Hiro Protagonist

She finished Fallout 3 and is now taking out her frustration at the piss poor ending.

I agree somewhat. I've worked for some psycho managers in the past. Fortunately, I've moved on from those multi-national companies and now working for a small company that have great staff. I never understand why people put up with so much for so long.

When I hear games like Crysis selling a million copies and didn't make any money, then something is seriously wrong with the company or industry. But then you can buy games now that are cheaper than they were 10-15 years ago. eg. Starcraft II is selling as low as AU$69.00 from retail shops but 10-15 years ago, games were being sold around the $90-100.00 mark and it was rare to see a new release sell under AU$90.00.

You can do that with email as well.

I banked last years tax return cheque today. Or should I say, I did my tax return a few weeks ago that I put off for nearly 12 months and should have done last year - Financial Year July 2008 - June 2009. I'll have to go into the accountant again in the next couple of weeks to do my tax return again for Financial Year Jul 2009 - Jun 2010. Two tax return cheques in the space of a few weeks is all good though.

Never used any of those social sites (facebook, My Space, twitter, etc). When my gf or I organise our social life, we use things like a phone or email. We're so 90s and behind the times.

Or everyone may become pacifists and who would fight our wars.

Labor promised Broadband Internet on Optical Fibre to 99% of Australians at a cost of 4.7 Billion. People cheered. Including myself. Then Labor revised the figure to 43 Billion. Some people had reservations, but mostly people were happy. Then now the pricing from one ISP has come out and most people 'in the know' aren't going to switch over to optical fibre for their internet. They'll use their existing ADSL2+ broadband internet connection though their Copper phone line. I say 'in the know' because the majority of Australians think the optical fibre National Broadband Network is FREE in that you just pay your existing ISP what you've been paying now and when you switch over to optical fibre you get SUPERFAST 100 MBps internet speeds. But that's not the case. Someone has to pay the Government the $43 Billion to put this network in place and the best way for the Government to get their money back is have an exhorbitant fee for the ISPs to pay and then the ISPs will pass that cost onto the consumer. In other words, it's a TAX to gain revenue to pay back the 43 Billion. One of my work colleagues mentioned to me that even though he hates Labor, he's all for the NBN. When I showed and explained to him the pricing and someone has to pay back the 43 Billion... He was all like, 'But I thought it was free." He's quite shocked at the pricing and now understands and won't be using the NBN.

1) Agreed. The miners and the Mining council are all for a Tax, but not at 40%. That is just way too high. This proposed tax has wiped billions off the Australian Stock Exchange, cancelled mining projects, jobs in jeopardy and if a miner loses their job, this has a flow on effect on other industries. The miner needs to buy food, go on a holiday, have a hair cut, etc. No job, all those other businesses are affected. 2) It wasn't the Liberals who didn't pass it. It was the Greens and 2 independants who hold the balance of power. I don't know why people focus on the Liverals for not passing legislation when they are irrellevant. The people who pass legislation are the Greens and 2 independants Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding. If the Greens are all for the Environment and THEY won't pass an ETS, then you know the legislation is flawed. 3) Abbot (Liberals) hasn't come out to say he will support the internet filter as far as I know. And when the Liberals were in power, they gave parents the option to download a free 'net nanny' type filter for their computers. The Liberals put the responsibilty back onto the parents. As it should be. That's not to say the Liberals won't back the internet filter, I think the Liberals will shelve it for more important things. 4) So many shelved and failed policies. Prepare for a wall of text as per below: - Kevin Rudd promised $290 million to be spent on improved dental care for Australians. Reneged on this post-election. - Kevin Rudd promised a federal takeover of hospitals should their performance not drastically improve by July 2009. Never happened. - Kevin Rudd pledged to build 36 GP 'super clinics'

No, I don't vote for either Liberal or Labor. I just criticise bad policy.

The A-Team. Awesome over the top action movie. Great stuff.

Basically we had the worst Prime Minister in the history of Australia, elected by promising the world and delivered little. In fact, he's done more damage to Australia and the Australian economy than any Prime Minister since federation. There was a coup organised by the right wing and the Unions to topple Rudd and the Deputy Prime Minister was 'promoted' to Prime Minister. In other words, the powerbrokers called up other members of the Labor Party to ask which side will they be on - Rudd or Gillard and most said they would back Gillard. The Labor Party had a meeting and were going to vote who would be the new leader to dump the current leader and Rudd knowing he didn't have the numbers, stood down. Now that we have a female prime minister, she's come out saying we're moving forward from the Rudd Government and won't make the same mistakes. Although nothing at all has changed. No changes in policies and in fact a commitment to continue with the same policies. But because she's a woman, she will get a lot of voters (including a lot of women) voting for her that wouldn't have voted for Rudd.

Unlikely. Labor are full steam ahead with the Internet Filter. Sure you might have some dissenting voices from the Left but Conroy is described as a Factional Dalek from the Labor right wing. And it's the right wing powerbrokers who have put Gillard in power. Different Cat, Same spots. She has the female vote now. Unfortunately there are plenty of women who will vote for her for her gender alone. Carbon Tax, Mining Tax, NBN tax pricing. I guess they have to get the money from somewhere with all their spending. And ruin the Australian economy and business australia wide. Carbon Tax will be the big one that kills our economy. In Sydney, we're ruled by women. Lord Mayor > Premier > Governor > Prime Minister > Governor General > Queen. But then Gillard is a Prime Minister elected by unions, weighted with baggage, complicit with every bungle, backflip, broken promise and fiasco that occurred over the past 2.5 years. That's if you can afford it. NBN pricing at the moment is $49.95 a month for 10GB allowance including uploads. ($129.95 for 60GB, $159.95 for 90 GB including uploads). iiNet are the only ISP to my knowledge that has released their pricing plan. Whereas you can get unlimited ADSL2+ for $75.00 per month with TPG. Currently I'm on 130GB (no uploads counted) with Voip for $49.95 with speeds around 10-12 MBps with a download speed of around 1.2Mbps - night and day. I'm happy. There's no way in hell I'm switching over to the NBN with its ridiculous pricing. But then someone has to pay back the 43 Billion for this scheme. I'm all for a NBN but not at the price this is at.

We are in the longest quietest solar activity period in a very long time, It doesn't look like the sun is going to be any more active than is was in 2000 probably less so. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1980 A short term solar cycle happens every 10 years according to wiki. Long term it may trend down again, so no, not long term global warming instead it would have a cooling effect, eventually. Like a few hundred years ago when England froze over. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle I'm getting a bit sick of the media trying to hype up what is just another solar cycle and a pretty weak one at that. But then, what would the media do if we didn't have a boogie man to fear? The fact of the matter is if we started worrying about every little potential thing that could happen, we wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. I will take the sun's mighty fury as it comes... and in the meantime, grow a veggie patch out the back.

Next we'll be hearing, a fox took my baby.

Yeah, that was Al Gore.

So you just accept best guesses and estimates and made up figures. okay.

And again you haven't addressed any points. You post to a graph and a picture of 2008 which is questionable. Also on the second link, they make up figures as a best guess and even their research is questionable:

No you haven't. Where were the temperatures taken? In the middle of the desert? In NZ? In Australia? Or in the U.S.? In Antartica? How were the temperatures correlatted? All you've done is shown a graph (from wikipedia) and that's it. Nothing scientific about that when even the research behind it is questionable. Why does one weather centre contradict another weather centre? Out of the top 10 warmest years half occurred before 1940. The years 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 were cooler than the year 1900.

No, you didn't address any of my points. So you think the ice in Antartica growing and not shrinking is a localised example. We had from 1920 to 1940 far less arctic sea ice than now, but then that's just a localised example according to you. Why does the Hadley Centre in the UK has shown that global warming stopped in 1998. What you're doing is cherry picking from different sources. When other sources are saying the opposite. Science is about what we can prove, thinking of alternative explanations, investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It's not about going off one graph and exclaiming there and then the science is settled. It goes back to what I said in my previous post about the weather stations used in global temperatures. We are currently in a cooling face, before that we were in a warming phase. From 1940 to 1976 we were cooling. So we go through regular cycles of cooling and warming. Also the NASA Goddard Institute has been widely criticised for its data. As stated before, NASA has had to withdraw statements in the past. Also, what about things like volcanoes? Volcanic eruptions will release carbon dioxide; in particular that submarine volcanoes emit huge amounts of CO2 and that the influence of the gases from these volcanoes on the earth's climate is drastically underrepresented in climate models. Have we seen an increase or decrease in volcanic activity over the last 20/30/40 years? There's so much that isn't represented or researched properly to prove or disprove anthropogenic global warming. BTW, I'm not a climate change sceptic. I just don't believe wildly and blindly in climate change. For me, the science isn't settled. There's more research to be done and more factors to research into than cherry picking results to prove a hypothesis.

If it's a fact, then can you tell me why: It's well known that eastern England is falling, Scotland's rising. Scandinavia's rising, Holland is sinking. We're getting the land go up and down, we're getting sea levels go up and down. We've got this wonderful measuring station in Port Adelaide where sea level was measured here, and people have claimed sea level has actually risen. But in fact, the measuring station has fallen. Why they're (the IPCC) is not looking at the total system of the planet, which includes the influence of space, the influence of sun, the influence of the oceans, ice and the earth. Barry Brook is a biologist. He's done some very good work on the mass extinctions of macro fauna in Australia. He's not a climate scientist, he's done no climate science. Yet he gets quoted by the IPCC on climate change. Professor Kurt Lambeck is a geophysicist who's done a lot of work on sea level changes. What he hasn't looked at is the broad scale of sea-level changes. Sea levels go up and down all the time. He also has not done work on, say, Tuvalu, where the floor of the Pacific Ocean and there's little wonder that Tuvalu is getting a relatively high sea level and nowhere else in the world is. And again, his work is very narrow geophysical work, mainly in the Mediterranean. Yet, Professor Kurt Lambeck is a Climate Change believer who regularly gets quoted by the IPCC. Why are some scientists only looking at different regions and not all regions. If we just take the last 2000 years. The planet was hot in Roman and Greek times. Then it cooled in the dark ages, then it warmed in the medieval warmth. Then it cooled in the little ice ages, and we are now, we've just come out of the little ice age. In the 1930s, it was much hotter. We had from 1920 to 1940 far less arctic sea ice than now, much, much warmer temperatures. Confirmed by NASA. The Hadley Centre in the UK has shown that global warming stopped in 1998. That's one of the four centres, and the four centres differ. That's one of the four centres that put out climate data, and the Hadley Centre use a slightly different database from some of the American centres, they use temperature based on thermometer measurements - some of the others use satellite and balloon. The British meteorological society has actually withdrawn the comments, that the years 1998 to 2006 include the hottest, the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth hottest years in recorded history. NASA also gave similar figures, which they withdrew. NASA was wrong and NASA withdrew as a result of that. NASA had the hottest US temperatures, not the hottest global temperatures. They occur in mid-latitude deserts. They don't occur in areas such as the US, which is not mid-latitude desert. We have 30 years of satellite and balloon measurements of global temperatures. They are not in accord with the other ways we measure temperature, which is done with thermometers in areas where we've got a huge amount of heat given out by villages as small as 1,000 people. And so one set of data where we use a thermometer gives us a completely different story to when we use radioson balloons and satellites. The first thing is that global temperature is a very difficult thing to measure. Secondly, we have a huge bias in the measuring station, and they are mainly in western countries, European countries - they're not in areas where we might get very high temperatures such as in the deserts. We know from 1959 the Royal Society of meteorologists in the UK argued that the variable climate was due to the atom bomb. In the 1970s, they argued that it was due to global cooling. Now they are arguing that we're all going to fry. Why is the ice in Antartica growing and not shrinking.

12 Angry Men. Both the 1957 and 1997 versions. It's pretty much word for word. Although I liked Henry Fonda in the 1957 version there was too much yelling and shouting for my taste. Had to keep turning the volume up and down all the time. I slightly prefer the 1997 version as (even though the characters do get angry and shout) it's not as bad in 'volume' as the earlier version. At least you can hear what the actors are saying instead of them yelling all the time. Also interesting to see so many old actors as well as young actors in the 1997 version. Actors like Willliam Peterson looked so young than when he did CSI. I guess 10 years can really age you in the movie/tv business.

Yeah, I read about that today. Over a will no less. I assume the parents left a substantial amount to the twin brother and he went postal. Now all the family is dead. Even the family lawyer. No winners in all this.

I was under the impression that the majority of Americans choose not to vote and therefore probably don't care what the American Government does overseas whatever morally ambigous that might be. In other words, if the American Government overthrows democratic governments, then most Amercians couldn't care less.

Nuke it!!!