cheers dag! yep, been away a while... love what you've done with the place!

In reply to your comment:
“Long time no see Haggis! Welcome back to the Sift.

eaglepowers, you missed one - on the final straight before the ball is released, the camera's watching the speedometer crawl towards 100km/h... and there's the music from 'Speed' in the background! (I'm a soundtrack geek, I spot these things.)

Technically, the choice of music is more than justified - the bus in 'Speed' only had to stay above a measly 50mph (80kph).

Well, I'd written a comment here, but VS is only displaying the first four lines of it, so I've edited it and put this instead.

Anyway, it was very funny and well-written and insightful. You'd have liked it.

Is there a bug in the comments system or something dag? I just tried again - same result.

Excellent documentary. Is it just me, or are a lot of peoples' paranoid fantasies coming true these last few years?

If the guy who likes to have cocaine and prostitutes together is getting worried about it, everyone else should be. http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=6078

I disagree with the message at the end though: "Even though we've just shown you that your vote counts for diddly-squat, don't forget to use it!" Here's what to do:

1) Click on the 'Go to Google Video' button at the bottom right of the video.

2) Download the Google Video Player, and download this video (a .gvp file). Open the .gvp file.

3) Let the Google Video Player download the entire film to your hard disc. You will then have a local copy. It will be in 'My Documents > My Videos > Google Videos'.

4) Change the file extension of the video from .gvi to .avi.

5) Burn a CD with the avi file, a player that can play it (e.g. VLC - http://www.videolan.org/) and the software and instructions needed to make further copies (DeepBurner is a good free CD burner - http://www.deepburner.com/).

5a) (optional) Make a pretty label saying what the CD is, and explaining how to use it.

6) Repeat step 5 a few times.

7) Give copies to everyone you know with a computer. Leave copies around your office, or school. Send copies to the press (local and national).


Whatever you do, don't let this shit happen again in 2008, or it'll become the norm, just like everything else. Where America leads, Britain all too often follows, and I don't want this country to get any more fucked up than it already is. Please?

Excellent!

Have you noticed how some of our most influential comedians are atheists? George Carlin and Ricky Gervais spring readily to mind alongside Bill Hicks and Penn & Teller. Hell, we'll throw Mark Twain in as well. And Colbert is utterly merciless - he seems to keep getting better and better.

What are your reasons for voting against this, Wumpus? If you don't mind me asking.

What's with people defending agnositicism? Damn no-good wishy-washy fence-sitting flip-floppers! At least religious fundies have the courage of their convictions (even if they would be entirely different convictions had they been born in a different place/time - go figure).

Anyway, it's reassuring to see that when these debates happen on the internet at a theologically neutral venue like VS, the atheists tend to outnumber the theists. In the Real World, the statistics would have us believe that a large majority of people believe in (a) (G/g)od(s). People who involve themselves in debates such as these tend to represent the better-educated portion of humanity, with more deeply considered opinions. That's why it would be interesting to see some statistics comparing religious belief with other social indicators.

Oh! Look what I just found: http://www.humaniststudies.org/enews/index.html?id=219&article=7

(By the way, I really don't care if I've offended anyone. Aside from the general rule that people who are easily offended need to be offended more often, I side with the Marxists when they say that religion is a symptom of a diseased society - if we could build real community here on earth, with meaningful relationships with one another, we wouldn't need to alienate ourselves by projecting our personalities onto a ruler-God. It's the 21st century people!

It's deeply patronising to suppose that the only way people can treat each other ethically is with the carrot and stick of heaven and hell. (Strictly speaking, that's not even ethical behaviour - it's non-ethical, in that questions of ethics don't arise when behaviour is self-motivated.)

But the think that REALLY gets my goat about religious people is this: YOU DON'T HAVE A RIGHT TO INDOCTRINATE YOUR KIDS. Children overwhelmingly take the faith of their parents. By failing to present them with a spectrum of possibilities (from which they can choose when they reach maturity), you are restricting their choices in life, and potentially perpetuating a set of dangerous and divisive myths. That's tantamount to abuse.)

[/rant]

Crikey. How did we get from underground nuke explosion to filling Catholic girls with spirit (boy is THAT open to misconstrual!)?

"now for one last thing, i learned most of this from the bible, the rest from my local pastor(who is spirit filled)."

Spirit filled? I'll say! And I daresay you've had a snifter or two yourself.

There's nothing free about it, ren - I don't know how much it takes to take an ad out in the Economist but I guarantee it's more than a bag of crisps.

Which leaves me asking the same question as you - what would be their possible motive to lie about this (assuming they're not just confused about what they've done)?

Stories of these kind of devices have been turning up on the internets every so often for years now, and they're usually followed by a HTTP 404 or a claim that 'the yakuza stole the technology'.

Still, this does seem like a fairly audacious move. And they're not claiming to violate the principle of conservation of energy. Strictly speaking, a windmill has a coefficient of performance > 1.0, and a century ago nuclear fission would have been thought of as free energy, just because we wouldn't have been able to explain where the energy was coming from. So I'm prepared to reserve judgment until the results come in - maybe they've found a way to tap zero point energy or something exotic like that.

An Irish company, Steorn, has been making waves with claims to have built technology that produces limitless clean energy. They have taken an ad out in The Economist, inviting sceptical people with the right qualifications to try and disprove them...

http://www.steorn.net/frontpage/Default.aspx

Either the world has just been brought back from the brink, or it's an elaborate and expensive hoax. Discuss.

Of course it's real Krupo!

yes, it is. Like the rest of London it looks much better on film than in reality.

I like the effect of the lights that come on when you enter a room then go off after a few minutes - presumably the caretakers working overnight - the building looks like it's playing Snake with itself

Where do you want to go today?

Wherever I feel like I wanna go, GOSH!

"And ok, the army is voulentairy... you join because you love your country and are willing to fight for its government. This isnt nam, all this anti-war "ooo the soldiers dont wanna be there" is a bunch of bull shit. I've even heard/ read interviews on NPR and NBC that show soldiers with no legs saying that we need to stay there and get this done so the next generation isnt doing the same thing."

I'm a former infantry officer. I have many friends who fought in Iraq. You are wrong.

Many, perhaps most, soldiers enlist because their prospects in civilian life are limited. The army offers them a chance that the rest of the world doesn't, and they take it. Some join because of the training and adventure, which they love. A miniscule minority are motivated by patriotism.

Very few soldiers, in my experience, are aware of the political environment in which wars are declared, or have an understanding of the large-scale consequences of what they do. They are told what to believe by their superiors. Then, they are trained to give certain responses in interviews. The soldiers who are unlikely to give the 'right' answers tend not to get interviewed.

joedirt is right - the only way to find out what the soldiers really think is to go out there and join them. But somehow I suspect you're not old enough to pick up a rifle yet.

Anyway, seeing as how you keep harping on about the plane bombing plot, I thought you might like to read a couple of articles about it. Then you'll understand why most people over here think it's much ado about nothing.

http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/