Huguenot

Why is highlighting a possible theft spiteful and bitter? This is a family company in an economic downturn that may need the money - there's no evidence the employee who has been alleged to have created irregularities is part of that family? If there is a theft it may put the company out of business, and the family on the streets. It may cost many people their jobs. How could highlighting a possible theft be spiteful and bitter unless you thought stealing from an employer was okay?

"nonsense written about the spirit of the game as if England are the only ones who seem to know what it is" Sp far as I can tell Medic, you're the only one who's made that assertion. Does that mean you accept you're talking nonsense?

32. After the game Marlin visited me at the Sandton Sun, where we staying, and gave me a leather jacket and R50,000 in two cash amounts (R30,000 and R20,000) on consecutive days. I believed this to be the gift he had spoken of. He said it was in consideration of me giving him information in the future, but did not specify what this information would be. The R500,000 which had been promised to a charity of my choice did not materialise and was never mentioned again.

Aha - the incredible and ghostly Marlin Aronstam. Hansie Cronje's stament in full regarding the declaration.... 24. On the fourth day during the rain interruption, a meeting was held between me, Nasser Hussein (the English captain), Dr Ali Bacher, the match umpires and the match referee in the library of the Northern Titans. Dr Bacher was anxious to save the game as a spectacle. There was pressure to turn it into a One Day International, but this was apparently not possible because of a clash of sponsors (Test Matches and the One-Day Internationals have different sponsors). 25. Thereafter, on the evening of the fourth day, I received a call on my cellphone. The caller identified himself as Marlin Aronstam. (I am not sure of the spelling) I do not know where he got my cellphone number and I had not previously heard of or spoken to him. 26. We chatted for a while. Marlin said that he was a cricket lover and wanted to see action on the field. He said that my image as a captain was poor and that I was being perceived as a conservative and negative captain. We also spoke about my recent form, which had not been good: I had had two ducks in a row. Marlin urged me to speak to Nasser Hussein, the English captain, about an early declaration to make a contest of it, saying this would be good both for me and for cricket. This is something which is often done, for example, in county cricket in which each side forfeits one innings. It had never before been done in a test match. 27. Marlin revealed that he was involved with NSI, a listed company, which I now know to be involved in sports betting. I did not know this at the time and only became aware of it in April of this year. 28. Marlin said that if we declared and made a game of it he would give R500,000 to a charity of my choice and would also give me a gift. We did not discuss either which charity or what the gift would be. He asked whether we could meet at my hotel, which we did that night. He wanted to call Nassar Hussein, who was in the same hotel, up to my room. I refused because I did not want him to be involved. We spoke about cricket and the Centurion test. I was impressed by his knowledge of cricket. He said a forfeit by each side would be a positive move for cricket. He genuinely sounded as though he wanted to see a cricket contest and I was not asked to influence other players, to perform badly, or to influence the result. Marlin's suggestion seemed to make perfect sense from an entertainment point of view. It was nevertheless wrong for me to have entertained the offer of a gift for doing something in respect of which I was required to make an independent decision as captain.

I think it's just one step at a time Loz - although I don't really think the two things are on a par in terms of diverting your attention. I've seen people in cars completely blind to the outside world because they're remonstrating with someone on the phone. I've never seen a cigarette have the same effect. Frankly, despite being a smoker, I have no idea how people can smoke in cars at all!!

I don't quite get what you're saying there acm? This seems to show that the US is the same as the UK in the sense that the 'colour' of the government has no correlation with debt. Please note that in the US the colours are reversed to the UK. In the US right wing is red, and left wing is blue (the terms right and left here are comparative not absolute). Quids, the arch proponent of lazy stereotypes is complaining about being 'put in a box'. Ha ha :)) I'm so relieved you can see the irony! I should imagine that nobody fits precisely into 'that stupid map' just as nobody fits into 'stupid' stereotypes of Guardianista bourgeoisie or lazy Greek spongers. I can't see how any sane person would try and say that people were so clear cut? I'm certainly not putting anyone into easy boxes, I can see how despite my generally left wing social leanings I also have a lot of right wing characteristics. Please feel free to use the 'map' as intended - for a bit of light-hearted fun and self-analysis ;-)

Medic, my initial impression was that the fielder had deliberately given the wrong impression that the ball was a bounday by failing to field it for 3 or 4 seconds despite it being at his feet. Since it is perfectly normal for the state of play of the ball to be signalled by the fielder, this is most unusual behaviour. If the ball was in play he should have been in a hurry to return it to minimise runs/ I then felt that there had been deliberate masking of the return of the ball in order not to draw the batman's attention to it. The fact that India then took the appeal led me to believe it was deliberate subterfuge and consequently cheating. There are plenty of unanswered questions about this that won't be addressed by the retraction. As you saw, on reflection I retracted my view that this was cheating, primarily on the grounds that they retracted the appeal. You cannot cheat to obtaina wicket if you don't take the wicket.

Really? I'd say quite the opposite - most sports are quite reliant on the spirit of the game: The Hand of God, diving, bribed referees, faking age, bribed judges, shortcuts in marathons, steroids, cocaine, faking gender, watered horses, dodgy fencing foils...where do we start? You've never seen a foot creep past the oche? I mean, what about the Spanish paralympic basketball team who faked mental illness? How fcuked up is that?

It applies to all sports. It's implemented to a different degree dependent upon your beliefs and cultural background. Culturally the English get more incensed about unfair play than, for example, the Italians. It may be Medic that you don't believe as strongly as I do in the spirit of sport. There's nothing likely to change this - it's about belief rather than rationalism. I don't really understand what pleasure there is in cheating, so I tend to think cheats have a more unhappy life than those who play by the rules. An empty victory is just that.

I think someone said earlier that planes take off with the wind. Although it seems logical, it's actually the other way round - planes always take off and land into the wind. This is because it gives a higher 'airspeed' compared with 'ground speed' for any given velocity. For example a plane going down a runway at 150mph into a 20mph headwind, will have wind going over its wings at 170mph. Higher airspeeds give higher lift - so it means that the plane is airborne at lower ground speeds and needs a shorter stretch of runway. This all means that taking off and landing into the wind is safer! As SCSB79 said - the only thing that counts is the wind at Heathrow, nowhere else. Be interesting to see how the traffic changes during the Olympics. It currently delivers almost 9,200 flights a week. To be honest, with the figures that high nobody's really going to be able to notice an extra 1,000, but 5,000 might be noticeable!

Cheating in sport is well known to be a cultural issue. There's two core elements - one is whether the end justifies the means, the second is whether cheating only exists if it's observed by a referee or umpire. I think that the whole concept of sport is about achieving certain objectives after artificially imposing a set of performance restrictions (e.g. only using your feet, or only throwing the ball backwards). If a sportsman deliberately steps outside these restrictions in order to meet their objectives then for me there is simply no point in sport at all. Hence there is always a 'spirit' to the rules. In this case Bell's proposed wicket was outside that 'spirit' and thus cheating. I know that some nationalities don't believe these rules are important, and that's why they never had an empire - they just couldn't cooperate. ;-)

If India didn't feel they did anything wrong they wouldn't have reversed the decision. Eat your own words Medic. ;-)

Edited out of shame for my bad blood...

katienumbers seems to have wandered back and started insulting everyone Medic, don't take it personally. ;-)

It's so easy for you to start rolling out the insults when the truth hurts. Don't expect a right winger to pay any attention to truth at all katienumbers. Goes the same place as climate change denial eh? ;-) Anyway here's national debt by government colour. It's as clear as you like that there is no correlation between 'debt' and the political colour of the government. Both types of government increase and decrease debt. It's driven by world events and macro economic events, not by petty issues like social conscience. To cross tab that with recessions: 1919-21 cuts in government spending (post war) 1930-31 cuts in government spending (right wing policies) 1973-75 oil crisis 1980-82 caused by monetarist policies 1990-92 caused by lack of management and regulation of financial markets (savings and loan) 2008-09 caused by lack of management and regulation of financial markets (leveraging and bad debt) So I think it would be fair to say that 5 out of the last 6 recessions were caused by right wing policies.

katienumbers' opinion is typical of poorly informed right-wing tub thumping. It's wrong and it fcuks nations up. The biggest recessions in history have been solved by left wing governments. The Great Depression in the US was caused by right wing US governments. This is what right wing governments did to the US in the 20s: By the end of the decade, the bottom 80 percent of all income-earners will be removed from the tax rolls completely. Taxes on the rich will fall throughout the decade. By 1929, the richest 1 percent will own 40 percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom 93 percent will have experienced a 4 percent drop in real disposable per-capita income between 1923 and 1929. Individual worker productivity rises an astonishing 43 percent from 1919 to 1929. But the rewards are being funneled to the top: the number of people reporting half-million dollar incomes grows from 156 to 1,489 between 1920 and 1929, a phenomenal rise compared to other decades. But that is still less than 1 percent of all income-earners. The Great Depression wasn't alleviated until the election of Roosevelt in 1933, a left winger whose belief in the redistribution of wealth was so frightening to the right wing establishment that they actually planned a military coup!!!

Not for any reason other than simplicity - you'd only need one log in, and one billing provider for example. However, I think you might just be missing the important things you should be considering with suppliers: I train guys in web creation, and here's a few notes from my slides on this subject, but all of these notes throw up issues that are more important than whether you use the same company or not: On domain name selection: Additional names Common misspellings Common variations International Competing domains Promotional domains On selection of your registrar: Cost - Base price of TLD - Registrar mark-up - Transfer cost Management - Domain management services - Additional functions ? auto renewal, freebies - Agree registration details On selecting your host: Services - In-house - Turnkey solutions - Software requirements - Email Reliability - Up time and access - Bandwidth Support - Practicality - Operating System - Control Panels - Services

This is an interesting political map... (sorry I had to break the page, but when I shrank it, it wasn't legible). http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/maps_and_graphs/2011/7/22/1311335535423/Information-is-Beautiful--001.jpg I can see where some of our more strident pundits fall on this ;-)

Mick Mac that's daft. The resolution in debt goes with defence spending, the only thing that republicans refuse to move on. Social services have had no impact on US national debt.

Thatcher stole pension funds to pay for tax cuts. That's the f up on pensions.

That's not you quids ;-)

Look at the data Right wingers are liars. Always were always will be. Look at the data.

Well, only 11% of US debt was created by left wing government investing in social programs. 80% was by right wing governments going to war.

Oooooh Trotty Trotster is not in the best of health...

*Contemplates de-worming treatment and decides cheesegrater is cheaper*