Posts by Steven Jones

More reason to Offshore

So that might just be one more motivation to offshore work. That's unless the EU is planning to extend employment rights to India.

@John Savard

"Religion isn't just a bunch of silly rules that make people's lives miserable; it is also a source of solace, by providing hope that there will ultimately be justice for the oppressed and miserable."

Deliberately misleading people in order to make them feel better is what you do to children. It's surely much better to get people to come to terms with what has happened than have them go around deluded. Following your line of logic, we should be praising the mystics who prey on the believed by pretending to be in contact with their lost ones. This type of thinking is truly the "opiate of the people view". It's the same logic that allows oppressed people to remain passive on the basis they will be rewarded in some after life. It's great at keeping the common people down - to accept their lot, a tactic followed by the powerful for centuries.

The proper way to deal with those who are oppressed and miserable is to do something about it in this life, not to tell them comforting stories.

@William

So internationally recognised domain names can be seized on the orders of local courts if their services are available in that area then? Of course there are plenty of US sites which are offering types of pornography that are illegal in many countries in the world. Presumably, on that basis, their domain names can be siezed too. In fact you don't need to go to such seedy areas - there are other services and views available from the Internet that are illegal in all sorts of countries.

For instance, we currently have an Australian citizen who has been arrested in London on the basis of Holocaust Denial charges in Germany based on a website published in Australia. There are plenty of US sites which operate quite happily under the guarantees of the 1st Amendment which will fall fould of such laws in Germany and Austria (although I don't think the German or Austrian courts would be so brave as to pick on a US citizen). This point about applying extra-territoriality laws to organisations in other countries solely on the basis of services and information offered over the Internet is very dangerous ground indeed. You never know where it might lead.

In this case, then the top level domains used for International purposes should be beyond the power of any single National court. There is possibly some way of dealing with International issues through some form of International court, although that is fraught with problems.

As it is, there is always the possibility of national legislation over the way that top level domains are interpreted in individual territories. Should that ever happen, so a dot-come in one territory is fundamentally mastered differently to that in another; well chaos truly will ensue.

They have no clue

That is they have no clue how to achieve this. I can't find a source to tell me the last time that CO2 equivalent emissions in the UK we below 20% of the current levels. My guess is some time during the early years of the railways, so some time in the 1840s. At that point the population would have been around a third of the current level. So we now have to achieve a level of CO2 equivalent emission which is maybe less than a third per head than it was in the 1840's.

20% of CO2 equivalent emissions is not that much higher than the food sector in the UK which was estimated at about 14% from memory.

Of course what would really happen is substitution - inductries generating lots of CO2 emissions will naturally gravitate to where the cost penalty is least.

I think what will be found - possibly, or even probably, in a catastrophic mannner that it is simply not possible to sustain a population level in the UK of 60 million or more on the basis of a CO2 equivalent emission level of just 20% of the current amount. It's about time the truth was accepted, and that is that the current worldwide population levels are unsustainable and we are only able to do so by using the limited resources laid down over hundreds of millions of years.

No major political party (or environmentatl body) is telling the truth here - they are living in a dream land. As it happens 2050 is not that far away - I may not be around to see it, but plenty of people readihng this site will be, as might a few politicians. Recent financial events show just how the veneer of control is paper thin and a mirage. This will be another example.

M3000

Surely something called an M3000 would be a dual socket machine, not a single socket as an M5000 is 8 socket and an M4000 is 4 socket. A dual socket machine would a gap in the product line - that is an entry level SPARC server with half decent single-thread performance.

If there is to be a single socket machine then M2000 would make more sense, but an M3000 with dual socket capability would also suffice for the single socket market.

A backward step...

No doubt from a minimising I/O latency approach this works well. Put it in a PC and it should fly. However, storage is put on the end of networks for a reason - those include data sharing, clustering, storage virtualisation and faster provisioning. So by all means put your server boot and local storage on the PCIe bus, but for larger scale and more sophistaced users, some form of storage interconnect is still required.

@Alexis Vallance

"Sure, it's got a mountain inside and shading, but what happens when it's printed in a single colour? I think Apple have a point with this one."

No need to guess what it looks like - I've tried it and apart from both being apple-shaped then they look completely different. Little clues like the large letters VSBT and the representation of a mountain peak for a start. Anybody stupid enough to confuse the two probably shouldn't be allowed out on their own.

It's a ridiculous and pointless case. I'm sure that Apple employ a company to search these things out and pay them each time they make a case.

@Gulfie

yes, yes - I know that Li-poly batteries are different, but they are a completely different construction to Li-ion and great if you want things like high draw current for flying model aircraft. The point is that the typical Li-ion batteries used in gadgets like phones and cameras are basically all very similar varying largely on capacity and the number of cells plugged together in series. Universal chargers are readily available for them. I'm not suggesting that cells using radically different chemistry are much the same.

For Li-poly you'd need a different sort of battery charger (or one that could handle both), just as is the case if you have Ni-Mh, Li-Ion batteries and lead acid batteries. The basic point is that comparable 7.2v Li-Ion battery from two different gadget manufacturers would essentially be interchangeable apart from the form-factor issue.

@Lewis Page

Looks like the are skewered on this one. It's also in Science Daily. I'm reminded of the later Professor Eric Laithwaite who headed up the department of heavey electrical engineering at my old university. In the physics department he was viewed either as an annoyance or as a clown once he started straying into the area of physics with his confounded theories on gyroscopes. It was great as a parlour act on Parkinson, but not much beyond that.

Anyway, any time that somebody talks about beating the Second law of Thermodynamics then smell a rat as solving that leads directly to solving the problem of a perpetual motion machine.

Utter Twaddle

I don't think that I've ever read such utter rubbish. This sounds like CMS (a single-threaded OS working only through virtual devices) running under VM and that dates back to the late 70s. Try running a modern database (or almost any modern non-trivial application that way).

@Joe & @AC

Putting the IRA down as a religiously motivated group is inaccurate. That they mirrored the schism between Catholics and Protestants is a result of the history of these two groups and was tied up with all sort of other social and political issues. Yes there had been politics ties in with religion (something that was fundamental to churches in the past - and still is in some places), but the IRA wasn't motivated by religion as such but by nationalism. There have been plenty of terrorist groups motivated by that or separatism. ETA is an example, the Tamil Tigers another - not all of these have echoed religious divides. In addition to the straight nationalist terrorist groups you can add the political ethos ones - Shining path in Peru, Maoists in Nepal, anarchist groups in Victorian England, the National Socialists in Germany (both before and after they came to power) the list goes on.

However, I think all of these have something in common - an absolute faith the the certainty that they are right and that this justifies whatever you have to do to get your way. The sort of blind faith that Marxists typically demonstrated in the mid 20th century is not, in my view, much different from that of religious zealouts of any sort.

As for AC talking about nonsensical bashing, well I'm not fan of name calling, but zealotry is what it is and it needs to be described as such. I doubt rather that you've ever read Richard Dawkins books, or at least understood the arguments if you have, but in them there is a clinical demolition of many of the tennets of the faith he was brought up with, as indeed was I (Christianity). Now the arguments used are not specific to that religion (or group of religions). They are largely generic - at least on the difference between an approach that is open to evidence, that theorises, that recognises when they are wrong and has mechanisms to correct them. Those are the features of rationalist argument - they are not those of faith. By definition faith starts from a basic acceptance of a particular world view and then fits the facts around it. Where the facts don't fit, these are either ignored, or ever more fanciful and unlikely justifications are made to continue the belief. Occasionally there will be some "re-interpretation" when the contradictions become too clear (except for the true fundamentalists when even that is unacceptable).

Faith is very much a result of society and history - far and away the greatest determinant of whether you are a Catholic, or a Jew, or a Muslim or a Sikh is the society and ethnic group into which you are born. In fact some religions, like Judaism and Sikhism are very explicitly bound with particular ethnic, and even racial groups, to the point the inheritance is codified down blood lines. These are the very echoes of ancient tribalism down to this present day.

So this is not a name calling exercise - this is the way it is.

As for the arguments about evolution, then it has withstood so many tests. For instance, even a scientist, the great Lord Kelvin thought the earth couldn't possibly be old enough for life to evolve as there was no fuel sufficient to keep the Sun burning long enough. It passed that test when nuclear fusion was discovered. The theory of evolution predicted that there would have to be a mutable inheritance system long, long before the discovery of DNA. Not only do we have DNA but we have the means to read it - and read the history and, low and behold, then it precisely matches the forecasts that was made of evolution many years ago. That you can actually read the branching and separation of life forms throughout the ages. You can see the familial links between species and when they separated. Evolution also predicts that you won't find rabbit skeletons in the same geological strata as dinosaurs and low an behold that seems to be true. Evolution predicts that we can see familial connections in the bone structures and skeletons of creatures - that we won't suddenly get a jump to a six-legged horse with wings. That the basic building blocks of creatures get moulded, and slowly adapted. It predicts that there will be "fossil remains" in out bodies of bits of our evolutionary history which no longer serve a purpose, just fading away. And that prediction holds true too.

As the old saying goes, there are none so blind that will not see.

Single thread performance

The Achilles heel of the Coolthread series of chips is the very poor single thread performance. It's fine if you have an application that can multi-thread, and where the response time doesn't depend on how fast you execute a single instruction stream. Unfortunately there's a lot of those sort of applications out there that are affected. Things get worse on the Coolthreads processors once you start winding up the throughput - those 8 hardware threads on a Niagara 2 core contend for just two integer and one FP processing unit. As utilisation winds up then the threads in execution slow down further due to this contention so your hardware thread might start looking more like a 700MHz (or slower) processor than a 1.4GHz one. it's not as bad as it might appear, as the core can make use of processing resources when a thread is stalled for something like a memory access, but it can have a very visible effect. it's best to view these hardware threads as virtual CPUs in the same way that guest machines under VMWare can be slowed due to contention.

A single or dual socket Sparc64 won't pirate sales from Coolthreads - it will fill a gaping hole in SUN's line up for SPARC servers; an entry level server with half way decent single thread performance. The Niagara series will always appeal where you need SPARC and want the best throughput per watt (the SPARC 64 is anything but power efficient), but the coolthreads architecture is not the answer to everything.

Nb. this whole things about hardware thread support is something that affects many modern processorrs SPARC64, Itanium and Power all have support for a coarse-threading model (and Intel used to have HyperThreads). They all trade a bit more throughput for much reduced single thread speed at high utilisation levels (and distinctly non-linear relationships between reported CPU utilisation and throughput).

@Steve Foster

The issue about the Fifth Gear test is that it addressed the issue of changes affecting structural integrity of different generations of vehicle, the survivability of the passenger compartment and the way the vehicles deformed in collision. However, there is one basic point of physics which cannot be overcome on a collision between two objects of very different masses.

In a collision between two very different masses, then the smaller one will be subject to a much larger change in speed (which will correspond to a very much larger rate of deceleration of the centre of mass). Collide head on in a car with a heavy truck and there will be a relatively small change to the speed of the latter. However, the car will be brought to a violent halt, very fast, and then be pushed backwards. Even if the car's survival cell is incredibly rigid, then the resulting deceleration forces can be very dangerous to the individuals in that vehicle. The only thing that can be done to reduce this effect is to increase the length of the crushable part of the smaller vehicle, thereby spreading the speed change over a greater distances (reducing the rate of deceleration). There's obviously a limit to this dictated by the dimesions of the car.

So for a collision between a heavy and much lighter car, the occupants of the latter could still come off a lot worse, even if the structural integrity of their vehicle's passenger compartment is not compromised. The ability of human beings to survive extreme deceleration depends on all sorts of things like weight, fitness, age and so on. Such things as the Aorta being torn out of the heart are not survivable and the older you are, the more vulnerable.

Principal principles...

"but more intriguing are the firm’s operating principals",

So that would be the heads of the various operational departments then. Or might that just be operating principles...

@Andrew

The cancer threat is more likely to be to the flight and ground crews of these flying tanks of noxious chemicals rather than missiles that have been blown up with them. In any case, in the unlikely event that this actually works, there will be far less radiation emitted by an intercepted nuclear ballistic missile than if the damn thing went off. In the 1950s the major powers were quite happily letting off nuclear explosions in the atmosphere. Those of a certain age will have the evidence in their teeth enamel.

I suspect that if the world gets into the sorry state where one of these things is used in anger then the worldwide addition of a little bit more radioactivity into the atmosphere with the destruction of such a missile in early flight is going to be the least of our troubles.

Lembit Opik

It's surely not necessary to say any more. Anything this clown comes up with is, by definition, a joke.

@Hig Pig

"Hawking Radiation is purely theoretical"

Well black holes are only theoretical too - their presence can be inferred from apparent gravitational on celestial objects and the like. Their existence can also be postulated on the basis of current laws of physics (which, of course, aren't laws - they are theories).

In fact the whole of physics is based on a stack of theories that have been developed in order to explain observed phenomena and, of course, to produce testable consequences (well the scientific purist would say they have to be testable; it's a moot point with theories like multiverses whether these qualify as scientific theories due to doubts about their testability).

Anyway, the point of all this is that nobody has directly seen a black hole. If Hawking radiation exists they might be able to see that of course...

Coomon sense prevails

So let me get this right - somebody was using his employee's equipment as a means of defrauding them and then, because he tried to hide what he was doing, proceeded to claim that the employer had no right to see what he was up to. So a lawyer tried to argue this case with a straight face and it was taken half seriously?

Simple point - if you want to defraud the company (or hold information which you consider to be personal) then don't use their equipment.

Value of QoS in capacity planning

There's a very good reason why having capacity limits is not an effective substitute for the lack of QoS/Traffic Shaping. As anybody involved in capacity planning can tell you, it's very useful to have prioritisation levels on shared resources. That's because it can even out the peaks - during the busy times the service of high-priority traffic can be maintained at the expense of the low priority work. The low priority stuff can catch up during off-peak periods.

The problem with treating all workloads identically is that you have to have sufficient capacity to cope with the full demand at peak levels as, if you hit contention, then it will degrade both service-critical and non-priority workloads equally. This means that your VOIP traffic will suffer equally with the P2P stuff. In fact, given the unfriendly way in which multi-stream P2P works in conjunction with TCP's rather trusting behaviour, the P2P traffic is likely to suffer considerably less than the single connection VOIP traffic. This means that the network suppliers have to build out more network capacity to cope with these peaks or suffer the prospect of service-critical traffic suffering badly. Network capacity costs - it is not free.

@AC - Glue and vaccuum's

anaerobic really means "without oxygen" not "without air" (sometimes it will be loosely mean the latter, but that's not really accurate).

The real problem with the vacuum is the rapid evaporation of liquids. Nothing can remain liquid in a vacuum. For a glue to work in vacuum it would have to be spreadable and it's a bit difficult to see how that would be done, although I suppose if it was something with very low volatility then it might be possible.

That's a very different thing to glues setting in a vacuum - that's perfectly possible.

@Matt

Totally agree, except of course it is the bankers (who are people) that did this, not the banks. As others have noted, it's the bankers who engineered this through get-rich-quick schemes where they could load all the downside onto the shareholders and customers. Of course there is no way that you can expect everybody to behave honourably (especially when the very system means that the gamblers will drive out the others). What's needed is a system engineered so that it is not in anybody's interest to so manipulate the system, and to do it in such a way that it doesn't kill innovation.

As it is, everybody competent knew this would happen some time. The aim was not to be there when the financial roof fell in.

@Richard

Dispense with road. So presumably we will need flying trucks to deliver bulk goods and supplies and landing strips to suit. Of course there is plenty of space for these car (and now truck)-sized landing strips isn't there. Dream on...

Negastive Black

There are rumours that a mysterious Swiss company are working on exploiting the technology involved in the CERN "big bang" experiment which has the potential to create mini, very short lived black holes at will. By using this capability in consumer displays it is believed that contrast levels unachievable with conventional methods can be reached by actively sucking light into the device. Certain practical problems remain in fittiing a giant hadron collider into the average suburban house, and that electicity supply for this device could be of some concern, Also the issue of power consumption in standby mode has not yet been addressed.

It's understood that Prince Charles has expressed his concerns over this development and has suggested that more support should be given to local organisation planning magic lantern displays and it's all a plot by giant corporations.

uhmm

Are you sure this isn't just a rejected plot line for "Father Ted"?

@Chris W

I despair at those people who seem to be willing to support, or at least tolerate, the exploitation of vulnerable and weak people in society. It might only affect the less aware people, children, pensioners, the naive and so on. However, this particular scam had no point whatsoever than to con people out of money - it offered no service, as described it is a simple con or fraud.

It's a mark of a civilised society that we do not tolerate the exploitation of vulnerable people through overtly fraudulent activities. Yes, everbody who uses services in an incredibly complicated society needs to be made aware of the dangers for their own interests. However, saying that is a long way from tolerating the behaviour of people like this and the exploitation of the vulnerable in this way is despicable and nothing to be supported in any shape or form.

@By RotaCyclic

This was not a "civil prosecution" - I think you mean "private prosecution" which is indeed a matter decided by the beyond all reasonable doubt measure (a "private prosecution" is essentially a criminal prosecution undertaken by a private individual or organisation and normally requires special permission by a court (although certain non-governmental bodies have the authority to carry out prosecutions where the law specifically allows for it - the RSPCA & NSPCC have that right in certain areas of the law). This case was a straight suing for damage, albeit under something allowed for by statute rather than just common law. It's (usually) a balance of probability issue, with the standard adjusted by the judge using his/her discretion.

As it happens, it looks like this was a case that went by default as the defendant didn't turn up. If you don't turn up for a civil case, then (usually) the case goes against you by default. If you don't turn up for a case under criminal law - well you are likely to be subject to an arrest warrant and could end up with some more serious charges as well.

T

False economics

The second most annoying thing about this sort of interference (the most being the patronising attitude of individuals going far beyond their brief on advising into interference) is the misleading claims about the extra costs of obesity, smoking, or whatever..

The fact is that everybody is going to die of something - yes, you might postpone it, but as the government is finding out, extending lifespans introduces costs of its own. Quite apart from the known fact that health care for the elderly increases with age (controlling all those chronic conditions, nursing and so on), the social costs of caring increase too. If we could arrange a health care system where people lived healthier lives then suddenly dropped dead with minimal costs to the health care services, then there would be some validity in the argument that obesity, smoking, or whatever costs the NHS money. As it happens, all that is likely to result is that the onset of chronic conditions will be delayed a few years into the end of a longer life where, if anything, the welfare and health costs will be higher.

By all means this guy can make a case that improving health and lifespan is a valuable thing in its own right, but what it will not do is save the taxpayer money and to claim so is downright fraudulent. From a purely economic viewpoint encouraging people to smoke would make more sense - lung cancer tends to kill quickly without extended periods of chronic diseases to treat for year after year, you can tax the addicts who are too stupid to break the habit and in many cases they will drop dead before they get to be a huge burden on the welfare state and after they've made most of their economic contributions.

So by all means promote better health and related longer lives, but please don't pretend it saves the state money. (I recall a Yes Prime Minister episode expounding this very point about tobacco tax revenues).

@tim miller

The increasing of prices in a inelastic market to optimise profits is only possible with a monopoly. In theory, in a commodity competitive market then the price will fall to something close to the marginal cost level (although not many markets are truly commodity in that sense). Note that this is where there are not supply constaints - where there are, as in the case of some natural resources or where these are largely under cartel control (e.g. the diamond industry) then different rules apply.

Anyway, as far as the story goes, then Ofcom, like any such organisation, employ people with their own vested interests in promoting their own worth. Such regulatory bodies are not usually inclined to be objective over their true value when the authors of such reports have their own careers and prospects to consider.

@Neil

"Sorry, but I really don't want my Bank calling me up several times a day - that would be a sure fire way for me to revert to carrying large amounts of cash around with me!"

Well I don't want a system that requires me to authenticate every transaction - after all, I might not have my mobile with me, the battery could be flat, you could be in an area of poor reception, I could be abroad and it could be embarrassing to find that out at the checkout in Tescos not to mention the time delays and people muttering in queues. Just possibly there is a need for mobile phone authentication for very large transactions. However, a notification system by SMS for every attempted transaction authentication would hardly be difficult to deal with - looking at my card records then that would only amount to about 40 messages per month.

Having twice had my card compromised in less than 6 months, then I'd value it.

The real reason...

Technologies (or worse, court cases), to band screen-scraping just looks like a way of Ryannair preventing customers from easily making price comparisons or making complex multi-company bookings.

To liken screen-scraping to video piracy is just a joke - it's not exactly going to be a secret to the consumer that they are flying Ryannair, and if that turned out to be a nasty suprise, then it's the consumer that needs protection, not that notoriously passenger-unfriendly airline. There's plenty of consumer legislation out there to cover issues like that. Companies should not be allowed to put in place overly restrictive practices essentially introduced to limit competition.

However, I've got no great hopes for the EU given the way that they have supported the effective banning of "grey imports" into the EU.

@James Monnett

Making your own copy, whether it is a shared folder or a private one not is an infringement of copyright if done without authorisation. It doesn't matter if you copy somebody else's CD, download it or record it off the radio. It's an unauthorised copy. You don't need to take a copy for commercial or distribution purposes to infringe copyright.

Of course the damages would be less for making a private copy (in principle the copyright holder might only have "suffered" the loss of a sale - which they may not have made anyway). However, the legal costs (and investigation costs) would vastly outweigh that.

So be clear - taking an unauthorised copy, by whatever means is an infringement of copyright (subject to fair usage and other such caveats). There are some grey areas - such as data caching and so on with which the law has yet to get to grips, but aside from those little nuances, a little common sense tells you when it is an infringement of copyright.

No Sympathy

I'm afraid I can't sympathise for the inhabitants of any city that voted for John Prescott as MP. I feel that being cut off from the civilised world is an appropriate punishment. Perhaps we can make it permanent?

The sad thing is

I'm old enought to remember the story. I seem to recall that time as a miserable one with a bad economic outlook, inflation on the increase and an unpopular Labour government was replaced by a Conservative one in two years time.

(Albeit the Labour PM was called "sunny Jim", not a description that fits the dour one we have now).

Anyway, now that this woman is back to add a little tittelation to the tabloids (including this one), then we know the bad times are back. If times are repeating, in about five years time we will be embrolied in a war - sorry, that's already happened...

blatant sexism

Consider the following extracts :-

"If a customer is standing 3 feet away from the cashier, it would take approximately 0.002665 for the words "paper or plastic?" to reach him at the speed of sound."

"it would take a mere 0.000000001016703 seconds for the information to reach her at the speed of light."

This blatant bit of gender stereotyping will probably have completely passed by the approximately 99.9% male readership (my conservative estimate) of this virtual rag. It's just a good thing that nobody from an HR department has ever heard of The Register or the formal complaints would have been winging there way in.

Not fuel

Just a little pedantic point. The material ejected out of such a system is not "fuel" by any definition I can find (which generally all refer to the use of a substance to produce heat or power). The "fuel" is in the nuclear reactor which is used to generate the electricity to run this thing.

What is ejected out of the vehicle is the "reaction mass"; that's something ejected at high speed which, by good old conservation of memomentum, results in the vehicle being accelerated in the opposite direction. Of course the fuel and the reaction mass in a chemical rocket are one and the same thing. That is not the case here (or in ion motors).

Just to be clear, the term "reaction mass" as used here has nothing to do with nuclear reactions. Some numpty will no doubt think it is.

So there is more propulsion from a given amount of fuel, but that's basically because if it swapping chemical fuel for nuclear and using a method of ejecting the reaction mass at a much higher velocity that can be done with chemical power (ion motors, which have already been used in space, can do that but the thrust is much less).

Accidents?

Flying cars seem like an accident waiting to happen. In the US there are about 2 deaths per 100,000 flying hours of general aviation versus around 1.4 per hundred million passenger miles on the roads. Take an optimistic view that the average speed of general aviation is 150mph and there are two people on each plane, then that's a fatality rate for general aviation seven times worse than for road use. Given that long car journeys are (per mile) much safer than short ones, then it seems clear that it's a much riskier activity travelling by light plane than in a car (but probably not so bad as motorbikes).

This is all against a background of relatively empty skies, reasonably well-trained pilots and good facilities. I suspect once the skies started filling up with these sort of things then we'd see a lot more problems.

That's without throwing in all the problems of finding enough landing spots, people complaining about the noise of these things constantly buzzing overhead, traffic management, policing and so on. Congestion is bound to follow - there are only so many places to land these things and with massive increases in usage then approaches would rapidly get clogged up in any remotely urbanised area.

Even if a viable flying car could be produced, then this is going to be a minority game of relevance to only a small minority of people and then only for a minority of their journeys (most journeys are local). A viable electric car would be far more useful to many more people on a daily basis than something designed only to address journeys in excess of 50 miles and more at a capital cost several times the price of current cars. Practical, light-weight composite cars could aspire to better than 100mpg equivalent, and maybe much better if a practical methods of storing electricity (or fuel cells) can be found.

I have read better researched and thought through articles than this bit of fantasy land stuff. It reads more like something a young high-school kid would have dreamt up.