TetsuoShima

That's easy, Star Wars is all about exciting things with individuals, while Star Trek is much more often about 'the team', it's harder to make a good game about an individual in a team (where the team is the most important thing) than it is to make one about a heroic individual. (imho)

Hmm, might be injust, but it's also incredibly stupid of those people to keep so much money in their home, sure it's their right, but that doesn't mean it's less stupid. It's basically asking to be robbed in todays society. People have been killed for far less. What's more, by keeping so much cash in your home, you are placing suspicion on yourself in the eyes of any government agency. Cash can be used much easier for 'illegal acticities' than electronic money. I'd also bet that if they got it back, they can expect a visit from the IRS, in which case, they're likely to again lose a large portion. For good, that time. In any case, I'd expect that there is something more going on then just what is described in this acticle, since it makes it sound plain silly. Then again, who ever said that governments are always just was an even bigger fool then these people. As far as the land confiscation is concerned, there are such laws in nearly entire Europe, though obviously, there is more going on then just "generate more tax revenue", such statements, in my eyes, makes this a poorly (read inaccurately), written article, that seems to be aimed at creating sympathy for these people, instead of telling the objective truth of the matter. Then again, who ever said that newspapers write objectives truths was probably just as much of a fool as the one who said governments are always just. Newspapers are rarely to be trusted fully and governments rarely pass laws that are completely in your favour. Still, if these people are legit, I do hope they get their hard earned cash back. :)

You had bad sectors. O_O *Gasp* Well, in that case, the prog you had previously installed most likely was not the cause of your 'unbootability'. At least, not if it was a genuine prog and not some 'virus-like' that intentionally wrecks your hdd. Nice that it's fixed tho. :)

If your windows fails to boot properly, you should get an option in the F8 boot-up list: "Last known working configuration". If you select that option, it should resolve any issue you got since the previous working boot. Once you're in, you can uninstall the cr*ppy software you managed to install. :p Alternatively try the safe mode as stated above, but usually LKW works just fine, unless it's a boot sector issue or something, but if that's so, then safe mode wouldn't work either. If all else fails, you can also boot from the windows cd and revert to a previous restore point, that does require you to have that service enabled, but it's enabled by default, so if you didn't disable it yourself, that should work. Windows (starting from the 2k version) is pretty robust, a re-install is rarely necessary.

Try SmartFTP and it's forums, they have an excellent free client for non-commercial use and there's lots of info help files to be found on their website. http://www.smartftp.com/ Moved to general computing, since so far this doesn't seem to be a development or design oriented thread.

Woot, that is a monster mate. :D The only negative points about it, could be weight and size, but that all depends on what you expect from a laptop. The internals must be top of the line! It must be costing them a small fortune. :cyclops: nice! :)

OH NO, IT'S KILLING THE INTERNETS!!! (or is it?) A tale of refuted untruths. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/exaflood-not-happening.ars Much more indepth info in the article. It's an interesting read. :)

(or how to ruin a mozilla based browser) http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pogo-browser-beta-first-look.ars

Thread cleaned as a result of not heeding my request. Please stay on topic now, or the thread will have to be closed!

kyran, you should know that Virgin is THE one company that is pushing for the BBC to pay extra fees to pay for the bandwidth increase because of the online BBC videos. It is the company that most pronounced said that they'd either get paid for providing good service for the BBC or they would throttle them as far as they see fit. http://torrentfreak.com/virgin-media-ceo-says-net-neutrality-is-a-load-of-bollocks-080413/ By all means, if you like a fully tiered network, all go to Virgin and soon you'll find yourselves in more trouble than before you began. dBLOOD, this is simply the American net neutrality arguement crossing the Atlantic, Europe is catching up it seems. The consumer organisations are already filing with EU to make net neutrality law, if they succeed, the Virgin CEO can shove his taunts 'where the don't shine'. Some background: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080413-atrans-atlantic-definition-of-net-neutrality.html

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the current system is right, but it's the system that's in place and I'm very doubtfull it's going to change anytime soon. It's not just the UK btw. We pay (converted into USD) $160/month for just broadband (no phone included). That's for a monthly bandwidth limit of 50GB, but the speeds are good, no complaining there. The price is rediculously high though, but it is shared between all the inhabitants of the appartment complex (so is the bandwidth limit btw, so in reality for me, the price and bandwidth limits are 1/10th of what I mentioned above, if I need more bandwidth, I can buy that at $1.5/GB). Coutries like Japan/Korea/... are the exception, not the norm. Though we probably would all want that to change, it's unlikely to, not in any major way anyway and not very fast either. That's just the way things work over here. Broadband requires huge investments that are not easily earned back (because of the incredibly rapid development of new technologies in this sector), so by letting 'the free market' do it's thing, you create monopolies that have a large enough customer base to stay in business and make money (the more the better, high service is secondary to high profit) from it too.

This isn't on topic (but the reply to which this is a reply is also of topic, so at least I'm not alone :cyclops: ), but isn't that the whole idea about the EU in the long run, to come together as one 'country' in the long run. Comparable to the US? Have a joint international policy and divide areas of law between the 'local' government and 'federal' government. I'm talking 'really' long run here (say 50-100 years). If that isn't the intention, then we may as well quit right now and sell our souls to the US, since that's what it'll boil down to then. Individual countries in Europe have zero international influence compared to the US, as a combined block we at least have a chance. You cannot have a union between nations if they are completely free to change any and all of their laws without regard for the laws of other union members. Going that way, is turning back the clock to the 1950's (or even further). Heck, even without the EU no Western European country is free to do with their laws as they please, every country is bound to a multitude of international treaties. Forming a Union to continuously update the 'treaties' between those countries, is just the next step to take, it's evolution, which in the long run should result in a completely unified Europe.

You realise that the money for the bandwidth has to come from somewhere, if it isn't coming from the BBC (which I'd have to agree with is a rediculous demand), then it's either going to come from part of the profit and investment into a 'better' (read faster, more reliable) network or it's going to come out of the consumer's pockets, possibly a combination of both. There is nothing free in this world (unfortunately). In light of that, another possibility could be that they again switch over from 'unlimited' *cough* access, back to a XX GB/month system. Somehow I think the ordinary consumer never thinks of this aspect when they talk about ISP's, they are not a public interest company, they are there to make profit.

A few words on that, it's not binding, so if any member decides thay want to do it anyway, they can. Any country that implements such a system should immediately be classified as non-democratic (in the broad sense of the word) imo, since they are taking a run around the complete judicial system.

You guys realise that this was originally a thread about recommending somebody some scifi show to check out, NOT to DISCUSS which one you think is THE best scifi show out there. Just give the person some suggestions and let him/her decide for himself which one he/she likes best. By saying: don't watch another user's suggestion or using all sorts of colourfull words to describe why show X is better than show Y, you're turning this thread into a discussion thread about why which show is better than the other, which was not in the thread desciption. If I catch anybody turning this thread away from that thread title, I'm going to have to retro-actively delete all previous and following replies that don't fit the thread title according to my own judgement. That's more than 10 replies up untill this point already!!! (And yes, it includes one of my own.)

Fun fun fun and more fun. Did I mention this was a fun episode. :cyclops: The only thing that was a bit 'annoying' was the catapulting stone escape pod capsule coming out of the volcano, was a bit over the top imo. The bit with the household gods at the end was marvellous. :D I had a blast with the waterpistol bit too. Gotta sting, LOL. ed.: typo, any more?

On all 'current' windows platforms, most crashes are caused by bad drivers or unstable hardware. We all know Vista has had its share of 'bad luck' *cough* with bad drivers. As the 3rd parties get more experience on Vista, the number of crashes should reduce to below the number of crashes on XP. Vista is slower than XP and always will be, in virtually every aspect (every bench I've read confirms it, without a single exception and SP1 does very little to mitigate that), whether or not it is perceptibly slower, depends on the user in question and which tasks he performs. The 'slowness' is a trade-off you make for other 'benefits'. My personal opinion on Vista: if we're talking about the 32-bit version, the 'benefits' are not worth the step from XP to Vista, as such imo, XP beats Vista. Unless of course, you want to game on dx10, in which case you have no other choice. If we're talking about the 64-bit version, I'd have to say Vista beats XP. So, to conclude, it's pointless to buy a 32-bit Vista version, but if you're going 64-bit, Vista is probably worth it. Of course, when the OS forcibly ships with the computer you buy, then there usually is also no point to specifically buy XP, the transition to either side (Vista-XP) is not worth the extra money if you've already got one of both. FYI, OEM versions of Vista Ship either 32-bit or 64-bit, never both. Retail versions have both 32- and 64-bit installation possibilities. That's of course just a small personal analysis between Vista and XP, Mac OS really isn't an option, unless you buy a Mac or like to mess around a lot. Linux... well, if you forget about gaming and are willing to put some effort into learning how to operate Linux and are willing to search around on the internet a lot to solve all those 'problems' you're bound to run into, mostly by yourself and are not dumb (you don't have to be smart, but you can't be dumb either) and are willing to forgo some of those popular proprietary applications that are not available on Linux and are content to work with open source variants instead then, if all of those apply, Linux is the OS for you. It'll be more stable; once you get the hang of it, you'll get less easily frustrated by your OS and it's free and new versions are released on a much more regular basis then either windows or mac os. Of course, deciding which distro to install is a daunting task, most people recommend starting with an 'easy' Ubuntu and if you feel you'd like to experiment a bit after you've gotten the hang of it, try some others. If you're still not happy with Linux, you can always try BSD, more specifically PC-BSD, that's about as idiot proof as BSD gets. :)

Look, this thread isn't a debate on whether there is a point to the question or not, there is a point if someone is interested in the reply, looking at the situation from different timeperiods, opinions on how races might conduct themselves (keeping in mind their stereotypical racial traits), what people think about this. If you don't have an opinion or don't want to express it, or simply feel this thread is too silly for your involvement, don't give a reply (or at least don't give the same statement 3 times, we heard you the first time). Coming in a thread, saying multiple times the same thing with purpose to discourage the discussion is not acceptable. Look beyond mere fact and make reasonable assumptions, if they are reasonable to you, then that's fine, and let others be the judge whether or not they are reasonable to them, in the sense, would Vulcans be able to outsmart the pure muscle of the Klingons, would they (Vulcans) lose their cool and go barbaric in their struggle for survival? I'm interested in opinions, not facts, as this is speculation about fiction. With that (personal speculation/fantasy on a scifi show) in mind, it should be clear to anybody reading this thread, that writing your own opinion on how you think this might turn out (call it a brief essay if you like, call it whatever), was the exact purpose of this thread. It's basically about mind over muscle or the other way around, which is a more philosophical question placed in a Star Trek environment than anything else. For me the philosophy behind some of the ideas in Star Trek, is what makes it interesting. Though with the rise of mind-numbing shows since the late 90's, it's clear most people don't want to be reminded of the philosophy of their actions and instead simply want to be entertained by shows without much substance. I lately have a tendency to try to overcome this by not writing full explanations about my questions and instead place them in a simple (be it silly) context instead and let the reader decide for himself how to respond to it, instead of pointing him in the direction I am thinking, so hereby I've distilled the core question out of the 'silly' context and with that partly ruined the fun of the situation, but at least you now no longer have to go look for 'the point'. Though given the size of this reply, I doubt anybody will ever bother to read it. If I wasn't in the mood for it, I wouldn't either. Now, let's stop discussing the purpose of the thread and go back on topic.

Let expand on a line of the original post for you then: In other words, the premise is up to you to decide, within the Star Trek universe. You can pick your own timeperiod, give different results for different times, reasons, think freely, set up your own reasonable 'qualifications'... ;p

I don't want to be an a**, but technically, html isn't a programming language either... Expand the 'M' in html. :p

Is that the one with the creepy 'angels'? Man, I loved that episode, it's only fair it gets an award, it was/is awesome!!!

Well, if that's true, I'll quit being an a** and sign up unconditionally. :)

ST:A??? :o Star Trek: Atlantis o_O

That's about double of the Torchwood viewers. I'd expected more actually, given so many people's dislike for Torchwood.

OMG, I had no idea he was that old already. He will be missed, a great actor. Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!! :o