I've seen a fair few Hollywood movies made for a lot more where the storyline is tenuous to say the least.
I think the direction shows promise and why not - Spanish speaking American and European markets must be a potential goldmine for Hollywood. It rather reminds me of the music industry, which I worked in for a short while. They take a good looking teenager or group of teenagers with a few half baked songs scribbled on the back of their schoolbooks off the streets and throw a few million at them just in case they are the next Michael Jackson or SClub7 or whatever. Reckon Hollywood is the same. Take a punt on somebody with a bit of promise, surround them with time served veterans who can keep things on schedule and at worst it gets written off as a tax loss to balance the books and at best you might find a genius. Got to be worth a punt, costs about the same as one Hollywood star's pay for one movie probably.
Plus Hollywood loves a formula. District 9 = "African sci-fi", maybe this is the missing link "South American sci-fi" that will clean up that market.
Not sure what you're getting at here, interested to know, but there's an example of a plane that originated in London Heathrow bound for the USA which got blown up in flight. Do please explain your point, interested to know...
Some folk in the UK make surrender jokes, but on the whole they don't go down too well. We're well aware that we were 25 miles away from being invaded ourselves and it was a close run thing. You walk round the UK now and still see bomb damage from then. We have relatives who have personal frightening memories of the time. We're very aware that the French fought before losing their country and fought incredibly bravely even after losing their country. We know French people carried out acts of incredible bravery to shelter our airmen and others from being captured and helped get them back home and risked their lives and torture to resist the occupation.
My theory is that the further a place was from a war, the easier it is to be ill-educated and insensitive about it.
I'm going to love this one. How are the patriotic American geeks going to respond? US military goes with Microsoft products, French military supports open source....
Purchase a copy of the A-Z map of London (A5 book type not large fold out map). It's got real spatial maps and at the back or on the back cover has the tube map. Plus an index so you can see where tube stations are in the real world. Very handy for visiting friends etc when you're told "the nearest tube station is X" and you need to navigate the 200 metres from there. No maths degree required, average 11 year old literacy will suffice.
I think you mistake the purpose of the tube map - it was intended to show the sequence of tube stations and how each line connects. Read up on Harry Beck and the intention of the classic tube map redesign. As someone who likes cartography you'll understand the problems involved that occur when you try to represent tube stations on a correct to scale map: lots of central London locations crammed together to enable you to fit the outer London stations on, plus too much peripheral geographical information.
p.s. I like your phrase "semi-employed mathematical friend from Cambridge" but I don't understand what this means. Are they part time tutoring/ lecturing, or does this mean they are doing shifts at MacDonalds?
Hey, are you the guy who ran the Millenium Store? all the stuff we were supposed to buy when the world fell apart on January 1st 2000? I've still got some of your freeze dried food packs, can I get my money back?
Didn't you used to write novels in the 1980s about how we'd be foraging for food and ammo from1988 after the Soviets invaded and turned out country into a wasteland? I am sure I grew up reading those knowing the sky was going to fall on my head by 1989 *latest*!;-)
(yup we should definitely use less energy though and live more simply so our resources can go on for longer, people are too extravagant and wasteful. But people do seem to love the idea of living in a Mad Max movie).
Interested to hear about your reference on "the earth's energy being used up" - do you have any references? I thought that using the earth as a storage device was more about the ground gathering solar heat and giving it up slowly during the winter, a bit like the sea (amelioration effect near the seaside for coastal towns), and also heat gradually permeating up from the centre.
Really interested to hear if the storage of heat gets "used up" and takes several years to warm up to the temperature of the ground - what, 10 metres away? 100 metres away? How long does it take to heat back up?
UK government amongst others are still heavily promoting geothermal energy so suprised if what you say is common knowledge that they continue to recommend this path.
I don't think you helped yourself in getting a measured response by setting yourself up for a fall.
"I have never heard of this country before!"
You're rather asking for people to send cheeky responses back to you. Posting that Country X is not significant in geopolitical terms because you as a single individual has never heard of it is a rather weak argument. You come over as ignorant and arrogant, I am sure you're not but this is how it looks. Google will help you, (15.9 million hits for "Eritrea").
Eritrea was in the news a lot because it broke away from Ethiopia in a bloody civil war and there have been border conflicts ever since. Being a poor country it also has food crises and there are calls for international help in the news sometimes.
Even if your conference is free to attend, it still costs the delegates their travel costs, their accommodation and food, and covering the time away from their workplace. The tough question is- does your conference have enough to persuade your delegates' bosses that it's worth it?
Unfortunately as a new conference you are going to have to work that bit harder, can you bring in something with pulling power? Once you've got a good reputation it gets easier, there are some conferences which have a strong enough reputation that they sell themselves (I can tell my boss I want to go to Famous Conference X and if she's got the budget and it doesn't cross any deadlines I don't need to tell her any more). But a new conference will have to have great speakers or some other professional value that your delegates bosses will accept.
So you're saying that to make sure the stories in the Star Trek films stay factually correct (in their fictional fantasy way), Trek fans are duty bound to destroy the Virgin Space Ship and make sure it never flies?:-)
(disclaimer - I live in Milton Keynes next to Bletchley and have been to BP on many occasions).
Bletchley Park is easy to get to by public transport, it is 100 metres walk from Bletchley train station. This is on the Northampton line from London Euston. trains every half an hour from London, from about 06.00 to 24.00, they take about 50 minutes. Look for trains for Northampton, usually on Platforms 8/9/10/11 from Euston. About 15 or 20 pounds day return (sorry, our train service is very over priced).
Aged 22, he's probably also got 4 or 5 years experience of driving real cars on the road. He's probably picked up "his most basic driving habits" in that time in reall life. Maybe his advanced race track driving skills he's picked up from games rather than real life, but if he's not picked up the most basic skills by now driving his car round town and to the race track he'd have probably been in a wheelchair or prison by now...
You try sailing up to a port in the USA with weapons systems on board, Asian or Arabic looking crew and telling the port authorities and coastguards to get off your case because you're legitimate and just protecting yourself.
You may well be - perhaps you are a merchant vessel that has to sail through dangerous middle eastern or asian waters and has a legitimate and proven reason for being armed to the teeth, but I can imagine what the American responses would be from the port authorities up to the senators.
I've got a feeling the general consensus in the USA (and many countries) would be "well we don't mind if our merchant ships are armed to the teeth when they sail into foreign ports, because they are all honest decent boys and girls on board, but we don't trust any dodgy foreign merchant vessels coming into OUR ports like that...
"The pirates are in this for the money, not primarily because of ideaology; if it looks like the could be killed then they might reconsider their chosen line of work."
And what exactly do you think they can do instead? This is Somalia, not New York or the Paris suburbs. There is no work. Because there is no functioning government, large fishing fleets from other nations have fished the locals traditional fishing grounds bare. Their traditional work no longer exists. You have young guys, with no hope, going hungry. We're not talking USA-poor, you've only got last year's playstation and your car is ten years old, we're talking African poor. There are no food stamps in Somalia, if you don't bring in money you starve to death. Or you can take your chances and become a millionaire overnight. Fishermen have always died on the sea, I'd say the gamble is still seen as better than starving to death slowly.
A dozen deaths isn't going to make these young guys think "oh I'd better go to college and learn how to become a sports therapist instead" because there isn't a functioning education system, there aren't jobs down the local MacDonalds... we've got to think in far bigger terms than "kill them all". That just doesn't work, we got to work out how to improve the country and the region so there are better options than becoming a pirate.
Don't worry about being labelled as an "IT guy" - most of the people in your workplace label you as "student" I should imagine with all that entails...
No, most powerful sovereign state wins. USA gets to tell pretty well anybody (apart from maybe Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea) when they want somebody brought over the USA to stand trial under US law. How often does the US let other countries take its citizens away to stand trial under their laws? Can't imagine US citizens being shipped to the EU very often, not even thinking of less developed countries.
"I wouldn't want to be lifting something heavy if one of those suits broke and dumped the entire weight of the load on me."
Same is true of any machine, so what's new? I wouldn't want to be under my auto if the jack holding it up broke, or lifting bags of cement with a JCB if that broke. Not sure of your point beyond "machines need to be tested and proved to be safe before being sold to people"?
Better security solution. Because me old china, even if a whole bunch of yer muckers take a butchers they won't have a scoobie about you're rabbitting on about.
Got an Ericsson R310s 9 years ago, dropped it off scaffolding and all sorts of things. Contacts for the recharging conntection died after 6 years so I replaced it with another one off ebay for £30, this one is three years and counting, multiple soaks, puddles, etc. I believe there's a new branded armoured phone out there, will be my next choice: Sonim S1 http://blog.phoneslimited.co.uk/2009/08/13/landrover-s1-sonim-landrover-phone-review-sonim-s1-review/
Nice reviews. It made me smile when he said that some of the locations were up to 1.5km/1 mile out - pretty useless for a tourist then (apart from the ones who are locals and also experts on how GPS works). Quite funny when he was pointing at such obvious things as HMS Belfast and St. Pauls Cathedral and the systems weren't finding them. Early days I guess, come back in five years. I suppose the systems are busy filling in the data points that are paying them, e.g. commercial companies that have struck up a deal with them, and the cheap systems will just tell you where every McD's is but miss half the tourist sites?
"Why would you need to spend more money on health benefits for the poor if you have the National Health Service? Doesn't that provide universal health care regardless of income?"
A lot of what the NHS does is curative medicine, the first time most of us come into contact with it is because we're not well (illness, accident, etc). I don't have the information to hand (and I'd welcome more info and references) but my suspicion is that you'll find poorer people are more likely to encounter health risks, struggle with health challenges etc in their daily life than more wealthy people, hence the approach in many social-leaning countries to give additional support/benefits to the poor. Richer folk can buy their way into continued good health while folk at the bottom of the economic pile struggle as they have less disposable income to afford health related purchases, so need the NHS more often?
If you are on vey low income, you have much less disposable income. Therefore help in paying for health related additional resources can help individuals and families afford things that would benefit their family but they could survive without. For example: if you're on limited income, you can feed your kids on really cheap burgers and white bread and processed breakfast cereal, but child allowance (cash allocation per child on a regular basis) might give you the opportunity to give them a more varied and better diet - meaning they will be more healthy and less likely to get illnesses that later need to be treated by the National Health Service, when the child gets diabetes or obesity related illnesses. Or providing low income old folk with financial support to help them improve their home with insulation in winter, or handrails to make going up stairs when they are not so good at walking, will reduce the number of admissions to hospital in winter with cold related illnesses and also fall-related accidents.
All of the above can be dealt with through your own finances if you're wealthy but might be impossible financial challenges if you're poor for any reason. If you can stop people having illnesses or accidents in the first place then in the long term it will work out cheaper and less cost to the NHS.
Well noted - it's a lot of the old mines that people have forgotten about that continue to cause problems. I've visited Cambodia and there are a lot there because of the Khmer Rouger period there, and in Laos and Vietnam there are a lot due to the "Vietnam War" as we think of it in the West from over 40 years ago. Lots of other conflicts in Africa and other places as well. Not so bad if you're in a rich country or you've got resources that people want access to (e.g. oil) but a lot of places have just been forgotten about and there are precious few resources to clear up the ordnance.
Apart from nobody keeping maps of where they put the mines / cluster munitions down (if they could even be bothered to do so in the first place) there's a real problem with UXO shifting in loose ground. My friend in Cambodia tells me they'll clear a road in the jungle one season, but then after the rains the loose soil has turned to mud and moved down hillsides so a path / field / road might be dangerous again and has to be treated as a live minefield all over again.
UXO just keeps on killing people for years after the conflict has finished, land mines and cluster bombs and the like are really evil.
But the Daily Mail in the UK and I am sure many media outlets in the US as well as right wing politicians the world over are telling us that "asylum seekers", people who seek shelter in another country because they fear for their lives in their own country, are all criminals and freeloaders.
Surely if Mr. Dymovsky tries to claim asylum our politicians and media will demand he goes back to his own country, after all asylum seekers are all fakes? Plus our leaders are always telling us that Mr. Putin is a man who they can do business with and that Russia is a lovely country with no real human rights issues to worry about?
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I've seen a fair few Hollywood movies made for a lot more where the storyline is tenuous to say the least.
I think the direction shows promise and why not - Spanish speaking American and European markets must be a potential goldmine for Hollywood. It rather reminds me of the music industry, which I worked in for a short while. They take a good looking teenager or group of teenagers with a few half baked songs scribbled on the back of their schoolbooks off the streets and throw a few million at them just in case they are the next Michael Jackson or SClub7 or whatever. Reckon Hollywood is the same. Take a punt on somebody with a bit of promise, surround them with time served veterans who can keep things on schedule and at worst it gets written off as a tax loss to balance the books and at best you might find a genius. Got to be worth a punt, costs about the same as one Hollywood star's pay for one movie probably.
Plus Hollywood loves a formula. District 9 = "African sci-fi", maybe this is the missing link "South American sci-fi" that will clean up that market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103
Not sure what you're getting at here, interested to know, but there's an example of a plane that originated in London Heathrow bound for the USA which got blown up in flight. Do please explain your point, interested to know...
Some folk in the UK make surrender jokes, but on the whole they don't go down too well. We're well aware that we were 25 miles away from being invaded ourselves and it was a close run thing. You walk round the UK now and still see bomb damage from then. We have relatives who have personal frightening memories of the time. We're very aware that the French fought before losing their country and fought incredibly bravely even after losing their country. We know French people carried out acts of incredible bravery to shelter our airmen and others from being captured and helped get them back home and risked their lives and torture to resist the occupation.
My theory is that the further a place was from a war, the easier it is to be ill-educated and insensitive about it.
No worries. We know there are idiots (and really great folk) in every country. "Empty vessels make the most noise" is indeed a truth.
I'm going to love this one. How are the patriotic American geeks going to respond? US military goes with Microsoft products, French military supports open source....
Purchase a copy of the A-Z map of London (A5 book type not large fold out map). It's got real spatial maps and at the back or on the back cover has the tube map. Plus an index so you can see where tube stations are in the real world. Very handy for visiting friends etc when you're told "the nearest tube station is X" and you need to navigate the 200 metres from there. No maths degree required, average 11 year old literacy will suffice.
I think you mistake the purpose of the tube map - it was intended to show the sequence of tube stations and how each line connects. Read up on Harry Beck and the intention of the classic tube map redesign. As someone who likes cartography you'll understand the problems involved that occur when you try to represent tube stations on a correct to scale map: lots of central London locations crammed together to enable you to fit the outer London stations on, plus too much peripheral geographical information.
p.s. I like your phrase "semi-employed mathematical friend from Cambridge" but I don't understand what this means. Are they part time tutoring/ lecturing, or does this mean they are doing shifts at MacDonalds?
Hey, are you the guy who ran the Millenium Store? all the stuff we were supposed to buy when the world fell apart on January 1st 2000? I've still got some of your freeze dried food packs, can I get my money back?
Didn't you used to write novels in the 1980s about how we'd be foraging for food and ammo from1988 after the Soviets invaded and turned out country into a wasteland? I am sure I grew up reading those knowing the sky was going to fall on my head by 1989 *latest*! ;-)
(yup we should definitely use less energy though and live more simply so our resources can go on for longer, people are too extravagant and wasteful. But people do seem to love the idea of living in a Mad Max movie).
Interested to hear about your reference on "the earth's energy being used up" - do you have any references? I thought that using the earth as a storage device was more about the ground gathering solar heat and giving it up slowly during the winter, a bit like the sea (amelioration effect near the seaside for coastal towns), and also heat gradually permeating up from the centre.
Really interested to hear if the storage of heat gets "used up" and takes several years to warm up to the temperature of the ground - what, 10 metres away? 100 metres away? How long does it take to heat back up?
UK government amongst others are still heavily promoting geothermal energy so suprised if what you say is common knowledge that they continue to recommend this path.
cheers!
I don't think you helped yourself in getting a measured response by setting yourself up for a fall.
"I have never heard of this country before!"
You're rather asking for people to send cheeky responses back to you. Posting that Country X is not significant in geopolitical terms because you as a single individual has never heard of it is a rather weak argument. You come over as ignorant and arrogant, I am sure you're not but this is how it looks. Google will help you, (15.9 million hits for "Eritrea").
Eritrea was in the news a lot because it broke away from Ethiopia in a bloody civil war and there have been border conflicts ever since. Being a poor country it also has food crises and there are calls for international help in the news sometimes.
Even if your conference is free to attend, it still costs the delegates their travel costs, their accommodation and food, and covering the time away from their workplace. The tough question is- does your conference have enough to persuade your delegates' bosses that it's worth it?
Unfortunately as a new conference you are going to have to work that bit harder, can you bring in something with pulling power? Once you've got a good reputation it gets easier, there are some conferences which have a strong enough reputation that they sell themselves (I can tell my boss I want to go to Famous Conference X and if she's got the budget and it doesn't cross any deadlines I don't need to tell her any more). But a new conference will have to have great speakers or some other professional value that your delegates bosses will accept.
..It's about where aviation was in the first 20 years or so in the last century, give them time.
So you're saying that to make sure the stories in the Star Trek films stay factually correct (in their fictional fantasy way), Trek fans are duty bound to destroy the Virgin Space Ship and make sure it never flies? :-)
(disclaimer - I live in Milton Keynes next to Bletchley and have been to BP on many occasions).
Bletchley Park is easy to get to by public transport, it is 100 metres walk from Bletchley train station. This is on the Northampton line from London Euston. trains every half an hour from London, from about 06.00 to 24.00, they take about 50 minutes. Look for trains for Northampton, usually on Platforms 8/9/10/11 from Euston. About 15 or 20 pounds day return (sorry, our train service is very over priced).
Aged 22, he's probably also got 4 or 5 years experience of driving real cars on the road. He's probably picked up "his most basic driving habits" in that time in reall life. Maybe his advanced race track driving skills he's picked up from games rather than real life, but if he's not picked up the most basic skills by now driving his car round town and to the race track he'd have probably been in a wheelchair or prison by now...
You try sailing up to a port in the USA with weapons systems on board, Asian or Arabic looking crew and telling the port authorities and coastguards to get off your case because you're legitimate and just protecting yourself.
You may well be - perhaps you are a merchant vessel that has to sail through dangerous middle eastern or asian waters and has a legitimate and proven reason for being armed to the teeth, but I can imagine what the American responses would be from the port authorities up to the senators.
I've got a feeling the general consensus in the USA (and many countries) would be "well we don't mind if our merchant ships are armed to the teeth when they sail into foreign ports, because they are all honest decent boys and girls on board, but we don't trust any dodgy foreign merchant vessels coming into OUR ports like that...
"The pirates are in this for the money, not primarily because of ideaology; if it looks like the could be killed then they might reconsider their chosen line of work."
And what exactly do you think they can do instead? This is Somalia, not New York or the Paris suburbs. There is no work. Because there is no functioning government, large fishing fleets from other nations have fished the locals traditional fishing grounds bare. Their traditional work no longer exists. You have young guys, with no hope, going hungry. We're not talking USA-poor, you've only got last year's playstation and your car is ten years old, we're talking African poor. There are no food stamps in Somalia, if you don't bring in money you starve to death. Or you can take your chances and become a millionaire overnight. Fishermen have always died on the sea, I'd say the gamble is still seen as better than starving to death slowly.
A dozen deaths isn't going to make these young guys think "oh I'd better go to college and learn how to become a sports therapist instead" because there isn't a functioning education system, there aren't jobs down the local MacDonalds... we've got to think in far bigger terms than "kill them all". That just doesn't work, we got to work out how to improve the country and the region so there are better options than becoming a pirate.
Don't worry about being labelled as an "IT guy" - most of the people in your workplace label you as "student" I should imagine with all that entails...
Lowest common denominator laws win.
No, most powerful sovereign state wins. USA gets to tell pretty well anybody (apart from maybe Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea) when they want somebody brought over the USA to stand trial under US law. How often does the US let other countries take its citizens away to stand trial under their laws? Can't imagine US citizens being shipped to the EU very often, not even thinking of less developed countries.
"I wouldn't want to be lifting something heavy if one of those suits broke and dumped the entire weight of the load on me."
Same is true of any machine, so what's new? I wouldn't want to be under my auto if the jack holding it up broke, or lifting bags of cement with a JCB if that broke. Not sure of your point beyond "machines need to be tested and proved to be safe before being sold to people"?
Better security solution. Because me old china, even if a whole bunch of yer muckers take a butchers they won't have a scoobie about you're rabbitting on about.
Got an Ericsson R310s 9 years ago, dropped it off scaffolding and all sorts of things. Contacts for the recharging conntection died after 6 years so I replaced it with another one off ebay for £30, this one is three years and counting, multiple soaks, puddles, etc. I believe there's a new branded armoured phone out there, will be my next choice: Sonim S1 http://blog.phoneslimited.co.uk/2009/08/13/landrover-s1-sonim-landrover-phone-review-sonim-s1-review/
Nice reviews. It made me smile when he said that some of the locations were up to 1.5km/1 mile out - pretty useless for a tourist then (apart from the ones who are locals and also experts on how GPS works). Quite funny when he was pointing at such obvious things as HMS Belfast and St. Pauls Cathedral and the systems weren't finding them. Early days I guess, come back in five years. I suppose the systems are busy filling in the data points that are paying them, e.g. commercial companies that have struck up a deal with them, and the cheap systems will just tell you where every McD's is but miss half the tourist sites?
"Why would you need to spend more money on health benefits for the poor if you have the National Health Service? Doesn't that provide universal health care regardless of income?"
A lot of what the NHS does is curative medicine, the first time most of us come into contact with it is because we're not well (illness, accident, etc). I don't have the information to hand (and I'd welcome more info and references) but my suspicion is that you'll find poorer people are more likely to encounter health risks, struggle with health challenges etc in their daily life than more wealthy people, hence the approach in many social-leaning countries to give additional support/benefits to the poor. Richer folk can buy their way into continued good health while folk at the bottom of the economic pile struggle as they have less disposable income to afford health related purchases, so need the NHS more often?
If you are on vey low income, you have much less disposable income. Therefore help in paying for health related additional resources can help individuals and families afford things that would benefit their family but they could survive without. For example: if you're on limited income, you can feed your kids on really cheap burgers and white bread and processed breakfast cereal, but child allowance (cash allocation per child on a regular basis) might give you the opportunity to give them a more varied and better diet - meaning they will be more healthy and less likely to get illnesses that later need to be treated by the National Health Service, when the child gets diabetes or obesity related illnesses. Or providing low income old folk with financial support to help them improve their home with insulation in winter, or handrails to make going up stairs when they are not so good at walking, will reduce the number of admissions to hospital in winter with cold related illnesses and also fall-related accidents.
All of the above can be dealt with through your own finances if you're wealthy but might be impossible financial challenges if you're poor for any reason. If you can stop people having illnesses or accidents in the first place then in the long term it will work out cheaper and less cost to the NHS.
Well noted - it's a lot of the old mines that people have forgotten about that continue to cause problems. I've visited Cambodia and there are a lot there because of the Khmer Rouger period there, and in Laos and Vietnam there are a lot due to the "Vietnam War" as we think of it in the West from over 40 years ago. Lots of other conflicts in Africa and other places as well. Not so bad if you're in a rich country or you've got resources that people want access to (e.g. oil) but a lot of places have just been forgotten about and there are precious few resources to clear up the ordnance.
Apart from nobody keeping maps of where they put the mines / cluster munitions down (if they could even be bothered to do so in the first place) there's a real problem with UXO shifting in loose ground. My friend in Cambodia tells me they'll clear a road in the jungle one season, but then after the rains the loose soil has turned to mud and moved down hillsides so a path / field / road might be dangerous again and has to be treated as a live minefield all over again.
UXO just keeps on killing people for years after the conflict has finished, land mines and cluster bombs and the like are really evil.
But the Daily Mail in the UK and I am sure many media outlets in the US as well as right wing politicians the world over are telling us that "asylum seekers", people who seek shelter in another country because they fear for their lives in their own country, are all criminals and freeloaders.
Surely if Mr. Dymovsky tries to claim asylum our politicians and media will demand he goes back to his own country, after all asylum seekers are all fakes? Plus our leaders are always telling us that Mr. Putin is a man who they can do business with and that Russia is a lovely country with no real human rights issues to worry about?