
Do No Evil
People mock Google with their "Do no evil" mission statement, but frankly when a company like Facebook does something like this, you begin to see the point.
26 publicly visible posts • joined 3 May 2007
Played with the lights low and the sound up, that was a seriously scary version.
Not helped by the fact that I had a mouse problem at the time which meant every so often my gun would go off in automatic mode, making me jump and wasting all the far-too-scarce ammo that I had.
Happy days...
Surely a petition to hold a debate to retain the ban, is the same debate (albeit phrased differently) to that advocating the reinstatement? If that's the case, all these "anti" petitioners are hastening the day when there will be a debate on the subject.
On top of which, how exactly do parliament debate to leave a law unchanged?
Many years ago as a student I worked briefly at a government science lab.
As part of the induction we had a security lecture where it was made clear to us that if we ever went to science conferences in moscow (and oddly this did happen, just not to me), then Russia would send nubile agents to seduce us.
The official advice we were given was to lie back and enjoy it, but to lodge an official complaint the next morning. Seems "lie back and think of England" was government policy back in the late 70's.
I imagine it's the same today.
Back in the 1980's the Kendrew report looked into funding of UK particle physics. They concluded that we won more Nobel prizes per capita than any other subject or nation, delivered large scale projects on time and on budget (those were the days!), and were producing interesting science.
They also concluded that funds should be cut by 25% and came very close to taking us out of CERN. That was what made me decide to abandon a career in science. It sent the clearest possible signal that science wasn't valued in this country.
Politicians can't see science for the money involved. They're like accountants, they see the money first, and only dimly percieve what it's being used for second. They have very limited short term vision (they seldom look further than re-election in 4 years, and often don't look that far). In short they shouldn't be trusted with the year-to-year allocation of funds to science projects, and they certainly shouldn't be allowed to play politics with it.
They're certainly no judge of what will pay off. In the same way that you have to trust that "more education" is a good thing, we should hold to the faith that R&D is a "good thing" will pay dividends, even if we can't yet see how.
She's suing the guys who planned to publish the content, but actually didn't and not suing Guido Fawkes and the national newspapers who actually did publish the content and presumably acquired it through nefarious means.
Regardless of the morality of all this, surely she hasn't got a legal leg to stand on?
The new site is fine, but whilst the font used on articles is just about bearably small, that used in the comments section is unbearably small. I know I should probably get glasses, but one of the joys of the Old Reg was it's readability. Why are they different anyway?, surely what we have to say is just as important :-)
Oh... and your icons seem to have gone pastel/beige but I can live with that.
PS. The font size on the "Preview post" page is fine :-)
True story: I once went for an interview (*) where the very first question I was asked was
"Do you find the Higgs mechanism esthetically pleasing?"
After a bit of fumbling around I basically said "no", and failed the interview. I've kinda resented it's potential existence ever since So imagine my delight to find that, albeit 20 years late, Prof Hawking has come out in public to back my point of view :-)
BTW, there is an icon here ( <-- ), it's just that you haven't yet got a monitor big enough to see it.
(*) The interview was for a a Particle Physics Phd place, so it was probably fair game although most people opened with the more friendly "so you found us alright?" :-)
I got the spam (but haven't seen the apology, presumably because spam filters have kicked in).
Although I registered for the festival, in the event I *didn't* try to buy tickets, so the fact that I failed to buy a ticket could only be inferred by comparing the registration database with the list of successful purchases.
Which is quite different from the story we're being told.