Sdrawkcab

Virgin Media are doubly terrible because they routinely finger all their users as well as performing dodgy practices like traffic shaping/port throttling. I'm glad we no longer use them, speedtest.net would show us getting decent speeds but we'd still get pings of over 400 in online games. I'm now on Xilo.net, I don't get the same theoretical speed that I got on VM, but now I average pings of 5-20 while my flatmate is streaming stuff from iplayer etc which is something we could never have done before.

Yeah I know, rereading my post now I can see that I was flying off the handle a little bit there. My apologies if I came across a bit too aggressive, it's obviously an issue that is pretty close to the bone for me and so I can get a bit carried away when discussing it. It just frustrates me when people actively continue with ignorant statements like "he should just lose some weight" instead of just saying "I don't understand this because I have no experience to relate it to" and then moving on. Yeah the one thing I regret most about this was not talking to my parents about it. I don't think I've ever seen either of them so angry as when I finally did tell them. I had left the school by then though so there was nothing that could really be done about it.

How do you know? Do you know the girl yourself? Have you been through an experience like this? No? Then you cannot understand the situation. Why is it that people find admitting ignorance so hard? I myself was heavily overweight (nowhere near 43 stone though) from the ages of about 14/15 to probably November last year (I am 27). I was pretty extensively bullied at school because of this, and this gave me pretty bad self-esteem/confidence issues which I am still recovering from. I felt so massively unattractive and unwanted for so long that I didn't see the point in making an effort to change things. If everybody thought I was a massive fat waste of space, why shouldn't I be one? I am aware of how illogical this is now, but unhappy people rarely make great decisions. It got to the point where I dropped out of school after AS levels as I just couldn't take being there any more and then spent the following year being a literal shut-in. The bullying doesn't stop when you leave school though, people would yell things at me in the street and I had to leave a (admittedly crappy) part-time job because my boss constantly referred to me as "fat lad" (I told his superiors and they just told me to deal with it). You feel constantly scrutinized by everyone because it is acceptable to mock people for their weight in public. Nobody will ever defend you, and if you try to talk to people about it in order to get help you're pretty universally ridiculed. Case in point: When I was at school someone once held me down and rubbed a rotten fish they had found on the school field over my face "because I loved eating". I should also explain that my nickname at the time was "plum" for obvious reasons. I went to the my form tutor/head of year, primarily about the fish but I also mentioned the name calling and they said "Why do you think they call you that?". How are you supposed to answer that? All I, aged 16, could think to do was say "I don't know". They replied "Well then why does it bother you?" and that was the end of that discussion. The boy who had rubbed the fish on my face got a lunchtime detention and then carried on as he had been before. Nobody did anything or said anything. This was not an isolated incident where people could have done/said something, but didn't because obesity isn't really recognized as being a legitimate problem. By treating people like obesity is something they can "stiff upper lip" their way out of, you are propogating this problem. Use your empathy, try to understand how they came to be in that position and if you can't say anything helpful, don't say anything at all. (For the record I should say that I don't feel like this any more. I won't get into it too much, but I have overcome a lot of my issues and since November I've lost 3 stone. I'm not at a "normal" weight yet but I'm getting there. None of this would have happened if I didn't get the support I needed from my friends.)

This is an extremely hateful and ignorant thing to say. Have you ever been addicted to anything? Have you ever had a mental problem of any kind, like depression or anxiety? It's not as simple as "They just aren't trying!!!!". Pretending you can 'bootstraps' your way out of a situation like this is an extremely backward/old-fashioned way of thinking. This is obviously true as well, but people should be asking why the parents allowed her to get like this, not condemning them for it. It's pretty clear that the girl isn't healthy, so why did they keep feeding her even when she couldn't get the food herself?

Yep well done. You win. You found the one thing I was wrong about in my post and then ignored all the other points I made. Congratulations.

Addiction =/= dependency. You can be addicted to plenty of things without actually being physically dependent on them (see: videogames, jogging, television, spending money). Even with physical dependency, any kind of addiction is 99% in your mind. Take smoking as an example: 3 days after stopping smoking, you no longer have any nicotine in your body. This means that physical dependency also stops, and yet people who have "quit" smoking often pick it back up after a short time because they claim they are craving it too much. Why do they do this when they actually shouldn't be suffering withdrawal symptoms any more? Answer: Because they are addicted to it.

It's not really as simple as "JUST STOP EATING", and frankly saying that it is is pretty insulting to people with genuine eating disorders? Telling someone who is overweight something like that is as helpful as telling someone with depression "JUST CHEER UP OKAY". People who are obese don't just "like food a lot", there are a lot of complex psychological (and sometimes medical) reasons for their condition. What, did you think they enjoy being fat? THEY'VE HAD OVER A YEAR TO CHEER UP AND THEY JUST WON'T DO IT. THEY EVEN WENT ON HOLIDAY LAST YEAR AND THEY WERE MUCH HAPPIER, BUT AS SOON AS THEY GOT HOME IT WAS ALL SADNESS SADNESS SADNESS ALL OVER AGAIN. I'M HAPPY, SO WHY AREN'T THEY? I am exaggerating here obviously, but you get the point.

This thread has taught me that when I post on here I had better include ALL THE DETAIL about what I'm talking about or people WILL come and "correct" me. So, here's my go at it: If we're getting technical here, the north didn't actually declare anything. The armistice talks were started by the US, and the armistice agreement itself was written and brokered by the US. Neither of the Korean nations wanted to stop fighting at all. The South Korean president even went so far as to run a massive propaganda campaign opposing any cease to the fighting until the country was totally unified. Did I do it right?

Install this North Korean Economy Watch » North Korea Uncovered – (Google Earth) and enjoy looking at all the prison camps! In some places they've even used actual aerial photos in place of Google Earth as Google didn't take high-resolution images of most of NK. The thing I found most staggering about all this was the huge amount of propaganda all over the place. I mean, I was expecting a fair bit but it seems to be literally everywhere there! I don't think you could do a journey from one location to another without reading "Give Thanks To The Glorious Revolutionary Leaders!" in one form or another. You are right, inexplicably probably wasn't the right word to use here. "Confusingly" is probably the right word. In internal DPRK propaganda , the country is always portrayed as being on war footing. Their media constantly talks about the threat of the American Imperialist, and they talk about the South Korean government like the war there is still ongoing. It's not a "new" thing for the DPRK to feature extensive aggressive rhetoric in their external propaganda too. 3G service for tourists was in place when they very nearly were at war after they shelled that SK island, so why would they switch it off now? More to the point, why would they invest so much in getting 3G coverage for the country only to prevent anyone from using it? (I suspect there is a simple answer to this one: It's North Korea)

I think he means "service" not "single" - up until pretty recently tourists could use their smartphone to roam onto the DPRK mobile network for 3G internet access. They've inexplicably stopped that now though.

Reddit is awesome in parts but also EXTREMELY creepy in others. That story is made doubly creepy when you realise that the site owners had been defending subreddits like /r/jailbait as "free speech" for ages before enough of a clamour was raised that they had to shut the subreddits down. Also you have vile places like /r/mensrights, so not all of reddit is "good". Stick to /r/funny and /r/pics, stay out of the comments and you'll be fine.

Yep, you can cancel any time you like if you aren't happy with the service.

This is the utility I used, but if you read the thread you'll see that it's actually for the HTD Desire and not the HTC Desire HD. I wouldn't reccomend trying this with a phone it doesn't expressly say it supports, as I've bricked more than one android handset doing stuff like this.

This isn't true (or at least it wasn't for the HTC Desire). I rooted my friends and put Cyanogenmod on it, thinking it would unlock the phone from Vodafone (which it was locked to) but her Orange SIM still wouldn't work. I had to use the utility on the GiffGaff website to unlock it after rooting to get her SIM to work.

If it is locked, O2 will give you an unlock code for free if you ring them. Only problem is, they can sometimes take a couple of weeks to do so. I gave up waiting for them to give me the code for my HTC Desire in the end and unlocked it using a neat little utility I got from the GiffGaff website. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's a similar guide for the Desire HD

I'd consider GiffGaff "semi-contract" - the £12 a month is a "booster" that gets you your minutes/texts/internet, and then everything else on top of that is PAYG. I've never bought non-booster credit though as I don't send MMS (why would you when all phones capable of receiving picture messaging can also receive emails now?). You can set up the £12 a month to renew automatically through the website so it's pretty much the same as a pay monthly phone. I switched to GiffGaff for the £12/month deal and I couldn't be happier. I get to use Google Music all I want (I have over 19,000 songs in my collection so google music is the only practical way of accessing all of them on the move) and I don't have to worry about getting shafted with data charges. They also say they don't allow tethering (like all networks) but I've not had any trouble tethering my Nexus 7 via bluetooth when out and about, which is also a bonus. It piggybacks off the O2 network (in fact, my phone says O2 on the screen instead of GiffGaff), so if you get good O2 signal where you are GiffGaff is probably your best choice for sim-only network.

Haha, I was one of the poor sods who had to make the phonecall! I didn't really know what I would be doing until I turned up as they weren't amazingly specific in the interview. When I found out I would be harassing old ladies on behalf of Christian Aid, I left the job sharpish! Absolutely disgusting behaviour and it's made me wary of giving any money to charity now, since pretty much all of the major ones use tactics like this. Was it P&B that you worked for or another group?

You can't stop charity phone grifters from calling you with TPS unfortunately At some point or another you've probably made a donation to charity and haven't ticked the "please don't call me again ever" box, which gives them enough of an invitation that they can ignore TPS and continue merrily harrasing you forever. They'll keep asking you for more and more money until you answer the call and literally say to the agent "Don't ever call me again, remove me from your database." The worst thing is that they're paying people to make these calls - maybe if the charities didn't have paid staff doing this they wouldn't need to harrass people for donations so much?

I'd suggest the Nexus 4. The phone is by far the cheapest sim-free handset (you can get the 8gb model from google for £240), and it's probably one of the most powerful phones on the market at the moment too. If you get a GiffGaff contract (£12/month for unlimited internet, unlimited texts, 200 minutes) it works out way cheaper to get the N4 than pretty much any other smartphone of equivalent power on the market at the moment.

That horrible vomity taste in Red Bull (and indeed all energy drinks) comes from tasty tasty Taurine! Taurine is made from lovely tasty 100% natural Bulls bile, mmm mmmmm!! The reason they have to put so much sugar and fake "fruit" flavourings in these drinks is because Taurine tastes unbelievably hideous on its own, but you wouldn't actually get any kind of "boost" from the drinks without it. YUMMO.

And they still will be able to. This PPV system is aimed at allowing people to produce something like Netflix but within the Youtube ecosystem. Essentially it's another level of monetization for people who already produce Youtube content as a job (e.g. Yogscast, TotalBiscuit et al). Don't like it? Don't buy the videos. Honestly, it's like people make up their mind about something after reading only the headline of an article.

What is this, exactly? From the website it looks like some kind of multiplayer ARG, but how do you play it? I signed up anyway because it looks cool but I'd like to know what I'm getting into!

Did this advice come from the capita knowledgebase? Like everyone says, in my experience there is no problem with applying the reindex patch using the SA password. I can't even see why it would - the SA account is completely unrestricted so what permissions could it possibly be missing?

Hi y'all! I've been lurking for a while now but I've only really started posting "properly" recently so I thought I'd better post in the welcome thread! I can't say who I work for or I'll get in trouble, but you've probably heard of us. I'm mostly registering so I can try and get an idea of what being a Network Manager in a school is like, as this is where I want to eventually end up in my career. I did teacher training for a while before realising that I was much better at supporting teachers than actually teaching myself, and I was already a pretty big computer nerd, so moving into Network Management/teching just seems like a smart idea. I'm currently doing a CCNA course (passed part 1 on monday, booyah!) and after that I'm going to look into doing some microsoft AD qualifications too. So uh yeah, hi!

The regular/original HTC desire? I'm hardly suprised that CM10 isn't working well on there then! You're making the phone run an OS that was released like 3 generations after the phone was! Switch to a proper supported ROM for your device like CM7, which you can get from here