Posts by Spleen 826 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Nov 2007
Probably not, but it's important that there is a relatively large and vocal organisation that opposes torture in the face of the consensus that torture is justifiable in certain circumstances and if couched in euphemism. It's one of the things that prevents me from putting a bullet in my head in the hope of reincarnation as a less morally abhorrent species, like a shark or a dung beetle.
Lily Allen is good value on TV and normally I'd be cautiously optimistic about her being given a show - cautiously because it's a lot harder to carry six or more episodes on your own rather than being on the wings for thirty minutes in Never Mind The Buzzcocks, but optimistic because she might pull it off. If professional "comedians" like Peter Serafinowicz and Ronni Ancona can produce stinking s**tbuckets of shows, no reason why a singer couldn't make a good one.
Unfortunately, she's been stuck with a format that is a complete loser. I simply cannot see how you can get a good show out of a free advert for Facebook - if they were taking the piss out of it it would have potential, but "homage" no. For once the "wah wah wah what about my licence fee oh that's right i don't pay it because I bittorrent all my episodes of Top Gear" crowd are right.
Mind you, when was the last time BBC3 had a good show that wasn't just a warm-up for a run on the real channels.
We aren't really looking at the risk aversion issue from the right angle here.
The decision to kill de Menezes was a calculated political risk. Imagine if he had been Osman. You can see the tabloid headlines now - "Hero cops save dozens by shooting terrorist". From that point on, the police would have a massive amount of brownie points which they could spend on anything they liked - no politician would have the balls to stop a sweeping expansion of police power in the name of "stopping more Osmans". Every cop armed, 90-day detention without trial, weakening the basis of conviction for terrorist offences from "beyond reasonable doubt" to on the "balance of probabilities" - the only limit is your imagination. We already know the British police are perfectly willing to intervene in politics, this would led them do it on an unprecedented scale.
On the other hand, if they'd got it wrong and the guy wasn't Osman - well, absolutely nothing would happen. The police are the one profession allowed to use lethal equipment without any responsibility, unlike factory workers, taxi drivers, etc who can count of being sacked at least and prosecuted at worst if their negligence gets someone killed. There'd be a media frenzy, an investigation or two, and in the end no-one would be sacked. And so it has proved.
From a risk perspective, shooting the foreign-looking man who was boarding a Tube train was a surefire bet for the police. As it happened, it didn't come off. But if you bet on red you don't cry if it happens to come up black.
Apparently "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength" was dropped for not being sinister enough.
No IDS, I will not let you keep it that way. I will keep it that way myself, and you can take your existence licence and shove it up your arse and die.
The original article at http://www.enn.ie/article/10123401.html has a picture. It looks far too small to hold any components. Maybe memory sticks would fit in the spheres but how they could hold a graphics card, or how the column could hold a motherboard, I've no idea. Has she designed special wrap-around components as well?
I know art isn't meant to be practical, but if you say it's an upgradable computer than it should be a computer that you can upgrade.
Fair question actually, because the age of consent in Britain is 16. It's also when you can smoke - or it used to be, the Raj are postponing it to 18 now, along with alcohol. You can also get married with your parents' consent.
Generally if you were talking about "coming of age" it would be 18, being the day when you can have your first legal piss-up.
We were definitely expected to understand negative numbers in primary school (this is mid-90s). I distinctly remember getting a sequence question which went something like 5, 4, 3, 2. I was one of the few who wrote "1, 0, -1, -2". Most of my classmates wrote "1, 0, 6, 7" or something equally awesome. That would have been around 8 or 9 years of age.
Funny the things you remember from childhood - I wasn't particularly conceited about getting that right or anything. I think I remember it because of the complete failure of most of my friends to even understand the concept of negative numbers - even the thickest kids know what addition is even if they can't actually do it.
So to answer the question, you do learn negative numbers in primary school, but most people are too stupid to understand them.
See, being the devil's advocate is fine, if you're defending one of his promising-but-fatally-flawed works - communism, eugenics, that sort of thing. It's a bit harder trying to defend something he came up with when he was just being a dick, like paedophilia, cluster bombs and Noel Edmonds. Or, for that matter, throttling bandwidth for certain customers, not telling them you're doing it, and lying to the press when they ask you if you're doing it.
Comcast are indefensible here. Piracy is wrong and illegal, yes, Comcast probably have the right to manage their traffic, yes, but you *cannot* defend not telling the people you're "managing" (i.e. restricting service to) while you continue billing them at the same price, nor can you defend repeatedly lying about it even when multiple press outfits - real press outfits, not bloggers - have confirmed that's what you're doing. Oh, and doing it by sending packets pretending to come from the users - surely a form of identity theft - goes from indefensible to just plain flabbergasting. If I send someone a racist email and falsify the headers to point to someone I don't like, can I call that "reputation management" and not be prosecuted?
Come down from the moral high ground Bennett, it's chilly up there and you don't have a scarf. Or any trousers.
"ACPO accepts that there needs to be a limit to pre-charge detention"
Well, it's nice of them to accept something that has been part of the foundation of British society for EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS. Better late than never?
No, wait. Accept? El Reg is right, acceptance is not the same as believing. Anyone who does not believe in individual liberty is not truly British, and should not be entrusted with power or influence over anything more than a goldfish.
"I want to say I love my writers. In honour of them today, I'm not going to do a monologue."
Of course, reading a quote you don't have any idea of the context, or the manner it was said. If this was a British show it would have been a joke.
But this being an American show, we can be absolutely certain that this was said totally without irony.
Presumably you want tax breaks for not smoking, drinking, being obese, etc as well? A society that believes in giving all its citizens a subsistence income, or providing free healthcare, can't then try to stop people using its services in ways they disapprove of - not without a bureaucracy so huge it would cost far more than any money saved.
You could, of course, argue for a cut in benefits and a commensurate cut in income tax, which would achieve the same thing, but for some reason people seeing their fellow humans dying in the streets is a vote-loser.
"In Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and requires the use of your toilet, you must let them enter"
No entry for "In Scotland, it is permissible to take large amounts of money for the English and give it to students so they can smoke more pot per day" or "In Scotland, you can only discipline your child by asking them nicely to stop what they're doing, or you will be arrested"?
"Osbourne tacitly acknowledged the vote counting debacle in Scotland, saying that while technology ("intelligent kiosks or whatever it might be") would almost inevitably make its way into elections..."
Why?
Why is it inevitable?
This question - on the rare occasion that it's asked - is never satisfactorily answered. The real answer, of course, is to rig the election, or at least to give the incumbents a bit of a nudge. It's not that electronic voting is easier to cheat - I don't know enough about the technical details to know whether it is or not - but it's certainly possible to cheat (no system is perfect), and the crucial thing is that it *makes it easier to conceal*.
Paper ballots can be rigged, African governments do it all the time, but then you've got to do something with all those bloody boxes of paper. Somebody generally notices when you're burning them or pouring them down a drain. With electronic voting, there's no inconvenient physical evidence. Moreover, people understand the concept of men in sunglasses turning up, confiscating ballot boxes and disappearing with them, whereas falsifying electronic voting is a technical issue and if you told most people that the system had been rigged in such-and-such a way they wouldn't understand.
The question is not whether Labour would stoop to rigging the election, because they would, and they already have. Labour's base is the trade union movement, and they inherit the union mindset that all that matters is to satisfy your group, no matter how much it screws everybody else. (We won't even get into their revolutionary "smear the other candidate as a paedophile" strategy.) The only question is whether we're going to let them do it - then again, we may not have a choice.
Have you ever driven for an hour or more to the beach only to realise you've not brought your swimsuit?
No, nor have I. Nor have I ever spent over 10 thousand euros and several months making a film based on someone else's intellectual property without getting the rights *first*. That's because I'm not a cretin.
What I'd suggest to the makers of Damnatus is that they edit the film. It can't be that hard to change all the names and maybe reshoot a few scenes with different costumes so that it's not a violation, seeing as W40k is based on standard fantasy and sci-fi clichés.
""Yahoo! realized that new graduates and college students were in dire need of a way to build a professional network, but that existing solutions were either too tailored to seasoned professionals, or too geared towards communicating and keeping in touch with friends"
Yes! Yes! Finally! This is indeed what I've always wanted - not just wanted, direly needed!
Oh wait no it isn't.
"BTW, Bullies are dicks and if she did anything like that to a daughter of mine (i don't have any kids) I'd kill her."
Nothing says "classy" more than "I'd murder a 15-year-old girl for an act of minor violence".
But then, why buy a ceremonial katana off eBay if you're not going to use it?
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