Posts by itzman

Brexit: UK gov would probably lay out tax plans in post-'leave' vote emergency budget

Re: can't agree how they would leave, then the UK couldn't leave.

Basically if Cameron doesn't get a move on, UKIP will win (enough of) an election and declare UDI.

Peopels patience is running out.

Re: So basically...

Democracy sounds like a great idea, until you realise that it means everyone has an equal say

ROFLMAO!

Nah

Democracy means one man, one vote, and I am that man!

(attributed to Robert Mugabe).

Re: So basically...

Law without democratic legitimacy is really lawlessness.

No, its totalitarianism.

If you think of government - all government - as a self legalising protection racket, it all becomes clear.

The point about democracy is that you dont need guns to pick a different Godfather, that's all.

The point about the EU, is that you do.

Unless you vote Brexit, and even then, its not clear whether the EU will let Britain go.

Re: So basically...

*I* don't trust the democratically elected UK government to do what *I* want so *I* would prefer to have a system that allows me a chance to sack them every so often.

Re: equivalent terms

Sunderland-built Nissans will become more expensive for French and Germans to buy: Renault, Peugeot and BMW will be very pleased about that. Sunderland's Nissan workers less so.

How can that be when everyone* agrees that sterling will tank against the Euro, thus making foreign holidays more expensive, but British exports highly desirable?

Or is it simply more Orwellian doublethink?

TGFL.

*On the remain side..

Latin-quoting Linus Torvalds plays God by not abusing mortals

Winne Ille PU dixit...

...De heffalumpis semper dubitandum est.

Universe's shock rapidly expanding waistline may squash Einstein flat

Re: Well..

Relativity and quantum mechanics do not agree with each other, so something is wrong somewhere.

One is a description of a macro world built along classical lines, the other is a description of a world behind the classical world, so to speak, so there is no reaosn why they should agree.

Its a bit like expecting the workings of a computer to obey the geometry of a picture displayed on its monitor.

Quantum reality is not a 'part of' classical reality. Classical reality is the observation of quantum reality on a macro scale.

Cart before horse.

Geek's Guide to Britain – now a book. Permission to geek out granted

You had me up to...

Already featured in The Guardian

At which point I realised that if the guardian has featured it, the general rule is avoid like the plague.

Its like my general rule "if its advertised on TV, arrives as spam in your inbox, or as a popup advert on a web site, dont buy it".

Am I the only one who would cheerfully pay an online or licence subscription NOT to be bombarded with advertising, and get cheaper products, too?

I thought about Sky, but there is even MORE advertising as WELL as a subscription.

King Tut's iron dagger of extraterrestrial origin

Re: It's an interesting bit of enconomics

Iron ore needs high temperatures and a a reducing agent - generally carbon in charcoal or latterly coal - to reduce it to the metal

I guess the African/middle eastern cultures didn't light huge roaring high temperature fires and certainly not on iron ore deposits.

Wiki says :

"It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores from China to Africa south of the Sahara."

Which suggests it may well have started in China.

Its one of those things - like rubbing two boy scouts together to make a campfire - that once you have done it, you wonder why you never thought of it before.

Of course metal smelting had been going for a long time, but iron needs a deal more heat to smelt.

Mushroom farm PC left in the dark and fed … you know the rest

Fly agaric..

I dont think anyone has died from Amanita Muscaria ever. By all accounts lots of vomiting, strange visions and ecstatic vistas eventually, but no death.

https://www.erowid.org/plants/amanitas/amanitas_info7.shtml

Amanita Pantherina(same but brown instead of red) is a lot worse. More vomit, not many visions.

But the two to really watch out for are Amanita Phalloides (Death Cap: HGreeny Brrown without spots) and Amanita Virosa (Destroying Angel :All white even the gills). Less than a mushroom will have you ill for a day, then better, then rapid death due to liver failure. There's a blog online from someone who didn't quite die after eating one.

If you ever go picking wild mushrooms, don't learn what's safe to eat, learn what is deadly and learn it well. There are only about half a dozen species that look and taste good enough to eat that will kill you.

Most of the rest simply taste revolting.

Probably a well known mediaeval alternative to a general election for getting rid of useless rulers.

Now, about that referendum ;)

Winston Churchill glowers from Blighty's plastic fiver

RE: blood, toil, tears and sweat.

And charlie.

The $64,000 question is whether the new surface is slick enough to let the coke crystals slide off.

FAA to test Brit drone-busting kit

well yes

also,there are more than one way to communicate..

Swiss effectively disappear Alps: World's largest tunnel opens

And all because the lady...

..loves Black Magic.

Brexit? Cutting the old-school ties would do more for Brit tech world

Re: From the outside looking in

Of course we are fed wall to wall propaganda, as British. But will the European Union make that worse, or better?

I've worked on a different CONTINENT. Europe itself is a hot bed of smug propaganda, as indeed is any country.

The world of politics runs on propaganda. It is essentially all lies. One eventually accepts that. It ceases to be an issue. What remains is a decision between an over centralised parochial set of lies or leaving and facing up to an independent set of lies.

Or looking beyond at the technical efficacy of a bureaucrat centralised structure, and its dynamic response to change vis - à - vis a more devolves set of quasi-autonomous structures that have greater speed of response and flexibility.

As a system engineer, the EU has all the hallmarks of being designed by a committee on ideological principle, and almost no chance of working as it is alleged was intended. And its members like those of any other political system who find themselves in power, but unable to actually effect any worthwhile change in anything, they have settled down to a life of expense accounts, generous salaries and pensions and only getting excited when their jobs are on the line.

Middle managers at best, now occupying the boardroom of a company they didn't build and dont actually understand, so all they do is fight to keep their positions.

Even a PFY probably knows better.

Like Kiplings monkeys, they spend all their time and huge sums of our money, assuring us that 'they are the greatest the wisest in all the jungle' and 'they all say it, so it must be true'.

Yeah, right. THEY want to make the argument about moral questions of race, immigration, or economic questions of loss of earnings. etc etc. But the real argument is simple. They are by any stretch of the imagination manifestly incompetent, and that is a view you only have to step outside of Europe to appreciate. That Europe is different only in degree to Zimbabwe, which is overtly run by an elite for an elite, and justified on left wing ideological grounds.

Few places are any different - the ideology may change, but the venality, the corruption, the nepotism, the implied racism or elitism (usually described as anti-elitism or antio-fascism) still exists, and always will, and that ultimately is why Britain almost alone of all nations developed a system that allowed of the removal en bloc of any clique that the rest of the country deemed had pushed it too far, by the process of election. WE didn't have the French revolution, and Napoleon, we didn't have a Russian revolution, we didn't have a fascist dictator, as dis just about every other nation in this wonderful EU.

WE ended up with a system of parliamentary democracy that just about worked. Till we threw it away and seemed to accept that a bunch of countries who have never achieved as much knew better, and should govern us.

And having thrown it all away, we have become like Europeans, prone to totalitarianism, antidemocratic fascist or communist (is there really a difference) rulers that we cannot change by the electoral process, unless we vote leave on June 25th.

Leaving the EU is not leaving Europe, its merely disengaging from a corrupt political structure that we cannot change from within, and which no longer believe serves our best interests, even if it ever did, and as far as I am concerned, no longer serves the best interest of the European peoples, if it ever did.

If we fail to leave, we will have voted to relinquish democracy, forever.

WE probably will. And it will get worse. As an Iranian friend one said 'we voted to get rid of the Shah, because he was elitist, and was spending all our money, and then - and we dont know how it happened - this exiled mullah from Paris turns up and turns the clock back 100 years and we wished we hadn't. The Shah wasn’t perfect, but he was better than what happened afterwards'

The great thing about voting leave, is that having regained our democracy, if we dont like it, we can always apply to join the EU.

The bad thing about voting remain, is that we will never ever again get a chance to leave. WE will, as a nation, cease to exist.

The Windows Phone story: From hope to dusty abandonware

Re: I wonder when Microsoft is finally going to pull the plug.

Intel aren't making low end chips because there is impossibly no way a CISC based chip can get away with the number of transistors an ARM RISC does,.

Intel would have to abandon its whole instruction set..and what would be the point?

BBC's Britflix likely dead before the ink has even dried on the news

Re: The BBC exists ...

The BBC exists to keep the TV license fee going, rather than the other way around?

All stable systems that persist in time exist initially because conditions are favourable, and continue to persist long past their sell by date, because they haven't proved to be so dysfunctional that they die an (unnatural and horrible) death.

The BBC no longer performs any useful function beyond a political mouthpiece for a narrow clique of left wing media luvvies, but it hasn't yet got to the stage of complete putrefaction that would allow a 'national institution' to be euthanased.

And it still provides a limited service for necrophiliacs.

I used to build model aeroplanes with Britflix..

Or was that Britfix?

Never mind. Senility beckons, and all I can say is that it was more fun than watching the BBC, especially as the cellulose paints both dried quickly, and gave off 'interesting' fumes...

The underbelly of simulation science: replicating the results

Re: and this is called chaos theory...

What is more concerning, is that no one at all has a clue about anything outside their narrow speciality.

Almost no scientists of the common or garden cooking variety have a clue about philosophy of science, which might tell them when their speculations are exceeding limits of applicability, and those schooled in manipulating linear equations haven't a clue about the relevance of non linear equations to almost every problem that remains unsolved, and as for the people who run politics and the media, and probably the banks too, they dont even understand what science is!

If I've had one online conversation, I've had a thousand all of which can be boiled down to a simple class

"You can't build a perpetual motion machine"

"How do you know until you have (spent a billion or ten public money) trying?"

"Science says you can't"

"But science could be wrong. It's always changing"

"Odd. I thought you lot were saying that the science was settled, and it was right"...

If only we could send all these people to a country where they could run it according to their naive idealistic principles, and simply remove themselves from the gene pool thereby..

I re-read a Jane Austen Novel last week. Jane Austen is heralded as a prototypical modern woman and feminist. However much as I enjoy her work, it has a hole in it big enough to drive ten nuclear reactors through. In Jane's society (dominated by the sensibilities of those of the female persuasion) the function of the cardboard cutout men is to provide income support and amusement for the main purpose of life, which is social climbing and a little bit of baby rearing. Only on three occasions is Work mentioned., Mrs Smith (persuasion) has to do needlework to stay alive Ugh!. And in Mansfield park the Master of the house is absent for a protracted period doing something industrious to do with slaves and sugar in the west indies or something, but this is mere plot device...and of course there is the Navy, which is one supposes more about robbing the enemy for prize money than actual work, and indeed, is eventually dismissed as utterly dull in the context of Social Life: 'Of Vices and Rears I have had my fill!' daringly exclaims one risqué protagonist.

The point? Oh the point!. Austen's Women have become the norm in the middle classes of today, endlessly discussing this and that, and being widely read and in possession of fine opinions, but all part of some game that is completely and utterly divorced from the actual realities of ensuring there is bread on the table water in the tap, the lights still work and sewage isn't piling up in the street.

It's even reached science. So called. In the pinnacle of insanity, science has ceased to become the development of models that inform us about behaviour of the reality we have already observed and is now the development of metaphysical models that seek to determine what the reality we observe shall be.

If we dont actually observe any global warming, that doesn’t disprove AGW, oh no., In fact it just shows that we need more funding to determine why stuff is stopping global warming appear to be happening, because we know it must be still happening, because the models say so.

The models no longer model pre existent reality, as a derivative product of it. Oh no, models now determine reality.

Well in a sense they always have, and that is what metaphysics is all about, but we didn't use to call it 'science' . Mostly we called it 'religion'. One might argue endlessly about why God's Will expressed itself in the way that it dim, but we never questioned that there was a God, with a Will, and that's what was really happening.

in 1600 97% of early scientists agreed that there was a God, and that was that.

Re: Computer modelling is more of an art than a science

well yes, except climate models ignore fluid dynamics turbulence and convection and most non linear effects anyway cos they are too hard to model

Wayne Rooney razzles in X-Men: Apocalypse plug

I am confused

was that promoting some collection of football players, some film, or some ginger haired twat reciting lines he had just learnt?

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

First they came for E-Cigarettes..

...is there anyone who actually believes this legislation is anything to do with protecting consumers, rather than protecting competitors profits?

June 23rd, the first step in a long road top protect ourselves against people who want us to live one way, buy one product, from them...because its all really for our own good..

GM crops are good for you and the planet, reckon boffins

Patrick Moore

I see you have bought into the rewritings of history Greenpeace has indulged in.

Re: petrochemical companies

wouldn't the petrochemical companies who are the richest and most influential groups in the world tell the gov't to say AGW isn't real?

Why? They dont lose any business from renewable energy that doesn't actually work, and renewable energy doesn't actually work.

They end up selling a little less gas into an energy market that is suddenly far more lucrative, because the competition have raised the expectation of energy costs.

As far as liquid hydrocarbons go, the market is identical. All the oil majors looked at hydrogen, solar cells, BEVS, biofuels etc. and came to their won private conclusions, shut down their 'green' programs and went back to selling gasoline and avjet and diesel. Why? Because renewable energy simply is no threat. Because fundamentally it doesn't really work commercially.

Germany goes into a righteous orgasm of Energiewiende and shuts down its nukes, and ends up burning more fossil fuel than ever.

Shell BP and Gazprom snigger quietly.

Re: The National Academies

The National Academies have also produced research supporting man-made climate change, so can't really be attacked as business stooges.

Are you saying that there simply is no money to be made out of 'man made climate change the political and marketing movement'?

I've got a few trillion greenbacks that say different.

Re: Gene escape

The precautionary principle says we should uninvent the wheel. And indeed all of civilisation, because we simply dont know where its going

ON an entirely separate note, The EU believes that the precautionary principle should be the mainstay of its (environ)mental policy...

Re: When electricity was first introduced....

Well if you dont think you are sensitive to EM radiation, go and lie naked on a beach in the carribean all day, or hang out for a week inside the containment thingy at Chernobyl. and if you dont think you are sensitive to wind turbines, go and live within 100m of one.

It is manifestly a matter of degree, and shame on you for using such crude politically biased binary logic in a world which has many shades of grey. GM crops are different. That's the WHOLE point. And they may indeed represent some changes that are negative as well as positive. I happen to think they are overall probably a Good Thing, but that certainly doesn't mean I am in favour of stupid Windmills, which have far more negatives and no discernible positives.

The PC is dead. Gartner wishes you luck, vendors

Re: PCs are no longer the first or only devices users are choosing for internet access,"

I think the point here is that domestic customers, and to a large extent many corporates, have dumped the PC, especially where all they actually want is internet access.

The PC has been a two pronged fork - business workstation and low level domestic and corporate network access device.

The second prong is now essentially dead. What that means is that there will be a huge drop in sales volume of both the desktop hardware, and windows software, in favour of android type devices.

And the severe risk that in more professional situations, running bespoke code, the PC will be running Linux instead of windows.

Girls outpace boys in US IT and engineering test

I attend a technical mentoring group

At my old college. Engineering. There are lots of girls doing PHds in engineering these days, and what marks out the people I have met is not that the girls are better than the boys, but that the overseas students are infinitely more world wise, and mature than the UK ones.

To the point where it is embarrassing and saddening.

I guess if your parents are paying upwards of 100k to get you to a university that the Brits get a loan to attend, a loan they can easily evade by emigrating, or simply not paying back because they never earn enough, you would take it all more seriously.

Let me assure you that there are some bright - extremely bright - and competent engineers on the way of the female persuasion, from places like S Africa, Venezuela, Chile, Latvia, and Poland, and I have met them.

Sadly there are not many that good coming from Britain, where they would still rather be clubbing than studying. Not that I can talk on that matter, but I did at least take an interest in the subject.

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise salute EU flag, blast Brexiteers

One final thought.

Its fairly clear that Brexit would in the end trigger the collapse and breakup of the Union. And a lot of Turkeys would find Christmas came early this year.

What is less clear is whether the Union is indeed viable even if Britain votes to stay in it.

My personal perspective, expressed elsewhere is that it's not. The EU is so centralised and large its incapable of responding effectively to events, and that has been utterly rammed home by the financial and immigration crises.

In some senses whether Britain marginally (and it looks like it will be a very narrow margin indeed) votes in, or out, is almost irrelevant. The tides of history are showing up the existential dangers of over-centralisation, just as they did in the Soviet Union.

I would prefer we leave now, and be early adopters of common sense, but if we persist in our folly, we will eventually, like the Americans, do the right thing 'after we have exhausted every other alternative'. The only difference is how much misery and wasted money we might have saved.

Leaving the EU is not turning our backs on Europe, becoming isolationist, giving in to xenophobia or indeed an instant cure for immigration issues. It is a single step on a road towards constructing a better model of governance better able to meet 21st century needs than the 19th century Brussels based 'Reich' we now have.

Its not looking backwards, it's looking forwards.

Given the state of the polls right now, and the amounts of money being poured into the campaign, Id say I'll get slightly more downvotes than upvotes for this.

Even that doesn't matter. The tides of history are stronger than any bunch of Cnuts who try and evade their effect, and what will be, will in the end be.

Cmon guys, some of you have studied system theory...

Which is able to respond faster to inputs, and is more stable, a series of units with localised feedback coupled together with quite low overall feedback, or a mass of units coupled together all with delays and lags and just one overall feedback path?

I mean, your car has spark advance and retard and mixture controls on the dashboard so you, the centralised authority, can monitor the engine state and continually adjust it as road conditions change?

Of course it doesn't. The engine management system is almost completely autonomous and the only input the driver has is the go faster pedal, and even that isn't less and less mechanically connected.

How many more incredibly bad decisions, incompetent blunders, failure to respond in time or adequately do we have to live through before the real reason for Brexit, that a tightly controlled political Union is a totally cr@p way to run a continent, for reasons that have nothing to do with politiics or ideology, becomes apparent?

Igf I wanted to design a political system for a stable and flexible response to a changing world, out of te peoples of Europe, the first idea I would throw out would be a massive single centralised bureaucracy.

Id probably start with tribes, and small geographical units, and put localised feedback in this, and call them 'counties' and then have them represented at a larger scale in pockets of similar geography, called 'countries. and then have a very very lightweight executive, probably on a voluntary basis, to handle continent wide issues.

I certainly wouldn't have Germany trying to replicate the British Empire, in the 21st century.

Empires are so last century.

If microsft are for it...

Its gotta be bad for me.

Brexit it is then.

5% of drivers want Nigel Farage to be their in-car robo butler

Re: where is Ed milliband?

Who is Ed Milliband?

Want a Brexit? Promise you'll sort out UK universities' £1bn research cash loss

The answer is...

..that the UK is not a net beneficiary of EU funds. Ergo it could afford to replace all EU funding with direct funding by the UK government on leaving, out of the money saved by not propping up Eurocrats and Eastern European failed states.

In the end what counts is the funding, not the tortuous route it has to take from taxpayer to UK government to EU government to largesses that buys EU loyalty, all with a whopping commission deducted at every stage.

If you want to see UK research well funded, why not vote brexit, vote for lower taxes and leave your estate to a university?

That way you cut out the greasy political middle men altogether.

The nearest thing to democracy that exists is the debit card, the internet, and the right to keep what money you earn and spend it on what you, not some political bureaucracies, choose.

Kids these days can't even write a decent virus

so its official then?

Microsoft Windows is the greatest threat to the Internet there is?

UK needs comp sci grads, so why isn't it hiring them?

Compsci - doan make me larf..

As a former IT boss, I have hired mathematicians (superb), [software] engineers' (superb) Natural science grads (Often plodders, but very competent and reliable coders). And once a compsci. Never again.

There may be a need for a compsci graduate somewhere in the world, but it isn't in a busy IT house configuring and installing, coding testing and debugging, and getting stuff done.

The job is already out to the customer before the compsci has established most complex and obfuscated (simple and elegant, to any other compsci, Sir) way to express it in a language no one else has even heard of, let alone acquired fluency in.

You do NOT want to hear 'this bug would never have happened if it had been written in modula 2' when its actually in 8086 assembler.

Compsci - doan make me larf..

As a former IT boss, I have hired mathematicians (superb), [software][ engineers' (superb) Natural science grads (Often plodders, but very competent and reliable coders). And once a compsci. Never again.

Ther may be a need for a compsci graduate somewhere in te workld, but it isnt in a busy IT house configuring and installing, coding testing and debugging, and getting stuff done.

The job is already out to the customer before the compsci has established the most complex and obfuscated (simple and elegant, to any other compsci, Sir) way to express it in a language no one else has even heard of, let alone acquired fluency in.

You do NOT want to hear 'this bug would never have happened if it had be written in modula 2' when its actually in 8086 assembler.

Radiohead vid prompts Trumpton rumpus

Dull incomprehensible video...

to match a dull incomprehensible song.

Perfect.

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Re: Now build a few dozen more...

Sorry, folks, you wanted wind and solar to power nations.

No, I never did, because it cant.

You need power storage that can match those demands and there's no simple, cheap solution.

There's no solution at all, even complex and expensive. Especially in terms of storing summer solar energy for winter usage.

Renewable energy is pretty much dead in the water as any competent electrical engineer can calculate for you. It doesn't work now and it never will.

Largely its there to make money out of stupid consumers and to buy stupid green votes with.

On those terms its been a spectacular success. It just fails to generate useful net amounts of energy at costs exceeding even the most ill-conceived nuclear plant...

Re: Viewing habits

I wonder if they still get the same kind of peaks these days with everyone's PVRs skipping the ads or people watching on-demand?

http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk

Re: Great article

Well no, its far more like a battery, since its voltage output is constant, and its the current draw that varies, whereas a capacitor displays a falling voltage as it discharges.

Re: Great article

Correction:

Something rather more compact and not limited by local terrain would be be needed if we had to increasingly rely on intermittent power sources.

However since no such technology exists, nor even the possibility of it, and we dont have to rely on intermittent power sources, we will continue to rely on non intermittent power sources.

PS the stated efficiency of 76% is as good as or better than any other storage facility of similar capacity, and its not Victorian technology. Its Edwardian (Heath) technology IIRC.

Dwarf planet intumesces before astronomers' gaze

sort of dull red?

OBVIOUSLY a rusting Vogon planetary bypass construction vehicle.

Call it VoDoza.

First successful Hyperloop test module hits 100mph in four seconds

Re: Technical Question

What is the speed of sound in a "near vacuum"?

Oddly enough, it doesn't change much...

"For a given ideal gas with constant heat capacity and composition, the speed of sound is dependent solely upon temperature; see Details below. In such an ideal case, the effects of decreased density and decreased pressure of altitude cancel each other out, save for the residual effect of temperature."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound

Re: So many luddites...

and lot's of people don't think electric cars will work either, but we are well on our way to achieving it.

Well really, are we?

Or is that a perception fostered by interested parties.

WE are as stalled and stuck with electric cars as we have been since their invention back in the dying gasp on the 19th century.

Lithium as a battery material has made them almost feasible, but lithium technology is now well developed and there is not a lot more to come in terms of energy density, which is the real target.

I am a great fan of electric vehicles of all sorts, but I am only too aware of the inherent limitations of batteries.

There is a faint possibility that a lithium air battery might just break the energy density barrier and be as good as fuel in terms of recoverable watt hours per lb. But that's it. A faint possibility.

And at what cost?

Re: Nonsense

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia. - Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London.

And the whole point of the 'loop, is to finally make this statement true...;-)

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Re: Two things...

You forgot the third thing. The cost and scarcity of someone who knows that wot u sed was the 'right' way to do it..

You have no IDEA how really computer illiterate 99% of businesses really are. Yea, even unto fortune 500 companies.

They buy some stuff, a PFY installs it. It works to do what teh job requires, and they learn JUST enough to make it do that.

to any astroturfing MS shills....

My neighbour was so upset confused and paranoid about M$ insistence he install windows 10 (have I caught a virus?) that he asked me to install Linux instead.

His laptop runs faster now than it ever did on Win7.

Brit polar vessel christened RRS Sir David Attenborough

Re: a triumph for commonsense

The trouble is, that idiotic twattery is democratic, which we are told is a DamnedGudThing.

I am pondering the stability of a highly complex technological system that denies anyone a decent education, and gives them a vote instead.

Boaty McBoatface is harmless enough.

But I've seen city councils get voted in to 'get rid of city traffic', do so, and then wonder why 'the high street is almost derelict'.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

All of this hate and resistance to change...

..is reserved for people who think change for its own sake is progress.

I have this cool modern car with square wheels to sell you sir...

so what's it got...

...that mint 17 has not?