Money on?
Given that we know that "Al-Qaeda" is a CIA invention, it's a certainty.
What self-respecting terrorist, after all, would call his organisation "The Toilet"?
(www.whatreallyhappened.com/fakealqaeda.html refers)
244 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2008
Very well said, twice.
If I want to buy something, I'll go and look for one, thanks, and decide on the facts. One factor heavily influencing my decision is always which contender has NOT shoved "funny"/ garish/ animated/ whatever crap in my face/ web viewing/ environment/ etc. in an attempt to influence me. More people should treat advertising as negative - it's the only language "they" understand.
If the greedy rabble of private companies who now feast off what *used* to be Royal Mail's profitable business were required to provide the same universal service, covering the whole UK, it might matter less, or not at all, if RM did disappear.
As it is, RM struggles still to provide proper, universal service without the income to keep it going - a recipe for disaster or, at least, progressively more expensive mail. Either force the greedy rabble to provide a proper, universal service at one price like RM, or put our country back together again, please.
If you break up a country's infrastructure, as the evil Thatcher did in spades, you can't be surprised when stuff stops working properly. Private companies don't exist to provide a service, they exist to channel your money into their shareholders' pockets by the easiest possible route, which doesn't include troublesome deliveries to more remote places like Shetland.
Flame on.
Always refreshing to hear about scumbags getting done over, and even better that it was one which will embarrass them in front of their mates for years and years to come.
Another such, which I clipped out of the Guardian years ago and which deserves not to be forgotten:
"Seven Spanish teenagers have been hospitalised after attempting to mug a defenceless woman in Alicante. Herminia Alvarez, as the boys have since discovered, is a circus weight-lifter, the centre-piece of whose act is supporting eight people on one shoulder."
"If you have a collection of huge bells all ringing at slightly different frequencies or tones, the amplitude or ‘wave height’ of the overall sound heard will be markedly smaller than that heard if they all ring at the same tone."
I'm not entirely convinced by that analogy. If you've ever tried recording choral music, where you have a collection of human voices all singing at slightly different frequencies, you'll know why. The <average> level may be more-or-less constant and predictable, but every now and then when the phases add up just right (or wrong) you can get a momentary amplitude which pins your meter on the stop (analogue) or clips (digital), if you're not aware of the problem.
And if one of those peaks is enough to create a "wake field" ... hang on, isn't that in Yorkshire? ... then, presumably, a super super burnout for your new toy.
The revolving door goes round and round,
Round and round,
Round and round,
The revolving door goes round and round,
All day long.
Who will rid us of these turbulent* parasites?
* New Shorter OED:
- turbulent (adj)
3 Of, pertaining to, or designating flow ... in which ... there is continual mixing ...
We, the human race, have access to precisely 1.0 electromagnetic spectra. It is a strictly limited resource which cannot simply be extended at will.
We seem, though, to be able to "use" (if that's not too serious a word for some of the "uses" we see proposed) an exponentially increasing amount of spectrum.
To put it bluntly, then, neither the FCC nor our own non-regulator Ofcom can simply collect the cash from an endless stream of would-be "users" of the spectrum, much as they would no doubt like to do so. There simply isn't room for them all. If these "regulators" are truly incapable of distinguishing between services genuinely useful to society as a whole, which clearly deserve spectrum space, and the commercial froth which wants to overfill the spectrum with seventy seven shades of timewasting tat, which are at best optional extras, then it's time for them to do the Darwinian thing and become extinct, to be replaced with something which is a little more in touch with reality.
In short, as long as spectrum "regulation" is conceived of as some sort of market activity, where they get to flog spectrum to all comers, they are on a hiding to nothing. They cannot succeed. Their model is inapplicable. Instead of pleading for clever ideas to cram as much crap as possible into our 1.0 spectra, they need to prioritise allocations according to socially determined criteria, rather than according to which commercial entities can stuff the most greenery into their coffers. We live in a limited physical world, guys, not an indefinitely expandable free market. Get used to it, or go.
H.O.: "Last year a total of 17,614 crimes ... were detected in which a DNA match was available."
"Available" doesn't mean "Essential".
What proportion of these 17,614 crimes could have been "detected" (? - maybe even solved) in anycase, with no recourse to universal, intrusive DNA databases?
Common Purpose.
Imagine their zealots running this system (hell, from the look of it they *designed* the system) with their usual enthusiasm for going beyond the call of duty in the cause of the destruction of society.
Dear God, and I say that as an atheist.
Like AC 15:35 GMT, I don't trust it one tiny bit. As someone said in a Guardian letter today, can it be long before you need a CRB check to live on a street where there is a family with children?
BB. Not *just* watching. Listening out for malicious gossip too.
Oh, dear, Michael C - "Cut back the HAM frequenct range to about 10-20% of what it is today"? That is an astonishingly arrogant attitude, which surely shows that you do not understand the issues - issues which arise whenever *anything* is permitted to radiate EM energy in the range (approximately) 1.6 to 30 MHz. And what difference does it make how many of us are actually active? - there are only a minority of us interested in *most* things, except maybe football, yet we seem mainly to accommodate our differences amicably enough.
In the real world - the one out there which AFAIK exists quite independently of all our arguments and sophistries - the shortwave frequencies exhibit the unique ability to allow very small signals, intereacting with the earth and its ionosphere, to travel over, and be received at, incredible distances, up to and including right round the world. No other frequency range offers anything like this natural property. By the time they get into my receiver, we might easily be talking about attowatts - millionths of millionths of microwatts. Femtowatts are easy. Picowatts are downright luxury. How much, precisely, does your PLT thing radiate?
Lower frequencies (think LW or MW transmitters) need a good deal of power and aerial systems which, though physically big, are electrically rather small and inefficient. Although there is some skywave present after dark, the range is essentially limited to groundwave distances, which means local, by day, and maybe into Europe at night. Higher frequencies - anywhere from around the VHF broadcast band up - travel generally only over line-of-sight paths, apart from rarer occurrences like meteor scatter. The line-of-sight characteristic again means, essentially, local - although many of us take advantage of the fact that satellites pass in line-of-sight range.
Inbetween, in the shortwave area under discussion, we amateurs are allocated small bands of frequencies right across the shortwave precisely because, in this region of the spectrum, the conditions vary - with time and season, as well as with frequency - enormously, and offer scope for many activities and investigations. Yes, many of us are available for emergency work too, and why not? When all your fancy digital stuff goes down, we can still guarantee a comms link, which might be vital; most of that, though, goes on at VHF, so isn't really relevant to a dispute over shortwave.
Why should the unique features of shortwave simply be sacrificed to the convenience of people who can't be arsed to run a simple cable from A to B, or to install, instead of PLT, a 2.4 GHz WiFi - which doesn't crap right across the spectrum - to connect their digital boxes? Everyone who plugs in a PLT system WILL contribute sufficient pollution to that super-sensitive frequency range to destroy its usefulness to the people who are trying - quite legally - to use shortwave in the exploitation and investigation of its unique characteristics. They do not "impair" its use, they do not "add a bit of background noise" - they *destroy* it, since by definition we are looking for the very smallest signals. The situation is very like that resulting from modern light pollution of the night sky, which results in your being able to discern maybe half a dozen very bright stars instead of the thousands and thousands of tiny ones which are there ... so I'm told. Civilisation detaches us from the real world in many ways. Why add more?
No. No matter what commercial considerations may be tried as levers to force this polluting abuse of the electromagnetic spectrum onto the market, it should be banned outright, along with atrocities like "WiTricity". No equipment whatever, if not intended for a bona-fide radio use - which are long-established - should be allowed to emit *any* significant energy between at least 1.6 and 30 MHz. Indeed, it might be preferable to extend the upper limit to 50 or 100 MHz, to allow for proper investigation of the extreme - and extremely interesting - phenomena which can occur in the low VHF, especially near sunspot maxima. The unique physical properties of our world should not just be polluted out of existence to suit the market, no matter how clever we get at thinking up ways of doing it.
Mind you, in a world run by quangos and governments who are firmly in the corporate pocket, don't expect rationality to count for much until after the revolution.
"Fail" icon especially for Ofcom. They're so good at it.
should make everyone's flesh crawl. It's about as egregious an example as you could ask for of the evil, prurient drivel which now routinely pours out of the degenerate, brain-dead petty bureaucracy which has somehow gained power over the western world. Things aren't going to get any better until the last of these specimens are thrown out.
I salute our bare-breasted sisters, and wish them a good - and successful - day.
Er ... what /is/ the IT angle? ...
David63's comment about temperature prompts me to note that it would probably be a good idea to wrap the camera (not the lens, obviously) in a thermally protective jacket. The temperature gets pretty frosty at interesting altitudes, and it wouldn't be much fun if the most interesting photos were missing because the camera or its battery had packed up.
On a structural note, papier maché presumably counts as paper and can make surprisingly strong, lightweight structures.
And another vote for PICs, but remember that if there's soldering involved get a home constructor to do it, as we (sorry, they) are still allowed to use *proper* solder with lead in it rather than that dodgy lead-free stuff. (I'm assuming we want it to work reliably :)
2028 is a long time after December 2012, after all. Your Mayan wristwatch will have stopped, Xenu will have called by to pick up all the scientologists, and there'll have been many variations on the end of the world, including the Second Coming. But, since we're also supposed to be moving forward into a more enlightened and spiritually aware New Age of Humanity, then Ofcom - and, presumably, political parties - will obviously have become history, as there just won't be room for anything as unenlightened and awful as they are to exist any longer.
Mine's the one with a quartz crystal in the pocket, man ... says 7.030MHz on it ...
... but perhaps a bit of a high price to pay for what would seem to be a rather limited scanner. Why don't the powers that be just decree that from such-and-such a date all emergency comms equipment *will* be common and interoperable? One range of hardware, their own special encryption, the relative economy of scale: if a policeman needs an ambulance he only has to tune to Ambulance Control. Trivial. If the UK can stuff the entire public into digital, I'm sure the USA could convince its own officials to tidy up this problem more rationally.
Now all we need is a way of cutting off the feed to the rest of these scaremongers and maybe we'll be getting somewhere. The idea that our little scratchings about are 'causing' big, scary effects is pure hubris. Yes, the climate is warming. Climates warm and cool all the time, quite naturally, and at the moment ours is still warming up after the 'Little Ice Age' (slightly too long ago for Reg readers to remember it, unfortunately).
Chexk out the summary of peer-reviewed research on http://www.petitionproject.org/ - a rare glimpse of real science on the 'global warming issue'. Global Warming = Bollix.
The Imperial system isn't all the Romans gave us. Not every fule no that the international standard railway gauge - four foot eight and a half inches, or 1435mm - comes from the average spacing between the wheels on a Roman cart. Flanged wheels were a later invention though, coming when we started building horse-powered railways to haul stuff out of mines, which is why the Romans didn't leave us a grid of straight railway tracks around Europe.
So ... THEY don't trust US to respect THEIR "privacy and security", but they expect US to give THEM every last detail of our lives, biological makeup etc for their crass, snooping database. Someone remind me - who is supposed to be whose servant here?
And then they wonder why most of us wouldn't trust them as far as we could throw them. I never thougfht I'd find myself saying it, but three cheers for the Daily Telegraph for omitting the black blobs and exposing the black hearts.
"... amazed they are allowed to be outside an institution"? - Surely that's why the politicians think the whole damn country has to be turned into a secure prison camp, since they obviously regard us with such comtempt.
My New Political Model: the Bathwater model of society.
Definition: The scum floats to the top.
We need to skim it off, and soon.
This has been on the cards since that story last year about the Chinese sending people over to the UK to study how London does CCTV. When THEY are taking lessons from US in repression, you just know things have gone thoroughly rotten.
Oh, and El Reg, I do agree with Wayland (14:41 GMT). You really must stop talking about "Britain slowly sleepwalking toward becoming a surveillance society". That phrase suggests a degree of futurity which is years out of date. Britain IS a surveillance society, and has been for years now. Come on. Open your eyes, look around. It's easy. Count the cameras, the databases, the "terror" laws being used against innocent citizens, the officious little shites who are being given the power to fork up your life in the name of some bit of vacuous doublespeak, and, and ...
What we need to be talking about is, how we break our way out of the S.S. (such /appropriate/ initials, my dear!) and smash it into little bits which can't be put back together, ever. Not pretending that it's just some vague threat.
Hang on - aren't green laser pointers done with an IR laser blasting its energy into a crystal which then glows green (and apparently *equally coherent* green, too - cool stuff)? Sounds as though the field of IR-to-visual energy conversion already exists, and if there is a mass market to be had I'm sure the cash would turn up for a bit of further research into different coloured / more efficient materials.
Meanwhile, I want one of those zappers, just to see what a "femtosecond-long pulse of extremely high-energy laser light" might do to a CCTV ...
that both sides are very unlikely to disappear, notwithstanding that most of the country would love to see it.
But there is a certain fascination in watching two thoroughly vile specimens circling round each other and hissing. We'll have to content ourselves with applauding each hit and praying for maximum damage all round.
A nice sideshow to watch while Western civilisation falls apart.
whether half Joe Public's problem is that he looks at a word which is obviously "lye-nux" but which its techies insist is "linnux". No such problem with "windows". (Other problems, yes, a thousand times yes, but not pronunciation.)
Sorry, it's me sinnus trouble making me ... all right, I'm going ...