Chindie

I thought black pudding but a black pudding looks nothing like a Christmas pudding. Even allowing for Singapore point of view

...eh?

Do love the Postal Service, wish they'd knock another album out.

The Geordies have apparently sent a strongly worded letter to FA demanding appropriate action against De Jong. Morons.

Married couple tax break being mooted as a sop to those the child benefit cut has pissed off.

Good post peterms. I agree wholeheartedly.

Incubus - Aqueous Transmission One of the most chilled songs ever.

Aye that was a slip of the... finger. I meant single earner households too. Doesn't make any sense. I caught a bit of some Tory dogsbody explaining why, which from what I heard amounted 'Means testing costs too much'. Which I don't think is an excuse for half arsed legislation. Surely somebody must have heard this idea and went '...but that's just stupid' with regards combined earnings still getting it? Surely? Worryingly, one of the Beeb's pundits reckons this legislation is basically being put through to take the edge of the really nasty cuts that will hit the much much worse off - effectively something to hide behind if critics claim the cuts disproportionally attack the poor, which they undoubtedly will. Even more worringly, if you can make such a cock up of this, a pretty simple bit of legislation and one with comparatively few casualties... what the **** is going to happen when the big knives come out?

More or less as Risso says above. I think if you're earning £44k a year, you can probably afford to live rather well with a child even without the benefit. Of course the benefit would still be useful but I'm not sure it's desperately required at that end of the income bracket. The loss of benefit isn't going to see you destitute if you're on £44k a year. I don't mean anything of the sort that you are suggesting. Rather like the Rev above though, I'm completely flummoxed as to why it's not done on a complete household income. A couple earning £80k certainly don't need child benefit, yet would get it, while a single parent earning £44k wouldn't get it but would certainly have greater claim to it (though, imo, probably still shouldn't be getting it).

I very briefly caught the child benfit announcement on the Beeb earlier. Can someone run by me why it's fair to take away benefit from a household with a single £44k income, but OK to let a household with a combined income of higher than that keep it? I mean personally I'd say that if you're earning £44k you can probably do without the benefit anyway but it does seem rather unfair, to the point that it seems idiotic. Sorry if it's already been mentioned but I can't be arsed to trawl through the tit for tat rubbish.

Cheers... I did have a suspicion that might be whats done but neither seems perfect somehow.

Duran Duran - Ordinary World. I hate Duran Duran, but I tend to like this for some reason. I think it was on a compilation CD I added to iTunes.

Whats the etiquette in applying for a job via email? By normal post it'd obviously be CV and cover letter, however a couple that have caught my eye have the only contact detail as email, so do you just write out the cover letter as the email? I know that sounds fairly stupid but I've always considered email a slightly less formal method and somehow using an email as a cover letter doesn't quite seem right. But then neither does the more stupid attaching a cover letter as a seperate document.

Tool - Aenema I adore this song. The driving riff at the start, the constant rumbling beat under the verses, the Bill Hicks reference, the overall message, the quiet venom in lots of the lyrics, it's fantastic. into The National - Without Permission

Dunne leaving vdV for a completely free header.

Fantastic from the big man

Germany's WW2 reparations were largely paid in labour/material/technology, we actually dismantled factories and shipped the kit around the world to the Allies. The US especially took German scientists and research, which went on to make inroads into rocketry and eventually, NASA. Actual cash reparations were kept consciously low IIRC, fearing that crippling Germany any further would just lead to a repeat of the rise of the Nazis or create an enormous vacuum of power in the centre of Europe (strategically, Germany is very, very tastey with reference to Europe - anyone that dominates Germany has the European hegemon). So, assuming I'm not mistaken, I'd imagine as far as we're concerned at least, the money owed from the Germans for WW2 has been long paid. Germany has paid considerable reparations to Israel. Not sure if they've finished those payments but the Israelis have planned to ask for more regardless recently. We only paid off our own debt for WW2 a few years ago IIRC.

Why are you so special that it's OK for youto pay less than everyone who would like to go to a Villa match? The club sets those prices for a reason. They may be too high, thats by the by - theres a price, you pay it. But it needs to make money and every penny you defraud from the club is money that is to the detriment of the clubs cause. Even if it's only comparatively small amounts. Can't say I'm at all surprised though.

Promotional picture for Sandra Bullock's rubbish film Premonition

Watching Question Time for the first time in a good old while. That was a mistake. Starkey is a clearing in the woods, the Tory is a smug cock, the Lib Dem is desperately doing whatever he can to not look embarassed that his party's sold it's soul for 30 pieces of silver, Diane Abbott is.. well... Diane Abbott, and only Brian Cox seems able to portray himself with any sympathetic, empathetic, or any endearing features.

My luck at poker has dived in coordination with my general game going down the pan. I've been in a slump for about a year now, started immediately after my biggest win (£250). I've never been that good anyway and always disliked online poker which only goes to make it worse. Last night was the first time in a very long while I've played, had some poor results and thought **** it and chucked it away mind.

When I ordered a couple of things from the US I was given a card with details on it, like you'd get when something was delivered while you were out, that had details of what you needed to pay. Just went onto the Post Office site and paid by card (although if you're unlucky like I was you'll run into issues with the options it gives you - it'll ask certain things about the delivery like why you need to pay costs and none of them applied to my item).

Even the bullpup design is about 60 years old now Rev, it just needed more refinement than simple rifle design because of the inherent issues in such a set up. Still hasn't stopped the US not liking them mind, they dislike the difficulty in field maintenance that can come with a bullpup design. With some justification too, the debacle we had with the SA80 in deserts was due mostly to the complications of bullpup design (and was also why we had Heckler & Koch give them a reworking. But yes, guns haven't really got anywhere to go that they haven't already. We've reached most of the levels necessary for more or less any situation a firearm can face - reliability, range, accuracy, fire rate... Indeed in terms of how we're propelling bullets we've reached the apex of whats possible (not that that is necessarily a bad thing, we don't need anymore energy in handheld firearms). The thing now is just developing on some issues found with current designs. The last sniper rifle the US has invested heavily in, the M110, was for example just considered an upgrade to get rid of the issues inherent with a bolt action rifle that they had been using (bolt action rifles have been traditionally preferred for their ease of use and reliability and consistant accuracy... however that accuracy is undermined by the slow rate of fire and by the tiny movements that can be made in a shooters position just by reloading). They'd decided the time had come to reinvest in a semi-auto sniper rifle and that the technology to reduce recoil issues and so on so got a company to knock out an adapted variant of the AR10 with AR15 commonality). Thats just a textbook example, homogenise the firearms as much as possible so the user is used to maintainence and needs only to be retrained in the specificities of the role required (as well as keeping parts costs and so on on down), and simply develop out the foibles. The next evolutionary step for firearms is either electronic operation on the lines of current firearms (i.e. the gun uses an electrical circuit to fire off the bullet rather than a mechanical hammer system) or in the longer term and on the much, much larger scale end, rail guns, which we're apparently one of the foremost nations in development of. Just need to overcome the vibration issue in firing them, and the heat issue and erosion issue... but then they'll become the norm (). Incidentally reading up on railguns is awe inspiring. We're on the verge of being able to fire quite small rounds (in the heavy ordance scale of things) so spectacularly fast that they can obliterate enormous structures, with good accuracy. ...yeah I did a uni course where a lot of this kinda thing was important to know :oops:

Did not know that. I knew the M16 and M4 were related, the M4 IIRC is a variant that was brought about by the demands of Special Forces to have a much more adaptable firearm (i.e. more usable than the M16, which is too big, too heavy etc etc), hence I thought the Commando was the M4 because of the SpecOps nature of the game and the sheer look of the thing. Interesting. Incidentally this is the first Treyarch game in the series I've any interest at all in, although a lot of that is due to my interest in the time period and the hope that its plot doesn't shit itself inside out like MW2 did.

Did anyone else perceive David Milliband as I did, that is a slightly slimy untrustworthy individual who always appeared to be just on the edge of losing his temper in an extremely overblown way? Whenever he was in a debate he flipped from slightly disconcertingly smarmy and sometimes verging on a slightly seedy, to really quite snide and snipped comments that suggested he was going to get very angry shortly and wasfighting to stop himself flipping completely?