Treat me as a bloke down the pub.

So how do you think search engines pick the best results? It’s always going to be subjective.

Usually by returning webpages which contain the terms you searched for. Not by ignoring one of the three words you searched for, using quotation marks.[/url]

Glad you guys like duckduckgo – once you get passed the initial “it’s not Google” shock, all is well.

What implications?

Neither my address, phone number, bank details, date of birth or any other details such as these are online.

So actually Google and the likes have less ‘real’ information about me than the bank, the mortgagte company, insurance companies, the DVLA etc.

And the governmant have more than any and we know how good they are at leaving computers on trains.
Sorry phil.w – that was left over from a previous draft. It was meant to be along the lines of ‘considering the current implications isn’t sufficient – we all know how processing power is scaling. The viability of algorithms good enough to perform this data processing is also increasing, especially considering the vast resources at Google HQ.’

You’re right about the amount of info Google have compared to other sources. Naturally “it’s ok cause everyone else does it” doesn’t assure me. But what scares me with Google is that it’s financial gains driving a top IT company: they have the money and the know-how that the DVLA and the Government don’t.

This paranoia thing – I used to be responsible for monitoring web-access in my company. That was 5000 people. That much information just becomes nothing.
The millions of people that this mythical person “Google” is watching? Gathering information on? What is Google going to do with it?
Advertise stuff that I’m interested in? Frown when I search for naked pictures of Christina Ricci? I really don’t give a toss.

Yes, it’s a lot of data. But it’s stored. There is a lot of money to be made out of deriving alogorithms which can process and sift through this data for advertising purposes, turning it from reams of data and noise into useful information, which can be requested by the government, snooped upon internally at Google[/url] and hacked[/url].

The updates are part of Google’s drive towards social search. It’s not so they can sell your details. It’s about changes to search results, making them more personalised.

Considering how Google makes its money, I very much doubt this statement. The cynic in me wants to claim all of Google’s innovation is driven towards the development of additional platforms across which advertising can be delivered, like their Google Goggles, driverless car etc.
Most of me doesn’t care; Google will peak and decline, users will move to other platforms, history will repeat itself.
Unless it gets political.
yadda yadda yadda

The little Steadepod thing looks interesting, basically just a bit of wire down from the camera to the ground so you can pull up on it for stability. Can’t do any harm I suppose.

Just go to B&Q, get a bolt that screws into the base of your camera and use a bit of string which you tread on?

If you don’t use Google what else are you going to use – Bing? Hotmail? Yahoo? All of these track you in some way.

DuckDuckGo.
They don’t track you.[/url]
That’s for the high volume of searching I do, everything else is either provided by myself for the public domain (eg, this post) or collected in a non-transparent way. I don’t mind some things, but helping a large company isn’t my cup of tea.

Can anyone recommend a good search engine then that isn’t google and that is at least quite good?

DuckDuckGo.

I simply don’t like the idea of a corporate body tracking and profiling me for their own profits.

I’m sorry, but:

:D

I have a small screw gate style ‘tripod’ which I carry in my pocket, I clamp it to a mountain board.

It’s a good job you can’t see the cold

Front:

Out back there’s a beach…

It’s really impossible to answer – there is no ‘perfect sound’ and no ‘perfect playing action’ – it’s all to your taste. How do you want to sound? Do you want to caress gentle tones out of it? Smack it around to make it scream?

Generally Mexican strats have a more pleasant feel to them than Squiers, and are worth the extra.

But my advice is to go to as many shops as you can with a real ‘guitar shop’ vibe – more stock than space, an owner who wants to sell the guitars but are clearly sad to see them go – and play as many as you can. You’ll know which one you can’t live without. And the next one you can’t live without… And so on…

Edit: MrNutt – Nice taste, especially the rum

+1 for DuckDuckGo

I got fed up with google. I like to search something, then refine my results by searching again based on what I see from the original search. This isn’t possible with google’s auto-fill-search thing. You can turn it off, but I use multiple computers and don’t want to have to sign in to google whenever I want to search.

Fed up with my results being tailored to what it thinks I want them to be, when I use the internet to learn more than to fester my original viewpoints.

Fed up with it assuming I want things like ‘social search’ involving social network posts from people I don’t know in my searches, enabling them by default.

Fed up with it telling me to use Chrome when I use Firefox.

Dissapointed that hundreds of talented software engineers were duped into working for the world’s largest advertising broker.

The company seems determined to be the one-stop-place for everything on the internet. See also: Early 00’s AOL

I could go on and on…