Here in Ireland (and I think most other European countries - certain UK and Germany in my experience) you have to wait till the transaction is completed, then insert the card, wait for a moment, enter your pin, press OK, wait again (even a moment before the receipts print) and then take your card and take the receipts.

If you are somewhere without broadband (countryside) you potentially have to wait for the dial-up modem to connect.

Every so often some bank's system goes down and you end up with people unable to pay by card for half a day or so.

Cash is fairly quick for most people as either they can make change fast, or they don't bother and just handover notes (check-out operators are fast at making change). I find most of my change is used paying for small-ticket items and even though I don't hoard change and prefer to use it, I can mostly just pay with notes of €10, €20, €50 for items above €5 and still get my loose change used up paying for coffee or whatnot. If I have too much loose change, I use it for a larger amount sometime when there is no queue.

I prefer card just for when I have little cash on me or would end up low on cash in my wallet and it's inconvenient to go to the ATM. Even abroad this is the case, as it costs me nothing to use my cash card in a UK or a Eurozone ATM and it can be inconvenient not to have cash on hand for small items.

I should have used preview. The sentence about Germany isn't criticising liberals, but rather saying people who have civilised egalitarian views are targetted as "liberals" and lynched also.

Also to clarify, this isn't some extremely widespread issue or making Germany out to be particular bad (quite the reverse, they can actually run their country sensibly unlike here in Ireland), just one of the many little issues just like all Western countries have.

You can say the same about Northern Ireland, and indeed there are various parts of even Western Europe where certain seemingly ordinary behaviour can get you in a lot of trouble (like being in a particular place that unbeknownest to you is a "bad area" - like one block away from a busy ordinary central area). Parts of England are grim and like something out of Dickens, supposedly civilised Germany still has problems with trogodytes who will lynch certain categories of people or liberals who cling to concepts of people being equal. Here in Ireland most of the country gets drunk often - and the emergency rooms fill every night with the results. Like England, there is the problem of a roaming "underclass" who might take offense to you happening to look at them.

As for the US, the police there shoot people. Criminals are executed. People have guns for "safety". Being ill can pretty much being destitute too. Certainly being mentally ill or poor can mean being homeless. OK a gross simplification, but from a European country the US seems like the Wild West (or worse in some social respects). As regards ordinary people, I would suspect it isn't healthy in certain places in the US to be obviously Muslim, or the wrong skin colour, or even certain European countries like France. Being very Irish or very Italian probably causes issues in certain places too.

Basically the world isn't civilised, and "the West" although probably more civilised than many parts of the world, is still not entirely civilised either, and differs in its definition of it.

Israel is pretty civilised in general for a "trouble spot".

We can already feed everyone. It's down to economics that we don't. The West produces vast amounts more food than we need, and the majority of it that is sold doesn't even get to our plates. Every year less farmland is worked in parts of Europe as it becomes unprofitable.

As for conditions - well, our beef here in Ireland comes from cattle who are raised on grass (apparently means the meat is far healthier than corn-fed or even the grain mixtures used elsewhere in Europe). You can see them out grazing for yourself, most people would know someone on a farm and have visited a farm or two, and while slaughterhouses aren't pretty, EU legislation is so strict that there are few cases of people getting away with mistreatment of animals. One can buy free-range eggs and chickens, and even on a large scale that just fits the definition, it's fairly reasonable (certainly compared to battery chickens). Tastes better too.

People do need to eat less meat though - even just from dietary perspective. I'm not talking about something regimental either - reasonable portions daily would still be a lot less than many people are currently eating.

This synthetic meat thing I have to say sounds absolutely grim from a taste and dietary perspective. If it comes to market, it will not be due to any superior qualities or advantages save one - that it will make some people a lot more money.

It nevertheless should tell you something that criticism of Wikipedia is now so widespread, and particularly by ex-editors/admins (one could argue that is nothing surprising - but the sheer numbers of such "exs" surely is extraordinary).

Anyway, it is interesting, sometimes useful in a sort of "ask a friend" way, and sort of a real-life H2G2, but basically, it's a bit of fanciful nonsense to think it's anything particularly special or proper (the same goes for the web in general, and "web 2.0" in particular). People are the same as always, and the information online is neither necessarily persistent, and is mostly noise (and any influence on offline "hard copy" information may be overall detrimental due to the noise/inaccuracy added).

Also too many people still haven't realised that the Internet is not some special mystical place but is in fact just part of the real world, and ultimately has to be subject to real world social, political and judicial norms, despite the difficulties in applying some of those.

A lot of the idealists who want to belief the fluff about a free magical Internet are people who in the real world would try to push their idealistic nonsense and simply allow the strongest elements in society to abuse any "freedom" to impose horrible restrictions of freedom. It's the same kind of mindset that believed the nonsense accompanying certain failed political ideologies of the 20th century, which we now have ample evidence that they are fanciful ideas that in reality just bring misery.

People need to stick to boring old tradition and the lessons we have learnt over and over again over centuries.

Plus the more "optimised" languages don't cease to exist, and are available for use where more appropriate than a "friendly" language. Indeed there exists a spectrum of languages, with situations where each can be appropriate (although obviously some particular languages have disadvantages or even a degree of "brokenness" as all of them are pretty much characteristic human creations, and some more so than others).

Personally I like getting the opportunity to code in various languages - one quickly gets comfortable with the idiosyncrosies of each, and to be honest, I think the experiences coding in higher or lower level languages are complementary (one has a better understanding of what functionality you want to manually create in lower level languages, and in the higher level ones you have a better idea of the implications of using certain features).

It's all great fun really - although possibly my viewpoint is biased by an academic setting.

I consider we're pretty fortunate here in Ireland to have cows that graze on pasture and are mostly grass-fed (eating silage in winter). Also use of hormones and other practices are banned by EU regulations. Plus, it's reassuring to see the conditions cattle are brought up in, and also it adds to the countryside to have cattle idly grazing throughout the year. It's not perfect - milk farmers are not allowed to sell cows for meat, so male calves instead of being used for food are just a waste byproduct (they do get used in rendering plants I believe) - but on the other hand, it's not just a matter of red tape - the practices "meat" farmers have to sign up for (and that dairy farmers don't want to, or can't afford to deal with) are part of what improves things for consumers.

I don't know about slaughter/butcher practices, but in any case you have to properly cook minced beef and at least seal cuts of beef (cook the outside) - bacteria can grow on the surface of the meat whatever about how it has been cut or contamination, and with minced beef - if that has happened already, then mincing it mixes the bacteria all through it. So even uncontaminated beef, eating raw mince, while it may be OK most of the time (people being able to cope with some ordinary bacteria) it won't be OK for some and will sometimes have particularly bad bacteria that may cause stomach upset or illness for even the more robust.

I would argue that it and other elements of LOTR that used CGI were of the calibre that they were because they relied on *real* stuff (in the case of Gollum, an actual actor having his actions/features captured, not just dialogue). So many wonderful settings, although augmented and given backdrops or details filled in by CGI, were actually created as sets and props. Even the obvious CGI looks better due to relying on real stuff (e.g. replicating orc hordes based on a sizable enough mini-horde of people dressed convincingly as orcs). Watching the making of DVDs for LOTR is pretty mindboggling in terms of seeing the amount of *non* CGI work that went in (and then the CGI on top of that was very cleverly done too). In fact you only have to consider the creation of a mini Hobbiton as an example.

Now I want to go watch it all again despite the length (although it's something like 4% shorter for us Europeans, about 30 mins across the three extended editions).

I'd like to see more films done in such a way, although there are plenty now that use CGI not as the be-all and end-all but rather to seamlessly augment "reality" (the fairly decent sets etc. they start with).

You assume someone is going to use a new portable device. A lot of people are at the least, using devices from last year, or the year before. We quickly end up with only being able to assume 1-4GB of storage and many portable devices are not music players only - that storage has to allow apps and photos as well. Personally, I have 1GB micro-SD in my mobile phone, and using about half of that for music, I can fit just over a half-dozen albums as compressed MP3s - sure I don't need that much for a single trip as such, but I'm not going to selectively load music before every journey - instead it's easier to have a couple of albums, and then just occasionally dump some I'm bored with and load a couple of new ones.

I am considering switching to a less reliable mobile network to get the new subscriber bonus of a "free" (18 month contract at 20 euro pm) nice new phone with GPS and everything. Thing is, it will still have MicroSD (don't know that it even allows HC) but it will have a 5 megapixel camera compared to the 3 mp camera I currently have - so even more storage required for photos. Also this new phone can have apps loaded - so I may use more storage for that too. So even getting a higher capacity card, I think it is doubtful I'll be using less compressed music.

As for hard drives - I still need all the gigabytes I have for games - and with a laptop - even if I cared to throw over 100 euro at boring hard drive storage upgrade, I'd only double my capacity from 80 GB to 160 GB. The terabyte drive while reasonably good value, is desktop only - and I use my desktop infrequently now (just a couple of big-box newer games where I can't turn down the settings enough for my laptop - although more and more I'm turning to direct-release games that are cheap and run on a laptop - and indeed take up megabytes not gigabytes).

The problem isn't just the scaling - it's that the games were designed to be viewed on CRT. Exactly 2x2 pixels does *not* acheive this - on a CRT even at low res, the CRT is more condusive to the eye interpolating detail. Crystal-clear pixels are not how older games are intended to be viewed. I've found some laptop LCDs (i.e. not huge resolution) actually allow you to play old games (e.g. on DOSBox) looking fairly similar to how they should, as the basic scaling to some extent achieves a similar effect to old lousy CRTs. Reference is 320x200 (original Duke Nukem) on a 1280x1024 screen. Indeed even dimensions not matching doesn't entirely matter.

The worst seems to be close resolutions - so 800x600 on 1024x768 LCD looks pants. Indeed the rough multiple of resolution needed may matter too, although it doesn't seem entirely consistent - again it may vary depending on how close you are to native res.

There is a mod for Diablo 2 though to allow any resolution (think it's called AnyRes). I found it was best to just maybe go to 1024x768 on a 1600x1200 screen - anything more and it was too small, but it was an improvement over 800x600 despite the theoretical 2x2 match. I found even with that, the interface and graphics were a bit too primative to allow me to enjoy it as I had. Will stick with Titan Quest for now (a very close clone, with the added plus of fun ransacking of mythology - it's like some hideous mangled mythological dictionary). Torchlight is a good substitute too, though more of a mini-game IMO. Other games in the genre aren't quite as similar.

I wasn't that into Starcraft myself (lousy at RTS - can't multitask and respond fast enough, and the nervous energy kills me), but even with some cool modern RTSes, I can understand why people would still want to play Starcraft.

Well, the original members (plus maybe one or two others) produced a set of 8 coins each. Then after the EU expanded, eventually the common design was changed to not only show EU, but all of Europe on the 10c, 20c, 50c, E1 and E2 coins. Some of the newest Eurozone members will only have minted these coins though (plus the 1c, 2c and 5c which haven't changed in common design). Also there are commemmorative E2 coins - e.g. Treaty of Rome coins of similar but individual design by each state, and then national issues as well.

But if you included coins issued different years, there are far more (minting started in 1999 and some countries put year of minting on the coin, although many like Ireland just put 2002 on all coins minted before 2002).

Also Germany has more than one mint (for a start, former east Germany as well as western mint, but I think there are 3 total), and there is a letter on the German side of the coin denoting which mint the coin came from.

It's not as complicated as you would think though as there are only the old and new common sides, and people are familiar with the major countries they usually get coins from. Seldom here in Ireland for example you get coins from Finland, Greece, Malta, etc. - but commonly Germany, Spain, France, Italy - probably in that order - and to a lesser degree Portugal and Netherlands, and very occasionally Belgium, Austria and then further away/smaller countries. Of course if UK was in Eurozone, then here in Ireland we would most of all after our own coins have theirs (indeed UK 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p and 50p used to circulate in Ireland when we had Irish pound, until the redesign of the higher value coins).

A real mouse works for that too - they'll happily gnaw through the metallic shell to get at the tasty chocolate inside.

Referring to the EC rather than the EU is like referring to the cabinet of a country's government rather than the country itself. Although unlike most government cabinets, one member is nominated by each national government rather than from/by the European Parliament (although I believe they get to approve/reject the commission now - I should know having voted in the Lisbon Treaty referendum here in Ireland, but I'll admit I'm not sure).

The one time I've actually had to replace a plug fuse (UK-style plug), was on a desk lamp (3A fuse). When the halogen spot gave out, it blew the fuse.

As regards Christmas lights, I don't know about the US, but here in Ireland (UK is the same) there is always a fuse bulb (as well as the fused plug). Not entirely sure why this is, but faulty Christmas lights seemingly even so manage to start fires here every year.