threegee

We've always had "freak weather". By definition weather is changeable and full of surprises, otherwise we wouldn't be preoccupied with it. There are places where the ice is getting thicker. Doesn't suit the global warming industry to take the cameras there! NASA satellites (which measure globally and can monitor minute changes) show no recordable differences on average. Doesn't suit to mention this! You can arrive at any conclusion by selecting your data. Continents move; solar activity varies; the earth wobbles; the jet-stream moves about; lots and lots of other things change over time. The Earth has a monstrous Carbon Dioxide sink called the oceans, and they have a super way of locking up carbon in carbonates (limestone etc.). But the whole ecosystem is fairly self-regulating, else we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't have survived (as mamals) through previous cataclysmic changes, disasters far greater than the doom-mongers can ever come up with. Doesn't mean we should treat the Earth like a garbage dump. Doesn't mean that we can go on in the same dumb way as before. But it does mean that all the dire predictions are a load of utter crap, fed to us by people who can profit from the alarmist talk. That we should spend countless billions on carbon capture and such junk when there are real problems to solve - people dying for want of food and the simplest or remedies - is almost beyond belief! Pity the oil price has dropped so much; we were just at the point where we would have been forced to get off our backsides and speed-up the development of alternative technologies. Now that has been once-again put off. Our politicians are now too busy digging themselves further into a crisis they themselves created (by licensing the printing of huge amounts of money to buy votes) to return to the subject. So.. "global warming" is off the agenda for now, and thank goodness because it was a non-issue to start with! I for one would readily pay far more for a car that had fuel-cell technology. Not just because it would reduce pollution (particularly lead) but because it could even work out cheaper over the life of the vehicle. So why haven't we seen the incentives to produce and market these vehicles? Could it be that the government is addicted to taxing the motorist (and even taxing tax itself!), and without that revenue they'd be sunk. More or less the same situation which applies to tobacco - tax it as far as you can possibly get away with, but not enough to kill the golden goose. If to get some needed change the existing motor manufacturers have to go bust then bring it on! But the government is preoccupied with the short-term consequences and vote garnering, so they won't keep their noses out of the situation, or their hands out of our pockets!

I drive a Fiat Punto, but it's not mine! Really need something with more room in the back - for the alligators! And on the what would I rather be driving: I'd rather be flying. Will post you a picture of the helicopter quite soon.

Always billed on the Internet as the centre of the known universe (specifically the Market Cross). So what took them so long?

Yes. Original report was over 6000 jobs in total. Comprising plant jobs and including as many jobs again at suppliers. So logically that means 3000 direct jobs - an almost exact match with the current Nissan figure. It looks like Vauxhall at Ellesmere Port is already down to about 2000 workers so that doesn't seem a good match.

So could the latest "enemy without" be global warming? Although we've got the luxury of two imagined foes to unite us at the moment. That's if you ignore the real one of a major and extended economic depression. Can't be the latter of course as we are constantly being fed the line that it's both global and unforeseen, and so, by definition, not any fault of The Great Leader. The culprits who must be sent to the guillotine are the bankers. The very same bankers who were members of the Gordon Brown - City of London Mutual Back-slapping Society of the past years. Oh how embarrassing those Lord Mayor's banquets look these days. Definitely not a fashionable place to be seen anymore! Ah Magna Carta! Fed to us in school as the emancipation of the common man. Ask any historian and they'll tell you that it had b-all to do with that. It was solely about the Barons pointing out to the monarch who's pocket he was really in. But of course these days we can all aspire to baronhood - only providing the PM so favours us!

Another reason to believe it's Nissan is that Mandelson specifcally mentions them in this recent interview. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7902584.stm If he'd mentioned someone who wasn't under threat that would have been irresponsible in itself.

Would Honda involve the quoted 6000 jobs? According to the FT Nissan was down to 3800 jobs at year-end from about 5000 a few years back. Take away the 800 redundancies last month (ignoring the 400 contract workers laid off) and that gives 3000. Add in the "as many workers again at suppliers" and you get to the 6000 quoted figure. Honda employs 4200 at Swindon according to a recent report, but is already closed until June 1st. So not only don't the figures square but it would be strange to announce a permanent closure at quite this time. If it is Nissan though then things must have got a lot worse in just a few weeks.

The most "wow" experience for me was at the NEC in Birmingham in the early '80s. I was there for serious things but Atari (well I think it was Atari) was showing an early console with a 3D space-ship sim shoot-em-up. I've no idea which model, or what the cart was, but after all the early 2D stuff it left a lasting impression.

Anyone known which it is they are talking about? You can't keep news like that under wraps, even without the Internet!

'Cos you hadn't signed in!

Ah those smoke-filled rooms! It was always thus. The UK problem is that the PM simply has too much power. There's no effective president as in other countries, to guard the constitution. And of course there's no proper constitution eitther, so the PM gradualy writes his own constitution over the years. In theory the monarch could say no, but doesn't because her/his position is so anacronistic as to be under constant threat of abolition from the (supposedly subservient) PM. Like so much else in UK public life it's all a complete sham. WYSIMDNWYG - What You See Is Most Definitely Not What You Get.

New Forum needs a(nother) moderator - please PM offers?

What I "got snotty about" was your picking words and reordering them inside inverted commas as if I'd written them that way - or even used them at all! No that's not a quote. It's the entire text of your misrepresentation of what I said. Quotes by their very nature are selective, and I did you the favour of cutting and pasting your entire first and last paragraphs unaltered. Either you still agree with what you wrote or you've changed your mind? Nothing to get upset about either way. But you are quite prepared: 1) to support them in this. 2) to attribute the best motives to what they are doing. I'm not prepared to do either. And my last post was to illustrate that neither are my views unreasonably paranoid, as you imply, or at variance with what insiders or former insiders are thinking. You put a lot of weight on those supposedly in-the-know rather than BB "ranters" - so quoting Stella Rimington is a valid point. None of this did I say, or even imply! What I said was "No other state in history has had the breadth and depth of controls that our UK government is in the process of imposing. Eat your heart out Joe Stalin, you've been outclassed by the Brits again!". I'm saying that the technology and surveillance methods being used, or being proposed, by this government would be the envy of those dictators. Thanks for the permission to proceed. Better get as many rants in as possible before the Gestapo comes knocking. Because, with acquiescence like yours, this nation is going to be a push-over at some future date.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7894763.stm The biggest step forward since sliced bread! Will save heaps of clutter, and mean charging can be provided in public places and transport. Will be used on lots of things besides phones. 5.7v would be nice. For older stuff a single simple adaptor might be worth carring around.

Ministers 'using fear of terror' Stella Rimington has often been critical of the government A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism to restrict civil liberties. Dame Stella Rimington, 73, said people in Britain felt as if they were living "under a police state".

That's not a very efficient way to do it. Normally you'd use a graphics program (like Photopaint or Fireworks) to do this on your local machine. You could try uploading a picture to your a gallery you create here (using MyControls) then right clicking and saving the resulting resized images. There's a limit on the size of file you can upload though - somewhere around 2MB I think. You can make a gallery private or say which members you want to share it with. Plenty of free photo sharing sites on the web too, but beware of ones which charge to download full size images, you could find your own photos held to ransom if you mislay the originals. Also remember that a smaller file size and a smaller displayed size are not necessarily the same thing. You may want one the other or both. Encoded email attachments are a very inefficient way of sending data. If you've got more than a handful of photos, a slowish connection, or do this regularly look at peer to peer (P2P) file transfer programs.

Of course, how silly of me to forget?! Famous for cake decoration:- Ma-zappa'n

Well, the next 1000 didn't take so very long! BTW just got the glasses in an Elton John sale.

B*&***! Where do you get them from? Apple aped features of the Linux FS3 file system in the (appropriately named) Cheetah. They made a clean break with old code in order to do this leaving their users stranded - as per usual. Linux users had Compiz before Aero and Aqua. When you can freely browse someone else's source code for ideas it's so easy. Compare: http://www.abadiadigital.com/noticia1778.html Even going back to MSDOS things like pipes and filters were cloned from Unix and Linux. The original MSDOS was a straight rip of CP/M and Windows 1.0 an inferior clone of DR GEM (in GEM the Windows could overlap, but BG instructed staff that this was unnecessary! ). Very little originality has ever come out of MS considering the vast sums they spend. And much of what Apple does is others originality dressed-up. I've even heard on the media recently that Apple "invented" the pocket MP3 player. What rot! I had a couple of pocket MP3 players long before Apple entered the market. P.S.: Not being familiar with Lindows I just checked and discovered it's a trademark owned by Microsoft! Seems like they paid a fancy sum for it! :

F. Zappa? Did he invent the TV remote? What offends me is his usual insistence on using those damn silly AAA's instead of cheaper and easier to find AA's, that you can sit on far longer before they need changing.

They are all converging because they are copying Linux - particularly Apple!

Rock solid on this Ubuntu Linux machine. May not have noticed the improvement quite so easily if I'd had to reboot. But on closing and re opening browser after the upgrade the improvement in rendering was quite spectacular. Maybe its just a Linux thing or maybe it's now making use of multi-threading better. Doing some tests with a laptop last year I found that Ubuntu was something approaching 20% faster on file downloads that Windows XP, using the same hardware and same download sources. So it looks like the Windows TCP/IP stack isn't what it could be.

I don't think we have! Interesting to hear the hackneyed old sound bite about not shouting fire in a crowded theatre trotted out again - gets them every time! But THINK, how many people are stampeded because someone gets up and shouts "fire!". It doesn't happen in the modern world because we've learned about crowd behaviour and fire precautions. It doesn't happen not because there's a law against it (and there should be about giving out patently misleading information - politicians please note). It doesn't happen because of people's innate common sense. If there was mileage for mischief in doing it don't you think a hell-bent terrorist or loony would be regularly doing it? The real reason for the UK's restrictions on freedom of speech is that there are issues which should be aired that those in power don't want to touch. The reasons are historical, fear of communism and the rise of the trade unions, etc. We've unlearned what we were taught in the playground: "Sticks and stones..." Being frightened of ideas is the end of freedom (an absolute concept in itself) of speech and true democracy. As in the case of our manipulative Dutch MP, suppressing - and particularly in being seen to suppress these ideas - only gives them more power. We've have heard next to nothing about this if he'd been allowed to travel to the Lords and answer questions on the film. But he figured he wouldn't be, and dummies in government obliged him with the publicity he couldn't have bought.

When you quote other people it's generally accepted practice not to write the contents of the quotation marks yourself. Not yesterday - a very real danger that this bunch of incompetents are delivering the country into the hands of totalitarians at some point in the future. Though I think that some elements of this government would happily ditch their pretensions and take power in such a regime. He was only going to the House of Lords under invite. What precisely is the potential threat to disorder there? Are their Lordships going to riot, burn down the commons, or restore the feudal system? The real reason for banning him is what has been termed by some senior figures as "appeasement". So allowing a vocal minority that does not share our common values and wishes to overthrow our democracy, to dictate to the British People. Make a few threats - kill free speech - wow, we're well on the way to that Muslim state already! Ah, right then. So what you're saying is that they need to threaten disorder and we won't be able to ban them? Could it be that it's only the billions of taxpayers money that's being spent spying on these extremists night and day that's keeping their subversive activities in check. We need to be told the true cost of this little multicultural society social experiment. The monetary cost as well as the cost to our hard fought for freedoms. Glad you agree that it's a slight chance. This is a grossly incompetent government, on a scale we've seldom seen before. Now where's my copy of that thoroughly researched dossier on WMD? You know, the one prepared by security experts and government advisers that's so "informed" that we can confidently start a war over! In any event it's not about making calls it's about standing up for principals. I don't even believe what the Home Secretary has done is legal under European law. Your faith in ANY government is misplaced. Something that will start to occur to you with a little more experience of how the world really works.

Or maybe not? Could having a Jewish Home Secretary now have something to do with the latest banning? Or would any such claim be racist in itself? Then again we probably have to accept what The Muslim Council of Britain claims: That horrible reactionary and unreasonable right-wing David Cameron prevailed over the loony "liberal" left desire to let him come back. BTW isn't The Muslim Council of Britain supposed to be sugar 'n' spice and all things nice where this "multicultural society" thing is concerned? How could they possibly want to hear from, and encourage, a Muslim extremist? Doesn't all add-up, does it?