It is still running to a bunch of lawyers though to settle what should be a technical issue.

He is worried about the damage to his wonderful players reputation be secunia filing a few bug reports? It works both ways, if they have filed bug based on security issues that do not exist that damages their reputation. Surely it makes more sense to have a discussion between two techies regarding the expected behaviour of the application. I don't see what a bunch of lawyers can contribute to that.

Oh, apart from burning them to keep the techies warm :)

Often laws under a jury system are designed to be vague catchalls. This is because the jury is there to act as the final check on whether the law should actually apply in each individual case. Juries do not just decide whether the person did something, they also decide on guilt as well and that is more complicated and includes an element of whether the actions of the defendant should actually be a crime.

The best examples of wide reaching vague laws are usually found in the laws pertaining to military secrets and espionage.

Lol, I actually failed the selection exam (the 11 plus) to get in to Grammar school so does that answer your question regarding ability :)

To be honest though, I didn't see much point in it at the time as I lived in a borough that had grammar and comprehensive schools but actually went to school somewhere that only had secondary moderns that did not place any stock in the 11 plus exam. I only did the exam because of where I lived, not because of where I actually went to school so it did not matter if I passed or failed, I was always going to go to the same school afterwards.

And by the way, I was one of the thieving kids from the council houses who had nits :)

My point was really that grammar schools offered the possibility for the select few of us poor folk who got in to be schooled in a similar environment to that of a private school. Whether this is a good idea or not is irrelevant, what is important is that some people who make decisions (oxbridge admissions professors for example) later on in the childs life think it is.

There was a very interesting documentary about this recently on UK TV where they interviewed a bunch of people who had come through the grammar school system. I know it had been criticised since but the reality is that it did have a valid point in that however unfair it is to stream kids at 11, it gives the opportunity to those who do well to break into the sort of jobs that are normally restricted to those coming from public school. By removing grammar schools we have diminished the number of state school kids who get in to oxbridge.

Being that under the old system a great many people I know did well based purely on hard work even though they went to comprehensives being disadvantaged at that age did not really make much difference in the long run even though it might have stopped us going to oxbridge.

Those who are opposed to forcing kids though an exam in principle though will often never take the pragmatic view of grammar schools I do though and I understand that, its just that the private school system does exist and there is no getting away from that. Most private schools have an entry exam at 11 so having something similar in the state system just seems to make sense to counter this.

I am actually considering saving money for my kids now (just before the first one is born) in order to maybe give them an opportunity to go to a private school later on. Of course in 18 years though I will probably need every last penny just to help her get to any university.

Actually she might be very special, but that is utterly irrelevant when you work as part of a team.

It sounds like she was easily able to drive her own team, and manage those beneath her. But those are the easy part of management, the hard bit is called managing up (In this case it is probably more like managing across).

What she needed to do was go round every different person in the company she could and get their buy in and input into what her project should do and most importantly why it was a good idea. This probably seemed very strange to her as the boss had given her a task and she wanted to do it. She was probably expected to recruit other people from within the company who liked her idea to spend a bit of time on it. This is why they kept her department under resourced. That means long hours learning what everyone else does, forcing yourself into the existing social scene within the company, talking to people to find people who might be able to help you even though they are not strictly part of your team.

It sounds what she actually tried to do was hire a microcosm to work for her and just drop in a hierarchical department within a company that has no hierarchy. That was obviously never going to work and the company was never going to allow it to flourish.

It seems like her biggest problem is that the masses at Valve simply did not get behind her idea, that is why she was allowed to keep her product as they did not hold it in high enough esteem. Maybe they were right, maybe she was, only time will tell.

Ok, I'll bite.

I personally think Grammar schools are a good idea. It makes much more sense to stream pupils by ability.

When some children arrive at school they have been given a massive head start by their parents who have spent a great deal of time teaching them to read before they even get to school. Other children have parents who do not put this same effort in (probably because they are too busy at work trying to keep a roof over their head)

That advantage gets more and more pronounced as the children get older as one set of children grow up in a home where they are constantly pushed to learn and another set are constantly dumped in front of the TV. These two groups of children have the potential to massively diverge so why hold the brightest back just because it makes the kids who can't keep up jealous?

You can say that comprehensive education helps bring the slowest children up slightly, but that is not really worth sacrificing the growth of those academically strongest for. If you do you just gift all the places at the best universities to the parents who send their kids to private schools.

The founding fathers were also very specific about not raising taxes to keep a standing army but that shit went out the window. I mention this because it is entirely related. The US has forward bases all over the world in countries where a large percentage of the population consider them to be a hostile occupying force not too dissimilar to the way the british empire was when the founding fathers wanted shot of it.

If the US did not have the level of armed forces that was so active overseas then there would be far less need to worry about terrorism at home. Especially if they resolved to the army being truly made up of an armed citizenry that had to take time out of work for a few days a month to keep up firearms training and civic duty stuff.

What the US currently has is a strange sort of halfway house between what the founding fathers wanted and what the US armaments industry wants. The armed forces don't really trust the US population enough to let them have the easy access to weapons they do have but they can't get away with restricting access to them so instead they try and eavesdrop on everything the population says privately in order to catch any wrongdoing.

In this case they clearly want to be able to track the geographical location that every single item of mail came from in order to try and track back if someone gets a bomb or chemical agent through the system undetected. This can be combined with things like cell phone movement tracking, automated licence plate recognition, credit card tracking and keeping a large list of suspicious targets to try figure out who did it. Its not perfect but it's the best they can do.

So the 4th Amendment, which is about Search and Seizure and is derived from English law about an englishmans home being his castle should stop government taking a photo of the outside of an envelope that has been put in a post box in a public place. I know that the 4th has been extended to cover bugging a phone box where someone had a reasonable expectation of privacy, but since the outside of the envelope needs to be public in order for the letter to be delivered correctly I am not sure this would apply. Obviously the contents of the envelope are a completely different matter entirely.

But ammo is small. Has anyone here not seen that crap Clint Eastwood film in the line of fire. Most of it is utter tosh but it is worth it see how he smuggles 2 rounds past all the security using a furry keyfob to hide them inside. My shoes also set off metal detectors so you can probably get a few rounds in their as well. All you need to do is make sure the object they are in is opaque to the x-ray device all your stuff goes though so they can't see the outline of a bullet.

If every security check point suddenly has to investigate every item that is big enough to hide a bullet in but opaque to the scanner then expect checking in to the average plane to take 5 times as long in future. The average laptop has loads of bits that are opaque to the scanners, it looks like from now on they might have to go in the hold.

So how many extra plants does the US have to build to cover every person driving an electric car?

Of course you are modded funny but this is 100% true. Each slingshot transfer we do brings the day the moon crashes into us a fraction closer.

When I was a physics student a decade ago we once calculated the time the moon had left (it slows down slowly anyway as it hits bits of the earths atmosphere boil into space then get in its way) and whether the sun would have run out of fuel before then. I seem to remember both events being somewhat far off so not really worth worrying about, we are more likely to have been taken out by an asteroid or comet before then anyway :)

The power plant might be way more efficient but I reckon you instantly lose that efficiency gain by using horribly inefficient overheard lines to transmit the power miles across the country from where it was generated to where it is needed. Then you lose even more by using the electricity to charge a battery which starts leaking its charge as soon as it is full.

Electric cars are able to solve one problem only: the fact that we are running out of oil. Solving the environmental impact problem of cars can only only be solved by using mass transit wherever possible and making less journeys in the first place.

The idea of every person getting their own huge metal box that could fit 4 or 5 people but is actually only used for 1 most of the time is the biggest problem. If you ignored this and just moved to electric cars then you would end up with a power plant for every 1000 people or something silly.

I think the unfortunate truth for you guys in the states is that your cities (New York excepted) have evolved around private car use and cheap oil. When it runs out you are going to be screwed unless telecommuting takes off. Here in the UK we kept a public transportation system so we have slightly more options in terms of what to do to get people to work without using cars.

There are plenty of things that you still need some form of private transportation like a car for but we have a slight benefit that in cities like London where I live the vast majority of us don't rely on cars to get to work even if there are a tons of other things we do need cars or trucks for (like delivering everything we need to live). It might be more of a PITA on an individual level to use public transportation, but as a country it will give us an economic advantage as oil becomes more and more scarce.

So in the name of helping the american economy you should clearly accept an 80% pay cut to make yourself competitive with someone from India :)

(PS - This is a joke, in my experience offshoring to India is an utter disaster as your average indian outsourced development company will never give you an honest assessment of time involved in a project or actually admit when they are going to overrun the deadline before they do, causing any sort of confrontation is just too alien to the local culture even when it is better in the long run)

Once it blew the first one you should have sent it back.

The only thing I have noticed though is that their stuff seems a little fussy about wanting a decent PSU.

Xfx are cheap crap.

  If you want to have fewer problems buy the most expensive manufacturer of a given gpu, not the cheapest. I generally try and stick with gigabyte or evga.

Are you paid to post crap about Google?

  Notice your screenshot is trimmed down to hide the word "Ads" from the top right. You might say it us not prevalent enough and have a point but by photoshopping your screenshot you also edited away your credibility.