Re: I suspect the chinese might find
This before or after they hatched the nuke?
2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
I think you may need to think for a moment before describing Tony as "dumb", chum. He wrote the article. The headline and strap are most likely written by a subeditor, likely some malnourished intern locked in a basement without any natural light.
Besides, ad hominem is hardly an effective argument technique.
"you're stupid"
"your argument is stupid"
One of these is a valid criticism. The other is just rude.
Of course it's utter bollocks. I've seen this same anon on any article about linux, either posting obnoxious twattery claiming that linux has some number of orders of magnitude more security holes than windows (which is apparently so secure that the NSA cries its collective self to sleep at night worrying about to crack it) or just claiming flat out that linux is insecure because... well they never actually say why.
And it is always the same anon. You can tell by the writing style and the copy-pasting of bullshit statistics.
No, the law works on the basis that a criminal conviction must be evidenced _beyond reasonable doubt_. You are talking about suspicion: your fellow with a balaclava might be arrested for suspicion of intent to commit burglary, but unless they can prove that beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law then he gets away scot free.
Was he seen in the commission of a crime? Did he confess intent to commit a crime? Without that all they have is circumstantial evidence and suspicion, and frankly that doesn't amount to much.
With this lass, they suspect she had them turned on. Can they prove it? If they can prove beyond doubt she was distracted then that's one thing, but if there is ANY doubt at all, if she can demonstrate that the glasses were turned off or even demonstrate that the officers in question couldn't tell if they were turned on, then she wins. A criminal sentence would be overturned on appeal faster than you can say "unsafe conviction".
"machine guns"
You mean rifles, surely? An automatic rifle and a "machine gun" are very different classes of weapon. The infantry carry rifles (M16A1 for the US, LA85 SA80 for the UK). There might be the odd shotgun floating around, and the odd 50cal if they want to make a real mess, but the majority will be carrying rifles and enough ammo to deal with most situations.
What they won't be carrying is a bloody heavy lump of metal designed to make people feel manly.
And all this talk about the military rebuilding their weapons with CNC machines? Please. They would order a half-million custom units, not buy stock and rebuild it. Nor would they order a pistol that didn't use 9mm NATO.
And the British Army don't fly jets. That's the RAF's job, and they have the sense to order them with the right engines to begin with.
I'm starting to think you don't actually know what you're talking about.
A "regional assembly" that would have added nothing except another layer of bureaucracy, justified the removal of yet more power from the local councils, and been funded entirely from whitehall, thus making it entirely beholden to the national government anyway. Disenfranchising the people and stealing more power to the centre of the state does not make a more independent or representative government.
Much as I would want to support a study that pushes back against the whole "games are evil! think of the children!" mantra, there are two words in this article that destroy the validity of the whole affair.
"meta study"
A data dredge, in other words. Pile a bunch of studies into a pot and then slice it up with bullshit statistics and ludicrous probability thresholds until you get the result you want.
It's meaningless.
You might have a point, if not for the fact that fanboyism extends to things that are often free of any significant cost.
Vi vs Emacs, for instance.
Or Everton vs Liverpool (or United vs City)
Salad cream vs Mayonnaise...
The list goes on and on. It's not the cost that drives it.
In fact yes, an 80s Fiat is more resilient than a modern lorry, in the same way that I could leave an old mini mayfair sat out on the street for a year without moving it and be able to drive away without issue, yet I couldn't leave my 2003 ford focus out for a year without having to spend a fortune having it repaired. Never mind the diesel in the lorry's tank turning to sticky sludge or the engine seizing up from lack of use, the ECU will be knackered, the electrics will be shot and the tyres will be ruined from sitting so long.
Those trucks you mentioned that the army keeps? They maintain them. They regularly turn over the engines, roll the wheels and clean the bodies, and air out the various bits where stale moisture will trap and corrode things. They change the oil, occasionally pump and replace the fuel, replace the wheels and test the electrics to be sure they're in working condition. They don't just leave them sat out in a field without touching them.
That aside, your fiat was built to very crude tolerances. Modern vehicles aren't. Even a 1980s lorry would have had a finer tolerance in its manufacture and would be much more vulnerable to environmental effects without regular maintenance.
So yes. Your fiat could survive conditions that a lorry would not tolerate, but only because it was made of rust and string to begin with.
Ah, but the constitution of the united states didn't establish a democracy. Democratic elements were involved in the election of representatives, but the fact remains that the United States were established as a republic, with decidedly undemocratic elements balanced against the democratic, in order to prevent mob rule.
The united states are not a democracy, and they never have been.
You're both wrong. Burning was reserved for "heretics". Accused witches, if they were executed (which was much rarer than people seem willing to accept) were hung or occasionally drowned. Homosexuals were generally hung.
Stop laughing at the back.
Things were bad enough back then without having to make up all these falsehoods and silly stories. The etymology of faggot (and gay for that matter) is not even remotely similar to the one you're spreading, so please stop.
It's also mentioned in Luke. Each of the four gospels had different points to make and so epmhpasised different aspects of the story.
The NT consists largely of letters between people, which can hardly be called allegorical (though they do make allegorical points at times). Textual analysis of the surviving copies (of which there are thousands for each) indicate that they were all written within a period of around 90 years. There's very little disagreement over this even amongst the most critical of bible critics. Where the disagreement lies is on the validity of their content and the accuracy of translation.
But that's irrelevant to what I was discussing.
Apart from the Magi, who can't be verified, everything I described is true. The triple conjunction, the political turmoil (and the potential links between the two), the existence of the man called Jesus, who called himself "bar Abbas" - the son of God - and his death, the rebellion against the occupying Romans, and the conquest of Israel in the mid 60s. All these things happened.
This was to illustrate the point that the jesus story and the events leading to the end of Israel as a nation both began with that conjunction. It occurred at the right time, it had the right "meaning" for the people of that time, and the events that took place after it are all verifiable.
You could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy if you want. That isn't the point either. I was simply trying to establish that the whole supernova idea is a crock, and that the language used in the text fits the appearance of a conjunction - and the events that took place in that area at that time - much more readily than any other phenomenon.
In hebrew thought 3 is one of several "perfect numbers", along with 7 and nine. I have forgotten why.
Incidentally, the most likely candidate for the "star of Bethlehem" wasn't a star at all, but a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces. A conjunction of the two was interpreted as the passing of leadership from an old king (Saturn) to a new (Jupiter), and a conjunction taking place in Pisces associated the events with Israel. Israel of the day was important to the Persians as a close ally, granting access to the Mediterranean coast and serving as a locus of trade routes between Africa, Europe and Asia, so their astrologers (the magi) would have been keen to see what events might take place there.
In fact, in 7BC there was a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces (that magic number again), which gives us a pretty firm date for when the events would have taken place. Herod the Great died in 4BC, which sets a boundary for the other end of the period in question.
Israel of the day was also in a "great tumult" about whether the nation should strengthen its ties with their historical ally of Persia, or whether they should throw their lot in with the Romans. Herod was of course a Roman client and would have favoured them, but many in Israel favoured the Persians. It goes without saying that Herod's court would have been aware of the conjunction in 7BC, and it could just as easily have been interpreted as a validation of Herod's links to Rome or a harbinger of the restoration of Israel's links with Persia. When the magi came along and declared that a new king had been born in Israel, well, you can imagine what that would have done to the political situation.
And then in the late 20s AD, when Israel has been informally occupied by Rome in order to "support" the government against the insurgent Persian faction, this man Jesus appears and starts talking about purifying the temple and fulfilling the laws of Moses and all sorts of things that echo the Maccabbean revolt against the Greeks of a few generations earlier. With Jesus having a fairly supportable claim to being the true "king of Israel", the political seeds planted by those magi start to bear fruit: Israel begins to resist the Roman occupation, only to be destroyed 30 years later when Rome decides it's had enough of rebellious client states and absorbs Israel into the empire properly.
I It could be miniaturised quite handily, I reckon. You could get the individual characters down to, oh, maybe 10 or 15mm on a side. Have the screen take up the majority of one side of a box with the mechanics in it and attach the keyboard via a cable containing the hydraulic lines.
The major potential problems would be in the durability of the tiny pins and the reliability of their motion. The clearances required to make a small display wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of the technology of the day, given how fine they made their clockwork.
I'm tempted to go off and scribble up some rough plans for this...
I believe that what you need is something like a pin screen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_Art), with the pins hidden within and only visible when they're pushed out.
Pins could be manipulated with an x-y traversing arm that carries the character head.
The character head is an n*n array of pneumatic or hydraulic hammers, activated in different combinations by the keys of the keyboard. The hammers push the pins out in various combinations; the pins are a high contrast to the screen (white on black perhaps) that then appear as a character. Each key press advances the head one space.
Removing characters could be difficult. Perhaps the head can make a seal with the back of the character and simply suck the pins in again. Clearing the display would be as simple as tipping it back, or running a shallow-sloped wedge across the front to slide all the pins back into place.
What this offers: the display becomes its own memory buffer. Each character is "stored" in the display and can potentially be read back by a second head - or even the same head, if there's some way of shifting the hydraulic connection from the keyboard to a memory device. It'd be slow, one character at a time, but it could be done relatively simply by extending all the hammers on the write head and then pressing it against the character, and recording which hammers were pushed back and which remained in place. That would give you a record of the pins that had been stored in the display.
There'd need to be some way of preventing the pins moving at that point. Perhaps the pin screen could be made with a plate on the back that slides to one side when reading, narrowing the holes the pins pass through and wedging them in place.
Other possibilities: given you're working with a matrix of pins, you can go back and edit whatever you want by shifting the head back and forth with a set of control keys. With a little tinkering you could even have different font sizes, typefaces and even simple graphics.
No electricity or magnets required.
I hope that makes sense.
Of course in the real world, inhabited by the real humans you seem to contend this is aimed at, even the most dense and unfocussed realise that they can extend the life of their expensive hardware by replacing ram or replacing the harddrive at relatively little cost, both to themselves - as the cost of a new speedy large drive is significantly less than a new laptop - and to the environment - as they don't simply throw out an entire computer just to buy the latest new piece of shiny, overpriced kit from the world's most effective tat marketer just to get an incremental capacity upgrade.
A few issues.
First, get your prescription checked.
Second, a lot of the blueray films that came out in the first wave or two were just upscaled DVD releases rather than remasters. They're generally crap. It took a while for television broadcasters to really get the hang of producing HD content, which has resulted in ramping of quality just slow enough to be not-quite-perceptible. Compare TV now to TV then and it's pretty obvious how much higher the quality is.
Of course visual quality doesn't mean much if there's nothing worth watching.
in most of the country the single biggest killer of songbirds - allegedly the favourite prey of cats - are not cats, but magpies. A cat might be able to get one songbird but given their lack of flight, cats are generally not capable of catching that many birds. In contrast, magpies do something that no cat would even think of attempting: they destroy nests. They take songbird chicks to feed to their own young. The growth in magpie numbers in recent years has had a devastating effect on all sorts of small birds - and not-so-small birds as well. They aren't particularly picky about where they get their food, you see.
I dunno, JDX. Perhaps the fact that it's a tropical island is a pretty good reason to live there? I don't begrudge him that. I'd do the same if I were rich enough to buy an island. What's the point of an island if you don't live on it?
Just as long as he doesn't start lobbying for any tax increases in the UK. These rich ex-pats have been known to do that from time to time.
You want an unassailable example of a de-jure standard, look no further than the Intermodal Shipping Container, which is no less than the physical manifestation of a set of ISO standards on the transportation, identification and handling of freight. It transformed the freight industry so completely that the cost of worldwide shipping has gone almost completely flat and is no longer governed by distance or mode, but rather by content.
Every time anyone complains about ISO standards all you have to do is point at that. Or road traffic signs. Or bolt threads. Or any number of other things that we take for granted and assume are "just so", but are in fact the result of a piece of an international agreement to set a standard.
I'm saying this as someone who's really not all that keen on transnational and supranational organisations: there are times when they just bloody work. Setting standards is one of those times.
They assume. They can't do much else but assume and pester you with threatening-sounding letters that amount to nothing much if you read the fine print. They have no legal right of entry (even the police have no legal right of entry without either permission or a warrant) and they have no ability to procure a warrant, and have to ask the police to do it for them.
The detector vans and all that gubbins are empty propaganda, merely designed to remind people that the TVLA exists. Just ignore their letters and tell the "inspectors" to take a walk. If they can't see a television displaying live broadcasts from the public highway, there's nothing they can do.
Not that I'm saying you should try and evade the license by hiding your TV in a back room where it's not visible to passers-by...
I only ever watch DVDs on mine.
For the sake of comparison, I went n900->xperia mini pro (which was awful)->xperia pro
I couldn't live without the physical keyboard. Even with the screen size of these latest phones, the lack of tactile feedback from a screen just confuses my fingers. It's a failing. If I could get some sort of clip-on bluetooth keyboard that suppressed the on-screen keyboard I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Course, the great thing is, if or when Sammy goes down another manufacturer will slip into its place with a new line of droid phones and you'll be able to seamlessly transfer all your contacts and apps between them without any hassle.
Of course, it has to be acknowledged that not everyone is comfortable with all that information being handled by Google.