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In article ,
Tim Streater wrote:
Dave is talking cock again, that is the problem. What you are
suggesting is no more than what the situation used to be pre-EU.

When I had a summer job at CERN in 1967 and drove across France and
into Switzerland to get there, any question of visa never arose. And
more than it did visiting Italy, Greece, or even commy Yugoslavia in
1970.

Dave is having hysterics about everything these days. He's suffering
from cognitive dissonance like all lefties are at the minute (i.e.
since brexit and/or Trump).

And you are one of those eternal optimists who have absolutely no clue how
to control immigration in practice. One of the key things many voted leave
for. But almost certainly will be just another broken promise.

It also comes as no surprise you've not noticed how easy and cheap travel
can be today, compared to 1967. Ah well.

--
*Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

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In article ,
Michael Kellett wrote:
You didn't notice one of the main reasons many voted out was to
control immigration from the EU? So just how do you do that while
allowing free access to anyone?

You'd have to basically stop everyone from coming to this country.
Then give permission (visa, etc) to those you wish to admit.
..

If you're going to edit my post, would you mind removing the signature too?
Any half decent newsreader will do that for you.

You are confusing issues - the example was " visa to send over an
engineer to trouble shoot something" - this has nothing to do with
immigration.

It is a foreign person coming into the country. Just how are the
authorities going to know whether he is here to work for a few days or is
an immigrant intending staying for as long as he wants?

"You'd have to basically stop everyone from coming to this country.
Then
give permission (visa, etc) to those you wish to admit."

Why - that doesn't happen now - why should we be so stupid as to start.
Terms vary but most reasonable countires allow short visits without
visas.

Of course it doesn't happen now. We're in the EU which allows free
movement.

I would expect that we would allow visa free travel form the EU and a
great many other places - but not a right stay indefinately.

What's the problem ?

The problem is you've not thought just how you can enforce this.

--
*Remember not to forget that which you do not need to know.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

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On Sun, 05 Mar 2017 13:48:11 +0000, Eiron wrote:

On 05/03/2017 11:26, tony sayer wrote:

One things for certain the feral Pigeon and Collared Dove populations
never diminish;(..

How did the Americans solve the passenger pigeon problem?

The answer to that has just got to be "Sheer dedication!". That, along
with the American fixation on the idea that every single "problem" can be
solved with a big enough gun.

--
Johnny B Good

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In article , Tim Streater
wrote:
In article , Jim Lesurf
wrote:

FWIW I used to work on instrumentations for 'Far Infra Red' (say 100
micron to 3 mm wavelength) astronomers many years ago. Back then no-one
had detected anything in the FIR sky beyond the Sun, Moon, main solar
planets and *barely* the crab nebula.

Ah. Now why was that? And what has changed so that much more is detected
today?

Various things which feed back on each others.

Better detectors and measurement systems

Better signals and control methods with more powerful techniques and
hardware.

Simply having people realise that when you look you tend to find more
things than anyone expected. So a change of attitude.

Shift from a few 'fringe' researchers to being a main focus of the work of
many astronomers.

Initially, detection in the FIR was limited to using bolometers (heat
detectors where something like the resistance of something changed when it
was warmed by the faint (filtered) signals. The main material at the time
was germanium cooled to a few deg K.

The first FIR 'telescopes' were things like a couple of ex-WW2 searchlight
mirrors. John Bastin at QMC (as was) bought two. Put one on the roof.
(Mile End Rd E1, best seeing in the world... not) and the other on
the back of a 6x4 lorry he and his students used to drive to the
Alps to get higher.

By the time I'd retired the astronomers had the James Clarke Maxwell
Telescope and various other nice systems They now have an array in
Chile high up. Higher than Mauna Kea where I used to use the old
UK Infrared Telecope.

When I started people were *just* on the edge of getting decent
hetereodyne mixers that worked at about 100 GHz. These also used a bulk
effect (in Indium Antimonide, also cooled), not a junction diode. But by
the time I 'retired' people were able to use hetereodyne methods extended
up to over 1 THz and systems had wider bandwidths, higher sensitivity, etc,
etc.

If you're interested in the more ancient/historic end, I did a few webpages
on one project that start he

http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/history...aseTheSun.html

Good fun. :-)

MM-Wave/FIR instrumentation was my day job for decades, with Hi-Fi just
a hobby. if you want a MM-Wave radar or similar I can tell you who
you can commission one from. Ditto MM-Wave ESR systems. :-)

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

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In article , Huge
writes:

Nor me, given that it's a religious issue. Cat owners are largely insane
concerning their murderous, sadistic, vermin pets.

I'm not so insane as to consider my cat to be human, whereas you
evidently are (murder = the killing of one human by another, sadistic
= an anthropomorphic concept). And they very rarely kill humans, but
beware of them learning to use can-openers, because I'm sure they've
got a list.

--
Mike Fleming

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On Sun, 05 Mar 2017 15:24:25 +0000, Don Pearce wrote:

On Sun, 05 Mar 2017 12:34:51 +0000 (GMT), Jim Lesurf
wrote:

In article , Don Pearce
wrote:

That's my take on the numbers too. The process reminds me a bit of the
nonsensical Drake equation.

Well, the *equation* is quite logical. The snag is to fill in sensible
values for the variables. :-)

There has been some progress with this in the last decade or so as we've
finally begun being able to detect and examine extra-Solar planets.
Finding 'life' is a bit harder, though. 8-]

Jim

The variables are part of the problem, but it is also quite an
ill-conditioned equation.

As for the variables themselves, it looks like planets are far more
ubiquitous than it allowed for. It seems that every star that can be
imaged has planets. I suspect that is going to be the case generally -
if there is enough "stuff" to make a star, there will be enough left
over to form planets as well.

The Drake equation started life as a well meaning attempt at *trying* to
quantify the chances of there being another suitably advanced
civilisation elsewhere in the Galaxy that we might be able to detect by
their em emissions whether incidental or targeted radiation.

To be quite frank about it, there are far too many variables missing
from that equation such as the chance of the planet being possessed of a
protective magnetic shield to prevent its parent star's stellar wind from
stripping away its atmosphere within an all too brief billion years, that
is to say, possessed of a sizeable molten iron core.

Also missing is the chance factor for a satellite of sufficient mass and
proximity to provide spin axis stabilisation and regular 'monthly' tidal
effects to help drive evolutionary development of single celled life
forms into the ever more sophisticated multicellular forms required to
evolve the creatures of 'Higher Intelligence' we ultimately desire to be
able to 'communicate with'.

That's just two additional (but extremely vital) factors which I don't
recall seeing in the original Drake Equation. What's worse is that I seem
to recall there being yet more 'vital factors' also absent from the
equation. Factors, which it turns out, after checking out wikipedia's
entries on this subject, are all described in the "Rare Earth Hypothesis".

All of this will be familiar to anyone who follows the BBC's "Horizon"
programmes and other such scientific documentaries. Over the past decade
at least, as I've learned from such documentaries in spite of the
horrible 'dumbing down' that's all too often applied, I've come to
realise that even the most pessimistic estimates for intelligent life
elsewhere in the whole universe by proponents of the Drake Equation have
been way over-optimistic in their estimates.

Quite frankly[1], I think it's a far safer bet to assume that we
represent the *only* example of intelligent life capable of technological
advancement sufficient to appreciate the very fact of its uniqueness
within the Cosmos (and the very Cosmos itself) to have ever arisen at
this point in time, if not ever at all at any time throughout the whole
period of the universe's stellariferous evolution through to its final
demise, than it is to assume that global warming is an entirely
anthropomorphic effect which we somehow have the potential to reverse.

If that is indeed the case, then it seems to me that we, as very
probably the only species in the whole of the Cosmos able to appreciate
the extreme lengths the current Universe has gone to in creating the
conditions for our very existence, ought to be taking more responsibility
in avoiding a premature extinction event of our own making.

[1] This is the second usage of the expression which first time round
only gave me a sneaking suspicion that I had made an unintended pun until
I checked out the wikipedia article on Frank's now 'famous' equation.
This time round, the pun *was* intended, how could I not resist? :-)

--
Johnny B Good

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On 06/03/2017 20:07, Huge wrote:
On 2017-03-06, Mike Fleming wrote:
In article , Huge
writes:

Nor me, given that it's a religious issue. Cat owners are largely insane
concerning their murderous, sadistic, vermin pets.

I'm not so insane as to consider my cat to be human, whereas you
evidently are

Ahh, a cat owner.


Nah, he only thinks he is, the cat owns him.

--
Graeme Wall
This account not read.

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In article ,
Mike Fleming wrote:
In article , Huge
writes:

Nor me, given that it's a religious issue. Cat owners are largely
insane concerning their murderous, sadistic, vermin pets.

I'm not so insane as to consider my cat to be human, whereas you
evidently are (murder = the killing of one human by another, sadistic
= an anthropomorphic concept). And they very rarely kill humans, but
beware of them learning to use can-openers, because I'm sure they've
got a list.

Interesting indeed that a cat is a sadistic killer when it eats a bird -
but that bird is perfectly reasonable eating worms, insects, and other
birds eggs too.

--
*Is there another word for synonym?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

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On Mon, 06 Mar 2017 19:05:41 +0000, Tim Streater wrote:

In article , Johnny B Good
wrote:

Also missing is the chance factor for a satellite of sufficient mass
and
proximity to provide spin axis stabilisation and regular 'monthly' tidal
effects to help drive evolutionary development of single celled life
forms into the ever more sophisticated multicellular forms required to
evolve the creatures of 'Higher Intelligence' we ultimately desire to be
able to 'communicate with'.

And a probable collision between the planet and another of similar size
which (a) gives rise to the satellite, (b) leaves a thin enough crust
for plate tectonics to arise and (c) by melting the entire surface in
the collision causing most of the heavy (and in particular radioactive)
metals to sink to the core, thus providing the heat source for the
liquid iron core and consequent magnetic field.

That was precisely what I was alluding to. :-) "Capture" of such a
sizeable body as the moon would have required a braking force to be
applied at just the right time, almost certainly on the order of the
"braking force" that only such a collision would have applied.

Such an event would have boiled off most of the water that had been
collected during the Earth's pre-lunar formation. It's hypothesised that
half of the water now on Earth was delivered during the late heavy
bombardment (LHB) period by icy asteroid and comet strikes.

Assuming this hypothesis is true (the LHB period is not in any doubt
since it has left ample evidence in the cratering of the Moon and Mercury
as well as other rocky bodies such as the larger asteroids and the moons
of Jupiter and Saturn), then this is yet another factor to be added to
the equation.

Yet another factor is the one where our cosy assumption that the planets
were formed where they are presently to be found has been called into
question by the preponderance of all those "Hot Jupiters" being
discovered orbiting those stars with a retinue of planetary bodies. If it
turns out that our own gas giants were formed close in to the Sun and
migrated to their present orbits, it makes the very existence and
location of the Earth in the habitable zone even more improbable.

--
Johnny B Good

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In article , Huge
writes:

On 2017-03-06, Mike Fleming wrote:
In article , Huge
writes:

Nor me, given that it's a religious issue. Cat owners are largely insane
concerning their murderous, sadistic, vermin pets.

I'm not so insane as to consider my cat to be human, whereas you
evidently are

Ahh, a cat owner.

I have been adopted by a cat.

And I notice that you snip the evidence of your insanity. They're
really not human, you know.

--
Mike Fleming