In the UK and Ireland you can get Sky TV over your XBox. They even have Pay per view for sports and films.

I bought one of these for a bit of fun and hacking...last week. I'm not joking, the thing has arrived in my country and I expect it to be delivered in the morning. I'm kinda laughing now about this, after all hardware is hardware.

Surely you meant the Blue Sky of Death?

I think it's loss in popularity has less to do with Ubuntu being what it is and more to do with how badly openSUSE fell apart in the 10.x releases. It went from being one of the most solid and user-friendly distros to failing its own dependency checks and making codecs more difficult to install. That was quite sad as it pioneered in taking the approach of providing codecs in the repos where they couldn't ship on the disc.

And what's "ultraviolent" exactly? It's these kind of weasel-words that make these surveys dishonest. A reasonable person would probably support an age limit on games at the extreme end of the violence scale but with this vague description you can be guaranteed that if any action will be taken it'll just be on "anything with violence". What looks like a semi-reasonable idea will become an over-reaching all-encompassing bad on anything violent for anyone under 18.

What we really need is for this to be firmly the responsibility of the parent as it should have been all along. I remember a few years ago queuing for GTA:San Andreas after driving all over the city to try and get a copy on the release date. There was a fairly slovenly looking woman in the queue in front of me who asked my friend and I "Is this violent?". I replied "This is an outstanding game a revolution in gaming. It is quite violent; it involves drug-dealing, prostitution, murder and any violent rampage you can imagine any time you want. Are you buying this for someone young?". She answered "Yeah, it's my son. He's nine years old. I have to get it for him because he'll drive me mad if I don't". Now this is precisely the half-assed parent who doesn't care until their child gets into trouble and then gets to blame the game for all of the troubles. Instead of banning games we should be trying to figure out a way to have parents actually do some parenting. My own mother didn't mind me watching violent films when I was about ten or eleven years old because I had good grades, stayed out of trouble and didn't try to re-enact everything I saw on the big screen. The result of good parenting if I may be so bold. How about effective or not we put the onus back to the parents to decide what's appropriate.

This I actually believe. Intel have been doing some cool stuff recently. It's in their own interests to do things like this, just remember Powertop for Linux.

Magnanimous and self-serving at the same time, or as I like to call it "Good Business".

Actually the TDI is in fact just an engine, or rather a family of engines. The cars with TDI come in the same trimlevels as petrol cars, for example you can buy your 1.6 Golf as a base version through to the Comfortline level just as you can with a 1.6TDI, 1.4TFSI, 2.0TDI CR etc. SEAT sell the Reference, Stylance and Sport models and Audi do something similar.

The fact the the TDI badge appears on almost all models from all marques of Volkswagen-Audi group would reinforce this notion.

That's a misunderstood relationship. Petrol cars need to rev high because their peak torque range is frequently between 4000-5500rpm. Diesels usually produce their peak between 1500-2200rpm and up to 3000rpm if you're using a turbo, which presumably you would be. The height of the revs is irrelevant, it's a matter of gear ratios to transform those revs into real tire rotation. Also, when you overtake in a diesel you are less likely to drop a gear or punch the overdrive as your power lies in the lower rpm. You just sail on by.

...and Ireland.

It's worth noting that diesel has a much higher energy density so it's a waste of time comparing them directly. Example, a 2.0l petrol/gasoline engine might drive 250-300 miles on a tank of fuel. That same tank of fuel feeding a 2.0TDI will bring you 500-550 miles. Even if diesel cost 50% more than gasoline it would still be a cheaper to run on it.

I'm surprised by that because I own a SEAT Leon and SEAT Exeo - the Leon is based on the VW Golf/Audi A3 and the Exeo is a badged engineered Audi A4 (B7/PLQ6). The Leon has the 1.9TDI engine and I get between 4.5l/100km and 5.5l/100km(the unit I assume you meant).

The Exeo is a 2.0TDI, the new Common Rail variant in place of the older and more VW proprietary Pump Deuse. Being a bit bigger and in a heavier car I'm getting more like 5.1l/100km to 5.9l/100km. That leaves me getting 950km+ out of each on a tank of diesel; the Leon has a 55l tank and the Exeo has a 60l tank.

One thing I have in my favour is that I have a long drive to work each day of almost 80km and I use manual transmission. The longer journey and care taken in shifting gear definitely contribute to the great economy I'm getting.

That's a fairly romanticised version of events there. If you talk to anyone who fought in the Falklands you'll hear tales of how they used captured Argentinian FALs because the SLRs were jamming and butts were cracking. I don't doubt that squaddies would take one over an SA-80 because they have been so troublesome (and the old brigade tend not to like Bullpup rifles), but there's no doubting that it was a cheaper weapon. Now I learned to fire by single shot unless I was the squad scout (always automatic, buy some time but probably take the first round anyway); I wouldn't say the FAL was useless in full auto. It's wasteful for sure, but firing from a bipod or just using it for suppressive fire at short range it's a lifesaver.

That jab may have been a slight overstatement but in reality there were some pretty bad things said about the SLR and many revisions were made to correct issues that didn't exist on the original FAL.

The real problem is that you're given the impression you can hold a rifle still the way you can hold your mouse. I get where you're coming from but it's all part of a bigger problem. I'm not even talking extreme cases where real physics are lost, I'm just talking basics. Try holding a baseball bat in the aiming position after running a few laps, you'll see what I mean.