My god, I wish I had mod points for you good sir.

But then there's a conflict. My local MP, a conservative, voted against basically all of liberty-trampling ideas jacqui smith has come up with. While I hate the tories as any decent person would, they're miles better in this respect.

So on the one hand its the "european busybodies" interfering with our sovereign state, and on the other its them protecting us from big brother, an issue a lot of tories hold dear (and you can sort of see why)

This is exactly right. My maths teacher, who has been teaching maths for many many years, himself says that the tests haven't got easier or the students dumber. Nay, it's just the fact that the curriculum is different now. It adapts.

For example, when he was at school, he was routinely using logarithms at age 11/12 just because it was the simplest way to do operations involving large numbers. We didn't start that til I was 16, but we learnt about other areas of maths a bit more. Geometric, series, etc.

Everyone bangs on about how hard old exams used to be. It's simply not true, the students were just learning different things back then.

I attend a state school, and I consider myself quite gifted. I've had a good education all my life and I've always been creative/interested in all things science/maths. And honestly, after all the work that's gone in, I refuse to believe that I'd be in a majority if I'd lived 50 years ago. It just doesn't make sense; my parents' education's standards just weren't different.

Just out of curiousity, what is this "last loop"? You mean like, the user's NIC card? or what?

Thanks

Mine:

Nov 10th: 5 messages
Nov 11th: 17 messages
Nov 12th (so far, it's 4:20pm): 3 messages

I guess you need to receive an awful lot of spam in order to get reliable data on a reduction.

I made smaller things. I had this really wonderful motorcycle design which was super strong. It had a third wheel on top which was hinged, such that when you used it, it made a motorcycle-style noise too. I can still make these beauties no problem :)

I'm tempted to disagree. My experience of sonic isn't vast (1, 2, 3, spinball, sonic & knuckles, sonic adventure 2, some GBA game), but I definately enjoy sonic 2 and 3 much more than sonic adventure 2. It's just more fun, a lot less tedious... generally really awesome

The original sonic games sort of have a life to them. There were all these quirks, all these interesting things you could do. You could play them again and again and never get tired, never find them tedious or repetitive. I don't get that with the 3D counterparts.

It used to, but doesn't any more. Lack of demand.

And incase you're saying that PPC support is more important than the tens of thousands of devices linux supports, think again. I've never had a hardware setup ubuntu hasn't worked with. It can be tricky at times, but my digital camera works straight away, my phone does, my MP3 player, web camera, usb headset, usb/wireless mouse, etc etc etc. The hardware support in linux absolutely vast, and support for non-peripheral hardware is going to be pretty tight.

So yeah, linux supporting everything does mean lowest-common-denominator development, as the grandparent said.