Posts by Loyal Commenter 5761 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2010
Whilst I broadly agree with your concerns, I am pretty damn sure that my local council hasn't been using anti-terror laws to check if I have been putting my bins out on time.
Yes, these laws may be poorly worded, vague, unnecessary, and may have been abused in specific circumstances, but such hyperbolic rhetoric does nothing to aid the case against them. If anything, it undermines the argument, when it gets called out as bullshit.
All so the "great and the good" can carry on troughing/stealing/getting dildos shoved up their arse at Nazi-themed parties/getting sucked off by whores in alleys knowing full well nobody will dare publish.
I'd argue that yout first two examples are things that should be revealed as being in the public interest, and the remainder are personal matters, and therefore none of your business. It is quite right that such things should not be published by the gutter press. What has anyone's private life got to do with anything in their public life, whoever they are?
No.
It's to stop the gutter press sticking their noses into the private lives of people who happen to be famous, often at the expense of those people's professional careers, purely for the short-term titillation of morons, and lots of profit for the owners of those non-so-august periodicals.
It's to limit the scope that the press currently has to influence, rather than inform, the people by telling lies and half-truths in order to manipulate political policies in their favour.
It's to remind people like Piers Morgan what a slimy little turd he is.
Whether the laws will be effective, balanced, fair and well enforced remains to be seen.
If you expect your partner to be more interested in you than anything else, at all times, then you are an egomaniac, and they are better off without you.
Whilst a relationship where one partner ignores the other all the time is doomed, a relationship where one partner expects constant attention from the other, over all else, is equally doomed. The trick lies in finding the right balance in the middle.
in this case, it sounds like the guy wasn't paying his girlfriend enough attention, but it also sounds like she is not entirely sane and reasonable herself, given that she was running around naked from the waist down.
"Now, I would dare say, again, it is time to biometricallly identify every last man, woman, and child in the USA (South Korea is a "democratic nation", and it does so) to verify nationality, to verify work eligibility, and to verify tax-payment or compliance."
I'm going to run the risk of being called out on Godwin's Law here, and state that this sort of thing has been tried before, and it didn't end well for the perpetrators.
As for South Korea, I'm going to call you out on this one, and ask for the evidence that this is happening, because I strongly suspect you are talking out of your anus. Maybe you are confusing The People's Republic of Korea (South Korea) with the wonderfully ironically named Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).
I'm also going to take the opportunity to remind you that your country is populated almost entirely with immigrants, so your xenophobic stance is invalid on those grounds also.
OR; fast breeder reactors will continue to be used for plutonium production for the bombs that the Us aren;t still building, honest (because after all, that's what they're designed for), and the wastes from those could go into feeding these things, rather than having scores of massive radioactive ponds lying around the place holding all the high-level waste?
Yeah, I suppose if you buy something and it breaks a week later you just suck it up and bin it, all that terms and conditions bs is just for the sheeple who believe in crap like "law" and "society". Bunch of Corporate Pricks.
*Shakes head*
In the UK at least, you are protected by law, in the form of consumer rights, whether or not there are appropriate 'terms and conditions'. If electronic goods fail within a certain time (IIRC 12 months) due to a mnanufacturing defect, the manufacturer has to, by law, replace the faulty goods. No T&Cs required. What the T&Cs are actually for is to limit the responsibility of the company in question, not to strengthen the rights of the consumer. In fact, it is precisely because of things like T&Cs that we have legal concepts like 'unfair contract terms', and legally enshrined rights such as the one I describe above.
Because, at the end of the day, 'law' and 'society' are social constructs that are in place to, on the whole, protect the people. Without them, we'd have much worse corporate feudalism than even the most fevered fanboy's imagination could come up with, and we'd all be indentured to the likes of Google and Apple.
Am I a whiney bitch, or is it a cse of...
Adverts:
I don't want to see them.
I don't want to click on them.
I don't want them to pop up so I might accidentally click on them which might send me god-knows-where, potentially to a malicious site.
I'm not going to buy whatever they're touting, so why force them on me if I make the choice that I don't want them?
I understand that it is Google's business model to sell advertising space to third parties. Good on them, they've done well out of it, but I still think I should have the choice to not have information about me sold to others without my explicit consent.
And by the way, many people consider most forms of advertising to be 'evil' due to the fact that they are designed to be deliverately manipulative (the whole point is to influence you to buy something you otherwise wouldn't). They use psychologically tricks to influence you against your will. The same tricks that if someone used them on people to influence them into, for instance, having sex with them, would be considered evil by a lot more people. The fact that advertising may be a necessary evil in order to fund the internet doesn;t subtract from its evilness, but merely highlights how we don't live in a black-and-white world, and such terms are relative.
So, don't patronise us and tell us to grow up for lamenting the removal of the option to exercise choice.
If you paid £2000 for a camera, there's nothing written anywhere that says you deserve to earn that money back. To mkae money, you need to be able to produce something that people want to buy, will pay your asking price for, and can't find elsewhere. Simply owning the tools of the trade doesn't automatically mean that you will be able to make a living from that trade. This is why most people do a job to get paid money to live, not as a vocation.
"Its not about the raw numbers that leave, so much as the creative talent of the people who leave."
s/creative talent/self absorbed wankers/
The whole 'people will leave' argument is, always was, and always has been, based on the flawed concept that people already resident in the UK are somehow superior to those that will replace them if they leave. There is a word to describe this misapprehension, it rhymes with 'basism'.
Thes proposed laws would stop it being profitable for someone to hire a helicopter, take yet more aerial photos of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Cabot Tower, and charge £150 a pop for them.
My heart bleeds. If it's not a viable buisness then it's not a viable business - if someone really needs those photos, the odds are that they'll commission them, or buy existing ones from a photographic library which remembers to properly watermark their sample images.
Whilst I do get the point that some people might google a random image, crop it, and use it on their web-site, are these people who would have paid £150 for the photo in the first place? Are they then charging others for it's use? If that image wasn't available to them for 'free', would they then pay for it, or would they use the second reuslt that google has returned? The point here is that the internet itself has devalued the images, by making them more accessible. Pandora's box has been opened, and you can't go back to the old days of paid acces to information.
If a meson is composed of both a quark and an anti-quark, how can it have an anti-partner? Surely that, too would be composed of an anti-quark and quark; what then distinguishes this from it's normal matter counterpart?
Is it just by convention that we call a meson composed of a anti-charmed quark and a down quark as matter, but one composed of an anti-down quark and charmed quark as antimatter? How does flipping between the two cause CP violation, or is it to do with the quarks having different charge/spin/colour values?
I'm sure the answers are out there for me to google if I so wish, but I feel the article should at least explain what the actual transition that has been observed is, and why it demonstrates charge/parity violation. After all, if this does go towards explaining why the universe contains matter at all, it is an important result.
"I don't get why more phones don't have a serious go at voice recognition, given that speech input/output is supposed to be a core capability."
For that suggestion, you will be consigned to a special hell where you are eternally stuck on a bus with a load of teenagers speaking text messages into their phones.
The reason that voice-input isn't in common usage isn't necessarily technical, it's because people don't want it, principally because sitting in front of your computer talking to it makes you look like a massive arse.
@Sir Runcible Spoon
You may be joking, but there is tentative evidence to suggest that longer wavelength EM radiation (e.g. radio waves) may interact less with spacetime than shorter-wavelength EM radiation (e.g. light) leading to minute differences in the arrrival time of photons of different energies that have travelled billions of light-years. Such a thing has been measured...
This, of course has nothing to do with c not being constant, but instead to do with the structure of spacetime at very small scales (e.g. the Planck length) as predicted by certain unifying theories such as string theory.
The OP, of course, was talking bollocks.
I would imagine it is a case of the caalyst being 'poisoned' by impurities in the hydrogen, and its no-doubt high-surface area structure needed to be an efficient catalyst breaking down / getting clogged up.
It is also worth noting that 'reserves' of an element generally refer to the mineral deposits that are surveyed and known about, so there could be a lot more than the 'known reserves', and that ruthenium is one of the fission products in uranium burning nuclear reactors, so conceivably could be extracted during fuel reprocessing.
The BBC used to have a reputation for being independent of the UK government in their broadcasts, but in the last couple of decades have sadly had themselves dragged down to the politicians' level. These days, their 'independence' is largely a myth and UK news reporting has a definite pro-government bias to it (whoever the current lot happen to be on a given day).
To me this is quite clear; the parent makes a purchase for their child, the card is authorised. There is no good reason I can think of to then not require authentication for subsequent purchases.
There is also an element of bad parenting to this of course - the children should not have considered stealing from their parents and the blame for that lies with the parents - if their kids aren't old enough to understand that this is theft, then why the hell have they got iPads to play with?
The fault lies with Apple, however, for bypassing the credit card authentication mechanism in favour of some 'ooh-shiny-shiny-it-just-works' bullshit.
Interestingly, in this country at least, the majority of people actually don't believe in a god. They may list themselves as CofE on the census out of habit because that is how they were raised, but a straw poll of the people around you (unless you happen to be sat in a church/mosque/synagogue/Jeremy Kyle studio audience) will show you that genuine religious believers are in the minority in the UK.
By this logic, you actually believe in a negative god. I call satanist!
I beleive the system in the US grants patents without considering prior art, but they can later be invalidated if prior art is shown. IMHO, this is the wrong way round, the thinking behind it is that it reduces the cost for the patent office, whose job it would be to check for prior art, thus allowing patents to be applied for and granted more cheaply and theoretically give the US a competitive edge.
There is an old adage that says, "many a true word has been spoken in jest."*
I'm sure that if Apple didn't have a history of trying to patent the obvious, or indeed things which are prior art, then they wouldn't come in for so much flak.
*Very old; for example in the 14th century, Chaucer wrote: "But yet I pray thee be not wroth for game; A man may say full sooth in game and play."
"My thoughts too - don't you have to make something to patent it?"
If I understand it correcty, this is a US 'design patent', what the rest of the world would call a copyright. Our transatlantic cousins just like to use grandiose* words for things. And use the letter 'z' too much.
*or as they might spell it, grandioze?
If you endanger someone's physical or mental wellbeing, okay, it is reasonable for measures to be taken. 'Moral' wellbeing, however, is a subjective term, and is bound to be tainted by the preconceptions of the beholder. Such fuzzy terms do not belong in law books, at least not before thought crime appears on the statutes.
Exactly. For example:
End Wearer License Agreement for MS Coat 2013
The licensee is granted permission to wear MS Coat (henceforth known as 'coat' or 'the coat') for one season only. The coat is not transferable to another user or other season except where the licensee dies within the original season in which case the coat may be transferred to the licensee's next of kin on presentation of a death certificate, for the remainder of the season only.
How can you have a maths free overview of cosmology? Other than the one that starts "it's big, it's very big..." and that has been done already.
You have obviously not read Stephen Hawkins' "A Brief History of Time". Go and pick yourself up a copy from your nearest charity / second-hand book shop. IIRC, the book has one equation in it, which just goes to show you can give quite a comprehensive overview of cosmology entirely empirically, and make quite a lot of money from selling it in book form.
"You could always try working on a different number base that would make pi expressible in just a few digits."
Pi is an irrational number (i.e. a real number that cannot be expressed as a fraction), so the only way to do that would be a base-pi number system, which would make every single other number irrational instead. Not an improvement...
proto-robbie; you don't got your sums right.
However, CO2 frozen gas hydrate might be stable under those conditions; this is a physical, rather than chemical reaction, and requires only water and cold to form a solid that is stable under pressure at low temperatures. The problem comes if the rpessure is reduced, or the temperature rises to the point where the hydrate breaks down.
If you can guarantee to capture and sensibly handle all of the products from burning coal, then what's the problem?
Of course, this is only a solution for the carbon dioxide produced. Some other issues are:
micro-particulates (i.e. soot)
sulphur oxides (which cause acid rain and respiratory problems)
nitrogen oxides and ozone (which cause photochemical smog)
mercury vapour (which is toxic)
fly ash (which is caustic and produced in large quantities)
radioactive emissions (large coal-fired power stations release more radioactivity in their flue gases, from trace elements in the coal than nuclear power stations do in their cooling water)
Actually, the generic term for molecules with the amphetamine backbone is 'amphetamines', which is the only case I can think of where you would pluralise it anyway.
For example, free base amphetamine, amphetamine sulphate (speed), methamphetamine (crystal meth) and methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, or ecstasy), along with others are collectively known as amphetamines.
My original pluralisation of the word was a typo. I am prone to them.
Kind of correct. It's more to do with how much insulin your pancreas can be forced to churn out before it gives up the ghost, there is a genetic component to the amount of abuse it can take, the amount of abuse itself is obviously important. Plenty of people can have a predisposition to developing type II diabetes without actually succumbing to it by not forcing refined sugars down their throat, and conversely, those without such a predisposition can damage their pancreas through prolonged excessive blood glucose levels. The western diet generally has too much refined sugar in it, hence the current 'epidemic' of diabetes, where a significant proportion of people are stressing their pancreases beyond the point where they can cope. This is hardly surprising given the fact that we didn't evolve on a diet of refined sugar.
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