Posts by Chris Thomas

I don't understand

A year ago I registered a domain and was to mean (and stupid) to pay extra for privacy. Since then I have been plagued by offers of web development, logo and picture services both by phone and email. A year later the phone calls have stopped and I only get one email per day now. If I had paid extra then presumably this would not have happened and my personal information would not have been exposed/sold. So a mechanism already exists to preserve privacy, albeit a paid one. So just turn it on for everyone and the problem goes away. What is this two years of development?

Not this twaddle again

How disappointing to see this old chestnut rearing its ugly head again. Manned space flight may be inspiring, but it is both expensive and dangerous. To me, at least, it is clear that manned spaceflight does not produce good science whilst unmanned missions have provided a wealth of new information.

With a crisis in science funding in the UK, having anything to do with manned missions will result in funds which could be used to address relevant and important issues being transferred to expensive PR and engineering. The only valid argument for adopting this policy would be if one was "optimistic" enough to believe that it would generate additional resources for science - some chance!