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IRcutekitten

Listed below are comments made by IRcutekitten between Friday, 25th September 2009 and Saturday, 31st October 2009.

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Nutt gets the sack 5:43pm on 31 Oct 2009 306. At 5:04pm on 31 Oct 2009, MrWonderfulReality,

You basically hit the nail on the head in your first sentence, and then went off on a wild tangent.

"The argument that Professor Nutt has put is backed by scientific research & evidence and is correct".

There you have it. End of debate. He was there as a SCIENTIFIC adviser. Not as a political adviser. He was doing his job. He was "sacked" for doing his job properly and telling the truth!

Still, the rest of your post seems to be filled with nonsense about this being PC liberalism or something. It isn't. It's called being realistic. That's just how science is, it doesn't chase political leanings all too readily, it deals with reality, and empirical evidence. Alcohol is, in fact, dangerous. Cannabis is, in fact, less dangerous. All things carry risk. You can moan about these facts all you want, it won't make them any less true.

This isn't a matter of whether certain drugs should be legalised or not; it's a matter of whether we should have policy based upon reality and proper scientific inquiry, or upon the dream-world that politicians seem to think exists up in their ivory towers.
Is primary education threatened by authoritarianism? 3:12pm on 19 Oct 2009 re 118. JadedJean:

It's not that i've missed your point. However, it's not just a matter of nature (genetics), it's also a matter of nurture, especially the values which are passed on from parent to child. Just as a christian parent is likely to raise their child to be a christian, and a muslim parent may raise their child to be muslim, so might a chav parent raise their child to be a chav. This is basically what Richard Dawkins (in "The Selfish Gene") called a "meme". In particular, the more children the parent has, the faster the meme spreads throughout society.

I'm not denying that genetics will come into it. Of course it will. However, having a subculture of being deliberately stupid (cuz bein smart aint cool) and living on handouts from the state isn't good for society.
Is primary education threatened by authoritarianism? 01:08am on 19 Oct 2009 It's not necessarily all down to genetics; it's as much to do with a cultural shift. There's the chav/benefit class culture in particular, which is an "underclass" which is (generally) unemployable, but breeds like crazy in comparison with the middle and upper classes. Their children aren't encouraged in school by their parents, many of their kids emerge with no qualifications at all (despite the best efforts of the education system - they could be going to a top local school where many kids get A*s and still end up at the bottom of the class), and in many cases end up just as unemployable as their parents. Thus, over the generations, this culture increases in size, resulting in a dumbing down. Their actual genetics might not prevent them from having high intelligence, but the culture does.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, there's a "geek" culture. These people tend to be highly employable, and their kids tend to be top of the class. However, they are far less likely to have multiple children, if any. They're far more likely to end up being well-off but single. This mostly applies to the "western world", since in other parts of the world, those in this culture are likely to be subject to an arranged marriage.

If you need some evidence on why this is, compare the number of men vs women studying university Computing, or Physics, or Engineering, against the numbers in Psychology or Sociology. This isn't because women are in any way prevented from studying "hard science" type subjects, either, or that men are prevented from taking social sciences. There are other, far more complex issues involved there.

So, this can all happen without bringing genetic limits on intelligence into it - one culture encourages education but has no kids, the other culture has tons of kids but don't encourage education. The effects of liberal/concervativism are lower than you'd expect, it's not necessarily a problem caused by some political power, it's more of a fundamental problem with geek/chav cultures. To solve this, you need to make some massive changes to both, very different, cultures.

Eventually you'll hit issues with genetics, of course - some kids WILL have poor genetics preventing them from learning, and inevitably fall into the chav culture.
British games: Small is beautiful? 10:11pm on 17 Oct 2009 I agree with knowles2. The low-cost of these games is due to the fact that the iphone, and its competitors, simply don't have the capacity to run games with cutting-edge graphics, or those which take up outrageous amounts of disc space (many modern games are Gigabytes in size). There's also the size of the screen to consider - you're not playing on a 20" TV.

Because of this, you can spend a lot less on development in order to be competitive - the sheer costs involved in developing a game with ultra-realistic, 3D graphics are prohibitively expensive for a small company, whereas a cheap background made in MS Paint over a lunch break is far less expensive.

And I'll agree that we're nearing the limits now on how much the ultra-realistic will cost, mostly because there's a limit on how much people will pay. On the subject of engines, take a look at the Source engine. It'll be very difficult to develop anything better. There's player-made mods available, showing that it's at least possible to produce games cheaply, but it still costs money to produce new graphics and things.

The difficulty is in creating new content. Not just designing it, but also the costs of testing can be expensive, unless you happen to have a huge volunteer army to do it.
Top G-man in Phishing scam 5:08pm on 09 Oct 2009 @7 and 8,
All good points, however, having worked in tech support before, I can assure you that half the problem here is that those most likely to get caught out by these scams are people who don't understand what an operating system is, or an email client, or a web browser, and have no clue what a URL or IP address is. To them, they click the blue-circular button for the internet, and the envelope for email. They certainly don't have a clue how to set up their email client to disable HTML.

Therein lies the problem - too many clueless people on the internet. While some will benefit from education - an ECDL course or something similar may at least vaguely help them get up to speed, many of them are too far beyond help, and ought to be banned from the internet for their own financial safety.
Broadband Britain - how far down the league? 8:57pm on 01 Oct 2009 We're in 31st place.

It's a matter of quality over quantity. You could have the entire country wired up with a 1MB connection, even if those using it rarely get half that, and still call it "broadband". This seems to be one of the goals of the digital britain report; to subsidize the installation of out-of-date equipment in order to get a few more people some basic network connectivity, and get us further up these results tables in order to meet an arbitrary target.

Meanwhile, over in Sweden, they're getting speeds over 100 times as fast, and almost doubling every 6 months. This is because they're not deploying out-of-date rubbish, and they don't have BT slowing everything down by waiting for more money from the government before doing anything, effectively holding the entire nation to ransom.
Revealed: The minister who 'wasted' millions 5:41pm on 01 Oct 2009 @51 " I'm not in the least bit surprised by this revelation. But what completely floors me is the idea that this "research" costs MILLIONS! Why on earth does it cost so much, just to get a few academics to look over some data and give their opinion?"

In this case, it's probably because more than 25 schools were involved in gathering this project. £6M divided by 25 schools, that's about £240,000 per school over a 6 year project, or £40,000 per year, per school.

Which, needless to say, isn't much when it comes to an individual school's budget - it's only enough to pay for 2 teachers at most, or perhaps a new computer lab.
Revealed: The minister who 'wasted' millions 1:55pm on 01 Oct 2009 @46; "well the timing and motives of academics naming and shaming Ministers is worth questioning altho chances are the Minister either was wrongly more optimistic about the likely results than these academics [which might have meant their concerns on sample sizes were less valid] or was poorly advised, or had been given conflicting evidence, or he followed an ideology or political judgement because the evidence presented was either not understood or not presented well or because that was his decision - many people forget that a large part of the population dont have as much as a maths GCSE."

There's a word for that. Incompetence. He was clearly given adequate advise on this, but chose to completely ignore it. If he doesn't understand basic maths, he shouldn't be allowed to spend millions.

"what we do know is that these academics claim after the event to have had a clear view at the time that proceeding would have been a waste of considerable public funds, but, indicate that, rather astonishingly, they did not follow up to see what happened as a result of a substantive piece of work they had carried out."

Because that really wasn't their job. They're just regretting not doing so because it costed them (as tax payers) money.

"If any expert provides their expert advice to a non-expert client, in a technical report, it is a complete failure on the expert's part if they fail to make sure the client understands the implications and acts on them, at the very least the expert should make sure they do understand why the client has chosen not to take account of their view, if that is the case. Where the expert is fully aware that £millions of the client's money [in this case the govt's and taxpayers] is at stake, it indicates a total disregard by the expert for the well being of the client."

No, it's a complete failure on the client's part for basically not being literate. Not everything can be dumbed down to levels that any idiot can understand.

If a technical report is what's asked for, and if the client is too stupid to understand it, that's their problem, the expert has done his job and can expect to be paid as such. If they wanted something other than a technical report, they should've asked.

If the client ignores the expert's advise, the expert has no need to worry about the well-being of the client.
Lily unites musicians against file-sharing 6:03pm on 25 Sep 2009 Ermm, no. Just no. No amount of "support" from musicians is going to help Mandelson here, he needs... how shall we put this... a clue.

Seriously, what good is IT advice from a bunch of recording industry bods? Getting IT advise from Lily Allen is like getting financial advice from the spice girls! After all, they have lots of money, right!?

What's needed is a level of specialist knowledge probably possessed by less than 1000 people in this country. These are the network engineers and programmers who are able to say, with absolute certainty, whether these plans can, or ever will, work. No number of musical artists can, or will, provide this.

Note that it's never been done anywhere in the world, ever, except perhaps on a very small scale (think a select few schools/colleges/places of work) and so they'll be working mostly from scratch. What's more, they'll KNOW the system they're implementing is potentially dangerous, since that which can block and cut off customers using bittorrent on a national level can do the same for bank websites and ebay.

Until Mandelson realizes this, he's just wasting everyone's time. Oh, what, did he think it was all going to happen by magic?
Will you pay for a Digital Britain? 09:16am on 25 Sep 2009 50p per month for fibre? Bargain. Unfortunately, it does seem too little too late. First, I doubt that 50p per month will be enough, considering the amount of work it'd take to lay the fiber on a national scale. Secondly, this roll-out should have started 4 or 5 years ago, when youtube was launched, it's not the sort of thing that gets done overnight.

Now for the really bad news; the rest of the world isn't going to stand still on the issue, they don't all have a broken privatisation model wereby 1 company (BT) has a complete monopoly on all land lines, and another (virgin) has a complete monopoly on all cable. There's the real problem - a privatised model without competition, to force prices down and service up.

With this in mind, it's starting to look inevitable that Britain's telecoms infrastructure is going to be looking 3rd world by 2012, just in time for the olympics for all the world to see. Just don't mention the power cuts we're going to have thanks to private industry not building a new nuclear plant in the last 20 years. But hey, at least we have a water supply... oh wait, water shortages every year. damn. And a broken financial system. This country's on its last legs, time for a ticket out of here... gonna have to start learning swedish i guess.

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