@Mike Powers

You just described The McInternet!

Scary idea...

The yellow one with the red and white stripes please.

Right...

"dark from 15.30-ish to all intents and purposes (especially on dank, overcast days) till 08.30-ish. Bad weather made much of the "daylight" questionable."

SO, by assuming that people tend to turn their lights on by themselves when it gets dark and by assuming that most people would not be so bloody stupid as to completely fail to see a hulking great chelsea tractor cruising along a well-lit or broad-daylight street somewhere in manchester, I'm the one that loses credibility?

By assuming that most people are smart enough to know when to turn their lights on, I lose credibility? (all right, I know that one's pushing it but be serious for a moment...)

Frankly mate, you don't seem to have read what I was writing anyway. I know exactly where my MP comes from. Who gives a damn? We aren't talking about my MP. My MP cannot change these policies; his party cannot change these policies; the executive in this country CANNOT change these policies. The point I was making was that the EU does not have a democratic mandate by any measure of the meaning of "democracy". That is it. The fact that I vote for my MP makes bugger all difference to that because the national legislature no longer legislates in the majority of cases; the legislation they pretend to pass is generated by the European Council(s), by the Commission, neither of which is elected, neither of which operate under a democratic mandate. Much of that legislation is never even seen by our national legislature.

THAT is the point I was making, but you'd rather try and prove that I lack credibility with an example that is very, very stupid. Why do we need DAYLIGHT running lights? The assumption that people are too ruddy stupid to turn on their headlights when it gets dark is not enough reason to mandate DAYLIGHT running lights. Nevertheless, because we have no recourse to a democratic institution to prevent it, we have had these things mandated and they WILL kill people.

In a sense you've made part of my point for me anyway. Southern Europe doesn't need running lights at all, but they'll be forced to have them because the EU says it must be so. Why? Because! Who cares whether it's actually a sensible idea, they will have them because the EU demands they have them, and tough titties if you complain.

The possibility of the EU imposing these charges on mobile phone calls wouldn't necessarily cause any deaths (with a few exceptions for Ms Campbell's staff perhaps) but it's potentially another example of the same thing. In any case, if the EU decide against the wish of the majority, well, the majority can screw themselves as far as the EU is concerned. That's what I mean by "no democratic mandate".

@grahamt

"The European civil service though is like every other national civil service, so not elected, but is answerable to the elected government."

Bollocks. The euro elections are meaningless and the parliament, by its own admission, is merely an oversight body - and in reality it can't even perform that function as it has no means to prevent legislation, merely "amend" it. It can't create legislation either. It has no executive powers. It's a useless talking shop, little more. It can be ignored by the commission and indeed has been many, many times. The real power lies in the hands of the European Councils, made up of appointed representatives of the various ministries of the member states, and the commission, which is also unelected. These councils tend to operate in secret and rarely produce minutes. They create drafts for the commission to turn into directives, which are then handed out to the member states to implement into their own legislation, often with less than a day's oversight by the national parliaments. In the case of technical and regulatory directives the national legislatures are bypassed completely.

The crazy thing is, these councils are, most of the time, simply re-drafting the output of various United Nations councils and technical committees which, under our UN treaty obligations, we would examine and implement into our own law anyway. Most of the legislation emanating from the EU consists of redrafted UN recommendations. Were the EU not there we would have the option of implementing these recommendations at our own pace, without the drag of the EU taking years to redraft them and without the compulsory element. We would be able to amend them as we saw fit, or even ignore them entirely if we felt they were not in our best interests. Two examples that spring to mind are running lights on cars and high-visibility reflectors on trucks. In the former case, we don't need them - we are not a country with long, dark winter days - and in the latter case we had two government committees recommend the use of high-vis reflectors on trucks a full year before the EU even considered it but we were unable to create legislation to that effect because road safety is an EU competence, meaning that the national legislature cannot act unless the EU provides it with something to act with.

And, again, the parliamentary committee recommendations were based on technical documents provided by a United Nations committee. So what use is the EU? It slows things down, it prevents us acting in our own best interests and - crucially - is not elected at any meaningful level.

So yes, the EU operates without a popular mandate. The only tangible benefit we actually have from it is being in a free trade zone, but we could do that without the ruddy toy parliament and the bureaucracy associated with the EU as a whole, implementing the various bits of ideas that come from the UN or from standards bodies and merrily subsidising our own farmers, schools and hospitals with our own money rather than giving it to the EU so we can have some fraction of it back to be mis-spent on stupid "culture" projects and bits of paper telling us why the EU is so bloody brilliant. We simply don't need it. Why not simply be in the EFTA, like Switzerland or Norway? They get all the benefits of free trade and open borders without any of the stupidities and economic drags.

Oi, leave our politicians out of it!

"The dwarf cretins in Europe have just the same structural rotation of the arm bone."

That's no way to talk about Robin Cook!

All done then?

And when the first sports-car driving idiot scientist decides to play with it at 3am during a stoem and gets himself blasted into another world?

Call me stupid, but...

... if you're going to put a fence on the border, why not use... I don't know... a FENCE. For the cost of this they could build a triple layered concrete barrier along the entire border *and* man it with 24 hour patrols *and* have enough left over to do it again at the canadian border. Gotta stop all those "cheap meds" daytrippers getting across somehow...

@AC

Part of the point of researching this is to see if we can then spot it happening to other stars "now" (or then, as it were) which then allows us to start working out other stuff. What that other stuff might be is anyone's guess, but something will come of it sooner or later. I mean, lets face it, back when Newton finalised the theory of gravity it was great... in principle, but what practical application was there for knowing how fast something would accelerate toward the earth? At that point, very little. It was information for information's sake. Now it's an absolute necessity in physics. Or if you want to be more abstract, why bother finding out that the earth moves around the sun? There was no particular reason for knowing it; seasons were already predictable, the sun rose and set like it always did, so why spend the effort when it doesn't actually make any difference?

@AC re: pie

mysle = Male, geek and can cook better meals than most people. Projecting, a little?

Also...

I can't spell "myself". Whoops.

@Paul Smith et al

What's the harm in telling a lie to get people to change their ways?

That's the essence of what a few people have said here, asking what the harm would be if the AGW hypothesis is false, if it gets people to be more efficient. It's an issue of trust; if or when AGW is falsified, all these people who you convinced to tighten their belts in its name will decide that you were lying to their faces, and will in future be much less likely to listen when the call goes out. You do not, not ever, try to convince people with lies because they will cease to trust you.

Let me put it another way. So what if the dodgy dossier was a load of bollocks? It got Saddam out of the way, didn't it?

See the point now? You can't tell people lies to get them to do the right thing; when the lie is exposed they will assume that your right thing is wrong because they no longer trust you.

The world-wide agreements on AGW might well cause the west to take a hit in its standard of living but the biggest losers are, as always, the third world nations. They will be forced to stay in a state of poverty in order to preserve the current level of atmospheric CO2 whilst the big green proponents are still swanning around in their private jets. This position has been stated repeatedly and is proven by the reaction of various environmental groups to Indian's new teeny tiny and highly efficient car - which, incidentally, woud be winning all sorts of plaudits and awards if it had been manufactured in California. This whole scam ultimately results in making poor people poorer and preventing them from improving their lives. In the case of India it actually endangers lives; the car is aimed at people who would otherwise be teetering around on mopeds and getting squished. That's people who *will* die if Greenpeace get their way, as opposed to people who *might* die if they don't.

A little sense...

This can only be good. Food prices are already suffering huge inflation because of the pressure from biofuel production and as things ramp up it's only going to get worse. The EU has already demanded that some arbitrary percentage of local fuel consumption be met from biofuels - 10%, I think... of course to meet 10% of the UK's fuel consumption from biofuels would require every acre (or hectare if you want to be metric about it) of land currently used for food production in this country, plus every acre of land current assigned as "set-aside". We'd be completely reliant on imports at a time when many countries are dropping all their import tarrifs in order to get enough food in to feed their populations. Biofuels are madness. Any idiot could tell you that using food to produce fuel is beyond stupid.

And the EU's answer to this problem? Well of course they're going to carefully monitor imported biofuels and place tarrifs and penalties on imports from countries that are exceeding some arbitrary CO2 output limit or chopping down too much forest. Lets not think about scrapping the idea of producing fuel from food just when we're running out of the edible stuff, lets just add yet another layer of taxation and bureaucracy and pretend that will solve all the world's ills. That's the European way!

@ac

Satire? AmanfromMars posting as an AC? I dunno, but it seems that you obviously missed the little joke in Spaceballs about Hollywood's obsession with producing sequels to big hitters in the hopes of making more money from the same idea.

Did you even *watch* the film?

Is Paris going to be voice-acting in this one?

A pedantic tit speaks (and if you don't get it, tough, um, noodles)

"And I wonder what the 'leccy bill will be for it? Powerful magnets usually require powerful power supplies to generate the magnetism."

A few people mentioned electricity bills and apparently haven't read the definition of "permanent magnet".

Paris, cos if I sit in front of her you might start thinking of Total Recall.

Imperial?!?

Farenheit is not an imperial measurement. Never was. The whole farenheit vs celcius thing is completely independent to metric vs imperial. I mean, at least imperial measures are based on things that matter (Elizabeth the first and her new miles notwithstanding) and have a logical progression of sorts. Farenheit is just *weird*.

I admit...

I am a tit. :)

I haven't watched football for years.

@Steve Evans

Trademark, not patent.

And 19-0 as in number of games won, not the score in a single match. The equivalent might be Man City winning every match they played in the premiership. Assuming they could get into the premiership.

If you're going to make fun of our cousins across the water then at least get your facts straight, otherwise you end up looking like a complete tit.

@Joe K

They said the same thing in the 70s, and the 50s, and in the 1860s, and... well, on and on and on. It was bullcrap then and it's bullcrap now.

used a special tool

"used a special tool to guide the hose back into its storage box while the payload bay doors were closed"

I believe Gordon Freeman is familiar with that particular tool.

Orange and black with a spiffy lambda symbol on it and the infinitely deep pockets. Ta.

@les matthew

More fin than you might think. The pilot and co-pilot on the BUFF ejected *down*.

@ac

be quiet and enjoy the fireworks ya feckin hippy.

Entitlement culture

Convince people that the state (or other authority organisation if we're going to be fair) is there to provide their every need and, as night follows day, they will turn to the state (or etc) to provide every _want_ that they _perceive_ as a need. Cos they pay taxes/subscription fees/whatever don'tcha know...

@Dr Mouse

Argh, beaten by my own pedantry! I should have know this one too, they had that exact phrase in Ash: A Secret History which I only just finished reading.

Oh well.

Anyone remember that classic scene in Hunt the Bismark where they intercut between the British gunery officer shouting "SHOOT!" and the german one shouting "FIRE!". When I was a kid that amused me greatly for some reason...

Fail

That bitter pungent foretaste is what makes an onion what it is. Onions aren't all sweetness and light, they're like women: bitter and acrid and sharp and tangy.

And they make you cry.

So wait...

... you just wasted an entire article on something written by PRAVDA? I mean, really, who takes that rag seriously? The only time anyone ever believed what pravda published was back in the days of th soviet union, and even then it was only the loons who thought the USSR was some sort of paradise.

Is Paris a vegetarian or a vegetable?

Bass Ackwards as usual?

Would it not be more likely that jihadist types would try and recruit people who actually know how to make bombs?

The bigger question is, what proportion of jihadis raise funds from downloading music?

Terse and impenetrable, sure...

But not exactly creative. My favourite still remains Commodore's "Guru Meditation Error". It was very zen.

Tux, because the other day I actually was able to read a kernel panic and understand why it was panicking.

"There should be a law"

If there's *anything* that should strike terror into the hearts of the average man it's when someone speaks those five words, since they mouth often spill from the mouths of people who haven't a clue how to go about it. It's as if legislation is some sort of magic bullet that solves all the world's ills.

Let them explain how it will be done, in detail and in language that anyone who isn't a lawyer can understand, before they're allowed to submit even a green paper on the subject. Then when everyone's finished laughing the edjit in question can go away and cry in the corner.

That shark jumping moment...

Everyone hits it sooner or later.

@Ian McNee

If they offered the same level of service I wouldn't *have* to go to these dodgy outlets.

@Try Pritt-Stick

"If you sniff at a Pritt-Stick for long enough, interesting things start to happen. Go on, try it."

Yes... the men in white coats give you a nice new jacket.

@Steve Roper

Ozone is a good thing in the right place - up there. Down *here* it's a very potent poisonous gas which is why people make such a fuss about it.

Edison and Swan

Actually both men invented the light-bulb independently; not one nor the other, but both. Edison and Swan went into partnership in Great Britain and Europe because Swan held British patents.

They both invented it. Great minds and all that.

Nothing good can come of it.

Where will these people be when the first old lady dies because some twit on a "visit" to their new socially cohesive fire station got in the way and tripped up a pump's driver, delaying their departure by 30 seconds?

It makes all the difference...

It's possibly ironic...

It's very likely that the clay tablet in question is a receipt or bill of sale. A large number of the tablets dug up in the middle east are receipts, stock lists, shopping lists and inventories.

Might even be a receipt for a dodgy auction...

What next, losing the entire MoD's employment database?

Oh wait, losing that one would set back organised crime by decades it's so inaccurate...

Without wanting to be flippant...

I can't read GWT as anything other than Global War on Terror these days.

Yes, the one with the american flag on the lapel, please...