And it won't keep people from cheating on their taxes
It seems to me that actually a very major part of this is, precisely, road-tax enforcement.
For non-UKians, a brief summary of the process of getting your car taxed (including recent amendments).
To keep or drive a vehicle on the roads, you need to display a 'Tax Disc' inside your windscreen. Non-display of the disc is an offense. As the Registered Keeper of a vehicle, if you don't tax it because you're legitimately taking it off the road for a while, you must instead get a Statutory Off-Road Notification certificate, so you can't slip off the database. The SORN is free (or is it £5?). No SORN is a £1000 fine, driving a SORNed vehicle is a £5000 fine.
To get the disc (annually, expiry date is the biggest thing on the disc), you need to go to a Post Office and present either the reminder that was sent to you or the Vehicle Registration Document (in your name, with your address) and a valid Insurance Certificate for the vehicle. If the vehicle's more than 3 years old (but less than 25(?)) you also need an 'MOT Certificate', a certificate of basic roadworthiness originally named for the Ministry of Transport). All these documents must match the registration mark of the vehicle and the address of the applicant.
In the legitimate channel, if you need a new plate (as I did recently when someone tweaked the front of my car in the carpark at work, thanks!) you need the Registration Document and two pieces of ID to get your new plate. Obviously this wouldn't apply for fake plates. But be careful making those fake plates as having a plate in the worng font (typeface or size, or those silly italic plates) is also an offense.
So, since all new cars went onto the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority) database at first registration, it's really easy to identify all the non-taxed cars on the road (of which there are far, far too many).
And this is definitely a good thing. Firstly, I pay my road tax (which incidentally isn't hypothecated and has had nothing to do with road-related expenditure for years), so why should someone else get the benefits of using the road for free or for the price of a SORN? And more importantly, a major reason for driving without tax is that you can't GET a tax disc, because you're uninsured. Which at best means that if you have an innocent accident, other people don't get their costs covered. More realistically you're actually uninsured because you've become too expensive to cover, or you're outright banned but driving anyway.
I'd feel a lot safer driving with a system to filter out the road-users who've already been identified by the law or the insurance market as Too Dangerous To Use The Roads, and I'd also be happy to know that everyone else on the roads is making the same payment I have to make.
So in short, yup, I see it as primarily a tax-enforcement thing
Professionals might, but like mentioned before, they would prefer to use an expendable minion to do the actual work
Granted, and the impression I've absorbed from the press in recent years is that increasing volumes of car thefts are done to order, hence, by professionals.
And if I were this posited professional, stealing cars to order, I'd definitely prefer an expendable minion, but it I was able to, why not supply him/her with a lasered number-plate suitable for the model I've sent him/her out for, thus increasing my chances of a successful operation?
where can you get a legitimate copy of VS.Net 2003 for $20?
OK, so strictly it's $29, according to Moft, but (so long as you already have a copy of 2002 - mine came from ebay for about 1/3 the original price), this is entirely legitimate. Mine's already ordered. TomV
It's alright, but not as good as the finished City of Death, which is I think another Douglas Adams write.
Fair comment, but then again you'd be hard pressed to come up with any other story from the whole 1963-1989 run which gets the same level of fan-respect as City Of Death. It's perhaps rather atypical in cartain respects, but as a comlete package, the only issue with using CoD to introduce the show to new viewers is the difficulty of finding another story to follow it with. It's a little gem.
For that matter, are/were there any astronauts/cosmonauts aboard Alpha? How are they going to get home now? I don't think there's going to be any shuttle missions for quite a while. Are we going to have to get lifts from the Russians?
According to the ISS website, the current (Expedition 6) crew is:
They've been on the station since November 25th 2002 (two days after launch), and were scheduled to return on shuttle mission 114 (Atlantis) on an as-yet-unspecified date no earlier than March 1st 2003.
BBC TV news just mentioned this concern, suggesting that Russia would probably do the crew recovery mission, given that after the Challenger incident, the shuttles were grounded for over two years, and speculated as to whether today's news might render the ISS program unsustainable.
Just where did you get the idea that there's any socialist planning going on here. As I understand it, India was socialist until several decades ago, not now
2002 is the first year of the Tenth Five Year Plan in India, mandating the prices of staples such as rice, milk, sugar, of paraffin for domestic cooking, and of industrial essentials like fuel, fertilisers, electricity. The Plan also sets the vast tariff rates on many products such as textiles and cars/trucks/2-wheelers that maintain local production...
The BJP may be moving the country away from command socialism, but there's a long way to go yet, and the process has to be managed carefully because the livelihoods and indeed survival of a billion people depend on getting it right.
The slight lack of food in other countries is nature's fault, but the people and governments are pulling together to get everyone fed.
The starvation in Zimbabwe is Mugabe's fault, and would have happened (although maybe less severely) even if the drought hadn't happened.
Indeed, Zimbabwe used to be the 'breadbasket of Africa' - if Mugabe hadn't sent the army out to make sure that no food was planted on the farms of Zimbabwe this year, then on past performance, it's likely that the famines in these other countries would be nowhere near as severe because they would be able to get food grown in Zimbabwe.
There's a real drought problem, certainly, but the starvation is at least partly down to issues of distribution, and the farm-shutdown in Zimbabwe most certainly exacerbates the problem.
If they are starving then why are they worrying about exporting food?
Oh, that's easy. To get some hard currency to buy more weapons to fund Zimabawe's army in the Congo to protect Mugabe's personal logging, cobalt and diamond businesses.
Mr Mugabe may have been a figurehead of Africn independence 30 years ago, but Mugabe2002 appears to be interested only in personal aggrandisement, wealth and survival in the face of a population which appears, in large part, to despise him.
The phone is identifying itself to the phone company and they check (they should!) in the register to see if the phone is stolen or not. They would rather not provide this service and some do not, mainly in poor countries where my stolen phone is most likely in use right now
...and I suspect this is exactly the point of this Bill. Here's a BBC Watchdog Report on mobile phone theft in the UK, dated 29 Jan 2002.
key points:
~700,000 mobile phones stolen in the UK in 2001 including at least one cited fatal shooting
an estimated 48% of these phones were stolen from under-18's, often with a threat of violence
only Orange and One-to-One currently track IMEI's
Cellnet (name changed to O2 since the article) and Vodaphone refused to implement IMEI tracking citing estimated costs of £18million each, (<£1.50 per subscriber)
a network providing service to a stolen handset can expect to make about £30/month from the subscriber
all four major networks give statements at the end, and Vodaphone and Cellnet both explicitly state that they will not implement IMEI tracking because it is not a bar to crime, because IMEI's can be easily reprogrammed.
And here's some Hansard transcript of the Bill's second reading in the House of Lords (HoL Hansard's generally a whole lot more 'insightful' and less 'flamebait'-ridden than House of Commons stuff). Gives a good overview of the thinking behind the bill, and in plain english rather than legalese, too.
Indian online population [www.nua.ie]: 3.3 million
Point of clarification - the article you've cited doesn't actually say that the online population of India is 3.3 million: it says:
Jul 04 2002: ZDNet India reports that the Internet
subscriber[my bold] base in India has fallen by 18 percent since December 2001.
This is according to new figures released by the Department of Telecommunications.
The number of subscribers in India at the end of June 2002 was 3.3 million, down from four million at the end of March 2002.
However, Internet usage[my bold] is up by 20 percent following the legalisation of Net telephony services in April 2002.
Take careful note of the word subscribers: now bear in mind that the potential market for internet-mediated commerce is not limited just to those with their own ISP subscription, and that the vast majority of internet use in India works on the 'internet cafe' model (except most of these places don't do catering, just Internet and telephone service ('ISD/STD')). A PC is a huge capital investment, which not many can afford. 60 rupees an hour for internet access (I've seen it as low as 20Rs/hr in Bangalore) is far more widely available. What would be far more interesting if available would be the number of hotmail / yahoomail accounts used by Indians
What I have seen on TV of India is many people starving, a Hindu population that is as violently anti-Muslim as some Muslims in the region are violently anti-non-Muslim, and a military that is willing to push a Muslim country of former Indians to the point of nuclear war, because they know they will win even if the Pakistani do nuke them. You are right, it is bullshit, but unfortunately it actually is true
What I have seen of India on the ground includes all of the things you mention.
It also includes:
hundreds of thousands of extremely rich people, with cellphones, mercs, domestic servants, laptops....
other members of that Hindu population who are terribly saddened by the intercommunal problems, who blame a lot of it on manipulation by small cliques in the governing 'mafia', who think that the country has many pressing problems but that the authorities prefer to create scapegoats rather than grasp the nettle...
a lot of people who say that partition was the single worst thing that ever happened to India: direct quote - 'we are all indians, there is no pakistan, bangladesh, afghanistan, we are one family'...
A military which represents a small, vastly overprivileged clique with its own vested interests, closely aligned to the herrendous corruption which is endemic throughout the state apparatus...
a state apparatus which is currently inthe hands of the BJP, a hindu nationalist party (and for 'party', feel free to substitute 'mafia', because that's how politics mostly works in India) which is an offshoot of the RSS, the organisation behind the assassination of Gandhi amongst other 'achievements'...
a vast number of staggeringly kind, friendly, helpful, immensely hardworking people who simply haven't got the time or resources to waste on the things you've described...
baksheesh, baksheesh, baksheesh, baksheesh,...
I've also been to the US (lived in DC for a while, even) and I know that despite the impression in the european media, the impression mainly given by the words and actions of the US government, most people in the US are also staggeringly kind, friendly, helpful, immensely hardworking people. You know that's the underlying truth, I know that's the underlying truth, but you'd never guess it from watching the TV coverage.
you'll see that the AVERAGE salary in India is $40.00 per month.
Oops. When an MP3 player is 2.5 months rent I don't think there a premium crowd of net surfers out there in India.
You're right about the average salary, but you also have to take into account that population figure, currently estimated at a billion people, and bear in mind that the variances are huge.
I spent a few months in India at the start of this year, and one of the (many) things that boggles the mind is the sheer variety of everything, the wild contrasts. In India, there are millions of people who live in the street, who live under blue polythene tarps, who live in mud (well, cowdung, usually) huts and if they're lucky, get to break rocks by the roadside in the ferocious heat to feed themselves and their families. But the 250 million people of the 'middle classes' as they are referred to in India are, in many cases, doing extremely well. As in cellphones, Mercedes cars, designer suits, laptops, satellite TV, and all those other appurtenances of a modern 'western' lifestyle. In Bangalore alone, there are reckoned to be maybe 100,000 rupee millionaires (at about 45 Rs per US dollar). And then there are the industrialists, the Bollywood people, and let's not even start on those who've become staggeringly rich through the back-channel of baksheesh.
So the minority of rich people in India, and the relative handful of very rich people, still represent a huge market, and what a lot of them want is the 'american' lifestyle - McDonalds, Starbucks, Tommy Hilfiger and so forth.
It's all about that figure of a billion people. There's a huge amount of money to be made in India, make no mistake.
Which is why, as a tourist, it's so hard to get your head around the lepers, the polio victims, the people whose parents cut off their feet in childhood to give them a glimmer of hope of a living as a street beggar.
TomV
Re:SMART-1 Is Not First With Ion Propulsion
on
Back to the Moon?
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· Score: 2, Informative
To be fair, the BBC article brushes over the Ion Drive aspect of the mission in favour of the exciting return-to-the-moon side of the story.
As the SMART-1 site itself makes clear:
SMART-1 is to be the first European spacecraft to travel to and orbit around the Moon. It will also be the first time that ESA employ electric propulsion as the mission's primary propulsion. Electric propulsion on an interplanetary mission has been used only once to date, on NASA's Deep Space 1 probe launched in October 1998.
...
The electric propulsion technology to be employed by SMART-1 was initially developed over 30 years ago, notably in Russia which, since 1972, has launched a number of operational spacecraft placed in Earth orbit. They used electric propulsion for attitude and orbit control in addition to the classical chemical propulsion. In the early 90s, agreements were reached between Russian, American and European industry, notably SNECMA, France, to pursue the development and commercialisation of such thrusters.
...
In recent years commercial telecommunications spacecraft built in the United States using different types of electric thrusters have been launched. The first was the Hughes PanAmSat-5 in 1997
Now compared to chemical rockets, in terms of missions flown and experience gained, I'd accept ion drives as pretty 'new', so, while maybe a little clumsy, the BBC's text
The main objective is to test a new type of engine technology - solar electric propulsion - which could power future missions very long distances into deep space
seems OK, and ESA certainly don't claim to be the first with an Ion Drive themselves. They don't even claim to be the first to use the SNECMA PPS 1350 Hall-Effect thruster in question (shame the SNECMA site doesn't seem to give an off-the-shelf price for one of these cuties!).
And the Apollo/Soyuz mission [...] I may be the only one reading this thread who remembers it real-time).
No, you're not. And what I like most about this story is that, when you follow the links through to the ESA SMART-1 stuff, you can see that, underneath all the grown-up grant-aided professional image, they've got the same wide-eyed enthusiasm we got sitting in front of those broadcasts - Apollo 11 and the other moon landings I can just about remember being sat in front of because this was important, but Apollo-Soyuz I was old enough to have some idea why it was so important and exciting.
And when we look at the SMART-1 site, what do we see? Lunar survey craft, great in itself, about time too, but in addition, it's a test mission to see if their ion drive (with pretty blue exhaust) will do the job for their probe to Mercury
It's great to see that the ESA understand the importance of keeping this stuff exciting, and of communicating that excitement with the public. It's my tax money that goes into this, and I'm very happy to see what they're doing with it.
Because, 27 years ago, I was really looking forward to living in the Space Age, and it seems to have been mislaid somewhere in the intervening.
Last I checked most contracts for hosting are rather clear about who is authorised to login and make changes and the extent to which they are authorised to make changes. So, a crime was perpatrated against a US company and it's computer assets by members of the Itallian police.
If this is the case (probably is), then the site owner was in no position to sign up to a contract on those terms. He's Italian. He know's he's subject to Italian law. If Italian law permits the police to use his saved userid & password, then he's either negligent in leaving that information around, or he signed a contract he couldn't keep to under the laws of his home country.
As I see it, that's the site owner's fault for agreeing the contract without checking if it was enforceable, not the Italian police's fault for doing their job. In which case, the hosting company might be expected to pull the site entirely due to the invalidation of the hosting contract.
Yes.. I think it's worth explaining for our international audience that the notoriously left-wing Mayor of London (who is setting up this scheme) was thrown out of the ruling Labour Party.
True. Thrown out of the labour party for daring to gainsay the party hierarchy in favour of the views for which he had been elected as an MP.
And a few more facts to follow. The Labour Party's candidate, Frank Dobson, got 13% of the first-preference vote in the mayoral election, compared to Livingstone's 38% (58% after second-prefs were taken into account). Indeed, such was the strength of feeling about Labour's arrogance at parachuting in a minister, confident that they had some sort of 'right' to the mayoralty, that only a notorious rebel stood a chance of getting in as a labour-ish mayor.
This isn't some stealthy, fifth-column infiltration. After years as leader of the old Greater London Council, followed by years as a very rambunctious backbench MP, I think most people in London knew full well what they were voting for. I even remember talking to a few people who are definitely not socialist, and definitely not labour supporters, who were pretty clear that they would vote Livingstone because he wasn't a party clone and specifically because he was proposing to actually do something concrete about traffic, rahter than just use it as a stick to beat the Labour pary with at election time. Never forget that the congestion carges were inhis manifesto and that the public chose to vote for him. Democracy.
Whilst I would agree normally, if they were truly public lands then they would be usable by everybody. In this case, the public land in question is demarcated for the sole use of car drivers
Bottom line - if a few of us were to get together and decide to have a nice picnic on a sunny afternoon on the 'public land' currently designated the A40, let's say at the top of the Hammersmith Flyover, we'd be moved on or arrested for causing an obstruction just as soon as the police could find a way through the traffic to get to us. So 'public' in that sense, it ain't.
Which point leads on to another, which I don't think has been mentioned yet - public services are horribly hampered by the traffic situation. Whtever your views on the appropriate role of the state, I think it's reasonable to say that if police, ambulances and fire engines can't make it to incidents quickly, everybody suffers. At present, the response times are just about OK, but as traffic volumes continue to rise, so does the time to fight through that traffic. Inconvenient for citizens. Expensive for businesses. Potentially fatal for accident or attack victims.
Congestion charging is hardly desirable, but at least it makes a change from the usual supine defeatism, and it's finally got people to actually talk about the issue. Real people inthe pub, not talking head media people on TV.
Yup, Tori Amos, electronic music. Specifically, as a target for remixers. More specifcally, as the voice (and not a lot else) on Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix of Professional Widow (remixed by, for those who aren't in the cosy name-dropping clique yet, Armand Van Helden).
Plus sundry other remixed tracks, but who cares. On the strength of this one mix, Tori's definitely on the bus.
To be honest, I'd get away from the idea of buying a single artist/album since this has a lot less relevance in Dance music. There are tons of Dance producers that make one fantastic record and everything else they do sucks. So mixes are the best way to go.
I'd definitely endorse this, if only because it's (mostly) how I finally got the hang of dance music. In fact, I'd argue that, withthe amount of remixing applied to the tracks on the good comps, i tend to think of the DJ as the producer nowadays.
OK, there had been individual artists I'd liked (and in the UK at least there's been an electronic side to 'pop' since the early 1980's) but as the explosion took off from about 1987 onwards, there were just too many artists, in too many narrow, blurred subgenres, to work out what to try next.
But remember, with dance music comes DJ culture. Individual records aren't quite so important, the combinations, the synergies, become a big part of the fun. And in DJ culture, you don't look for artists you trust anymore, you look for a DJ you can trust. My DJ history, like a lot of people's, I suspect, shares with the submitter the 'Sasha & Digweed / Oakenfold' start. in my case I got S&D's original 'Renaissance' comp from he library (i was bored, i'd listened to most of what they had already, it was a triple in really flash packaging) and liked it, asked some of my dancy friends for hints, and got played Oakenfold's Goa Mix (Paul Oakenfold had produced The Happy Mondays' "Thrills, Pills and Bellyaches", so I was definitely up for heaing some of his other work, and the Goa Mix is still, to my mind, a total masterpiece, if you can find it).
That's all I neded really. I now knew that I could trust these 3 DJ's, that I'd probably like their other mixes, other stuff by the artists on their mixes, and that I'd also probably like their remixes of other people's stuff. In which case I might like other stuff by the artists they'd worked with.
Believe me, that's plenty of degrees of freedom to work with. On the Kevin Bacon Game Principle, you should now be able to follow your trusted 'guides' to pretty much anywhere. Via stuff you stand a good chance of liking. It'll even get you out as far as Madonna (via William Orbit), Motorhead (via the Orb and the KLF), Pink Floyd (via Blue Pearl) and all points west.
Which also reminds me - since the DJ / Remixer / Producer role is all a bit of a continuum, there's a good chance that some of the 'non-dance' stuff you like is produced by someone who's also a name in the dance / electronica side of things. Oh, and a lot of stuff is on small, specialist labels where you stand a very good chance of liking several labelmates.
So dive into the documentation basically - gorge yourself on production credits, tracklists, remixers, record labels, then dive inand play the Bacon Game.
TomV
oh, a quick p.s. to the direct parent, Disc one of Oakenfold's Global Underground - Oslo mix is pretty DnB if you count LTJ Bukem as DnB, which I do ymmv, although granted in general you think Oakenfold, you think Trance, and Endtroducing DJ Shadow was pretty DnB by the standard of its time.
*I* was referring to the REAL KLF, from the great, great book. The idiots you mention STOLE their name from there.
Well, not so much, stole, more that after his involvement designing sets for Ken Campbell's stage production of Illuminatus in the 1970's, Bill Drummond (one half of the KLF, with artist Jimi Cauty, who did that Lord Of The Rings poster that was on every student wall a few years back) got totally obsessed (like, sub-clinically) with Operation Mindfuck. Hence before they were the KLF they were the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (23 letters if you spell it that way rather than Mummu), and in true mindfuck style they also operated as the Timelords, the K Foundation, 2K Plant Hire (but only for 23 minutes), the One World Orchestra, the AAA Sonic Attack Formation. Their last video ended up with them geting into a submarine and heading off to Atlantis, as a credit rolled by thanking The Five for making all this possible.
They subverted the Turner Prize by offering more prize money for the WORST nominee, attempted to take a statuette of Elvis to the North Pole (read Bill Drummond's 'Bad Wisdom', it's fab), invented a Finnish record labe, Kalevala, to release the most preposterous music I've hear so far (including the ultimate punk record, The Fuckers' Teenage Virgin Supermodels Eat Shit), accepted their Brit Award in 1992 by performing with Extreme Noise teror and throwing offal over the audience, they claimed to come from Atlantis and have been waiting 20000 years for he right moment to (as in the lyrics to 'All You Need Is Love' (1987)) Immanentise the Eschaton, put full-page (expensive) enigmatic adverts in the national press every now and again...
They didn't steal the name, they kopylefted it and took it into the real world to the extent of seling millions of records, closing down KLF Communications at the height of their commercial success (signed a contract to keep it out of action for precisely 23 years), and burning the remaining assets, a million pounds in fifties, on a scottish island on he 23rd of August 1994 (this after they had nailed it to a plank and failed to sell it as art for 1/2 a million). There's an FAQ for the curious.
All in all, a pretty discordian exercise - many thanks to the Drummond Cabal, Eris be praised!
OK, so strictly, village-wise, he was born in Anchiano, a full 3 km from the town of Vinci, on April 15 1452, but he was baptised in the chapel of Vinci, and his family moved there when Leonardo was five. His father was a public official in Vinci, Vinci was the centre of the parish and the local administrative centre. Leonardo lived there until he was 14 (very much adult in those days) when he moved to Firenze (Florence). Trust me, I'm a librarian!
TomV
Re:It's not "da Vinci"; it's "Leonardo".
on
Da Vinci Bridge Built
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· Score: 5, Informative
"da Vinci" is the last name. He's known as Leonardo because he signed as Leonardo
Not quite. Remember that Leonardo was born in 1452, well before modern European naming conventions developed. His full name of 'Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci' means "Leonardo, sired by Piero, from Vinci".
So whilst "da Vinci" is the last chunk of his name, referring to this bridge as the work of "da Vinci" effectively means attributing it to "some bloke from Vinci". If he'd been born 400 years later, "da Vinci" would have been reasonably described as a surname, as it is, it stands as a reasonably useful way of referring to the man, but then so does 'Leonardo', which, as Kazzuya points out, has the benefit of being how the artist himself signed his work (let's not get into the 350 different ways Wm Sheakspeer spelled his name...)
Slashdot Mirror
And it won't keep people from cheating on their taxes
It seems to me that actually a very major part of this is, precisely, road-tax enforcement.
For non-UKians, a brief summary of the process of getting your car taxed (including recent amendments).
To keep or drive a vehicle on the roads, you need to display a 'Tax Disc' inside your windscreen. Non-display of the disc is an offense. As the Registered Keeper of a vehicle, if you don't tax it because you're legitimately taking it off the road for a while, you must instead get a Statutory Off-Road Notification certificate, so you can't slip off the database. The SORN is free (or is it £5?). No SORN is a £1000 fine, driving a SORNed vehicle is a £5000 fine.
To get the disc (annually, expiry date is the biggest thing on the disc), you need to go to a Post Office and present either the reminder that was sent to you or the Vehicle Registration Document (in your name, with your address) and a valid Insurance Certificate for the vehicle. If the vehicle's more than 3 years old (but less than 25(?)) you also need an 'MOT Certificate', a certificate of basic roadworthiness originally named for the Ministry of Transport). All these documents must match the registration mark of the vehicle and the address of the applicant.
In the legitimate channel, if you need a new plate (as I did recently when someone tweaked the front of my car in the carpark at work, thanks!) you need the Registration Document and two pieces of ID to get your new plate. Obviously this wouldn't apply for fake plates. But be careful making those fake plates as having a plate in the worng font (typeface or size, or those silly italic plates) is also an offense.
So, since all new cars went onto the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority) database at first registration, it's really easy to identify all the non-taxed cars on the road (of which there are far, far too many).
And this is definitely a good thing. Firstly, I pay my road tax (which incidentally isn't hypothecated and has had nothing to do with road-related expenditure for years), so why should someone else get the benefits of using the road for free or for the price of a SORN? And more importantly, a major reason for driving without tax is that you can't GET a tax disc, because you're uninsured. Which at best means that if you have an innocent accident, other people don't get their costs covered. More realistically you're actually uninsured because you've become too expensive to cover, or you're outright banned but driving anyway.
I'd feel a lot safer driving with a system to filter out the road-users who've already been identified by the law or the insurance market as Too Dangerous To Use The Roads, and I'd also be happy to know that everyone else on the roads is making the same payment I have to make.
So in short, yup, I see it as primarily a tax-enforcement thing
TomV
Professionals might, but like mentioned before, they would prefer to use an expendable minion to do the actual work
Granted, and the impression I've absorbed from the press in recent years is that increasing volumes of car thefts are done to order, hence, by professionals.
And if I were this posited professional, stealing cars to order, I'd definitely prefer an expendable minion, but it I was able to, why not supply him/her with a lasered number-plate suitable for the model I've sent him/her out for, thus increasing my chances of a successful operation?
TomV
where can you get a legitimate copy of VS.Net 2003 for $20?
OK, so strictly it's $29, according to Moft, but (so long as you already have a copy of 2002 - mine came from ebay for about 1/3 the original price), this is entirely legitimate. Mine's already ordered.
TomV
would that be a link using the htt:// rotocol, or would they have to get it over ft:// ?
Actually, I'd hoe as a malware-rotection comany, they'd use htts:// rather than vanilla htt://
It's alright, but not as good as the finished City of Death, which is I think another Douglas Adams write.
Fair comment, but then again you'd be hard pressed to come up with any other story from the whole 1963-1989 run which gets the same level of fan-respect as City Of Death. It's perhaps rather atypical in cartain respects, but as a comlete package, the only issue with using CoD to introduce the show to new viewers is the difficulty of finding another story to follow it with. It's a little gem.
TomV
How long before shirts, jackets, etc. come with random number plates as the logo on the back?
No, hang on...
How long before shirts, jackets, etc. come with Ken Livingstone's number plates as the logo on the back?
TomV
According to the ISS website, the current (Expedition 6) crew is:
They've been on the station since November 25th 2002 (two days after launch), and were scheduled to return on shuttle mission 114 (Atlantis) on an as-yet-unspecified date no earlier than March 1st 2003.
BBC TV news just mentioned this concern, suggesting that Russia would probably do the crew recovery mission, given that after the Challenger incident, the shuttles were grounded for over two years, and speculated as to whether today's news might render the ISS program unsustainable.
TomV
2002 is the first year of the Tenth Five Year Plan in India, mandating the prices of staples such as rice, milk, sugar, of paraffin for domestic cooking, and of industrial essentials like fuel, fertilisers, electricity. The Plan also sets the vast tariff rates on many products such as textiles and cars/trucks/2-wheelers that maintain local production...
The BJP may be moving the country away from command socialism, but there's a long way to go yet, and the process has to be managed carefully because the livelihoods and indeed survival of a billion people depend on getting it right.
I 'get the idea' from having visited the country in the last year. I'm backed up in this belief by, for instance, the WTO's review of the latest 5-year Plan.
TomV
That is barbaric
Right. Lads, we've given them 225 years of the benefit of the doubt, but this must stop. And it must stop now!
It's 01:30GMT. I reckon if we let slip the cavalry now we can have the US back in British hands in time for tea.
Hey, it's the moral imperative. How else can we react?
TomV
The starvation in Zimbabwe is Mugabe's fault, and would have happened (although maybe less severely) even if the drought hadn't happened.
Indeed, Zimbabwe used to be the 'breadbasket of Africa' - if Mugabe hadn't sent the army out to make sure that no food was planted on the farms of Zimbabwe this year, then on past performance, it's likely that the famines in these other countries would be nowhere near as severe because they would be able to get food grown in Zimbabwe.
There's a real drought problem, certainly, but the starvation is at least partly down to issues of distribution, and the farm-shutdown in Zimbabwe most certainly exacerbates the problem.
TomV
Oh, that's easy. To get some hard currency to buy more weapons to fund Zimabawe's army in the Congo to protect Mugabe's personal logging, cobalt and diamond businesses.
Mr Mugabe may have been a figurehead of Africn independence 30 years ago, but Mugabe2002 appears to be interested only in personal aggrandisement, wealth and survival in the face of a population which appears, in large part, to despise him.
It ain't a democracy.
The people of Zimbabwe are starving.
Robert Mugabe is worrying about exporting food.
TomV
key points:
- ~700,000 mobile phones stolen in the UK in 2001 including at least one cited fatal shooting
- an estimated 48% of these phones were stolen from under-18's, often with a threat of violence
- only Orange and One-to-One currently track IMEI's
- Cellnet (name changed to O2 since the article) and Vodaphone refused to implement IMEI tracking citing estimated costs of £18million each, (<£1.50 per subscriber)
- a network providing service to a stolen handset can expect to make about £30/month from the subscriber
- all four major networks give statements at the end, and Vodaphone and Cellnet both explicitly state that they will not implement IMEI tracking because it is not a bar to crime, because IMEI's can be easily reprogrammed.
And here's some Hansard transcript of the Bill's second reading in the House of Lords (HoL Hansard's generally a whole lot more 'insightful' and less 'flamebait'-ridden than House of Commons stuff). Gives a good overview of the thinking behind the bill, and in plain english rather than legalese, too.TomV
Point of clarification - the article you've cited doesn't actually say that the online population of India is 3.3 million: it says:
Take careful note of the word subscribers: now bear in mind that the potential market for internet-mediated commerce is not limited just to those with their own ISP subscription, and that the vast majority of internet use in India works on the 'internet cafe' model (except most of these places don't do catering, just Internet and telephone service ('ISD/STD')). A PC is a huge capital investment, which not many can afford. 60 rupees an hour for internet access (I've seen it as low as 20Rs/hr in Bangalore) is far more widely available. What would be far more interesting if available would be the number of hotmail / yahoomail accounts used by Indians
TomV
What I have seen of India on the ground includes all of the things you mention.
It also includes:
I've also been to the US (lived in DC for a while, even) and I know that despite the impression in the european media, the impression mainly given by the words and actions of the US government, most people in the US are also staggeringly kind, friendly, helpful, immensely hardworking people. You know that's the underlying truth, I know that's the underlying truth, but you'd never guess it from watching the TV coverage.
TomV
Oops. When an MP3 player is 2.5 months rent I don't think there a premium crowd of net surfers out there in India.
You're right about the average salary, but you also have to take into account that population figure, currently estimated at a billion people, and bear in mind that the variances are huge.
I spent a few months in India at the start of this year, and one of the (many) things that boggles the mind is the sheer variety of everything, the wild contrasts. In India, there are millions of people who live in the street, who live under blue polythene tarps, who live in mud (well, cowdung, usually) huts and if they're lucky, get to break rocks by the roadside in the ferocious heat to feed themselves and their families. But the 250 million people of the 'middle classes' as they are referred to in India are, in many cases, doing extremely well. As in cellphones, Mercedes cars, designer suits, laptops, satellite TV, and all those other appurtenances of a modern 'western' lifestyle. In Bangalore alone, there are reckoned to be maybe 100,000 rupee millionaires (at about 45 Rs per US dollar). And then there are the industrialists, the Bollywood people, and let's not even start on those who've become staggeringly rich through the back-channel of baksheesh.
So the minority of rich people in India, and the relative handful of very rich people, still represent a huge market, and what a lot of them want is the 'american' lifestyle - McDonalds, Starbucks, Tommy Hilfiger and so forth.
It's all about that figure of a billion people. There's a huge amount of money to be made in India, make no mistake.
Which is why, as a tourist, it's so hard to get your head around the lepers, the polio victims, the people whose parents cut off their feet in childhood to give them a glimmer of hope of a living as a street beggar.
TomV
As the SMART-1 site itself makes clear:
Now compared to chemical rockets, in terms of missions flown and experience gained, I'd accept ion drives as pretty 'new', so, while maybe a little clumsy, the BBC's text seems OK, and ESA certainly don't claim to be the first with an Ion Drive themselves. They don't even claim to be the first to use the SNECMA PPS 1350 Hall-Effect thruster in question (shame the SNECMA site doesn't seem to give an off-the-shelf price for one of these cuties!).Still determined to live in the Space Age
TomV
No, you're not. And what I like most about this story is that, when you follow the links through to the ESA SMART-1 stuff, you can see that, underneath all the grown-up grant-aided professional image, they've got the same wide-eyed enthusiasm we got sitting in front of those broadcasts - Apollo 11 and the other moon landings I can just about remember being sat in front of because this was important, but Apollo-Soyuz I was old enough to have some idea why it was so important and exciting.
And when we look at the SMART-1 site, what do we see? Lunar survey craft, great in itself, about time too, but in addition, it's a test mission to see if their ion drive (with pretty blue exhaust) will do the job for their probe to Mercury
It's great to see that the ESA understand the importance of keeping this stuff exciting, and of communicating that excitement with the public. It's my tax money that goes into this, and I'm very happy to see what they're doing with it.
Because, 27 years ago, I was really looking forward to living in the Space Age, and it seems to have been mislaid somewhere in the intervening.
TomV
If this is the case (probably is), then the site owner was in no position to sign up to a contract on those terms. He's Italian. He know's he's subject to Italian law. If Italian law permits the police to use his saved userid & password, then he's either negligent in leaving that information around, or he signed a contract he couldn't keep to under the laws of his home country.
As I see it, that's the site owner's fault for agreeing the contract without checking if it was enforceable, not the Italian police's fault for doing their job. In which case, the hosting company might be expected to pull the site entirely due to the invalidation of the hosting contract.
Just an opinion
TomV
True. Thrown out of the labour party for daring to gainsay the party hierarchy in favour of the views for which he had been elected as an MP.
And a few more facts to follow. The Labour Party's candidate, Frank Dobson, got 13% of the first-preference vote in the mayoral election, compared to Livingstone's 38% (58% after second-prefs were taken into account). Indeed, such was the strength of feeling about Labour's arrogance at parachuting in a minister, confident that they had some sort of 'right' to the mayoralty, that only a notorious rebel stood a chance of getting in as a labour-ish mayor.
This isn't some stealthy, fifth-column infiltration. After years as leader of the old Greater London Council, followed by years as a very rambunctious backbench MP, I think most people in London knew full well what they were voting for. I even remember talking to a few people who are definitely not socialist, and definitely not labour supporters, who were pretty clear that they would vote Livingstone because he wasn't a party clone and specifically because he was proposing to actually do something concrete about traffic, rahter than just use it as a stick to beat the Labour pary with at election time. Never forget that the congestion carges were inhis manifesto and that the public chose to vote for him. Democracy.
TomV
Exactly - that's why we have Reclaim the Streets.
Bottom line - if a few of us were to get together and decide to have a nice picnic on a sunny afternoon on the 'public land' currently designated the A40, let's say at the top of the Hammersmith Flyover, we'd be moved on or arrested for causing an obstruction just as soon as the police could find a way through the traffic to get to us. So 'public' in that sense, it ain't.
Which point leads on to another, which I don't think has been mentioned yet - public services are horribly hampered by the traffic situation. Whtever your views on the appropriate role of the state, I think it's reasonable to say that if police, ambulances and fire engines can't make it to incidents quickly, everybody suffers. At present, the response times are just about OK, but as traffic volumes continue to rise, so does the time to fight through that traffic. Inconvenient for citizens. Expensive for businesses. Potentially fatal for accident or attack victims.
Congestion charging is hardly desirable, but at least it makes a change from the usual supine defeatism, and it's finally got people to actually talk about the issue. Real people inthe pub, not talking head media people on TV.
TomV
Yup, Tori Amos, electronic music. Specifically, as a target for remixers. More specifcally, as the voice (and not a lot else) on Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix of Professional Widow (remixed by, for those who aren't in the cosy name-dropping clique yet, Armand Van Helden).
Plus sundry other remixed tracks, but who cares. On the strength of this one mix, Tori's definitely on the bus.
TomV
I'd definitely endorse this, if only because it's (mostly) how I finally got the hang of dance music. In fact, I'd argue that, withthe amount of remixing applied to the tracks on the good comps, i tend to think of the DJ as the producer nowadays.
OK, there had been individual artists I'd liked (and in the UK at least there's been an electronic side to 'pop' since the early 1980's) but as the explosion took off from about 1987 onwards, there were just too many artists, in too many narrow, blurred subgenres, to work out what to try next.
But remember, with dance music comes DJ culture. Individual records aren't quite so important, the combinations, the synergies, become a big part of the fun. And in DJ culture, you don't look for artists you trust anymore, you look for a DJ you can trust. My DJ history, like a lot of people's, I suspect, shares with the submitter the 'Sasha & Digweed / Oakenfold' start. in my case I got S&D's original 'Renaissance' comp from he library (i was bored, i'd listened to most of what they had already, it was a triple in really flash packaging) and liked it, asked some of my dancy friends for hints, and got played Oakenfold's Goa Mix (Paul Oakenfold had produced The Happy Mondays' "Thrills, Pills and Bellyaches", so I was definitely up for heaing some of his other work, and the Goa Mix is still, to my mind, a total masterpiece, if you can find it).
That's all I neded really. I now knew that I could trust these 3 DJ's, that I'd probably like their other mixes, other stuff by the artists on their mixes, and that I'd also probably like their remixes of other people's stuff. In which case I might like other stuff by the artists they'd worked with.
Believe me, that's plenty of degrees of freedom to work with. On the Kevin Bacon Game Principle, you should now be able to follow your trusted 'guides' to pretty much anywhere. Via stuff you stand a good chance of liking. It'll even get you out as far as Madonna (via William Orbit), Motorhead (via the Orb and the KLF), Pink Floyd (via Blue Pearl) and all points west.
Which also reminds me - since the DJ / Remixer / Producer role is all a bit of a continuum, there's a good chance that some of the 'non-dance' stuff you like is produced by someone who's also a name in the dance / electronica side of things. Oh, and a lot of stuff is on small, specialist labels where you stand a very good chance of liking several labelmates.
So dive into the documentation basically - gorge yourself on production credits, tracklists, remixers, record labels, then dive inand play the Bacon Game.
TomV
oh, a quick p.s. to the direct parent, Disc one of Oakenfold's Global Underground - Oslo mix is pretty DnB if you count LTJ Bukem as DnB, which I do ymmv, although granted in general you think Oakenfold, you think Trance, and Endtroducing DJ Shadow was pretty DnB by the standard of its time.
Well, not so much, stole, more that after his involvement designing sets for Ken Campbell's stage production of Illuminatus in the 1970's, Bill Drummond (one half of the KLF, with artist Jimi Cauty, who did that Lord Of The Rings poster that was on every student wall a few years back) got totally obsessed (like, sub-clinically) with Operation Mindfuck. Hence before they were the KLF they were the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (23 letters if you spell it that way rather than Mummu), and in true mindfuck style they also operated as the Timelords, the K Foundation, 2K Plant Hire (but only for 23 minutes), the One World Orchestra, the AAA Sonic Attack Formation. Their last video ended up with them geting into a submarine and heading off to Atlantis, as a credit rolled by thanking The Five for making all this possible.
They subverted the Turner Prize by offering more prize money for the WORST nominee, attempted to take a statuette of Elvis to the North Pole (read Bill Drummond's 'Bad Wisdom', it's fab), invented a Finnish record labe, Kalevala, to release the most preposterous music I've hear so far (including the ultimate punk record, The Fuckers' Teenage Virgin Supermodels Eat Shit), accepted their Brit Award in 1992 by performing with Extreme Noise teror and throwing offal over the audience, they claimed to come from Atlantis and have been waiting 20000 years for he right moment to (as in the lyrics to 'All You Need Is Love' (1987)) Immanentise the Eschaton, put full-page (expensive) enigmatic adverts in the national press every now and again...
They didn't steal the name, they kopylefted it and took it into the real world to the extent of seling millions of records, closing down KLF Communications at the height of their commercial success (signed a contract to keep it out of action for precisely 23 years), and burning the remaining assets, a million pounds in fifties, on a scottish island on he 23rd of August 1994 (this after they had nailed it to a plank and failed to sell it as art for 1/2 a million). There's an FAQ for the curious.
All in all, a pretty discordian exercise - many thanks to the Drummond Cabal, Eris be praised!
TomV
OK, so strictly, village-wise, he was born in Anchiano, a full 3 km from the town of Vinci, on April 15 1452, but he was baptised in the chapel of Vinci, and his family moved there when Leonardo was five. His father was a public official in Vinci, Vinci was the centre of the parish and the local administrative centre. Leonardo lived there until he was 14 (very much adult in those days) when he moved to Firenze (Florence). Trust me, I'm a librarian!
TomV
Not quite. Remember that Leonardo was born in 1452, well before modern European naming conventions developed. His full name of 'Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci' means "Leonardo, sired by Piero, from Vinci".
So whilst "da Vinci" is the last chunk of his name, referring to this bridge as the work of "da Vinci" effectively means attributing it to "some bloke from Vinci". If he'd been born 400 years later, "da Vinci" would have been reasonably described as a surname, as it is, it stands as a reasonably useful way of referring to the man, but then so does 'Leonardo', which, as Kazzuya points out, has the benefit of being how the artist himself signed his work (let's not get into the 350 different ways Wm Sheakspeer spelled his name...)
TomV