Pipski

1. job 2. flat 3. car 4. girlf 5. holiday. man i need a holiday.

I'm sure many of you will have heard this story before but here goes: A few years back (about 10 iirc) the management of a Japanese shopping mall learned exactly how much we in the Western world spend on consumer goods at Christmas and decided to try and introduce it there. They decided to do some research and have a big Christmas display in the centre of the mall with lights and music and all the rest of it. Someone was hired to look into the trappings of this gaijin Christian tradition and co-ordinate the festive extravaganza. Unfortunately this person got his wires crossed and misinterpreted some key elements of Christian belief. Hence, when the shoppers duly arrived on the day this display was unveiled, they were confronted by the spectacle of a 25 foot tall Father Christmas ... nailed to a cross! There you go, the Japanese crucified Santa.

I don't recommend that mate, if I were you I'd watch them one after the other instead

How do we do this, do we like cut your testicle into a few hundred pieces and take a bit each or all have the whole thing for one day per year?

I'm not too sure what your question is precisely. If you mean `how did they get a sample of guaranteed Saddam DNA to compare to this guy?' then I have no idea! However, if they do have a sample that is known to have come from Saddam before he went awol then the throat swab taken from the guy they've arrested can be compared using RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphisms) or, much more likely these days, PCR (polymerase chain reaction). In broad terms the sample will be amplified using primers that select for variable number tandem repeats and then seperated on a polyacrylamide gel using electrophoresis. Comparison of the pattern of bands resulting with those from the guaranteed Saddam DNA will make any differences obvious and indicate a negative. If they look the same, positive.

lol, only in such countries?

I choose to believe that you just phrased yourself badly there? If you create a position of absolute power, no matter how humble and kind your leader, it will attract the kind of person you do not wish to see in power. Power corrupts and absolute etc. etc. Politics already draws the biggest charlatans and slimebags, introduce a dictatorship and you're going to see even worse. At the end of the day you need a system whereby all the ethnic groups in a region can get along because if you split it up the same tensions will develop into cross-border conflicts. This has been seen time and again. Also, as long as there is contact and communication between members of different groups in the general population there is a degree of insulation against inflammatory propaganda from governments or vested powers. Dividing a region reduces contact between the peoples and lends itself to the demonization of other ethnic groups. Frankly, I see no reason why democracy can't work in Iraq. Iran is - slowly, painfully slowly - becoming more democratic before the will of the people, and knowing what they know of corruption and dictatorship, I'm pretty sure the Iraqi people are going to have similar impulses.

Do we know whether the sniper configuration xm-8 will be 5.56mm or is that when they think people are going to start changing calibres? If so, do we know what the options are? And is the xm-8 going to be, wotchacallit, federally restricted? i.e. like the FN P50, not available to the public. And has there been any talk about a 9mm version for law enforcement? There's that much speculation about this gun on the `Net it's hard to find anything reliable.

According to the Beeb his supporters in the area have been very upset that Saddam didn't `open fire on the Americans' or resist arrest in any more demonstrative way than getting into a hole. Maybe, just maybe, this will demonstrate to them that this man is not a demigod with the wisdom of Solomon, the craft of Odysseus and the strength of ten ordinary mortals, just a depraved, egomaniacal, bullying, cowardly psychopath.

Ah, I've been a bit out of touch with conspiracy theories. I was madly into them 10 years ago. Back then it was all Opus Dei, P2, the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers. I see that today's flavour of the month is the Carlyle Group. Well I say that the Bilderbergers could have the Carlyle Group for breakfast! Maybe with some help from the Knights Templar ... btw, anyone who feels they have a pretty good grounding in occult conspiracy theories would probably enjoy `Foucault's Pendulum' by Umberto Eco. It's very tongue in cheek, about a group of publishers who decide to invent a conspiracy theory to sell a book only to find that it appears to be coming true ... very tongue in cheek and you do need a PhD in paranoid arcana but very entertaining.

Outstanding analysis AS. As for the Polish issue my question would be `which dingbat drafted the original EU-entry for Poland that gave them 27 (? 29?) seats in the parliament'? They were told when they joined that that's how many seats they'd have, you can't blame them for being grumpy now if people are changing their minds after the fact. It doesn't make it right but in civilian life if you sign up for something you don't expect the conditions to be changed after you've put your name on the dotted line. If something is advertised at one price you don't expect to be charged differently when you get to the till. So you can see how they'd be annoyed.

What will be more influential with the resistance, Fedayeen or Baathist, is what it does to their funding. If Saddam's capture enables intelligence agencies to interrupt funds to the resistance then they're done. According to reports they are already very short of readies and have been selling crops to buy arms. They can't keep that up forever.

The article's tosh because it misinterprets the facts. The British armed forces have been reliant, to a degree, on the US since the end of WW2 when we were faced by a big, aggressive power not too far away with a shattered country to rebuild. Our own nuclear deterrent was not enough without the US multiplying it, we wouldn't stand a chance against the Red Fleet on our own, and we only commanded one of the three army groups in West Germany and even that had to be bulked out periodically by US troops. But we are less reliant on the US now and more reliant on Europe than ever before. If you look at Kosovo, yes we worked with the US but we worked a lot more closely with the Dutch, French and other Euro nations. Our armed forces are deficient in a number of glaring areas - submarines, projected air power, strategic bombing to name a few - but for less dramatic, cataclysmic, war-to-end-all-wars type confrontations we are not doing so bad (when our soldiers have boots). poi, good article in the Times today about designs for new modular ships for the RN. One large hull transports 4-6 smaller high speed attack boats that are controlled remotely.

Cheers mate, will give it a go.

Hi all. Â First off, thanks to Hellfish6 for sorting out my registration! Secondly, I've got a big problem with OFP. Â I'm running Cold War Crisis v1.0 which I bought when it first came out. Â For various reasons too boring to go into I'm not in a position to patch it up to 1.46 right now but I should have a copy of the GOTY edition within a few weeks anyway . Â The problem is new. Â I've been putting together a mission in the editor recently but the game has just started crashing to desktop at the end of missions. Â This happens in campaign or single missions. Â When I true to load up my editor mission the game crashes immediately. Â My campaign is now stalled because it doesn't record the fact you completed the mission before you crashed. Â From what I've heard this is not too uncommon a bug. Â Have looked it up on Avonladys site and heard that other people have fixed it - bizarrely - by uninstalling and/or reinstalling CloneCD. Â This hasn't worked for me. Â It did occur that the onset of the problem roughly coincided with me burning some unrelated data files to CD so I guess it could be linked to something Windows uses to write CDs (I used the built-in WinXP drag & drop writing facility). Â Uninstalling and reinstalling the game doesn't fix it, defragging the hard disk hasn't helped, increasing the amount of paging memory to a gig hasn't helped. Â Moving my User folder out of the OpFlash directory didn't work, nor did setting up a new User. Can anyone think of anything else that might fix it? Â I'm stumped! Â I could really use a fix for this as it would be very handy if I could finish my mission in the next week or so. Â Plus, it's really bugging me that I can't mend it! Â It must be a problem outside of OFP entirely or at least in the files that aren't deleted by an uninstall. Â Could it be .dlls? Â Something arcane like that? Â Any suggestions very welcome and very much appreciated! PS - I have hunted through the FAQs and forums here, at Avondlady's and at ofpec with no joy so far.

Have already turned off antivirus software as PC is not online anyway. Have DX9 already. Do not have SP1 but will make a point of procuring it asap. Oh, and Nvidia drivers are all bang up to date already too. Any particular reason for the SP tip? I can get it, but it's a bit of a pain tbh.

And if you're born in France and choose to convert to Islam? Or is that alright, it's not Muslims you hate, just foreigners? Plank.