Posts by PhilipN 1689 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2010
If I can find a link I shall repost but I can only imagine with a smirk what GBS may have said on this topic. He once wrote after attending a concert of his unhappiness (danger zone ...) at seeing a woman member of the audience with a dead bird nailed to her head. Took a brief while - GBS was nothing if not plausible with his pungency - to realise he was complaining about her hat.
Does not cost much. A junior clerk could do it.
Now the grounds of appeal - that comes later and needs more than half a brain cell.
But this kind of protective manoeuvre is typical - file notice of appeal before the deadline expires. Then figure out what the hell you do next. At least the door is kept open.
"It's more so for people that want to be able to carry a gun when they need to and not have to engage other people about why they're carrying that gun,"
I thought, at least how the gun freaks explain it, one purpose of having a gun is so, when "necessary", the bad guys (or whoever) could see that you have a gun. Silly me.
Wake up everybody.
I have had 2 clients done by similar but even more sophisticated email scams in the past couple of months. One for US50K the other for 500.
And don't bother with a police report. Once the money is gone it is gone and tracing will not work, the scam is that well planned.
Wake up everybody - or did I say that already.
I would go further. Most of the children here who live online through their browser would not understand the expression "browser wars". What happened is that progress was put back 10 years globally because MS behaved like the obnoxious kid who did not want anyone else to play on the swings.
That amount is more than US10bn PER WEEK.
It makes the amount of cash invested by Silicon Valley et al and all other bedroom hackers around the world paltry to the point of inconsequential.
Could they not just give a few million each to every adult human in the Middle East so they embrace middle class values and selfishness right away?
Hell that is enough to give everyone on the planet a hundred bucks. Same again next year.
Ok Uncle Sam. $100 please and I promise not to attack you.
I am more concerned about IBM sliding towards irrelevance than the arrivistes in Redmond flailing for direction.
In the days when MS was given the journalist's accolade of World No. 1 software company, it wan't. IBM's software sales, once you stripped out hardware sales, were consistently greater.
More pertinently, IBM has consistently been the largest customer of the US Patent Office - year after year after year. If IBM cuts its R&D budget, who is going to take up the slack?
Like a lot of us I was a complete shit* when I was a teenager and it makes me cringe to think of the stupid things I would get up to. Thank Whoever I did not get caught for youthful stupidity.
Any hypocrite want to claim he was not taking risks with life, limb and property when at a tender age?
*Complete because of cultivating a respectable persona to display to the rest of the World.
For perspective : A while ago I was looking into home telephone wiring systems to try something imaginative and I came across various explanations online.
One of them, with photos, declared that back in "those days" the wiring done by a well-trained (they all were) telephone engineer at all locations were close to works of art. Seeing the photos, I had to agree. Good quality kit (natch) but crystal clear layout and barely a millimetre of excess cable anywhere. For connections, every wire stripped to precisely the same depth.
The bloke who did such installations had probably been doing it for 10 years and would probably be doing it for another 10 years but it was impressive.
Tangentially from the above discussion about soft landings, the aeronautics are fixed, so the challenge is handling the massive stresses caused by gravity - twice - which are greater on landing than on take-off - is that correct? Which more than doubles the wear (to put it mildly) on the equipment. Why fight gravity twice, and use so much energy, when parachutes have been used for decades to drop the personnel module "gently" on to Earth's surface. Or even several parachutes for separate parts. No doubt the engineers will explain that a parachute is too unpredictable as are weather patterns etc but why not have both options ready?
What Musk and his team are doing is brilliant and essential, and I would not want to have 2 different modes of propulsion for, say, a quick trip to the shops - hey how about a large elastic band on the back of my car to tug me back home in an eco-friendly fashion - but I think there has to be an ingenious way to avoid the huge expenditure of power than we have grown accustomed to with rocketry.
Hydrogen balloon stored in the nose? Or hot air - one thing a rocket has is plenty of heat. After all, what is the hurry to bring the thing down again?
Any smokers ready with the fag packet ready to make notes on the back of?
Trying to replicate human thought and actions is mere vanity. There is nothing ideal about the way we are constructed and move. Some years ago it was shown that a one-legged robot which bounces along like a pogo stick is more efficient and a damn sight easier than one with 2 "legs".
Let's face it even the way we think is not clever. Progress derives mostly from flashes of insight which come from who knows where?
Trying to reproduce the conscious mind of an adult human will create an equally stupid and irrational "thing".
Homo sapiens sapiens? Gimme a break!
Plants, microbes and insects do a lot of things a lot better than we do.
Good God! Is that the source of the joke whose punch line is ".. She doesn't have to put a pillow under her ass" ?
Nah ... I first heard it from an Aussie long before our minds had the risk of being kardashianised.
Course who knows she may even be a nice girl under all the hype. And silicon.
In one visit to Japan we bought an alarm clock in the shape of a bear standing to attention wearing baseball kit.
Sure enough - you're probably way ahead of me here - while peacefully asleep in the hotel room we were rudely awakened at 3 a.m. precisely by the little fucker right on cue shouting "Go! Go Go!" .... "Go! Go! Go!" complete with faux crowd noises ..... Of course as a new purchase that day it took a while to realise what was making the din, and another while to find the box, and open it, and to figure how to silence the f******
