If they're going to print comic books, they'll need to be *about* the sort of character that'd drive those cars.

The Vauxhall Astra could get Thirtysomething-married-with-two-young-children-in-the-back-seats-Man.
The Ford Transit gets White Van Man, obviously.
With its contrived, overstyled appearance, the Nissan Juke looks like that puppet from the Saw films, though in reality our hero^w villian driving it would be Twenty-or-Thirtysomething-twonk-with-a-moderate-amount-of-disposable-income-to-spend-on-crappy-"lifestyle-oriented"-pretend-4x4-toy-vehicles-demographic-Man (or -Woman).

The possibilities are endless, problem is that 99% of cars will look like they should be driven by Boring-Stuffed-Shirt-Man or Dull-Suburban-Mother-Woman (er, because in reality... they are). ;-)

Intentionally mis-paraphrased because when I read your comment my immediate thought was that something along the lines of the final scene in Scarface- but with your pet in place of Tony Montana- would be a fantastic way to go out.

Granted, it'd probably upset the child audience even more, but you can't please everyone.

Also, they could have all the mafia characters die by taking them to the vet to be put down. ;-)

Well, this is what gets me about the "Facebook IPO was a failure" argument. An IPO takes place for the benefit of the existing investors and stakeholders, whether or not that happens to be at the expense of anyone buying in.

Of course, normally one has to convince the would-be investors that it's also in *their* interest to do so, and obviously if you can be shown to have actually defrauded them, then that might not work out so well for you. But that doesn't change the basic principle- the people organising the IPO are doing so to benefit the existing stakeholders. From that somewhat amoral (but truthful) point of view, the Facebook IPO was a roaring success- for them.

That depends on how much money you gave them ;-)

I never played any of them, so I'm not really speaking from a position of authority. However, the MMORPG even *I* remember people going on about was Everquest. Looking back, I always got the impression that Everquest was the 800lb gorilla that dominated until the King Kong-sized WoW overshadowed even that.

Maybe as a non-game player I didn't notice FFXI because I assumed it was just a regular RPG like its predecessors, but I don't recall people going on about it anywhere near as much as "Evercrack".

No, it doesn't. This is an actual, legitimate question.

As I correctly predicted earlier this year, lots of Slashdotters have seized upon Betteridge as the latest fad kneejerk response, and are misapplying it without understanding what it means. In his own words, Betteridge's Law applies to cases where journalists "know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."

For example, without the evidence to back it up, a headline saying "Tomato ketchup caused AIDS that led to exitinction of dinosaurs" would be obvious crap and lead to criticism of the paper and/or journalist. OTOH, "Did Tomato ketchup cause AIDS that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs?" gives them the weasellish get-out of "Well, we didn't actually *claim* that it did".

Even then, if a question headline was a genuine attempt to present a plausibly-supported but not universally-accepted idea (possibly because it was new and/or divisive), then Betteridge's wouldn't apply.

In short, Betteridge's original observation was insightful where he claimed it applied, but it was never a blanket dismissal of question headlines, so please stop the tedious, kneejerk misapplication.

No, trust me, he really *doesn't*.

If you think I was "encouraging people to suck it up" with what I was saying, then you missed the point and shot the messenger in exactly the way I was talking about. But if one ignorantly thinks going into court with some smartass scheme an AC cooked up would achieve anything, then this is like walking into a minefield having been warned of the dangers because one thinks that minefields shouldn't exist in a civilised world.

Yes, that's right, but you'll still be blown to smithereens.

Okay, now you've *definitely* confirmed that you're an Internet Tough Guy fantasist. I was pretty sure that this was the way you were thinking, and this confirms it- you think that hiding behind "a dozen proxies in a dozen different nations" (*) means they have no way of *proving* that it was you in court.

If you ever had the guts to put your money where your mouth was in the real world, I suspect you'd get a *very* unpleasant awakening.

Your proxies- if they were all set up correctly- would almost certainly be a totally effective cover for your identity... if you weren't even known to them, let alone anywhere near their radar as a suspect. Unfortunately, in your case, it's quite the opposite. If they even have a *suspicion* that this wasn't just a random hacking and decide to investigate further, getting the police involved, you're already the single biggest suspect.

You have the motive. They have the code you wrote with the backdoor in it; they might or might not find that. They probably have some logs somewhere that indicate what was being done to their systems. They might be able to get some logs from your ISP that suggest, even if they don't provide direct evidence of, particular patterns of behaviour and timing. They'll probably take your computers away for evidence.

Let me predict what you'd do.... "Oh, I'd be clever, I'd destroy the hard drives with thermite, so they wouldn't be able to retrieve anything from them, I'm still safe, ha ha." Would you care to explain to the court what happened to your hard drives and/or why they were destroyed. *That* would be massively suspicious in itself.

Did you mention this to *any* of your friends online in any form that may have a retrievable record?

There are countless pieces of possible evidence that would prove nothing in themselves, but which taken together could collectively paint an incriminating case that proves your guilt beyond any reasonable doubt. Which is all they need (even in a perfectly-functioning court system) to lock you up and throw away the key.

But you're safe behind your "dozen proxies in a dozen different nations", of course. ;-)

It's Welsh. Which is ironic, as I'm Scottish, but there you go... (I don't speak Gaelic anyway!)

BTW, http://translate.google.com/ has an "auto-detect" option which is the default, so you don't even need to know which language it is to find out what it means. :-)

I actually had a great, if somewhat unusual, method of backing up my photographs- I got a deer to memorise them. I know it sounds weird, but it turned out to be quite effective, at least with the males (does, on the other hand, were less reliable). I trained it to understand basic commands and in response, it scratched out a basic reproduction of the requested image, eventually improving to quite impressive quality after a period of time.

In this way, I came to realise that I was using their brain as a sort of basic computer memory. This worked very well until I realised that my contract with the owner of the deer meant he had the right to reuse anything they had memorised.

Of course, this was not acceptable, so I no longer store my photos in stag RAM.

No, he's the artist.

I'm pretty sure that the exponential growth of hard drive capacity has *slowed* significantly in recent years. In the 90s and early-2000s, they seemed to be increasing much faster. I remember considering buying a 120MB HDD for my Amiga circa 1993, which was moderately big at the time IIRC, then five years later my first Wintel PC had a 3.4GB HDD, and that was nothing special by the standards of the time. Four years after *that* I got an 80GB HDD, which was quite decent, but still pretty mainstream in terms of capacity. All this was well above (the misapplied to spinning discs) Moore's Law.

Nowdays... well, it's over 5 years since 1TB drives became "mainstream" affordable... we should be at around 10TB if we were doubling capacity every 18 months, and we're not. By ordinary standards this would still be amazing growth, by the standards of 10-15 years ago, it's not.

Their point would be that you *did* agree to give them permission when you agreed to their terms and conditions.

Not entirely sure if I'm playing devil's advocate or not here, because while I have nothing but contempt for this move by Facebook (or any similar "land grab"), people *do* have the choice whether or not to use their shitty, worthless service and did agree to terms and conditions, supposedly.

The question is to what extent people are made aware of these terms and to what extent they can truly be expected to have "agreed" to this clause, especially in cases where they've been changed. I suspect that it might or might not stand up in court- but it's certainly not as clear-cut as you imply.

rwyf wedi creu cod newydd anhygoel. mae ei enw yn gymraeg. actores enwog noeth ac garegaidd a gwmpesir yn graean poeth. chi clod ansensitif. yn sofietaidd rwsia, teledu gwylio chi!