Posts by chris

Surely any civilisation with the technology for inter-stellar travel..

..will realise that a third series of Fawlty Towers wouldn't be any good. Have you seen any of John Cleese's recent output?

Not just cute animal fixation

There is some justification for being more concerned about the extinction of a large mammal than a bacteria. Bacteria reproduce and mutate extremely rapidly. If one species disappears, that's ok there will be another one along in a minute.

The more large and complex a creature is, the slower it tends to breed and the more likely it is that a mutation will render it non-viable. AFAIK, there have been no new cetacean species in the last few hundred years so we should be concerned that we have removed this one.

Good news for the army

Soon telling women that you're a pilot will have the same social cachet that telling them you're a programmer has now, fantastic. The only heroic jobs left will be infantry and fireman.

There's a serious point here relating to E's comment.

It's already the case that you can bomb less powerful countries without any risk to your own servicemen. We were quietly bombing radar installations etc in Iraq for years before we went in. This technology doesn't change anything.

The reason it doesn't matter is, no one surrenders to aircraft. Look at the Blitz, the fire-bombing of Dresden or the Kosovo War. You can do massive damage to a country and they just get more pissed off with you, reinforcing the current regime. It's boots on the ground, or at least the credible threat of them that are required to force a surrender.

Disappointing

I was so excited when I got my username and password. I know I was only falling for the oldest salesmanship trick in the book. Artificially restricted supply to create some more hype. But damnit, I was excited anyway.

It's such a disappointment though. Ewen Bruce describes quite nicely what a pita it is to install, so I won't do that again. I got a different error at the end though. Instead of telling me I wasn't in the UK, I clicked a link in iPlayer that took me to a web page which told me I didn't have iPlayer installed.

Deleted and forgotten about.

I'm glad that it exists though. I'm not sure about legally but morally I feel that the existence of iPlayer means I can download those programs from more user friendly places.

Life imitates art

They clearly got this idea from watching Die Hard 4.0

Real mules?

Real mules are faster, probably quieter, and carry heavier loads than this thing. So why don't modern infantry use them? Because they're a ridiculous idea, that's why. Either you're being stealthy, in which case sorry but you need to carry your own kit. Or you aren't in which case, throw your kit in the back of a 4 tonner, warrior or quad bike.

Gloriously Belize have a mule load as a standard weight measure. It's 200lb.

http://www.sizes.com/units/mule_load_standard.htm

Why bother?

I'd have thought any geek squader would be able to find plenty of free porn and music on the internet. Why on earth would they bother pulling it off customer PCs. Especially since people who feel the need to take a PC to the geek squad will probably have a poorly organised collection of dubious quality.