Smithster

Hi, not been on here for quite a while. We have just moved to a new house on Heeley Bank Road, S2 and we have two cats who we planned to keep inside for 2-3 weeks to get used to the new house before letting them outside, but one of them managed to escape very early this morning. His name is Otis and he is a 3-year-old black and grey tabby with some white patches on his belly and front legs, and a distinctive brown patch around his nose that looks like a moustache. He is neutered and chipped (under the name of Bill, which is what he was called by the rescue centre where got him from). He will undoubtedly be very frightened because we have just moved here from a different area and he will not know his way around the neighbourhood. We will be contacting the RSPCA and other rescue centres in the morning if he has not returned of his own accord. If anybody thinks they have seen him, please PM me so I can pass on my contact details. Many thanks. ---------- Post added 04-09-2014 at 06:09 ---------- Great news - he came back. We left the catflap (which was previously locked completely) set to 'in only' and the clever lad managed to find his way back in through it. Please feel free to lock or delete this thread mods.

Any chance you could qualify that statement for me? Just wondering on what basis you make such an assertion. I grew up in Southampton and have been supporting them since 1988. I have seen many managers come and go during that time. Some good, some not so good. But Nigel Adkins was head and shoulders above them all. EVERYTHING that has been achieved at the club over the last two and a half years (from near the bottom of league 1 to the PL through successive promotions) has come about because of his infectious optimism and faith that if everyone pulls together in the same direction with belief in their own abilities then the sky is the limit. The core of our squad today, who have shown over the last couple of months that they are more than capable of mixing it with the best of them in the PL, were with us in League 1 less than two years ago (Lambert, Lallana, Schneiderlin, Fonte) and there is no doubt in my mind that it is because of Adkins they have been able to make that step up. He united the fanbase and brought a feelgood factor back to St Marys that had been missing for many years, and in one foul swoop on friday, a narrow-minded, megalomaniac fool has wiped out all trace of that and turned us into a poor man's Chelsea. I can't doubt that Nicola Cortese has been extremely influential in turning around the fortunes of the club, but his delusions of grandeur will be his, and SFC's, undoing. He has it into his head that we can challenge the top six and get into the Champions League; He may be a successful businessman but he's a deluded idiot who nobody associated with the club has a good word to say about. The way he has treated Nigel Adkins is nothing short of despicable. We had a manager who was showing that he was learning very quickly and adapting to life in the PL. The players loved him and the fans loved him, and he could well have gone on to provide the managerial stability that has been so lacking at Southampton since Chris Nicholl was sacked in 1992 had he received the support of the board. What Cortese is essentially doing is gambling everything on the future. It has come out that he didn't give Adkins any say in who we signed over the summer and he has made it clear he wants to attract some continental talent and for the club to play a certain brand of football. He can stick it. We've all seen, thanks to the complete insanity of the events at our local rivals over the last five years, what happens when you go s**t-or-bust in football. There is no way I can happily sit back and accept the same thing happening at my club. The vast majority of my fellow Saints fans are incensed by what has happened, but there are some who simply shrug their shoulders and say "Oh well, that's modern football" and carry on as normal, convinced that it must be right for the club and that Cortese must be trusted. They can stick it as far as I'm concerned. In the words of the Manic Street Preachers... 'If you tolerate this, then your children will be next'.

So let me get this straight... you want to ban medication, which exists to help people recover from various health conditions, and ban video games, which exist to provide entertainment, while keeping it legal to own an assault rifle, which exists for one purpose and one purpose alone: to kill roomfuls of people in one go. Riiiiiiiight

Went for this one in the end. Just ordered it today with my xmas bonus money. Spent hours looking at various options over the last few weeks and this seems to be by far the best I can get for for my budget. Power consumption is low and it comes out top in the value for money stakes on that benchmark site.

Yeah I've already accounted for needing a new PSU but they are minimal cost anyway. Looking to spend no more than about £150 on the card. The monitor is a 19" IIama Prolite with a DVI connection (No HDMI).

I'm thinking of treating myself to an upgrade cos the one I have, although not that old, isn't very high spec and I really want to be able to enjoy Far Cry 3, which I have just bought, in as much detail as possible. I have a ASrock n68 c-s mobo, that uses an NVIDIA chipset, with AMD Phenom II quad core processor, and I was wondering if anyone can tell me whether I would be better off getting an AMD or a NVIDIA graphics card to compliment it. I'm currently using an ATI Radeon HD5670 which was about the best I could afford at the time, but my system struggles with the more resource-hungry games like Crysis 2.

Excellent, excellent news for the Palestinian people... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20550864 Maybe now the Israeli government can be brought before a tribunal to answer for their actions in Gaza.

Wow. That's one hell of an assumption. It seems my point about greyscales was completely lost. Some blinkered people will spend their evenings willfully swallowing everything that sites like rense tell them. Some people like to spend their spare time infecting their brain with utterly pointless turd like X Factor or I'm a Celebrity Get Me on TV, blissfully unaware of the machinations shaping the world around them. Others, like myself, have an interest in the ideas put forward by the conspiracy theorists and then go about searching out information which will either confirm or refute them through various media such as books or the internet, while deliberately avoiding such agenda-driven sites as rense. Take the whole 9/11 issue for example. Like most, I imagine, it never even occurred to me that there might have been something fishy about it until I started seeing discussions on forums such as this one about it. I was intrigued. The idea that we may have been hoodwinked by the most powerful government in the world for their own political and financial gain was, to my mind, not outside the realms of possibility, so I started reading as many sources as I could and even bought a couple of books on the subject. A large chunk of the supposed 'evidence' put forward by the conspiracy theorists can easily be debunked (like the idea that the towers could have been rigged for demolition without anybody noticing) but in many aspects of it, the official story just doesn't add up. I have now read an awful lot on the subject, viewed from both sides of the argument, and the only aspect of the whole affair about which I am certain is that the 'investigation' carried out by the 911 Commission was nothing of the sort, and was actually a complete whitewash designed to hide the truth rather than expose it. Now, I don't claim to know what it was intended to hide (Complicity? Utter incompetence in failing to prevent the attacks? Who knows) but I am certainly not the kind of person to deduce from this that it must therefore have been shape-shifting lizards who are hell-bent on global domination, nor am I going to just shrug and say "Oh well, never mind - when is Strictly on?". Like I have tried to point out I, like most people I imagine, am somewhere on the spectrum in between.

A little harsh. Of course this is something I have always believed in, although the teachers at my school down south were pretty poor and were much better at teaching what to think than they were at how to think. It's just that my recent studies have re-iterated the importance of it. By proactively engaging in some research and looking for them, obviously. Not sure of your point here.

Sorry, I have to disagree. I think it is very good advice. One of the things I have learned during my recent studies is that it is always helpful to check the sources of any information and question what motives the author may have. Certain media organisations are very skilled at cherry-picking data and presenting it in such a way as to shock and generate anger (an excellent example of this is the way in which the Daily Mail reports on the subject of climate change) so if people do not question it, accept it without reviewing the evidence for themselves and then pass it on as fact then they are unwittingly furthering the political agenda of others. This is clearly demonstrated at this time of year by all the moronic "AAARGH - bloody immigrants telling us we can't celebrate Christmas any more! Pass it on if you agree!" Facebook updates, which are invariably based on complete falsehoods to begin with.

This is a very interesting topic epiphany, and I seem to remember starting a similar thread myself (a few years ago now, mind). If you want to completely discredit someone then simply throw the label of 'conspiracy theorist nutjob' at them and conjure up an image of a spotty geek who spends his entire life watching sci-fi, eating takeaways, and sitting at his computer coming up with all sorts of weird and wonderful alternative explanations for historical events. I believe you are correct in that those who jump on any and all conspiracy bandwagons, to the point that their world-view leads them to see things which aren't there, are just as bad as those who, convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority, dismiss them out of hand without bothering to view the evidence. Indeed, it is the existence of this latter group upon which those who conspire to fool the public rely in order to get away with it, because without them generating doubt and pigeon-holing the fervent theorists as social outcasts, a much larger percentage of the population would most likely start doing more digging to try and expose their nefarious activities. But I do not agree with andygardener or RootsBooster's belief that there are only two categories in between. I see the middle ground as a large greyscale with numerous different attitudes towards the subjects, but it is always the two extreme groups that polarise the debate (on SF at least anyway) and the sane and rational voices often get lost amongst the abuse and ridicule they throw at each other, which is a real shame.

"I'm not racist, but...." Because any post or sentence that begins with this invariably goes on to be quite racist.

Well you're right in that the science can never be 100% proven, but I would stick my neck out and say that 99.83% of all peer-reviewed papers available on the Web of Science endorsing the idea of AGW pretty much constitutes a consensus - by my definition of the term anyway. The reason for the 'debate' and the lack of consensus among the public is because of the deliberate attempts by discredited organisations such as the Heartland Institute (funded by the oil industry - naturally) to spread misinformation and cloud the issue.

They are certainly in the minority... http://scienceprogress.org/2012/11/27479/

I refer you to my post #2851... Now I know that the data I got that from is from 2007, and as Bothyman has rightly pointed out the current figures show that the GMST has risen 0.8 degrees in the last century, compared to an average warming rate of 0.1 degrees per century over the previous 10,000 years. There is no precedent in the historical records taken from ice cores showing a warming rate anywhere near as high as the one we have been experiencing since the dawn of industrialisation.