@Periodic Table Memories . . . Ahhhh!!
But do you remember the Tom Lehrer version...?!
http://www.privatehand.com/flash/elements.html
6899 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2007
Rimmer: 'That's it, I'm invoking All-Nations Agreement Article 39436175880932/B.'
Kryten: '39436175880932/B. "All nations attending the conference are only allocated one parking space." Is that entirely relevant sir? I mean, here we are, in mortal danger and you're worried about the Chinese delegates bringing two cars.'
The scene you're thinking of wasn't a "re-entry", it was a system allowing someone to successfully bail out of a supersonic plane at high altitude.
The situation being described is more like that used by the Mobile Infantry to effect an assault landing on a planet from orbit in Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Mine's the Armoured Combat Suit...
"Cyclist kills pedestrian and gets £2000 fine" is big news because it happens so rarely.
Meanwhile "Lorry driver ignores Give Way sign, kills cyclist but only gets £275 fine" only makes the local papers because such things are commonplace.
http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/Widow-outraged-at-39ludicrous39-sentence.4268357.jp
And for those who criticise some cyclists for dangerous riding, I agree that they're putting themselves in jeopardy (and shouldn't do it), but, apart from some very rare cases, that's pretty much *all* they're doing. Whereas someone in control of a ton and a half (or more) of metal puts many others in jeopardy by failing to pay attention...
... "Sorry, mate, I didn't see you"
Not many people are aware that this legislation brought in the "extreme pornography" criteria before that was even enacted in UK law. In its criteria for someone being excluded from working with children *and* adults, it says:
"conduct involving sexually explicit images depicting violence against human beings (including possession of such images), if it appears to IBB that the conduct is inappropriate"
(The IBB is the Independant Barring Board)
In other words, even before it was illegal to possess so-called "extreme porn" it could *already* get you blocked from a job.
Oh and regarding the cyclist, I would invite people to consider the following:
Whilst the National News was trumpeting how a cyclist who killed a pedestrian gets a two thousand pound fine (the family, unsurprisingly, think that's not enough of a penalty), a lorry driver in Portsmouth got a £275 fine for killing a cyclist when he (the driver) ignored a Give Way sign
Of course the first story is the "big news" because cyclists don't actually kill or injure people very often, but cyclists being mown down by careless drivers happens on a regular basis and, as such, aren't newsworthy...
<http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/Widow-outraged-at-39ludicrous39-sentence.4268357.jp>
... All of this is irrelevant BS based on the idea that, somehow, if people don't see nasty things, they won't *do* nasty things!
Ever since Socrates was forced to drink Hemlock for "corrupting the youth of Athens" Governments have been trying to control or ban anything that they don't like because we, the weak minded public, cannot be trusted to behave like sensible, reasonable, rational beings.
Of course our Great Leaders are such paragons of Moral Virtue that they can make these decisions *for* us...
What Martin Edwards and the AC from the "Erm" post don't seem to realise is that the banks use the Chip and Pin system to absolve themselves from any losses caused by card fraud.
They go "Your card was abused? Well it was done with a PIN, so it must be your fault, so we're not going to give you a refund", despite the fact that this is an abuse of the Banking Code which requires that the banks *prove* gross negligence instead of just *claiming* it.
This means that the customer (and often the business the goods came from) get screwed and the banks are laughing all the way to... well...
Banks have only *now* started pushing the "protect your PIN" message, something which they should have done right from the start. The number of times I could have shoulder-surfed someone's PIN doesn't even bear thinking about, but if you point this out to people their attitude is "well you shouldn't have been looking" as if a criminal would care!
IMO this is gross negligence by the banks, but nobody can be bothered to take them to task over it.
Consider the following situation:
1) I can touch type, ie I don't have to look at the screen when I'm typing.
2) I'm in the middle of composing a reply on a web page input box when I look away to check a reference
3) Whilst I'm looking away a dialogue box pops up on my screen saying "a new update is available, do you want to download it?"
4) I start to touch type again and then look back in time to see the message triumphantly vanish because I've just hit Return and it had taken over focus from Firefox with "yes" selected as the default option.
That happened to me just a few days ago.
Update boxes should *NOT* seize focus and take over from what you're doing (although at least it's slightly better than just assuming you want the update anyway as $ome other companies do...!)
> You can't fight a fire with gasoline.
No, but you can't fight a fire by legislating against it either, yet that is what our Great Leaders think they can do!
Your comparison with red lights is facile and irrelevant, I suggest you "stop and think" and then look at a little history because there are people who *have* given their lives to protect us from the sort of people who think that basic liberties and freedoms are inconveniences to be ignored when they interfere with what the State wants.
When I did my Direct Access motorcycle training my instructor rode a white BMW with fluorescent stripes, dark jacket, hi-viz vest and a white helmet.
At one point we'd stopped in a side road when a Police car came racing by with lights and sirens going. Just as they went past there was a quick "toot toot" salute from the Coppers' horn...!
Mine's the one with the built in back protector, shoulder and elbow pads because I don't trust cagers to look where they're going...
No doubt this "loophole" will be closed with another "Christmas Tree" piece of legislation (where everyone gets to hang something on it, like the Serious and Organised Crim Act or the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act) and, under the guise of "protecting us" yet more liberties get whittled away.
"What concerns me," said Hampshire assistant chief constable Steve Watts, "is the lack of legislation available for the police service to adequately address the threat of pseudo-emergency service vehicles."
And what concerns me is that these "pseudo-emergency service vehicles" could be let through security cordons without proper checking because "oh, well, they're one of us, they must be ok..."!
Stop sign because...
> once again, liberals got what they wanted
That's odd, because as far as I recall, it's only the Liberal Democrat Party which has had the balls to stand up in Parliament and the Lords and *OPPOSE* this sort of ludicrous legislation and I would describe myself as a liberal (with a small l) person who believes that our liberties are more precious than getting some good headlines.
The Big Brother, Nanny State Labour Party think the only solution to any problem is to pass new laws, the Tories daren't do anything that might upset the Daily Mail readers of Middle England so only put up a token resistance but mainly refuse to support the Lib Dems, so yet another ridiculous law gets passed.
Blaming liberals (be it with a small l or a big L) instead of this authoritarian Government sounds very much like propaganda to me!
... just how many False Positives would also be included in those figures?
"[...] in more than a quarter of cases where crime scene DNA matched the database, the police were given a list of potential suspects because the profile was not complete."
So how would this go? "Ok lads, we can't prove that he *was* there, but if we can get a Judge to agree we've got reasonable grounds for suspicion we can get a search warrant and dig around his place until we do find something."
"Yeah Guv, and don't forget we can grab his computer and look through it for anything we think is extreme porn, so even if we don't get him for the murder we've got a consolation prize that will still let us chalk up another solved crime!"
>> "because the technology does not work and the public would not tolerate the long delays"
> And this does not apply to airports ???
Most people don't commute to work on aeroplanes!
Imagine trying to catch the 08:21 to Waterloo only to find that you have to arrive half an hour earlier to get through the security scanners whilst removing your shoes and disposing of any bottles of liquid greater than 100ml...
> the government plans to launch a consultation to consider “all necessary evidence around current and future video games classification”
Which, if it's anything like the "consultation" on the Extreme Porn Legislation, will be totally biased in favour of the Government's plans and the "evidence" will be considered by rabid anti-violence campaigners who will ignore anything that doesn't agree with their views that it's obvious that these games cause people to do nasty things, so should be banned...
"[...] its call for restraint was backed by all three Westminster party leaders."
At least one of these leaders is a member of the Party that, in 2003, allowed David Blunkett to wave through an expansion of the number of organisations able to invoke the act from nine to seven hundred and ninety two...!
This is just another example of the "Do as we say" attitude which is pervading this country in the guise of "protecting our freedoms" as those with even a little bit of power follow the example of our Political Leaders in seeming to think that it is their duty to control every aspect of our lives.
Of course what they are actually doing is *threatening* our freedoms, but try explaining that to them...
> WHY? All because we can not moderate our behaviour.
No, all because we have a puritanical bunch of leaders who think that *we* shouldn't look at anything that *they* don't like and a spineless "Opposition" who don't want to upset Middle England, so will pander to their prejudices instead of voting against a ludicrous Thought Crime law which says "if people don't see this stuff, they won't do nasty things".
I have *no* respect for a law like that.
> An image deemed to be obscene is of you and your partner for example?
> Could they arrest you for having pictures of yourself???
Paragraph 66 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act says:
* * * * *
[...]
(2) It is a defence for D [the Defendant] to prove—
(a) that D directly participated in the act or any of the acts portrayed, and
(b) that the act or acts did not involve the infliction of any non-consensual
harm on any person, and
(c) if the image portrays an act within section 63(7)(c), that what is
portrayed as a human corpse was not in fact a corpse.
* * * * *
Of course there's the small technical details that 1) this defence will only be available *after* you have been arrested and charged and 2) it rather ignores that little thing called "presumed innocent unless proven guilty" because it requires you to *prove* that you are innocent.
There's also the matter that you have to have been a "direct participant", so if a photographer takes a picture of two people engaged in a legal act, but one that could fall under this law, the participants would legally be permitted to own a copy of the image, but if the photographer keeps a copy, they would be breaking the law...!
BTW The Ministry of Justice have said that they will be producing some "non-statutory guidance" regarding this law, however there's no sign of it actually appearing and any enquiries to them simply get a response which has been cut-and-pasted together from various stock replies with some vague and non-specific (ie useless) suggestions of what might be covered.
PS Here's a good example of how stupid this law is. It makes illegal "extracts from [BBFC] classified works" if "it is of such a nature that it must reasonably be assumed to have been extracted (whether with or without other images) solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal" but that does *not* include the entirity of those films.
The BBFC recently gave an R18 classification to a film called "Girls with Guns" which features men being "forced" to engage in sex at gunpoint.
Clearly that "threatens someone's life" and it's "for sexual arousal", but because it is not an "extract from a classified work" it would still be entirely *legal*!!
(Headdesk)
Having now had time to look through the Explanatory Notes here's some more information regarding this offence:
The explanatory notes on the "Communicating Indecently" section say:
* * * * *
23. Both subsections (1) and (2) provide that the offences are committed only where the victim did not consent to the activity and the perpetrator had no reasonable belief that the victim consented.
[...]
26. Subsection (3) provides that an offence under subsection (1) or (2) is committed only where the perpetrator’s purpose is to obtain sexual gratification, or to humiliate, distress or alarm the victim.
[...]
28. Subsection (5) provides a test for whether an activity is sexual for the purposes of this section. This is effectively the same as the test used in section 2 – see paragraph 13 above.
(Paragraph 13 says: [...] It provides that an activity is sexual if a reasonable person would, in all the circumstances of the case, consider it to be sexual.)
* * * * *
This suggests that it would require the prosecution to demonstrate that the communication was sent "to obtain sexual gratification" or "to humiliate, distress or alarm the victim".
This is unlike the UK's "Allowable Defence" for possession of "Extreme Pornography" in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act that the image was not owned "for sexual arousal", ie a much more stringent test.
I still think that 10 years is ridiculously excessive, but perhaps people might like to stop their knees jerking when they read an article like this and try to ascertain a few of the facts first...
... Having just read through the Scottish Bill, it's a shame that this article focuses on only one small area of what is actually an eminently sensible proposed set of laws.
Unlike the English Government's usual "sledgehammer to crack a nut" approach, the Scottish have engaged in some joined up thinking such that it's much clearer what actually would or wouldn't be an offence including, for instance, not criminalising children for "underage sex" if they are between 13 and 16 but the difference between their ages is less than two years.
Admittedly the possible maximum of 10 years for a text seems excessive, especially since they only have a maximum of 5 years for offences such as indecent exposure or "administering a substance for sexual purposes" (ie a date rape drug) and it's 10 years for causing a child to be present during sexual activity or "communicating indecently with a young child", but hopefully this anomaly would be sorted out during debate of a Bill that the English Government could learn a lot from.
Of course just because Parliament *debates* something doesn't mean that they are actually obliged to *DO* anything, especially when you have a bunch of arrogant, Big Brother, Nanny State pillocks like the current lot who are quite happy to guillotine debates which might ask awkward questions about the liberties they are taking away...