Until very recently, it was mandatory in the UK to return to the lane furthest from the median immediately after overtaking
Nope, as the poster above states, nothing's changed.
It could be that some Minister was talking off-message in a "We'd like to see this sort of thing" sort of way, then was quickly slapped down by DoT civil servants. My favourite example of this was about 20 years ago when a Roads Minister confidently said they'd start allowing drivers to overtake on the inside lanes of motorways as "people already do it". He didn't really think through implications of simply making illegal stuff legal, just 'cause people break the law.
Changing 'Scottish' to 'English' negates the impact of the original statement and changes a lot more than the nationality of the subjects discussed. The majority idea of an individual nations' identity trumping being British is relatively new (2 decades). It took a long time for the policy of 'North Britain' from the C19th to be reversed (with London also refusing acknowledgement of any vestige of being Welsh). Growing up English meant little to me- people who waved flags of St George were racists, pure and simple. I was British. The English football team even used to fly off waving the Union flag. Welsh and Scottish nationalism has, of course, been around for centuries, but a subtle sea-change happened around the time of Scot's Parliament and Welsh elected assembly (and, interestingly, Euro 96).
So when Renton rants about being Scottish, he's talking about its status within the Union, how it acts like a provincial city declaring themselves "The Best", how insularity can be celebrated 'cause it's Scottish, how the Scots still always come second to English in the priorities of the UK [e.g. Poll Tax] and haven't [at publication of 1993] done anything about it.
Indeed, and if I was paying & 4 000 a year (or more) for third party insurance, which is the entry level for 17-21 year olds, I'd jump at the chance of anything that would reduce this. With ANPR linked to insurance records, there's little chance that you won't be caught, especially in urban areas.
The idea that we all have it however, simply won't wash. The petition against GPS road charging showed 'poll tax' levels of unpopularity and was quickly dropped. Also, kudos to the chap who organised it before the govt. had spent hundreds of millions on consultants.
No. Paranal is 24 d 37'; they should see down to 65d 23', but adding a few degrees for atmosphere and the pointing of the telescopes, they can see any part of the sky from 90 S to roughly 60 N, which is 87% of the whole sky.
And one of those two could be Newt Gingrich! Says everything about the process of picking candidates. Look at his record on marriage, lobbying/money, racist [food-stamp president, what sort of shit is that?], together with levels of hypocrisy beyond invention. Incredible. The idea of President Gingrich was laughable 10 years ago. What changed?
No, I don't think so, my only personal knowledge of this area are of links to Pakistan. Literally all the Pakistani children (correction, boys) in primary school classes I deal with go and visit every early summer; it rather messes up teaching and testing them. But this builds conjecture on speculation.
The plane was flying an odd pattern over a relatively long period, unless your experience of aircraft finds them often flying a circuit overhead for hours? I'm simply pointing out in a discussion on what drones may be doing over US skies, that casual, almost throw away, lines in a report on UK-based Taliban, show that the RAF may run UK-based surveillance.
I needed a pair of binoculars to see properly/identify the aircraft, so it was at some height; it was certainly in controlled airspace, the main N America - S England/N France traffic is passing over me as I type, albeit it at double the altitude.
But it was the odd pattern. Didn't think twice about it when I saw it the first time, but why would anyone mapping fly the exact same route at least three times (maybe more- I wasn't out before or after)? Also, it wasn't sweeping in cardinal directions, it was doing a wide circuit. Weather was totally clear and any decent photogrammetrist would get the pictures first time. Can you suggest another purpose?
Here in a S. English city (Bristol), I was digging my garden one autumn day, when just the faintest of traces of engine noise made me look up. Over the next two hours, a Britten-Norman Islander made three very exact circuits over my inner city house. High up (15 000?), in airspace usually used by the local airport, it was almost invisible; very funny I thought.
We live 3/4 mile from the centre of a large UK city. This is near enough that whilst there are some incongruous solo CCTVs attached to lampposts (assume these are incident-related), you have to walk almost to the centre before you're on camera all the way. This area also contains the highest concentration of pubs and clubs.
Our friends, a street away, were burgled in the night last year, the thieves escaping in their car. Two chances to get facial ID on CCTV were a local pub and a traffic camera. The pub had a spiders's web across the vital part of the picture, whilst the traffic camera had an 'awkward' reflection from a streetlight.
There were three burglars, the occupants were in the house, the cops really wanted to catch people as potentially very dangerous situation could occur later, but the CCTV was useless.
Good link. Space tourism has become a more visible issue because the newly-rich technological class are buying seats with their own money, rather than US and foreign politicians using that of their own people.
The computer models are so inaccurate below the continental scale that they are useless
This used to be true. Up until the end of the 20th Century, climate models had 'flux corrections', without which oceans would boil over the millennia they were forecasting. This was a flaw as the models weren't mature enough, but you can't just keep being employed without showing some progress. Some of the fundamental research was just that, providing foundations. Current climate models are nowhere near perfect, that's why a lot of people are working hard on them. However, even with no corrections, with increased temporal and spatial resolution, they still give the same ball-park figures [the flux corrections were for modelling inadequacies, not for our understanding of the atmos/ocean].
Do you know the bit you should be scared about, the bit that should appeal to your green-lifestyle skeptic? Unspoken parts of the culture of scientific research is unpalatable to scientists [ego, greed, money]. They are the same as almost every other large sub-section of humanity. No one likes having their dirty laundry aired. However, this is the beauty of the current system as it works both ways, Any researcher could make a fortune and a permanent high-level career by debunking climate change. But they can't, and they would if they could.
and we still don't have models that can predict El Nino/Southern Oscillation.
Mea culpa, all oceanographic and atmospheric models are useless. Sorry for troubling you.
This is the kind of stuff I oppose when I say I'm a skeptic about global warming.
You oppose a scientific report [an interesting word to choose], calling it propaganda. Why? Tautologically, your answer is
I want people to be scientific, that's all I'm asking.
You also call troll to posters who point out the strong dichotomy in your belief system; that you want a scientific view, but not a science that actually works as science. Instead, you'd prefer one that finds things that you oppose to be incorrect.
I have no problem being green
I withdraw my accusations of your profligacy with resources, your perceived selfishness, and I apologise. I now think you do not understand the scientific arguments surrounding climate change and should withdraw from further commentary.
So your argument about doing anything that could even slightly inconvenience your life is.... you simply can't/don't want to believe it. It hurts to realise we [i.e., anyone with enough money to afford a laptop and internet connection] may be incrementally reducing/removing the quality of life for our descendants.
IBM was one of the few companies that knew when the D-Day invasion would be as it was actively using computer power
Total bollocks. Weather forecasting using artificial means didn't start properly until post-war, let alone IBM being a leader in this field. The reason that the British forecast D-Day correctly, and the Germans didn't, were the availability of surface observations from the North Atlantic. See the short, but wonderful, book by Overlord's Chief Met Officer: J. M. Stagg, Forecast for Overlord.
If you look at game theory, you see that many optimal (i.e., rational) strategies are "mixed" strategies where the rational party necessarily behaves probabilistically, not deterministically
I prefer:
...in formal experiments, the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths
Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, Part 2.
There was a blog early last decade that purported to be by someone in the White House; lots of gossip about Condo Rice checking her bank account. Only thing that really stands out as credible data is that the DHS had so much cash in the budget, they couldn't spend it all on things within their remit. So they bought and stored in underground bunkers masses of expensive supplies, "Just in case".
This feels like the sort of thing a govt. dept. WOULD spend money on, as no sane private corporation would do this.
I have to reply to this as there will be some poor, frightened, person wondering if sex is a death penalty. You're talking pure and simple rubbish.
An example. The UK has 60 million people. Nearly a million people per year have an explicit HIV test in a clinic. Many, many more have implicit ones when donating blood. 6,000 people a year are newly diagnosed with HIV. This leads to an estimated cumulative total of those with HIV, including those unaware of it, of 86,500. Of those, 36,427 were gay men and 30,188 were black African. This is unfortunate for both groups, but with clear, clinical reasons. However, current HIV/AIDS death rates are 1%, which is equivalent to the back ground rate and so isn't the death sentence of 25 years ago.
All those sums leave a cumulative total of 20,000 people out of a sexually active population of about 40 million. That includes intravenous drug users and high risk lifestyles (prostitutes); the latter are also the main source of gonorrhea clusters.
So, even taking the INCREDIBLY STUPID idea that you can extrapolate infection rates from high risk groups across the whole population, you'd have to live to be over 6,000 years old before you're more likely to have HIV than not.
Hubble doesn't just have a resemblance to spy satellites, the optics were made by spy satellite manufacturer Perkin-Elmer. This was the primary cause of the original mirror defect as NASA weren't allowed into the factory to check all was well. All this was pretty scandalous as P-E massively underbid everyone else at $60 million, with the final bill actually coming out at $400 million. So plenty of scope for 'unforeseen difficulties' and, one imagines, this is standard practice in sensitive govt. projects.
Kodak (RIP) bid $100 million and actually made the mirror as an engineering project. Anyone know what happened to this?
No, it was a judge sitting in Chester crown court. Magistrates have a maximum sentencing power of 6 months. IANAL, just heard that expression repeated a lot recently; many looters who plead guilty are being remanded for sentencing at a later date.
I think most of your scenario is correct and that's possibly what happened. But it's a little like the police arresting you when a library book is overdue. It is the bar owner's problem, so why couldn't they simply close it, arrest him/her and certainly do this when the bar was empty so as not to become a public order issue?
The matters should be addressed through the civil courts, not through the criminal system (although I'm ignorant of the judicial status of the ATF). The courts deal with it and, if you don't follow instructions, you are hauled up before a judge to explain. Anything else is WIDE open to 'local interpretation'. To this visitor it looked like the bar didn't pay their protection monies.
...the UK is the most intense police state / surveillance society in the "free" Western countries.
That's bollocks. The UK has a load of CCTV (which seems damn ineffective looking at the results from last week) and ANPR is being aggressively installed without debate (next big liberty row ahead), but there's no separate paramilitary police (France, Germany, US National Guard [?}, et al.) or a nationwide police force under direct govt control (e.g. FBI). We almost certainly have a very advanced spying of phones and t'internet (hello GCHQ and thanks IRA)- and it's more than likely that all phone calls are monitored. But read up on Echelon; it's not just the UK.
I was in a Ventura, north of LA, a few years ago and we found out about the ATF. They came into a bar below our hotel and made the drinkers overturn their pints 'cause the ratio of alcohol/food in the bar's accounts was not the same as the licencing conditions. That's an intense police state.
Slashdot Mirror
Until very recently, it was mandatory in the UK to return to the lane furthest from the median immediately after overtaking
Nope, as the poster above states, nothing's changed.
It could be that some Minister was talking off-message in a "We'd like to see this sort of thing" sort of way, then was quickly slapped down by DoT civil servants. My favourite example of this was about 20 years ago when a Roads Minister confidently said they'd start allowing drivers to overtake on the inside lanes of motorways as "people already do it". He didn't really think through implications of simply making illegal stuff legal, just 'cause people break the law.
Changing 'Scottish' to 'English' negates the impact of the original statement and changes a lot more than the nationality of the subjects discussed. The majority idea of an individual nations' identity trumping being British is relatively new (2 decades). It took a long time for the policy of 'North Britain' from the C19th to be reversed (with London also refusing acknowledgement of any vestige of being Welsh). Growing up English meant little to me- people who waved flags of St George were racists, pure and simple. I was British. The English football team even used to fly off waving the Union flag. Welsh and Scottish nationalism has, of course, been around for centuries, but a subtle sea-change happened around the time of Scot's Parliament and Welsh elected assembly (and, interestingly, Euro 96).
So when Renton rants about being Scottish, he's talking about its status within the Union, how it acts like a provincial city declaring themselves "The Best", how insularity can be celebrated 'cause it's Scottish, how the Scots still always come second to English in the priorities of the UK [e.g. Poll Tax] and haven't [at publication of 1993] done anything about it.
Thanks for the reminder though.
Indeed, and if I was paying & 4 000 a year (or more) for third party insurance, which is the entry level for 17-21 year olds, I'd jump at the chance of anything that would reduce this. With ANPR linked to insurance records, there's little chance that you won't be caught, especially in urban areas.
The idea that we all have it however, simply won't wash. The petition against GPS road charging showed 'poll tax' levels of unpopularity and was quickly dropped. Also, kudos to the chap who organised it before the govt. had spent hundreds of millions on consultants.
No. Paranal is 24 d 37'; they should see down to 65d 23', but adding a few degrees for atmosphere and the pointing of the telescopes, they can see any part of the sky from 90 S to roughly 60 N, which is 87% of the whole sky.
Are you sure?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/extinction_events
And one of those two could be Newt Gingrich! Says everything about the process of picking candidates. Look at his record on marriage, lobbying/money, racist [food-stamp president, what sort of shit is that?], together with levels of hypocrisy beyond invention. Incredible. The idea of President Gingrich was laughable 10 years ago. What changed?
No, I don't think so, my only personal knowledge of this area are of links to Pakistan. Literally all the Pakistani children (correction, boys) in primary school classes I deal with go and visit every early summer; it rather messes up teaching and testing them. But this builds conjecture on speculation.
The plane was flying an odd pattern over a relatively long period, unless your experience of aircraft finds them often flying a circuit overhead for hours? I'm simply pointing out in a discussion on what drones may be doing over US skies, that casual, almost throw away, lines in a report on UK-based Taliban, show that the RAF may run UK-based surveillance.
I needed a pair of binoculars to see properly/identify the aircraft, so it was at some height; it was certainly in controlled airspace, the main N America - S England/N France traffic is passing over me as I type, albeit it at double the altitude.
But it was the odd pattern. Didn't think twice about it when I saw it the first time, but why would anyone mapping fly the exact same route at least three times (maybe more- I wasn't out before or after)? Also, it wasn't sweeping in cardinal directions, it was doing a wide circuit. Weather was totally clear and any decent photogrammetrist would get the pictures first time. Can you suggest another purpose?
Here in a S. English city (Bristol), I was digging my garden one autumn day, when just the faintest of traces of engine noise made me look up. Over the next two hours, a Britten-Norman Islander made three very exact circuits over my inner city house. High up (15 000?), in airspace usually used by the local airport, it was almost invisible; very funny I thought.
The next year, I read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/24/uk-based-taliban-afghanistan
We live 3/4 mile from the centre of a large UK city. This is near enough that whilst there are some incongruous solo CCTVs attached to lampposts (assume these are incident-related), you have to walk almost to the centre before you're on camera all the way. This area also contains the highest concentration of pubs and clubs.
Our friends, a street away, were burgled in the night last year, the thieves escaping in their car. Two chances to get facial ID on CCTV were a local pub and a traffic camera. The pub had a spiders's web across the vital part of the picture, whilst the traffic camera had an 'awkward' reflection from a streetlight.
There were three burglars, the occupants were in the house, the cops really wanted to catch people as potentially very dangerous situation could occur later, but the CCTV was useless.
Good link. Space tourism has become a more visible issue because the newly-rich technological class are buying seats with their own money, rather than US and foreign politicians using that of their own people.
This premise w.r.t. nuclear weapons is incorrect, as well as being very, very dangerous. We had 45 years of Cold War; MAD worked.
Governments who are unpopular with other governments may have their leaders called lunatics, but can you name one significant leader who truly was?
This used to be true. Up until the end of the 20th Century, climate models had 'flux corrections', without which oceans would boil over the millennia they were forecasting. This was a flaw as the models weren't mature enough, but you can't just keep being employed without showing some progress. Some of the fundamental research was just that, providing foundations. Current climate models are nowhere near perfect, that's why a lot of people are working hard on them. However, even with no corrections, with increased temporal and spatial resolution, they still give the same ball-park figures [the flux corrections were for modelling inadequacies, not for our understanding of the atmos/ocean].
Do you know the bit you should be scared about, the bit that should appeal to your green-lifestyle skeptic? Unspoken parts of the culture of scientific research is unpalatable to scientists [ego, greed, money]. They are the same as almost every other large sub-section of humanity. No one likes having their dirty laundry aired. However, this is the beauty of the current system as it works both ways, Any researcher could make a fortune and a permanent high-level career by debunking climate change. But they can't, and they would if they could.
Mea culpa, all oceanographic and atmospheric models are useless. Sorry for troubling you.
You oppose a scientific report [an interesting word to choose], calling it propaganda. Why? Tautologically, your answer is
You also call troll to posters who point out the strong dichotomy in your belief system; that you want a scientific view, but not a science that actually works as science. Instead, you'd prefer one that finds things that you oppose to be incorrect.
I withdraw my accusations of your profligacy with resources, your perceived selfishness, and I apologise. I now think you do not understand the scientific arguments surrounding climate change and should withdraw from further commentary.
So your argument about doing anything that could even slightly inconvenience your life is.... you simply can't/don't want to believe it. It hurts to realise we [i.e., anyone with enough money to afford a laptop and internet connection] may be incrementally reducing/removing the quality of life for our descendants.
Read about possible (geological timescale) massive positive feedbacks http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111109111542.htm and see if it's still stretching credibility.
Total bollocks. Weather forecasting using artificial means didn't start properly until post-war, let alone IBM being a leader in this field. The reason that the British forecast D-Day correctly, and the Germans didn't, were the availability of surface observations from the North Atlantic. See the short, but wonderful, book by Overlord's Chief Met Officer: J. M. Stagg, Forecast for Overlord.
I prefer:
Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, Part 2.
Shipping is so dependent on GPS that they follow the exact shipping channels, no matter what's in the way...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/dec/16/1
Wonder if any of those six locations will again include the IT powerhouse of Hambleden, Oxfordshire?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6686406/BT-criticised-over-broadband-access-for-chairman.html/
There was a blog early last decade that purported to be by someone in the White House; lots of gossip about Condo Rice checking her bank account. Only thing that really stands out as credible data is that the DHS had so much cash in the budget, they couldn't spend it all on things within their remit. So they bought and stored in underground bunkers masses of expensive supplies, "Just in case".
This feels like the sort of thing a govt. dept. WOULD spend money on, as no sane private corporation would do this.
I have to reply to this as there will be some poor, frightened, person wondering if sex is a death penalty. You're talking pure and simple rubbish.
An example. The UK has 60 million people. Nearly a million people per year have an explicit HIV test in a clinic. Many, many more have implicit ones when donating blood. 6,000 people a year are newly diagnosed with HIV. This leads to an estimated cumulative total of those with HIV, including those unaware of it, of 86,500. Of those, 36,427 were gay men and 30,188 were black African. This is unfortunate for both groups, but with clear, clinical reasons. However, current HIV/AIDS death rates are 1%, which is equivalent to the back ground rate and so isn't the death sentence of 25 years ago.
All those sums leave a cumulative total of 20,000 people out of a sexually active population of about 40 million. That includes intravenous drug users and high risk lifestyles (prostitutes); the latter are also the main source of gonorrhea clusters.
So, even taking the INCREDIBLY STUPID idea that you can extrapolate infection rates from high risk groups across the whole population, you'd have to live to be over 6,000 years old before you're more likely to have HIV than not.
Hubble doesn't just have a resemblance to spy satellites, the optics were made by spy satellite manufacturer Perkin-Elmer. This was the primary cause of the original mirror defect as NASA weren't allowed into the factory to check all was well. All this was pretty scandalous as P-E massively underbid everyone else at $60 million, with the final bill actually coming out at $400 million. So plenty of scope for 'unforeseen difficulties' and, one imagines, this is standard practice in sensitive govt. projects.
Kodak (RIP) bid $100 million and actually made the mirror as an engineering project. Anyone know what happened to this?
No, it was a judge sitting in Chester crown court. Magistrates have a maximum sentencing power of 6 months. IANAL, just heard that expression repeated a lot recently; many looters who plead guilty are being remanded for sentencing at a later date.
I think most of your scenario is correct and that's possibly what happened. But it's a little like the police arresting you when a library book is overdue. It is the bar owner's problem, so why couldn't they simply close it, arrest him/her and certainly do this when the bar was empty so as not to become a public order issue?
The matters should be addressed through the civil courts, not through the criminal system (although I'm ignorant of the judicial status of the ATF). The courts deal with it and, if you don't follow instructions, you are hauled up before a judge to explain. Anything else is WIDE open to 'local interpretation'. To this visitor it looked like the bar didn't pay their protection monies.
That's bollocks. The UK has a load of CCTV (which seems damn ineffective looking at the results from last week) and ANPR is being aggressively installed without debate (next big liberty row ahead), but there's no separate paramilitary police (France, Germany, US National Guard [?}, et al.) or a nationwide police force under direct govt control (e.g. FBI). We almost certainly have a very advanced spying of phones and t'internet (hello GCHQ and thanks IRA)- and it's more than likely that all phone calls are monitored. But read up on Echelon; it's not just the UK.
I was in a Ventura, north of LA, a few years ago and we found out about the ATF. They came into a bar below our hotel and made the drinkers overturn their pints 'cause the ratio of alcohol/food in the bar's accounts was not the same as the licencing conditions. That's an intense police state.