I believe traitorous twatty northern fat boy David Shayler once ...

in response to the question as to whether they laptop left in a bar by some guy from the South Bank Massive, could be cracked, said....

"It's more likely that the Sun will melt."

So the last thing I'd expect would be the security services using it, Mr Section.

Will never happen.

Unlike all other animals, we've conquered the environment with intelligence, so physical characteristics are irrelevant.

However we carry over our evolution so birds fancy tall blokes, the tendency is for increase in height. World war two and the welfare state has caused the massive increase in height over the last century, and I see no reason to see it end.

Firstly the war meant that all the dutch are tall because half the dutch women were screwing the same giant of a german soldier, if you're going to fall on your back with your legs in the air for an occupying force, it might as well be for a tall one. The same is true for all the HausFraus in the 50s, with the yanks.

Secondly, the welfare state allows women to screw whoever the want and not worry about how they're fed.

Hey presto, any society where you've conquered the environment and women have a choice, will ensure increasing physical attractiveness. (and intelligence, because stupid men can't get laid, because they're poor.)

What a great thing.

Good for men whose wives are getting the pill from their company doctor, and their husbands don't know about it, so they can find out, and sort her out.

Or Muslim men who want to see if their daughter's had sex with a Jew, so they can restore their family honour.

All very tongue in cheek, natch... but it will be interesting to see in Hello, which royals have had illegitimate children, which film stars have had the clap, and which male stars have had treatment for rectal collapse, without Rupert Murdoch having to get involved.

If a black hole was a long way from a galaxy...

and moving directly towards it in the same orbital plane, would it hoover it up?

The reason I ask is that, everything would come from one direction, and the matter would perhaps funnel into towards it, as it approached. Is it only when there's a lateral movement do we see orbits and accretion discs?

This question I forward to the astrophysicist known as Dobbin.

There is no reason why query should be limited to merely set operations on tabular data.

And no reason why decision support should be limited to preconfigured cached/non cached queries a la OLAP.

It is my view that from a base set of "Don't repeat yourself" (DRY) data (i.e. things that actually happened, and can't change.) then basically anything that you can logically derive from this data, is also unchangeable, and true. It doesn't matter if it didn't happen, if it's a factual derivation then it's as valid as a SQL query.

Not only does deductive inductive queries like this (I call my view of it UQ - unified query, because it allows for relational, hierarchical, object, network and inductive queries like functional (function query is induction, because the function models the nature of the man you speak Clarice) - all current databases being just a subset;) but the mode of derived query gives rise to all sorts of other paradigms such as the enterprise replicated dataset whereby derivation sets can be published, but the base data hidden. (The simplest possible example being ANPR, one such set could be the average speed of each vehicle - it's perfectly possible to have an immutable view - i.e. a derived dataset which is the average speed of each car yesterday, without disclosing any details of ANPR sitelocations. The average speed dataset is just as valid as the point to point observations and can be replicated. Other examples "people who couldn't be in London at the moment,")

I think this work is the most interesting place to be at the moment, and just wish I could find someone to pay me to do it. What I could make of SQL Server with a freehand, I just can't describe. It shouldn't be a relational database. It should be a database that among other things, also implements the relational paradigm.

Journalists?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/04/milly-dowler-voicemail-hacked-news-of-world

Could it be the news of the world?