Let's be honest, even if I had a recording of a meeting between ISPs, government and the music industry all agreeing to it and admitting it you would still write it off as a fake, or "leftist propaganda" or a "liberal conspiracy".

When someone like you blasts off a reply about left, or right, or insert whatever inherent hate target you have here it says one thing, it says that that persons views cannot be fluid, it says their views are crystalised. Your outrage, your bile spewing to your chosen hate target occurs because you cannot cope with the idea that the world does not bend to your whims, you detest the idea that someone might think differently to you, you want everything to be as you want it. In short, you have the mind of a dictator, albeit thankfully without any of the power, so you're left spewing bile.

But I'll leave you with this, this isn't a scientific publication, I don't profess that everything I say is guaranteed to be 100% correct, I don't post with a warranty on the validity of it, I post ideas based on what we do know about the world. So yes, it's possible that I'm way off the mark, it's possible that I'm completely wrong, but here's the thing. It's also entirely possible that you're completely wrong too- the difference is I'm open to other views and that's how I get to avoid being a flagrant wing nut, you however, are not, and that's why you are a flagrant bile spewing wingnut with nothing useful to say.

If you would like to know why I've put forward the possibility that ISPs, government and the music industry might well have gotten a little too cosy, then I'd gladly give you some links. But frankly, for that to be even worth my time you'd have to display some semblance of rationality, and get past your wingnut bile spewing. Given your post history I'm not convinced you can do that, you appear too mentally immature to engage in rational debate.

Yeah tell me about it, as I say I was struggling at first and figured maybe it was a snobbish reference to the use of artifact rather than the British English but basically never used artefact.

It wasn't until I literally parsed it word by word taking a pause in between that I caught it. It's a rather fantastic example of inbuilt human brain automatic error detection and correction though :) Judging by the replies it caught quite a few people - I think there's a psychological study in there somewhere!

Here is what they said, followed by what you just said they said.

they a found trove of strange artifacts
they found a trove of strange artifacts

Hopefully side by side you can more easily spot the blatant illiteracy :)

Have you ever stopped to read one of your own posts? It's just you like to cry that everyone else is crying, which means that you're basically always crying that the world apparently doesn't adhere to your Daily Mail led world view after all.

I know it must suck being lied to all your life, to find out that you've in fact been consistently fed a crock of shit when reality comes shining through, but I'm afraid that's something you'll have to get used to.

Don't worry, you can go and vote Farage soon, and when your ilk get a mere 15% at most you can pretend that you're somehow in a majority and we should do everything you say, even though the reality is you're still a pointless little squeak in the corner that no one gives the slightest shit about.

There's always someone that gets a lemon though, you can't judge an entire range with a single anecdote, you need a larger data set. To highlight the point that you can't judge the whole on one case I can simply counteract with my anecdote; I've knocked my Nexus 7 off a table directly onto a solid stone floor. I expected a smashed screen and broken innards, but it didn't even get a scratch and still works fine one year on.

My partner's iPad (also an iPad 2, though doesn't go back to 2009, I don't think they were out then) in contrast just started randomly freezing recently, though it is at least about 3 or 4 years old now I believe so I don't really feel too bad about it given it's age (and the fact she won it so didn't cost us anything anyway).

I'm not here to defend Google, god only knows they cut off support for my Galaxy Nexus after less than 15 months of it being available in the UK market which is a wholly unacceptable way to treat customers, and as such I too wouldn't buy another Google branded device. But I don't think it's fair to say the Nexus 7 is an inherently unreliable device as mine has been sturdy and reliable since I got it (I got mine in 2012, no idea where the 2013 in the summary comes from, maybe the version refresh?).

Er, the simple fact that the British government has greenlighted the abandonment of net neutrality, coupled with the fact that ISPs have stopped fighting the ban and instead are voluntarily banning IS the evidence that something is going on. Given that we've seen the link between people like Jeremy Hunt (who have publicly sided against net neutrality) and Rupert Murdoch and so forth first hand, coupled with the fact the Digital Economy Act was put in place after a bit of boat based lobbying from Geffen to Mandelson it's not entirely rocket science to see there is a strong link between the music/movie industry and government efforts to block piracy websites. It's also established fact that government has greenlighted the industry's net neutrality whitewash.

But it's not surprising you're a bit dumb, you're on TalkTalk after all, it's not exactly an ISP that's designed for intelligent people, mostly targetting the dregs of society who don't know any better and are happy to pay for an overly contended ISP that anyone with a clue wouldn't use even if it was completely free.

You know what gave it away? The fact you had to jump straight into some random, nonsensical left vs. right rant. It gave it away because that's the sort of nonsense I'd expect from someone as dumb as Sarah Palin, which you apparently are as dumb as. So well done on broadcasting your stupidity and your black vs. white "I'm too dumb to understand shades of grey" mentality to the whole internet.

Angry un-thinking Daily Mail reader 0 - 1 Reality

I'm pretty sure it's not a perfectly well constructed bit of English.

But honestly, I don't blame you for claiming it's not, I read it correctly 3 times before I realised it's actually incredibly broken.

It seems I have the capacity to automatically filter out terrible English unless I'm really trying hard to look for it. I'd wager you do too :)

Honestly, the explanation may be even simpler again.

This pyramid dates back 1800 years, but 2200 years ago China's first emperor had his own tomb built, and whilst it has not been excavated it is long rumoured to have been filled with rivers of mercury, and of course, jade, which is common in China.

So as much as we like to pretend otherwise in many Western history books it's feasible that there was, in the intervening 400 years, some knowledge transfer and trade from China to Mexico, and that this Mexican pyramid was simply built to mirror this one in China that is similarly pyramid shaped, filled with mercury, and full of jade.

Of course, I believe the oldest pyramids we know are perhaps the most famous ones in Egypt dating back even further, so this may all simply represent an eastwards spreading of that kind of style of tomb over a few centuries of human civilisation. I can quite imagine travellers being so mesmerised by these massive constructions full of jade, liquid mercury and other such things that they may want to replicate them upon returning home or reaching new lands.

"The cost for the ISP to send someone is more than they're likely to lose, so you're very likely to get a default judgement against them."

Not on something like this you're not. ISPs aren't going to let the floodgates to such claims be opened. They'll try and extinguish any such movement using plenty of cash for the best representation they can find.

This is what the banks tried and failed to do with PPI - they fought tooth and nail to try and get those cases shut down ASAP because they knew if people started winning it'd cost them a fortune, luckily it didn't work, however for anyone trying such a thing it can be an expensive and time consuming battle.

This isn't entirely true, some ISPs have been going above and beyond the court order.

For example, even though PlusNet is owned by BT, it isn't covered by the original court order, and yet it still blocks ThePirateBay.

The court order was relatively limited in scope, and yet ISPs like Sky are actively hunting additional proxies not even covered by the order and blocking those too.

Somewhere along the lines the ISPs dropped their opposition to this very quietly. I'd wager a deal was done between music industry, government and ISPs - it seems that the government has promised not to enforce net neutrality on ISPs so that they can filter, throttle, and block at will as long as ISPs agree to bow down to the whims of the BPI. The ISPs get to screw people by double dipping on their networks, the BPI gets to have sites it hates censored, and government puppets of the likes of Murdoch's media outlets keep getting their back handers. It's a solution that's made everyone happy except, you know, the people ISPs customers who actually pay for their existence in the first place, and that the MPs are supposed to serve those same people but instead serve whoever will bribe them the most.

Yeah, what about flappy bird, you could repeatedly tap your wrist to gain altitude, whilst everyone around you wonders if you've perhaps strayed too far from your mental institute and if you have some kind of helper they should perhaps call to pick you up.

Honestly, gaming on a watch strikes me as one of those things that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Just like you can write code on a phone or tablet, but you shouldn't unless you're simply trying to make your life as difficult as possible.

You seem obsessed with the idea that programming languages are better if they're close to English, but this is a long debunked theory so you're living in the 70s/80s on that one. If closeness to English was an overriding priority then we'd all be using COBOL.

We don't however, because regardless of closeness to English we still have to learn the syntax, and if we have to learn the syntax either way then we read code as if it is English. Anyone that knows C style syntax can read your C style example just as easily as they read plain English, and yet the VB style syntax requires you to parse a double negative which is bad English.

As such, all you're left with with VB is bug inducing double negative mindfucks, and increase unnecessary verbosity resulting in lower productivity.

It boils down to this:

"Is not equal to null"

vs.

"Is not nothing"

The former is perfect English, the latter is terrible, broken English.

The only way you can have a programming language that works with plain English is by allowing it to have a large number of keyword combinations, so that you can express "Is not nothing" as "Is something". Until you do that attempts to create a programming language in plain English are a long verified dead end.

Don't try and pretend my example was intended to be anything other than an example of VB's terrible syntax and verbosity. If I was creating a demonstration of great coding style I'd stay out of any VB discussion in the first place because VB is the antithesis of that. There is nothing readable about VB's syntax because it's broken English end to end and that gets in the way of clean syntax that can be read logically.

Have fun writing low readability code with your reduced levels of productivity if you enjoy spitting out such unnecessary verbosity if that's your thing, but don't try and pretend it's superior. There's a reason VB is hated and unpopular, and that's because it's shit for the reasons I've described here, if you think otherwise it's not because you're some super coder who just sees something no other coder gets, it's just that you're an inept VB fanboy.

Because VB brings us such fucking abominations as:

If myVar IsNot Nothing AndAlso myVar = "something" Then
' do something
End If

The problem with VB is in it's attempts to be English like it's just ended up requiring you to spout nonsense. No one says "Is not nothing", they say "Is something".

It's too verbose and ends up forcing you to write stuff that's inherently less readable than if it didn't try and fudge English into it's syntax.

Whilst I don't really know anything about Swift, what the GP describes makes it sound like the features he's describing are basically exact copies of the way C# does things.

If so, then what you describe isn't really correct. In recent versions of C# you can simply declare a variable with "var". The situation you describe where it determines something to be an integer when you wanted a string shouldn't be an issue because in C# what would happen is the initial assignment of an int would have the compiler treat it as an int, and then any subsequent attempt to use it as a string would throw a compiler error because the compiler already figured out that it's an int by that point.

So you still declare your variables, you just let the compiler automatically determine the type.

This said however, I'm still not a fan of it, I don't like C#'s var keyword. It makes it easy for sloppy developers to write code quickly, but it kills readability and maintainability for other developers, because they have to expend effort figuring out what type the variable is actually meant to be rather than being able to just look at the definition to see what it's actually declared as.

It's a feature that's been added in to try and woo sloppy developers, but frankly all it does is reduce the average level of code quality by allowing people to write such sloppy code in the first place.

It's not an unreasonable viewpoint given that we can use math to describe universes that physically could not exist.

Math obviously exists outside of those particular universes, thus, one must reasonably conclude that either math can exist outside of any particular universe, or that for some reason some universes, such as ours (or perhaps only ours), are special cases where math exists.