SignorSuperdouche

I haven't done this sort of thing since high school, but I think it's anything with a transformer in the power supply. If the voltage your device runs on is different to the mains supply you'd need a transformer to change it so you'd have two circuits running at different voltages connected by the transformer. The circuit that runs from the mains to the transformer and back again will always be on irrespective of whether a phone or laptop etc is attached to the other circuit. It may be that if there is nothing drawing power on the second circuit the energy has to dissipate as heat which would be where the fire risk comes from. I don't know any of that for sure, it's just semi-educated guessing. Modern power supplies may well be more sophisticated anyways.

Why not just credits? To give someone credit means to acknowledge them for their work, as in film credits, and also has financial connotations. Could sound a bit boring and generic though.

Great news Spaff, nice one

Good point. It's even quite possible that the article was thought up by one of her editors and Murray just had the bad luck of being given the assignment. Not that that would make her blameless, but she shouldn't bare full responsibility. Going over the PCCs Code of Practice again I noticed I had missed this bit: I think that the story definitely goes against the "full spirit" of the code, so yeah, PCC is entitled to spank some bottoms here.

I've been mulling this over and I'm not too sure what to think. I read the article (I found a copy of Page 1) and had a look at the PCCs Code of Practice and I'm not entirely sure any of the rules were, strictly speaking, broken. There were two parts that I thought were possibly relevant: The quotes from the social networking may well be reasonable representations of the teenagers (they seemed pretty average sounding to me, so quite possibly), but if they were cherry picked does that qualify as "misleading or distorted information", even if they were accurately quoted? MSP Elizabeth Smith claims her quote was taken out of context. This seems the most likely candidate for "distorted information", but a politicians words taken out of context is, to me, the least worrying aspect of the article. If the PCC just came down on the Express for this, it would't address the major issues I have with the story. The key part here is obviously "without consent". Adding the reporter as a friend on a social networking site seems to be a pretty reasonable form of consent to view their page. I'm not sure how to get around that fact. If the current regulations aren't enough to stop this sort of exploitation, how can we tighten them so that they are without restricting legitimate investigative journalism? Should journalists have to identify themselves a journalists? Should they have to indicate that they are researching an article? This would completely undermine investigative journalism very important role it plays in a free society. It's late and I'm quite tired so I maybe missing something obvious, but it seems to me that as abhorrent as it is we can't really regulate against this sort of thing without doing more harm than good. The best thing we can do is stop buying tabloid rags, but then I, nor anyone I know, buys them anyway.

Well, they have issued an apology, but it's an issue dodging, face saving apology that basically boils down to "we're sorry that we got lots of bad publicity" not "we're sorry that we did something terrible". I'm actually pretty shocked that you can only complain about a printed article unless you are personally involved in the story. I'd just sort of assumed it was covered by Ofcom.

Totally agree. I'd be a douchebag for saying your building's going to fall over, Ebert's a douche for saying games cannot be art, the pope is a douche for say saying condom use aggravates the spread of AIDS. I think we're agreed though that that doesn't make the arguments necessarily false. I think it is fair to dismiss arguments for practical reasons, such as when there are hoards of creationists all spewing the same arguments over and over, but this is one dude. If we dismiss him it's not because we can't practically respond it's because we can't be bothered.

Backwards clapping is my new favourite thing ever

Look, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be a dick, I just get ... uh ... passionate sometimes and one thing I get passionate about is critical thinking. My tone was unnecessarily smug and I apologise for that too. So anyway, how 'bout those video games eh? eh? ...

That is precisely why I picked the examples of astrophysics and marine biology. They are just two random examples of areas of expertise, which was OssK's intention when he mentioned cooking and architecture. OssK even gave as one of his assumptions: Your refutation is that he couldn't not know about either, but that was never part of his argument. You've commited the logical fallacy, intentionally or otherwise, of creating a straw man argument. Other logical fallacies worth knowing are poisoning the well and ad hominem, both of which you are advocating.

Come on you're just being a dick now. The fact that we all live in some kind of building doesn't magically imbue anyone with innate knowledge of architecture. Even if it did you know as well as I do that that wasn't Ossk's point. You could substitute cooking and architecture with astrophysics and marine biology and Ossk's argument stays exactly the same and your retort becomes nonsense. You poked holes in the details of the analogy rather than address the actual argument.

Is it just me or does Tim have cartoon eyes with no iris at all just massive black pupils? I could swear they're about to pop out on stalks.

Oh shit! Whose is the signature on the far right? It looks like "Mshlee" to me, but that doesn't seem right.

Sounds like a character from Stoppit and Tidyup, if anyone else remembers that.

Just to go back to this ever so briefly, what you are talking about there is just things being in expected proportion. These particular lengths may or may not be in the golden ratio but that's irrelevant, what's important is whether or not they deviate from that. If I was sufficiently familiar with, say, orangutans, whose limbs are not in the same proportions as ours, I would likely have the exact same "that doesn't look right" reaction to an abnormally proportioned orangutan as a would to an abnormally proportioned human. Anyway, I'm not trying to say that it isn't a good rough guide. What I'm trying to say is that the golden ratio happens to fall within a range that people find visually appealing but that correlation does not mean the two are linked. It irks me when people refer specifically to the golden ratio in this context because it implies authority and scientific understanding on the subject that the speaker doesn't have. Which is exactly what the author of the document was aiming for in an attempt to justify their doubtless exorbitant fee.

Marek has the sexiest voice in podcasting.

"As I was playing I farted and little bit of poop came out." - IGN.com

It's not so much that there's an argument against it, it's more that the argument for it doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Proponents of the idea that the golden ratio is something that humans find aesthetically pleasing never explain why it should be so, they just point to a bunch of examples in paintings, architecture or nature and say "Look, it's there. Therefore it is aesthetically pleasing.". If you look at this evidence, excluding the renaissance artists who specifically put the ratio into their works, all of the examples given are either comparing arbitrary lengths for no reason and/or ignoring all of the examples of similar things which aren't in that ratio. A whole bunch of bad, cherry picked evidence does not aggregate into one good piece of evidence. It's all just one big feedback loop of confirmation bias. I found a brief analysis here. I'll include the last two paragraphs, they essentially say what I am trying to but much better than I ever could.

Hasn't all that golden ratio stuff been shown to be nonsense about a million times?

Gravity Bone was awesome. I'd totally pay for a slightly longer (say 1-2 hours) sequel/remake:tup: Also, running Windows 7 as your only operating system is pretty daft.

That was really cool, until I realised it was all just an ad for samsung . I fucking hate viral advertising. Actually I fucking hate nearly all advertising, but I especially fucking hate viral advertising. It is kind of hard to hate this though: -Ky7g1lgTwc

This struck me as the equivalent of the more recent colour coded terror alert system from the NSA or whoever it was. People may have taken it seriously at the time, but it just seemed a bit daft to me.

As all English schoolboys know, Brest is a place in France. Subtitles would be neat, I noticed a Ninja in there at around seven and a half minutes but that was about it.

I'd forgotten about these, they're ace People may have already seen this, but I came across this a while ago and it couldn't be more perfect vPKRs3LF88M

Hey, don't feel too bad chap. It's not that nobody likes yours, it's just that there's some stiff competition. If it's any consolation, I think IdesofMarch and Hogboon's scores are a disgrace too, you all deserve way more than what you've got.