Posts by Naughtyhorse

reading required

The USSR did some pretty interesting stuff going to venus and mercury.

prolly dont count cos it's downhill all the way there

Re: @ Dalek Dave

dave

get yourself a laser

get yourself a timer

and while you are about it, get yerself a feking clue m8

I doubt you'll get it cheaper

If I were you I'd have a look at a cheap box and then bung a kick ass soundcard in it.

that's how my DAW came into being, a while back now.... 5 years or so. got a cheap pc for about £450 (with a quad core chip in it!) squeezed all the ram I could into it, stuck a 1/2 way decent soundcard in there, bob's your uncle.

Re: Indefinite growth is not sustainable

Yet it is a fundamental part of the business strategy at the companies that pretty much all of us work for. And a common strategy employed by every government for the last 30 years.

Whatever we achieved last year, next year we can do better.

go figure

Re: Bomb us back to the stone age please

errr..

the demographic time-bomb is what you are talking about, it's to do with the ratio of producers to consumers driving the levels of contributions and benefits. it's been well understood since the 50's (when barbara carthorse was employment minister) and in common with my prior post in this thread it's to do with the fundamental weakness in leaving the planning for _any_ long term project in the hands of politicians.

In the old days when said politicos had some form of fundamental belief (marxist, monetarist didnt really matter, they believed in something) this was bad enough - but the modern trend toward career political managers makes it 100 times worse. For these dickheads there is absolutely no point whatsoever in spending money now to make the job of the next guy easier.

case in point HSR - it's all about construction contracts with little or no concern for the long term benefits or otherwise.

what should have happened with pensions is contribution levels should have slowly increased over the last 40 years and the retirement age should have been gradually increased. The equation can be made to balance - in the absence of massive changes in population growth - but it requires pain now to buy gain 30 years down the road. Our political systems cannot deliver that.

true for tech...

for generation - not so much.

Here's a graph showing consumption since the war:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Historical_Net_Electricity_supplied.PNG

It's pretty linear-ish. kit gets more efficient.... we get more kit.

Trouble here is that the decisions are being made by politicians, with a 5 year time constant. If planning was carried out by academia & engineers then we would have sorted this out decades ago.

Re: a duty to look after these children.

Not my judgement matey :-)

praps its a bit old fashioned of me but if you are going to have a kid, make sure you are capable of providing materially, emotionally, spiritually (if that floats yer boat) and intellectually. And that covenant extends from conception to _at least_ the sprog's mid 20's. If you can't do that then you you have absolutely no business having children. (it's not like, as a species, we are threatened with extinction or anything - apart from global warming, terrorism, and fucking big stones in space etc)

Of course unforeseen anomalies occur, parents can die, apparently settled spouses can suddenly bugger off with the man from the pru. Promising careers in the PV generation business can be stymied by working thorium tech, etc etc etc.

But it seems to me that that is not how it works these days, I think I only know about 2 people under 50 or so that don't have children with multiple partners. And that's not good for them (the kids) or me (cos the inevitable loss of mere financial support is paid for in part by me and you - never mind the other costs to the individuals or society that are hard to quantify in this post-thatcherite world of ours)

One in four children in this country now live in poverty. I'm sure many of them would have been skint whatever happened, but a metric fucktonne of them are poor because the people that created them reneged on the covenant above, and see their older kids as just so much walking history, and a history they'd rather forget all about. And that is just wrong.

I really hate to sound like the UK's branch of the tea party, but, clearly there is insufficient downside for these fuckwits to cause them to pause in the pursuit of their own agenda to think of the consequences of their actions on pretty much everyone else. Think of me as a liberal with an attitude :-) you can do what you like, but fuck you and the horse you rode in on if it fucks the rest of us over in the process.

So i am sorry that my prosaic hyperbole upset you, but it's actually about a bit more than free porn (although it is mostly the porn thing :-D)

Re: block copyright infringing sites....

this missing the point is catching methinks

praps i should have added a <sarcasm> tag

vpn - vm can block all they like i still gets my KAT.ph

my point is somewhat the same as yours, but tempered with the knowledge that the govt dont know shit 'bout IT (hold the presses!) and will _always_ be, at least, 1 step behind.

let em say whatever they need to to assuage the purple haired harridan that keeps bending their ears down at the con club about the end of civilisation as we know it. if they had one scintilla of competence about them they get a real job.

Re: a duty to look after these children.

No I bloody dont!

If I did then they would never have been born, like my kids.

This world sucks, if you cant care properly for your kids for the entirety of their childhood/adolesence then you should be sterilised at puberty. thats MY end of the deal, I'll then happily care for the mistakes that slip through. Encouraging morons to breed and leaving it to everyone else to foot the bill, is really not the way forwards.

compassion for the kids... why? they are just the next generation of morons......

Re: A sliding slope on the thin end of the metaphor

'stumble'

interesting word that.

of course you are still guilty. if you D/L it. couple that with the twitterfication of CP paints a scary as fuck picture.

thank <insert deity of your choice, or 'dawkins' here> i am only marginally less interested in cp than i am in twitter. so file under 'someone elses problem' which is, i believe, where we came in.

oh dear!

Re: block copyright infringing sites....

They blocked copyright infringing sites!!!11!!!!!

oh noes, errr when did this happen, and why didnt i notice.

Re: The Americans must love asymmetric warfare

Well it looks like they will keep plugging away til they win one.

Re: Ask The Physicist

Of course you also need to consider the nitrogen, oxygen, co2, water, and other miscellaneous shite that's inbetween you and the target. Not a lot of point in having a big assed laser if all it's going to do is heat up the water vapor twixt you and the bad guy. Also efficiency, many years ago when i was a lad industrial lasers were outrageously inefficient (10-20%), no big deal if you are in a huge factory with an HV 3 phase supply, but a bit of a challenge if you are in the back of beyond, in a truck.

Re: Good job Iain-Duckegg-Smith doesn't work at Tescos.

Koolaid much?

The scheme is all about 'incentivising' work. I was on the dole in the 80's and got 'incentivised' a lot. And i can tell you it had fuck all to do with saving the country money, or doing me any favours.

My take on 'the benefit trap' is that most people getting into work, after a potentially long absence don't have the advantage of smith in that they don't get to start at the top with no discernible talent. So the trap is more about the piss poor wages of the worst off workers. Exacerbated by the massive cost of housing driven by the last 30 years worth of house price inflation (err i mean economic miracle of ever increasing house prices)

Even if you have a shitty job stacking shelves on the night shift, for a 40 hour week you should get paid enough to say to the state, thanks for the help, but now i don't need it, i can pay my own way (and have some tax while you are at it)' apparently the fact that this is not so is all the fault of the worker. It's scrounging claimants every time, never exploitative employers or landlords.... i wonder why that is?

Re: I Googled German Goo Girls

Well that was bound to end in tears :-D

Re: A solution in search of a problem

Ah but you see what you have failed to do is drink the renewables koolaid!

if you are going to think practically about the reality of implementing these ridiculous garden shed schemes then we'll never get anything done.

also i'll see your 'vibrations will destroy your house' and raise you a 'the whole embedded generation pipe-dream is ruining the grid we already have'

Re: Blinded by the light

FFS!

low power density for the transmission of power?????????????????????????????????????????????????

?????????????????????????????????????

okay thats a lot of question marks, but it's a pretty big fucking question.

AFAIK we'd want to use IR lasers for this, trouble is, apart from amat observers, there's nitrogen, co2, h2o and a whole shitload of other stuff in the way each of which have their own absorption spectra, which would seriously fuck up any power link. Further complicated by the fact that not every wavelength is available.

Look at the anti missile tech as the state of the current art, consider the bigness (not to mention inefficiency) of the laser, the smallness of the target, the puny-ness of the distance, and the relatively piddling amounts of power transferred. Multiply all that by a couple of orders of magnitude then design me a heat-sink that will allow the laser to run continuously... in space.

piece of piss really!

(not saying impossible, but very very very hard)

Re: Sadly modern porn is crap

I must admit i really don't get it...

That is to say 'modern porn' is, for the many reasons listed, awful (if you don't 'get' max hardcore for eg)

now post-modern porn.... it's whatever you want, exotic, mundane, real, fake... everything all the time.

maybe you guys need to search a bit harder (fnar fnar etc etc)

Re: Well

Not strictly true

Anyone with VPN can speak out for you.

and as time moves on there will be more of us.

among the many, many things that dave and is evil cohorts fail to realise is...

we will always be one step ahead

<note to self, invest in VPN solution providers>