Humodour

I broke the dam!

Fully sick mate.

Ta. Archos 5 looks pretty decent as is, but I'll wait for the Dell Mini 5 - it has 3G! And no offence Purkake, but I clearly said runs on Android. I can't see anything from Microsoft fitting that category.

I want a device that has as large a screen as possible while still fitting in my pocket. I want it to run on Linux, preferably Android. I want it to be at least 600 mhz (preferably a gigahert). I want it to play MP3's. I want it to have Flash support. I want it to have WiFi. Ideally it'd also have 3G mobile broadband. I want it to have mobile page support, but also (and perhaps default) full-size page support. A USB port would be nice. Preferably flash memory since I'd be carrying it a lot, possibly drop it - hard drives seem less rugged. Ideas?

Have fun when your 1 terabyte hard-drive dies.

Steam generally doesn't do regional pricing for Australia, so it's a great deal to buy on there. When it is forced to do regional pricing by stupid publishers however, e.g. Bioshock 2, the product is usually twice as expensive. Why? Taxes add about 10% to 15%, not 100%. It is for this reason that I will not purchase Bioshock 2. I won't deny simply downloading it instead crossed my mind, but I'm a patient person - I'll just wait 3 years until the price drops to $20 or so on Steam (I'd never buy it elsewhere, since it'd have online activation DRM).

She looks like whatsername from Dr Who. Donna something. I was thinking EXACTLY the same thing. Hahaha!

She's a brave girl.

Oh.

I absolutely loved VtM:Bloodlines. Combat was great fun, what are you guys smoking? Flamethrowers, claws, swords, pistols, magic, stealth... Maybe you guys didn't play the Brujah or Tremere? Those are the most fun classes because of their wide skill sets. Oh, and Malkavian.

As Wals said, oil won't suddenly dispappear. The price will simply reach a point where it's uneconomical to use it as a fuel (whether due to pollution taxes or peak oil). It's not at all elementary that this would raise the cost of plastic manufacture prohibitively.

Sry, I'm not mongolian. Shutup woman get on my horse.

With the previous thread being a modest failure, I was hoping that with a little more exposure and growth, HoN might have by now expanded to the greater gaming populous. Romans. To that end, I was wondering if anybody from Obsidian plays it these days? What is HoN? Epic stuff. An independent studio remake of a classic Warcraft 3 map, new graphics engine, awesome new lobby system, and cool new heroes. And they're independent, but the servers and game are pretty sweet and reliable. Think, I guess, RTS + Diablo 2 + turn-based except not because it's real time and turns don't exist shutup. Add me. I'm 'Fuse' - I get a 4 digit letter account name because I registered before it existed and then it got hacked by Chinese but not really. Type /b add fuse I'm not sure if you still need invites or not. I think it's open beta by now but if it isn't I have 7. I'll give them to the first people to request them, regardless of race, religion, creed, skin colour, gender, or sexual preference or political persuasion or if you like other guys. http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/ I forget how many players there are. There's over a million accounts and either 250,000 regular players or 25,000.

I'm cautiously pessimistic, if all goes well.

Yes. What do you expect? It's Britain.

The second you stop being a cranky rotten bastard No, when he does that he's drunk. I'm drunk now you mong.

OK, I think you almost have a valid point, but I lost interest when you brought up 'organised crime' in a thread about, essentially, individual ignorance/laziness.

Good. Stop being such a soft male-chicken.

What evidence do you have to back up that claim? It's quite a stretch to claim that the human brain has changed significantly in 10 years.

And, not to spam, but one has to wonder why the media industry (which includes all the big-name American media companies as well as Australian ones - don't think they wouldn't do it there) would bring such a clearly unfair case before the court? "There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Heinlein, Life Line, 1939 And, not to get off-topic, but this applies just as much to the auto-industry or banks as it does the media industry.

This bit is interesting, worth a read: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2810520.htm Note: the 'repeat infringers' mentioned are those who are legally proven by courts and police, not merely suspected by the various media lobbies. This is important considering that the media lobbies often accidentally accuse things like network printers of copyright infringement.

The first thing I do when I buy a new CD is burn it to FLAC. It's lossless, open (no patents or IP infringement to worry about) and awesome. How can you go wrong?

So what? Oh no, we'll have to use the immense reserves of Thorium, Plutonium, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biofuel algae, natural gas, or coal. However will we survive?! You do realize that almost all plastic we use today is oil based, right? Try to imagine a world without plastic for a second. When we run out of oil, there's more than transportation that needs to be altered. Don't even bother bringing it up. Every chemistry class I've done since 2004 has in some way covered plastics and polymers. For a start, only something like 2% of all oil is used to manufacture plastics. Moreover, even with oil being uneconomical to use as a fuel source (which is what we're REALLY talking about here), I've read that that will barely interefere with plastic manufacture prices, and that even if it should, we have lower-grade hydrocarbons we cen resort to. And that's ignoring biological polymers which plastics are starting to be made from (I know my shampoo and some food containers are, and you can't tell the difference). The most common one is probably polylactic acid (PLA), trailing that is I guess polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB). Not to mention that it's trivial to convert ethanol into the the polyethylene (plastic bags) monomer, ethylene.

Late 2009, the media industry lobby here in Australia pissed off a lot of people (especially the Internet and ommunications industries and consumers) by taking one of Australia's biggest and most well-liked ISPs to court over the copyright infringements of its users. Their argument was basically that ISPs had to become police and judges and cut off users they suspect of copyright infringement. Obviously this is a blatant disregard for due process (and indeed iiNet forwarded all copyright infringement alerts it received onto the police - it couldn't take any action directly without court approval, warrants, and that was what the media lobbies took issue with). http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technolog...00204-ne1w.html Well today the court ruled that the media lobby has no right or grounds to demand that service providers take on the extra duties of (basically three strikes rules) that the media lobby wanted, and furthemore the media lobby has to pay iiNet full court fees to compensate them for time and money wasted defending themselves. http://www.smh.com.au/business/iinet-slays...00204-nedw.html Choice quotes from the judge: “In the law of authorization there is a distinction to be drawn of the means of copyright infringement… the mere provision of access to the Internet [does] not authorize infringement.” “iiNet has no control of the BitTorrent system and is not responsible for its use by users…iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user uses that system to bring about copyright infringement … the law recognizes no positive obligation on any person to protect the copyright of another.” tl;dr version: Internet providers are no more responsible for what their users download than the post office is for what somebody writes or sends in a letter.