Posts by JimC

Possibly so

But the trouble I have with the climate change people is that the science really doesn't seem to be there yet...

Only a fool believes the climate doesn't change. There are all those U shaped valleys round England for a start.

And within recorded history there are big climate swings. The Vikings successfully dairy farming in Greenland for instance. Then it was impossible, now its possible again.

Where I get all worried is that the science really doesn't seem to be there yet to explain what's going on. Its phenomenally complicated stuff. Much more so than brain surgery or rocket science. And we also know that what we are experiencing is well within the known bands of natural climate variation. Speed of change might be another matter, but there I <em>really</em> don't see any evidence that there's good data. If you're nmot sing the same measurement system for all your data you really are pushing your luck, especially if its mainly derived.

But the assumption that it must be artificial and not natural seems to be sending down all sorts of bad alleys. Some things are obvious. Burning oil and coal for fuel is a damn silly idea, and the sooner there's a sensible replacement the better. Wind power is not a sensible replacement: Seven hundred years of pre -industrial history tells us you only use it when there's no alternative. Filling the atmosphere with pollutants is a bad idea too. But ultimately if the climate is changing <strong>sufficiently</strong> so as to cause disruption (and history tells us that it often will) then whether its natural or artificial isn't such a big deal as to work out what to do about it. And if your only remedies are based on "oh well, lets stop civilisation" like the dumb greens then we're stuffed whether the change is all natural, partly natural or all artificial.

"will you do naughty things?"

I suspect that rather depends on the post you are being interviewed for. If it were as, shall we say, "information gatherer" for the late NOTW for instance...

@Alex/Win 98 in VM

'fraid I just did it, there weren't any hoops or anything. It was fairly straightforward. However I didn't manage to get it to run in any significant manner on my XP box, but on the Win7x64 it just worked.

Desailination...

If you can get your fuel production sufficiently efficient maybe you could drive desalination plants... Of course that sends the effective efficiency even lower, but isn't Australia going to need very large scale desalination for agriculture in the future? There is only so much fossil water...

My Dear AC

There are doubtless all sorts of parasites and other beasties inside you and on you eating you. That's how nature is. But most of us manage to avoid large populations of the really unpleasant ones.

@Taxing the Internet

Well, we shall see. Few things concentrates Government minds so effectively as loss of tax revenue.. In the long run I wouldn't be surprised to see national boundaries on the internet...

Ah memories...

I used to have a special version of command.com with a whole bunch of the messages changed... Ah, what sweet naive innocent entertainmants we had back then [fx nostalgic glow]. Later on we moved on to the delights of customised Windows shells. What happened to those carefee days of youth?

and then

after all the lying idle subtract all the tpyo squatters, all the spam domains, and finally all the domains that are pointless duplicates because oranisations have been persuaded they should register their name under every possible tld or country, which rather defeats the purpose of aving them in the first place.

Always interesting looking at a selection of people's other posts...

Obviously I have better things to do than browse through all Mr Marsden's back posts, but I spotted that he has used this rhetorical trick of "I can't be bothered to point out fallacies" before.

It is, of course, much easier than actually making a case and has the advantage that its not possible to demonstrate flaws in a non existent argument.

I could of course be very dumb and failing to spot obvious flaws in the principle that its up to business to comply with the law rather than up to the law to comply with business, and it appears that I will continue to be ignorant in that respect.

I will freely admit that there are all too many cases of large companies ignoring the law or even, in some jurisdictions, actually having the law corruptly changed to suit them, but I'm less convinced that this is a good thing.

From what I can read elsewhere

that summary goes a lot further than the official enquiry has done so far. It seems plausible, but I wouldn't guarantee that the official report will be identical.

Sacking people for making simple mistakes is a possibility of course

But you might run into problems with employment laws, and it leaves you with the problem of finding anyone better, and competent Social workers are pretty hard to get anyway.

I'd be interested to know though, what aspects of their own jobs the people recommending it reckon should be summary dismissal errors.

Think you need to read a bit more than the newspapers then

Private sector pensions have by no means disappeared, especially if you're in the Executive class, although they have massively reduced. Have you not been paying attention to all those stories about banker's multi million pension pots? At least partly, I suspect, the drop in pensions is because so much of financial systems earnings are being trousered by said executives rather than being paid out in dividends. Its a double hit where profitability has reduced and overheads considerably expanded.

As for higher average pay - well I reckon the CCU guys would just stand back and admire their masters when it comes to the sort of statistical manipulation that produces that set of numbers. Where I am there's been a pay freeze for at least three years. Oh, apart from the executive, who carry in in their circle jerk of swapping jobs every few yars for a big hit of extra cash.

Lifelong job security - ROFL. In the Local Government IT department I work in just one person has reached full pension age in the last ten years I can recall: all the others have been made redundant or retired early (which amounts to the same thing).

Subsidised pensions - all pensions are subsidised. Its called employers' contribution.

> undercover space missions we haven't

I suspect its not impossible that there's the occassional SF fan in NASA, and it might be they're leaving a bit of room for space craft from other intelligent life forms...

Nonsense

Statistics are the most powerful tool we have for finding out what' really going on. Absolutely vital. Yes they can be misused, especially by people with an axe to grind, but name something that can't.

The problem with the whole global warming thing is that there is damn all long term historical data for the statistics to munch.

> I wonder how the yusual euro bashers are going to spin this

My dear chap, it would be a remarkable feat for any organisation or entity to be wrong *all* the time.

For the hard of thinking...

<satire>Looser! #

Danel Carg your just jeluos ... [snip] ... Justin Biber should be the nxts Jams Bnod.</satire>