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adriantc

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Everything posted by adriantc

  1. I think he refers to the myCents from the Xisto billing account. If so I don't think it is possible. You can use those for pretty much any hosting and domain service (yes you can buy a domain using your myCents), but as far as I know you can withdraw that amout. However the services are extremly good... I am using their services since many years ago when the forums where called Xisto and when they didn't offer services like domain registering. Their services are by far the best ones in the 'free' zone and even better then many of the paid ones. As for their support... simply surprising (in a good way).
  2. It has been done... A historical moment.... Finally today's attempt was successful. Felix Baumgartner now holds the record for a skydive from the highest altitude and he is (not yet officially) the first men ever to reach the speed of sound in free-fall. However his jump was shorter then Joe Kittinger's 4-minute, 36-second jump. Absolutely amazing feat of human engineering and human courage. Congratulations to Felix and him team for this unforgeable moment.
  3. I don't think the legal machinery is better or worse then it ever worse. The problem is in the society not actually in the court. The quality of the justice system has gone down with the quality of the society in general. The court is just an extension of societies current status and its individuals. This is the general trend... Of course that in a society with morals at an all-time low the justice system cannot do an exception. We have to remember that the judge, the individuals that form the jury and the lawyers are all human. And some of them (laywers) have part of they job description total disregard for morality. It amazes me how someone who takes pride that just saved a rapist or a pedofile from hanging can go home and kiss his wife and kid(s) goodnight. I consider the justice system to be a service... just like the fireman or policemen. The way it works is just a mirror on the terrible state of society, not a cause of its decline.One thing that comes in my mind when I write about the legal system is the movie Law Abiding Citizen. It's one of those rare movies when you take the side of the bad guy. I think the movie (if you have not seen it I highly recommend it anytime) shows very well what the justice system has become. It is no longer a quest to do justice to a particular individual, but to close a case and win a trial. It's not important if justice is served as long as somebody is condemned. Justice is now treated as a commodity, something that can be negociated. When it comes to murder or other offenses of the same kind nothing should be negociated... justice has to be followed to the bitter end.
  4. adriantc

    I'm New

    Welcome to Xisto! Happy posting. Give us some questions and we'll give you some replies
  5. For the Maps on iPhone state For the maps on iPhone statement I have to remaind you how incomplete Apple's maps are compared to those of Google. Of course that was to be expected since Google had a lot of experience in this department... Not to mention they haven't started from scratch as they bough other companies that had experience of their own. While that may be true Apple shouldn't have released a product that was not up to the name of Apple. I think this picture sais a lot for the status of Apple's maps: .... On a serios note a side-by-side comparison makes it pretty obvious: I have to agree with the photos part, but with an observation. It will be true until Nokia releases its latest creation will basicly destroy everything on the market when it comes to picture and video... quality, stabilization and all.
  6. adriantc

    Amazon

    I guess it's better safe then sorry. I've had problems with the credit card companies from my own country because I've had a few cases of a payment getting processed twice. But they were very fast to fix their mistake... Of course it wasn't because they are extremly polite, but because keeping money locked may lead to a head-spinning court case so I guess this is not one of those cases when they just delay everything. PS: A more personal question... Are you a vet or the vaccines are for your own dog (maybe the one from the avatar?)
  7. Everything ever discovered is done by experiment and experience. It might seem extraordinary for them to figure out all that details, but considering they have hundreds of years of trial and error they have extremly exact patterns. So it's no wonder they can figure out such trivial details. Just think how many scientist have studied the rocks in rivers here on Earth. By recording and studing changes over countless generations on Earth they can compare with rocks on Earth of the same pattern and since they know how fast a river is flowing on Earth they extrapolate how fast it would have been on Mars. (of course taking in considerations things like gravity and atmosphere on Mars) That is why science cannot ever be put in the same bascket with religion. One takes facts and can be disputed by one single powerful evidence, while the other rests everything on.... well... faith. Just think how many theories have been disproved over the years... The Earth rested on the back of an animal, the Earth was flat, it was the center of the Universe and so on. Now remember how many things from religion changed... Basicly nothing... Except for the fact that a big part of humanity has somewhat disconected from the weight of religion. One has been been continuously corrected and improved over the ages the other remained the same. With every new discovery one make the other less and less likely... But something that does not require proof can never be disproved. Depends on what boat you want to be...
  8. A small update for those not tune to this attempt. Launch has been aborted yet again because of strong winds... Just as they began balloon inflation. Maybe next time...
  9. You may have heard during the last few days/weeks about the jump that Felix Baumgartner is going to take from the very edge of space. If you haven't hard about this - in a nutshell Felix is going to do a skydive from the stratosphere, which is a record altitude of 37 km or 23 miles. In fact he will be the very first human to reach and go beyond the speed of sound without any craft, just in freefall. He is expected to reach a maximum speed of 1100 km/h. Beyond the record speed it seems some important scientific conclusions will be drawn from this jump. Of course he will have a fully pressurised suit and he will go up with a ballon. On a funny note he will take off from the famous Roswell - who knows what he'll met on his way up... Well after some delays caused by weather problems he is about to embark for the jump. You can watch the action live HERE...
  10. As someone said... if you are a camper and a bear attacks you don't have to be the fastest camper, just faster then the last one. I also think the shark attack subject is highly overrated. Just like the plane crashes a case is sufficient to create in a global scare of the sharks. Of course they occasionally attack, but on a global scale the chances are extremely slim. Even if you live by a shark infested beach I'm sure there are more chances you die in a car accident then by a shark attack. But I guess for the media its for more thrilling to get a news about a tourist being the dinner of a shark then a car accident with fatalities. In my country two weeks ago there was a huge media roar on a couple of bear attacks. In one case a bear was cough in a trap and the hunter (illegal of course) thought about poking the bear to death with a stick at which end he fixed a knife. Pointless to say it really annoyed the bear and somehow escaped the trap and showed the poor men who is in charge. Happy to say they haven't killed the bear afterwards as they usually do after an attack. Of course after watching this kind of news you'll think bears are the main cause of death for people living near woods. False of course.
  11. Hello Carlow!Welcome to Xisto forums! We are happy to discuss with you all kinds of topics. As a veteran of Xisto I hope you'll have a great time writing and contributing to this community, making it as large and shiny as it used to be.
  12. I don't believe that mankind should be destroyed but I am sure it (we) will finally have the fate it (we) deserve(s). We have become something like a teenager on drugs doing bad things because he has time and resources... the drug of mankind is oil and all the free power it represents makes us think we can do everything and get away with it. Eventually it may kill us, may it be global warming or the final lack of oil and the depression it will mean, or we may stop using it long before that - which I highly doubt will ever happen until the last drop is extracted from the ground it was stored for the last few millions of years. Our own greed is the main enemy not an unknown meteor or the final act of an omnipotent God. Just like a teenager we are playing with fire and we may eventually get burned, but we may also learn a valuable lesson from it.I am a strong supporter of Darwin's natural selection. I believe that it applies even to huge cosmic scales. If one specie cannot adapt to its planet, to its finite resource, it will get naturally selected, by starving, by overpopulation, by war, or by a passing meteor (that we are incapable of destroying). But the conclusion of course depends on ability to do our best with what we have and not put all our eggs in one basket. Although we had the huge resource I was speaking about mankind hasn't taken a real interest in space - only while it had something to prove to its self. Once that was done space was forgotten - only the occasional rover or telescope peers its eyes to the universe. And I think space should be the final destination of mankind. Or who knows... maybe even time may prove to be no limit.To come back to the metaphor... that drug addict teenager might also survive, might get thought its addiction and learn its lesson. He might just reach to be an adult. We may get to see what is at the end of the rainbow. And I think wonderful things are there, just waiting to be discovered. But first we have to prove we are worthy of them.
  13. adriantc

    Amazon

    Glad you have finally managed to get the book you wanted. Maybe they have changed something in the script of their website to accept an address like yours. When it comes to their profit, I'm sure Amazon is very efficient. And I am sure you are not the only one with this kind of issue. How is that your credit card company declined the payment? Did you actually pay on credit? I don't live in the US, but I never had a transaction blocked by the credit card company. And I do buy a huge lot on eBay and Amazon. Or maybe that is exactly why the transaction was unusual...
  14. My first mobile phone was the Sagem myX-2. It was so popular I couldn't even find a photo with a phone with the color scheme I had.
  15. I really don't agree with the carrier policy on phones. On two-year-long or one-year-long contract they look like banks... they profit from the costs of the phone and from the cost of the service. They pack everything up to look like it was cheaper, but on the long run (two-year-long) you actually pay more on the phone then you would do upfront. It's just like a credit with interest. That wouldn't be a problem if they wouldn't also make money on the calls you actually make. I have two older Sony-Ericsson phones (dumb-phones ) and there are not many occasions when I miss having a smart-phone. The main advantage of a smart-phone is the browsing capabilities which I sometimes need. But there are also some drawbacks. For one thing iOS seems more stable then Android (I haven't used Linux a lot, but Google seems to have managed to make a pretty stable OS into an unstable one). One more thing that requires permanent updates and fixes. One more thing that can crash (and Android sure does a lot) and make you loss countless hours on installing all the applications again and again. But returning to Apple... I think they have capitalized on the popularity of their laptops and OSs. If the iPhone would have been released by any other company, but would look just the same and have the same characteristics, it wouldn't have enjoyed nowhere near the same success. It's all about the vibe in the name Apple. And they are still selling the phones, by taking advantage of that. The advantages over the competition are very very small (compared to the first iPhone when there was almost no competition), but the phones still create some kind of emulation when they get released even if the changes are not large. In conclusion I think the real performer during the last years is not their engineering department, but their marketing department.
  16. I have opened a ticket and received a reply. Great support service by the way... not my first ticket - all resolved in due time. Anyway I have posted quite a lot this days, just got an update and received what I was expecting. Maybe it was a glitch or something. I was very careful because last time when I was active they where just implementing the Credit System and it was full of bugs (I don't say that to be bad... I'm also a programmer and I'm doing my share of bugs ) It is my second update done as expected so I am going to close the ticket, but I'll keep an eye open.Thanks everybody for all the help.
  17. I don't even think that people with a lot of referrals do really make a lot of money. It's not only a question of the number of referrals you have, but a question of whether they are active or not. And since the one on the bottom makes very little there's nothing to keep him active. Maybe only the same wish to make a lot of referrals. Of course once you start to look at things this is another classic example of Ponzi scheme. I remember the good old days of 12DailyPro. That is the mother of all Ponzi schemes... 44% return in just 12 says... its fall has marked the fall of the Ponzi scheme online industry. I did have an account with them and some pretty dollars when they were eventually shutdown. Bottom line is... don't get your hopes up in making money online and not working for it. There is no such thing as free money. Doing freelancing is legit, but for the big bucks you have to have a reputation in order to get the big projects. And reputation comes only with time and small projects that don't pay so great. So be careful what you get into...
  18. adriantc

    Amazon

    I may not be the best example, but I had some mixed experiences with Amazon customer service. On one hand I they sent me a book 3 times because the first 2 times the book had a printing error and doubled a chapter and missing another one. They didn't ask any questions (maybe they already knew of that lot) and just send a new one. But of course 3rd time was the charm. But this small issues cost almost nothing for a giant like Amazon, but for the customer is a lot and a few negative reviews will have an impact in their profit share.On the other hand I'm really upset by the way they treat international customers. For example I own 2 Amazon Kindles and I buy ebook from them. They have a price for the US and another (larger... in some cases more then 30-40% larger) for the rest of the world. Not only that, but they don't sell many book outside the US even if it's a digital format - they don't have to actually ship anything. But they are not the only ones that treat the dollars of others different from their own dollars. (as if their own "presidents" have less value here).
  19. I don't think denying something to kids is going to resolve the issue. Of course since I'm not a parent my words don't have a real weight in the issue, but from a general standpoint when you forbid something, specially to kids, they sure will make an effort to avoid it. I think the parents should concentrate on explaining why you should not spent too much time online or what is good and what is bad online. And lets not forget the Internet is a huge step forward if used for a rational purpose. I wouldn't consider spending 2 hours everyday on Facebook for example is rational use of course.As sharmiladevi very rightfully pointed kids imitate whatever their parents do. You can't expect to keep your kids away from Facebook if you do that all day. Also if other kids do it at school, I think its almoust impossible to stop them from doing whatever everybody else is doing. We are like it or not animals in origin so the herd instinct in very powerful in all of us. The more I think about it the more I realise parenting is not only a full time job, but a really hard one ^_^Also giving them something else to do should also work. Maybe a sport which also has other advantages.It's not less true that in my case my love from childhood is the computer. I did spend a lot of hours on the computer... But the computer is now my means of living. So it doesn't really matter how much time he is spending. If he uses it for other things then games and Facebook maybe he should be encouraged.
  20. I didn't actually know that. But I think you still require a software to transfer files. Open-source is better then iTunes (coming from an open-source developer ), but you still shouldn't be forced to install anything (on the phone or on the computer) to put some mp3s on your phone or download some photos. On the funny side here is a nice prank that shows what kind of people camp in front of Apple stores
  21. Welcome back! I am exactly like you... I came back some two weeks ago. Had a great time setting up a new plan with some cents I still had in my account. Although the visitor count of the forums seems to have gone down (can't imagine why) the quality of the service is as high as ever. I can congratulate Xisto for that. Xisto - Support is very helpful. Another 5 * for that. So it's up to us to bring the forums (for which by the way I like the name change) back to it's former glory. I for one am working hard on that. I don't know if you have noticed it (depending if you were last on Xisto), but there is a new credit system which you have to get used to. I have had trouble with it, mainly because it's extremly random. The myCents get updated at a random basis and the myCents go to your Client Area on another random basis. There is a delay between when you post and get an update in the forums and another delay between the update on the forums and the update in the Client Area. All are apparently random. So (as one book says) DON'T PANIC, writtten with large friendly letters!
  22. Finally there are some news from NASA's Curiosity... It seems it has discovered what seems to be an ancient river bed. It's not yet as big news as life would be, but even showing that liquid water is not such a rare thing in the Universe is a big deal. In fact considering the huge distances in the Universe two planets with running water in the same solar system is an important discovery. Considering how many star systems are there chances for intelligent life out there are improving dramatically. If you want to read the article and judge for yourself go to: https://www.engadget.com/2012/09/28/nasa-curiosity-mars-water-streambed/ It's nice to see that from some pictures they can even tell how deep it was, how fast it was running and the fact what it was rather a permanent river then a one time thing from a flash flood. It's nice to see that science works so great no matter where. Looking forward to that one great discovery...
  23. Another update... I still think the credit system is not working as it should. Yesterday myCents from the forum changed from 98.08 to 93.68 (posted quite a lot so it was expected)... That would mean it has gone over 100 myCents and I should get 1 dollar in my account. But that hasn't happen. I'm thinking I should post a support ticket.
  24. You know that there is the theory that life on Earth has been actually seeded here by an incoming comet. It would make sense if we accept it, that a near planet is the supplier. (chances would be a lot better for a near planet, then from one from a different star system) And if we don't accept that theory and we do find life on Mars (and I don't necessarily mean one that still lives... it could very well be fosil... remember that meteorite from Mars two decades ago that seemed to prove just that) it would actually show a lot more then life on a planet in a different star system. It would show life is a lot more common then we can think... if it started on two planets in the same star system it might very well mean that the galaxy, the universe, is full with all kinds of life forms. Of course there is the problem of timing... on most of them it might already have gone extinct a long time ago, on others they may have helped themselves go extinct (as we are on the brink of doing so). There is one more reason I hope they find life on Mars. It's the only planet in this star system with real chances for that. I don't think we will visit other star systems in my life time (50-hopefully 60 years... I am highly pessimistic it will only happen... I guess that for any species living to see other star systems is, as the great Sagan put it, some kind of growing up ritual) so this is the only chance I'll get to live that historic event. Of course there is the chance that somebody will pick up an ET version of "I love Lucy", but i doubt that... it is once again a problem of timing. I would have liked to have seen the Moon landing with my own eyes, I hope I can see something even more spectacular.
  25. I wonder how can it connect with iTunes ... nothing Apple makes seems to work without iTunes installed. (one of the main things that makes me steer far away from anything that has an apple on the cover.Now that it has been 2 weeks since it was released people (of course) started complaining. The joins aren't that great (light seems to come out of the cover), the cover seems very happy to get scratches, WiFi seems to have some issues. I guess if it's not the battery, it's the signal... if it's not the signal, it's the screen... if it's not the screen, it's the cover.On the other hand in a face to face camera comparison between the latest Nokia and the latest iPhone really kills the iPhone - camera wise of course. Nokia may be up to something here. (they still have to do some more work on the marketing department - specially considering they liberal use of... let's call them... "special effects" in their commercials).
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