Posts by Graham Dawson
1252 posts • joined Monday 5th March 2007 21:42 GMT
Posted in Northern ocean filling up with CO2
@h2nick (and then some general ranting)
You forgot the third option: Chop down forests for more oilseed rape for fuel.
I am no environmentalist, and I shall explain why. In my unhuble opinion the current environmental movement has very little care for environments. No environs, just mental, that's how it seems to this poor sod. Still, even I can get worked up about environmental issues from time to time, and right now there are thousands of acres of forest being chopped down to grow crops for bio-fuels. The orangutan is facing the biggest threat for years because of short-sighted biofuel policies.
In fact deforestation is a huge problem in many parts of the world, and these policies are only going to make it even worse. I've seen the impact it can have first-hand while I was in Paraguay, and that was just clearance for food-crops. With the added pressure of biofuel production things just get a whole lot worse, and for no actual benefit.
That's the problem with this whole deal. The science, despite what people insist, is not settled. Anyone who reads the actual IPCC reports and not the policy-maker summaries (or worse, the media's analysis of the summaries) will see that our actual knowledge of atmospheric sciences is still in its infancy, and the so-called consensus has no basis in evidence, being merely an appeal to authority based on a-priori and increasingly fragile assumptions about how the atmosphere works. There is, I would point out, no consensus about Newton's laws of gravity or the fact that heating things makes them warmer. There doesn't need to be an appeal to the authority of consensus because the facts speak for themselves in those rather simplistic instances.
The facts do not speak for themselves in the AGW debate. The models that are used in place of hard data prove nothing except that you can make a program do whatever you like given specific assumptions. They are a logical fallacy, a dead-end, they do not reflect reality, are highly flawed and should not be used as a substitute for empirical evidence. Yet they are. That's just one problem out of any number of problems with the supposedly settled science, but it never makes it in to the summary for policy makers and the media simply ignore it.
So with that out of the way, my rant continues. The current status of global anthropogenic climate change trumps all other environmental concerns to the point where, as I mentioned, short-sighted policies that run counter to the very ethos of environmentalism are instigated in the name of "saving the planet". These policies are looked on with approval by the environmental lobby - which mostly consists of people like Al Gore - not because they actually achieve anything to save the planet (it's likely any gains made would be wiped out by a few months of heating Gore's pool) but because they are re-directing people's efforts toward the lobbyists' ways of thinking and doing. The fundamental problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by strutters and preeners who are more concerned with having people see them than they are with actually doing something constructive. If they believed their own hype then they'd tear down their palaces and mansions and live in energy-efficient homes, and do all their lobbying over the internet rather than flying everywhere in private jets.
They don't do this, ergo they are either callously exploiting the movement for their own self-promotion, or they are lying out of their arses. And in the meantime hundreds of species that could be saved right now, with very little effort, are being threatened with extinction because of policies inspired by these people.
And that's why I'm not an environmentalist.
Posted in Northern ocean filling up with CO2
If nothing else...
... at least this will finally put paid to that ridiculous geo-engineering scheme put about the other week wherein water would be pumped up from the depths using "millions" of pipes in order to promote algae growth.
Incidentally could someone explain how Ozone depletion could change wind patterns? I really don't see the link.
Posted in Women's panties threaten Burmese Junta
@Mark
The point isn't necessarily that the Burmese should have got it. The point is that Gore shouldn't have got it. What does jetting around the world trying to scare people half to death with hyperbole and rhetoric actually do to achieve peace?
Not much, if you ask me.
And @AC I think you mean "all three". Depending on who you ask, of course.
Believe it or not...
It is entirely possible to fight terrorism without restricting our rights.
There are two ways to do this. The first is to actually be competent and go after terrorist funding organisations... which our government doesn't because they're a bunch of idiots. The second is to do like the EU and simply re-define the meaning of the word "rights" to be "privileges that are bestowed by the state", which is quite obvious from the wording of the human rights act and the directive that spawned it.
Our rights, as defined in the bill of rights 1689, and magna carta before that, are quite clearly innate, not granted, but in recent years we've been educated to believe that all our rights extend from the patronage of the state. The state serves to protect our rights, not define them, and frankly I think they need reminding of that.
Posted in Women's panties threaten Burmese Junta
Worthy of the peace prize, surely?
Farbeit from me to sound off on such things (is that an irony meter I hear exploding?) but I would have thought that the Burmese people would have been a far more worthy recipient of the nobel peace prize than the inventor of ManBearPig...
Yes, I know he didn't invent ManBearPig, but the danger is still a serial threat.
I mean, seriously, when the prize was started it was regularly awarded to people who actually tried to bring about peace. Now it's been handed to a terrorist, an incompetent and a blowhard in relatively quick succession (I'm sure that some people would say handing it to Bush would be the crowning achievement of that particular list, but that's another argument for another day). How many of us would have the guts to protest the way those monks did the other week? I wouldn't. I'd run like a screaming girl and hide under a rock...
No islamic terrorism in the UK?
"Am I the only one left in this country that notices that prior to Tony Blair taking "our boys" into Iraq there were NO Islamic terrorist incidents in this country? Who declared war on who exactly?"
Forget Lockerbie did we?
It isn't right to blame US foreign policy for islamic terrorism, regardless of what's happened here in the UK. Islamic terrorists started blowing things up on Carter's watch, this despite the fact that the US actually aided the creation of the islamic republic of iran by withdrawing support for the Shah at a critical moment. It went from amateurish nothings to outright nastiness within the space of a few years as Islamic groups ramped up their assaults against Israeli and US targets at a time when Israel was already making peace overtures to its neighbours, trying to actually give back the territory it took during the previous two was (where, incidentally, its islamic neighbours were the aggressors) and the US was bending over backwards to be nice to the arab world because oil prices were so high. This was when the PLO decided it would be quite fun to slaughter the entire Israeli team at the munich olympics and other islamic groups decided it would be highly entertaining to board cruise ships and throw disabled people overboard because they looked a bit jewish. Islamic terrorism hit its current stride during the US-led balkan war, which was *defending* ethnic albianian muslims against the serbs. Several islamic groups decided that this would be a great time to tart attacking the people that were helping to defend their brethren.
The only reason we weren't targeted over the majority of this period was because the Home Office turned a blind eye to terrorist organisations operating within the country and funding their counterparts overseas with money gathered here. The muslim rulers of Andalusia kept jewish bankers around for the same reason - why kill them when you can get money out of them? When we started to crack down on these organisations they turned on us as well. Of course that blind eye didn't stop islamic terrorists from attacking British interests overseas...
You've mischaracterised the entire conflict. This idea that Islam is always the victim and that the west is always the aggressor is... quain, but it doesn't match reality. The majority of Islam's history is one of conquest and violence. The peaceful periods in Islam's history are short, and characterised by an initial flush of learning and enlightenment as new technologies and knowledge were gleaned from conquered territories and spread about the ummah (which could take anything up to a century as empires grew), followed by a reversion to fundamentalist, dogmatic hatred of everything that wasn't of the book. Then another wave of expansion would begin and start the cycle again.
Our current foreign policy is based on the idea that Islam is, as it claims to be, a religion of peace. It isn't. It's a highly aggressive, tribal religion based on conquest and subjugation. It has a very strict honour code that is based, fundamentally, on lying. Once these two facts are acknowledged we can formulate a suitable policy for dealing with, and existing alongside, islam. As long as we deny these facts we will be flailing about, alternating between outright appeasement and pointless war.
And after all that, I agree with the point that the MET royally fucked up on this case. The MET's armed police section are a bunch of tossers who will casually shoot people first and then not bother asking questions later.
No god given right...
... to deny the government their new revenue stream as they sell off huge chunks of spectrum.
Posted in MIT boffins plan for asteroidal doom
@storm cloud
"I know this is a fair chunk of rock, and it would whack this planet with a fair thump, but can someone please explain how something 270 Metres across takes out a country with a land area of over half a million square kilometres?"
Ever thrown a rock in to a sand pit?
No?
I guess it was just me then...
Well look at it this way, that big famous crater in arizona is said to have been made by a rock about 50 metres across. The crater it made is 1.2 kilometres wide and it spread its debris several hundred miles (mixing measures the good old fashioned NASA way) in every direction. The actual crater isn't the total sum of the devastation wrought by a meteor.
A 270M rock moving at something like 40 metres a second would make a crater about half the size of Paris, and would spread its debris across hundreds, possibly thousands of miles. More immediate would be the shockwave, earth tremors and heat-blast. Even spots hundreds of miles from the blast would be turned from nice arable land into a muck-encrusted, uninhabitable waste. That's how an area the size of France can be devastated.
Surprised? Hardly...
The whole road-charging scheme was based on the idea that the Eu would have its own nifty GPS with encrypted - chargable - signals that could be tied in to the charging system. Since Gallileo is about a year away from going completely titsup is it any surprise Brown has decided to cancel this particular invasion of lour civil liberties?
@Alan
"Since you appear to know so much about it, you would know that HGV speed limiters only restrict a vehicles top speed and as such"
Do you know how limiters work? When you hit the pre-defined speed limit they drop your revs to nill until you've slowed down again. Driving instructors will shout and scream at any learner who drops the clutch and takes their foot off the accelerator for any period longer than that necessary to change gears.
I'm sure you've seen a HGV passing another, racing along for miles while barely managing to pass. Because of those limiters you seem to love so much can't accelerate up past 60, and trucks often lose power right when they're about to pull back in front of the vehicle they just passed. Frankly, if you can't see how bloody dangerous this, is then you shouldn't be driving.
Good presidents.
"N.B. I should quantify that last statement really. The sooner America gets a sensible administration and stops seeing itself as the world's police force who expects everyone to do things THEIR way the better."
Lets hope they don't elect the other Clinton then.
People might say "she can't be worse than Bush", but she definitely can. People said nobody could be worse than Blair. Now who's laughing? Nobody, that's who.
We could try the current Belgian model. They haven't had a functional government for nearly half a year now, yet the country hasn't fallen apart. If we could somehow engineer the same situation in our own countries and stop the buggers from making new laws all the time we might actually be able to get on with our lives...
I may have it figured.
I was just downstairs watching TV and noticed - again - that whenever certain types of car stop in front of the house the digital signal gets completely bolloxed until the traffic lights change and they move off again. I've seen this happen ever since the digital sky was installed.
What that tells me is that it's entirely possible for signal wash from a radar or other powerful transmitter to blank out satellite signals entirely by accident. The possibility that it's caused by the UN forces in the area - as was the case with the germans previously - seems to be increased a great deal with this knoledge. At least in my mind.
Now as for you lot arguing over Israel's right to defend itself; You try living in a country that suffered daily rocket attacks for over two years without blinking, only to be vilified when it finally decided to sort out the problem. Get over yourselves. Seriously.
Posted in Beeb news website goes titsup
@can't employ the best...
They could probably afford it if they got rid of Jonathan Woss. Sorry, Ross. Get rid of Humphries and a couple of the other doddering old fools and they'll be able to pay twice the going rate!
The BBC makes something close to 4 billion a year from the telly tax, and another couple of billion from international sales of its back-catalogue yet, like any publicly funded organisation it always seems to be short of money. The problem, as always, is to be found lurking in the layer upon layer of administrators, managers, line-managers, overseers, executives, assistants, assistants assistants, house managers, floor managers, health and safety managers, lawyers and other middle-management cruft that always gathers in public institutions. The answer is simple. Fire the lot. Get rid of the failing digital channels, get rid of the unnecessary management layers and give Ross and his compatriots a well-deserved pay cut.
T'isn't happening though. Instead we've got the BBC chasing ratings. Ratings! It's a public service broadcaster, not a popularity contest! They're cutting the news and docuemntaries budget in order to expand their digital channels and re-organise as some sort of international comglomerate. How is that even justifiable given their charter obligations?
Translation or intent?
"the naughty radar is specifically an "army radar", not a naval one - unless that's a translation error"
The most likely explanation is that the Israelis don't have a navy as we would understand the term. All three branches of their military are distinct, but they all fall under the aegis of a single command structure with a primary emphasis on ground forces. The whole lot could conceivably be called "the Army", which makes it likely that a spokesman would make the minor slip of assigning their own understanding of military terms to foreign military equipment and organisation. *shrug*
Posted in BT home router wide open to hijackers
Nice features though...
I quite like the BT router. I mean, apart from its tendency to fall over when you put anything more intensive than a single html request through it, the annoying habit it has to completely lock up when you try and use wireless and its periodic absolute loss of any ability to resolve new DNS requests it's quite nice. Shiny. If I could keep the fancy graphical user interface they've put on top of iptables and dump the rest I'd be very happy indeed.
Posted in BT home router wide open to hijackers
Hit reply, engage brain
Of course "html request" should be "http request"...
Where's me coat?
Williams was clearly at risk of being shot repeatedly in the head as a suspected suicide bomber.
Strictly speaking he would have been at far less risk from TSA than from our own genighted police force. American cops train with their guns more regularly than our own armed police and they're around them all the time. Our lot tend to be nervous trigger-happy bastards at the best of time because they aren't really used to carrying their weapons on a regular basis.
And, as has been demonstrated several times, where in the US they use those guns as a last resort even in highly volatile situations (by and large, of course - all generalisations are ultimately wrong), over here they'll casually shoot people in the back of the head for carrying bits of wood.
Of course it might just be that Steve Jobs is secretly trying to bring down the governments of the world and institute a new world order where everyone worshiops him as a god. T Think about it, all you have to do is convince the best and brigest to voluntarily strap explosive devies to themselves on a 24 hour basis and then, when they're all wired up, set them all off at the same time. Suddenly the world is deprived of thousands of its most important citizens. He's a genius!
Secret Gay Bomb Tests
It's obvious that the gay bomb was not only built, but was tested on the USA's own civilian population in california. It'd certainly explain large areas of San Francisco. I demand an immediate investigation! And impeach random people!
Could be worse...
"4: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow are the first two Blu-ray releases to feature BD+"
Is it possible this DRM glitch is actually doing people a favour? I mean, who'd want to actually watch that shite?
Posted in UK, Germans, Dutch slam EC Galileo plan
RE: By EC I mean European Commission
Uh-huh... ESA was started before the EU existed, though if and when the new constitution gets passed trhough it'll be part of the EU hierarchy. The EU patent office was created as a special case by agreement of the 'core' EU nations in order to implement part of the constitutional treaty before it was ratified. You'll find a lot or these 'independent' organisations created outside the provisions of the treaty of rome are actually part of the constitutional... sorry, 'reform' treaty, and that they're being implemented through the European Councils on the sly, and in something of a rush, in order to get as much of the infrastructure of the new reform treaty in place as possible. They don't have an official identity but that doesn't matter; they're laying the groundwork for when they do. The EU defence agency is another example - it was part of the constitution, but since the constitution was not ratified it had to be created outside the aegis of the comission and consequently acts as an NGO. I can probably find a dozen other non-governmental agencies that are not officially part of the EU yet, but which were created as a response to the failure to ratify the constitutional treaty.
Eurofighter was an EEC inspired project (back when the EU was the EEC, that is), and was one of several projects designed to provide a common European defence identity even back then. There are others that have failed miserably; the single european frigate, the tank, FRES (still failing but not given up yet because it forms the core of the EU rapid reaction force), various munitions, such as the Meteor, which was meant to equip the Eurofighter but which is going to be many years later, and Storm Shadow, which was a european vanity project to create a "superior" cruise missile. I think that one's been cancelled now. These projects are not, as you have tried to characterise, outside the EU but are integral to the idea of ever closer union that is presented in every single treaty since the formation of the coal and steel union.
And I shall say it again; the same people who organised those are organising things at the european level. Just adding the commission doesn't change anything since the organisations - the people - that carry out these things are the same, and they're a bunch of incompetent morons no matter which name they use.
Posted in UK, Germans, Dutch slam EC Galileo plan
re: EC should lead it
"They know how to whine and gripe and moan but Eurofighter project shows they collectively can't run a piss up in a brewery."
Yes, and the difference between the EC/EU/whatever it is this week and those three is...?
You forget that the EU is, collectively, made up of the same people that couldn't get Eurofighter completed on time. How anyone can believe that a bunch of retards suddenly turn into geniuses because they adopt a collective name is beyond me...
re: Moral of this story is to stick to what you know, or risk appearing foolish.
Tis better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt.
Sometimes I have to remind myself of that... :)
Anyway there's not much to add, though I expect a lot will. The man speaks of things that he has only a passing knowledge of and speaks with the gravitas and authority of assumed knowledge. In other words he's the perfect politician. Par for the course really.
Hey look, everyone missed my point!
Pre-conceived notions rule the day.
Again.
I'd laugh but it's just so damn depressing...
I think it's worth pointing out...
The vatican has one of the oldest astronomical observatories in the world within its borders, which proves that you can do all the science you like but it'll mean squat if you come at it with pre-conceived notions.
Small samples
Statistically it's not significant no matter how you twist it. When you're working with such a tiny group you will inevitably hit apparently huge, sudden changes entirely by chance.
So...
I can accept that he might have exaggerated from plain old coppers to MI5 in order to sound scary or something but that doesn't change the fact that it happened.
@colin actually that was a typo. I meant "known or suspected". Satisfied?
Of course, in focusing on this one rather insignificant part of my post your'e all rather missing the point I tried to make and if I'd know that would happen I simply wouldn't have mentioned it. We,in the UK, live in a country that routinely monitors domestic communications with almost unlimited scope, without any sort of oversight and without any way to prevent it, in other words wiretapping. The operation in the US does not have any contact with domestic or even interstate communications. It is focused on a limited subset of international communications, where it creates a database of telephone numbers without actually monitoring what conversations go between them. It is not wiretapping. It is data farming and it can certainly be argued that this is not exactly a healthy policy, and I have never said otherwise, but wiretapping it is not. My point was that this limited scope compares very favourably with our own situation, meaning that it's a little hypocritical of us to criticise them without first criticising our own government for carrying on much wider reaching operations for a hell of a lot longer.
RE: I would hope...
Who should I believe? You or my lyin eyes? *shrug*
I would hope...
The register, being a UK-based news source, is subject to government monitoring and has indeed been subject to monitoring for many years without any apparent complaint. I am not for a moment saying that such monitoring is ethical, but I would have hoped that the register could at least focus on fixing problems in its home country before turning its attention to others.
Confused? Let me explain then. Since the end of world war 2 this country has had in place systems that allowed the government to monitor all communications within the country. That's domestic phone calls. Calls are routinely monitored for keywords. A friend of mine once tested this by repeating a bunch of keywords to another friend of his during a phone call. The next day he received a rather lengthy visit from MI5.
We have been subject to this monitoring for the last 60 years. Many other european countries have even more invasive monitoring of domestic communications.
Now lets compare this to what Bush wants. FISA does not actively monitor domestic telephone calls. It does not check for keywords in telephone calls. It records international telephone numbers called by known suspected terrorists within the united states and consequently has a very limited scope. It's little more than an attempt to connect people to other people. It is not the invasive and aggressive monitoring that we have been subjected to since the 50s and to compare it as such is, frankly, ludicrous.
I would hope, as I said, that the register would be keen to focus on the invasive domestic monitoring that we have been subject to since before many of the register team were even born but I suspect that their haste to find any fault they can with the Bush administration has blinded them to the real problems that we face over here right now.
Posted in Why Microsoft vs Mankind still matters
@Glenn Gilbert
"Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Visual Studio, Internet Exploder, Safari, iTunes"
Dreamweaver and Photoshop work remarkably well under wine, as does IE (got all versions from 5.5 to 7 running on my computer for testing. Check out IEs4linux). Safari is just Konqueror with a nice skin. Itunes? There are several media players that have I-tunes style integration with the ipod and numerous other players. Amarok does it very well. Of course they don't let you buy from the itunes store, but that's never bothered me. Overpriced low quality tat. I just rip CDs.
Why doesn't apple support ogg? Actually I know the reasons why they don't, but I don't particularly agree with them.
Ulster splits
It's a little known historical fact that the split in ulster occured for democratic reasons. Three of the nine counties voted to join the Irish Free Republic, which lasted just long enough to ratify the treaty giving Ireland its independence before ceasing to exist. The other counties voted to remain part of the UK, and were given their own parliament and a bunch of other stuff that lasted until the 1970s. The parliament was shut down after the PIRA started their terrorist campaign.
Don't ask why anyone thought that would help. I have no idea.
As for stamps, I think what would likely happen is that scotland and wales would be obliged to put their name or some other symbol on their stamps, whilst england would retain the classic queen's head in the corner.
Wasn't this article about "teh internets"?
There are a lot of good reasons for sending people
Those mars rovers have been celebrated for their longevity and endurance, and sol they should be. They've been up there several years now, despite their initial mission being expected to last just a few months. However, in all that time they've covered about 8 miles (I think? Couldn't find the exact figure) in a near-straight line and done about three bits of science a day on average. A human team could cover that much distance in a *week*, and could have performed all the science of those rovers plus a hell of a lot more in that time. Humans can make on-the-spot decisions that rover operates at a distance can't necessarily make. Our brains are highly advanced pattern-recognition devices that would be able to spot things in person that even a bloke looking at the camera images from a rover wouldn't spot, and in fact those images are often going to confuse because they lack context. Remember the big furore over that guy who reckoned a picture showed pools of water? And how it turned out to be flat stone on a slope? Context, you see...
That's why humans need to be out there. We're simply better at it than even the most advanced robot.
ICBM?
"As an alternative to spyplane work, a Blackswift hypersonic bomber could offer the ability to strike anywhere in the world at fairly short notice, but then so does an existing ICBM."
I suspect you've missed the point here. The only use the US has for ICBMs is to deliver strategic nuke - you know, city killers - not conventional weapons or tactical strike weapons. Cruise missiles can deliver conventional or nuclear strikes in a tactical role, typically being launched from very close to theatre. The reason the US keeps trying to develop aircraft like this is because they only have the blanket option of the ICBM or the in-theatre option of the cruise missile. A hypothetical super-fast jet could deliver a tactical weapon, such as a bunker buster, to a target from the other side of the planet with the added advantage of being able to re-assign its target en-route, which can't be done with a cruise missile.
Forget the lefties...
*I* want one of those keyboards! Whoever thought it was a good idea to put the numpad on the same side as the freakin mouse deserves to be shot. It's knackered my shoulder having to reach that extra three inches to move the thing, or having to lean overs slightly to type if I centre up the keyboard on the screen. I know it sounds like a tiny distance but in ergonomic terms it's huge.
Posted in Great British fry-up under threat
Extreme weather events being...
... a typical english summer. Come on! Do some research for once people. The reason cereal crops are in such short supply is because the EU sold off its entire reserve last year after believing the predictions that global warming - causing an unusually hot summer - would bring about a bumper harvest. On top of that there is also the pressure of a mandatory 10% of fuel production coming from biofuels, which would require the UK to use its entire cereal crop to meet that target, further pushing up the prices, and the fact that a large amount of land is no longer used for food production but is "set aside" at the behest of the EU, ostensibly for use as nothing at all, but in reality used to produce industrial crops like rape seed and flax.
Blaming global warming is specious at best and simply bad journalism. I expected better from you.
@batman
He can breathe in space you know.
http://shortpacked.com/d/20050131.html
10 years...
... should be ten yards. And all the other typos should be what they're meant to be as well.
The dyslexia shows when I get narked.
Not this *again*...
"Obviously at least six other pilots were not rich enough to warrent the massive search that has been launched for Mr Fossett."
This was answered quite well in the previous article about this bit of news, but I think it deserves answering again. Nevada is Big. VERY. VERY. BIG. Every time they go out searching for wrecks it's likely they'll find other wrecks that weren't found last time they went out searching, and it's already been established that some of the wrecks they've found were either badly marked or are so old that they didn't have a hope in hell of finding them the first time around. We're talking about wrecks dating back to the 60s.
It's a large state that consists of lots of very lumpy deserts interspersed with mountains. It is empty. There are places out there where people have not set foot for over a century, not counting the odd plane that might have crashed and burned in those places. It has nasty box valleys and crevaces, weird rocks that overhang things and lakes that are about 10 years wide wide and half a mile deep. It has weird stuff. Above all it's BIG. You could lose a plane out there and NEVER find it again in some instances. There are about a hundred or so aircraft that have gone missing in Nevada and never been found because it's so big and so empty.
Frankly this "Oh it's because he's rich" bullshit is getting on my nerves. Can you tell?
@Can Google help...
When you're flying VFR you don't need to file a flight-plan, or even give any notice of where you're flying to. And, for the record, he was actually carrying a survival kit with a beacon in it and another beacon attached to the plane. The one on the plane is designed to start transmitting if it undergoes a heavy impact (aka a crash). The one in the survival kit is manually activated. The fact that neither has been activated means that he might have made a controlled landing and then tripped and broken his neck. Or he could have crashed in a deep valley, which would make it almost impossible to pick up the signal. Or... well, a lot of things.
@Ground troops?
"dubbed "HALO" (High Altitude Low Orbit)"
Hate to be a pedant but I think you'll find that's actually "High Altitude Low Opening", and they're so named for the fact that they jump out somewhere slightly below the normal cruising altitude of a commercial jet and then don't open their parachute until they're about to go splat.
Posted in Greens walk out of nuclear debate
@"Uranium will run ooout"
And wen when it does run out, there's alternative fuels that will last for about a millenium, though they're less efficacious than uranium.
Besides, by the time the uranium runs out we'll have perfected fusion, and will never have to worry about our energy needs again. OF course it's impossible to perfect fusion when your lab is switching off every 30 minutes because of a dodgy power supply, which is what we'll have if we're relying on so-called renewables for all our generation. One thing the greens never mention is that our wind resources need an equivalent output coal-fired generator running on standby all the time in case the wind is coming from the wrong direction, or not blowing at all.
The only surprise...
... is that they didn't think of this earlier. Of course hindsight is always 20/20.
Oh good lord...
Amanfrommars is replying to comments as well now?
Who *is* that mysterious handsome alien...
Posted in Virgin rocket-ship terminal revealed
Ok...
"The Branson biz empire's suborbital-tourism-for-the-wealthy operation"
Can we PLEASE drop all this class warfare crap just for once? Nearly EVERYTHING starts out as "for the wealthy" and then becomes commoditised later. Sea travel, cars, air travel. Hell even indoor toilets used to be a sign of wealth and 'breeding' at one time.
It makes it very hard for me to take the article seriously when the first _line_ is dripping with such apparent hatred and envy.
Another statistic I heard...
I remember reading about neutron stars in some almanac years ago, where they said that if all the water in the great lakes (the in the united states and partly canada, in case someone wonders) were compressed to the density of matter in a neutron star, it would fit in your kitchen sink.
I now feel confident enough to demand that gigatonnes per sink should be added to the lexicon of odd weights and measures as a measure of density.
This would go beyond open source licensing
It strikes me that so many people make the mistake of assuming that open source licenses are a completely separate category to any other copyright license; they aren't. In terms of basic substance, or stuffness, they are simply a vastly more permissive version of that EULA that microsoft foists on you whenever you scrape the shrink-wrap on one of their boxes. In terms of intent they're very different, of course, but that doesn't change anything; they're still a copyright license.
This means that other, less permissive licenses are also affected by this ruling. Every copyright license relies on the fact that a copyright holder can do whatever he wants with his product, and license it however he likes, with a fallback to written copyright law in the case of licensing breaches. Without that piece of law the license is worthless. With the law, a breach of the license is also a breach of the law.
What this means is, if the judge rules the way it seems he might, then *all* copyright licenses could be considered contracts. All copyright licenses would change status, not just open source licenses, but all and contract law brings a long a whole set of provisions that most copyright licenses are just not designed to consider. The explicit lack of implied warranty in all software licenses are run-of-the-mill in licensing terms, but would be an onerous provision in a contract, a provision worth suing, especially as the "contract" has been foisted on the end-user by a change in legal status without any actual acceptance of the terms of that newly-minted "contract".
I wonder if the judge has actually thought about this...
Actually...
"Their actions are driven by the fear that their core beliefs are untrue."
No, my actions are driven by a fear that the government is using this as a lame excuse to raise yet more taxes. And so it is. Shock horror.
To me, the desperation appears to be in the other camp. The talk about "consensus" - which, excuse french, is just a pile of shit, frankly, because science doesn't work that way - the constant harping about the oil industry and the ad-hominem attacks against anyone who dares to question the alarmist paradigm. The fact that the Met Office has now essentially declared that global warming has stopped doesn't seem to have any effect on them... the presence of an increasing number of scientific papers debunking just about every claim of the alarmists doesn't phase them. The fact that the IPCC has, on each occasion of its full report (not the summary for policy makers, which is partisan crap and was disowned by about half the IPCC scientists anyway), severely downgraded every supposed effect of ours on the climate has no bearing for these people. We're BAD, so we have to be punished and to hell with the truth.
The climate changes naturally all the time. The only people denying this are the alarmists, who appear to believe that the climate was steady and unchanging until mankind came along. It wasn't.
So what if he is american?
Normally people have a go at our american cousins for not caring about other languages. Now when someone who *may* be an american *does* care about other languages, you have a go at him?
Damned if you do and damned if you don't?
Hardly fair is it...
Look at the wookie.
It doesn't make any sense! (abridged version)
A more accurate headline...
"Renewnable targets complete fantasy". That's essentially what the report says.
it's true as well. We will never be ale to supply our energy needs from renewables without tearing up most of the countryside and replacing it with windmills, as demonstrated by Denmark which, with all its massive windfarms, has enough theoretical capacity to supply its entire power needs from wind alone. Yet wind power supplies only about 4% of Denmark's electricity...
Just build a few modern nuclear reactors while we wait for the fusion revolution. It's a lot more sensible than covering scotland in windmills.
Posted in Australia declares war on net porn
Ironic perhaps?
It's funny seeing the christian argue for less control of the net and the (apparently) humanist atheist, or perhaps just plain progressive, arguing for more. Not necessariy ironic though. My experience has often been that progressives of a certain mould (and, to avoid accusations of generalising, there are many moulds of progressive thought) are quite authoritarian, moreso than even the most uptight christian moralists (amongst whom I often count myself) who tend to have a limiting factor placed upon them by the very personal nature of the christian message, or at least should if they actually believe what they're preaching. The brief mention of "theocracy" perked my ears up, as I believe the hardest pressure for limitation of access to the internet (in the UK at least) is coming, not from any religious group, but from the secular and authoritarian section of the left that likes to meddle in the affairs of others.
Incidentally, on a point of semantics: "All of them are tarred with the same brush." I do not think this means what you think it means. They are only tarred with the same brush if someone else is doing the tarring. Perhaps what you meant to say was "all of them are much of a muchness" or "of the same stroke", both of which mean that, in your view, they are similar enough as to be no different. Tarring with the same brush is something that *other* people do to innocents by associating them with the guilty.
