DMCA

Slightly off the point but some years ago I had a car to sell. It was due for MOT so I had it done (almost nothing wrong) and advertised it. Some woman came with a couple of other people who examined the car fairly cursorily, had me drive it up the road and back and then she said she would have it. She paid and went off with the car. A week later I get a call to say the car is a deathtrap, she had it looked at by some 'mobile garage' for some unknown reason, who in the process of examining made the engine fall out and told her it was unroadworthy! She wanted her money back. I contacted the guy who did the MOT and the mechanic who actually did the work. Both said the car was/had been fine. In the end the MOT man (years and years in the business) went out to the woman's place to see the car as he couldn't believe he'd missed whatever was wrong with it. Never heard any more about it and never got to the bottom of it! However, she was a woman and they were a 'mobile garage'...

Shakespeare would have been proud...

Smaller than you might think.... http://anglersnet.co.uk/ubb/ultimatebb.php...ic;f=6;t=004067

quote: Er - DMCA, don't know if you noticed but you are equating people with foxes and other wild animals. Sort of a non-sequitur isn't it? Goes way beyond "extending an attitude" anyway.[/QB]Longwinded reply time: No equation between people and animals intended nor (it seems to me) implied. The point was to show the extrapolation in extreme form of a particular attitude. The attitude is the same whether it relates to people or animals. I see know reason to defend someone's right to carry out acts of unacceptable cruelty to human OR animal. In this case the question then is whether you think hunting is unacceptably cruel: if you think that cruelty is always unacceptable and you consider hunting cruel then the implication is clear; if you think hunting is cruel and cruel in an unjustifiable way, then don't sit on the fence about it (this is the crux of the matter); if you think hunting is cruel but in some way acceptably so (because we are only dealing with animals after all, perhaps) then defend the rights of hunters. If you don't consider it is cruel at all then defend the rights of hunters too of course. To make the point clearer with regard to animals alone, I personally don't wish to defend someone's right, say, to kick, starve, cook or otherwise torture a dog to death. That goes beyond the pale, I think. Likewise, for some people, including, it would appear, some people posting on here, hunting is beyond the pale. If you do feel that way then defending someone's right to do it seems inconsistent. There's a world of difference between defending someone's right, for example, to free speech and defending their right to act in any way they choose. Hope that's a bit clearer at least.. btw Chesters...are you implying that there should be no laws since people will do 'unlawful' things anyway? Couldn't quite follow what you meant. Could be worth a go though cos there are a few people I wouldn't mind bumping off with impunity.

Is there something wrong with your plumbing then?

I don't understand this attitude. It's possible to extend it until you legitimise anything: stoning for adultery (Iran, parts of Nigeria), female circumcision (various), torture generally. 'Well, I think it's evil but people should be allowed to do it if they like'. If you think hunting's cruel AND you find its particular type of cruelty unacceptable then take a stand: don't defend someone's right to do it. It's not really about opinion in that case: it's about what you think is right and wrong. I'm not suggesting you stamp on someone's rights just because you don't like something, but there are times when it goes beyond likes and dislikes (if not for you, then at least clearly for some others on the site).

Not only that. I'm drinking Danish beer at the same time. No flys on me when in comes to the information super highway!

It would be worth going here just to read the notices...kids especially welcome it seems. http://www.tourismus-tirol.com/scharnitz/r...hof/indexe.html

I don't think we would have had much of the force left over here in Cambridge but I was definitely very puzzled by a cupboard that rattled quite noisily and inexplicably (it seemed) for several seconds sometime between 12 and 1 (roughly). I guess that explains it then...it was certainly rather weird at the time... Last time I can remember one in this country I was in a an office seated round a large table and everyone sat at the table looked at each other with the same thing clearly going through their head: 'Hey...I wonder who's shaking the table..let's see who looks guilty...hmmm everyone's pretending to be surprised...must be one of them...hang on, maybe they thinks it's me...well, it's not me mate so look at someone else...' etc

Can we be sure that this is Christmas 2002 that Sainsbury's is celebrating?

Someone has to bring a bill to ban premature yuletide. Now there's something worth marching for! I'm surprised the Church doesn't make more fuss about this..

...a penetration tester... Hey, I like the sound of that. experience is all in that game, expecially in the contract market I bet it is! you'd be in at the bottom. Uhoh...on second thoughts...

Blimey! It's by Jeanette Winterson! Wasn't expecting that.

quote: Originally posted by StuMac: [QB]However, local matchmen don't like the pike that are appearing in numbers so are organising pike culling events. At the last one a fish of 25 and 28 lb were killed. [QB] That's an absolute disgrace, indicative of selfishness both with regard to other anglers and to the environment/river in general, and probably also of plain ignorance (when it comes to predator/prey balance). :mad:

Spasor...er..is there something funny about your keyboard that makes the exclamation marks come out as question marks? Spent time in Australia, perhaps? No offence now...asking this doesn't mean I want to see babies on pitchforks!

Here's a joke someone told me at the pub last night (sorry if you've heard it before). Man goes into a bar and orders a drink and the barman says 'Just thought you should know we're having a promotion on this new stuff tonight: buy one shot and get two free!' 'Ok' says the man 'I'll give it a go' Anyway, turns out he quite likes it and decides to stick to it all night since it's so cheap. At the end of the evening the barman says 'Damn. You got through a whole bottle and a half of the stuff yourself. You ok?' 'Sure..hic..'says the guy, falling off his stool. Next night he comes back looking a bit green around the gills and sits heavily on the barstool. Barman waits a bit then says cheerily 'Same again?' 'Hell no,' says the man. 'I'm never touching a drop of that devil drink as long as I live. Took me 2 hours to find my house and when I finally got in I blew chunks on the kitchen floor!' Barman replies 'Yeah, but you're ok now, right?' And the man looks forlornly back at him and says 'No, no you don't understand. Chunks is my Doberman'

Have I missed something here? What's with the BNP? Is the idea that Cranfield is some sort of uber-Tory whose very presence at the march damns the CA to being dismissed as reverse class warmongers? Or is it something more sinister? Can't work it out... :confused: (Clearly Cranfield's post and mine arrived at the same time!) [ 17. September 2002, 08:09 PM: Message edited by: DMCA ]

quote:The area of downtown Manhattan with all the concrete, tall buildings, and proximity to the water makes the winds impossible to predict. They often blow hard and from some really unusual directions. Frankly, if a plane had just flown in to the building I was in casuing an inferno and I was somewhere above it, I wouldn't give a damn about all that. But the buidling doesn't hav to be on fire for such evacuation to be useful. I wasn't suggesting it for thrill seeking yuppies to use on a daily basis as a means of avoiding queuing for the elevators. (Apparently if you actually do know what you are doing you can jump from as little as 100 feet.) quote: Trying to jump with a chute would give about the same survival rate as jumping without. I know you say 'almost' but still I can't help but doubt that a little. Anything at all more than zero is a lot more than almost zero. quote: Add that to the fact that the two buildings saw more people during an average day than populate most small cities. Again wouldn't expect everyone to want to use one every day. And the towers aren't the only tall bulidings in the world. Surely more rather than less need of safety gear the more people there are in a building anyway. Turns out though that unsurprisingly this is not original idea: Leonardo Da Vinci had it long before me. http://www.aero.com/publications/parachute...9512/pc1295.htm

This site has a lot of interesting stuff on the towers, including a detailed interview with an MIT engineering professor about why they collapsed and a description of how he escaped by one of the very few people who survived from above the impact zone: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/ One thing that puzzles me about these very tall buidings (and this is not meant to be a frivolous suggestion) is why parachutes are not available as emergency equipment. If something happens where immediate evacuation is necessary (or where there is no safe way down) this surely must be the best way out, assuming you are high enough.

Another nice example of how legislation helps the strong target the weak... However...in Britain of course we know how to look after our car dwellers...when their vehicle starts to look a bit past it, we simply upgrade them! http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_539768.html

Who was that masked man?

IN my teens I fished a water that was infested with rats. I would amuse myself at night by catching them in the landing net: prop the net upright where they run and every few seconds off it would go, shaking about with ratty entangled inside. Quick flick and he was out and away again. One year, though, come the start of the season not a rat to be seen...not one...after a while it became clear why...mink had taken up residence and that was that. Don't know if the mink simply ate them all or the rats evacuated the place en masse. Incidentally, on that telly programme about the Thames I mention elsewhere, it was pointed out that mink were the reason for the general disappearance of water voles...except, that is, where people regularly walk their dogs...the mink won't stay where there are dogs but the voles aren't bothered. Good old dogs (might eat your sandwiches and groundbait but they keep the mink at bay.)

This doesn't seem a very complicated issue. The avatar is not only created and personally added by mpbdnsu, it is also in fact a photograph of him. If someone else wants to use it, they have to ask him. At the very least, this is simple courtesy. If he is OK or even amused about having clones of himself knocking about the boards, then fine, go ahead. If someone uses it by accident (which is pretty easy to do) and mpbdsnu objects, then change it to something else and apologise. If that makes you unhappy then you must get unhappy very easily! Frankly, it seems a bit pointless to choose any avatar already used by someone else, even a stock one, but downright bizarre to fight a corner to use someone else's photograph of themself as your own.

I happened to see quite a nice programme on the telly this week about the Thames...following it from source to outfall and concentrating on the parallels between man's/the wildlife's use of the river. Of course, when it came to a section on swan upping the business of lead shot was mentioned. This was done fairly unequivocally...along the lines "there used to be x thousand swans on the river but their numbers were reduced to x-minus-a-lot thousand after being poisoned by anglers' lead weights...the numbers are now recovering after lead weights were made illegal..." As my memory of the lead ban and the alleged damage to swans at the time is hazy, my question is...was the situation ever clear? Did anglers at the time (officially?) put their hands up and say guilty...we'll stop using lead shot? Did they deny responsibility (blaming shooting or increased boat traffic perhaps, or simply arguing that 'real' anglers don't leave shot behind) and have to be legislated against unwillingly? If so, should we be convinced by the figures mentioned in the programme that anglers were in fact to blame? Or was it all more complicated than that? I don't think the intention of the programme was to denigrate anglers as such but it did give the impression that, at least in this respect, anglers were definitely harmful to the environment and that their (selfish) practices had had to be curbed from outside. Finally, for those who shoot, what is the situation with that? Surely one blast from a shotgun leaves more shot in the water or elsewhere than a careful angler could lose in a year (or I am just exhibiting my ignorance here?) Has there been legislation that affects lead use in shooting?

Thanks guys for all your help. I've just got back so it's the first time I've been able to have a proper look at it...have managed to fix it (or at least cure the symptomatic error message)... In case anyone is interested... Tools/Options/Other/General/Advanced Options/Add-in Manager/remove n2phone from here... Not planning to chase this one further (such as into the registry) for now as not interested in n2phone itself.. thanks again [ 11. September 2002, 03:34 PM: Message edited by: DMCA ]