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Vote Marx

The BBC are doing another one of their "greatest... of the such and such" vote things.

Karl Marx is again on the list of greatest philosophers of all time, after winning one back a few years ago also on the BBC by quite a large margin it's no surprise he's doing well this time around too.

Go ahead and vote for Karl Marx, you can find out more about Marx on their website, or on Marxists.org or even on my old website with an Overview of Marxism. You can also listen to Francis Wheen on why you should vote Marx.

I'm mainly posting this to counter articles in several right-wing papers, including the Economist and the Times telling people to vote against Marx, stating their disbelief that Marx could possibly in the lead.

2 comments »

I really hate astrologers

They should all be lined up in front of a wall and shot - and anybody who takes their mumbo jumbo seriously.

Look at this from the BBC:

Hours after a Nasa probe crashed into Comet Tempel 1, legal reverberations were felt in a Moscow court.

But Judge Litvinenko opened hearings into a case which could see Nasa pay a local amateur astrologist millions of dollars in damages.

Right, not a good start. Judge Litvinenko clearly needs to be moved to an area where his decisions don't effect other people.

"Nobody has yet proven that this experiment was safe," says Ms Bay's lawyer Alexander Molokhov.

Right, nobody needs to prove it's safe, because it is safe - you need to prove it's unsafe. What's the comet going to do throw a wobbly and come and get us? No other planetoid has done that.

"This impact could have altered the orbit of the comet, so now there is a chance that the Tempel may well destroy the Earth some day!"

No chance.

However, even if the comet stays at a safe distance from Earth, Ms Bay's own life, she thinks, will never be the same again.

An amateur astrologist, she believes that any variation in the orbit or the composition of the Tempel comet will certainly affect her own fate.

So Ms Marina's claims to be experiencing "a moral trauma" - which only a payment of $300m (252m euros; £170m) can put right.

Yes I'm sure that $300 million (about the same as NASA spent on this mission) will definitely effect her own life, and no doubt the boost in her business due to all this press coverage will effect her own life.

Moscow representatives of the American space agency have ignored Monday's court hearing.

Good.

Marina Bay's legal team remain confident, and they are even looking for volunteers to join in on the claim.

"The impact changed the magnetic properties of the comet, and this could have affected mobile telephony here on Earth. If your phone went down this morning, ask yourself Why? and then get in touch with us," says Mr Molokhov.

Yes an in perspective tiny piece of metal hitting a comet on the other side of the solar system is going to effect your phone. Have they even proved the comet contains an iron core to have a magnetic field?

Shoot them all, or better yet stick them on a rocket and crash them into some more comets.

4 comments »

I very nearly had it this time

Time for a Silent Hunter 3 mission report. November 1942 - about 200 kms south-east of Newfoundland. I ran into a convoy heading east-north-east with 4-5 escorts doing about 5 knots. Up until this point I've not had much trouble evading destroyers. That changed on the morning of the 22nd - it took me 7 hours to slip away, and not without a seriously bashed up boat.

At 21:14 on the 21st I engaged the convoy, slipping along side the central row and fired a torpedo into two T2 tankers, blowing each one sky high, while firing another two into a T3, which went down within minutes.

My tubes would take another 30 or so minutes to reload - there was no way I could keep up with the convoy without having some serious problems with the escorts, so I slip out to the south-west to about 20 kilometres distant, surface and run a parallel course for a 2 hours at flank speed and move back in ahead of the convoy, after 20 minutes the escort goes within 200 metres of me. I'm sat perfectly silent - he detects me (it was the damn new radioman sneezing I'm sure of it). I shove the engines to one-third and move into engage the southern row, led by two victory cargos - very nice targets. I put two torpedoes into each, the first sinks after about 20 minutes, the second one requires my last torpedo to sink her. All this time the escort is giving me hell waiting for my torpedo to reload. I manage to get up to periscope depth after he made several passes overhead and fire it off, impacts with the victory cargo, which sinks sometime later.

I dive to 70 metres (the sea floor is only about 80 metres) and proceed at silent speed out the rear of the convoy, I can't shake him, turning back at flank speed into the heart of the convoy I try to lose him in amongst the other ships, it seems to work, so I sit on the bottom and wait for the convoy to pass me by. He picks me up again... This went on for hours. With my boat suffering major damage, luckily no causalities. By sunrise the next morning I made my escape - and head back to Breast.

Things are really heating up in the Atlantic. I just hope I can survive another couple of years and get the Type XXI.

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Mainstream and then some

Xbox 360 Degrees:

If that's not enough they put Sony into checkmate with the media functions of the Xbox 360, there's just so much you can do. I don't know about you, but I store all my media on my PC. At the moment there's no real way to get it down into the living room and get it enjoyed by everyone easily. This all changes with the Xbox 360, using Windows Media Connect (available for free via Windows Update). I'll be able to stream my pictures, music and videos all down to the Xbox 360. What's more, plug your digital camera, your PSP, your iPod or other MP3 player into the Xbox 360 and have all that content available to you too, all in a really gorgeous and simple to use user interface. Take digital photography today, how people interact with the content is lot different then an old film camera, there's no simple way to view the content unless you've got a PC in the living room, you just don't want your friends and family in a bedroom (where most PCs live), you want to be able to sit around the TV in the living room, put some nice music on in the background and show off your photos, in the way you used to be able to do with print. Xbox 360 allows that, trust me - mums will love this feature.

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For the spammers

Now this is pretty cool, it's now being shown to all referrals coming from the black list, the spam robots.

If you have reached this page in error, feel free to bypass this message with our apologies. Please leave a comment telling us to stop blacklisting sites matching [$string] so that this doesn't happen again.

Thank you, and sorry for the inconvenience.

If, on the other hand, you are a bandwidth-eating referrer spam robot, then we hope that your owner dies a painful death and rots in hell, and that his or her seed is scrubbed from the face of the earth.

3 comments »

Java in every Blu-ray player

CNET:

"The Blu-ray Disc Association, the standards body for the format, has decided it will adopt Java for the interactivity standards," said Yasushi Nishimura, director of Panasonic's Research and Development Company of America, speaking at Sun's JavaOne trade show here. "This means that all Blu-ray Disc player devices will be shipped equipped with Java."

Oh dear.

30 second boot time.
Dropped frames from Java using too much resources.
Higher costs to deal with Java's huge memory needs.
Pop-up ads during the film.
Spyware and adware being installed.

This really gives content producers no limits to how much they can now abuse the consumer. They'll abuse it, don't think they won't! We had some companies sticking trailers in the copyright section of a DVD to stop people from skipping it. They're going to be able to control everything now.

No thanks. You've just removed any advantages Blu-ray had over HD-DVD in storage, it's going to be filled up with Java malware.

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