Walsingham

I have absolutely no idea about the whole pension thing. I'm keeping my cash and moving abroad when I get to that age, if I'm lucky enough to still be alive. Moose you do make a good point. I think a lot of people do tramp about and wear the poppy wihtout a thought in their heads for our veterans OR the dead ten minutes later. However, for the priviledge of feeling good about themselves they have to 'buy' a poppy, and that is some good at least. Personally, I try to do my bit, not just by sponsoring a charity, but by talking and helping veterans, and by educating the ignorant about their sacrifices. I recall an incident two years ago where I go stuck on a commuter train in mid-summer, the air-conditioning had broken and everyone was bitching. I started telling stories my grandfather gave me about the desert, and moved on to other stories, and pretty soon everyone had shut up complaining in the immediate vicinity. People were sharing water and so on. Primarily though it is kids and teenagers who seem to have no concept at all of what people went through for them. Or, indeed, what servicemen are expected to go through today. Education here is important not just for the veterans but also to appreciate the costs of mass war. Every time I hear someone talking about 'those muslims' or 'the chinese' I wonder if my kids will be forced to go through something similar, because we have forgotten what war means. EDIT: I do know the history of Monte Cassino, BTW. The consensus of history was that it was unnecessarily bombed. I certainly think it proved (like Stalingrad) that airpower only goes so far. However, the consensus of the first hand accounts I have heard is that it was terrible for morale to have this fortress looking thing overlooking the entire region. The veterans, the guys we are talking about here, say it had to go. *shrugs*

Firstly, can we try to be civil here? I realise this is an emotive subject, but that is no excuse for bad manners. I say that as someone who once spent 14 hours straight having a face to face arguement on this precise topic. Indeed, I say that as someone who quite categorically would not be here at all without the free provision of superb healthcare on the NHS. I should also say that a little focus would not go amiss. I only read these gargantuan posts because I have to. I don't know what purpose anyone thinks there is in making them as a means of swaying anyone's opinions, if they are practically unreadable. *Sound of world's tiniest violin, playing just for Walsingham*

You people who are claiming to prefer science over religion should be ashamed of yourselves! Most of you seem to be happy to state that Intelligent Design is not worth thinking about, in fact one of your (naming no names) said that we shouldn't even try and investigate! This is outrageous. Intelligent Design is a hypothesis. This excellent thread suggests we test the hypothesis. What could be more worthy than that? The issue is not if we should, the question is HOW. Can we define a falsifiable premise for intelligent design? By which I mean, we define how creation will look if it is was designed by an intelligent agency, and then define what will work against this. If we collect enough examples of non-intelligent design, then we can close the book on that hypothesis. But until we do, no dice. ~~~ Example of non-intelligent design one - Mankind: Spandrels are systems which served a pupose to our ancestors, but serve none today. Our vestigial tails are one example. Our appendix is another. Speaking as someone who knows some engineering this does not seem very intelligent. Indeed, the appendix is not merely a waste of space like the coccyx. The appendix is system which can fail and kill you, but serves no useful purpose.

Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis/Kev Walker. Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Judge Dredd. In that order.

I have to agree with you here. There really aren't enough peopel wanting to be doctors. However, taks' point about allowing the free market in does not apply, given my starting premise which is that we need a healthy nation. This has to be budgeted for, not bid for. It has to be planned. A fact which is true whether we are trying to reduce cancer rates, lower infant mortality, or prevent infectious diseases. It can be done by the civil service in theory, and is being done in practice. Lady Crimson makes a further point regarding pill-pushing. There is an important difference between a private and a public health system. The former gets paid to work. teh former gets paid when it treats people. The latter gets paid irrespective. True the latter can be a little slack sometimes. But the former has no interest at all in preventive or low-effort measures. For example, stem-cell treatment of heart conditions is being trialled in the NHS. With some astounding initial results. It seems that people with weak hearts may be treatable using relatively simply one-off interventions, rather than continually taking drugs and visiting their doctors. This makes the NHS happy, and it makes us patients happy. It does not make a private doctor or a drug company happy.

The notion of private healthcare is fundamentaly flawed. Health is not private. Diseases occur in populations, and the effects of disease impact upon all members of those populations. Bird flu is an excellent case in point. You cannot simply seek to inoculate yourself and your family. Because unless we all get inoculated then the national machine breaks down. The people who supply our food and power and sweep our streets get ill and die. The people you employ in your business get ill and don't show up to work. in the worst case scenario all the people who don't have the cash keel over in the streets and go unburied because the numpties who usually collect bodies are dead as well. If you look at the history of altruistic healthcare you find it matches rather neatly the rise of industrialised society. It is a requirement for industrialised society. This is not to mention the emphasis various religions place on helping those less fortunate than yourselves. I certainly do not believe anyone who calls themselves a good Christian should be against public healthcare or social security.

As I saw on the BBC there are a number of anecdotal cases of persons, for example sexworkers, who appear to be immune to the virus. However, I am afraid that on balance I'd believe the hospital got the test result wrong in the first place. These things happen even in the best run places.

I've yet to get into tinkering. But the more I learn, and the more I earn, the more I want to.

Ok, Hellykitty, I think I get you. The nature of an FPS is to shift the complexity into the environment rather than the controls. Can you think of any strategy or rpg games where this would be the case?

I agree it's not as if the rest of town is clean and pure. However, while I've done my fair share of careening around town centres singing songs about goblins I've yet to desecrate a war memorial. ATM's, rosebushes, squaddies and nurses, yes. But not war memorials.

Yrkhoon, as a matter of etiquette could you not triple post? It is something I had to learn to do. If you must address several people, take notes or something. Again, it's what I now do. Welcome to the party, though. While I accept that technically the signature of the OLC would make any memo official, the reality of government is that such a communication would be treated as advice. And as my friend the talking kumquat says, how can it be wrong for a President to ask for advice on an issue? Even a sensitive issue. Secondly, while I would agree that a lack of public oversight would tend to encourage abuse, I would not agree that it _guarantees_ abuse. On the one hand you have the fact that experienced interrogators know damn well that torture gets them nowhere. In fact it makes their job harder. Remember that the subhumans at Abu Ghraib were torturing on their own time as guards, not interrogators. One the other hand oversight can be provided by the CO of the prison, and if well chosen this can be enough. Finally, the absence of charges of torture to my mind merely reflects an unwillingness on the part of the Pentagon to hold US troops accountable for events occurring in service and abroad. It has happened in Japan, Afghanistan, and when bad things happen between NATO forces. I can only assume it is intended to avoid legal precedents being set. It is extremely unhelpful for all concerned at the sharp end, however, and is roundly condemned by every responsible officer (including Americans) that I've met. The refusal to conduct proper investigations mentioned above is especially unhelpful in that it creates an image of indiscipline and arrogance. However while this may be true at the Pentagon, you should not make the mistake of assuming it goes all the way down.

I can guess Kreia must be a Jedi (alright I looked it up). But is he some kind of stand-up comedy jedi? An A/S/L is good. On the other hand, maybe we ought to be competing rather than collaborating.

Do you guys get people sitting on your war memorials, and leaving kebab meat and lager cans lying about?

I must say it really helps whenever I hear other people who feel the same way. In the UK there isn't a single town or village without a war memorial. So many died. Yet in too many places you see them neglected or worse covered in trash/vomit/urine. I try to clean them up when I have a moment. People look at me as if I'm crazy. I often think of the poor sods who have no other resting place than that big stone. Young men who would love nothing better than to be out clubbing and eating kebabs, but never got the chance because they risked all to serve. I remember these guys at times like this. But I also think of them when I'm out having a great time, and hope this is just as worthy. I know too many soldiers to think they'd want nothing but solemnity after their passing.

What about actually sensible quizzes?

That's cool, kotorkyle. Actually I just noticed I'd made a mistake. Only one of my gradfather died! The other (living) one is still very much with us. And a feisty little b****r he is too. But he did lose every single one of his childhood friends. And every man he liked in his unit. Fought for five years, and lied about his age to volunteer. Yet he still talks about it as a job that needed doing.

"They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We shall remember them. " - Laurence Binyon ~~ I just realised no mention had been made today of the fact that it is Remembrance Sunday. The day on which Great Britain and all the Commonwealth recalls the lives and deaths of the men and women lost in service of Queen and country. Primarily in both World Wars, but also I think in other conflicts since. It has become unfashionable to honour this day. But having lost two decorated grandfathers who served, one of whom died, and the other having lost every childhood friend in war, it has been a strong tradition in my family to stop and think. I should like to use this moment to invite all of us to think about the sacrifices made by those people, in service to us later generations. Not just in the UK, or from the UK, but all free Allied nations who fought. And I include those who had to fight from exile, such as the French and Polish; as well as those who fought within the Empire, such as those from the Indian sub-continent, and Africa. Though we may still live in a world of violence, where hatred exists, and fear, the world would be darker still were it not for their efforts. (Ruins of Monte Cassino. A town the Allies fought through in the Liberation of Italy. The scale of the devastation reveals some of the scale of the fighting.)

Wow. Kasoroth I didn't think I'd be able to read a post that long, but I did. Kudos. I'd agree pretty much with what you said. But at the same time while people might be technically capable of building their PCs [if one factors in techie friends as you rightly do], the awareness of that is so poor it doesn't really count. however, this may improve. The most interesting part of your post for me was the move to open source OS. The problem there is the availability of games in those OS. Didn't the sole Linux games developer go bust this year? Otherwise I'd say you were spot on. ~~~ Other posts, I run along with the rejoinders. Yes technically you can write on an old PC. My dear old dad does on a 233Mhz pentium. And he bitches constantly about the performance, while insisting it is fine. If he wants to receive a file it takes forever. He can't run Excel and Word at the same time as being online. He can't conveniently include pictures into his work. The list goes on. I recently discovered he had been achieving part-way passable performacne for a while by turning off all his protection ...then of course falling down due to spyware. The difference, as I have discovered between - a fully serviceable working home PC, that lets you produce genuinely first class photos/presentations/papers, while holding your music and showing films; - a gaming PC is the graphics card. Which is at mid-range about 90 UKP. ~~~ I accept that there are people who don't have day jobs that can use a PC, but if they are really living then they can use the PC for education, art, and oddjobs and hobbies. You really can't do any of that with a console. A games console games.

How about the majority of the letter is a sequence of slightly implausible statements about how fantastic we are. I'm thinking maybe we cheat by treating ourselves as a corporate entity e.g. Height: 5'4 - 6'4" Hair Colour: Brown, Blonde, Black with a little Red Education: [i think we can safely storm this one, since I'm fairly certain we can pack out the qualifications] Interests: Personality: And so on. Finally, we finishing up with the suggestion that in light of all our great points we can only recommend she tell us en masse to push off. Since this will prove she is fantastic. Thought: what might be quite cool is if we could put together a pick of us using our avatars. A la the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

EEEnteresting. Vorry EEEEnteresting. Waiting until after Christmas suits me from the money angle also. I agree with you, Meta about the forthcoming shifts in tech. But I'm not going to be looking at those new sub-systems.

Shooting first does not apply. The bounty hunter was clearly going to take Han's life. I'm not even sure that Greedo coudl have been that stupid. I reckon he had got tanked up and was intending to play a practical joke on Han. Or Mossad did it.

Excellent idea. The idea of a 'human wave' date appeals to my military snese of humour. :D Very Soviet. I'm still chewing over comedy themes. *scribble scribble* "Why settle for a single breadstick when you can eat the whole jar?" No, that makes her sound like a pig... I doubt Lanchester's equations are going to do us any good...

So the consensus is don't even bother unless I'm getting a better card? And then to get a new motherboard?

Shhh! I'm trying to rile them into writing. I guess I'd like it if this thing turned into the world's funniest application letters, as an event. Because if it does then much good comedy will arise. If it does not then some poor single mum gets the most embarassing and humiliating christmas of her life. This will not please me. I've been considering writing my own application but can't think of a funny enough hook.

I saw an ad for a site set up by leading cretins to explain the basics if anyone is interested. http://www.getsafeonline.org/ I know no-one will use it, but I thought it made an interesting statement about government advice that no-one would.