There is a closed room with 3 switches on the outside. One of these switches operates a light bulb in the room and for some reason you have an overwhelming urge to find out which one even if means you're stood outside forever ( or until you die ). You can't see into the room except when you open the door and for some other mysterious reason you can only open the door once and once the door has been opened you can no longer touch any of the switches.
So how do you know which switch operates the light ?
In Scotland there is a 3rd possible outcome from prosecutions; Not Proven which means the defendant is probably guilty but there isn't enough evidence to prove it.
You must lead a pretty miserable existance but I think you need to realise that not everyone is like you, a lot of the rest of us have friends who'd stick up for us in bar fights or pretty much any other situation we may find ourselves in.
Personally I have known most of my friends for over 20 years and see a lot of them at least a couple of times a week, they are not fair weather friends by any means and during those 20 years a lot of peoples lives have gone in pretty diverse directions so some of them are groundsmen where other manage insurance firms yet these social differences do not affect the friendships at all.
You probably need to ask yourself why some people can find genuine, real, friendships and yet you can't rather than attempting to judge other peoples situations through your own, obviously jaded, experiences.
A gun is not a Wifi connection, the sole purpose of a gun is to shoot and kill things ( which in some cases may be legal but in the majority of cases is not ) whereas a Wifi connection is a perfectly reasonable thing for anyone to run perfectly legal.
I would imagine that leaving your guns lying around on your porch is already illegal in most places whereas there is nothing illegal about running Wifi hubs. You are basically suggesting that accidentally leaving your car unlocked and it then being used in a robbery or hit and run child slaying would leave you open prosecution as well as the actual perpetrators of the crime.
If there was overwhelming evidence that you had set up your wifi for the sole purpose of encouraging illegal activity then you may well find yourself in trouble but no one but the most slack jawed, dribbling, shambling idiot would ever be so stupid as allow that to be the case.
My patent for a phone into which you had to talk backwards to it doesn't seem to generated much capital for me, yet. The idea is that the person you're calling will immediately hear the end of the conversation and know straight away if it was a worthwile conversation or not and thus be able to terminate the call immediately if the conversation didn't end positively for them.
Exactly, the home office should concentrate on doing its current job properly without wasting time thinking up nonsense like this. They can't even track down or keep tabs on people when they know there real names addresses so the concept that they'll be able to monitor the thousands of people forced to register "screen names" is simply laughable.
Perhaps it was an error on the reports part but when I heard about this on the radio this morning it was described thus:
"Sex offenders will register their screen names allowing Police to monitor their e-mail and any activity in chat rooms they may undertake on-line"
Obviously we all know that there is no connection whatsoever between peoples e-mail addresses and the names they use in chat rooms, indeed the name you use in one chat room maybe entirely different to the one you use in another chatroom and neither of these types of names need be connected at all to the name you use for instant messaging - etc.
It's interesting that the areas which experience the most political attention; schools, the NHS, the Police all think they would be a lot better off without the attention the government lavishes on them. Every government when elected is of the view that Education, Law Enforcement and Healthcare have been broken by the previous government and then proceed to not so much plan for the success of these organisations as to plan how make it look as though they are making big and important changes which will sort things out. All these organisations would benefit from being managed with a longer term viewpoint than the next election and should be managed independantly from the government.
The home office and John Reid at the moment are a complete joke, I wouldn't trust them to do anything effectively at this point.
I noticed on the news a couple of weeks ago that Britain has just made it's last payment on a loan from the US to pay for reconstruction after WWII, the final payment was around £85 Million and I think the last of 50 payments ( each one paid annually from 1950 ).
I think Britain needed this loan because during the beginning of the war it was paying cash on delivery for huge amounts of material from the US which used up its reserves until Britain was having in territory handed over to the US. When the US entered the war then I think lend lease began where Britain got as much stuff as we wanted but anything left over after the war needed to be paid for at 10% of it's initial cost.
So Britains debts to the US for WWII are paid off now but Britan still apparently owes the £885 from the then of World War I which we stopped paying off in around 1930 when the debt was worth £4.4 Billion. In todays money that is around £225 Billion. Lots of countries owed the US after WWI but I think most of them also stopped paying around 1930, the loans haven't been cancelled and are in theory still outstanding.
Even that debt however is dwarfed by the amount owed to Britain for it's help in WWI by other countries which at the end of the war amounted to £2.2 Billion which according to my calculation might be worth today £5.5x10^19. Unfortunately no records exist in the archives saying who the countries are which owe us this.
Sounds to me like this guy is a line dancer, line dancers in my experience are all pompous little pricks.
I was at a free music festival once near Wolverhampton. It was a Country Music festival but that year a huge crowd of line dancers had turned up and took up the entire area in the front of the stage.
To start with they offered to teach people line dancing so we did that for a while but it was deadly dull so we just started hanging out in front of the stage drinking and performing our own dances instead to the increasing annoyance of the line dancers who eventually made a big fuss and asked us to leave because we were spoiling their dancing.
You're spoiling our music festival we said, why can't you go and dance somewhere else ? The band who were playing at that point stopped the music and said there was no way we should go anywhere because we looked like we listening to the music and clapping and cheering and such whereas in his opinion the line dancers were a bunch a miserable tossers and hadn't clapped a single band all day. That shut them up and they went off somewhere else but I think this is indicative of the general attitude of the line dancers.
As I understand it the foetus is riddled with original sin from the moment it was conceived and until it's baptised forgivness is out of the question so technically foetuses are evil.
I hear you brother by contrast I got off likely, I think.
When I signed up Yahoo! forced me authorise a Yahoo! powered ethnic cleansing mission somewhere in Africa, the mercanceries wages would be paid by selling the photos of my kids to prominent paedophile rings and the authorisation box only had an OK button on it, no CANCEL or QUIT or anything so if I wanted my Flickr I had to agree.
Once I'd signed up I got an e-mail from Yahoo! explaining that I was responsible for funding and directing the slaughter of hundreds innocent women and children and that they would hand a dossier of my activities to my local police force ( I had to provide that information in the login process ! ) unless I sold my soul to evil and agreed to act upon their suggestions ( never orders, never instructions ) to promote their evil machinations for the rest of my natural life.
Someone should moderate your post up, it's very amusing !
Again, if this is so valuable then they should back it up and have control over it themselves.
Before you say that can't be done, it can. I have all my photos organised into albums and tagged and reproduce my Flickr account with the click of a button. All that would be missing is the comments and the group memberships which is not a big deal.
Both Yahoo and Flickr have said that if you've paid for an account then they will not delelte anything until your account is expired which is exactly what you'd expect. If you're not paying for it then you have no expectation that Flickr should do anything in the way of archiving things for you.
Not only that his every second post also seems to drop in the fact that Zoooomr is an amazing alternative to Flickr !
I went there to see and the site just sat there with a little loading icon in the corner and refused to do anything else ! Maybe it was overwhelmed or something but that's not an ideal advertisment.
The amount of wailing and hair pulling going on over this in the Flickr forums is simply awe inspiring, it's really amusing to see the number of people with no sense of perspective whatsoever.
Anyone who posts a comment such as the one I am about launch into is shouted down immediately and called all sorts of nasty names, this is less amusing and simply disturbing.
It's no big deal, the only difference is that people now have to log in through Yahooo rather than Flickr maintaning a separate login system just for them. Nothing else has changed, the Flickr experience is identical from that moment onwards.
Common complaints are
1) Yahoo will log me off all the time 2) I don't want a "silly" Yahoo login name 3) I am genetically incapable of remembering any more logins 4) I will lose my "old skool" status and reputation 5) Yahoo will send me spam all the time 6) Yahoo are evil and I'm so right on I don't support evil
To which the answers are
1) No it won't ( I have a Yahoo login to Flickr and it has stayed logged in for months now ) 2) You still keep your flickr screen name, no one will see your Yahoo name 3) You won't have to remember your old Flickr login anymore and thus have more room in your impoverished memory for a new one 4) Since you are the only person who sees how you login this is a stupid claim based on a worrying sense of misplaced elitism 5) I've had Yahoo e-mail since 1999 and can't remember ever getting any spam off them in all that time and if you don't want to use the e-mail you don't even have to sign up for it 6) Yahoo have owned Flickr for over a year now so if you don't support them on moral grounds why are you still using Flickr in the first place ?
This "old skool" thing is simply ridiculous, ok so you discovered Flickr maybe 6 months before other people did - there are no prizes for this and it has no effect whatsoever on your value to society or as a person in general !
Seriously, they really should just shut up and change their login or shut up and find something else which is happy to accept a huge bunch of whining holier than thou nuisances. Either way they should shut up because it's quite unpleasant listening to this caterwauling.
The results you get from Google are tweaked by a number of factors, and at the end of the day the company has complete control over what rises to the top You don't say ! Luckily I like the fact Google does its best to cut out the nonsense spam sites which seem to be intent on swamping the web. Whoever wrote this article seems to me to be a little too concerned about this and makes me suspect he is some kind of spam merchant himself.
I think the claims about a mini ice age were coming mainly from the journalist in that article.
The scientists he was quoting were saying a couple of things, firstly that in some areas that less sunlight appeared to be reaching the Earths surface and secondly that around the equator they had noticed a warming trend. The scientists also say they need more data and were not making any predictions at that time except to note that some trends seemed to emerging from their data which required further investigation.
So far as I can see the situation today is that Scientists have done an awful lot more study and are now presenting their findings that the climate is changing and the Earth is warming up.
Indeed, and now you're no longer to protest or make any political statements anywhere near Parliment or Number 10 the Government moves one step closer to disassociating its self totally from the political views of the populace.
Ironically these people should take lessons from Trigger, the dimmest bulb in Peckham and think about the parable of his broom.
Personally I've been using the same computer for over 8 years now. Fair enough it might have a different monitor, mouse, case, motherboard, powersupply, more hard drives etc but it's the same computer all right.
My typical voting experience which I'm sure is the norm in the UK:
Walk 5 mins to polling booth, walk straight in and stand behind the 1 other person waiting for a ballot, spend 30 secs getting ballot, 30 seconds filling it in and handing it back and then 5 seconds avoiding the people milling around outside asking questions and walk home in 5 mins.
I've voted at every election for the last 18 years and never had to wait for more than a minute.
I will almost certainly vote but I have a problem in that my current Labour MP actually seems like a decent person and votes against the government on numerous occasions, is opposed to ID cards, was opposed to the Iraq war etc.
However I absolutely don't want Labour to get in again so I will have to choose the Conservative guy who unfortunately seems like a bit of a muppet.
With regard to the topic I can't see any benefit in e-voting, my polling station is a 5 minute down the road and I think the majority of people in the UK aren't that much further away from their polling station so if there are people who can't be bothered to walk this distance and make at least a minimum effort then I'm not sure I want them to vote in the first place.
In fact I'd probably be in favour of making it harder to vote in an effort to prevent the kind of clueless labour voting muppets wrecking the country even further. Under the last conservative government when every right-on comedian and media personality was banging on about evil "Thatch" a lot of my friends were very keen on voting labour and I told them then that the Labour party didn't actually have any real beliefs or principles to support them and that their leaders were obviously willing to lie and tell people what they wanted to hear in order to get into power but none of them listened. I think they all agree with me now.
"did you factor in the costs of having a heavily guarded (war on terror, remember?) storage facility, for 576 years? Including personnel costs? Now, is it still cheaper than renewable alternative energy sources?" Quite possibly yes, how many personnel do you require to maintain your wind turbines ? Wave power or any power generated by the sea takes an enormous amount of maintenance and the people who provide this maintenance are likely to be fairly skilled and therefore fairly expensive. Are your solar panels going to last for 576 years or will you require them to be manufactured again every 10 or 20 years or so, at what cost ?
Lots of things require guarding 24/7, military facilities for a start so by storing nuclear waste in somewhere which is already going to be guarded anyway will immediately remove the cost of personnel.
The fact is that no country on earth is ever going to rely on renewable sources of energy 100% because first of all they are simply too unreliable and second of all it's a bad idea to rely on only one source of energy production so you absolutely need a reliable source of power such as coal or oil. We now realise the pollution and damage these can cause and that nuclear is a better long term option. The quicker we get behind nuclear power the better, invest money and solve the waste problems, the better.
The scaremongering tactics espoused by many so called environmentalists are not doing anyone any favours, least of all themselves, and serve only to spread misinformation and fud which is holding everyone back. Please note I'm not suggesting you're in this category at all but it is just something which I find really really annoying, hence this rant !
Not a bad idea, the idle poor ( known as Chavs in the UK ) use far more than fair share of power sitting around all day, as they do, in centrally heated saunas with Trisha on full blast on the Sky box.
If we limited the amount of energy available to them they would be forced to get off their collective arses and get jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a closed room with 3 switches on the outside. One of these switches operates a light bulb in the room and for some reason you have an overwhelming urge to find out which one even if means you're stood outside forever ( or until you die ). You can't see into the room except when you open the door and for some other mysterious reason you can only open the door once and once the door has been opened you can no longer touch any of the switches.
So how do you know which switch operates the light ?
In Scotland there is a 3rd possible outcome from prosecutions; Not Proven which means the defendant is probably guilty but there isn't enough evidence to prove it.
You must lead a pretty miserable existance but I think you need to realise that not everyone is like you, a lot of the rest of us have friends who'd stick up for us in bar fights or pretty much any other situation we may find ourselves in.
Personally I have known most of my friends for over 20 years and see a lot of them at least a couple of times a week, they are not fair weather friends by any means and during those 20 years a lot of peoples lives have gone in pretty diverse directions so some of them are groundsmen where other manage insurance firms yet these social differences do not affect the friendships at all.
You probably need to ask yourself why some people can find genuine, real, friendships and yet you can't rather than attempting to judge other peoples situations through your own, obviously jaded, experiences.
+5 Insightful ?
A gun is not a Wifi connection, the sole purpose of a gun is to shoot and kill things ( which in some cases may be legal but in the majority of cases is not ) whereas a Wifi connection is a perfectly reasonable thing for anyone to run perfectly legal.
I would imagine that leaving your guns lying around on your porch is already illegal in most places whereas there is nothing illegal about running Wifi hubs. You are basically suggesting that accidentally leaving your car unlocked and it then being used in a robbery or hit and run child slaying would leave you open prosecution as well as the actual perpetrators of the crime.
If there was overwhelming evidence that you had set up your wifi for the sole purpose of encouraging illegal activity then you may well find yourself in trouble but no one but the most slack jawed, dribbling, shambling idiot would ever be so stupid as allow that to be the case.
My patent for a phone into which you had to talk backwards to it doesn't seem to generated much capital for me, yet. The idea is that the person you're calling will immediately hear the end of the conversation and know straight away if it was a worthwile conversation or not and thus be able to terminate the call immediately if the conversation didn't end positively for them.
Exactly, the home office should concentrate on doing its current job properly without wasting time thinking up nonsense like this. They can't even track down or keep tabs on people when they know there real names addresses so the concept that they'll be able to monitor the thousands of people forced to register "screen names" is simply laughable.
Perhaps it was an error on the reports part but when I heard about this on the radio this morning it was described thus:
"Sex offenders will register their screen names allowing Police to monitor their e-mail and any activity in chat rooms they may undertake on-line"
Obviously we all know that there is no connection whatsoever between peoples e-mail addresses and the names they use in chat rooms, indeed the name you use in one chat room maybe entirely different to the one you use in another chatroom and neither of these types of names need be connected at all to the name you use for instant messaging - etc.
It's interesting that the areas which experience the most political attention; schools, the NHS, the Police all think they would be a lot better off without the attention the government lavishes on them. Every government when elected is of the view that Education, Law Enforcement and Healthcare have been broken by the previous government and then proceed to not so much plan for the success of these organisations as to plan how make it look as though they are making big and important changes which will sort things out. All these organisations would benefit from being managed with a longer term viewpoint than the next election and should be managed independantly from the government.
The home office and John Reid at the moment are a complete joke, I wouldn't trust them to do anything effectively at this point.
I noticed on the news a couple of weeks ago that Britain has just made it's last payment on a loan from the US to pay for reconstruction after WWII, the final payment was around £85 Million and I think the last of 50 payments ( each one paid annually from 1950 ).
I think Britain needed this loan because during the beginning of the war it was paying cash on delivery for huge amounts of material from the US which used up its reserves until Britain was having in territory handed over to the US. When the US entered the war then I think lend lease began where Britain got as much stuff as we wanted but anything left over after the war needed to be paid for at 10% of it's initial cost.
So Britains debts to the US for WWII are paid off now but Britan still apparently owes the £885 from the then of World War I which we stopped paying off in around 1930 when the debt was worth £4.4 Billion. In todays money that is around £225 Billion. Lots of countries owed the US after WWI but I think most of them also stopped paying around 1930, the loans haven't been cancelled and are in theory still outstanding.
Even that debt however is dwarfed by the amount owed to Britain for it's help in WWI by other countries which at the end of the war amounted to £2.2 Billion which according to my calculation might be worth today £5.5x10^19. Unfortunately no records exist in the archives saying who the countries are which owe us this.
Sounds to me like this guy is a line dancer, line dancers in my experience are all pompous little pricks.
I was at a free music festival once near Wolverhampton. It was a Country Music festival but that year a huge crowd of line dancers had turned up and took up the entire area in the front of the stage.
To start with they offered to teach people line dancing so we did that for a while but it was deadly dull so we just started hanging out in front of the stage drinking and performing our own dances instead to the increasing annoyance of the line dancers who eventually made a big fuss and asked us to leave because we were spoiling their dancing.
You're spoiling our music festival we said, why can't you go and dance somewhere else ? The band who were playing at that point stopped the music and said there was no way we should go anywhere because we looked like we listening to the music and clapping and cheering and such whereas in his opinion the line dancers were a bunch a miserable tossers and hadn't clapped a single band all day. That shut them up and they went off somewhere else but I think this is indicative of the general attitude of the line dancers.
As I understand it the foetus is riddled with original sin from the moment it was conceived and until it's baptised forgivness is out of the question so technically foetuses are evil.
I hear you brother by contrast I got off likely, I think.
When I signed up Yahoo! forced me authorise a Yahoo! powered ethnic cleansing mission somewhere in Africa, the mercanceries wages would be paid by selling the photos of my kids to prominent paedophile rings and the authorisation box only had an OK button on it, no CANCEL or QUIT or anything so if I wanted my Flickr I had to agree.
Once I'd signed up I got an e-mail from Yahoo! explaining that I was responsible for funding and directing the slaughter of hundreds innocent women and children and that they would hand a dossier of my activities to my local police force ( I had to provide that information in the login process ! ) unless I sold my soul to evil and agreed to act upon their suggestions ( never orders, never instructions ) to promote their evil machinations for the rest of my natural life.
Someone should moderate your post up, it's very amusing !
Again, if this is so valuable then they should back it up and have control over it themselves.
Before you say that can't be done, it can. I have all my photos organised into albums and tagged and reproduce my Flickr account with the click of a button. All that would be missing is the comments and the group memberships which is not a big deal.
Both Yahoo and Flickr have said that if you've paid for an account then they will not delelte anything until your account is expired which is exactly what you'd expect. If you're not paying for it then you have no expectation that Flickr should do anything in the way of archiving things for you.
Not only that his every second post also seems to drop in the fact that Zoooomr is an amazing alternative to Flickr !
I went there to see and the site just sat there with a little loading icon in the corner and refused to do anything else ! Maybe it was overwhelmed or something but that's not an ideal advertisment.
The amount of wailing and hair pulling going on over this in the Flickr forums is simply awe inspiring, it's really amusing to see the number of people with no sense of perspective whatsoever.
Anyone who posts a comment such as the one I am about launch into is shouted down immediately and called all sorts of nasty names, this is less amusing and simply disturbing.
It's no big deal, the only difference is that people now have to log in through Yahooo rather than Flickr maintaning a separate login system just for them. Nothing else has changed, the Flickr experience is identical from that moment onwards.
Common complaints are
1) Yahoo will log me off all the time
2) I don't want a "silly" Yahoo login name
3) I am genetically incapable of remembering any more logins
4) I will lose my "old skool" status and reputation
5) Yahoo will send me spam all the time
6) Yahoo are evil and I'm so right on I don't support evil
To which the answers are
1) No it won't ( I have a Yahoo login to Flickr and it has stayed logged in for months now )
2) You still keep your flickr screen name, no one will see your Yahoo name
3) You won't have to remember your old Flickr login anymore and thus have more room in your impoverished memory for a new one
4) Since you are the only person who sees how you login this is a stupid claim based on a worrying sense of misplaced elitism
5) I've had Yahoo e-mail since 1999 and can't remember ever getting any spam off them in all that time and if you don't want to use the e-mail you don't even have to sign up for it
6) Yahoo have owned Flickr for over a year now so if you don't support them on moral grounds why are you still using Flickr in the first place ?
This "old skool" thing is simply ridiculous, ok so you discovered Flickr maybe 6 months before other people did - there are no prizes for this and it has no effect whatsoever on your value to society or as a person in general !
Seriously, they really should just shut up and change their login or shut up and find something else which is happy to accept a huge bunch of whining holier than thou nuisances. Either way they should shut up because it's quite unpleasant listening to this caterwauling.
I think the claims about a mini ice age were coming mainly from the journalist in that article.
The scientists he was quoting were saying a couple of things, firstly that in some areas that less sunlight appeared to be reaching the Earths surface and secondly that around the equator they had noticed a warming trend. The scientists also say they need more data and were not making any predictions at that time except to note that some trends seemed to emerging from their data which required further investigation.
So far as I can see the situation today is that Scientists have done an awful lot more study and are now presenting their findings that the climate is changing and the Earth is warming up.
Indeed, and now you're no longer to protest or make any political statements anywhere near Parliment or Number 10 the Government moves one step closer to disassociating its self totally from the political views of the populace.
The junk mainly. I think they would probably prefer to be known as Wyirdoes but I destroy them too when I come across them.
Ironically these people should take lessons from Trigger, the dimmest bulb in Peckham and think about the parable of his broom.
Personally I've been using the same computer for over 8 years now. Fair enough it might have a different monitor, mouse, case, motherboard, powersupply, more hard drives etc but it's the same computer all right.
If you go to most stone circles in the UK you can generally find pieces of junk left behind by those weirdos. When I come across them I destroy them.
My typical voting experience which I'm sure is the norm in the UK:
Walk 5 mins to polling booth, walk straight in and stand behind the 1 other person waiting for a ballot, spend 30 secs getting ballot, 30 seconds filling it in and handing it back and then 5 seconds avoiding the people milling around outside asking questions and walk home in 5 mins.
I've voted at every election for the last 18 years and never had to wait for more than a minute.
I will almost certainly vote but I have a problem in that my current Labour MP actually seems like a decent person and votes against the government on numerous occasions, is opposed to ID cards, was opposed to the Iraq war etc.
However I absolutely don't want Labour to get in again so I will have to choose the Conservative guy who unfortunately seems like a bit of a muppet.
With regard to the topic I can't see any benefit in e-voting, my polling station is a 5 minute down the road and I think the majority of people in the UK aren't that much further away from their polling station so if there are people who can't be bothered to walk this distance and make at least a minimum effort then I'm not sure I want them to vote in the first place.
In fact I'd probably be in favour of making it harder to vote in an effort to prevent the kind of clueless labour voting muppets wrecking the country even further. Under the last conservative government when every right-on comedian and media personality was banging on about evil "Thatch" a lot of my friends were very keen on voting labour and I told them then that the Labour party didn't actually have any real beliefs or principles to support them and that their leaders were obviously willing to lie and tell people what they wanted to hear in order to get into power but none of them listened. I think they all agree with me now.
Lots of things require guarding 24/7, military facilities for a start so by storing nuclear waste in somewhere which is already going to be guarded anyway will immediately remove the cost of personnel.
The fact is that no country on earth is ever going to rely on renewable sources of energy 100% because first of all they are simply too unreliable and second of all it's a bad idea to rely on only one source of energy production so you absolutely need a reliable source of power such as coal or oil. We now realise the pollution and damage these can cause and that nuclear is a better long term option. The quicker we get behind nuclear power the better, invest money and solve the waste problems, the better.
The scaremongering tactics espoused by many so called environmentalists are not doing anyone any favours, least of all themselves, and serve only to spread misinformation and fud which is holding everyone back. Please note I'm not suggesting you're in this category at all but it is just something which I find really really annoying, hence this rant !
Not a bad idea, the idle poor ( known as Chavs in the UK ) use far more than fair share of power sitting around all day, as they do, in centrally heated saunas with Trisha on full blast on the Sky box.
If we limited the amount of energy available to them they would be forced to get off their collective arses and get jobs.
The other thing about nuclear waste is that you know where it is, you don't just go pumping it out into the atmosphere and hope for the best.
The article is banned by the filter here at work but the answer is obvious - build more nuclear power plants.