Mark Thomas is an alternative comedian who enjoys hassling big business, governments and 'individuals of high net worth' live on Channel Four. Basically he is an out-and-out unreconstructed socialist and quite often gets right on my tits (or he would, if I had any) but just occasionaly he does something truly amusing like bumrushing Jack Straw at an Oxford University Union debate.
you are indeed correct, which is why I really rather liked the Mark Thomas show where they went and hassled a bunch of people shamelessly - several of whom ended up paying the tax to avoid being bumrushed.
I have to agree with Archangel M. here: the principle that 'the government knows best' is a hateful idea...*shudder*.
I rather liked a comment that Regan made in the eighties about the difference between the US and the (then) USSR:
"Our countries are both alike in the we have constitutions: Yours sets out the rights of the people and so forth, whereas our says that the people will allow the govenment to do the following things."
Anyway inheritance tax? In the UK it is 40% of anything over £140,000 (This may not be exactly right but is of the correct order of magnitude, circa $225,000) which is not chickenfeed. Secondly, as all watcher of "The Mark Thoams Product" know, if you wish to avoid paying inheritance tax on an item of art or suchlike you must allow the public to see it within 30ish days of the request.
Finally, I love the idea that all rich kids are layabouts who just have a good time on Dad or Mom's money. How about sayng that all white southern US citizens are unemployed rednecks...uhh, crass generalisation?
A) The operating system used by such machines will be mandated by the university authorities?
and
B) That operating system won't be your favourite Linux distro?
I use a Windows NT network at this University (Ecole de Chimie de Clermont-Ferrand) because I have to - my laptop is Debian. With loads of useful little things to play with like Perl, MySQL and an internal CERN-HTTPD webserver. I guess I just wouldn't like to be TOLD what to use - education is abuot giving people the ability and information to make bettr choices, right?
"The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating? "
Errr, water?
Microwaves are commonly used in chemical spectroscopy as they represent the changes in (pure) rotational energy levels of molecules.
Personally I am highly sceptical about claims that the radiation is particularly harmful - just isn't enough evidence yet.
"There are vast quantities of the greenhouse gas methane locked up in a hydrated form on the sea floor. If the sea warmed and/or sea levels decreased (lowering the pressure) the methane could be released leading to a runaway greenhouse effect. "
A good one, but improbable because if we assume that pressure=(mass/volume) * g * height
and that v=area * height
and that V = k * 1/T
we can deduce that the pressure at the bottom of the sea is not ultimately function of temperature or density but of the mass per unit area for a given depth of water.
OTOH, if the temperature increase causes the
methane hydrates to decompose, ulp!
I liked the article, a good balance of information and humour. There were one or two problems though -
Particle accelerators are an extremely improbable source of what have been described as 'quantum foam phase changes'. The earth atmosphere (as a single example) is bombarded with 'cosmic rays' actually relativisic speed particles (Is it a wave? Is it a particle? Well see, it's kinda uncertain!) the upper energy of which is really high, far higher than the bombardments caused in particle accelerators. PA's are also unlikely to produce black holes, apparently the energy density ain't high enough.
Vacuum collapse is another example of phase change - also improbable.
The reversal of the earth's magnetic field one had me puzzled: the title, followed by earth's magnetic field getting stronger, followed by the lack of a magnetic field leaving us open to particle storms. Seemed a bit random and unstructured.
T'was written...Why should anybody want to do that?
Laughs aside, because they usually have loads of really groovy ideas which our own government is too stupid or too tight to fund, so we have to get people with a little vision to back with capital.
T'was written...Why should anybody want to do that?
Laughs aside, because they usually have loads of really groovy ideas which our own government is too stupid or too tight to fund, so we have to get people with a little vision to back with capital.
This is true and I freely admit it - I am just a nasty cynic. NASA has come a long way in the past few years with the lighter, faster, cheaper methodology but this still doesn't get them off the hook for poor project management: nonexistant cost control, save-yer-own-ass managers and a NASA gets the credit at all costs policy.
The worth of the possible data is enormous but that don't mean to say that it couldn't be done better and/or cheaper.
Develop a world-class orbiting laboratory for conducting high-value scientific research
Fairy nuff, although quite why you'd want to orbit some of these is beyond me except in specific cases where ultra-low gravity is required.
Develop ability to live and work in space for extended periods
Already done. Mir, skylab usw although I do agree that more research should be done on mankind in space for extended periods as I agreed earlier.
Develop effective international cooperation
I can agree with this one. Mankind's future in space will definitely require cooperation between nations.
Provide a testbed for developing 21 st Century technology.
How exactly? Give me examples, reasons or some good links to these. Plenty of 21st century technology is already developed on the ground. I doubt there will actually be a huge amount of 21st century technology used in the station on the grounds that in space where just about everything everything is critical tried-and-trusted technology is used.
>>Listen you little shit, who the fuck doesn't know the problem with the mirror? Nasa fixed it. End of story. >Go find me ONE astronomer who has ANYTHING negative to say about Hubble.>And, yes, one of the many missions failed. Wow, I guess we should throw away all the other science data we've obtained through those boobs at Nasa. It's all just a cock-up! Fucking pathetic. Please guy. Sit down and shut up. No one cares to hear from loonies like you.
Okay, I'm done with being aggressively reasonable - go fuck yourself and your opinions. You're clearly too ignorant to know jack about the issue and clearly too stupid to formulate a reasonable argument without resorting to insult in the face of sensible, if perhaps cynical, argument.
Yep, Hubble was an almost-unmitigated fuck up - read the reference book listed - Perkin Elmer ground the mirror wrongly and even when they had some basic evidence that it was ground wrong they still shipped it, NASA consistently claimed that HST was fine - even better than designed - despite the fact that it was spherically abberated, they used second-hand gyroscopes which malfunctioned regularly, and finally when they put the corrective optics in (WF/PC 2) they had to take out about the only instrument which worked reliably and as designed - one of the spectrometers. True, much has been achieved but nothing like what could have been if NASA's management had been halfway competent.
On the second point - so failing to convert poundinches to newtonmetres and crashing your expensive Mars mission into the Polar regions of the planet is not a cock-up? Really, I'm so glad.
Before you debate the issue, know the facts. Also have the courage to sign in instead of posting anonymously if yoi wish to make personal insults.
In the Napoleonic wars it was not too uncommon to find the Brown Bess muskets used by the majority of the British army loaded from breech to muzzle because the soldier holding it hadn't pulled the trigger.
Oh, how original...the laugh to prove the other person wrong treatment.
As a child of thirteen I was shown how to shoot a.22 rimfire and a 7.62 (aka.308 Winchester) target rifle safely and sensibly. I also spent three years with the Royal Marines cadets while at school, theoretically learning how to kill people, including 45 Commando RM's 1993 annual four day exercise. I still shoot regularly and have represented my country at international level - does this make me some kind of sicko pervert who would want to kill people?
Nope.
Do you blame the sword for the hand that wields it?
Nope.
Do I blame violent television or computer games for mass killings?
Nope (I'm also a Quake'r).
Grow up and treat the issue with the respect and seriousness it deserves. Arsehole.
Alas I have to agree, it's a waste of space (Excuse poor pun.)
it is all very well saying things like 'money spent on the space program is spent on the ground' and so forth but ultimately if you don't do something useful with the ISS all you have is a multi-billion dollar toy. Pretty but useless.
NASA (Never A Straight Answer?) has never given any particularly good answers on what the hell they're going to do with the ISS. I don't agree that we have done enough physiological research into people in space, facts are still being found, à la vitamin K story a few weeks ago. Various things that I have read in the papers include a tracking system for stolen cars (I kid ye not) and super-accurate timing signals worldwide (uh...relativity?).
The basic fact is that they haven't got a damn clue what the hell they're going to do with it - they are just bloody sure that they are not going to screw it up like so many previous cockups by NASA (I'm not proud the ESA have made enough too and it must be said that at least you have a damn space program - unlike the UK. We got the scientists but we've also got a government which couldn't give a shit.)
Essentially NASA is just praying for some good publicity after the strem of unmitigated fuck-ups of the nineties - Hubble, Mars craft etc...
Gotta say what I see.
Elgon
"Uhhh, what planet are we sending this (Hubble ST) to?" - Gore, Albert.
(PS - for real afficionados of space cockups, read: Chaisson, Eric. 'The Hubble Wars'. A damned fine read.)
while I don't specifically agree with all of your statements you do talk sense. The whole idea of stealing jobs is a false one - if you're good enough you get the job. Companies who hire labour simply because it is cheap will find that such cost effective labour comes at a higher cost than hiring a guy with the right skills, or the ability and drive to learn the right skills and employ them usefully. The supply/demand law will hold true ultimately when these companies wise up to the fact that they are hiring something which appears impressive but when the glitteris scraped off proves to be cheap crap.
Ability, drive and enthusiasm are far, far more important than a CS degree. Several of the IT people I know don't have IT degrees - Biology PhD, Master's in Computational Linguistics and a couple with no degree at all (but generally very smart indeed.)
While I almost certainly say that the Z80 wouldn' handle Linux I can say that the Z80 had several clock versions...
Z80 - 2.5 ???
Z80A - 4MHz (as per RadioSpares catalogue)
Z80B - 6MHz (ditto...)
I believe there was also an 8MHz version. I also have personal experience, having built a Z80 machine of my own when I was 16ish. 4MHz, 16kROM, 32kRAM, and 2 pageable 8k RAM/ROM sections using a 32 character by 6 line display. Ahhh... Those were the days.
Elite for the ZX spectrum was a true classic along with JetPac, Sabrewulf and all the Ultim8: Play the Game doohickies.
Elgon
Slashdot Mirror
Nope,
Mark Thomas is an alternative comedian who enjoys hassling big business, governments and 'individuals of high net worth' live on Channel Four. Basically he is an out-and-out unreconstructed socialist and quite often gets right on my tits (or he would, if I had any) but just occasionaly he does something truly amusing like bumrushing Jack Straw at an Oxford University Union debate.
Elgon
MemRaven,
you are indeed correct, which is why I really rather liked the Mark Thomas show where they went and hassled a bunch of people shamelessly - several of whom ended up paying the tax to avoid being bumrushed.
excellent stuff
Elgon
I have to agree with Archangel M. here: the principle that 'the government knows best' is a hateful idea...*shudder*.
I rather liked a comment that Regan made in the eighties about the difference between the US and the (then) USSR:
"Our countries are both alike in the we have constitutions: Yours sets out the rights of the people and so forth, whereas our says that the people will allow the govenment to do the following things."
Anyway inheritance tax? In the UK it is 40% of anything over £140,000 (This may not be exactly right but is of the correct order of magnitude, circa $225,000) which is not chickenfeed. Secondly, as all watcher of "The Mark Thoams Product" know, if you wish to avoid paying inheritance tax on an item of art or suchlike you must allow the public to see it within 30ish days of the request.
Finally, I love the idea that all rich kids are layabouts who just have a good time on Dad or Mom's money. How about sayng that all white southern US citizens are unemployed rednecks...uhh, crass generalisation?
I like David Brin's books but this letter sucks.
Elgon
Twas written...
"The only conceivable reason to use dlaptops is so they can lug them to classes-"
Cue first lawsuit for back trouble caused by hauling around a 'puter.
Elgon
Who wants to bet that...
A) The operating system used by such machines will be mandated by the university authorities?
and
B) That operating system won't be your favourite Linux distro?
I use a Windows NT network at this University (Ecole de Chimie de Clermont-Ferrand) because I have to - my laptop is Debian. With loads of useful little things to play with like Perl, MySQL and an internal CERN-HTTPD webserver. I guess I just wouldn't like to be TOLD what to use - education is abuot giving people the ability and information to make bettr choices, right?
Elgon
Twas written...
"The claim that microwaves can't do anything because they are not ionizing radiation is at best doubtful. How do we know that there isn't a chemical substance in the brain which resonates at the frequencies of these transmitters and which will selectively absorb energy from them causing a breakdown of the chemical from selective heating? "
Errr, water?
Microwaves are commonly used in chemical spectroscopy as they represent the changes in (pure) rotational energy levels of molecules.
Personally I am highly sceptical about claims that the radiation is particularly harmful - just isn't enough evidence yet.
Elgon
A pity, one of the truly great space projects of all time.I hope that this is just a glitch or some temporary condition.
Elgon
Twas written.
"There are vast quantities of the greenhouse gas methane locked up in a hydrated form on the sea floor. If the sea warmed and/or sea levels decreased (lowering the pressure) the methane could be released leading to a runaway greenhouse effect. "
A good one, but improbable because if we assume that pressure=(mass/volume) * g * height
and that v=area * height
and that V = k * 1/T
we can deduce that the pressure at the bottom of the sea is not ultimately function of temperature or density but of the mass per unit area for a given depth of water.
OTOH, if the temperature increase causes the
methane hydrates to decompose, ulp!
Elgon
I liked the article, a good balance of information and humour. There were one or two problems though -
Particle accelerators are an extremely improbable source of what have been described as 'quantum foam phase changes'. The earth atmosphere (as a single example) is bombarded with 'cosmic rays' actually relativisic speed particles (Is it a wave? Is it a particle? Well see, it's kinda uncertain!) the upper energy of which is really high, far higher than the bombardments caused in particle accelerators. PA's are also unlikely to produce black holes, apparently the energy density ain't high enough.
Vacuum collapse is another example of phase change - also improbable.
The reversal of the earth's magnetic field one had me puzzled: the title, followed by earth's magnetic field getting stronger, followed by the lack of a magnetic field leaving us open to particle storms. Seemed a bit random and unstructured.
My vote is mass insanity.
Elgon
T'was written...Why should anybody want to do that?
Laughs aside, because they usually have loads of really groovy ideas which our own government is too stupid or too tight to fund, so we have to get people with a little vision to back with capital.
Elgon
T'was written...Why should anybody want to do that?
Laughs aside, because they usually have loads of really groovy ideas which our own government is too stupid or too tight to fund, so we have to get people with a little vision to back with capital.
Elgon
Wrong. End of story I'm afraid - none of the firearms users I know fit into that category (I do know rather a few).
Just a quick question Nico, where are you from?
Elgon
This is true and I freely admit it - I am just a nasty cynic. NASA has come a long way in the past few years with the lighter, faster, cheaper methodology but this still doesn't get them off the hook for poor project management: nonexistant cost control, save-yer-own-ass managers and a NASA gets the credit at all costs policy.
The worth of the possible data is enormous but that don't mean to say that it couldn't be done better and/or cheaper.
Elgon
esonik wrote...
Develop a world-class orbiting laboratory for conducting high-value scientific research
Fairy nuff, although quite why you'd want to orbit some of these is beyond me except in specific cases where ultra-low gravity is required.
Develop ability to live and work in space for extended periods
Already done. Mir, skylab usw although I do agree that more research should be done on mankind in space for extended periods as I agreed earlier.
Develop effective international cooperation
I can agree with this one. Mankind's future in space will definitely require cooperation between nations.
Provide a testbed for developing 21 st Century technology.
How exactly? Give me examples, reasons or some good links to these. Plenty of 21st century technology is already developed on the ground. I doubt there will actually be a huge amount of 21st century technology used in the station on the grounds that in space where just about everything everything is critical tried-and-trusted technology is used.
Elgon
LOL!
Nope, just someone I used to share a house with - with my (then) girlfriend.
Elgon
PS - If I say that I am not gay, does this mean I am in denial?
>>Listen you little shit, who the fuck doesn't know the problem with the mirror? Nasa fixed it. End of story. >Go find me ONE astronomer who has ANYTHING negative to say about Hubble.>And, yes, one of the many missions failed. Wow, I guess we should throw away all the other science data we've obtained through those boobs at Nasa. It's all just a cock-up! Fucking pathetic. Please guy. Sit down and shut up. No one cares to hear from loonies like you.
Okay, I'm done with being aggressively reasonable - go fuck yourself and your opinions. You're clearly too ignorant to know jack about the issue and clearly too stupid to formulate a reasonable argument without resorting to insult in the face of sensible, if perhaps cynical, argument.
Elgon
Yep, Hubble was an almost-unmitigated fuck up - read the reference book listed - Perkin Elmer ground the mirror wrongly and even when they had some basic evidence that it was ground wrong they still shipped it, NASA consistently claimed that HST was fine - even better than designed - despite the fact that it was spherically abberated, they used second-hand gyroscopes which malfunctioned regularly, and finally when they put the corrective optics in (WF/PC 2) they had to take out about the only instrument which worked reliably and as designed - one of the spectrometers. True, much has been achieved but nothing like what could have been if NASA's management had been halfway competent.
On the second point - so failing to convert poundinches to newtonmetres and crashing your expensive Mars mission into the Polar regions of the planet is not a cock-up? Really, I'm so glad.
Before you debate the issue, know the facts. Also have the courage to sign in instead of posting anonymously if yoi wish to make personal insults.
Elgon
Yes! Fencing is EVIL!
Let's ban kendo, karate and all other martial arts while we're at it!
Elgon
In the Napoleonic wars it was not too uncommon to find the Brown Bess muskets used by the majority of the British army loaded from breech to muzzle because the soldier holding it hadn't pulled the trigger.
Elgon
Oh, how original...the laugh to prove the other person wrong treatment.
.22 rimfire and a 7.62 (aka .308 Winchester) target rifle safely and sensibly. I also spent three years with the Royal Marines cadets while at school, theoretically learning how to kill people, including 45 Commando RM's 1993 annual four day exercise. I still shoot regularly and have represented my country at international level - does this make me some kind of sicko pervert who would want to kill people?
As a child of thirteen I was shown how to shoot a
Nope.
Do you blame the sword for the hand that wields it?
Nope.
Do I blame violent television or computer games for mass killings?
Nope (I'm also a Quake'r).
Grow up and treat the issue with the respect and seriousness it deserves. Arsehole.
Elgon
Alas I have to agree, it's a waste of space (Excuse poor pun.)
it is all very well saying things like 'money spent on the space program is spent on the ground' and so forth but ultimately if you don't do something useful with the ISS all you have is a multi-billion dollar toy. Pretty but useless.
NASA (Never A Straight Answer?) has never given any particularly good answers on what the hell they're going to do with the ISS. I don't agree that we have done enough physiological research into people in space, facts are still being found, à la vitamin K story a few weeks ago. Various things that I have read in the papers include a tracking system for stolen cars (I kid ye not) and super-accurate timing signals worldwide (uh...relativity?).
The basic fact is that they haven't got a damn clue what the hell they're going to do with it - they are just bloody sure that they are not going to screw it up like so many previous cockups by NASA (I'm not proud the ESA have made enough too and it must be said that at least you have a damn space program - unlike the UK. We got the scientists but we've also got a government which couldn't give a shit.)
Essentially NASA is just praying for some good publicity after the strem of unmitigated fuck-ups of the nineties - Hubble, Mars craft etc...
Gotta say what I see.
Elgon
"Uhhh, what planet are we sending this (Hubble ST) to?" - Gore, Albert.
(PS - for real afficionados of space cockups, read: Chaisson, Eric. 'The Hubble Wars'. A damned fine read.)
Ooops,
I meant to post that one to continue in the anonymous coward vein. Oh well.
Elgon
No probs, you just seemed a little eager to pounce!
Thanks for the reference.
A nonny mouse.
Jetson,
while I don't specifically agree with all of your statements you do talk sense. The whole idea of stealing jobs is a false one - if you're good enough you get the job. Companies who hire labour simply because it is cheap will find that such cost effective labour comes at a higher cost than hiring a guy with the right skills, or the ability and drive to learn the right skills and employ them usefully. The supply/demand law will hold true ultimately when these companies wise up to the fact that they are hiring something which appears impressive but when the glitteris scraped off proves to be cheap crap.
Ability, drive and enthusiasm are far, far more important than a CS degree. Several of the IT people I know don't have IT degrees - Biology PhD, Master's in Computational Linguistics and a couple with no degree at all (but generally very smart indeed.)
Elgon
While I almost certainly say that the Z80 wouldn' handle Linux I can say that the Z80 had several clock versions... Z80 - 2.5 ??? Z80A - 4MHz (as per RadioSpares catalogue) Z80B - 6MHz (ditto...) I believe there was also an 8MHz version. I also have personal experience, having built a Z80 machine of my own when I was 16ish. 4MHz, 16kROM, 32kRAM, and 2 pageable 8k RAM/ROM sections using a 32 character by 6 line display. Ahhh... Those were the days. Elite for the ZX spectrum was a true classic along with JetPac, Sabrewulf and all the Ultim8: Play the Game doohickies. Elgon