> So where can I find these refutations (backed by research figures)?
>
Having followed the topic as an interested lay-person for the last 20 years, I find it the need to refute attempted dismissals of climate change hypothesis hard to comprehend. However, the point of the exercise is to build a solid list of such refutations. I have a fwe dozen things listed in various bokomarks files, but clearly what's needed is a systematic lists of properly sourced and justified sources.
At some point it'll probably come down to *toc-toc-toc* these scientists are all crazy!" on the part of the nay-sayers. At that point I suspect we'll have to resort to simply shrugging and saying "well if you're not going to accept the science that makes your computers run, models atomic reactions to 1x10^20th degree of accuracy, etc etc (pick your favourite metric) - you might as well be arguing that an invsible Snarg Monster is reading everything you type over your shoulder - ie., the arguments are beyond the arena of rational debate and may therefore be dismissed as unscientific, irrational etc etc. The difference is that *after* this exercise, I'll be able to point nay-sayers to chapter and verse before insulting them;)
I've been getting gincreasingly despondent reading climate change stories on Slashdot over the last few years, seeing well-established science ridiculed and ignored by people apparently intelligent enough to know better. In particular I see the same tired old straw man arguments, deliberate canards, propaganda, misinterpretion and plain ol' ignorance trotted out again and again. No doubt the comments here are full of the same nonsense - see below for my working list of tired attempts to refute rationality.
After the most recent Slashdot story I actually steeled myself to do something about it. I re-read the whole story at Threshold 2 to gather UIDs of people who might help. The idea is to build a list of myths and authoritative answers to them. For example, the old line that the sun's getting hotter, and that this explains global warming, comes up over & over again. Many, very patient! and knowledgable people posted to that story with excellent refutations of such nonsense.
I'm going to put my plaintext mail address in this comment, that's how serious I am about this! You can even help if you believe that Climate Change is hippie nonsense trotted out by pseudo scientists who just want more funding!!
What I am looking for:
A list of skeptical objections to the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are changing the climate, and that this is a bad thing. I don't really mind how loopy or paraniod your objections are: whatever reason you use to claim that it's nonsense, let me know so I can add it to the list.
More importantly - people who can help prepare authoritative, rational refutations of these assertions.
If you have violent objections to the idea that global warming is a bad thing, please email me at the address below describing why you think this. As you will see if you hit 'see the rest of this comment', the existing list - which were collected from a single Slashdot story - is already pretty long, so this isn't so vital.
If you can help knock down such gibberish- if you have posted with a calm, well-argued and ideally knowledgable or carefully referenced refutation of a wild claim - please email me and make yourself known; I will get in touch in the next few days.
If you want to subscribe me to lots of spam lists, don't bother; Gmail are very good at spam filtering, you'll get yourself blacklisted when I hit 'report spam' and you won't be helping your cause one little bit.
If you can help, mail me at:
username: imipak; domain (at): gmail.com
Here's the list I collected from the last Slashdot climate change story, only a few days ago, about "why anthropogenic climate change is a myth". Read it and weep.
We only have temperature records for the last few hundred years.
The sun is getting hotter.
Climate change == global warming - great! It's too cold where I am!
Climate change is pseudo-science
Climate change is just a theory - we should wait until it's proven
before taking action
Climate scientists deliberately falsify and/or manufacture fake data
to support the theory, because otherwise they wouldn't get grants for
further research.
Climate science is skewed by unconcious assumptions that climate
change is anthropomorphic
Climate change is a conspiracy by the UN or the French or Europeans or Chinese to hurt the USA
Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans (several variants on this one - eg
more than all humans ever, this year, etc)
For every scientist who predicts global warming doom and gloom, you
will find as many who say that it isn't happening, or that human
activity isn't a significant factor.
we are barely 10,000 years out of our last one, and may still be
warming FROM it? 10,000 years are mere seconds in geologic time.
the Earth has sustained worse temperature fluxations. (variants: in
human history / last 10,000 years / lifetime of the planet)
(Pardon me, I feel compelled to relapse into the local vernacular for a moment...)
A'roight owld butt? Ow bist g'wan on?
*cough* that's better. Now, the fact is that down the in (British) West Country, we've been building sustainable housing for years. here's a straw house, for example - alas it fell foul of the planning regs and the local council are insisting it be demolished; but it'll be back up in a day or two.
cheers geezer:) Yep I know something will turn up when I need to it.. which is about now, actually! To be fair I have to say that the pleasure in waking up at 7am every day & remembering I have nothing more important to do but walk around the local woods picking up litter (IO'm in the Forest of Dean on Welsh border, beautiful countryside) and then do a fe pages proofreading for Project Guteneburg, then over to/. for some metamod is still considerable.
The excellent satire / investigative journalism magazine, Private Eye, has been digging up stuff related to EDS and government contracts for many years now - before the Blair government IIRC. Google doesn't find anything on their website, though, last time I looked it just had a few cartoons up rather than any article archives, which is a shame... this is the only reference I've turned up. I recommend the paper version of Private Eye, I've been reading it since 1983 and it's never less than amusing, sometimes 'piss yourself in public' funny, and the investigative journalism has turned up a lot of stories before anyone else was looking at them.
I'm signing on at the moment and noticed the 'EDS' badge on the side of the Jobpoint machines. These aer standalone appliances (literally, they're large freestanding devices with no visible interface apart from a flatpanel touchscreen; the UI looks like Flash to me. You occasionally see a flicker of a scrollbar on one side of the screen, it looks like Winders underneath.) These are actually pretty good, probably cos they've got one simple job to do, allow people to browse the jobs database and print off details of anything interesting (there's a thermal paper printer, rather like a shop till.)
However the rest of their systems look terrible. in particular, they're now forced to do a search for the jobs yuo've said yuo'er looking for, in front of you, before you sign. (For ex-UK people, the way it works is that you turn up once a fortnight, sign on the dotted line, and recieve a cheque / fnuds transfer to your bank a/c a fwe days later. I get GBP53 a week which I think is the standard rate.)
The desktops run a revolting system that appears to have a Visual Basic front end - it has that awful "Wow, look how many colours I can use on one form!" look UI that I thought died out in 1995/96 - probably after this system was implemented. Watching them search is *painful*; they have to enter multiple arbitrary codes (for the job types, and for the geographical area to search) that are apparently random strings of numbers and letters. Watching staff using the interface it's obvious no proper HCI clue went into it - they've been taught how to use it in a 'monkey see, monkey do' style. "Click here, then pull down this menu, enter that code from the other dialog, click OK, and again, then CANCEL, then stand on one leg with fingers crossed UNLESS IT'S A WEDNESDAY..." horrible.
Of couse I'm looking for particular kinds of job - pentesting, security consultant, Linux system or network admin, Perl / Apache development work. This all comes under one category (of thousands) CM297 or some such. Naturally the best fit they've *ever* found for me was "Sales assistent at PC World":(((
Naturally I would rather starve than sell people Windows for a living; as I've been signing for 13 weeks, they have now told me I have to accept the first thing offered - I'm stuck in the countryside where there are few proper IT jobs, so that would mean working as a cleaner or 'carer' (wiping arses of OAPs in care homes...:((( ) or they'll cut off my dole. I told them to sign me off and walked out - so hearing about this catastrophe this morning brought a sick warm glow of schadenfreude to me.
Fortunately Jobserve and OSTG have some reasonable things in the area & I have a couple of promising interviews lined up for the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed... it's gonna be a pretty crappy christmas if I don't get something, the insurance payments on my car are about to lapse, "result: misery" as Dickens said.
Way to go, FBI! [/sarcasm] I can't imagine many acts more calculated to alienate infosec geeks from the FBI in particular, and the US govt / law enforcement forces in general.
(Not as OT as it seems: the new head of the CIA, Porter Goss, has said that all CIA officers must support the Bush government's policies. Draw your own conclusions about political control of instruments of the state - extra credit for reference to the early years after the 1917 revolution and Marxist/Leninist thought. Oh and whilst I'm giong dopwn tangents, I just read today that a key political ally for the US in Iraq is... the ICP (Iraqi Communist Party)! (No, that's just the first Google result, not where I read it.))
More obviously on-topic - I have worked as a penetration tester, including work for one of the five most significant financial institutions in the world and many large corporates. Naturally Nmap was probably the single most important app I used. I'd just like to thank Fyodor for Nmap and to offer my own, insignificant, support in knocking back spurious and dangerous attempts to institute a surveillance society and remove our freedoms in the name of (ha!) security.
Hollywood does depth really badly. Even if they manage to fit all of The Watchmen into two hours while still keeping its shape, they're going to end up turning it into just another superhero team movie.
Given the horrible dog's dinner Holywood made of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I have a nasty feeling this will also severely suck. I just finished reading the utterly, utterly stupendous 'From Hell' - the detailed notes in the Appendix giving sources and showing the incredible amount of research he did utterly blew me away. It's the sort of text that stays with you for days or weeks afterwards. It made me really want search out Hawksmore's churches next time in London. I lived nearby to Herne Hill for 8 years, and less than 100 yards from the now-entombde River Effra (which now runs in a culvert under Effra Road in Brixton) and had no idea about the historical significance of those locations. I've also stayed with friends in King's Cross many times - I had no idea about the Bodicea link in Battle Bridge Road. In fact, given their location is walking distance from Whitechapel and Spitalfields I can see a long day of walking around with the A-Z, photocopies of relevant bits of From Hell loking for the locations. In fact I also worked across the road from the NatWest Tower, as featured in the climactic murder scene in Mitre Square. It takes a man from Northampton to open my eyes to the... uh.. magic?:)... all around me at that time.
ISTR 'From Hell' was also filmed (a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120681/">aha ! SmartSearch++) any Alan Moore fans care to offer an opinion about how good / faithful it was?
"You know you can go down to Dealey Plaza where Kennedy was
assassinated. And you can actually go to the 6th floor of the
Schoolbook Depository [...] Anyway, they have the window set up to
look exactly as it did on that day. And it's really accurate you know,..
'cos Oswald's not in it. [...] You can't actually get to the window
itself, and the reason they did that of course, they didn't want
thousands of American tourists getting there each year going [mimes
aiming rifle] 'No fucking WAY! I can't even see the ROAD!
Shit, they're
lying to us! FUCK! WHERE ARE THEY?? THERE'S NO
FUCKING WAY!' Not unless Oswald was hanging by his toes upside down
from the ledge. Either that or some pigeons grabbde onto him, flew
hinmn over teh motorcade... surely someone would have seen that? You
know there was rumours of anti-Castro pigeons seen drinking in
bars... someone overheard them saying 'coup, coup. Coup'
'Love All The People', Constable & Robinson, 2004.
Bill Hicks, still sadly missed (by us in the UK, who've heard of him,
anyway. Yeah he was from Austin, Texas.)
> Who am I? Why, I'm a Marine who got back from Iraq
> not long ago.
>
Wow, really? You truly are a polymath then. I've been keeping a private list of interesting things claimed by specific Slashdot posters; "I am a doctor", "I am a rocket scientist" and so forth. When I went to add your ID and username to the list, I found that someone else must have stolen your identity, because I'd already logged someone using your account name and UID as stating "I'm the I.T. Director for a large organization..." (Sorry, I don't track hrefs for each comment, because I didn't think I'd need to refer back to them, but that's a direct quote from a comment.) I guess it'd be in one of these previous comments but I'm on expensive dialup & haven't the time to go trawling for the exact comment.
So, you're the IT Director for the US Marine Corps? Wow, that must be a hell of a job; and you have to see active service as well! Well, good luck avoiding suicide bombers, 'insurgents' and other freedo^h^h^h terrorist types.
Ah, but how can you be sure? I thought I'd got over adolescent reading of Dunne and Priestly until I read 'Fabric of the Cosmos' by Brian Greene who asks the real, profound, question of 'What is time?" (as opposed to: 'What do we mean by "time" ', "How did time begin" and so on.) The upshot is that thermodynamics is the only area of physics that requires time to move in a given direction. My guess is that there are a lot of questions here that are ignored by physicists and comsmologists on account of they don't want to be reduced back to the answer "Because!":)
After posting (sorry) I did likewise and of course you're right - however (and this of course is the bit I forgot to mention in the original post) I DO remember seeing a large illuminated '42' at the top of the building after dark. IIRC Nat West sold it off to whoever it is that decided to try making it a landmark restaurant/bar place, they must have opened for business not long before 2001. FWIW I think the green or blue pastel blur at the top of some of the shots is actually the sign.
Having frittered away a couple of hours the other night painstakingly transcribing the lyrics from this, er, record (which I personally rate rather highly) I am now compelled to fight the lameness filter & post 'em here - for the second time in as many days, but this time it's ontopic:)
Oh and 'Liswerry' is a suburb of Newport, ten miles ---> thataway. I should also point out that the B side ('soapbar') is skill as well. "Two Four to Base, Over..." Laugh, I nearly did.
<b>Guns Don't Kill People - Rappers Do</b><br>(cod police on loud-hailer) Come out with your hands on your head Turn the rap music off and step away from the stereo Put the rap album down... leave MC Hammer alone. Turn it off<br>Guns don't kill people - rappers do - Ask any politician and they'll tell you it's true - It's a fact music makes you violent - Like Michael Jackson telling little timmy to be silent You don't believe me? Here's my hype Offer me the record and I'll show you the type of criminal this rap shit is breeding It's a fact that MC Hammer left me bleeding <br>Vanilla Ice made my mother say 'fuck' If it was UB40 I would have been in love But I didn't - I got it wrong Cypress fuckin Hill taught me to make a fuckin bong <br>Well I started - I bought another tape The Power Boy Snap made my cock and balls ache So remember kids - to the head, double tap - Guns don't kill people - it's just rap (rpt chorus) Guns don't kill people - rappers do I seen it in a documentary on BBC 2 Shot to death outside 'ypervalue Guns blazin - like Michael Caine in Zulu. Gun crime statistics are sometimes misleadin The type of criminal rap is breeding Shot in the chest - no wonder you're stopping breathin "Two-four to base, over - are you recieving?"
Remember rap tracks in '87? Scott La Rock's up in ip op Eaven Biggie and Tupac - RIP Even Jam Master Jack's in the cemetery (chorus) Guns don't kill people rappers do I'm a fuckin rapper and I might kill you As a rapper I'm teaching you a lesson AK47 to Smith and Wesson Just say no just like Zammo Bulletproof vest to Guns 'n' Ammo Hip Hop gangsta tripping - Even Eminem's into pistol whipping
It's like crew to murder one P. Diddy J Lo in a nightclub with a gun Heard Snoop Dogg now wants to bust a cap Guns don't kill people - it's just rap
One Two you'll face my shoe The name's Mike Balls and I'm coming throuhg Gun crime stabbing and burglarisation Is on the rise all across the nation The safety's off and the pistol's aimed The yardies and the mafia always get blamed Politians are shamed and they haven't got a clue Rap is more deadly than fuckin kung fu
(chorus)
Guns don't kill people - rappers do From Bristol Zoo to B&Q I wanna rap - I wanna rhyme Heard it in a song, now I'm into gun crime It's a sign of the times, like Prince changing his name Got to have a shooter to be in the rap game I'm Michael Ryan about to snap - Guns don't kill people - it's just rap (rpt chorus) Guns! Rappers! x4
Personally I think that's one of the best tunes of the last couple of years.
Like many geeks with issues:) I have been idly thinking about such things for many years - 25 or so. I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible to build a self-contained building (or even a subsection of a building) for less than a lot more money than anyone here has. Of course I'm talking about survivability against earthquakes - possible even in places like New England, fact fans! - large tidal waves of the sort caused by a 10,000y impactor over ocean, NBC, *AND* such things as marauding mobs of glowing irradiated zombie soldiers from the invading Sovs...
My London friends' approach to planning for something unpleasant of 911 proportions ("hey, if it happens, it happens") starts to look less irrational.
Bad form to followup my own post but I just found this:
http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:yGikzAd9umcJ:www.technicalaccess.com/grafix/site/access_platfo rm/case_studies/natwest/image8.jpg
The planview of the tower is the 70s NatWest logo.
Well I never.
This wouldn't have been Tower 42 which includes a bar and a restaurant ?
Yes, I imagine it probably was. But I can't see from the pictures in those links whether there is a big green 42 on the top of the building.
The building's still better known (to Londoners of a certain age, anyway) as the Nat West Tower - it was built for them (a large UK bank) in the 70s IIRC and was the tallest building in the UK for some time (several years IIRC.)
This google search finds some good pics of it under that name, I haven't the time to iterate thru the otions but variations on 'NatWest', 'Nat West' etc should find it.
Side note - I used to work for a dotcom in offices less than 100 yards from the base of the tower. (I used to use the cashpoint there at lunchtime...) However they went tits-up as the bubble popped and thus I was sitting unemployed at home five weeks later - Sept. 11th. Must say that the thought "I'm glad I'm not in Bishopsgate right now" did cross my mind.
>Do what you like to it visually, what the fuck, >bring in a fucking rapper to play ford, but >its still ours....
In honour of the fact that they're from Newport, five miles down the A40, I present to you the wise words of the mighty 'Goldie Looking Chains':
Guns Don't Kill People - Rappers Do
(cod police on loud-hailer) Come out with your hands on your head Turn the rap music off and step away from the stereo. Put the rap album down... leave MC Hammer alone. Turn it off!
Guns don't kill people - rappers do Ask any politician and they'll tell you it's true It's a fact music makes you violent Like Michael Jackson telling little timmy to be silent. You don't believe me? Here's my hype - Offer me the record and I'll show you the type of criminal this rap shit is breeding - It's a fact that MC Hammer left me bleeding Vanilla Ice made my mother say 'fuck' If it was UB40 I would have been in love But I didn't - I got it wrong Cypress fuckin Hill taught me to make a fuckin bong Well I started - I bought another tape The Power Boy Snap made my cock and balls ache So remember kids - to the head, double tap - Guns don't kill people - it's just rap
Guns don't kill people - rappers do. I seen it in a documentary on BBC 2. Shot to death outside Hypervalue - Guns blazin - like Michael Caine in Zulu. Gun crime statistics are sometimes misleadin The type of criminal rap is breeding Shot in the chest - no wonder you're stopping breathin "Two-four to base, over - are you recieving?"
Remember rap tracks in '87? Scott La Rock's up in 'ip 'op 'Eaven Biggie and Tupac - RIP Even Jam Master Jay's in the cemetery (chorus) Guns don't kill people - rappers do I'm a fuckin rapper and I might kill you As a rapper I'm teaching you a lesson AK47 to Smith and Wesson Just say no just like Zammo Bulletproof vest to Guns 'n' Ammo Hip Hop gangsta tripping - Even Eminem's into pistol whipping
It's like crew to murder one P. Diddy J Lo in a nightclub with a gun Heard Snoop Dogg now wants to bust a cap Guns don't kill people - it's just rap
One Two you'll face my shoe The name's Mike Balls and I'm coming throuhg Gun crime stabbing and burglarisation Is on the rise all across the nation The safety's off and the pistol's aimed The yardies and the mafia always get blamed Politians are shamed and they haven't got a clue Rap is more deadly than fuckin kung fu
(chorus)
Guns don't kill people - rappers do From Bristol Zoo to B&Q I wanna rap - I wanna rhyme Heard it in a song, now I'm into gun crime It's a sign of the times, like Prince changing his name Got to have a shooter to be in the rap game I'm Michael Ryan about to snap - Guns don't kill people - it's just rap
The Beeb's microsite suggests they have not one - not even two - but three whole new series of shows. I make that another nine hours. Sounds good so far judging by the trailer...
Due to desperate financial straits I've been reduced to hitting slashdot once a week in a terse frenzy of HTTP GETs, grabbing everything I see that looks interesting in one frenzy. I then get to sit reading for the next week/fortnight without running up bandwidth charges.
I just broke my rule and went back online to reply to this as soon as I saw it.
I beg the Slashdot editorial staff with as much emphasis as I can - PLEASE, change the Stars and Stripes logo!!!
I know in the US everything gets draped in the flag, but for much of the rest of the world it's a symbol with many more layers of cultural meaning than you perhaps realise. You risk blowing away one of the key features that has kept Slashdot interesting for me since I first started reading - before there were user accounts, IIRC - namely the nationality-neutral way stuff is presented. The 9/11 coverage was a great example of the unexpected benefits of this - the US, and other western (Canadian, European,..) and other posters from all round the world contributed to those stories.
It risks cheapening and diminishing something very precious. Please, change the logo.
This comment comes courtesy of my Dad's very old pentium - pentium nothing that is - running win89 with _four year old_ virus definitions. On pirated a/v software. He uses IE and Outlook.
I ran a couple of free online virus checkers over it and was surprised to find no evidence it's been owned or infected with anything. Perhaps cos it's only on dialup and he only visits two or three websites - banking type stuff. I haven't managed to educate him about not clicking links in emails though...
That said when I wanted to move some files down to my Linux box, Windows refused to install a NIC without the original access media (you guessed it, some friendly local amateur upgraded it to 98 using their own media.) Knoppix to the rescue:)
I'm catching up with Frank Miller's 'Sin City' series. Frank was the author of 'Dark Knight', one of the classic early new-wave-of-literate-comics in the 80s (along with Watchmen) and basis of the first Batman film.
Incidentally rumour has it that the Batmobile in the upcoming Batman film looks like Miller drew it in Dark Knight (vaguely oscene, a steroid-engorged phallus type thing...) Let's hope the rest of the story's used, too. I wanna see the Mayor being eaten!:))
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking from memory, the average depth of ice over Greenland is approx 1km, and there are NO parts of the land mass that are not covered by ice. Incidentally those glaciers are melting about twice as fast as the models that the nay-sayers have been happily dismissing as wild dooom-mongering have predicted.
Having followed the topic as an interested lay-person for the last 20 years, I find it the need to refute attempted dismissals of climate change hypothesis hard to comprehend. However, the point of the exercise is to build a solid list of such refutations. I have a fwe dozen things listed in various bokomarks files, but clearly what's needed is a systematic lists of properly sourced and justified sources.
At some point it'll probably come down to *toc-toc-toc* these scientists are all crazy!" on the part of the nay-sayers. At that point I suspect we'll have to resort to simply shrugging and saying "well if you're not going to accept the science that makes your computers run, models atomic reactions to 1x10^20th degree of accuracy, etc etc (pick your favourite metric) - you might as well be arguing that an invsible Snarg Monster is reading everything you type over your shoulder - ie., the arguments are beyond the arena of rational debate and may therefore be dismissed as unscientific, irrational etc etc. The difference is that *after* this exercise, I'll be able to point nay-sayers to chapter and verse before insulting them ;)
Please help me out...
Please help me out...
After the most recent Slashdot story I actually steeled myself to do something about it. I re-read the whole story at Threshold 2 to gather UIDs of people who might help. The idea is to build a list of myths and authoritative answers to them. For example, the old line that the sun's getting hotter, and that this explains global warming, comes up over & over again. Many, very patient! and knowledgable people posted to that story with excellent refutations of such nonsense.
I'm going to put my plaintext mail address in this comment, that's how serious I am about this! You can even help if you believe that Climate Change is hippie nonsense trotted out by pseudo scientists who just want more funding!!
What I am looking for:
If you have violent objections to the idea that global warming is a bad thing, please email me at the address below describing why you think this. As you will see if you hit 'see the rest of this comment', the existing list - which were collected from a single Slashdot story - is already pretty long, so this isn't so vital.
If you can help knock down such gibberish- if you have posted with a calm, well-argued and ideally knowledgable or carefully referenced refutation of a wild claim - please email me and make yourself known; I will get in touch in the next few days.
If you want to subscribe me to lots of spam lists, don't bother; Gmail are very good at spam filtering, you'll get yourself blacklisted when I hit 'report spam' and you won't be helping your cause one little bit.
If you can help, mail me at:
username: imipak; domain (at): gmail.com
Here's the list I collected from the last Slashdot climate change story, only a few days ago, about "why anthropogenic climate change is a myth". Read it and weep.
*cough* that's better. Now, the fact is that down the in (British) West Country, we've been building sustainable housing for years. here's a straw house, for example - alas it fell foul of the planning regs and the local council are insisting it be demolished; but it'll be back up in a day or two.
cheers geezer :) Yep I know something will turn up when I need to it.. which is about now, actually! To be fair I have to say that the pleasure in waking up at 7am every day & remembering I have nothing more important to do but walk around the local woods picking up litter (IO'm in the Forest of Dean on Welsh border, beautiful countryside) and then do a fe pages proofreading for Project Guteneburg, then over to /. for some metamod is still considerable.
The excellent satire / investigative journalism magazine, Private Eye, has been digging up stuff related to EDS and government contracts for many years now - before the Blair government IIRC. Google doesn't find anything on their website, though, last time I looked it just had a few cartoons up rather than any article archives, which is a shame... this is the only reference I've turned up. I recommend the paper version of Private Eye, I've been reading it since 1983 and it's never less than amusing, sometimes 'piss yourself in public' funny, and the investigative journalism has turned up a lot of stories before anyone else was looking at them.
However the rest of their systems look terrible. in particular, they're now forced to do a search for the jobs yuo've said yuo'er looking for, in front of you, before you sign. (For ex-UK people, the way it works is that you turn up once a fortnight, sign on the dotted line, and recieve a cheque / fnuds transfer to your bank a/c a fwe days later. I get GBP53 a week which I think is the standard rate.) The desktops run a revolting system that appears to have a Visual Basic front end - it has that awful "Wow, look how many colours I can use on one form!" look UI that I thought died out in 1995/96 - probably after this system was implemented. Watching them search is *painful*; they have to enter multiple arbitrary codes (for the job types, and for the geographical area to search) that are apparently random strings of numbers and letters. Watching staff using the interface it's obvious no proper HCI clue went into it - they've been taught how to use it in a 'monkey see, monkey do' style. "Click here, then pull down this menu, enter that code from the other dialog, click OK, and again, then CANCEL, then stand on one leg with fingers crossed UNLESS IT'S A WEDNESDAY..." horrible.
Of couse I'm looking for particular kinds of job - pentesting, security consultant, Linux system or network admin, Perl / Apache development work. This all comes under one category (of thousands) CM297 or some such. Naturally the best fit they've *ever* found for me was "Sales assistent at PC World" :(((
Naturally I would rather starve than sell people Windows for a living; as I've been signing for 13 weeks, they have now told me I have to accept the first thing offered - I'm stuck in the countryside where there are few proper IT jobs, so that would mean working as a cleaner or 'carer' (wiping arses of OAPs in care homes... :((( ) or they'll cut off my dole. I told them to sign me off and walked out - so hearing about this catastrophe this morning brought a sick warm glow of schadenfreude to me.
Fortunately Jobserve and OSTG have some reasonable things in the area & I have a couple of promising interviews lined up for the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed... it's gonna be a pretty crappy christmas if I don't get something, the insurance payments on my car are about to lapse, "result: misery" as Dickens said.
(Not as OT as it seems: the new head of the CIA, Porter Goss, has said that all CIA officers must support the Bush government's policies. Draw your own conclusions about political control of instruments of the state - extra credit for reference to the early years after the 1917 revolution and Marxist/Leninist thought. Oh and whilst I'm giong dopwn tangents, I just read today that a key political ally for the US in Iraq is... the ICP (Iraqi Communist Party)! (No, that's just the first Google result, not where I read it.))
More obviously on-topic - I have worked as a penetration tester, including work for one of the five most significant financial institutions in the world and many large corporates. Naturally Nmap was probably the single most important app I used. I'd just like to thank Fyodor for Nmap and to offer my own, insignificant, support in knocking back spurious and dangerous attempts to institute a surveillance society and remove our freedoms in the name of (ha!) security.
Given the horrible dog's dinner Holywood made of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I have a nasty feeling this will also severely suck. I just finished reading the utterly, utterly stupendous 'From Hell' - the detailed notes in the Appendix giving sources and showing the incredible amount of research he did utterly blew me away. It's the sort of text that stays with you for days or weeks afterwards. It made me really want search out Hawksmore's churches next time in London. I lived nearby to Herne Hill for 8 years, and less than 100 yards from the now-entombde River Effra (which now runs in a culvert under Effra Road in Brixton) and had no idea about the historical significance of those locations. I've also stayed with friends in King's Cross many times - I had no idea about the Bodicea link in Battle Bridge Road. In fact, given their location is walking distance from Whitechapel and Spitalfields I can see a long day of walking around with the A-Z, photocopies of relevant bits of From Hell loking for the locations. In fact I also worked across the road from the NatWest Tower, as featured in the climactic murder scene in Mitre Square. It takes a man from Northampton to open my eyes to the... uh.. magic? :) ... all around me at that time.
ISTR 'From Hell' was also filmed (a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120681/">aha ! SmartSearch++) any Alan Moore fans care to offer an opinion about how good / faithful it was?
Alan Moore knows the score... :)
Bill Hicks, still sadly missed (by us in the UK, who've heard of him, anyway. Yeah he was from Austin, Texas.)
> not long ago.
>
Wow, really? You truly are a polymath then. I've been keeping a private list of interesting things claimed by specific Slashdot posters; "I am a doctor", "I am a rocket scientist" and so forth. When I went to add your ID and username to the list, I found that someone else must have stolen your identity, because I'd already logged someone using your account name and UID as stating "I'm the I.T. Director for a large organization..." (Sorry, I don't track hrefs for each comment, because I didn't think I'd need to refer back to them, but that's a direct quote from a comment.) I guess it'd be in one of these previous comments but I'm on expensive dialup & haven't the time to go trawling for the exact comment.
So, you're the IT Director for the US Marine Corps? Wow, that must be a hell of a job; and you have to see active service as well! Well, good luck avoiding suicide bombers, 'insurgents' and other freedo^h^h^h terrorist types.
Ah, but how can you be sure? I thought I'd got over adolescent reading of Dunne and Priestly until I read 'Fabric of the Cosmos' by Brian Greene who asks the real, profound, question of 'What is time?" (as opposed to: 'What do we mean by "time" ', "How did time begin" and so on.) The upshot is that thermodynamics is the only area of physics that requires time to move in a given direction. My guess is that there are a lot of questions here that are ignored by physicists and comsmologists on account of they don't want to be reduced back to the answer "Because!" :)
So, Google fails for once ;)
Oh and 'Liswerry' is a suburb of Newport, ten miles ---> thataway. I should also point out that the B side ('soapbar') is skill as well. "Two Four to Base, Over..." Laugh, I nearly did.
Personally I think that's one of the best tunes of the last couple of years.My London friends' approach to planning for something unpleasant of 911 proportions ("hey, if it happens, it happens") starts to look less irrational.
The planview of the tower is the 70s NatWest logo. Well I never.
This google search finds some good pics of it under that name, I haven't the time to iterate thru the otions but variations on 'NatWest', 'Nat West' etc should find it.
Side note - I used to work for a dotcom in offices less than 100 yards from the base of the tower. (I used to use the cashpoint there at lunchtime...) However they went tits-up as the bubble popped and thus I was sitting unemployed at home five weeks later - Sept. 11th. Must say that the thought "I'm glad I'm not in Bishopsgate right now" did cross my mind.
>Do what you like to it visually, what the fuck,
>bring in a fucking rapper to play ford, but
>its still ours....
In honour of the fact that they're from Newport, five miles down the A40, I present to you the wise words of the mighty 'Goldie Looking Chains':
The Beeb's microsite suggests they have not one - not even two - but three whole new series of shows. I make that another nine hours. Sounds good so far judging by the trailer...
Who watches TV these days?
I just broke my rule and went back online to reply to this as soon as I saw it.
I beg the Slashdot editorial staff with as much emphasis as I can - PLEASE, change the Stars and Stripes logo!!!
I know in the US everything gets draped in the flag, but for much of the rest of the world it's a symbol with many more layers of cultural meaning than you perhaps realise. You risk blowing away one of the key features that has kept Slashdot interesting for me since I first started reading - before there were user accounts, IIRC - namely the nationality-neutral way stuff is presented. The 9/11 coverage was a great example of the unexpected benefits of this - the US, and other western (Canadian, European,..) and other posters from all round the world contributed to those stories. It risks cheapening and diminishing something very precious. Please, change the logo.
full disclosure - yes I'm from the UK.
I ran a couple of free online virus checkers over it and was surprised to find no evidence it's been owned or infected with anything. Perhaps cos it's only on dialup and he only visits two or three websites - banking type stuff. I haven't managed to educate him about not clicking links in emails though...
That said when I wanted to move some files down to my Linux box, Windows refused to install a NIC without the original access media (you guessed it, some friendly local amateur upgraded it to 98 using their own media.) Knoppix to the rescue :)
Incidentally rumour has it that the Batmobile in the upcoming Batman film looks like Miller drew it in Dark Knight (vaguely oscene, a steroid-engorged phallus type thing...) Let's hope the rest of the story's used, too. I wanna see the Mayor being eaten! :))