Ok, i'll give you china, (although they are still decades behind US) but the rest is a joke, right?
Do you realise that they cannot even build a modern airplane?
I'm pretty sure 19th British people said something similar when they looked at those places like in the middle of Europe with funny names like Pomerania, Saxony and Wurttemberg. 'Those Germans can whip up a mean pickle I grant you - but build a battleship? I think not!'
It doesn't take long for a country to become a serious industrial power if it is prepared to invest in technology. The United States and Germany both surpassed the UK within relatively short periods of time around the turn of the 20th Century despite massive British leads. Japan dazzled the World with its technological prowess less than 20 years after it was bombed into oblivion. Korea has achieved it even faster and at the very pinnacle of modern technologies - LCDs, microprocessors, telecoms.
We have to expect the emergent economies of China and India to follow a similar path - but even faster. They are developing world-class indiginous technologies in areas such as computing and space flight, buying even more from abroad and developing close partnerships with countries such as Russia that has plenty of cutting edge technology eager for a new home.
The UK plan (currently on hold whilst Blair is being re-elected) would be very similar to the French scheme.
The whole scheme is very secretive, but from what we know, all citizens will have to take about 50 pieces of personal data, their eyeballs and £80 to a registration centre for the dubious pleasure of being entered into a national database. Their fingerprints and iris patterns will be digitised and a hash generated from each. The hash is then written to the chip on the card. the idea of the government is that soon Britain will have tens of thousands of biometric readers at paces like airports, police stations, hospitals and doctors. Whenever you need a service, enter or leave the country or get arrested you'd have to produce the card.
It won't be compulsory (at first) to carry a card, but it will be compulsory to register and keep your personal data up-to-date. The card is not yours, instead it remains the property of the government and can be withdrawn at any time on the say-so of the Home Secretary.
Last year the government conducted a trial of 10,000 people and promised to tell us the results before the ID card bill was brought before Parliament. Well they've had one go at getting the bill through but ran out of time before Parliament's dissolution - and we still haven't seen the results of the trials. Which is kind of suspicious - surely if everything is hunky dory then they would have been shouting it from the rooftops?
As for reliability, the Home Office (think Ministry of the Interior) doesn't seem to know the difference between false positive matches between two biometrics (where one person is mistaken for another) and false negatives (where a person isn't recognised at all). In written answers they only ever cite a failure rate based on the very low false positives - NEVER the much higher failure rate for false negatives. BUT positive confirmation of identity is the entire reason for their introduction.
The general feeling of IT experts is that the scheme will rocket in price and never work properly - but that millions of people will be inconvenienced and perhaps thousands have their lives ruined by the cards.
So for those UK people reading (hello!) - Labour is the only party promising to introduce ID cards. The Tories made no mention of it in their manifesto and have gradually gone off of the scheme. The LibDems, Greens and nationalist parties are all opposed. If you don't want ID cards, then the nice people at No2ID will be able to help.
Concorde comes close. Designed even before the Shuttle, nothing has come close to its performance and it was retired not because it was worn out, but because of the post September 11th economics. It looks better than the Shuttle as well!
And the Shuttles we see today have had major improvements - their original thermal insulation has been replaced with lighter and stronger blankets, their avionics have been completely renewed and so on. In many respects the Shuttles today are not the same ones that went to the launch pad in the early 1980s.
The problem isn't so much the Shuttle as the insanity of the ISS and the manned space programme as a whole. What are they for?
A fantastic little machine; light, truly portable and surprisingly useful. I must have written about half of my thesis on that patented dead flesh+ keyboard.
The Z88 was practically unique in being a Sinclair product that it worked straight out of the box AND it kept on working. Mine was out in the rain, dumped at the bottom of suitcases, dropped, sat on - you name it - and it kept on working! In the end it didn't survive a move to Milton Keynes - but then, few things do;)
Uh oh, nostalgia is coming on; you know I'm going to have to take a look on eBay now!
All DNA samples are retained indefinitely. Even if you willingly provide a DNA sample and are found innocent you do not have the right to ask for your DNA to be deleted. The police are also authorised to take samples without your permission.
I *think* this is what is happening. The Council is formed from the ministers of the Member States of the Union. It proposes legislation on the advice of the EU Commission (yet another body made up of appointed bureaucrats whose purpose is to develop and uphold the workings of the Union).
This directive has been proposed under the so-called co-decision arrangement with the European Parliament - the directly elected body of the EU.
In co-decision, Parliament has some measure of veto over the Council - it is the strongest of the arrangements between the parties. Council has sent the draft directive to Parliament. Parliament could adopt the proposed legislation - whereupon it would have taken effect in the EU, instead it proposed amendments.
The amendments have then gone back to Council which now has a choice. It can choose to accept Parliament's amendments and produce a compromise directive. Or it can override Parliament - but only by a unanimous vote by the members of Council. This is why the Poles are being strong-armed.
If Council rejects the Parliamentary amendments and fails to vote unanimously, the legislation must then head towards conciliation and arbitration which is brain-bleedingly complicated since the Commission becomes involved.
So all is not lost, the insitutions are working, although I have to wonder about the fisheries involvement. I would have thought those ministers have their own problems at the moment.
The last time a fire the size SF/1906 was set, NYC colonists burned their British landlords' buildings to the ground. So, if you want to keep this "East Coast vs. West Coast" thing going (you're on your own), you're going to have to burn Bost
Can us Brits join in? Burning down the President's house must score at least double.
San Francisco was built mainly on filled up marsh. the 1909 quake shook up the filling which made them settle, collapsing/burying the buildings built on it. later in order to stop land values dropping from the effects of the quake they focused attention on the fire..
History repeats itself - during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 the soil under the Marina District of San Francisco liquified and down came the buildings. Damage there was much more severe than in neighbouring areas of the city which were built on more solid foundations.
since when does a fossil fuel power plant produce radioactive waste?:)
Since the day someone first burned coal. Coal has a uranium content of around 1ppm which is concentrated in the ashy residue after burning. It also contains measurable quantities of thorium, radon and radium. Coal ash can be as radioactive as an average granite (about 10-30 ppm uranium).
If the powerplant doesn't have highly efficient filters then these tiny particles go up the smoke stack where they can be breathed in. Someone living downwind of a coal-fired power station accumulates about an additional 1% radiation exposure.
It's not a major problem (not compared to the acid and mercury thrown out by coal-fired plants), but fly ash from coal-fired power stations is widely used to improve concrete which may then get used in housing and offices. There people could be exposed to much larger amounts of radiation - particularly from the constant release of gaseous radon into their environment.
Every time I hear about a big government IT fuck-up it seems to be caused by EDS. Yet the government keep awarding them contracts. Why?
If you listen to the companies when they're trying to worm their way out of responsibility, it's because only a very few big companies have the resources to develop, test and run these enormous computer systems.
If you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, their track record seems to show that they don't have the resources to develop, test and run these enormous computer systems.
So it must be down to judicious lobbying.
Still here's hoping that the levels of expertise they've shown in a kaleidoscopic range of networking, computer security and database disasters - combined with the complete crapshoot that is biometrics will make for one hugely entertaining ID card cockup.
Where to have the debate where it might be read by those who mater:
Free service to fax your MP
Can I take the opportunity to point out that faxyourmp is for UK citizens ONLY and should only be used to fax your own MP. It is not for international write-ins or mass lobbying.
There is a huge contract that'll be up for grabbs soon - EDS are preparing themselves to manage the UK national identity database and identity card scheme. This is one we could lobby our representatives on to ensure they do it right..
No, no, no, this is the one we lobby them to employ EDS and Microsoft on!
If MPs are stupid enough to implement Blunkettcards we should at least get some entertainment out of it.
The Soviet's had a lot of failures though, more than the US would accept. E.g. the four N1 moon launcher failures, and the failure of this mission.
The Soviet mentality was to fly the hardware and then debug it. It allowed them to get rockets developed relatively quickly and without building expensive test facilities. This all worked fine for the earlier rockets like the R7. However when it came to the N1 the lack of a test stand for the first stage proved fatal for the programme. The Proton also had a troublesome birth with stages cracking on the pad or disintegrating in flight - that probably lost them the chance to send a cosmonaut around the Moon before the Americans as well as a couple of unmanned lunar landers.
Having said that, the N1 was probably ready for flight by the time of the fifth (cancelled) test flight. And the first launch of Energia was a massive success - the Soviets had never tried launching a liquid hydrogen rocket before, nor had they attempted a largely automated launch procedure. With the exception of a couple of minor problems that delayed Energia, the launch was a triumph - so much so that they were prepared to risk launching Buran live on television without further tests. The Communist Party then had a fit of nerves and cancelled the live broadcat.
The Soviets had to launch in poor conditions - their polar orbiting satellites were flown out of Plesetsk in the Arctic and even Baikonur has a lousy winter. With the relatively short lives of their satellites they needed to keep launching. By keeping their rockets simple, heavy and reliable it allowed them to conduct blast offs at -20C, in fog, blizzards you name it...
Several (at least 5) years ago there was talk of a similar system to serve Bristol, a largish city in the UK.
There is still ULTra at Cardiff which has gone rather quiet of late. At the risk of jinxing another British lead in technology, they've actually gone as far as building hardware and a test track.
Somewhere like here in Milton Keynes would benefit from this sort of technology - sprawling estates, congested centre, lousy bus service and plenty of room along the roads to build the tracks. And hey, we're still 'the city of the future' (which is a depressing view of the future when you think about it).
Don't you mean conduct the interviews, reluctantly agree to be interviewed, write the articles, do the fact-checking, throw out the facts, draw the diagrams, re-draw the diagrams in an incomprehensible but oh-so-hip fashion, take the photos, dick around with the photos in Photoshop until they look like something in a psychology test, fetch the coffee, take the coffee back because it actually tasted of coffee, have the requisite magazine editor nervous breakdown, shout at the printers, go grovelling to the printers so they don't print the whole magazine in mirror image on fluorescent stock - hold on lose the mirror image keep the fluorescent paper, glue on the commemorative CueCat(tm) - then edit the magazine?
And still have time to throw in one ludicrously bad special effect?
Last time I checked, Tesco didn't charge me £75 for a Clubcard, Nectar didn't demand I carried their card at all times, WH Smith didn't prosecute me for failing to register for their card, John Lewis wouldn't threaten me for cutting up their card and the police can't pull me over for not producing a Game card.
Store cards are subject to the Data Protection Act; Blunkettcards will run a coach and horses through the protection - so much so they'll probably have to amend the DPA (and not in our favour).
Apart from being card-shaped and having my name on them there is nothing in common between the two. Blinky is now trying the soft-sell; after scaring us silly with the threat that unless we have ID cards we'll all be blown up by terrorists; he's now trying the line that they aren't so very different from the cards we have in our wallet. When they are.
And expect copious repetitions of 'those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.', which as any five-year old can tell you is disproved by 'doesn't that rather depend on who's asking the questions?'
This is all going to be rammed through Parliament in time for a May General Election (which is only needed so they can get it out of the way before announcing tax increases). The government will call for all parties to come together to fight the menace of [insert suitable scare here].
Any party who objects to ID cards, or tries to drag it out in committee will be called 'soft on crime'. Which is the last thing they want before an election now that the tabloids and the Home Secretary have made everyone petrified of a largely imaginary crime wave.
Meanwhile the government will be whipping its own backbenchers and telling them 'don't rock the boat - remember there's a historic third term up for grabs'. They'll get it through the Commons on a massive majority and then bully the Lords into compliance.
If the Lords object, well last night showed that the government will use the Parliament Act 1949 for pretty much any purpose.
The only way to stop this madness (apart from hoping the same people who programmed the Child Support Agency computers are doing ID cards) is for people in Labour constituencies to contact their MP and say that their vote is conditional on the MP opposing the ID card legislation.
We can never prove that man evolved from apes. We can find evidence to suggest that it's highly likely that it happened, but that's as far as we can go.
Man didn't evolve from apes. Man and apes had a common ancestor. You are correct in that no one observed the speciation of humanity, but studies such as cladistics show the varying similarities between humans and the other primates and gives an explanation of how our species have diverged.
So yes, evolution is an unproven theory. It just happens to best one that we have at the moment.
Evolution has been proven. The word 'theory' has no particular weight in science. Darwin would have been equally justified in calling it his Law of Evolution.
Whether evolution proceeds along a strict Darwinian model of steady state incremental change or more like Steven Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium is a matter of debate.
But there is no debate over the existence of evolution itself.
More to the point, how do other political parties feel about this?
LibDems and the nationalist parties wholly against (there has even been talk of the Scottish Parliament refusing to play ball with the scheme).
The Conservatives haven't made up their minds, indeed the Shadow Home Secretary (and I thought Blunkett wouldn't cast a shadow) has been pro-ID and against them in the same speech.
UKIP - probably for them as they'll then be able to identify foreigners.
So, in what ways are motorways and rocket technology being safeguarded against misuse by a future facist government?
Since you're obsessed with motorways, lets lay the autobahn myth to rest. Pre WW2 Germany had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in Europe, Volkswagen did not deliver a single car to the people before the outbreak of war and almost all freight continued to be moved by rail. The autobahn were designed from the start to move troops and tanks. The propaganda angle was that Germany was moving into the motor age. It didn't.
Access to rockets is (somewhat) controlled by a series of international agreements as are devices such as nuclear weapons, chemicals and biological agents. So they can be enforced through international law.
And try as I might I fail to see how a motorway can be used to persecute a particular member of society. An ID card can.
Interesting that you have faith in a constitution. Why would you choose this particular government to be qualified to lay down principles that all future governments must follow? The mess that is the mass ownership of guns in America is down to the fact that the constitution was written at a time when gun ownership seemed like a good thing. Times change.
A constitution does not usually lay down law - rather it confines actual laws saying what is and what is not permissible. And no, a constitution is not for all time - they have things called amendments (which is what you are citing when referring to Amendment 2 to the American Constitution). Constitutions can be changed - BUT - and here is the important bit - they have a principle called entrenchment - they cannot be overturned by a simple piece of legislation. The US Constitution can be amended at any time provided that there is majority support - not only in Congress but in at least two thirds of the states. Constitutions can be changed, but only when required. Provided you write a good constituion (which the founding fathers did) you have a good way of ruling.
And whilst I disagree with the tenate of the 2nd Amendment, I think it is a little presumptuous of us to say it should be changed when there is clearly little popular support for such a move. When (and I hope it is a when and not an if) the majority of Americans want to revoke the 2nd Amendment they have a procedure to do so.
Compare it to the UK if a government were to ban a fundamental right (an abstract term in British constitutional law) it could do so with a simple Act of Parliament (it'll be even easier if Blunkett gets his emergency powers bill through the Commons). And that's it - no judge can overturn it, no one can declare the law wrong, the European Court on Human Rights could scream but not overturn it, and provided it didn't breach the EC Treaty 1957, there is nothing the European Court of Justice can do either.
I find it hard to believe that there is an argument for not having a constitution.
So are you against increasing the number of policemen? On the one hand, they are useful in combatting crime. On the oitherhand there's the possibility of them being misused as a political army against the people, as happened at Orgreave.
There is nothing about increasing the number of police in my argument. If on the otherhand police were given new powers then my argument stands. We are policed by consent only - not by the imposition of powers.
Do you for instance support stop and search? Which has time and time again been used in a discriminatory way against young blacks and now young Asians? before you give anyone any power you should be certain that they will use it in a responsible manner and be held to account if they do not. The British government and the police are largely unaccountable to the population.
And the ID card wasn't invented by the nazis. You can't seperate them on that flimsy basis. They were all used by the nazis to further their aims. As were airplanes and ships. Perhaps those should be banned too.
The fact is that any technology could and would be taken advantage of by some future nightmare facist state. But that doesn't mean we should live in mud huts now just in case.
What it says is that when you've seen technology abused you either don't use it again or you place safeguards around it so that it cannot be misused.
Blunkettcards are being introduced with next to no protections. the system will be overseen by a judge appointed by and answerable to the Prime Minister - and not Parliament. People will not be able to see the access records to their card. There are no restrictions on what data will eventually be put on the card nor which organisations will be able to access the data. No procedures have been put in place to redress errors in the data, the use/abuse of the card. No consideration has been given to the effect on the Data Protection Act of sharing large amounts of data within organisations, within government and exporting the information...
A spot of constitutional law - written constitutions and bills of rights are there to prevent abuse of power by governments against the individual. We have almost no protection from government in the UK. So giving them more power over us is a bad thing.
Oh and the idea of the motorway came from Italy and rockets were first used in combat by the Chinese.
And interestingly, the Home Office haven't even begun to cost for all the biometric readers in all those places that will be necessary for the Blunkettcard to work. I suspect that if they do, the Treasury will squash the whole thing dead in an instant. They'll probably try to hold off revealing the full cost until enough money has been spent already that it would be more economic to carry on.
Agreed. The Treasury has already said the system must be self-funding - hence the ever-spiralling estimates of what a passport is going to cost us.
But I guess when the IT companies really start screwing up a miraculous tax-payers' bail-out will materialise and not one of the people behind the scheme will have to resign.
There is a strong possibility there will be a general election in the UK next year.
Which is why, if this is introduced in the Queen's Speech late in November (as everyone expects) it will be a bad law. The various committee stages will be abbreviated, the Lords consideration will be curtailed and the votes conducted on a three-line whip.
The government cannot allow the bill to fall before the dissolution of Parliament, so they will push it through using the 1911 Parliament Act if necessary.
The best hope is that the Commons refuses to approve a second reading of the bill, but I suspect all New Labour drones will be on a 'don't rock the boat' footing.
If you are in the UK (AND ONLY IN THE UK) - use faxyourmp to fax YOUR MP and let them know you don't like the idea of ID cards. The figure of 80% support is crap and was given in response to the concept of a voluntary, free card - not the compulsory, expensive Blunkettcard (your inflexible friend) we're being pushed towards.
I think the ID cards and the national database are going to happen anyway, so I hope you are right. But history of political leadership tells me that sooner or later, I will be right.
And don't just worry about the authorities - how about the people manning the system? Only this week an employee of the DVLA was found guilty of passing on addresses of people to animal rights activitists/terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure 19th British people said something similar when they looked at those places like in the middle of Europe with funny names like Pomerania, Saxony and Wurttemberg. 'Those Germans can whip up a mean pickle I grant you - but build a battleship? I think not!'
It doesn't take long for a country to become a serious industrial power if it is prepared to invest in technology. The United States and Germany both surpassed the UK within relatively short periods of time around the turn of the 20th Century despite massive British leads. Japan dazzled the World with its technological prowess less than 20 years after it was bombed into oblivion. Korea has achieved it even faster and at the very pinnacle of modern technologies - LCDs, microprocessors, telecoms.
We have to expect the emergent economies of China and India to follow a similar path - but even faster. They are developing world-class indiginous technologies in areas such as computing and space flight, buying even more from abroad and developing close partnerships with countries such as Russia that has plenty of cutting edge technology eager for a new home.
Mike.
The whole scheme is very secretive, but from what we know, all citizens will have to take about 50 pieces of personal data, their eyeballs and £80 to a registration centre for the dubious pleasure of being entered into a national database. Their fingerprints and iris patterns will be digitised and a hash generated from each. The hash is then written to the chip on the card. the idea of the government is that soon Britain will have tens of thousands of biometric readers at paces like airports, police stations, hospitals and doctors. Whenever you need a service, enter or leave the country or get arrested you'd have to produce the card.
It won't be compulsory (at first) to carry a card, but it will be compulsory to register and keep your personal data up-to-date. The card is not yours, instead it remains the property of the government and can be withdrawn at any time on the say-so of the Home Secretary.
Last year the government conducted a trial of 10,000 people and promised to tell us the results before the ID card bill was brought before Parliament. Well they've had one go at getting the bill through but ran out of time before Parliament's dissolution - and we still haven't seen the results of the trials. Which is kind of suspicious - surely if everything is hunky dory then they would have been shouting it from the rooftops?
As for reliability, the Home Office (think Ministry of the Interior) doesn't seem to know the difference between false positive matches between two biometrics (where one person is mistaken for another) and false negatives (where a person isn't recognised at all). In written answers they only ever cite a failure rate based on the very low false positives - NEVER the much higher failure rate for false negatives. BUT positive confirmation of identity is the entire reason for their introduction.
The general feeling of IT experts is that the scheme will rocket in price and never work properly - but that millions of people will be inconvenienced and perhaps thousands have their lives ruined by the cards.
So for those UK people reading (hello!) - Labour is the only party promising to introduce ID cards. The Tories made no mention of it in their manifesto and have gradually gone off of the scheme. The LibDems, Greens and nationalist parties are all opposed. If you don't want ID cards, then the nice people at No2ID will be able to help.
And the Shuttles we see today have had major improvements - their original thermal insulation has been replaced with lighter and stronger blankets, their avionics have been completely renewed and so on. In many respects the Shuttles today are not the same ones that went to the launch pad in the early 1980s.
The problem isn't so much the Shuttle as the insanity of the ISS and the manned space programme as a whole. What are they for?
The Z88 was practically unique in being a Sinclair product that it worked straight out of the box AND it kept on working. Mine was out in the rain, dumped at the bottom of suitcases, dropped, sat on - you name it - and it kept on working! In the end it didn't survive a move to Milton Keynes - but then, few things do ;)
Uh oh, nostalgia is coming on; you know I'm going to have to take a look on eBay now!
Thanks for the flashback.
Mike.
All DNA samples are retained indefinitely. Even if you willingly provide a DNA sample and are found innocent you do not have the right to ask for your DNA to be deleted. The police are also authorised to take samples without your permission.
Airstrip One - over and out.
Mike.
It's only fairly recently that the British population noticed that Tony Blair had morphed into Margaret Thatcher...
In co-decision, Parliament has some measure of veto over the Council - it is the strongest of the arrangements between the parties. Council has sent the draft directive to Parliament. Parliament could adopt the proposed legislation - whereupon it would have taken effect in the EU, instead it proposed amendments.
The amendments have then gone back to Council which now has a choice. It can choose to accept Parliament's amendments and produce a compromise directive. Or it can override Parliament - but only by a unanimous vote by the members of Council. This is why the Poles are being strong-armed.
If Council rejects the Parliamentary amendments and fails to vote unanimously, the legislation must then head towards conciliation and arbitration which is brain-bleedingly complicated since the Commission becomes involved.
So all is not lost, the insitutions are working, although I have to wonder about the fisheries involvement. I would have thought those ministers have their own problems at the moment.
HTH.
Mike.
Can us Brits join in? Burning down the President's house must score at least double.
Best wishes,
Mike.
History repeats itself - during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 the soil under the Marina District of San Francisco liquified and down came the buildings. Damage there was much more severe than in neighbouring areas of the city which were built on more solid foundations.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Since the day someone first burned coal. Coal has a uranium content of around 1ppm which is concentrated in the ashy residue after burning. It also contains measurable quantities of thorium, radon and radium. Coal ash can be as radioactive as an average granite (about 10-30 ppm uranium). If the powerplant doesn't have highly efficient filters then these tiny particles go up the smoke stack where they can be breathed in. Someone living downwind of a coal-fired power station accumulates about an additional 1% radiation exposure.
It's not a major problem (not compared to the acid and mercury thrown out by coal-fired plants), but fly ash from coal-fired power stations is widely used to improve concrete which may then get used in housing and offices. There people could be exposed to much larger amounts of radiation - particularly from the constant release of gaseous radon into their environment.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I do hope so! Blunkettcards can also be called 'Your inflexible friend' and should marketed with the slogan 'I know what's in your pocket.'
Best wishes,
Mike.
If you listen to the companies when they're trying to worm their way out of responsibility, it's because only a very few big companies have the resources to develop, test and run these enormous computer systems.
If you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, their track record seems to show that they don't have the resources to develop, test and run these enormous computer systems. So it must be down to judicious lobbying.
Still here's hoping that the levels of expertise they've shown in a kaleidoscopic range of networking, computer security and database disasters - combined with the complete crapshoot that is biometrics will make for one hugely entertaining ID card cockup.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Free service to fax your MP
Can I take the opportunity to point out that faxyourmp is for UK citizens ONLY and should only be used to fax your own MP. It is not for international write-ins or mass lobbying.
Best wishes,
Mike.
No, no, no, this is the one we lobby them to employ EDS and Microsoft on!
If MPs are stupid enough to implement Blunkettcards we should at least get some entertainment out of it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Soviet mentality was to fly the hardware and then debug it. It allowed them to get rockets developed relatively quickly and without building expensive test facilities. This all worked fine for the earlier rockets like the R7. However when it came to the N1 the lack of a test stand for the first stage proved fatal for the programme. The Proton also had a troublesome birth with stages cracking on the pad or disintegrating in flight - that probably lost them the chance to send a cosmonaut around the Moon before the Americans as well as a couple of unmanned lunar landers.
Having said that, the N1 was probably ready for flight by the time of the fifth (cancelled) test flight. And the first launch of Energia was a massive success - the Soviets had never tried launching a liquid hydrogen rocket before, nor had they attempted a largely automated launch procedure. With the exception of a couple of minor problems that delayed Energia, the launch was a triumph - so much so that they were prepared to risk launching Buran live on television without further tests. The Communist Party then had a fit of nerves and cancelled the live broadcat.
The Soviets had to launch in poor conditions - their polar orbiting satellites were flown out of Plesetsk in the Arctic and even Baikonur has a lousy winter. With the relatively short lives of their satellites they needed to keep launching. By keeping their rockets simple, heavy and reliable it allowed them to conduct blast offs at -20C, in fog, blizzards you name it...
Best wishes,
Mike.
There is still ULTra at Cardiff which has gone rather quiet of late. At the risk of jinxing another British lead in technology, they've actually gone as far as building hardware and a test track.
Somewhere like here in Milton Keynes would benefit from this sort of technology - sprawling estates, congested centre, lousy bus service and plenty of room along the roads to build the tracks. And hey, we're still 'the city of the future' (which is a depressing view of the future when you think about it).
Best wishes,
Mike.
And still have time to throw in one ludicrously bad special effect?
Store cards are subject to the Data Protection Act; Blunkettcards will run a coach and horses through the protection - so much so they'll probably have to amend the DPA (and not in our favour).
Apart from being card-shaped and having my name on them there is nothing in common between the two. Blinky is now trying the soft-sell; after scaring us silly with the threat that unless we have ID cards we'll all be blown up by terrorists; he's now trying the line that they aren't so very different from the cards we have in our wallet. When they are.
And expect copious repetitions of 'those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear.', which as any five-year old can tell you is disproved by 'doesn't that rather depend on who's asking the questions?'
This is all going to be rammed through Parliament in time for a May General Election (which is only needed so they can get it out of the way before announcing tax increases). The government will call for all parties to come together to fight the menace of [insert suitable scare here].
Any party who objects to ID cards, or tries to drag it out in committee will be called 'soft on crime'. Which is the last thing they want before an election now that the tabloids and the Home Secretary have made everyone petrified of a largely imaginary crime wave.
Meanwhile the government will be whipping its own backbenchers and telling them 'don't rock the boat - remember there's a historic third term up for grabs'. They'll get it through the Commons on a massive majority and then bully the Lords into compliance.
If the Lords object, well last night showed that the government will use the Parliament Act 1949 for pretty much any purpose.
The only way to stop this madness (apart from hoping the same people who programmed the Child Support Agency computers are doing ID cards) is for people in Labour constituencies to contact their MP and say that their vote is conditional on the MP opposing the ID card legislation.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Man didn't evolve from apes. Man and apes had a common ancestor. You are correct in that no one observed the speciation of humanity, but studies such as cladistics show the varying similarities between humans and the other primates and gives an explanation of how our species have diverged.
So yes, evolution is an unproven theory. It just happens to best one that we have at the moment.
Sorry, not true. Speciation has repeatedly been observed in nature.
Evolution has been proven. The word 'theory' has no particular weight in science. Darwin would have been equally justified in calling it his Law of Evolution.
Whether evolution proceeds along a strict Darwinian model of steady state incremental change or more like Steven Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium is a matter of debate.
But there is no debate over the existence of evolution itself.
Best wishes,
Mike.
LibDems and the nationalist parties wholly against (there has even been talk of the Scottish Parliament refusing to play ball with the scheme).
The Conservatives haven't made up their minds, indeed the Shadow Home Secretary (and I thought Blunkett wouldn't cast a shadow) has been pro-ID and against them in the same speech.
UKIP - probably for them as they'll then be able to identify foreigners.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Since you're obsessed with motorways, lets lay the autobahn myth to rest. Pre WW2 Germany had one of the lowest rates of car ownership in Europe, Volkswagen did not deliver a single car to the people before the outbreak of war and almost all freight continued to be moved by rail. The autobahn were designed from the start to move troops and tanks. The propaganda angle was that Germany was moving into the motor age. It didn't.
Access to rockets is (somewhat) controlled by a series of international agreements as are devices such as nuclear weapons, chemicals and biological agents. So they can be enforced through international law.
And try as I might I fail to see how a motorway can be used to persecute a particular member of society. An ID card can.
Interesting that you have faith in a constitution. Why would you choose this particular government to be qualified to lay down principles that all future governments must follow? The mess that is the mass ownership of guns in America is down to the fact that the constitution was written at a time when gun ownership seemed like a good thing. Times change.
A constitution does not usually lay down law - rather it confines actual laws saying what is and what is not permissible. And no, a constitution is not for all time - they have things called amendments (which is what you are citing when referring to Amendment 2 to the American Constitution). Constitutions can be changed - BUT - and here is the important bit - they have a principle called entrenchment - they cannot be overturned by a simple piece of legislation. The US Constitution can be amended at any time provided that there is majority support - not only in Congress but in at least two thirds of the states. Constitutions can be changed, but only when required. Provided you write a good constituion (which the founding fathers did) you have a good way of ruling.
And whilst I disagree with the tenate of the 2nd Amendment, I think it is a little presumptuous of us to say it should be changed when there is clearly little popular support for such a move. When (and I hope it is a when and not an if) the majority of Americans want to revoke the 2nd Amendment they have a procedure to do so.
Compare it to the UK if a government were to ban a fundamental right (an abstract term in British constitutional law) it could do so with a simple Act of Parliament (it'll be even easier if Blunkett gets his emergency powers bill through the Commons). And that's it - no judge can overturn it, no one can declare the law wrong, the European Court on Human Rights could scream but not overturn it, and provided it didn't breach the EC Treaty 1957, there is nothing the European Court of Justice can do either.
I find it hard to believe that there is an argument for not having a constitution.
So are you against increasing the number of policemen? On the one hand, they are useful in combatting crime. On the oitherhand there's the possibility of them being misused as a political army against the people, as happened at Orgreave.
There is nothing about increasing the number of police in my argument. If on the otherhand police were given new powers then my argument stands. We are policed by consent only - not by the imposition of powers.
Do you for instance support stop and search? Which has time and time again been used in a discriminatory way against young blacks and now young Asians? before you give anyone any power you should be certain that they will use it in a responsible manner and be held to account if they do not. The British government and the police are largely unaccountable to the population.
And the ID card wasn't invented by the nazis. You can't seperate them on that flimsy basis. They were all used by the nazis to further their aims. As were airplanes and ships. Perhaps those should be banned too.
What it says is that when you've seen technology abused you either don't use it again or you place safeguards around it so that it cannot be misused.
Blunkettcards are being introduced with next to no protections. the system will be overseen by a judge appointed by and answerable to the Prime Minister - and not Parliament. People will not be able to see the access records to their card. There are no restrictions on what data will eventually be put on the card nor which organisations will be able to access the data. No procedures have been put in place to redress errors in the data, the use/abuse of the card. No consideration has been given to the effect on the Data Protection Act of sharing large amounts of data within organisations, within government and exporting the information...
A spot of constitutional law - written constitutions and bills of rights are there to prevent abuse of power by governments against the individual. We have almost no protection from government in the UK. So giving them more power over us is a bad thing.
Oh and the idea of the motorway came from Italy and rockets were first used in combat by the Chinese.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Agreed. The Treasury has already said the system must be self-funding - hence the ever-spiralling estimates of what a passport is going to cost us.
But I guess when the IT companies really start screwing up a miraculous tax-payers' bail-out will materialise and not one of the people behind the scheme will have to resign.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which is why, if this is introduced in the Queen's Speech late in November (as everyone expects) it will be a bad law. The various committee stages will be abbreviated, the Lords consideration will be curtailed and the votes conducted on a three-line whip.
The government cannot allow the bill to fall before the dissolution of Parliament, so they will push it through using the 1911 Parliament Act if necessary.
The best hope is that the Commons refuses to approve a second reading of the bill, but I suspect all New Labour drones will be on a 'don't rock the boat' footing.
If you are in the UK (AND ONLY IN THE UK) - use faxyourmp to fax YOUR MP and let them know you don't like the idea of ID cards. The figure of 80% support is crap and was given in response to the concept of a voluntary, free card - not the compulsory, expensive Blunkettcard (your inflexible friend) we're being pushed towards.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And don't just worry about the authorities - how about the people manning the system? Only this week an employee of the DVLA was found guilty of passing on addresses of people to animal rights activitists/terrorists.
Best wishes,
Mike.