The PS2 has also been out for a lot longer than the Wii, with some super-low prices towards the end that were cheap enough to entice the late-adopters and the "I want to play $PS2ONLYTITLE - guess I'd better get one of those too" gamers.

It's also been chippable and able to take a hard drive rom loader for a lot longer than the Wii has. Hey... I wonder how much THAT has to do with the fact that Wii owners are only buying two titles a year?

Interestingly, in Australia, Westpac has made a cynical grab for their share of the merchant fees by FORCING customers (like me) to have Debit Mastercards instead of regular ATM cards - they won't admit it, of course, but a free additional revenue stream for them has to be a huge attraction. My response, since they wouldn't let me keep my non-MC card, is to not use Mastercard side of it at all. What benefit does it give me? Nothing - it can take a few days for mastercard transactions to be properly reflected in the balance, unlike EFTPOS transations which are just about instantaneous, and I rely on that balance as a sanity-check for how much I have left in any particular week... plus I'm not the only one with access to that account, so unaccounted-for pending transactions could cause some embarrassment.

They make a huge deal out of how there's no limit to the number of Mastercard transactions per month, unlike EFTPOS ones, and cite it as a customer benefit. Their marketing drivel that came with the card stated how wonderful this was for the consumer, letting you use your money how and when you like with fewer fees (they helpfully neglect to mention that the merchant has to pay for the privilege of accepting Mastercard). They tried to avoid the subject of how somebody with the 16 digits on the front and three of those on the back could reach into my account without a PIN from the other side of the world, and wouldn't give me a plain ATM card instead - saying that it was done "because most customers want them", and they couldn't reverse it once the card had been converted over. Fuckers. Should have taken it to the Banking Ombudsman, but I just couldn't be bothered at the time.

I refuse to use it on-line or use the Mastercard facility; that's what the credit card and Paypal are for.

No, I suspect it was actually the other lot. That's what happens when you breach the terms of the Third Benthic Treaty...

...if I found myself suffering from methanol poisoning, and I had a bottle of vanilla essence or a tube of hand cleaner close by, I'd probably mix it with a cup of water and squirt it up there just after calling the ambulance. I believe intravenous alcohol solutions are used in hospital to treat methanol poisoning, but rectal administration is about the best I think anyone could manage safely by themselves with ordinary household items.

....FSVO "manage safely", of course. It's also somewhat disturbing that I can come up with a valid reason for a self-administered alcohol enema.

...and now that the cat is out of the bag, there will undoubtedly be students who will do all of that AND suck on a bong full of basil whenever they see the light come on. Entrap the bastards! "Let's see your evidence that I was using marijuana".

IngSoc is now free from crimethink.

I hadn't seen that one before. I found it vaguely amusing, in a "Let's watch the spotty 15-year-old telling his parents that they're idiots" kind of way. And don't get me started on Doug Engelbart and Bill English actually coming up with the first mouse in about 1963 (and "Get Off My Lawn!")

I don't see the problem as the non-obvious way that GIMP goes about it, so much as the quality of the documentation. It tells me exactly what I need to know to accomplish the task and acquire new skills, and a little levity something I appreciate even in technical documentation, but this seems too condescending and is not the kind of thing I would expect to see in commercial documentation. The "lusers are idiots" implications have no place in modern high-quality end-user documentation, although as someone who has had personal experience of the "Where's the ANY key" phenomenon I can vouch for the fact that sometimes assumptions about how much the user knows can be dangerous. And perhaps, in a world where the left-shift and right-shift keys are treated differently by some software, mention that GIMP uses both in the same way is of some use...

That documentation is also seven years old, and dates from a time when the software had a VERY limited target audience; it may well have been intended as a first-approximation, a placeholder for something better that would come later (and yeah, anyone who's coded ANYTHING serious, EVER, for someone else will understand how crufty crap you aren't proud of becomes production and then mission-critical because it's "good enough" for most purposes, and the same thing can clearly happen with documentation). I understand that getting people to write documentation is hard, getting them to do it right is even harder, and that in an environment where everything is done by volunteers you sometimes need to either do it yourself or accept whatever someone else is prepared to do, but it's time for a refresh of the documentation to bring its quality in line with that of the software.

imp-free or impfree

Image manipulation and processing, for free (freedom AND beer)

Software that's free from troublesome supernatural entities, or at least the minor ones...

Image manipulation and processing, free from the unfortunate linguistic baggage that has plagued the project.

I respectfully submit to the community imp-free or impfree as possible names for a "branding fork"; now we just need to get the developers to take a look at what was done with Firefox et al in Debian, and perhaps what CentOS have done with the RedHat sources, for a couple of hints about what could be done to facilitate this. "The GIMP" was a great in-joke when it was a homebrew-but-crippled Photoshop-wannabe, used only by the people who wrote it, but let's face it - branding is important. If this was a commecial product, and the name had negative connotations in particular markets, they'd change it as part of the localisation.

I believe Mitsubishi re-named a particular series of four-wheel-drive vehicles for Portugese-speaking markets because driving something that loosely translates to "Wanker" was unpopular for some reason, although I can't think of any particular software examples off the top of my head.

$ORKPLACE (a university) mandated the 3c509 because we apparantly had lots of problems getting Banyan Vines to work properly through generic NE2000 clones. When PCI came along we moved to the 905. Then we went Netware, and the on-board Intel and Tulip chips got really good, and separate NICs became an un-needed extra cost for most applications here - I could easily believe the same thing happened elsewhere, too. A couple of years ago I fished about 20 new-in-box 3c509b's from a skip; don't know what I'll use them for but they were just too good to let go into landfill, I'll probably wait until supplies dry up and eBay the suckers to the desperate if I can't find anything else to do with them.

They're lovely. I've got a whole stack of various revisions of them too, mostly pulled from computer carcasses because they were too good to throw away, and they're great as second or third or fourth interfaces in machines that need them.

I wonder if AC's rebuff to arekusu was posted AC out of fear for being labelled sick and extreme by a society that doesn't see any nudity as appropriate?
 
I don't have any nude photos of my kids, but I'll pose a question. Lots of people in the 1940s and 1950s had naked photographs taken on bearskin rugs by professional photographers - so why are their children being prosecuted for dropping off rolls of film containing a shot or two of their grandchildren playing under the sprinklers? If the test is whether some weirdo somewhere could jack off to it, I'm sure there are people out there who get their jollies imagining all sorts of things about pictures of three year olds with lollypops - and if we invoke the Quantum Fetish Theory, we probably shouldn't have any photographs of anyone under 18 at all. There's a line that has to be drawn somewhere, but I don't know if anyone can say for sure just where that should be without appearing foolish or perverted to someone else.

The problem with that is that they'd be too cheap, and thus more difficult to believe in.

Assuming for a moment that in the hands of a competent operator these things *do* find bad stuff more often than random chance would allow, you'd want them to be well and consistently made. You would want them built by a company that didn't skimp on materials and that wouldn't make random substitutions if certain parts or materials were unavailable. You'd want them as "mil-spec" as possible, so they'd survive field service. You'd want them to come from somewhere with a little credibility in the security field, as this mob seem to have from some of the other devices and bespoke vehicles they produce or distribute - this is not the kind of thing that you could get away with buying from just anywhere, and in the absence of the ability to properly and scientifically test it you'd need to rely on the thing's pedigree to some extent.

As for the assertion in TFA that reporters managed to carry AK-47s in their car without being challenged - perhaps what's being detected isn't the physical presence of weapons or explosives, but the intent of the driver and passengers. If a driver knew they had a bomb and had a belief that the checkpoint had a magic bomb-detecting divining rod, they'd be more likely to be nervous. Perhaps these devices give the operator a little more confidence that allows them to subconsciously take more notice of other behavioural cues. If that was the case, then a driver who didn't know the vehicle was packed with explosives or a driver who was a cucumber-cool psychopath could reasonably be expected to not "trigger" the device. Similarly, someone who was nervous in the presence of people with guns and badges and roadblocks could be expected to be spotted as being "uncomfortable" by the operator - and the gold teeth and perfume false-positive stories are intended to allow the operators to continue to believe in their skills and the device. You could probably get similar results from people who were conditioned to believe they were tapping into their own psychic potential, with a couple of potential drawbacks - if they fail with a prop they can blame the prop and the potential unreliability of the process rather than themselves, and they're less likely to be killed by the oppositiion if they're not seen as some kind of magical and irreplaceable person.

Sure, it's security theatre rather than a security device per se, and in use is a cross between a confidence trick and a carnival act, but that might just get results for reasons other than its own "bomb detecting" ability.

Same thing happened with my last Toyota, a '67 Corona. Turned out to be the breather tube from the rocker cover to the carbie fouling the throttle linkage and holding it wide open.