Your American and don't know what your talking about, the IRA deliberately targeted civilian areas in England and in Northern Ireland. It's aim was to re-integrate Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland through terror. It did play along Catholic and Protestant lines because there are deep social tensions in that area.

The UK armed forces got involved because the police couldn't deal with them as the IRA was robbing banks, blowing people up and had massive ammunition stock piles which were funded by Americans (particularly New Yorkers).

212 people injured by the IRA
Wikipedia puts the number of people murdered at 1824, 624 were civilians

Great Restraint indeed.

I was a beta tester for a MMORPG (Uru Live) they limited the testers to specific geographical areas and made sure each volunteer signed a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before letting us have a copy of the game. If anything was leaked they made it clear that they would be pursuing that person through the courts, I can speak of this because the NDA had a 2 year lifetime.

They did have the advantage of being able to distribute updates through a central several and everyone had to log in allowing them to make sure no one got in who wasn't supposed to. They also had leaks, all of those were by accident the beta tester forums were next to the game forums and some of the testers got confused. In the end several of the testers organised themselves to police the incidents.

Multi-function button binds are legitimate design choices when dealing with a console, this is because a controller has a limited set of buttons. PC gamers have a keyboard and a mouse and so a greater selection of buttons. In the example given the standard is r for reload and e for use, the only reason to keep a multi-function button is when a players situation changes e.g. looking down a scope, driving a vehicle, walking, swimming, etc..

It's lazyness by the devs and the Wii shovelware is a great example of the problem happening in console land. Not all games would lend themselves to working with a Wiimote and sometimes your gameplay is going to have to change drastically. But a lot of early Wii games simply took existing games and quickly remapped the keys for a motion controller and those games didn't work.

Your comments sound more like excuses.

Your wrong, take Half Life 2 Episode 2. When that game came out I could have all of the graphics settings turned to maximum except for Anti-Aliasing. Even with everything on minimum Anti-Aliasing would reduce the frame rate to ~22fps. With it off I would get ~50-60fps on maximum settings, I am sure there are people with graphics cards which could cope with the anti-aliasing but had only a small amount of memory so textures would need to be reduced.

The basic configuration options were arrived at for a reason, those reasons haven't diminished and to dismiss them is short sighted. Considering the amount of time it would take to extract that setting to a configuration file and the amount of time it would take to add a menu I say it's better to spend the morning in order to add the menu.

The options aren't vast there are about 9 graphical ones and around 2 seconds of playing with them will tell a user what they do. Sound is the same the only confusing one would be the PC networking options but that wasn't what the commandment was about.

Got an Xperia Play and the auto correct is driving me up the wall, I had a Nokia so I'm used to typing things in correctly but auto correct keeps changing words to the most random things. For example I typed "Haha", I could see that I had typed it correctly but auto correct had changed it to "havf".

On Android it displays a list of possible words above the keyboard, one word will be bolded if you press space the bolded word is used, if you click on any of the words above the keyboard they are used instead (includes bolded).

How many times have they told us that at top speeds the Veyron runs out of petrol in 12 minutes and the tyres go after 8 minutes. Clarkson loves that car but that particular limitation has been mentioned alot.

I ride a Suzuki GSR 600, commuting to work gets me 52MPG, holding ~70MPH for a long distance nets me around 65MPG. Blasting the throttle like they do on Top Gear gets me closer to 45MPG.

Driving/Riding vehicles differently nets different results, if Top gear tell me something got 20 MPG on their track I'd expect something like 30-35 MPG in real life. Top Gear were told by Tesla that the car would have a range of around 55 miles on the Top Gear Track. When Top Gear portrayed this with a bit of humour, Tesla get mad 2 years later? What about the BBC journalist who wanted to take an Electric BMW Mini Cooper from London to the north of England, it took him more than a week and his opinion was Electric cars just aren't ready for long distance driving. Are BMW going to sue him?

Even if Tesla do release a sensible car I'll be avoiding it, can't stand to support such pathetic companies.

Yes a completely gold cable would give improved performance over a copper counterpart. However what most shops sell is gold (plated) connectors. This will add additional input/output impedance on to your cable/amplifier/speaker, this causes the signal to degrade. In effect you spend more for a worse quality cable.

I can dig out the RF maths behind this fact if you like, in my university input/output impedance at RF frequencies was explained using gold/copper connector cable as examples.

My Uni course involved Assembly, Pascal, VHDL and C++. It forced a certain knowledge on how a computer works, I finished university 3 whole years ago and have been involved in training up new graduates for various projects. Almost all of them have only done Java in university, the result is they never understand basic concepts like pointers. Which would be fine but you need to understand pointers in order to code in Java (since it has them).

Having a basic understanding of the fundamentals is what a degree is all about, you also seem to think a person would either do technical writing or assembly. If your looking at a Software/Computer Engineering course the candidate should have done both since engineering involves everything from the design phase through to support and testing. Otherwise all the person has done is a software developer or technical writing course.

I do agree with CMU in that teaching how to write modular code is important, I love C++ but prefer Java because most old C++ projects I've worked on (and some are 15 years old) start out as modules but always turn into enormous inter-dependent blobs.Eclipse's plug-in approach seems to help keep dependencies to a minimum.

One day I'll meet this mythical knowledgeable Apple owner, it took 6 months of searching and I did finally find a nice chav* it's been six years and I've still not meet a knowledgeable Apple owner.

My criteria is simple, someone who knew to a relatively high degree a market and choose the Apple product. For example I know a number of software engineers who have bought an iPhone however if you were to mention Symbian, Palm Pre, Meego, Windows Mobile 6, Windows Phone 7, etc.. they would stare blankly at you. The Powerbook criteria is just someone who has heard of AMD Fusion or Intel Atom. You'd be amazed about the number of technical people who take no real interest when it comes to spending on gadgets.

*chav is UK talk for white trash, I dislike them intensely a friend said I was too judgemental and chavs were people too, hence the search. I had to admit I was wrong.

I can see two uses where the interfaces shown in the video would make sense.

I've noticed monitors with in built Intel Atom boards having been appearing in shops, pretty much everyone of these is touch screen. Considering the market they seem to be aiming for (basic web browsing, university desktops, etc..) bringing in the bubble designed UI would probably suit a lot of people.

The video also has a camera system setup which tracks hand movement, so you can use your hand like a mouse. I'd love to be able to interface with my media centre pc that way. My biggest announce is Windows Media Centre's interface sucks and the idea of using my fingers instead of a mouse on that PC would be cool.

Never heard of the site before today, went exploring. Found a bunch of artists I would likely never of heard of and £30 later I think I trebled whatever every artist was asking for and even then thought it was cheap. Before today I hadn't bought any music since Florence & the Machine came out.

My only criticism of the site is it doesn't seem to make finding albums by the same artist easy and doesn't provide a lit of "other people also bought..".

The ones in Tesco have EDF (Energy Supplier) logo's all over them, so I'm guessing they are. I the UK they also give references to the equivalent incandescent. We also had the slow start up problem when CFLs were first introduced around 10 years ago however none of the CFL bulbs in my home have it.

I don't understand why Americans are so against it, the bulbs are cheap, last a long time (never had one break on me), and are more efficient. The few use cases people seem to be going using are for heating but then there are more efficient means to do that.

Lower power technology is always more expensive up front but cheaper in the long run, I have alot of gadgets and yet my electricity bill is considerably lower than other single people I know.

There are chips designed to run Java Byte code as the instruction set, I've been waiting for a company to do the same for Davlik. That way you get the performance advantages of native code with none of the disadvantages.

Considering Symbian is such an OS and was open sourced I've always wondered why Google didn't take Symbian scrap the Series 60 UI and put their own in.