Humodour

Increased freedom? Increased tolerance? Increased opportunities? Increased knowledge of the world? I could go on, but I suspect you've already determined that you don't like multiculturalism.

I would say that in Australia at least, man is a part of nature and man-made fires is the natural order of things, since the aboriginies have been doing it for 40,000 years. For man to suddenly stop man-made fires in Australia's bushland, is not the natural thing to do. Fires lit by aborigines have been limited in scope and certainly not large enough or frequent enough to lead to widespread evolutionary changes in the short time they've had access to fire (they certainly haven't been doing their signature controlled burning since they first set foot on here as Africans). Moreover, Australian flora has been relying on fire to reproduce for millions of years, which kind of nullifies whatever silly point you were trying to make anyway. Those who claim controlled backburning is wrong annoy me, but you are no better; the same kind of zealot, just with the opposite agenda.

lol, I'm pretty sure arsonists didn't control the weather, though. Arsonists light fires with no wind and 25 degree heat: minor bushfires. Arsonists light fires in freak wind conditions and 45 degree heat: once in a century bush fires.

It works really well in Australia (minor kerfuffles such as those moronic Cronulla riots where drunk bogans and low-life gangs had a bit of a tiff), but we have the advantage of being an isolated island in the middle of nowhere. Actually, I'm not sure that's such an advantage since it means we have a massive border to cover. Still, Australia's basic cultural framework is immigration - at any one point in time, 25% of Australians weren't born here. We have an intake of about 100,000 to 300,000 new arrivals each year (it varies each year). A significant portion of them are Muslims, but the key thing to consider is that a) they are thoroughly vetted (typically for skills like doctors, bricklayers, etc, as well as their English), and b) they are accepted alongside many more immigrants from other countries/faiths which helps strengthen that somewhat ephemeral sense of multiculturalism. The biggest problem would probably be some gang activity in Sydney's less well-off Western surburbs, but that's usually blown out of proportion by the Daily Telegraph. Certainly the hyped up threat of the moment is gangs of a different sort - bikie gangs, which is predominately middle-aged white males. But yeah, I'm not sure how well immigration policy is working in other countries. Many European countries have had largely closed borders up until the middle of last century. I imagine opening them so swiftly would have caused a bit of a culture shock. Australia has had immigrants coming in since inception - Chinese, Afghanistanis, Italians, you name it. Still, I see Europeans as somewhat xenophobic and less multicultural and integrated than Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia (I'd include Britain but there seems to be a fair bit of racial tension there). That's my take at least. Haven't been to Europe personally yet.

Whoa, calm down mate. I've explained myself honestly; there's no reason for you to get so worked up. I'm really not sure why you feel the need to hurl such paranoid vitriol but it'd be nice if you kept it in your head next time you have a bad day eh?

I couldn't handle ToEE. It was pathetic. I say this as a massive Fallout, Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc fan.

In that case, I think your mouse skills need some have mods to be of any use. Seriously, silenced SMG = BEST GUN EVAR. One mouse click to their head and they go down without a sound. My main problem was the recoil. In any case a stand-up fire just wasn't fun. T'was with the flame thrower. Whatch them dance!

That's true for Mac laptops and the Mini, which are not usually used for gaming (I, for example, only intend to play pre-2009 games + Diablo 3 and Starcraft 3, which will run on old hardware). The higher end Macs tend to be top of the line (in part due to their popularity for use in things like the film industry, although they've largely been superseded by Linux there now). My point about the i7 was that it seems to be following the same trajectory as the Pentium D or Itanium.

This is a bit of a shocker. I won't believe it fully till I hear a Microsoft press release confirm it, but it's a pretty convincing article (coupled with other news articles I've been reading lately about MS and ARM): http://eetimes.eu/uk/217200966 I'm cautiously supportive of the move, as Intel is almost as anti-competitive as Microsoft is, but receives little to no negative reputation for such (it's currently about to get a billion dollar fine in the EU courts for anti-competitive practices against AMD similar to the one Microsoft got from the EU a few years ago). So a move to increase chip-maker competition is a good thing.

And Craps Macs are? Why did you write 'Craps' then cross it out?

i7's don't seem to be a long-term investment at all.

Alternatively, I quoted a news report I read today, which is obviously easy to access compared to a news report I read about a week ago which is clearly about 100,000 or more pages distant from this one in Google news, and which I can't remember enough key phrases of to find on Google (similar to the one where the US declared a national emergency because of swine flu - or do you not believe that either?). It's not worth my time to dig it up as I was not overly trying to prove a point, merely point out something interesting. It's amusing to see how hard you are taking it, however.

This relationship is OVER!

But every time I've had a type error in Python it specifically tells me why the error occurred: e.g. argument is of type int but I sent a string. Python is still strongly typed because Python actively tracks types, even if we aren't required to. Fair enough. I don't know much at all about shell programming. I have a feeling I'm actually mischaracterising OS X's shell switching method by way of ignorance.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09...8&art_pos=2 Supercomputer modelling predicts this will go pandemic sometime next week. On the other hand, the article aggregated states: http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217201126 On a related note in the article: Also, the WHO has renamed this to the Colbert Flu to avoid offending ethnic minorities. Report at 11.

Here here eh.

Processors are about 5 years newer -> better optimisations and technology, 2 cores instead of one, more ram (less use of paging), faster BUS, fasting grahpics card... oh I'd certainly say 4 times faster is a reasonable statement. You of all people know that CPU speed isn't the only bottleneck. Did I say it was? It's certainly a clever OS and while Ubuntu rivals it in the innovation department, there are still a lot of clever and innovative things about it I really like. Great, so even the console users of the future won't have a clue what they're actually doing... That's so silly. It's like saying Python coders don't know what they're doing because it's duck-typed. Anyway, Ubuntu does the same thing, AFAIK.

No problem. It was a CDC statement, and I can't be bothered digging it up (I read so many news articles on google each day and bookmark so very few), so take it with a grain of salt. It certainly wasn't a slight on America as Gromnir got irrationaly riled up about; many other countries would have responded similarly.

Also, if this is happening, it is pretty shocking. Don't worry, they're not. It's just Guard Dog's usual talent for mischaracterising the stances of individual MP's with an agenda as the stances of an big tent entire party. He is, of course, free to try and back up his claim with evidence to the contrary.

Just FYI, this will happen in 2010 or some such. Seriously, it's going to take at least until June. Incorrect, it will happen in June/July this year.

learn2QM Learn to... quantum mechanics? As in the Hiesenburg (I spelt that wrong) uncertainty principle? Which would validate the original post... Hmmm...so he knows either the location of the inhibition center of his brain, or its velocity, but not both at the same time? Unfortunately, I'm not sure scientists have figured that one out yet. Incorrect.

The US has already admitted it acted too slowly to the outbreak, and the WHO has voiced similar concerns. Really? Do you have a link for that, please? don't need a link or proof. it is a Given that the vast majority o' the world's tragedies in the post WWII era is the result o' American incompetence or greed. some folks start with the assumption that the US flubbed the swine flu thing and then work backwards... look for proof after the fact. why you gotta rock the boat? Gromnir is old fashioned-- we blame the Pope for all the world's ills. not any more valid than American hate, but at least our stoopidity gots pedigree and tradition. n00bs. HA! Good Fun! Way to completely misinterpret my post and have a bit of a paranoid rant while you're at it.

My Mac Mini arrived. I installed apt-get, OpenOffice 3, Firefox, VLC and WINE and it's purring like a kitten. Will test out some games on WINE soon, but I plan to install an XP dual-boot for my old games. I'm loving the fact that's it about 4 times more powerful than my previous PC. Old PC: 1.4 Ghz Intel Centrino 512 MiB DDR1 SDRAM Geforce 5200 32MiB New PC: 2 Ghz Intel Dual Core (C2D) 4 GiB DDR3 SDRAM Geforce 9400 256 MiB And holy **** is it small. It's smaller than my 5 year-old DVD burner in all dimensions. Oh, the console on OS X Leopard is really interesting. It automatically switches between sh, bash, Tcl, etc, depending on the command you enter.

They shouldn't be, but what's happening is they ARE becoming the Republican party, which is where a lot of the problem lies.

Sort of. There has been over 150 flu deaths in Mexico, most of them presumed to be Swine flu, but of those tested so far (which isn't many, since testing is slow), only 7 have been confirmed to be swine flu deaths.