Gerard

In an AV vote, you just put a number 1 next to your first preference, a 2 next to your second, etc etc until you don't want to vote for anyone else. Any reason for that? Or is it just "we've always voted labour" or "we'd NEVER vote tory"? Actually, I'd say the opposite. He seems smarmy and useless, but having spoken to him I know he has a lot of substance and he knows his policies really well, and I agree with most. You can see the question I asked him on TV if you like. In contrast, Obama got in because of his charisma and "change" slogan - most people wouldn't know his policies (except healthcare).It's like the Green party who go around saying they'd be friendly to the environment and be awesome, but nobody is going to want to pay for that. Shall we ditch the NHS or double uni fees or not bother having an army anymore? Yes there is a lot of waste in government, and I only trust the Conservatives to be able to find and eradicate that (without breaking everything). Labour have flat-out failed, and the Lib Dems are not experienced enough. Maybe next time the Libs would be better (especially if they get a couple of cabinet seats in a hung parliament). If voting is so useless, we could always adopt an African democracy system, where the vote is rigged and anyone who votes against the President gets shot? That takes the effort out of it. Alternatively just not bother with costly elections? Point being we have a choice, we should use it. Whether that means picking the winner, or voting Lib Dem just to prove you can. If Lib Dems narrowly lose this time, then they're gonna have a really good chance next time.

"First past the post" isn't necessarily the problem - that just means the candidate with the most votes wins the whole seat. Almost any election has that. People think that means the first party to get 326 seats wins, but that's not the case. If a party gets more MPs than all the other parties put together, then they can control the government even if the other parties all disagree. There's no way to avoid that, except having an elected upper-house. The problem is tactical voting. Even if you support the Green Party, you know they won't win so your vote would be wasted. To have a say in how the government runs, you need to abandon your chosen candidate and vote strategically for someone who can win. Of course if everyone switched to the Green Party then it would be fine, but that isn't going to happen unless people believe they can win. The Lib Dems are playing a great bit of politics by making people THINK they can win, so people will stop tactically voting for Tory/Labour and actually vote Lib Dem, which GIVES them the chance to win. The way to solve that would be an Alternative Vote system, where you rank candidates in order of preference. They count the first-preference votes, and eliminate the candidate with the fewest. So if you put Greens first, then Conservatives, then if the Greens get kicked out your vote changes to a Conservative vote. This lets you vote for who you want to win AND tactically vote for the actual winner. I run this system in our SU elections and it's great when you have several candidates. There are two other problems though. People don't vote for who they want to represent them, they vote for the party they want to win (and for the leader of that party to be PM). The only way to solve that would be to either get rid of parties (and let MPs have an open vote on who is PM), or let the people of the country vote for President (instead of a Monarchy). Neither of those is going to happen any time soon. There is also a bit of confusion between councils and Westminster. You elect an MP to represent your views about the whole country's policy to parliament, not to get your local Council to fix your town's roads. This needs to be clearer.

That would not work. The game would just crash every time it tried to load that station. I don't think the radio station is specified in a config file either (although I'm not sure for GTA IV), it'll be more hardcoded than that. If you're not comfortable deleting them, don't do it. If you are experienced at modding, then give it a try but back up first. You can only really mod PC versions of games, modding Xbox/PS3 versions generally requires a hardware modification to your console which is not allowed.

Some of those are really really nice, good work. My favourites are the bottom two. Are you able to create stuff on a larger scale, such as desktops and large adverts? Or is your technique restricted to smaller scales?

You could use another browser, or a private browsing mode, to keep separate login details (or stay logged out).

I disagree with Ivan. Even if it's a shitty job, do it. It was only because I started out in shitty jobs that I got the experience needed to work at Microsoft. The skills you learn in getting up in the morning, dealing with customers, respecting authority (even if they're wrong) and understanding office politics will be SO valuable to you. Think about it. In 5 years time, when you're in a job interview for your ideal company (Rockstar?), what would you rather say to them? a) "I worked my ass off for 3 years at a shitty McD's, underpaid and treated like crap but I still got up every saturday morning, made it into work and had a smile on my face for the customers. I'm a great employee." b) "I had this shitty job but gave up after 3 weeks cos it was hard. If this job is hard I'll just give up and leave." c) "I was going to get this job but it sounded hard so I didn't bother. I might not bother even turning up to work if you give me this job." Which person would you hire?

Horrible photo of me and David Cameron:

LIES! ITS ALL LIES!

Sony wants everyone to have a PS3, so that they'll buy Sony-licenced games ($$$) and official Sony accessories ($$$). Most will only have one console, so Sony want it to be theirs rather than an Xbox (causing Microsoft to miss out). And when the next generation comes out, they'll probably opt for PS4 rather than Xbox 3. Once they have the PS3 in their home, everything else will naturally come. The battle is won for them, and lots of monies will be coming their way. That's worth $38 per person to them.

Wait, your 'friend' has made a GTA site whose focus is on accomodating members who have been banned from the big GTA sites? That just sounds like someone is pissed off at being banned. Generally they aren't the type of people I'd want to run a site that I was a member of. That said, we get a lot of members here who were banned on GTA Forums, and we pride ourselves on a fair moderation system. If you were banned from GTAF, no big deal, just leave the site and join TGTAP or something. But if you were banned from TGTAP, then he would definitely have had to do something wrong. I'd suggest your 'friend' think hard about why he wants to run a site. If he thinks it can be a good, useful site built on a solid community, then good luck with that. If he just wants to be in charge because he's pissed off at being banned (probably for a very good reason) then it's not going to work.

People always confuse the support lifecycle with the availability of the product. We're stopping support for XP soon, which means that although people can still own/install/run it, we won't fix any problems with it - unless its a security issue or if you pay for your "extended" support until 2014. After 2014, we stop supporting XP completely. That's 13 years of support after the product release, even with 2/3/4 new releases in between (plus service packs), which is pretty damn good. You can see the full support lifecycle yourself. Full details for XP, Vista and Win7. Vista's uptake was slow, so we've kept support for XP for a longer period of time than normal, just because we want to support those people who chose to stick with XP. The recession was a big factor in that too. Windows 7 has been picked up a lot quicker, so Vista's support will last at its normal time (April 2012). We are not putting XP up for retail again. Doing this would unnecessarily harm Windows 7.

WRX - your PC/ISP is visiting the old server still, rather than the new one. I have modified the DNS records on the old server, so you should now see the new server even if your ISP still uses the old nameserver records. To test this, visit this page. If you see a "404 Not Found" message, you're on the new server and everythings fine. If you see a page saying "old server", then you are still visiting the old server and need to wait for the cache to empty (I have put instructions on that page). If you really need to see the new server, you could switch to using OpenDNS.

We have a whole section on GTA IV Modding. Post your question there, and be more specific as to what you want.

That's barely a website. It's a single blog post. No advantage to getting visitors to that (no ads, participation etc). Your best bet would be to post the story here to be discussed, rather than directing people to another website.

Sit down and think about what you just said.

We know we can lock this, and we will decide when to do that. No need to tell us how to moderate

Could you take a screenshot to show what you mean? Parts of signatures? Every image on this site? Other sites? You're not zoomed into the page by any chance?

Also on any user profile, you can click "Flag as spammer" - although only certain types of member can do this.

Fixed. In future, you should hit Report rather than making a new topic. We do get some ad bots, but they always get sorted out very quickly.

bahahahaha Completely false. You mean that numbers can be expressed in Binary, Ternary, Octal, Hex, Decimal etc. The number twelve is 12 in decimal, 1100 in binary, C in hex etc. Binary, decimal and hex just represent numbers, they can't show text. You need a separate rule for a certain number to mean a certain letter. So following ASCII rules, the number 65 in decimal (41 hex or 0101 binary) means the letter A. So using ASCII rules, your first four decimal numbers (087 097 115 117 112) translate to the letters "Wasup" There's nothing to do with binary or hex in your question.

I think Restricted members can't post images. So whatever you post shows up as IMG tags for everyone else too. You could have proved that without the huuuuge screenshot.

The difference between a 9400GT to a 9800GT isn't going to be worth the money to buy it. If you're going to upgrade, you should make a decent investment, something that will last you a long time. A slight upgrade basically just proves you wasted your money the first time. You're saying your amd athlon 3500+ 2.21GHz is a triple core CPU? Not last time I checked. I have a 5600+ and this is an Athlon 64 dual-core CPU. Either way, the 3500+ is going to be adequate. Phenom would be good but the graphics card is going to make a much bigger difference. RAM is also pretty important. I'd really recommend at least 4GB these days. You'd survive on 2, but you can't expect huge games like this to work without having to load stuff every now and then.

In that case, it's probably going to be a proprietory file format ONLY used by that game, probably containing multiple audio files and other information (rather than just being one MP3). A bit like GTA games use IMG files to store lots of DFF/TXD models. If you really need it, you could look for mods for that game and see if there are any tools for opening NET files. You could try renaming it to .mp3 or .wav and see if any of them work, but I'd doubt it unless you are expecting to be one song. You could always record the audio from your game? Bit of a hacky workaround but if you're desperate and can't get it anywhere else you could do that. Probably not strictly legal, as you won't be licenced to listen to that music except in that game.

.net is a weird file extension. It's not a common one, used by netViz, FileMaker, linux OSs (rc.net) and a few obscure random apps. Where did you get it from? What are you expecting to be in it? Image, video, a program? Is it possible that it's got the wrong file extension?

How did you install San Andreas in the first place? Just install it again. You have the CD, right?