JackC

Do you know if Langar still gets the LET this summer or is the new caravan a permanent replacement for both the 206 and the LET?

I am now utterly convinced that prolonged exposure to the wholly babble causes chronic delusional psychosis.

atheist P Pronunciation Key (th-st) n. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods. \A"the*ist\, n. [Gr. ? without god; 'a priv. + ? god: cf. F. ath['e]iste.] 1. One who disbelieves or denies the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being. 2. A godless person. [Obs.] Syn: Infidel; unbeliever. religion P Pronunciation Key (r-ljn) n. 1. a.Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe. b.A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship. 2.The life or condition of a person in a religious order. 3.A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader. 4.A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion. cretin Pronunciation Key (krtn) n. 1.A person afflicted with cretinism. 2.Slang. An idiot. [French crÅtin, from French dialectal, deformed and mentally retarded person found in certain Alpine valleys, from Vulgar Latin *christinus, Christian, human being, poor fellow, from Latin Chrstinus, Christian. See Christian.]

The reason we get trivial claims despite waivers is because the BPA probably just refers them to the insurance company. The insurance company then work out how much they expect it to cost if they fight it and lose. If the claim is for less, they pay up. They won't even take the chance. The lawyers know this and take advantage of it. Net result, insurance premiums go ballistic and everyone loses out. Every asshole who goes around with "in case of emergency, please call Claims Direct" on his lips should be tied to his lawyers and thrown down a mine shaft.

Derek, Not being a rigger and very new to the sport I don't understand. Could you explain what that means please? Where are the extra two slider stops situated, why are they needed, is plastic a problem and what happens if they aren't there? What happens if the bar tacks fail? Do PD do it better? I'm also debating PDr vs Smart and want to make as informed a decision as I can. Much appreciated.

That is not correct. Air guns, replicas and antiques are all perfectly legal in the UK. So if we examine your claim that "in the latest one-month gun turn-in amnesty, British police collected 43,000 illegal firearms...", we find that according the the Home Office web site you reference, only 6,529 illegal firearms were collected. The rest are all legal and could have been kept by their owners. Thereby implying that the 1997 UK firearms ban was the cause of this rise; contradicting the report which quite clearly states that there is no direct link. Surely you must agree to the possibility of other factors which could cause a rise in gun crime over and above the confiscation of guns from a mere 0.3% of the population? From the figures I produced earlier, less than 0.3% of the UK population had legal handguns. Whereas in the US, up to 50% of households are armed. In the US you are 5.7 time more likely to be murdered, 3 time more likely to be raped and 60 times more likely to be shot than in the UK (source) So what differences in culture do you think might mitigate the conclusions you draw from the 1997 UK ban? Since you have consistently proved your ignorance of UK culture and law, might it be that you are not qualified to answer this and therefore should not have used the UK in your argument? So now that we have established that some gun laws do work and that your oversimplified argument is wrong, why do you find it necessary to make deliberate and provocative statements like "gun laws don't work" when you know them to be incorrect? You think it's relevant to contradict reports written about the laws of culture of which you are unfamiliar, to use incomplete and erroneous information from which you derive flawed conclusions and to present these conclusions using misleading and inflammatory language? How strange.

Head Brickwall. How many times do I have to say it. Yes, this particular ban was ineffective and 60% wanted legal guns banned after Dunblane. According to this it was 20,000 but what you don't mention in your rush to prove your point is that the amnesty included air guns, antiques replicas and toys. Whoopdee doo. I feel much safer now. No. What this report is saying is that there is no short term correllation between the UK Firearms (Ammendment) Act 1997, (which if you remember, affected only 0.3% of the UK population) and the illegal use of firearms in the UK. Oh, by the way, did I mention that this was refering to the UK and not the US so that any conclusions about the ineffectiveness of US gun law from these UK statistics is invalid? What you're saying (and repeating ad nauseum) is that gun laws don't work. Period. So followed to its logical conclusion, your "gun laws don't work" idea would mean the deregulation of all firearms, ie no laws at all since they don't work anyway. So legally anybody, that means kids, drug addicts, convicted felons, anybody, could carry an AK47 anywhere they wanted, like schools, shopping malls, bars, government buildings, your house, anywhere. Either that is what you want, or it isn't. If that is what you want, then the US is in real trouble. If this is not what you want then you have to concede that some gun laws DO work, and your oversimplistic argument is wrong. But my only interest in this thread is to point out that UK gun law is irrelevant to your argument and to ask you to stop using it. Pass. Ask me one on sport. Edit: links

For christs sake. The ban wasn't effective. How could it have been? Even when they were legal, guns were like rocking horse shit. Taking away the guns that no one had isn't going to make a blind bit of difference now is it? It's like confiscating all the trees from Iceland. There are no fucking trees in iceland anyway so who gives a flying fuck of a razzoo if somebody confiscates all those pesky non-existant trees? That's why using the UK as an example is pointless. So pretty please, with sugar on top, find another dead horse to flog so I can go back to ignoring this stoopid thread.

The Firearm (Amendment) Act 1997, resulted in the confiscation of over 160,000 legally held handguns. The UK population of the time was in excess of 58 million people. Therefore, if we assume that each gun was owned by a different person, the 1997 ban on firearms affected less than 0.3% of the UK population. Evidently, any attempt to compare UK and US gun ownership/legislation is rediculous simply because the vast majority of UK citizens do not and have no desire to own a gun. Americans, on the other hand, seem to have a pathological need to armed to the teeth. Why do you suppose that is? The population density of London is estimated to be 11,652 per sq mi whereas Delaware has a population density of 401, that's 29 times less than London and yet you attempt to compare the murder rates between the two? Washington DC by comparison has a population density of 9,316 per square mile and has a murder rate of 46.2 compared to London's 3.3. Extrapolating from Delaware's population density and murder rate through Washington's, we find that for a US city with London's population density, the murder rate would be 56.8 instead of 3.3. From these figures, can I conclude that the lax gun laws in the US are the prime reason for high murder rates? No, that would be rediculous. But I can conclude that your argument is complete bollocks as I am sure you would have realised if you had bothered to even half think it through. So please stop using the UK as a shining example of how gun laws don't work because the only thing it tells anyone is that you have no idea what you are talking about.

As far as I can remember, no one at Nijmegen where the diamagnetic levitation of frogs was performed, ever claimed to have found anti-gravity. Whilst the the levitating frog experiment is not anti-gravity in the true sense, it is most definately real and is based on well known physical laws. Surely you do not dispute this?

http://www.dod.mil/releases/2003/nr20031115-0642.html

There's no doubt about it. He's gifted that way. But then arrogance and obtuseness is such a beady eyed package is bound to piss people off. I'm more pissed off with blair for being such a spineless, brown nosing useless fucking nonce to let Bush dictate the rules in our back yard. The guy's an embarrasment.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/7602147?source=Evening%20Standard I can't believe it. This fucktard wants to close down a big chunk of London for three days so that he doesn't have to deal with any protestors when he visits. Apparently he's stopping at Buckingham Palace while he's out-staying his welcome. I hope the Queen's corgis to drop a great big steaming turd in his shoes.

If god created the universe and by virtue of his omniscience, knows precisely what every consequence of his decisions will be; then it must follow that all future decisions for all elements in the universe have already been made simply by gods choice of initial conditions So if god is omniscient, there is no possibility that any choice we make has not already been pre-determined by God during creation and there can be no free-will. If we have free-will then god cannot be omniscient. A more rigid approach is taken by Dan Barker.

Or god dissapears in a puff of logic. Once you actually start to define god, you end up defining yourself into a corner. If you say god is omniscient, then either you can't have free will or you can't have god is omnibenevolent. If you define god as omnibenevolent then you can't have omniscient and/or omnipotent blah blah blah.. the list goes on. As soon as you start to limit the omni bits to get round the logical incoherence you no longer have The Almighty but merely the rather powerful or mostly good or knows alot but not everything. If you don't try to define god at all, then religion is completely pointless since you have no idea what your talking about. Which ever way you put it, I always end up with the conclusion that God is Santa Claus for adults.

Religion is to humans what sand is to an ostrich. Yep, I'm another one of the godless infidels but if I'm proved wrong when I die, I'll happily walk straight up to god and punch him in the mouth.

Any potential rider should watch this example of how not to ride a sports bike. http://www.honda-blackbird.dk/film/Specielle/pascal.mpg (56 Mb mpeg file). Most bikers can tell a few "no shit, I thought I was going to die" stories and have the scars to prove it but this takes the biscuit. Pascal (the idiot) was killed trying to break his own record a few months after this was filmed. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS!!

Polycarbonate helmets are not safe to paint, they do shatter on impact. Fibreglass, kevlar and carbon helmets are all OK.

Thanks Remster, I should have listened in my French lessons eh?

Whilst mooching about looking for bootleg copys of C`etiat Un Rendezvous, I found this. An 11 minute lap of the Peripherique du Paris. Words cannot describe how nuts this guy is. 56Mb mpeg file http://www.honda-blackbird.dk/film/Specielle/pascal.mpg

For a sports bike ridden on the limit in good conditions, if your rear wheel is still on the floor, your not braking hard enough. Rear brakes are just extra weight in that scenario. On the dirt or in slippery conditions, the front brake is less useful and it's much safer to lock a rear than to lock a front. Bikes normally only step out of line under braking if you stamp on the front anchors way too fast and loose rear grip by excessive engine braking or excessive use of the rear Jesus pedal. Even then you have to be leaning a bit to get the tail end out. To get it back in line just release the brakes and dip the clutch.

Just because something makes sense doesn't make it correct. To the biblical scholar he may well understand the biblical representation of the events at sodom and gomorrah but the bible is so contradictory in many areas that its reliability should be called into question as a historical recording of fact. If someone genuinely thinks an MRI scanner is magical then I would be pleased to explain its workings and dispel that misconception, but I doubt anyone honesly believes that. Accepting that Planck's constant just is 6.62e-34js is nowhere near the same as accepting that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, invisible, undetectable, contradictory deity just is. One is a simple number that comes out of a well defined theory. The other is the most complex being imaginable conforming to none of the physical laws that govern the rest of the universe. Talk about leap of faith! The Standard Model does very well at predicting most stuff and fails on this one point. OK, so it got that wrong but that doesn't mean that we just write the whole thing off as a foolish myth. Newtonian theories are wrong but they do very nicely for most real world applications. And I appologise for the bridge statement. Exactly, why is religion exempt from the same critical thinking? A god of the gaps. As science fills the gaps what happens to God? When I read the term "Christian science" my initial reaction was to say it was an oxymoron. But this would be incorrect. Religion is a science. It's just diabolically bad science. Religion has always tried to answer the same questions that science addresses. The origin of man, the universe etc. The difference is, science does it from empirical data and logical reasoning whereas religion just tells a good story and says believe this or go to hell. Literally.

If I remember correctly the different models are mutually exclusive. The Dirac model (read Standard Model) predicts that neutrinos have zero mass whereas the see-saw model predicts a non-zero mass and allows flavour oscillations. The solar neutrino problem is solved if neutrinos actually change flavour and there is strong evidence to support that theory. The see-saw model also predicts that a neutrino is its own antiparticle so there is a possibility that it could anihilate itself! Spontaneous self destruction if you will. I don't think they will be able to reconcile the differences between the two models but I'm not a particle physicist so I could be wrong about that.

All that proves is that Sodom and Gomorrah or someplace like it existed. It does not prove any other aspect of the Bible or God. Religion exists because people believe it. An archealogical dig may support one aspect but has bugger all to do with the rest of it. Conversely, every aspect of an MRI scanner is well understood. The analogy is flawed. Read some books on nuclear physics, vector calculus, relativity etc. and then build the machine. It does work and anyone can do it if they can be bothered to figure it out. You can physically measure all the fields and deduce the effects according to well defined rules and you don't need a god factor to make the equations work. Depends on what you mean by "faith". If you have "faith" that the theories and models predict correctly what you do know, you can be fairly confident that predictions made regarding what you don't know will be accurate within the regime that any approximations you might have made are still valid. If you mean "faith" in the biblical sense of the word then I have a bridge to sell you. Not true. The solar neutrino problem has been solved after various experiments at the Superkamiokande solar neutrino observatory in Japan. The shortfall is explained by neutrino "flavour" oscillations. The downside is that flavour oscillations are not predicted by the current Standard Model of particle physics but other models do predict this behaviour.

How about this one? Thrust SSC breaking the sound barrier in the Black Rock desert. The shockwave extends about 150ft to each side of the nose. I went to a lecture given by the chief engineer. One picture was taken from a microlight. Apparently the shockwave gave the pilot some serious trouble as it passed. At supersonic speeds, the top 6-8 inches of the desert underneath the car is actually vapourised!!