Posts by Dodgy Geezer 1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007
..Those who wish to conduct cheap microgravity experiments often turn to sounding rockets, which offer only a few minutes of space flight and no return trip..
Umm. My understanding of a sounding rocket is that it goes straight up. This gives a bit of microgravity once the booster stops and it cruises up... but then it turns round and comes straight down again.
So there's quite a rapid return trip. And one which, if you include a parachute, you ecperiment might survive...
<i...I can't put cheese in my cup of tea.....</i>
You can. You will not like it, but that's of no concern to government.
They have recently appled perssure to companies to remove sugar from squash, and substitute sucralose. I don't like the taste, but no one in government is interetsed in that - or even asked me...
...it usually meant libertarian attitudes to financial matters for the ruling classes - but tight control over ordinary people's private lives. A Jacob Rees-Mogg type of government....
I wonder where you got that smear from?
In reality, of course, you are describing a 'Green' government. For the Greens, their financiers, like Soros, or Elon Musk, can do no wrong, and will be given large amounts of taxpayer money to spend as they wish. While the little people are forced to eat and dring the 'right' things, then put the right kind of plastics into the right boxes, and be fined for leaving the top of your recycling bin open...
The 'relationship' is actually NOTHING to do with voters and politicians. That is just a story put up to pretend there is some degree of democracy.
The main driving force for policy is, and always has been, the Civil Service. In this case the Home Office want another central bureaucratic control they can administer. So they tell the journalists and activists that this is required.
The journalists then tell the politicians that this is needed, and the Civil Service steps in with a pre-arranged policy.
No need to involve the voters at all...
...Wow, I didn't know surrender flags were called "heavy arms" now....
'Heavily Armed' is quite compatible with the standard smear of the French military - in that they might require high levels of equipment and violence to deal with an unarmed pensioner civilian, while surrendering at the sight of a small boy with a catapult... :)
In fact, French soldiers have fought some famous actions against heavy odds. Much of the 'surrender' stereotype comes from incompetence at the high command and political level - a field where many other countries have a poor track record...
....No, it's rather saying you can't go from London to Birmingham ignoring speed limits and other traffic rules, while hitting other cars, pedestrians, cats and dogs, because you believe nobody else but you has rights......
Er, no. it's not. It's nothing to do with that at all. You appear to have lost it, and are ranting incoherently.
In such a state I would advise you to turn your computer off, walk slowly away from the screen, and have a nice cup of sweet tea. You are of no use in this discussion, and will only embarass yourself more if you continue...
...Do they feel the criminal is unlikely to be reformed? - does a conviction without prison actually reform anyone or is it just a line in a file and they continue as before?...
Well... if you were considering people for a handyman job and you found that one candidate had murdered his employer's family one day when they asked him to change a light bulb -- but 'he's quite all right now'.....would you like to 'give him a second chance'...?
...Is it really important what exactly did that man (it's a man, right?) do all those years ago?...
Er...yes. It is to historians, and to philosophers who work in the field of Epistemology (knowledge of the truth). But then again, you are probably not a historian or philosopher.
Actually, the issue seems to be: 'How easy should it be to obtain this data?'. The data would still be available in court hard copy archives - and, presumably, on the Web. Just not on Google. So we are (as I indicated above) in a fantasy world equivalent to saying that you can't use some modern services in some cases. Rather like saying that you can go from London to Birmingham, but you can't use a car or a train....
...*Please don't start a debate on carbon dioxide or cow farts or denial here. This question is not relating to any of that....
I don't know why you specify that requirement, given it cannot be complied with.
The position of the believers in Dangerous Global Warming is that it is due to humans increasing CO2 output, that all other possibilities have been considered and found not to be important, and that the science is as settled as gravitation theory. Therefore any solar variation cannot affect 'climate change'.
...or died out due to having consumed all the resources long before that....
Not that old hoary chestnut again!
We will NEVER 'consume all our resources'. We have a Solar System full of them locally, and lots more elsewhere. Read Julian Simon... https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/
...We put our name under this petition and sign it. However, by fear or reprisal, we request the Central Staff Committee to collect the signed petitions, to file them with a notary lawyer to certify the number of signatures and to send only the text of the present petition...
This is undermining the good name of the EU, which is illegal. Therefore, we will sub-poena the notary, obtain the names, and threaten to remove their pensions unless they withdraw their complaint....
...We want you to read @Wikipedia with a critical eye. Check citations! Edit and correct inaccurate information!...
It's certainly not enough to do that.
Activists are all over the Wiki, puffing their own favourite cause. They present one-sided articles, where all the information may be 'correct' and the citations are valid - but come from their friends in other supporting organisations.
To have any hope of getting anywhere near 'the truth', you need an academic, with no particular axe to grind in that field, to go through all the relevent facts and documentation and write a piece based on that research. Which is what people like Britannica do. Which is why you have to buy those encyclopedias...
The Wiki is good for telling you how an IP packet is built. Don't expect it to give you a balanced view of the history of Armenia, Climate Change, or Renewable Energy....
...The pebbles might not survive to ground level, but they're still going to be dumping all that energy into the atmosphere; there isn't any less of it because the mountain's been blown up....
Without doing the sums, I'm guessing that the atmosphere will heat up by an infinitesimal and insignificant amount...
...100Mt will probably split the Earth's crust...
Actually, no. At these sizes, for an airburst the blast goes upwards. Most of the blast from a 50Mt bomb goes uselessly out into space. A 100mt blast would simply punch a small* temporary hole in the atmosphere. Which is one reason why the military are not interested in weapons of this size.
* where small is in comparison to the size of the Earth...
....It’s an inherent technical problem down to the fact that females generally have higher pitched voices. They also tend to be quieter and sound more “breathy”....
Only in colonial, Empire, 'old white males' science. In the new wonderful post-modern world there is no problem, because all voices are equal in every way, and everything they say is of equal merit and validity.*
* Except white male voices, of course. And any traditional working class person from the North of Watford.....
...the good old hard copy will still have the story so it still exists in the press - you have to go old-school and search it out at the local library like in the good ol' days....
Er... the good old hard copy will be archived using technology. If I go to a library and ask for an old story the librarian will use their archive search engine to find it for me. What you have proposed is that hard copy archives should not be loaded onto modern technology at all - and that all historians should be deprived of the ability to use it.....
...The right to be forgotten attempts to force Google to comply with laws that everyone else already mostly complied with....
Not exactly. As you said, a conviction is a matter of history, and should be readily available from court records or newspaper reports from that period. Any attempte to ban access to these would be censorship of history.
The search engines are simply labour-saving methods of accessing such items as old newspaper articles without having to search through archives. But they are no different in principle from doing that. Stopping them will result in the odd result that access to this historical infomation is perfectly open, but we will artificially make it hard to find in practice by banning modern technology.
This is completely different from banning a newspaper from reprinting a story about an earlier criminal conviction 20 years after the event. It has odd implications. For instance, if I go to a newspaper web site that may well have an archive search facility which gives automated search access to stories 20 years old. Is this to be banned in the same way as a Google search?
...The man himself wore a neat dark suit, his greying hair swept back from his temples. He had loosened his top button, letting his dark, patterned tie hang slightly limp around his collar, although Court 13 at the Royal Courts of Justice was slightly above room temperature....Under the strain of cross-examination by a top barrister, NT2 showed visible signs of stress, turning pink in the face and becoming fidgety.
One of your journalists fancies himself as an author, I see.....
...location of the Wright Brothers’ first ever manned flight more than a century ago....
NO!!!
The first ever 'manned flight' that was well attested would be the Montgolfier Brothers balloon in 1783 - though the Chinese probably had man-carrying kites in antiquity.
First ever 'heavier-than-air manned flight' would be Sir George Cayley's glider in the 1850s. The French then take over, producing a number of powerd 'hops' in the period up to 1890 - some of which flew a few hundred yards.Lilienthal is, of course, famous for developing the controllable hang-glider with many flights to his credit. Several people around the world were flying by one definition or another before 1903.
The Wrights managed two breakthroughs. The first was really a joint development with Charles Taylor - a lightweight but powerul engine. The second was a practical 3-axis control system - though it was only just practical, being almost impossible to control. With that, they can reasonably lay claim to having the first 'sustained' 'engine-powered', 'heavier-than-air', 'controlled' man-carrying aircraft - though note that this does not count 'being able to take-off with no external help'. It was really 1905 before their aircraft could claim to be a full-functional flying machine, and by then there were a number of other machines around the world with similar capabilities.
This is not to belittle the Wright's achievment - their control system, though crude and unscaleable, was the most advanced of its day and a key reason for their success. It's just that people regularly seem to think that the Wrights invented the aeroplane, which is simply not the case. They were the first to manage to combine a number of useful features in a practical plane - but if they had never existed, those same features were all being independently worked on, and would still have been presented to the world around 1905 by Santos-Dumont, or Langley, or Whitehead, or Vosin....
I don't think you understand. If a poster mentions the word 'Trump', it is correct to accuse him (or his friends) of anything nasty. Because we have all been told to hate him, and we need to keep finding good reasons for this every day.
Besides, he's the sort of person who would do nasty things. So, if he didn't actually do them, that just proves that he's too stupid to think of them - because he'd certainly do them if he thought of them....
...Renewables tend to be able to come on line very, very quickly to meet surges in demand...
Er... no. Pumped storage can be brought online from 'totally stopped' very quickly - but if you want 'very, very quickly' you want 'spinning reserve' - which is typically gas turbine, though it could in theory be anything.
'Renewables' are most famous for being 'non-dispatchable' - which means that you can't guarantee that they will come on-line at all. Pumped storage, for instance, can only come on-line if there is enough water pumped up the mountain - and that will only last for an hour or so...
The Web, just like the news media, mirrors exactly what humanity wants. Humanity, en mass, is an appalling crowd of vindictive sheep with the attention span of a plank.
If you want a better Web the answer is simple. Educate people better. Then you will get better voters, better consumers, better everything....
...One solution would be to mandate that copies of all private keys be kept in escrow where only trusted law enforcement could access it. Could we trust LE to not abuse the system? Maybe, maybe not, but to say there is no solution is to be an ostrich....
Your 'solution', of course, leaves a gaping hole in a central principle of crypto security, which is that you do not let other people control your PRIVATE keys.
If you think about it (which you have obviously not done), there IS no solution to the problem of keeping your data completely secret while at the same time letting government bodies have access to it.
Oh, and why do you trust LE when corruption and incompetence is so widespread?
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