So it’d appear that the manager of the second coming of Jesus Christ (Not a latter day saint) is all up in ire because some people are apparently pirating U2’s music, stopping him from adding extra pillars of gold onto his luxurious mansion as the SMH reports:
The long-time manager of rock band U2 has lashed out at internet providers for resisting calls by the music industry to pull the plug on users who illegally download songs.
At a music industry conference in France, Paul McGuinness said internet service providers (ISPs) and technology companies had “enjoyed a bonanza” in the last few years by accepting fees from illegal downloaders while doing nothing to prevent them from stealing music.
“Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long,” said McGuinness, who has managed U2 for 30 years and is a highly respected industry figure.
I’ve been at Uni today forced to do an utterly useless subject for Engineering that is supposed to be ‘teaching effective writing’. We’re learning basic grammar. It’s atrocious. We’re being taught when to use each of the three “there, their or they’re”‘s. Anyway, whilst I was supposed to write a cover letter for a Resume, I wrote this instead.
 Dearest Sir,
I was startled to see the article “Rain, the final frontier of socialism” (13/1) whilst well written had no reference to the post-Chomskyist nature of fluid collectivism. As an avid student of the well-hydrated economic school, I found this reckless oversight to be most alarming in a publication such as yours. The author, Iron Waterford, seems to have perplexingly avoided the core philosophies of distributed agrarian irrigation and presents his own foundational teachings that are as anti-human and disturbingly pragmatic as evaporative liberalism! I hope that in all future articles about the palliative solidarity of comrade raindrop the correct degree of academic liquidity is maintained. I will be examining each future article closely to make sure they brim with approved accuracy and contain not a drop of irony.
[QUOTE=Cadbury;8295096]Dont buy the hype. A well made mini reactor is extremely safe. It cant blow up. It cant irradiate several city blocks. At worst, some radioactive coolant might leak out – requiring a cleanup crew.[/QUOTE]
I essentially agree with you, at least regarding the safety of these reactors in normal operation. However, what if somehow – maybe 50 years down the track, if we’re still here – some nefarious agent gets hold of the ‘depleted’ material in the core? Mother Russia built modular nuclear powerplants back in the day, to power autonomous lighthouses and whatnot. There’s a bunch left unaccounted for. Decades after the fact, a small group of hunters/trappers came across a discarded (still happily radiating) beryllium heater core from one of those bad boys, dragged it to their camp for warmth and died, hard, for the convenience. The incident was not isolated.
That anecdote is paraphrased from a New Scientist I read last year, dredge it up in their archives if you want. The point is not that nuclear powerplants are bad, or unsafe, and certainly not unreliable – it’s that the material they contain can and will be rendered extremely lethal in the wrong hands. It should not be packaged up in a block of concrete under some apartment building, where it can be lost and forgotten far more readily than a massive central reactor.
Worst-case scenario: Global warming may kill us all, sure. Nuclear war will, and then it’ll salt the earth so nothing will ever grow again (with poetic license). Let China burn coal.
He’s won Iowa. He can play a bass guitar. But who is the man behind all the hype? It’s time to play “Top 10 things that Mike Huckabee actually believes”:
That abortion legislation should be left to the states.
That the Federal government should override state legislation to outlaw abortion completely.
That “homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle” and that it poses “a dangerous public health risk”.
If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague. It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.
Creationism.
That his recent surge in popularity is due to “divine intervention”.
With regards to Church and State: “to separate the two is absolutely impossible”.
Fair trade.
“I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”
That the constitution should be amended to prevent homosexuals from marrying.
The second test between India and Australia flared up yesterday when Harbhajan Singh singled out Andrew Symonds, the only player with black heritage in the Australian team, to attack him with monkey sledges. Now it confused me last year to hear Indian crowds were doing something similar, and it still seems to me to be a very literal case of the pot calling the kettle black. Further, given that he hails from the only country that I know of to have troupes of the little primates running around flinging faeces at residents of their capital city, and one whose primary religion dictates that the monkey is in fact an animal to be revered due to its resemblance to a Hindu god, this is just blatantly retarded all round.
The Indian team should stop failing at being racist and get back to something they fail even harder at: playing cricket.
In the last few days Conroy has proposed that in order to protect ‘working families’ from all the porn their kids are going to access on their government bought laptops, we need mandatory ISP level censorship of “questionable content”. There would be an option to ‘opt out’, but being the cynical individual I am, it concerns me that the default option is censorship.
The problems are thus:
ISP’s will, by necessity, maintain a list of people who ‘opt out’ of the clean feed. A database of porn surfing perverts, if you will. The prospect of having this information sold on to third parties, or used to blackmail Family First candidates in Western Sydney seats, is alarming.
This will slow the internet down. Conroy holds up Britain as a shining example of how filtering can occur with minimal slowdown, but he neglects to mention that they only filter child porn, not porn in general (though apparently he covers this with another, equally nonsensical statement, see the next point).
“If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.”
Apparently general pornography and kiddy porn are the exact same thing, which must be a relief for Milton Orkopolous, who can now decide to ‘opt out’ of laws which stop him watching toddlers being ploughed with gardening implements.
Optus already offers an ISP level filtered service. It’s been spectacularly unsuccessful, because that’s not what parents want.
When the Government creates imaginary problems, or believes that technology can ever be a substitute for good parenting, or reasons that fascism solved Germany’s inflation problems, so it can fix
fucking anything, you know you’re in shit.
This post would not exist under mandatory ISP filtering.
Belligerent and Numerous 
Tonight: I pontificate in forums. Then: Copypaste to show I still have keys to the blog.
Topic: Aren’t kittens cute and wubbly đŸ˜€
Page: 36Â
[QUOTE=Cadbury;8295096]Dont buy the hype. A well made mini reactor is extremely safe. It cant blow up. It cant irradiate several city blocks. At worst, some radioactive coolant might leak out – requiring a cleanup crew.[/QUOTE]
I essentially agree with you, at least regarding the safety of these reactors in normal operation. However, what if somehow – maybe 50 years down the track, if we’re still here – some nefarious agent gets hold of the ‘depleted’ material in the core? Mother Russia built modular nuclear powerplants back in the day, to power autonomous lighthouses and whatnot. There’s a bunch left unaccounted for. Decades after the fact, a small group of hunters/trappers came across a discarded (still happily radiating) beryllium heater core from one of those bad boys, dragged it to their camp for warmth and died, hard, for the convenience. The incident was not isolated.
That anecdote is paraphrased from a New Scientist I read last year, dredge it up in their archives if you want. The point is not that nuclear powerplants are bad, or unsafe, and certainly not unreliable – it’s that the material they contain can and will be rendered extremely lethal in the wrong hands. It should not be packaged up in a block of concrete under some apartment building, where it can be lost and forgotten far more readily than a massive central reactor.
Worst-case scenario: Global warming may kill us all, sure. Nuclear war will, and then it’ll salt the earth so nothing will ever grow again (with poetic license). Let China burn coal.
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