It took us a decade to allow Nato to sort the thing out. The Europeans would have done it long before if they didnt have to ask permission from our American paymasters. The only reason

Americans get involved in everything is frankly because they have most of the weapons and soldiers that exist on planet earth. Its surprising that the American tax payer hasn't figured out that the reason they have shit schools and hospitals is because all the tax gets spent on cluster bombs and drones.

And interestingly a random poll of slashdot readers reveals that nearly 25% claim to have access to large telescopes inconvenient to carry or ones with even more light grasp and mass.

So that makes us different to the rest of the population - apart from not having a girlfriend and living in a basement of course....

So Slashdot is actually 'News for Nerds and backyard astronomers' from the sound of it.

Well I think its entirely understandable that the technologically interested have their own tools for accessing space.

I wonder if the same could be said of microscopes, I have one, but its nothing like the array of telescopes that seem to have come to live in the spare room..

Spot on. All those posts advising on what tools to learn are missing the point. The world isn't hiring people with toolboxes, its hiring people who know how to use the toolbox to make stuff. Concentrate on finding the right Stuff to become expert on and you will enjoy your toil and make money doing it.

Sitting in a basement learning how to use a bunch of tools will just see you end up on a production line making dog food. Which is OK if you like the all pervasive smell of dog food I guess, but probably wasn't in your plan for life when you thought that being an Astronaut might be fun.

Its "so bullshit" that the entire manufacturing output of the planet uses the Gaussian distribution, standard deviation and Cpk to make the things that keep sprats like you alive. Everything that is manufactured is measured on control charts - 3D printed livers, Nuclear fuel rods, gate oxide thickness on silicon chips, bandwidth available on your shared DSL line.

Now if some smart bastard like you can improve on 99.999% of the manufacturing worlds assumption that the central limit theorem will reduce everything to Gaussian then you my son are going to be very rich and famous. Let me be the first to congratulate you on deploying more sophisticated statistical tools worldwide and thereby increasing the efficiency and quality of every single factory on the planet.

Of course you might just be spouting your anally retentive opinion that you are disgusted by the fact that people don't use statistics in a precise way.

LEDs are just beginning to take off at sensible prices. Presumably we will now have to sit and watch the manufacturers go bust because of this political dick waving. Presumably we will also have to wait more years for efficient lighting to arrive meanwhile pointlessly burning energy to heat the outdoors. Frankly the planet would be better off if H5N1 wiped out human beings, it would raise the IQ of the planet considerably.

There is a reason why some USA detractors call it the Great Satan, some evil things are regarded as normal there.

I have to say that that is the dullest list I have seen in ages. It looks like an Apple advertisement. No wonder they retired him.

I am tired of illiterate morons running society, I sometimes wonder if we would be better off with an actual dictator instead of the establishment that runs it now. At least that would be a more honest arrangement instead of this bottom feeding so called democracy.

Dont be silly, most of us have already watched it, twice. Anyway you can be sure that first post will keep changing.

Oh so very well put sir - and funny too

Your assessment is incorrect. You focus on matters to do with military security and indeed the cold war is over and the old bugbear of communism taking over the world is defunct. However you are blind to the subject of this discussion. You are now a digital person and your existence is defined by what is on the Internet. The greatest and most free source of information ever devised. A source of information which is so free that secret policemen and all kinds of riff raff, state sanctioned and from private industry now own your digital persona. The question is when they are going to use it to enslave you, not if they are.

Enjoy your retirement in prison because of some data from your youth 50 years before. Remember me warning you.

Win 7 has been screwed for a few weeks now for right mouse clicks to bring up context menus. The menu sometimes persists but usually it disappears when you release the mouse button. I hope those fuckers at Microsoft are aware that the bad experience they are giving their existing user base, particularly in the corporate world will come home to roost. If Microsoft software has become so utterly unreliable on the back of their efforts to turn their operating system into a mobile phone, then I have no real issues to moving to Google documents or any other trendy joke business software because its unlikely to be worse than Microsoft.

A mobile phone or tablet are suitable for some tasks, the one thing they do not do is creative things. So they are fine for people consuming or processing content but not for anything creative like Engineering, content creation, analysis, synthesis. But that's OK because we don't do any of those things in the West anymore.
 

I agree, Cameron is coming over more and more like a complete twat. The Labor party will be back in power at the next election because of him.

No news that crappy 3D which costs almost nothing to film is the great hope of the content industry and that 4k which would actually give the consumer something worth having costs a lot for the content providers to do and is therefore dismissed by them. Death is too good for them.

I look forward to the day when you fall ill and have all the time in the world to find the best value for your cancer tests, your cancer treatment and your unplanned funeral.