Walsingham

Is it wrong that my first thought was "Hold on. You mean all I have to do to get beaten senseless by Scarlett Johansson is threaten the survival of the planet? I'm bloody in!"

I se your logic, Tale. But I don't think you're approaching this with numbers in mind. 1. Kidnapping is a substantially harder crime to commit. 2. The profits from kidnapping are significantly lower than drugs. 3. The availability of quality kidnap victims is lower. Cash is critical because at present the money from drugs is financing massive recruitment, sustainment, and arming of drug cartel 'soldiers'. Plus financial corruption of the police. Cut the strings of that finance and *fwoop* the cartel's have a serious problem. Conversely, killing off a few thousand 'soldiers' won't hurt the cartels at all. Provided they have the cash to recruit more, and there are physically men available.

I'm looking for something readable, with exercises, to brush up my UML. Recommendations?

Condolences, Enoch. Small comfort, but I'm glad to hear your wife's health wasn't endangered.

The crossborder trade is worth 200 billion. 200 BILLION, gentlemen. I'd remind you that it's almost impossible to stop drugs getting into maximum security prisons. Can anyone seriously assert that it is possible to achieve a better security level on a national border? Maybe, maybe legalisation isn't the answer. But FFS can we quit wasting assets on this ludicrous fantasy and work what the alternative is, and get stuck in?

I have to agree with Numbers. You've recently adopted a somewhat mesianic fervour about green policies which I just don't see justified by all the (many) green politicals I've met. As archbishop Desmond Tutu would say: they're bonkers in a big way. We're talking human culls, compulsory closure of factories, eugenics. It's pure dreaming outside of a dictatorship, and I'd rather be picking dessicated penguin out of my teeth in the Birmingham desert than live under a dictatorship. Also as Numbers points out you can't impose an academic test as a means of delivering voting rights. It's far too easy to abuse. But what you CAN do is to make it a part of the curriculum, and at least get keen people thinking logically. It's not beyond schoolchildren. I know a couple of public boarding schools who teach it as young as 14!

Utterly baffled and amused to discover that there is a perfectly serious and high profile US firm called 'Palantir' who do intelligence analysis. Talk about Tolkein nerds!

I actually skimread a copy of that a while back. I know what you mean. Is it not also massively outdated?

I agree, but I'm not sure how we can fix it. A start would be to improve the slightly abstract skill of critical reasoning in the voting populace. I say that because I think it's just possible one could foster that skill without getting directly political. It's a life skill so the benefits would be felt all over the damn place. However, I do sometimes wonder (in the twilight hours) whether it's just too easy for politicians to keep people dumb. I'm not saying they plan it. I'm just saying it's far far too easy to say it's far too difficult to do anything about.

Mother of God. You need to get old testament on your pets, man. I'm talking scourging floods. Possibly of fire.

Now there's a man who can rest easy.

I'm not saying that losing Suffolk wouldn't be inadvisable. I'm smply observing that the complexity of what constitutes our nation is huge and distributed over very disparate geographic regions. The crisis in the eurozone is a pretty mild example of this. Ask yourself where we get our food and energy from, and how long we could exist as a nation if those supplies were interrupted.

I've been pondering the recent furore over our Minister in charge of Defence, Liam Fox, and reached a hypothesis: No worthwhile politician or indeed person has a cupboard free of skeletons. It further occurs to me, reading this thread, that the US system is now a parlour game of 'who has the least skeletons' and is thereby rendered an exercise in selecting pasteboard simpletons.

Judging by the consistency I'd have to say that it's either a natural talent or the result of years of painstaking hard training.

Barbarians! @Guard Dog: Different lines of work, yet parts of it sounds strikingly familiar. High risk interesting projects versus the less glamorous ones that ensures you can pay rent in any foreseeable future. I like the first ones better, my employer the latter High risk sounds awesome until it doesn't pay off. Thats part of the fun. If you screw up, you're royally screwed (been there, done that) and if you succeed, you feel so very much alive (been there, done that too) Someone todl me the other day that an entrepreneur is a man who will cheerfully work 16 hours a day to avoid working 8 hours a day for someone else.

I don't think that we should be at all surprised by attacks on Wall Street. If the dog craps on the carpet, you reach for the rolled up newspaper! However, I don't see this spasm translating into an effective change in the political landscape of voting America. So long as the people vote for the guy with the best PR, they are going to be voting for the guy who sells himself best to big business. And that means no shift in the relationship between Congress and business. I don't see that as a failing of the system, so much as a failing of the people.

Barbarians! @Guard Dog: Different lines of work, yet parts of it sounds strikingly familiar. High risk interesting projects versus the less glamorous ones that ensures you can pay rent in any foreseeable future. I like the first ones better, my employer the latter High risk sounds awesome until it doesn't pay off.

I think I'm pretty consistent in arguing that kids don't reason effectively, due to a combination of factors, including susceptibility to peer pressure/advertising as much as raw mental immaturity.

I know you're exaggerating, but that's... a bit off even as an exaggeration. Losing Suffolk implies enemies a few quick and jaunty hours from downtown London. Actually this is precisely my point. Modern warfare doesn't move at the speed of tanks any more than WW2 moved at the speed of the horse. With pretty cheap missiles (as it goes) launching at 800 miles, and speeds up to around mach 4, a lot of places are "a few quick and jaunty hours" from London. Warfare - ad by direct inference statehood - has _always_ been about systems not geography. It's just that in the past the nature of system dynamics was synonymous with geography because geography was the prime enabling factor.

Today's comedy mistype: "I am familiar with your ork through the national press"

I did assume that. But not because I think you're a moron. The key here is that whenever I look at game reveiws there's a _very_ harsh assessment of graphics. You are either in that top 3%, graphically speaking, or you get canned. Now, I could easily be wrong. I don't own a top flight graphics processor and personally I couldn't care less about the graphics. But the bulk of game buyers are not enlightened. They go with the "94%!" on the box. i still think that this could be directly addressed if there was some numerical method of rating game complexity/realism. Nerds love numbers.

I know geography's not your strong suit, but wouldn't they have to annex Belarus or Ukraine first?

It's a defensive alliance, anyone who attacks one NATO member attacks all. That is about as close to insurance as you can get in international relations and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't be honoured. But that does mean there's as little obligation to support other members in elective wars as there is for Laos, Paraguay or Belize to. I follow your logic. But this isn't the 19th century. I've been arguing for some time that real present existential threats to national security are systemic in this day and age. To make the point exaggeratedly clear, we can afford to lose Suffolk more than we can afford to lose our bases in Cyprus. Because the two have very different contributions to our ability to function as an independent nation.

Can't find a simple way of presenting this. Nearly burst a lung laughing at the Tata steel company website. http://tatanagar.com/ There are some pics which slideshow around on this page. One of them says "Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves." I don't think I've ever seen such hideous buildings.

Surely it is the lady behind the boob that matters. Speaking as a man who's seen far more man-mammaries real and augmented than he should.