they've made them before and sold poorly. cards specifically for mining have a much poorer resale value than a standard card.

I feel Cycling is a skill sport but that's besides the point. I want to address the "skill sports" not needing drugs line which I think is a lie told so often it is accepted as the truth. For Soccer and Tennis - there is nothing to gain from catching doping. Absolutely nothing. If you catch drugs cheats in the Premier League you don't gain anything at all, you damage a multi-billion pound brand. This "skill sports" line is what everyone from the top to the bottom tells the public to deflect away.

For soccer - There is evidence of Italian and British clubs using drug transfusions. There are videos of Cannavaro on Youtube while at Juve taking blood. Chelsea went public with reinfusing blood in the early 00's. There are testimonies of German internationals from the 70's being injected with everything and anything. If you can take EPO and be fresher in the 89th minute than the other team with no chance of being caught (remember, the blood testing is rare) then why wouldn't you?

For tennis if you can take steroids or EPO and know you have little chance of getting caught you can train 2-3 times a day instead of the once - bringing massive strength and phenomenal endurance to the court for the sake of a good show. If you are glowing and a tester arrives you can hide in your panic room, even though it is the time and day you told the tester you would be at your house and then tell the world you thought you were being robbed (Williams) and people believe it because they don't want to believe the alternative.

Rugby has the highest number of athletes serving drug suspensions in the UK. Players are having to take mid career breaks to recover from spending 80 minutes a week getting beaten up. At local amateur level banned substances are normal here, it's a level playing field almost.

Cycling isn't clean, it's cleaner but there are still suspicious performances. It is a handy whipping boy though. During the whole Olympic scandal last year the first question of the first interview I heard on the BBC spoon-fed the party line to the interviewee from British Athletics along the lines of "do you think you will become as bad as cycling?". How can you answer yes to that? Why would you spit in the soup and admit you have a problem when you can just bring cycling into it?

I feel very strongly about this as a sports fan in general who prefers Cycling. The hypocrisy is infuriating.

Sorry but that's not true. Even in rural France you can make grocery purchases at many shops on a Sunday.

Just read this after putting it off for years, an incredible book. Another poster said Steinbeck was a great storyteller - In my opinion this is about as good as it gets.

The TV is freeview with on demand services over the internet. BT do not resell Virgins network, however BT Infinity broadband is delivered over fibre optic to the nearest distribution point with the link from there being copper.

I am not a postman but come off it, they're not "randomly" going on strike they are fighting for their working practices (whether you agree/sympathise or not is another matter altogether). Also how is it the Royal Mail's fault for what happens when packages go outside of the United Kingdom? They can give best endeavours tracking but are totally at the mercy of La Poste or whoever it's gone to.

do you understand the geography of the area he did it in, the way he moved around the area and the speed at which he did it? The police were very close to him but the nature of how shootings were reported (as people were found, not as they happened) meant they were chasing shadows. In that area there are normally tens of ways to get to the same place via various C road (i.e. single car width normally) and an experienced taxi driver would have a distinct advantage.

I was in one of the neighbouring villages at the time, the frightening thing was that you didn't know which town he'd pop up in next.

Both his weapons were legal, he was never deemed a risk and no-one suspected he would do it. You can legislate all you like but you'll never legislate against the completely unexpected or unimaginable in my opinion.

well aren't you a lovely soul. tell us all what you enjoy so we can rip the shit out of that.

watch it yourself and make your own opinion - that's what I'd do. Too many people hating for the sake of it to be honest

Juliet was saying it worked about unplugging the vending machine. then she said about going dutch, it was a bleed between timelines if you will.

I don't want to discus this.

what everyone conveniently forgets about BT is that they have a government-levied "maximum" installation charge for phone lines. From that they have to provide you a line whether it's up a mountain or whatever when costs could go into thousands of pounds to give you that line, then you want cheap ADSL on top of it. The likes of Sky etc use the infrastructure for broadband and pay little in exchange so BT still foots the majority of operating costs for PSTN and ADSL services. The exception of course is when new equipment is needed at the exchange and people complain to the Daily Mail because they don't want to pay for a new DSLAM or 5 miles of copper or whatever.

So from these costs they have to make decisions about who gets lovely "super fast" (or whatever it's called) broadband and who gets the bare minimum. Having worked in the industry it's hard to find people that "take little interest" it's sadly about the bigger picture.

Personally having grown up in a rural area I still have fresh and painful memories of dialup, but that's another story...

it's different but not as different as you'd like. if someone in my office had a serious contagious illness (or even a bad cold/H1N1) I'd much prefer it if they were at home rather than making me ill. I wouldn't even care if they were playing WoW whilst wrapped up in a duvet or something.

From reading the article it just seems like the author(s) were determined to find fault in it, no matter how good the game is. I got MW2 in December, it's a good game and I don't care if they think the reviewers were "shoved around". I played it myself and enjoyed it, there's my "review", I don't need a website with an agenda to tell me how to spend my money and what to play online.

The ratio of development:marketing is not how you measure how "good" something is.