Sdrawkcab

Also I would like to ask: If we are putting this ban in place, are we going to make tabloids like The Sun top-shelf publications too? Page 3 is arguably more accessible than most internet pornography, since any kid can easily access the papers outside a newsagents and most adults probably wouldn't stop them or refuse sale. If you think that Page 3 isn't harmful, remember that during the olympics last year the biggest photo of a woman in the paper was of a topless woman. What kind of message do you think that sends to young people? The answer, for the record, is No. David Cameron is a giant hypocrit.

Do we know what form the blocking system is going to take anyway? The current DNS blocking they're doing (i'd assume with Cleanfeed but I don't know) relies on you using DNS servers provided by your ISP. If you set your PCs DNS to Google DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) you can get around it that way and still get access to blocked sites like The Pirate Bay and KAT with no problems. If this is how they're planning on blocking porn too, I can't see it being very long before kids start figuring things like this out. This needs to be made opt-in, otherwise non-techy parents will just get complacent about things like this. To those of you saying they won't opt-in, surely they have had to fill out a form or talk to someone to sign up for their broadband service in the first place? Why can't that person say "Do you want a porn filter?" MUCH more focus needs to be placed on education as a means of prevention rather than looking for technological solutions. The problem is, that would mean openly discussing pornography with people. Most people don't really want to talk about that sort of thing, especially not with their children, and would rather just pretend it doesn't exist. Also discussing porn like this means accepting the damage it's done, which is something people will also find hard to deal with as they have probably enjoyed porn themselves in the past. It's much easier to pretend that the government has it all covered and not think about it. Self deception is something that we as a species are extremely good at.

You made an excellent decision. Hotline Miami is one of the best games so far this year, in my opinion. Adrenaline pumping gameplay and an interesting story which constantly has you questioning the violence in the game. If you don't own it yet, buy it now. Do you like hurting other people?

I don't understand why anybody thought he was in any way qualified to set policies for schools, the man has never worked in a school in his life! On top of all that, the school he attended for the vast majority of his childhood was an independant one, so he has literally no idea how state schools operate. But then, would you expect anything less from this current crop of MPs?

This was a double post but @plexer replied while I was typing so I'll use this to reply to him too.. (apologies) This is one pub out of how many thousands in this country? I like how they don't mention that customers paying with bitcoins would have to stand around for 10-30 minutes waiting for the transfer to be confirmed before they could actually have their beers. Or they could pay a bigger transaction fee to get their beer faster, I suppose. The thing is, the bitcoin protocol literally cannot work in any of these situations. If any significant volume of traders started accepting payments in btc, the network would grind to a halt and only the highest-fee transactions would be processed by miners. Do you find it annoying when you're paying with your debit card and you have to wait ~1 minute for the machine to dial the bank? Bitcoin delays would be ten times as long as that. This delay isn't something you can "fix" either, it's hard coded into the network.

They aren't anywhere near as volatile as BTC though, and are somewhat predictable by following company news etc. The value of BTC is tied to nothing, and on their own bitcoins are worthless - they only have value if someone is willing to exchange them for something which does have value. There's no reason to own a bitcoin other than to spend it on something else, and so few businesses accept btc that this generally doesn't happen. On top of that the protocol is actually massively limited (only handles 10 transactions per second) which makes it totally impractical to actually use for sales. Bitcoin has been kept afloat by media attention up until now, but with the MtGox withdrawal freeze and the slow decline in prices we've seen over the past month or so, I don't think it will recover. The reason it's rebounded from crashes in the past is because the price has always fallen so dramatically that it becomes attractive to buy in, which in turn causes a big spike in the price and generates more media attention. If the price continues to decline slowly like this it won't generate any headlines, and so the protocol will just die a slow and quiet death in obscurity. In the future a single coin will be worth nothing. Bitcoin value requires you to trade bitcoin for stuff, and people aren't actually doing that very much.

Bumping to say that the price per coin has dropped to $86 now on btc-e bitcoinity.org/markets It's still at about $94 on MtGox but that figure is largely irrellevant as MtGox have frozen withdrawals at the moment so you can't actually cash out. That's about $20 value lost on each coin over about 2 weeks. Who still thinks these are a good investment?

This is definitely the best idea. There might be a market for a low-cost android-TV box but the Ouya isn't the killer app for it by any stretch. I just had a thought - if you own an Android smartphone that supports HDMI via the USB port, wouldn't you get a better experience than the Ouya by plugging your phone into your TV and then using bluetooth controllers? Android supports them natively so in theory you wouldn't have to change any settings. It's more expensive to buy as a dedicated device, but if you already own a Nexus 4 or something this has got to be a cheaper/better way of doing it?

Oh god please don't invest in Bitcoin mining. You won't make your money back, and if you do it with school hardware you'll just end up wrecking the equipment and massively increase the electricity bill for the school too. Even if you do manage to make some coins, they won't hold their value for much longer because bitcoin is utterly useless as an actual currency. If you aren't looking to buy illegal drugs or questionable "adult" content, you will be hard pressed to find anywhere to actually spend your coins. Add on to that the fact that the value fluctuates by up to £50 per coin over a single day, and you have a completely unuseable currency in every way. If you decide to ignore all these facts and set up your equipment to mine anyway, good luck actually mining any coins. Graphics card mining is literally worthless now that people have ASIC machines up and running, as ASICs are capable of performing hashing calcuations thousands of times faster than graphics cards. Bitcoin mining works by increasing the difficulty of the next hash depending on the total hashing power of the network. This means that the more people there are mining, and the more powerful their mining rigs are, the less profitable mining is. You will not make money now unless you run an extremely large mining operation, and even then you won't make a great deal. Also lol at whoever linked BFL like they're some kind of legit mining company. I've been following them since they started pretty much, and they've had to change the spec on their boards about 10 times because they don't know how to properly build electronic systems. The units they're shipping now have a fraction of the originally promised power, and it could be up to two years before you even see the machine you've ordered because they have such slow production and such a massive backlog of orders. This is bad because it also means that by the time you receive your rig, hundreds of others will already have similarly powered rigs. This means that you will most likely never make a return on your investment, even if you mine 24/7. In conclusion I would like to remind you that bitcoin was never actually meant to be used as a currency. It was a proof-of-concept toy designed to show how a decentralized currency system could work, but it was never intended to be used as an actual currency. If you want to make money using a cryptocurrency system there are much easier ways to do it than mining bitcoins.

Those of you wondering about Stannis might be interested in this preview chapter GRRM has put out from The Winds Of Winter: GRRM - Wild Cards Sample If you thought a little bit of snow and ice could kill Stannis Baratheon, you were sadly mistaken. Also there's another one from Arianne Martell: Excerpt from the Winds of Winter | George R.R. Martin I've not had a chance to read this one yet though. There are two more books left in the series after TWOW right? He better start tying stuff up pretty quick!

ASOIAF is far from the only book to do this, and I don't even think it does it particularly well. Don't get me wrong, I've read the whole series and thought it was great, I just didn't think it was as subversive to the genre as everyone is making it out to be. If you want to read a really subversive/non-traditional fantasy series, start reading The Prince Of Nothing series by R Scoot Bakker, starting with The Darkness That Comes Before. I've just finished the 5th book in the series, and I can honestly say it's the best fantasy I've read to date. Makes ASOIAF look like a childs story. It gets pretty graphic at times, but it's no worse than other "adult" fantasy books (ASOIAF etc) are really. I don't understand how you guys could stick with Wheel Of Time for so long. It's the most boring, stodgy guff I've ever read. The main characters are literally never in danger, and the plot is unbelievably easy to predict. I'd say it's a book for teenagers, but imo it's pitched too low even for them. I stuck with it up to book 3 but I had to stop because the plot was just annoying me. It reminded me of some terrible anime plot, something like Bleach or DBZ where the characters face progressively larger "evils" (each time slightly too strong for them initially) and keep conveniently discovering NEW UNKNOWN ANCIENT TECHNIQUES to defeat them. As an adult, I wouldn't bother.

I was disappointed when I realised they had merged Gendry with Edric Storm Edric Storm is a hilarious character because of how he was conceived: He's the bastard son of Robert Baratheon and Selyse Florent (now Stannis' wife), conceived on Stannis' day in Stannis' wedding bed. Absolutely brilliant. I guess it's not worth keeping a character in just because he has an amusing origin though. While we're talking about weird nonsensical changes between the books and TV, I'd like to point out how strange it was that they changed the name of Theon's sister. I can't for the life of me figure out why they'd do that.

A little from column A, a little from column B. They have changed quite a lot of the plot between the book and TV series, and the Theon torture isn't really played up anywhere near as much as in the book (don't want to go into too much detail about the differences because spoilers). I figured out that it was in fact the same character as in the book from the clues in the TV show. I do know a couple of TV-only people who figured it out from the clues in the show, though. No need to go back to rewatch the whole season, there's one scene which should give you a fairly big clue: (apologies for the bad language in the video title here) I really wouldn't reccomend anyone answering this question or asking similar ones. It totally ruins the impact if you have any idea what's coming, and it's hard to give subtle clues without just out-and-out spoiling it.

GRRM himself said they'd made it more brutal than he ever imagined! I have to say, in a kind of bizarre way I've been enjoying what the writers have been doing with the Theon scenes. By keeping his torturers identity (mostly) secret, the scenes are as much Barry (not revealing his real identity here) torturing the viewer as he is torturing Theon. Pointing out all the visual clues the directors keep dropping in (e.g. the fact that Barry always blows a horn, the method of torture being used etc) has also proved to be a fun way of torturing my friends as they remain completely clueless as to his identity! It really is very obvious, especially if you go back and watch the end of season 2. Edit: Needless to say, "If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention" is a line as much directed at the viewer as it is at Theon.

<--- Extremely relevant quote from the series I hate to break it to you, but this is not the first time Game Of Thrones will do this to you. @sonofsanta As a fellow book reader I have to say: Prepare yourself for it to be more brutal than the book version. More characters die in the TV show RW than in the book, and they all die in a way more gruesome and horrific way. Brilliant stuff.

Ebay it. This console is going to fail hard as anything but a cheap Netflix/Google Play Music/Spotify/NES Emulator box. No big name developers are going to develop exclusively for the Ouya, and casual gamers can still play all the other games on their phones so why would they spend £65 on this?! Casual gamers are people who by definition do not play games very often, marketing a console directly to them is an extremely stupid idea. I don't know why people keep acting like this is going to be a success. It's not. Something like the GameDock (a device that connects your iOS device to your TV to use like a games console) would be a way better product for the price point, since most "casual gamers" have a smartphone already. LOL this is such a classic kickstarter backpedal. Set ambitious goals, fail to deliver on them and then make excuses until the story blows over.

I'd just like to chime in with a MASSIVE MASSIVE reccommendation that you buy the latest bundle, specifically for Awesomenauts. It's a MOBA like DoTA or LoL but with two key differences: 1. It's a 2D platformer rather than a 3D top-down RTS style game. You control your character on the X and Y axis using WSAD or the controller, and aim around your character using the mouse. This means it's way way more twitchy/action-y than your normal MOBAs which just tend to be slow horrid grindfests. 2. There's no equipment or mana, your powers have cooldown timers and you can fire them as often as the timers allow. This means you don't have to spend hours reading wiki pages to determine what the best loadout/equipment for your character is, you can just concentrate on actually being good at playing the game. Basically it plays like a competitive game of Mario with huge emphasis on twitch timing and positioning, as well as teamplay etc etc. There are plenty of characters but not too many and you unlock them gradually anyway so it never feels like there's too much to learn. If anyone gets it and would like to play, PM me your Steam ID here and we'll sort something out. In case you can't tell, I really like this game!

IIRC there's no "watershed" on the radio like there is on TV. I believe BBC have a "no swearing" policy, but I've heard some pretty strong language on the comedy shows they air at like 6:30pm on Radio 4 so I don't know how closely they stick to it.

The Queen is going to enter the internet armed with a special gun in order to fight piracy and cybercrime. A Windsor always pays her debts, they say.

Christ... Dead Bombing Suspect Heavy Into Hip Hop | TMZ.com Countdown to "HIP HOP TERRORISTS" news stories. Why can't the media accept that a sociopath is just a sociopath and nothing more? Why do we have to place the blame on anything other than the perpertrator themselves?

According to the news article in the OP, he was actually arrested rather than just being brought in for questioning. This means they must have some evidence which leads them to beleive he might be guilty, as otherwise they'd just bring him in as a witness/reference surely? I'm not saying he's definitely guilty (how could I know?) but the fact that he was actually arrested is pretty worrying.

Gawker confirms this is a load of crap: The Post's 'Person of Interest' Is a Local High-School Track Runner But then why would you believe any internet detectivery coming out of 4chan of all places??

Quoting this for massive massive emphasis. I worked for a small desktop/home support company and we had problems with stuff like this all the time because the guy who owned/managed everything didn't really "get" how tech support worked. The people you are going to be dealing with will know nothing about computers. To them, a computer is a magic box. If it breaks, you buy a new one or you take it to the wizard to have the magic put back in. This means some jobs might literally be a case of going into the house and switching the plug on at the wall, or similarly non-IT problems. When this happens your customers will argue that they shouldn't have to pay you for a full hour (or sometimes at all). This happened to me before, I spent 45 minutes travelling to a job by bike and the problem they were having (USB drive not reading) was because some genius had plugged the USB drive into the Ethernet port. When I tried to charge them for 2 hours (as that was our minimum call-out time), the guy went ballistic and threatened to report me to trading standards/take me to court etc. I had to show him the terms and conditions of the website before he actually finally paid up, meaning that I was actually there for about an hour anyway! After that incident we changed our pricing so that everyone paid a "call out fee" which was roughly equal to 1.5 hours of work at the hourly rate. This included the first hours work, and then any additional time after that was paid on the hourly rate. The other thing to avoid is running "no fix no fee" deals. People will call you out to their house because their PC is running "a bit slow" and then refuse to pay you for the work because you didn't make it quick again. The fact that the machine in question is a 10 year old Pentium 660 with 256mb of RAM and will never run modern software quickly means nothing to them. They just think you can wave your magic computer wand and have everything running miraculously faster.

The guys who run Ask.FM are really unlikely to shut it down because I'd imagine it's making decent money. I know it's not a nice way to look at it, but you could even argue that they would view the bullying as a good thing because it directs more traffic to the site. Besides which, if this site does get shut down the kids using it will just move onto something else. When I was at school Livejournal was the site of choice for this sort of thing, once that was blocked on the network everyone just moved onto other blogging sites. You can't stop this sort of behaviour by censoring people. Wouldn't it be more effective to send a letter home to parents saying "we are aware that some students are using ask.fm to carry out bullying, you might want to make sure yours isn't" or words to that effect? Why expect a website to do the duty that the bullying kids parents should be doing?

Should we have a petition to shut down facebook, twitter and youtube too? They're used for bullying as well, after all. Edit: Maybe using a picture of yourself (I'm assuming that's you) where you're giving the finger to the camera is not the best idea for a petition website. Just a thought.