Well no, but its harder to get evidence for recent or current shenanigans. The fracas in Venezuela a couple of years ago has a strong smell of CIA if you ask me, but we won't know for sure until sometime next decade.
If you'd actually read what I'd written there, mate, you'd realize you're talking from your ass. I said there's
no accounting for the construction of the pyramids, given the set of intelligence/knowledge that we currently have at our disposal. The greatest minds have only gross speculation, for the most part, as to how the pyramids were actually built, and most of those conjectures are just that - conjectures, as we can't conceive of a way for them to have constructed tools on that scale for such a task.
And that is the sort of nonsense people like Von Daniken and Hancock have been getting rich off of for the last forty years or so. Pyramids are basically a big heap of stones. The big ones at Giza use well cut and exquisitely laid stones I grant you, but still - a big heap of stones. The scale is impressive for a non-industrial civilisation and clearly the Egyptians (and the Khmer, Maya etc etc) had some remarkable organisational capabilities; but to assert that we have no idea about how they went about building their artificial mountains is just bullshit.
The C20th has been reasonably clear insofar as yer actual shooting wars go, but there have been numerous jaunts Down South that could have triggered a war if anyone other than the hemispheric superpower had been behind them.
Just because the biggest MoFo on the block doesn't get in many fights, it doesn't make him a man of peace.
Well I think there's a slight difference between 'the US' (as in an arm of the govt) staging such a campaign and an American newspaper doing it.
Both would be, sensu strictu, examples of free speech, but I think state actors tend to get viewed rather more critically than non-state actors when doing this sort of thing. God knows how the ditto-heads who flamed The Guardian would react if MI6 slipped the DNC a few million quid and started flying in airplane loads of letters threatening WTO sanctions if Bush wins next week. Probably call for airstrikes on Vauxhall before stroking out or something.
The fact that the CIA has done exactly this (and worse) in the past, is one of the reasons why I view the torrent of venom provoked by the Guardian's ill-judged wheeze as being just a bit rich...
This tallies with accounts I got from a friend who was doing similar 'Your world is about to change' briefing sessions for EMI's UK middle management back in the mid/late 90s.
She said their reaction started off at disbelief which quickly transformed into aggressive and total rejection of her message when she stuck to her guns and started showing them some of the tools that were hitting the net back then.
She also said that she hadn't ever encountered a group of people who were so pigheadedly ignorant and flat-out stupid as the guys (and they *were* all guys) who attended those sessions - starting with the casually sexist attitudes and going rapidly downhill from there. As far as she was concerned, the quicker their comfy little world got overturned the better.
The Guardian selected Clark County, OH as a hotbed of undecided voters, and put together a letter-writing campaign to them. Some 14,000 letters were sent and the universal response from Clark County voters was, well, unprintable.
Ironically the Guardian printed a whole bunch of the responses they got. The attitudes displayed in the 20-30 they used were certainly predominantly negative (and curiously concerned with bad dentistry), but not universally so. I have no idea how representative the sample was however.
I read some of the sample letters as well. Some were quite good I thought, but I'm a Brit so my opinion has no relevance.
Yeah that struck me as a bit odd and they didn't go into a great amount of detail regarding why the fault wasn't picked up on the ground - given that the problem was described as the transmitter and receiver being tuned to different frequencies it seems like a fairly easy thing to spot prior to launch.
Of course the documentary could have been simplifying massively, but I got a sense that there were plenty of things being left unspoken in an effort to foster diplomatic face-saving between the various project teams. It was pretty clear that the Hugyens imaging guy had a few choice words that might well have ended up on the cutting room floor.
I thought the solution to the problem (twiddling with Cassini's velocity so that doppler shifting 'retuned' the incoming signals to a higher frequency) was a nice hack though.
My anecdotal evidence is that all of the members of my regular gaming group come from stable families (or, these days, are looking after stable families) and are pretty much middle of the road when it comes to self-esteem; some above the average, some below.
We could well be weirdly 'normal' for roleplaying geeks of course. That's the beauty of anecdote...
Sort of, but its complicated. The BBC is an organ of the state, but it is not run by the executive arm.
First the BBC *is* actually responsible for collecting the licence fee. They farm the operation out to another entity, but its a statutory responsibility written in to their charter.
Second the BBC's grant-in-aid funding is paid from the the pot of licence fees but its level is set when the the BBC's charter is renewed every decade or so (of course the govt of the day has a large influence over that process when it occurs). So yes, the grant often diverges from what is in the common fund but the license fee which fills that fund is explicitly tied to this payment stream. And yes, the GotD has a big stick it can wave at the BBC - but a decade is a long time in politics and whilst theoretically, vide the Crown in parliament, the GotD can abolish the BBC (ie fail to renew its charter) if it gets uppity, the cost in goodwill would be horrendous. Even in her most eye-swivellingly megalomaniac stages, Thatcher never seriously considered doing that.
Addressing the way upthread post that started this off, the BBC is explicitly charged as part of its charter with conducting R&D into things like broadcast and storage technologies so this is exactly what they should be doing with the money they've been given. If they weren't, they'd be failing to fulfill their mandate. There's a lot of stuff out there that has come from the BBC Technology Divisions. Our gift to the rest of the world.
You missed the grandparent's point. He said that OPEC *bar* the 'three unstable states' was at maximum output back in 2001, ie. that the only surplus capacity for the US (leaving out the strategic reserve and suchlike) was in Iraq, Iran and Libya. Thus the points in your first paragraph are null and void - Iraq was not operating at full capacity under the prewar setup.
Personally I'm not sure I buy the grandparent's initial point, firstly because OPEC isn't the only player when it comes to hydrocarbons and secondly I'm inclined to be a little suspicious of any Saudi claims that they were stretched 100%. However I make little effort to follow the oil business in great detail so I'm not in a position to authoritatively challenge the point and will let it stand.
If we accept that there was no spare capacity in the world oil market, then a policy aimed at loosening up the political constraints that prevents reserves in Iraq, Libya and Iran from being fully exploited by the US economy seems like a sensible geopolitical goal for the US to pursue. We can kick around the precise details of recent US policy and how effective alternatives might have been, but it is an undeniable fact that two out of those three problematic countries are now under regimes that are much more acceptable to the US as vendors of a strategic resource than they were. They may not be able to pump more oil just at the moment, but the Iraqi interim authority would certainly *like* to supply more oil to the world market and the US is more than happy for it to be sold. Similarly the US is a lot more sanguine about Libya ramping up production than used to be the case.
Your later points about 'running out of oil' are correct as far as they go, what you are ignoring are the second and third order effects on the world economy that transitioning from a cheap to an expensive energy regime will entail. As you say there will be plenty of hydrocarbon reserves that become viable (and will be exploited) as the price climbs towards and beyond $100/barrel, but the real-terms trebling (or worse) in price of a primary input like oil will have a profound effect on pretty much everything and it will take decades for the changes to work their way through the world's economy - just look at what the two oil shocks in the 70s did and then turn the dial up to 11. Given the US's position as global hegemon it is likely that pretty much every such change will be a direct or indirect threat to some aspect of the US's current status (when you're on top most changes point downwards) - thus it is in the interests of the US administration to delay the transition to an 'expensive energy' world for as long as possible and recent changes in Iraq and Libya help towards that end.
Your final point is weak I think. Firstly 'people like Saddam' (in the sense of being brutal thugs) *are* tolerated in most significant oil producing areas - check out pretty much every other state in the Middle East and Central Asia for example. Indeed Saddam Hussein himself was groomed for dictatorship and supported in his horrors for decades, precisely because he guaranteed supplies and (latterly) was a regional counterweight to Iran. Secondly, if oil *wasn't* the reason for GWII, what was? As you say there are any number of horrible things happening in places without much oil (cf Rwanda, Darfur etc) and on the whole little or nothing is done about them. What was it about the horrors of Ba'athist Iraq that made them worthy of the expenditure of our blood and treasure if not oil?
I think wind farms are beautiful though. Maybe I'd change my mind if they were as ubiquitous as power lines, but at present I love seeing turbines in the landscape (there's one near a friend's village which you catch charming glimpses of on the horizon as it turns).
I was on holiday in northern Spain last year and saw some really eye-catching turbine farms around Lerida and Huesca - I'd be entirely happy to see the upland turbine farms proposed for northern England and Wales go ahead if they were as striking as those. Of course I'm a scummy, selfish townee who isn't in mystical communion with the soil of olde Englande, so what do I know?
But this is a problem for any significant piece of industrial plant.
German dams were bombed during WW2 for instance and the resultant flooding killed thousands of people (mostly slave labourers trapped in their barracks); the BBC just screened a mini-series ('The Grid') which postulated an al-Quaeda campaign against petrochemical transport infrastructure in various parts of the world (the climax being an attack on an LPG vessel in the Great Lakes).
Paradoxically one of the advantages of nuclear is that you can achieve a significant %age of your required capacity with a relatively small number of reactors, which means that you have fewer things to guard from attackers and can devote relatively more resources to hardening each of them against attacks.
Of course, having more reactors around means that the vicissitudes of war/terrorism/natural disasters are more likely to result in a reactor being in the wrong place at the wrong time - but that's true of any energy system we might devise.
Over the last 50-100 years the EM emmission profile of the sol system has changed radically thanks to the development of our technological civilisation. If there happens to be another technological civilisation within the 50-100ly radius sphere covered by these novel EM emissions and they can be bothered to look, then this change will be extremely noticeable to the sort of equipment that you do radio astronomy with.
It wouldn't be a signal in the sense of us being able to send the complete works of William Shakespeare, but it'd be a signal nonetheless.
Of course 50-100ly is nothing much to write home about when compared to distances at the galactic and intergalactic scales, but its a start.
A huge portion of the American/European middle class are wage-earners, which would make them "workers" according to Marxist thought. But they also own a substantial amount of property (houses, cars, boats, bank accounts, investments), which would make them capitalists. Funny old world we live in, isn't it?
I think an old school Marxist would nitpick this by saying that you only cease to be a member of the working class when you derive all (or as near to all as makes no odds) of your livelihood from rents, profits or interest ie. you can cease working for wages and it makes no noticeable difference to your lifestyle. Turning to the property owning middle-classes of your example, how much of the property that they own would still be theirs if they didn't have wages coming in to service the debts they've incurred to acquire it?
Obviously there is a border zone of hybrid worker/capitalists - my g/f is one, via the happy accident of moving in with me she is able to rent out her flat which, even after the mortgage, clears about 30% of what she makes in a year through her day job - but even in the advanced industrial nations the numbers of by-the-marxist-book workers is still a large majority of the population.
The fact that most 'workers' self identify as 'not-workers' is what yer classic Marxist would ascribe to false consciousness.
1984 was broadly a discussion of the direction Orwell saw the world heading and was based as much on the example of European Fascism and the U.K. as it was Communism. You're right, it was not about the west's fear of Communism, it was a carrier for Orwells distress at the massive use of propaganda (which was fairly new - in such a grand scale - at the time) and representative of his fears about the level of control this could exhibit.
It is also, fundamentally, an optimistic book - yes, Winston Smith is broken by the Party; but the essay discussing Newspeak in the past tense at the end of the book shows that the oppressive apparatus of Airstrip One - all that 'boot stamping on a human face, forever' stuff from Smith's interrogations in the Ministry of Love - ultimately failed.
Just because a book has a huge amount of pages doesn't mean it has to be "long". Long, in this context, means arduous and painful. There are plenty of long volumes (page count wise) that don't feel long (arduous and painful).
I agree on the basic point and yet, having just finished reading Quicksilver on holiday last week, I can report that, for me, it wasn't long at all.
Clearly, what you think is crappy overwriting and ego indulgence I think is immersive world-building and well-crafted, detailed exposition. Tastes vary. Who would have guessed it?
As someone who's just finished reading Quicksilver (and thoroughly enjoyed it BTW) I'm intrigued by some of your criticisms. I know a fair bit about the Smoke (and been living here for a while) and I thought he got the London bits down very well, especially for a non-native and a foreigner, but I don't know that much about Cambridge (neither Cantab. or Mass.) - could you give a bit more detail on how he got Cambridge/Trinity wrong IYO?
Also which bits of the history were especially Americanised or silly? I'm by no means well read in the period, so I'd like a better idea of where you think he went off the rails there.
it's been my experience that IE not only loads pages faster, but has more features and support than FireFox and other browsers do.
You should try Opera. It loads pages noticeably quicker than IE, has better security (not 'security'), works cross-platform and a bunch of features that IE has yet to implement.
The magnetic field acting as a shield from the ionisation caused by... solar storms.
The stronger gravitational field meaning that the energy requirements to boil off water from the earth's atmosphere is much higher. The additional energy that is derived from ionisation caused by... solar storms.
Proximate and ultimate causes can both be correct you know and it'd be a very poor scientist who failed to recognise this.
And are you surprised that they have a bunch of entirely plausible arguments backing up their position? Or that they seemed to be entirely lacking in cloven hooves, pitchforks and clouds of sulfrous smoke?
These people make their *living* from being able to put together an argument and then pleading its merits in front of hostile (or disinterested) audiences. Moreover they have a direct and pressing personal interest in achieving an alignment of EU law with WIPO and the US/Japanese systems since, as patent lawyers, they will be able to live extremely well under the proposed dispensation.
This is not to say that the plausible arguments they advance may not have some merit (*some* merit) but really, you have to look at who they are and where they are coming from when you assess these arguments.
I had some irritating problems with my OEM POS Windows installation freaking out and going into recovery mode when lilo set itself up in the MBR (solution: point lilo at the root mountpoint instead), but on-the-fly resizing of the NTFS windows partition was easy as pie.
The problem with PFI is that it's just putting more costs onto the next generation.
Oh absolutely. However the current incumbents think they are faced with the choice between committing future governments to paying over the odds for a long-term project so that it actually gets completed versus starting to pay the 'sensible' price for said project during their term of office, only to see it cancelled by the next government ten years before completion with several billions of sunk costs lost for little or no benefit.
Even worse, from their perspective, would be to see assets (painstakingly built up over the course of several parliaments of 'Iron Chancellor'-style prudence and politically painful self denial) sold off by a future generation of their opponents in order to secure a Thatcher-style electoral ascendancy over their own political heirs.
The current generation of Labour politicians were hugely influenced by their experience of the 80s and their analysis of the Thatcherite privatisations is that it permitted the Tories to do exactly that - sell off the 'family silver' to their core supporters and then use the proceeds to bribe the wider electorate. They are absolutely determined not to allow that to happen again and PFIs are their chosen mechanism for protecting their legacy - by their calculation its not going to be politically feasible for a putative Thatcher of the 2040s to sell off these assets if they are already owned by the PFI contract holders.
How does an Air Traffic Control centre cost that much? What is it? 400million quid?
Nope - current price tag is 600+ million.
How did it get so high? Well you spend ten million here, ten million there and before you know it you're talking serious money... For starters there is plenty of high spec custom-built kit at the Swanage ATC Centre (I've spoken to people who have worked there and they say the actual ATC screens are incredible to look at and use, but they are also eye-wateringly expensive).
Then there's the fact that IT consultants on these sorts of jobs are routinely billing 500-1000 quid a day - that quickly mounts up, especially when the project overruns by several years.
Then there was the whole testing and approval process. Back in 98-99 when I knew people involved on the project, they were doing full-scale shift rehearsals and they didn't come cheap - these would involve bringing in an entire duty roster of ATCs and running them through a simulated full shift using data recorded from the live ATC systems (using custom built data-capture and conversion tools to provide these data to custom-built test control harnesses). You don't have to run many of those exercises before you are into seven figure sums just on simulations alone.
All in all not a cheap business and the longer it has dragged on the worse it has got. But if you consider that earlier this year I was working for a well known UK bank who are planning on spending thirty five million pounds simply on upgrading their computer estate to the current versions of Windows it puts the whole thing into perspective. Sort of.
To be fair (not that I hold any affection for Mrs T. in my heart) the rot stretches back a lot further than the 70s.
I'd say the UK has been letting the infrastructure maintenance slide since at least WW2, maybe earlier. We inherited a fantastic installed base from the Victorians - the fact that it took 50 years of neglect to rot away is a tribute to how well they built - but the sad fact is this stuff was put together by a world-spanning Empire at the top of its game. What with paying for a couple of world wars and then trying to keep up Great Power appearances in the postwar world, we didn't have enough cash to keep this installed base up to scratch or replaced in anything like a timely fashion.
Unfortunately what has taken 50 years to fall to pieces is likely to take about as long to put back together again and (I have it on very good authority) *that* is the real reason why Blair and Brown are so keen on PFIs, despite them being such a poor deal for UK plc in the long term. Its not because they are a cunning dodge to keep spending off the treasury books and plump up the bottom line numbers for the current electoral cycle (although that's a handy side-effect); its because they know that they or their like-minded successors cannot stay in charge for the decades that a full infrastructure overhaul is going to take and they want to make damned sure that nobody raids the infrastructure warchest after their watch.
What one government gives another can take away after all, so from their perspective its no good kicking off a massive overhaul project now if a Conservative government is able to come along in a few years time and gut it for tax handouts just when its about to pay off. What handing out those juicy multi-decade PFI contracts does is lock in a powerful City-based constituency who will scream bloody murder if a future Chancellor tries to raid those revenue streams for a quick handout.
It doesn't make much fiscal sense, but politically its quite astute.
Slashdot Mirror
Regards
Luke
Regards
Luke
Mexico 1846
Spain 1898
The C20th has been reasonably clear insofar as yer actual shooting wars go, but there have been numerous jaunts Down South that could have triggered a war if anyone other than the hemispheric superpower had been behind them.
Just because the biggest MoFo on the block doesn't get in many fights, it doesn't make him a man of peace.
Regards
Luke
Well I think there's a slight difference between 'the US' (as in an arm of the govt) staging such a campaign and an American newspaper doing it.
Both would be, sensu strictu, examples of free speech, but I think state actors tend to get viewed rather more critically than non-state actors when doing this sort of thing. God knows how the ditto-heads who flamed The Guardian would react if MI6 slipped the DNC a few million quid and started flying in airplane loads of letters threatening WTO sanctions if Bush wins next week. Probably call for airstrikes on Vauxhall before stroking out or something.
The fact that the CIA has done exactly this (and worse) in the past, is one of the reasons why I view the torrent of venom provoked by the Guardian's ill-judged wheeze as being just a bit rich...
Regards
Luke
This tallies with accounts I got from a friend who was doing similar 'Your world is about to change' briefing sessions for EMI's UK middle management back in the mid/late 90s.
She said their reaction started off at disbelief which quickly transformed into aggressive and total rejection of her message when she stuck to her guns and started showing them some of the tools that were hitting the net back then.
She also said that she hadn't ever encountered a group of people who were so pigheadedly ignorant and flat-out stupid as the guys (and they *were* all guys) who attended those sessions - starting with the casually sexist attitudes and going rapidly downhill from there. As far as she was concerned, the quicker their comfy little world got overturned the better.
Regards
Luke
I read some of the sample letters as well. Some were quite good I thought, but I'm a Brit so my opinion has no relevance.
Regards Luke
Yeah that struck me as a bit odd and they didn't go into a great amount of detail regarding why the fault wasn't picked up on the ground - given that the problem was described as the transmitter and receiver being tuned to different frequencies it seems like a fairly easy thing to spot prior to launch.
Of course the documentary could have been simplifying massively, but I got a sense that there were plenty of things being left unspoken in an effort to foster diplomatic face-saving between the various project teams. It was pretty clear that the Hugyens imaging guy had a few choice words that might well have ended up on the cutting room floor.
I thought the solution to the problem (twiddling with Cassini's velocity so that doppler shifting 'retuned' the incoming signals to a higher frequency) was a nice hack though.
Regards
Luke
My anecdotal evidence is that all of the members of my regular gaming group come from stable families (or, these days, are looking after stable families) and are pretty much middle of the road when it comes to self-esteem; some above the average, some below.
We could well be weirdly 'normal' for roleplaying geeks of course. That's the beauty of anecdote...
Regards
Luke
Sort of, but its complicated. The BBC is an organ of the state, but it is not run by the executive arm.
First the BBC *is* actually responsible for collecting the licence fee. They farm the operation out to another entity, but its a statutory responsibility written in to their charter.
Second the BBC's grant-in-aid funding is paid from the the pot of licence fees but its level is set when the the BBC's charter is renewed every decade or so (of course the govt of the day has a large influence over that process when it occurs). So yes, the grant often diverges from what is in the common fund but the license fee which fills that fund is explicitly tied to this payment stream. And yes, the GotD has a big stick it can wave at the BBC - but a decade is a long time in politics and whilst theoretically, vide the Crown in parliament, the GotD can abolish the BBC (ie fail to renew its charter) if it gets uppity, the cost in goodwill would be horrendous. Even in her most eye-swivellingly megalomaniac stages, Thatcher never seriously considered doing that.
Addressing the way upthread post that started this off, the BBC is explicitly charged as part of its charter with conducting R&D into things like broadcast and storage technologies so this is exactly what they should be doing with the money they've been given. If they weren't, they'd be failing to fulfill their mandate. There's a lot of stuff out there that has come from the BBC Technology Divisions. Our gift to the rest of the world.
Regards
Luke
You missed the grandparent's point. He said that OPEC *bar* the 'three unstable states' was at maximum output back in 2001, ie. that the only surplus capacity for the US (leaving out the strategic reserve and suchlike) was in Iraq, Iran and Libya. Thus the points in your first paragraph are null and void - Iraq was not operating at full capacity under the prewar setup.
Personally I'm not sure I buy the grandparent's initial point, firstly because OPEC isn't the only player when it comes to hydrocarbons and secondly I'm inclined to be a little suspicious of any Saudi claims that they were stretched 100%. However I make little effort to follow the oil business in great detail so I'm not in a position to authoritatively challenge the point and will let it stand.
If we accept that there was no spare capacity in the world oil market, then a policy aimed at loosening up the political constraints that prevents reserves in Iraq, Libya and Iran from being fully exploited by the US economy seems like a sensible geopolitical goal for the US to pursue. We can kick around the precise details of recent US policy and how effective alternatives might have been, but it is an undeniable fact that two out of those three problematic countries are now under regimes that are much more acceptable to the US as vendors of a strategic resource than they were. They may not be able to pump more oil just at the moment, but the Iraqi interim authority would certainly *like* to supply more oil to the world market and the US is more than happy for it to be sold. Similarly the US is a lot more sanguine about Libya ramping up production than used to be the case.
Your later points about 'running out of oil' are correct as far as they go, what you are ignoring are the second and third order effects on the world economy that transitioning from a cheap to an expensive energy regime will entail. As you say there will be plenty of hydrocarbon reserves that become viable (and will be exploited) as the price climbs towards and beyond $100/barrel, but the real-terms trebling (or worse) in price of a primary input like oil will have a profound effect on pretty much everything and it will take decades for the changes to work their way through the world's economy - just look at what the two oil shocks in the 70s did and then turn the dial up to 11. Given the US's position as global hegemon it is likely that pretty much every such change will be a direct or indirect threat to some aspect of the US's current status (when you're on top most changes point downwards) - thus it is in the interests of the US administration to delay the transition to an 'expensive energy' world for as long as possible and recent changes in Iraq and Libya help towards that end.
Your final point is weak I think. Firstly 'people like Saddam' (in the sense of being brutal thugs) *are* tolerated in most significant oil producing areas - check out pretty much every other state in the Middle East and Central Asia for example. Indeed Saddam Hussein himself was groomed for dictatorship and supported in his horrors for decades, precisely because he guaranteed supplies and (latterly) was a regional counterweight to Iran. Secondly, if oil *wasn't* the reason for GWII, what was? As you say there are any number of horrible things happening in places without much oil (cf Rwanda, Darfur etc) and on the whole little or nothing is done about them. What was it about the horrors of Ba'athist Iraq that made them worthy of the expenditure of our blood and treasure if not oil?
Regards
Luke
I think wind farms are beautiful though. Maybe I'd change my mind if they were as ubiquitous as power lines, but at present I love seeing turbines in the landscape (there's one near a friend's village which you catch charming glimpses of on the horizon as it turns).
I was on holiday in northern Spain last year and saw some really eye-catching turbine farms around Lerida and Huesca - I'd be entirely happy to see the upland turbine farms proposed for northern England and Wales go ahead if they were as striking as those. Of course I'm a scummy, selfish townee who isn't in mystical communion with the soil of olde Englande, so what do I know?
Regards
Luke
But this is a problem for any significant piece of industrial plant.
German dams were bombed during WW2 for instance and the resultant flooding killed thousands of people (mostly slave labourers trapped in their barracks); the BBC just screened a mini-series ('The Grid') which postulated an al-Quaeda campaign against petrochemical transport infrastructure in various parts of the world (the climax being an attack on an LPG vessel in the Great Lakes).
Paradoxically one of the advantages of nuclear is that you can achieve a significant %age of your required capacity with a relatively small number of reactors, which means that you have fewer things to guard from attackers and can devote relatively more resources to hardening each of them against attacks.
Of course, having more reactors around means that the vicissitudes of war/terrorism/natural disasters are more likely to result in a reactor being in the wrong place at the wrong time - but that's true of any energy system we might devise.
Regards
Luke
Yes.
Over the last 50-100 years the EM emmission profile of the sol system has changed radically thanks to the development of our technological civilisation. If there happens to be another technological civilisation within the 50-100ly radius sphere covered by these novel EM emissions and they can be bothered to look, then this change will be extremely noticeable to the sort of equipment that you do radio astronomy with.
It wouldn't be a signal in the sense of us being able to send the complete works of William Shakespeare, but it'd be a signal nonetheless.
Of course 50-100ly is nothing much to write home about when compared to distances at the galactic and intergalactic scales, but its a start.
Regards
Luke
Obviously there is a border zone of hybrid worker/capitalists - my g/f is one, via the happy accident of moving in with me she is able to rent out her flat which, even after the mortgage, clears about 30% of what she makes in a year through her day job - but even in the advanced industrial nations the numbers of by-the-marxist-book workers is still a large majority of the population.
The fact that most 'workers' self identify as 'not-workers' is what yer classic Marxist would ascribe to false consciousness.
Regards Luke
Regards Luke
Its no longer an actively maintained project unfortunately, but so far bitrot doesn't appear to have rendered it inoperable.
Regards Luke
Clearly, what you think is crappy overwriting and ego indulgence I think is immersive world-building and well-crafted, detailed exposition. Tastes vary. Who would have guessed it?
Regards Luke
As someone who's just finished reading Quicksilver (and thoroughly enjoyed it BTW) I'm intrigued by some of your criticisms. I know a fair bit about the Smoke (and been living here for a while) and I thought he got the London bits down very well, especially for a non-native and a foreigner, but I don't know that much about Cambridge (neither Cantab. or Mass.) - could you give a bit more detail on how he got Cambridge/Trinity wrong IYO?
Also which bits of the history were especially Americanised or silly? I'm by no means well read in the period, so I'd like a better idea of where you think he went off the rails there.
Regards
Luke
Are you kidding? Where do you think these bozos got the idea from in the first place?
I'll lay odds a burly guy with a dodgy scottish brogue was around their head office trying to use a mouse as a dictaphone not too long ago....
Regards
Luke
Regards Luke
The magnetic field acting as a shield from the ionisation caused by... solar storms.
The stronger gravitational field meaning that the energy requirements to boil off water from the earth's atmosphere is much higher. The additional energy that is derived from ionisation caused by... solar storms.
Proximate and ultimate causes can both be correct you know and it'd be a very poor scientist who failed to recognise this.
Regards
Luke
And are you surprised that they have a bunch of entirely plausible arguments backing up their position? Or that they seemed to be entirely lacking in cloven hooves, pitchforks and clouds of sulfrous smoke?
These people make their *living* from being able to put together an argument and then pleading its merits in front of hostile (or disinterested) audiences. Moreover they have a direct and pressing personal interest in achieving an alignment of EU law with WIPO and the US/Japanese systems since, as patent lawyers, they will be able to live extremely well under the proposed dispensation.
This is not to say that the plausible arguments they advance may not have some merit (*some* merit) but really, you have to look at who they are and where they are coming from when you assess these arguments.
Regards
Luke
Mandrake 9.2 as well.
I had some irritating problems with my OEM POS Windows installation freaking out and going into recovery mode when lilo set itself up in the MBR (solution: point lilo at the root mountpoint instead), but on-the-fly resizing of the NTFS windows partition was easy as pie.
Regards
Luke
Oh absolutely. However the current incumbents think they are faced with the choice between committing future governments to paying over the odds for a long-term project so that it actually gets completed versus starting to pay the 'sensible' price for said project during their term of office, only to see it cancelled by the next government ten years before completion with several billions of sunk costs lost for little or no benefit.
Even worse, from their perspective, would be to see assets (painstakingly built up over the course of several parliaments of 'Iron Chancellor'-style prudence and politically painful self denial) sold off by a future generation of their opponents in order to secure a Thatcher-style electoral ascendancy over their own political heirs.
The current generation of Labour politicians were hugely influenced by their experience of the 80s and their analysis of the Thatcherite privatisations is that it permitted the Tories to do exactly that - sell off the 'family silver' to their core supporters and then use the proceeds to bribe the wider electorate. They are absolutely determined not to allow that to happen again and PFIs are their chosen mechanism for protecting their legacy - by their calculation its not going to be politically feasible for a putative Thatcher of the 2040s to sell off these assets if they are already owned by the PFI contract holders.
Nope - current price tag is 600+ million.
How did it get so high? Well you spend ten million here, ten million there and before you know it you're talking serious money... For starters there is plenty of high spec custom-built kit at the Swanage ATC Centre (I've spoken to people who have worked there and they say the actual ATC screens are incredible to look at and use, but they are also eye-wateringly expensive).
Then there's the fact that IT consultants on these sorts of jobs are routinely billing 500-1000 quid a day - that quickly mounts up, especially when the project overruns by several years.
Then there was the whole testing and approval process. Back in 98-99 when I knew people involved on the project, they were doing full-scale shift rehearsals and they didn't come cheap - these would involve bringing in an entire duty roster of ATCs and running them through a simulated full shift using data recorded from the live ATC systems (using custom built data-capture and conversion tools to provide these data to custom-built test control harnesses). You don't have to run many of those exercises before you are into seven figure sums just on simulations alone.
All in all not a cheap business and the longer it has dragged on the worse it has got. But if you consider that earlier this year I was working for a well known UK bank who are planning on spending thirty five million pounds simply on upgrading their computer estate to the current versions of Windows it puts the whole thing into perspective. Sort of.
Regards Luke
To be fair (not that I hold any affection for Mrs T. in my heart) the rot stretches back a lot further than the 70s.
I'd say the UK has been letting the infrastructure maintenance slide since at least WW2, maybe earlier. We inherited a fantastic installed base from the Victorians - the fact that it took 50 years of neglect to rot away is a tribute to how well they built - but the sad fact is this stuff was put together by a world-spanning Empire at the top of its game. What with paying for a couple of world wars and then trying to keep up Great Power appearances in the postwar world, we didn't have enough cash to keep this installed base up to scratch or replaced in anything like a timely fashion.
Unfortunately what has taken 50 years to fall to pieces is likely to take about as long to put back together again and (I have it on very good authority) *that* is the real reason why Blair and Brown are so keen on PFIs, despite them being such a poor deal for UK plc in the long term. Its not because they are a cunning dodge to keep spending off the treasury books and plump up the bottom line numbers for the current electoral cycle (although that's a handy side-effect); its because they know that they or their like-minded successors cannot stay in charge for the decades that a full infrastructure overhaul is going to take and they want to make damned sure that nobody raids the infrastructure warchest after their watch.
What one government gives another can take away after all, so from their perspective its no good kicking off a massive overhaul project now if a Conservative government is able to come along in a few years time and gut it for tax handouts just when its about to pay off. What handing out those juicy multi-decade PFI contracts does is lock in a powerful City-based constituency who will scream bloody murder if a future Chancellor tries to raid those revenue streams for a quick handout.
It doesn't make much fiscal sense, but politically its quite astute.
Regards
Luke