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Supergrunch

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Everything posted by Supergrunch

  1. Funny Stuff Thread

    The funny thing about telepathy is that we basically already have it.
  2. The UK Green party were advocating a policy along these lines in their manifesto for the last elections, and not as an opt-in thing, but an across the board payment: (see the full economic policy for more information) The main argument for the financial viability of this was that it saved lots of money by eliminating all the bureaucracy surronding means testing. However, I think this would create just as much bureaucracy elsewhere, as taxes would have to be significantly adjusted to make up for the citizen's income paid out to all those who don't need it. While I'm in favour of a significantly more egalitarian welfare system, I don't think there are ways to do it without additional financial cost, so I think it's better just to advocate raising taxes, unpopular as it might be.
  3. Yahoo account not recieving emails

    Ah, there are probably settings specific to the app too - the official site has this page, which presumably applies to their app as well as third party ones? But if you can't find settings like this, you're probably better off getting rid of it and using something else.
  4. Yahoo account not recieving emails

    Ah, then it likely is a POP/IMAP problem - probably when you set it up on your phone you configured it to POP rather than IMAP. There are instructions for how to change this for each email service and client/operating system here.
  5. Yahoo account not recieving emails

    Also, if you're recieving emails on two different devices, you need to use IMAP protocol - if you're using POP3 then emails will only be sent to the first device you recieve them on. So that could be the problem if for instance you can see the emails on your phone but not in a pc client of some sort, although it sounds like your problem might be more general than this.
  6. Questions

    There was a discussion about this a while ago on the bugs thread - long story short, click the stretched link below to get it back:
  7. Better Call Saul

    I thought it was pretty brilliant, to be honest. If anything dragged it was the first episode.
  8. good stuff thread.

    Spaetzle are great, although in my experience they normally look more like this: than the picture @drahkon posted. But they taste a lot better than they look. My friend actually has a spaetzle maker, which is kind of like a cheese grater:
  9. good stuff thread.

    Unfortunately it really jumps the shark in season 4.
  10. Terry Pratchett has died

    GNU Terry Pratchett.
  11. Help with English

    The reason "require to be tuned" is bad is that require can't take an infinitival complement. As others have said, "need to be tuned" is fine, and this is because need can take an infinitival complement. If you find need too low register but still want to retain "to be tuned," you could try something like "it is necessary for them to be tuned," but I think at this point the phrasing gets sufficiently wordy that it's better style just to use need. [Edit: As Moogle's comment shows, it's actually more complex than this - both allow infinitival complements, but it's still to do with the differing properties of need and require - in technical terms it's about whether they allow a structure known as raising. But this isn't terribly relevant to the advice.] "Most of the time" and "in most cases" are very similar, but I think there's a small register difference - I personally find the former more casual and would avoid it in formal writing. And you should consider just using usually, which also means largely the same thing. I'd write the passage you quote as follows: "knowing that even the most complex structures can in most cases be reduced to simpler systems." "The structure in question is a beam, held together by two pinned supports. It is usually sufficient to consider a single vertical degree of freedom in its mid-span (pictured in figure 4.1)" So I've used "in most cases" for the first sentence and "usually" for the second, and have moved their positions to respectively following the auxiliary can and copula is, which reads more smoothly to me.
  12. Questions

    I guess we'd better start a Kickstarter to raise the money then.
  13. Questions

    See the discussion in the last 2-3 pages of the bugs and issues thread. tl;dr: the menu vanished for unknown reasons, but themes can still be accessed with links to the style ID. Ashley gave a couple of the most common in the below post (change the number to get others e.g. Rummy found the mobile theme at 45):
  14. (Maybe) Bye bye US Netflix [falsified]

    I understand the position of the companies like Netflix, who need to attract the business of media companies operating with regional restrictions. I also understand the perspective of the consumer, who just wants access to everything, especially when they're paying for it. To some extent, I even understand the position of media companies themselves, with regional restrictions not only being needed for economic purposes, but also for licensing, marketing, etc. I think this mode of operation is beginning to get outdated though. One interesting comparison is with online games distribution, where the leading giant is obviously Steam, although other services like GOG also do well (less so for direct rivals of Steam like Origin). Here's a much-shared quote from Gabe Newell on the topic of piracy, which extends to region-circumventing too: Now, Steam isn't the platform for distribution of all PC games (although by now it's dominant), and I don't think it's completely free of region-locking (although such restrictions tend to be a matter of days rather than months or years). Two key factors in its success seem to be its near-universal availability, and the presence of high-quality exclusives (e.g. Half-Life, Counterstrike, Team Fortress, etc.). Netflix isn't actually too far off this model, with its growing body of exclusives, although of course the payment system is rather different (see Blink Box for a service that's more comparable to Steam in payment structure but has no non-regional exclusives). However, they also have a lot of region-locked stuff from other providers, and there's also a lot more competition than early Steam had, with other services like HBO snapping up a lot of the good exclusives. But I don't think it's entirely clear that the Steam model couldn't work here - if, for instance, Netflix focused on exclusives to the point where they had a large customer base on the strength of these alone, they could become desirable enough for other providers to want their content on Netflix too. And they'd then be in a position to demand region-free content, and might be able to gradually build up a library on this basis, eventually gaining dominance. But that would be very different and very risky, and so I think it's sadly unlikely that anyone's going to try this soon.
  15. Report a Bug! [Read OP first]

    I may be being stupid and missing something, but I can't find it anywhere in the user CP, including the options section.
  16. Report a Bug! [Read OP first]

    Yeah, it's vanished for me too, and I'm stuck on the default narrow theme (because Moogle banned me).
  17. Doctor Who

    Well, I always took the point of Doctor Who to be giving up any attempts to suspend disbelief and enjoying the ride. The attempts to use scientific ideas can be pretty hilarious though, but I don't think it's bad writing to e.g. call the spider things single-celled organisms, any more than it's bad writing to, say, relate weeping angels to the observer's paradox. I mean, this season has had a fair amount of poor writing, but I don't think the science has had much to do with it - what we need is believable scenarios, dialogue, and characterisation, not for the sci-fi to go from mush to soft.
  18. Doctor Who

    I don't really understand why people complain about bad science in Doctor Who - it's about a resurrecting alien who flies a geometry-warping time machine around, but suddenly if the moon hatches like an egg, everyone's up in arms. That said, this latest episode was pretty bad - it seemed like the writers only really had one idea, and didn't do much with it.
  19. Facebook things that get on your nerves

    Screege, obviously.
  20. Speed Runs

    This simultaneous Goldeneye, Mario 64, and OOT speedrun certainly seems bumpworthy, especially given the time he manages is 51 minutes:
  21. Doctor Who

    So who thought the robot looked like Garrus from Mass Effect? After a quick google I found a few articles noting the similarity from the general series trailer, but nothing about the episode itself.
  22. General Book Thread

    Yeah, it's a great book, as are all of his novels. And he has a new one out, as of early September - The Bone Clocks! I actually went to an event in Norwich at the release where he gave a reading and they interviewed him, and I got a signed copy, but I should probably wait until my PhD's submitted before starting it...
  23. good stuff thread.

    So I moved in with my girlfriend in Norwich, and am out of student accommodation for the first time in 7 years. Which feels great - now I just have to finish writing my PhD...
  24. Dota 2

    Cool, how about we try a game Sunday or something? We can always play against bots if Bard would prefer to take the pressure off, but either way it'll be best if you do the tutorial and read some of the guides (e.g. Purge's) first.
  25. Dota 2

    So, no more interest in this? I'm amazed so many people deny themselves this gaming ecstasy.
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