Posts by aawelj

Re: Aha! But that's clearly two words! *claims internet pendant award*

Aha! I put down the little known English word "epicaricacy" meaning "Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others."( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/epicaricacy ) and take the pedantry award myself!

100lb is a bit weedy for a gorilla, surely?

Paris, because she loves the wildlife and the icon has a question mark.

Re: Shiver me timbers

Aye, me hearty, and ye may lay to that! Unless they play suspended in mid air? Several hundred feet up, from the look of it?

Er, he was talking about visas - not technology. And the word visa is derived from one of those dead languages..... and if I had the brains to do a Classics degree at Oxford, I'd have jumped at the chance. If only it was just rote-learning and all the other stuff about actually speaking and applying the language didn't come into it....

Re: If they make it cheap enough

I think you'll find that quite a few people have noticed (and then bought) the Asus Transformer Pad series of tablets. Admittedly not as popular as Apple or Samsung but I think they are the third best-selling range of Tablets out there.

Re: It's just a matter of time

I would describe myself as a techie and frankly, I don't give a damn about what the NSA and GCHQ were up to. For me, the real question is, knowing what the NSA and GCHQ were set up for, i.e. to monitor communications in order to intercept information on potential threats both eyternal and internal (at least, this is what I have always thought they were meant to be doing), why is anybody surprised that they are in fact doing it? What did people think they were doing?

I've always assumed that any form of communication I have used is subject to monitoring. I have also assumed that, given the volume of traffic that has to be monitored, any such monitoring cannot be very efficient without either enormous resources or some way of homing in on the rogue elements (which is where MI5, SIS, CIA, FBI etc come in).

Maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm naive to think this is technically possible (although I would argue that as time passes it is increasingly possible to monitor all communication), but should I really be shocked that agencies set up to monitor potential threats might have to monitor everybody in order to find those threats?

I'm afraid that isn't necessarily always the case. I live in Germany and frequently travel to the Netherlands, Belgium and France. More and more motorways are being upgraded to 3 lanes because two lane motorways simply can't cope with the sheer number of lorries.

Road rage caused by one lorry overtaking (or to be more honest, inching it's way past) another is a rising problem.

Meh because I don't really care. But obviously I care enough to post. Hmm. Maybe I should get my coat....