quality of *life*. Doh.

HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system. We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live. For everyone.

FLAC may be lossless but it's still no guarantee of super HiFi. You've still got the DAC, amp and speakers to worry about. People often assume because it's FLAC, it is the acme of quality even played back on an iPod with Apple headphones. Ain't so.

> E.T. was a commercial failure
Not really. It sold 1.5m units. It's just they actually made way too many. It was a failure only inasmuch as they paid too much for the licence and made too many. In terms of sales it did OK.

Strictly speaking, I started with a TI 50 step programmable calculator in the late 70's but I would say for me, it really started when I got an Atari 400 and used to type in the game listings from Computer & Video Games mag in the UK. When the game wouldn't work, I'd compare my version with the magazine and after a while got to recognise what commands did what. Then I got a book on Basic and learned it properly. I also picked up 6502 assembler. Then I moved on to Lattice C & 68k assembler on the Atari ST. Having fought off doing IT as a job for 10+ years I eventually went for it and moved on to VB4 then VB6, did my MSCD courses and exams, added maybe 5 or 6 operating systems and at last count about 20 more languages of varying levels of obscurity. Along the way, I've read an awful lot of books, studied other people's code and so on. Apart from the 1 year spent on MCSD/VB6 it was all self taught but I think the amount of experience picked up along the way has meant I'm pretty decent within the areas I work in. I basically write finanancial software - databases, billing systems etc. I *like* documenting, write structured heavily commented and pretty much bullet proof code. Generally, if there's a bug, it's down to vague design or me misunderatanding the design rather than code errors per-se.

>and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier)
That would be the 10D. I had that hack in my 300D. Not all features of the 10D worked as the hardware simply wasn't there but many did and it added some nice new features.

I live in a UK village which recently got upgraded to a 21C exchange and I'm getting 1.5 megabytes a second down now. Up/down speed doubled overnight for the same price. They're getting there.

Really great, is that no-one can search what is written on other Oak trees.

Makes mental note to buy www.shareyouroaktree.com domain . Could be a money spinner. Bwahahahah!

I remember an 80's movie called Prime Risk where some girl is working on an ATM hack then realises terrorists are already in the system planning to blow up key data nodes to bring the banking system to its knees. Iliked it because she used an Atari 800/810 disk drive for everything but it was still an OK film from memory.

Which describes every large software project implemented by a non-software company, ever.

We've got the opposite problem, Everything is overengineered, modular, documented to death and scalable but 9/10 times the code base is never touched again for a decade then it's replaced. Might as well of thrown it together and saved 40% of the development costs.

Well I thought it was a good post, especially the GSV reference. if I had mod points you'd get some.

Modded down huh? Looks like the Monsanto shills are out in force today like the Scientologists ones are on here from time to time.

So this guy says we need to make more food? Is this so it can just be thrown away like we do currently? http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/half-of-the-worlds-food-is-just-thrown-away-8445261.html

Maybe if we did a better job of using what we make, this would be a total non problem (not that it is anyway, unless your a Monsanto salesman)

Much as it pains me to say it, being a major non GMO fan, you're not far wrong. It's the business practices, rush to market, lack of controls etc that's the issue but I suspect that's not going to go away any time soon.

Obviously criminals can get them where they're illegal but if the supply isn't there, less guns. If the crims can buy a 3D printer and start making their own, we have a problem. It's not a hard concept.