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Comment Re:Assholes on every flight (Score 1) 527

Planes can't carry 20kg per person of extra weight 'for free'. The more weight on board, the more fuel it has to carry / use.

If you aren't paying for baggage separately, then you are paying for it on your ticket, whether you use it or not. I don't really have a problem with baggage fees - it's all part of the cost of travel (like airport transfers - and that can be a MUCH bigger problem in the states, where some airports have very limited public transport options).

But it would make life a lot easier at times if you could pre-book / pay for your baggage at the time you buy the ticket, instead of making you wait until check-in.

Comment That just confirms my thoughts (Score 4, Insightful) 115

The original Syndicate was a 'beautiful' game, that did not contain or need extreme violence. A modern version of Syndicate would not need extreme violence either.

This is not Syndicate. It's not even a modern version, or a 're-imagining'. This is a completely different game, with some vague influence from Syndicate, and the name grotesquely attached to it.

Comment Simple solution, rolling channels PLUS releases (Score 1) 284

The easiest / best approach would be to have alpha, beta and release candidate channels, offering various levels of recency and robustness.

These are all unversioned, and simply update to the latest set of packages available in the each. Then, every 6 / 12 / 18 / whatever months, make the current state of release candidate a versioned release.

Comment Re:Really, Really, Really Bad Idea (Score 1) 417

It's actually not that bad in Chrome. If what you've typed looks enough like a url, then it will simply try to resolve and give you an error page if it can't. A search will only be performed for something that doesn't look like a url.

And even if it does do a search, you don't have to start over - the results page will have box that contains query, ie. what you typed into the combi-box. Fix it there, and 'search', and Google will direct you to where you wanted to be.

Firefox is actually worse, because if it doesn't like the url, it will try to 'auto correct' it, by putting www. and/or .com on the domain. So then you've got more work to fix it.

Comment Really, Really, Really Bad Idea (Score 3, Insightful) 417

One of the most useful 'innovations' in browsers over the years - aside from tabs - has been the permanent search box, so that we can fire off searches really easily.

Chrome combined this into the URL box as - reasonably - we don't need two separate boxes cluttering up the display.

But now to hide the combi-box takes away the useful feature that we had - the ever-present search box.

Plus, lets not forget that this is a phishers wet dream - you mean we can't see the url of the page we are looking at, just how it looks, and the title in tab? Hide the url, and it becomes a lot more difficult to be sure that the page you are submitting details to is the page that you intended.

Although I'm currently a Chrome user, I will switch away if this change gets forced on me.

Comment Re:KeePass (Score 1) 268

Using an online service is not incredibly stupid - it's a managed risk.

Yes, it is possible for someone to hack it and retrieve data - but as long as they are doing it the right way, and you choose a strong master password that is hard to brute force, it's incredibly difficult for anyone to do anything useful with it.

And, on the basis that the online service has been implemented correctly, it's far, far more likely that someone will break in and retrieve usable data from from the myriad of services that you might sign up to.

So whilst there is a risk, it's still the most secure you can be without sacrificing the convenience of being able to access your hard-to-remember passwords for a wide range of services from any machine with internet access.

And for a few of the most key services, you could always take the radical approach of not storing those details in the management service, and, you know, remember them.

Comment Re:Unprofessional (Score 1) 276

Whether they implied they would be back or not, is hardly the point.

People made purchase from them, and then they simply blocked access to the downloads without any client communication. However you look at it, that is extremely bad customer service.

It's reasonable enough for them to do a publicity stunt, but they have a duty to at least email the people that have made purchases and inform them what will be / is happening, or provide a way for them to access their account / downloads.

Comment Re:Now your pockets are bulging (Score 5, Insightful) 303

Pockets full of devices? I can't see why. Two devices would be perfectly reasonable - one for things that demand connectivity (talk, text, net), and one for the other stuff (games, videos, music). Even if the 'other stuff' has occasional connectivity capabilities to download new music, etc.

When people say phones are for talking, it's not a frivolous argument - they need to be available for talking. Which has two implications:

1) What should happen when you have an incoming call? Do you lose your position in game, etc?

2) The battery needs to stand up to the demands.

As it is, 3G devices struggle to get through a day. It's not going to help matters by gaming on them for an hour or two - pushing the cpu, graphics, display to the limit. If your games console runs out of juice, it's generally less of an issue than if you suddenly can't make or receive calls.

Comment Re:Wonder if AMD plays fair? (Score 1) 216

After all since it's based on name, it can't even conceivably help any real-world user application when operating as intended. It can only inflate the benchmark numbers.

Wrong. Drivers can and do detect the names of real applications, and configure their support accordingly. Control pad drivers can be set up to detect a certain application name being run, and set up button mappings to suit. Many graphics drivers have in the past had profiles shipped to iron out pathological cases in real world apps. You can even manually set certain parameters based on what application is being run in current drivers.

It's just that it can't pro-actively do this. You have to rely on support from the manufacturer (or create your own if possible), to get the best - or even half-decent - performance when new applications are released.

Comment Re:Wonder if AMD plays fair? (Score 1) 216

I used to work for a video card manufacturer and game and video developers often did totally retarded things which just happened to work on the cards they developed on but made the software run like crap on ours. We routinely had to implement workarounds for individual games to make them run properly on our cards.

This wouldn't happen to be a manufacturer that used some 'unusual' rendering methods?

Similarly, the issue here is not Intel punting processing to the CPU when the GPU is overloaded, but the fact that they do so by detecting the name of the benchmark rather than by monitoring the GPU loading and dynamically switching between hardware and software so that it would work on any application. General optimisation is fine, workarounds for retarded developers are fine, but special optimisations for benchmarks which don't affect real applications is getting pretty close to the line.

You would also need to monitor the CPU, and only switch when it isn't overloaded, but the GPU is.

The real question is, who cares if a manufacturer detects whether a certain application is running, and reconfigures it's support to provide the best experience for that application? If I'm playing a game, I just want the best experience that my hardware can provide.

That's the problem with benchmarks - you can't ever take one application, no matter how representative it is supposed to be, as the gospel for system differences. The real world across a variety of applications will almost inevitably be different.

Comment Re:Sure, but... (Score 1) 404

So who watches the CCTV footage? Who archives the recordings? Who maintains the equipment? I think there are serious questions to be answered there, but ultimately, there is no fundamental reason why those people can't be held accountable for their actions - and we need to ensure that they are.

Sure, an officer merely observing something isn't going to cause a big uproar. But the actions of any officer might. There are enough cases of police corruption, racial abuse - and perjury.

CCTV isn't a solution by itself, but it can be part of effective, responsible policing. There needs to be accountability, there needs to be a balance with enough officers on the street as well. But it does play a role in preventing crime from occurring in the first place, solving crime, and providing evidence when cases do go to court.

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