ColinW

I would put money on heather@printerinks.com being a real person's personal email address! I'd start communication with Heather, maybe something her husband definitely wouldn't appreciate I'd also make use of the freephone number 0800 043 1001 on their website to tie up their sales staff while I "look for a pen" or "just go to answer the door", just as I'm on the verge of giving them a big sale.

They have a choice. They can release the sh*t on a continual basis, or they can hold onto it until they get some "unforeseen rainfall" and release it all at once. If they hold onto it, like they now do, then it has minimal effect on the salmon and they can say "Look how clean we've made the river, even salmon can use it." The fact that the salmon swim up a dead river on their way to the spawning buckets doesn't affect the EA and Thames Water's publicity material in any way. I read that the estimated cost of the alternative has now gone up from £600 million to £1.5 billion because they didn't get on with the job. So barring fines comparable to those sorts of figures, nothing will get done (unless the EU forces them to do it.)

Putting aside the legal stuff, the obvious question is why are the fish stocks in the river so low? Putting more fish in is unlikely to improve stocks if the river is unable to support them. A drain near where I used to live used to be all but wiped out by the Environment Agency running raw sewage laden floodwater into it every few years. However, those "in the know" were catching double figure weights of the healthiest roach you've ever seen within a few years of each wipeout. The place was just stuffed with fish food. It never needed stocking even though the stocks were (literally) decimated after each pollution incident.

I forgot to mention the movie itself. I like the Pirates of the Carribean films. Unfortunately, as usual with Hollywood, they don't know when to quit. The story wasn't great, the acting was OK, the direction was awful. It reminded me of the old 50's 3D films where no opportunity was missed to have something leap out of the screen. I don't know what this looks like in the 3D version but in the 2D one it just looks silly. Then there are the scenes obviously put in for the games that will no doubt follow. They even managed to get in a product placement (a hard thing to do in a film set 200 years ago!) with San Miguel plastered across the treaure map

I just got back from taking my daughter to the cinema. Sadly I think that might be my last trip to the pictures! Putting aside the fact that the Odeon have the strange notion that Thursday is still a Bank Holiday and therefore dearer than normal because it is half term, the whole experience was just a complete disappointment. The Odeon's motto is apparently "Fanatical About Film". We went to see Pirates of the Carribean 4. Well, unless I am much mistaken, what we watched wasn't a film at all! It looked to me very much like a digital recording. Furthermore, a digital recording back projected onto a screen not massively bigger than the one in my local pub! The whole point of a cinema presentation is that it is on FILM, with the unique picture that only film gives. If I'm going to watch digital recordings I might as well do it at home on my big TV in a chair a thousand times more comfortable than the one I just spent two hours writhing on and can still feel now. So I don't think I'll be going again. When I think of cinema I'll be thinking nostagically about seeing Lawrence of Arabia, 2001, Star Wars, Saturday morning Flash Gordon etc, in massive picture houses with a proper projector lighting up the dust and smoke in the air. In future I'll just wait for the DVD, it's cheaper and I get to keep the movie. If I buy a Blue Ray player I'll probably have the same definition as well!

A bloke I play snooker with has a daughter with naughty kid syndrome. He gets a new car every two years at our expense because of it. It kind of reduces my sympathy for this particular condition.

Just type "sign our guestbook" in Google and that will give you loads of places to put the email address. This will generate hundreds of friends for them within a week.

No, but if you don't insure it, he'll get done (and you'll get sacked!)

I read on the BBC News today that over a million people applied for tickets for the 100m sprint final session. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13465562 Once all the parasites have their freebie tickets there will apparently only be 40,000 tickets available for paying spectators. So that is 25 applications for every ticket. Then lower down it says Is it just me that who thinks that if the tickets are in such great demand then they are too cheap (even at £725!) and they would have stood a better chance of saving taxpayers money if they'd done some research into what the market would stand? As it is, we will ALL be left with a massive bill for this nonsense, despite the fact that this is a London only event that most of us cannot possibly ever have attended.

The mobile phone ban was always only ever a money spinner. My local hospital lifted the ban a while ago and it's not killed anybody yet! On the subject of privacy, something that has really started to annoy me lately is getting automatically "logged in" on Google if i want to post a comment on YouTube. It's bad enough that they store cookies I don't want on my computer but when they start building up databases on my search activity, identifiable to me as an individual through details obtained via a login made on a completely different site, that is definitely a step too far. I do not want targeted adverts. I don't regard that as a service to me, I regard it as an intrusive nuisance. I don't want my boss looking at my computer and seeing yacht adverts, how the hell am i supposed to convince him I'm skint!

That's really just an argument about semantics. My definition of a device being "on the internet" would be it being able to communicate with devices that aren't on the same local area network.

No it doesn't. That is the whole point of Network Address Translation (NAT).

Before you start trying to fix it I suggest you have a look around t'internet and find out how the case comes apart. I once fannied about replacing stuff on mine via the opening at the bottom and then later found out that by removing a couple of well hidden screws I could remove the rear half of the case and have easy access to the whole mechanism

I should point out that the graph I put on earlier is not meant to indicate that there is no global warming taking place at the present time. It is meant to indicate that tree ring data is not a reliable indication of temperature, as it doesn't show any recent rise. It is therefore a mistake to use it in long term "temperature plots" (as has been done by several scientists). To plot graphs using this data to calculate past temperatures and then switch to measured data for recent times is just completely wrong. This is because the tree ring data reduces or even eliminates what is often known as the Medieval Warm Period. This is possibly a deliberate aim, because if it can be shown by skeptics that it was consistently warmer around 1000AD, when man made CO2 levels were almost zero, then the whole idea of man made global warming would be severely weakened. It's not in the interest of scientists or politicians to disprove something that they have made us spend billions on!

On your suggestion I searched for some tree ring data and found some on the American's National Climate Data Centre. This data is credited to Rashit M. Hantemirov and Stepan G. Shiyatov of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Ural Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences. ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/tr.../yamal_2002.txt I plotted what they call "temperature anomaly reconstruction" against the years from 1000BC to 2000AD and obtained this graph. Now "I'm not a climate scientist", but that graph looks pretty flat to me. So flat that my linear trendline just looks like a horizontal gridline. Feel free to tell me what I have done wrong.

The dataset which is of interest is that relating to a particular set of tree ring data from the Urals used by a CRU scientist called Dr Briffa. I assure you that your 15 year old kid WON'T find that particular data. Nor will he find an explanation of why Dr Briffa chose to use a particular handful of trees' data from the significantly larger amount of data available to him. I don't really know why you say things like "you will not accept climate change is not real" (which I assume is an unintentional double negative) when one of my first posts in this thread stated explicitly that I don't know whether or not climate change is real. Climate change, as far as I know, could be a perfectly natural cyclic thing that has nothing to do with us. I don't know, and as long as climatologists are producing bad science I won't get to know.

When I did scientific research it was a basic principle that if someone requested the data set upon which a paper was based you gave it to them. Why is this not so in this particular field, especially given that public interest (in the form of billions in extra taxes) is probably higher in this field than in any other? Why is the Climate Research Unit so unwilling to release data and explain how their graphs were produced from that data? For example why won't they explain why a particular handful of trees were chosen whose rings backed up the famous (infamous) hockey stick graph, when so much other data showed nothing significant? As long as there is any suspicion that the climatologists are cherry picking their data I will remain a skeptic.

No it isn't. The difference there is that in both cases there is incontrovertible evidence to back up the theory. Einsteins theory of general relativity is backed up by lensing effect of galaxies, not by ring spacings on one species of tree on one particular mountain. A bit like using the term climate change denier then? I suggest you read some of the Climate Research Unit emails! They are widely available. Moving weather stations, weather stations that don't exist, weather stations with no written records. Were these emails expressing concern that invalid data made the results unreliable? Not a chance - the only thing they were worried about were their own reputations and jobs!

I do hope this guy comes a cropper! http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsi...000/9487046.stm He ordered £36,000 worth of Olympic games tickets. Let's hope the organizers realize that not many people have that level of credit on their cards, so just give him a couple of thousand's worth of tickets to the rubbish events They are debiting people's cards over the next month before they tell them what tickets they can have and there are no refunds. You get the opportunity to sell them back next year (but only if the organizers actually want them back!) Ebay have said they won't be handling auctions of tickets, but I expect there will be a lot of things like T-shirts and badges up for sale with free tickets included

Interesting choice of words "climate change denier", a phrase designed to associate people who are skeptical about man made global warming with Holocaust deniers. There is a big difference. One is a theory, the other is a matter of historical fact. Personally, I don't know whether man made global warming is real, or if it is a problem. What I do know is that there have been some extremely unprofessional people working in this field and it's very hard to sort out what is true and what is self serving bull. That is because of the so-called "scientists", not because of the skeptics. As long as they are massaging results and making things up to suit their own ends I will take what they say with a pinch of salt.

A couple of years ago I bought my now ex a Shimano Alivio Match rod. She's now gone but the rod remains, so I use it for mullet float fishing (I don't want to subject my expensive stuff to sea water!) I have to say it is impressive for a £50 rod. I've had mullet over five pounds on it, so I've no doubt it could handle double figure carp. I'd rather fish with a rod like that, which is soft enough in the tip for casting floats and feeling small fish but which bends right through with something bigger on, than fish with something excessively heavy. Even on a commercial you will catch quite a few small fish before the big one comes along, you may as well enjoy catching them!

You could try chucking Chum Mixers in. That shouldn't interest the roach, because they'll struggle to eat them, and as they drift off in the wind they might take the carp with them. I have to say I haven't tried this!

I take it you aren't talking about the change of one hour that takes place when you log on because when you are logged on BST gets taken into account?

That's easy for you to say. I suppose you'd have stood your ground against the SS knowing it meant your certain death? In that case you're a bigger man than I am.

The problem with this legislation is that the offences will be anything but black or white. It will generally be down to personal opinion. For example, what constitutes a "slow moving queue" as mentioned in the Highway Code with reference to vehicles you are allowed to overtake on the inside? Neither the word slow nor the word queue is specific. Does a line of cars a hundred feet apart moving down a motorway at 40mph constitute a slow moving queue? A hundred feet is way less that the 118ft stopping distance given for 40mph in the Highway Code. 40mph is 30mph below the speed limit, so it seems you could argue it is slow. A queue is a "waiting line of people or vehicles" according to the dictionary. Well, as far as I'm concerned, if I am not travelling as fast as I'd like to then I am obviously waiting, so I am in a queue. At what speed and spacing does a "slow moving queue" become normal traffic? Even more subjective, how many cars does it take to make a slow moving queue. A hundred? Ten? Are two cars stuck behind a centre lane hogger a slow moving queue? If so, is it OK to overtake the cars that are stuck behind the lane hogger but not the lane hogger himself (since he isn't waiting for anything, so by definition isn't in the queue)? No, I don't know either. These are questions that would (and should) be decided by a panel of magistrates, NOT by a traffic cop. That is just a single example. The Highway Code is full of vague stuff. Here's another one: "You MUST ensure all sidelights and rear registration plate lights are lit between sunset and sunrise use headlights at night, except on a road which has lit street lighting." What exactly does that mean? There's not even any mention about whether you are actually driving the car or not! Does the second part mean you must not use headlights at night on roads with streetlights? That seems to contradict what comes two lines lower down. "You should also use dipped headlights, or dim-dip if fitted, at night in built-up areas." Do the words "must" and "should" mean the same thing? If so, why use two different words? If not, which one takes priority? Either way, you'd better hope your interpretation of all this vague waffle is the same as Plod's or "That will be ninety quid please sir. Would you like to use the ATM in the back of the patrol car?"