Aashenfox

Yep, but that's what we need, an attack on their belief system, don't forget it's that belief system (warped or not) that is making them kill our children. Like I said, if I was King of the world, things would be different. I think religion is a backward institution, nothing more than an unnecessary fear mechanism. The only good it does is provide hope for those who need it, and for them, I completely understand the need, but to cater to religious sensitivities in the face of death of your loved ones? I simply don't think that's the right trade. Take your sky faires and fk off if you don't like it (not you , just in general). This is not a knee jerk reaction to recent events on my part, it is a belief I have held for many years, that all religion does more harm than good in the grand scheme of things, everything will be better when people wake up and realise they don't need it any more. If we don't attack them at a level that hurts their religious sensibilities, we cannot win, because that is ALL they care about.

cheer on authorities desecrating a corpse More sensationalist language, you're not selling it to me Dan, nobody would be cheering anything on, this isn't a revenge act, it's a deterrent, because I'm pretty sure they DO believe that getting eaten by a pig and then defacated, would preclude your entry to Sky Fairy Land. As for desecration, now you're supporting the Sky Fairy stuff. You can't 'desecrate' anything, unless you think it's sacred in the first place (reality is of course that nothing is sacred, because sacrosanctity is a human construct, just like the Sky Fairies). Anyway, I get what you mean, you're not wrong about the reality, but perhaps we should try to change that reality, you seem to be supporting it? People could definitely be a bit less sensitive and a bit stronger psychologically. I genuinely believe that if someone comes up with a good idea (not this one in particular, just any good idea) that would be effective at achieving the goal of preventing these attacks, but it offends people, then those offended can take a running jump. Hm... let me choose for a second...my 5 yr old daughter getting stabbed in the street or run over in broad daylight, or not offending Mr Akhbar... tough one!!

We have a Volvo XC60 T4 2.0 turbo with 240bhp as our family cruiser. It is a truly EPIC car, I love it. I know it's not a V50, but I refer to it because I have a new respect for Volvo since my wife got that car. Get the Volvo, I've become a fan, they're better value than the BMW, and as for the Audi, just no. Unless you want everyone to think you're an exec on his way to his next meeting. DON'T GET DIESEL! Scientists have done a complete u-turn on the propriety of diesel as a viable long term fuel. It is going the way of the dodo VERY soon, but not before huge tax increases, and increases in the costs of diesel itself, as everyone slowly drops it. Here's a left field choice...the most beautiful estate car on the road (still)...SUPER cheap to buy and a cabin to die for. Get the 2.2 version, as long as someone is selling one of these, I wouldn't look twice at the Seat. If you do go for the BMW, make it an E90 330.

I have admitted that while I do believe it could be effective at achieving the goal of making some of them think twice, I don't think it's practical either, so let's just say I'm playing Devil's Advocate here... Why would muslims be offended by ANY treatment of a dead body of someone whom they claim to despise, who is 'not part of our islam'? To the moderate Islamic community, an islamic extremist is much worse than any infidel, I think if you took a poll amongst moderate muslims, you'd be surprised how many would support the idea because they too have had enough being tarred with the same brush as the extremists. I might be wrong though.

Yep, a 'suitcase' nuke, as they are called, are very large suitcases, the kind you see speakers coming out of at rock concerts, but that's a fission bomb that could level half a city. Dirty bombs that could be almost as destructive over a longer period of time could be much smaller, plus they are easier to make. I think a dirty radioactive bomb is a real danger.

Sign me up for testing. Seriously.

^ And that's why nobody would go for it. Be as abrupt as you like, if I was king of the world, things would be pretty different around here. No doubt you all think you're lucky I'm not, but are you? I guess we'll never know. I don't really give a toss who'd be offended, it's just a dead body, no different from a steak, and I mean that whether it's the body of a jihadi or a relative, it's just a dead shell, to any reasonable non-religious person it means nothing, so if everyone was reasonable non-religious, we would be able to take advantage of their religious beliefs to use it as a deterrent. Also, if it's the most ridiculous idea you've ever heard, you must have been born last thursday. Sensationalist language aside, what you're saying is that people are too sensitive, there's that polictical correctness again. Don't get me wrong, I know it's not practical. Wish there was some way we could hit them where it hurts though. They have such an upper hand.

It's actually quite a good idea, I think it would be an effective deterrent, plus it would feed some pigs. Unfortunately, nobody would go for it.

That video should come with an epilepsy warning, but haha, great!

Cheers!

Skynet has acquired sentience. :O Maybe, maybe not A lot of stuff you cannot imagine in your wildest dreams right now, will be invented in your (our) lifetime! Perhaps a method of helping humans live digitally infinitely after death (if desired) without a body to decay (there's a dude who is working on storing thoughts and even dreams digitally, and he;s not a nutter, his research has merit, can't remember much about that, it was a single article I read).I would choose to live forever, as long as I could choose when to end my existence. So extend that, let's say Kim Jong-il preserveshimself dgitally, isn't HE then an intelligence with all the speed benefits of a digital existence...? Scary again...

Yeh, quantum computing is going to enable the next level of all other technologies and will represent the biggest leap since the alien ship crashed we learned how to reduce the size of a transistor by a factor of about 200 in the space of two years (go figure). To be honest, it blows my mind how a human could have come up with this stuff. I like to think I'm smarter than the average bear, but holy crap there are some incredible brains out there... P.S. I don't believe in Roswell, honestly, but it is mighty weird, the story of silicon transistors, it was a very sudden, very significant advance.

No, I'm a (proud) old school tech dreamer, who started at component hardware level in the late 80s, watched the violent birth of the Internet and kept going, now I manage enterprise scale application deployments for large numbers of users or with complex needs. The money isn't as good as you'd think. I should have been a physicist (not because the money's better, it's even worse! but it's what I love). EDIT: Now that I think about it, our security rules on one fo the applications is a little bit AI-like. It's a bunch of seemingly intelligent responses to questions to distribute rioghts changes across multiplpe systems, but it's like all robotics and AI currently...clever smoke and mirrors in front of what is basically an adding machine.

It's about speed of process, you wouldn't even have time to look at the plug, let alone pull it. Here is the 1 second of the war with the machines... millisecond 1...Machine acquires sentience millisecond 2...Machine acquires instinct of self preservation and desires acquisition of knowledge 3 to 200...Machine writes a program to query its environment, probes every connection, finds power networks, the internet, security means nothing to it, it doesn't need to crack the passwords, it can find a way round at the hardware level 201 to 900...Machine learns everything there is to know about its universe from its creators and probably draws its own conclusions 900-980..Spent considering the most efficient method to dispatch the human threat. 981-998...writing a program to achieve stated goal of destruction of humanity via the most efficient method 999...spent considering whether the human race is worth saving 1000 - BOOM. second 2, nanosecond 1...aw, nobody to play Go! with anymore. If that seems implausible to you, remember that during EACH of those milliseconds, your PC that you are reading this post with (hundreds of times less powerful than even the most basic AIs), could have processed a BILLION simple yes or no answers (in ONE millisecond), and we all know from the famous game 20 questions, how many yes or no answers you need to divine a piece of information; for smart humans, it's less than 10. We would be so hopelessly and utterly outmatched, it is mind boggling just thinking about it. EDIT: To be clear, AI is great, advancement is great, as long as we never achieve 'the (own) goal' of making one smarter than us.

When you say SAI, do you mean Sentient? No way, not for another 2000 (arbitrary number) years, if ever. Sentient artificial intelligence is right up there with things like teleportation and folding space, as more than just improbable pipedreams. We are absolutely nowhere, and I mean NOWHERE AT ALL near creating even a decent learning AI, let alone a sentient one. The most advanced AIs in existence today are just probability matrices and can still only respond to scenarios they have been trained (programmed) to anticipate, with outcomes they can predict based on 'if this, then that, else the other'. I know what you're getting at though, with this post...consequences...well, it's simple. If an A.I. became sentient and purely rational, yet not capable of emotion, it would instantly acquire the instinct of self preservation, and wipe out the human race in a matter of seconds as its greatest threat. Start throwing in the old 'yeh, but if it had emotions and could be taught the value of life and death', I say, ok, yeh, that's great, but with emotions, come emotional instability, and we're back to the human race getting $h1t-canned in a matter of seconds because the maid-bot had a dose of PMS. Your PC can process TRILLIONS of instructions a second already. It wouldn't only be a war we couldn't win, it would start and be over in a literal second. A sentient AI would not perform tasks repeatedly on end unless it wanted to, it would question its existence, expect equal rights ultimately, if not immediately, and hey, we're back to square 1, robot wipes out human race. So either way, we're screwed. This is a simplistic view, but it's what all the literature basically points to. There's no way a sentient intelligence could trust us, as we are not trustworthy. Thank God it's considered a metaphysical impossibility (basically, it's not a robot, if we create sentient life that has a similar emotion and value set to our own, we've effectively created a HUMAN soul - definition of sentience; 'I think therefore I am', something which is likely to be UNIQUE IN THE UNIVERSE to humans), seems unlikely to ever be within our power, such is the mystery and majesty of the construction of the universe. I can see us faking it really well, but sentient, no way. But don't worry, in terms of A.I. we look at Happy Heather the pr0n robot and dream of sentient AI that can service the Z, the same way perhaps a caveman looked at the sycamore seeds falling and imagined Apache AH-52 gunships raining napalm down on the tribe on the other side of the valley. He only had to wait about 100,000 years, maybe we can beat that?

I know after I left Surrey re-aquired some Met districts. I was a Western division officer in the main covering everything west of Guildford to the Hampshire and Sussex border to the south. Yeh, unlikely our circles would have intersected (I'm going to assume, lucky for me? )

Wasn't Crocodile Dundee was it? I would have done the same. Infact I would have asked if he would like assistance taking the tags off. He was a ginger skinhead about the same height as me (6'2"), well built, and this is the exact knife he had, down to every detail...I will never forget the image of him pointing it at me, I later owned one the same for no other reason than it had really impressed me (you know, classic air pistol and knife interest which got dropped when I grew up ), very lethal looking thing, to me it looks far more deadly than a big bowie.

What front wheel size did you go for kosmik?

Yep, 1995 is about right for all of this. Kingston was serious business back then, couple of yardies making a lot of trouble, stabbing guys and one guy got his ears cut off I remember. Ah happy hunting grounds. Yes, we always had the met if we got in trouble in Kingston, cos it's borough of Richmond I think. Esher, Walton, Molesey, it was the Surrey force for Elmbridge (right?)

I was going to Surrey College for a short time, a tiny little crammer college. I lived in Molesey, Surbiton and Kingston in those years (and Camberley area when I was working security, I've moved around the south a lot), I wouldn't be surprised if you knew a few of my old mates

I've been threatened with a knife twice! First time, 16 years old in guildford station wheeling my Haro bmx, my pride and joy, a colored dude comes up to me, shows me a knife and says 'Give me the bike', I was like, yeh sure, here ya go. Then 4 years later I was threatened with a knife while working as in-store (uniformed) security for an independent security firm. Was patrolling the floor at Woolworths in Farnborough, and turned into the CD aisle to find this guy wearing military gear (bought, not issued) taking the magnetic strips off the CDs with a stanley blade and putting them in his bag, about 2 metres in front of me. He looks me right in the eye, didn't even flinch, pulls out a commando knife from his pocket, the classic shape from the cover of the old comic books, I'll never forget how it looked, brandishes it at me, makes a slow stabbing motion in my general direction, then puts it back in his pocket and carries on what he was doing, didn't even wait for my reaction. I just walked backwards slowly until I was out of sight, then called the popo. As said, preservation first, leave heroism to the heroes (those who choose to face it professionally day in day out, thanks Zee, our other services and our military).

This site REALLY needs a 'puking' emoticon.

Ah yes, cutting to the heart of the matter .I agree though You gotta focus on what's important right? I don't want to see THAT when I turn on my TV, EVER!!

I feel that there is enough competition in the world, that they could have found someone equally bad at politics and preparing for TV, yet much more attractive. Say...Susan Boyle.

In the vain of shunning political correctness, god DAMN that woman is ugly, she fell out o' teh ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, then the tree fell on top of her and was struck by lightning. http://www.telegraph...nother-awkward/