I'm was actually surprised they got out of that one alive when I saw it. It's also kinda depressing in that it showed up every southern redneck stereotype, they set up the stereotype just for a laugh and then "the boys" turn up...

Organise a "draw Jesus sodomizing Mary" contest in Texas and you'll get crazy Christian jihadists doing the same thing. If you set up an event specifically designed to insult/offend/antagonise a particular religion, you're always going to get a response like this from someone.

I'm waiting to see if it's really religion-based or just another negotiating (shakedown) tactic. A few million here to promote native cultural issues, a few million there into the ÅOElelo HawaiÊi fund, another few million to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and suddenly the spirits agree with the telescope being built, and all is good. Such magic.

Did the voices tell you to say that?

No, I read it all right. Do you think the banks are just going to stand by and let him do that?

Yeah, the banks are going to allow this. And big pharma will make make medicine freely available for the good of all mankind, the music industry will distribute MP3s of all their artists for free over BitTorrent, and Microsoft will cede the desktop to Linux. Any minute now.

"This is a Windows Phone. Prime quality. Feel it! And I can promise you it is not the only one we have. In Russia we have ho hooo... dozens of Windows Phones. Dozens! But this is our company's most popular product of all. Blue Screen! Finest quality. Try. By lucky coincidence we have more than 800 billion tons of it."

It's pretty straightforward really, you take your iOS app, you throw away everything other than int main( int argc, char **argv ), and then you replace the rest of the code with the Windows 10 equivalent.

No, no, no, that's not true! I once met a guy who had a Windows phone and he said his wife had one too, so they've sold at least two pieces. There may even be a third Windows Phone user out there (although I've never met him/her/it).

Well, the strategy worked so brilliantly for the Amiga (Emulate an Atari ST! Emulate a Mac! Emulate anything that isn't an Amiga!) that obviously Microsoft have decided to give it a go too.

Ah, that makes sense. It'll be interesting to see what snipers make of this, whether it's a help or more extra complexity to get in the way.

It isn't straight awesome, it's an awesomely expensive techno-toy that'll end up like Excalibur rounds, where you practically need a written order from the president every time you fire one because they're so exotic and expensive. The damn things get delivered in private jets by a butler carrying them on a silk cushion, and there's more brass than gunners standing around when they're used. Given that for the cost of a single $80,000 Excalibur you could get an entire battery to carpet the area with $500 M107's, and then carpet five more targets and still not equal the cost of the one Excalibur, they are at best fancy technology demonstrators/toys. Now scale that down to whatever this thing will be called when it's deployed in 5-10 years time and you're still better off using a 5-10-round burst (with 4,990 rounds left to spare for the cost of one of the trick rounds) than using one of these toys.

(And before the first person leaps in to say "yeah, but give it time and they'll get cheaper", these things never get cheaper, for every development cycle they have more crap larded onto them so that, at best, the cost remains more or less constant, although more frequently it tends to go up).

Cute toy though...

Good point. I did the same thing, starting from Tripadvisor, and found Google Maps' behaviour pretty annoying, both what you've found (I don't want paid product placement for other hotels, that's what I'm using TripAdvisor for) and the fact that the location marker would randomly disappear (e.g. when scrolling around to find nearby amenities) so I'd have to close the window and go back to the link from TripAdvisor to reset things. I'm not saying Bing maps is perfect (far from it), but it sure sucks a lot less than the new Google maps, and now that Google are shutting down the "?output=classic" capability (which was, in turn, better than Bing) they're not giving you much choice about what to use.

You want a rant? Here's a rant:

(Courtesy Bryan Price).

Actually it was a reference to this discussion, but thanks for playing anyway.

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