Is it just me...

[G.K Zhukov]

Or is the British Goverment & Unionists extremly keen on "taking on" Sinn Fein even before the case has been settled in court (ie police have finished their work)?

[Cannon_Fodder]

Originally Posted by G.K Zhukov

Or is the British Goverment & Unionists extremly keen on "taking on" Sinn Fein even before the case has been settled in court (ie police have finished their work)?

Just nuke them.

[Phang]

Originally Posted by G.K Zhukov

Or is the British Goverment & Unionists extremly keen on "taking on" Sinn Fein even before the case has been settled in court (ie police have finished their work)?

sweet christ above you're an idiot.

if the IRA are going around pillaging and murdering - grandiose language perhaps, but murders and bank robberies are not pretty things for a supposedly legitimate political party - then i see little reason why Sinn Fein should be cut any slack. They chose to cause a breakdown in relations with their actions, and regardless of the validity of their cause they've been recieving lenient treatment for far too long. I don't see why calling them on it can be even possibly construed as a bad thing here.

[Kurashima]

Yes Zhukov , it IS just you. Its almost always "Just you" , and i dont see that changing any time soon.

[Dace]

Originally Posted by Phang

if the IRA are going around pillaging and murdering - grandiose language perhaps, but murders and bank robberies are not pretty things for a supposedly legitimate political party - then i see little reason why Sinn Fein should be cut any slack. They chose to cause a breakdown in relations with their actions, and regardless of the validity of their cause they've been recieving lenient treatment for far too long. I don't see why calling them on it can be even possibly construed as a bad thing here.

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[Cannon_Fodder]

Originally Posted by Dace

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Whats your point?

[Kurashima]

Dace , stop hiding behind some west coast catholic solidarity shield and admit they are BAD MEN WHO KILL PEOPLE AND STEAL MONEY.

You dont become a good person overnight because you dont have to bomb people anymore.

[JonnyBGood]

If you've committed a crime previously you're axiomatically guilty of any crimes you're accused of at any point in the future.

[Kurashima]

Originally Posted by JonnyBGood

If you've committed a crime previously you're axiomatically guilty of any crimes you're accused of at any point in the future.

Thats needlessly defensive of career criminals such as those within the lower and higher echelons of the paramilitaries in Ireland, and as someone with first hand experience of the troubles, I truly expected a less "Noddish" response Mr B Good.

[Proxi]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Thats needlessly defensive of career criminals such as those within the lower and higher echelons of the paramilitaries in Ireland, and as someone with first hand experience of the troubles, I truly expected a less "Noddish" response Mr B Good.

That still does't mean that said paramilitary organisation is guilty of the crime that they are being accused of. Thats the only relative thing here, because thats whats endangering the peace process.

I think we all know the upper echelons of both sides are evil ****s

[Kurashima]

Originally Posted by veX

That still does't mean that said paramilitary organisation is guilty of the crime that they are being accused of. Thats the only relative thing here, because thats whats endangering the peace process.

I think we all know the upper echelons of both sides are evil ****s

Your point is based on Devils Advocate - Making an argument for the sake of making an argument. If the evidence gathered by the police says "It was the IRA". theres a good chance the Police are right. Said paramilitary outfit are widely acknowledged as the main source of crime in Ireland in many areas, and the chances of an international criminal gang pulling off a heist of that magnitude, in their territory, with that degree of organisation, and them knowing ABSOLOUTELY NOT A ****ING THING ABOUT IT, is just a little beyond believable.

[Proxi]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

If the evidence gathered by the police says "It was the IRA"

I think dace wins this thread.

But yes i did read your whole post, and you raised a good point, but dont you think its possible that it might not have been the IRA? What about paramilitaries from the other side?
As far as i am aware, none of the outfits over here have ever been involved in anything like this before, so why now at a time when actual progress might be made*?




*Although of course im not naive enough to rule out greed altogeather

[Kurashima]

Originally Posted by veX

I think dace wins this thread.

But yes i did read your whole post, and you raised a good point, but dont you think its possible that it might not have been the IRA? What about paramilitaries from the other side?
As far as i am aware, none of the outfits over here have ever been involved in anything like this before, so why now at a time when actual progress might be made*?




*Although of course im not naive enough to rule out greed altogeather

The level of organisation
The involvement of a large number of suspects
The network to hide £26 million worth of funds somewhere in Ireland for a long period without anyone knowing.
The ability to silence anyone who does know

Remember, when they were fighting, they could get funding from the US and UK from people sympathetic to their cause. With no fight on anymore, theyve had to get their funding from somewhere. Drug Dealing, extortion, prostitution, when youve got a paramilitary network capable of carrying out co-ordinated strikes against a much larger army, they dont just go back to their day jobs when the "War" ends. Theyve got guns, money, and they probably enjoy their position of power.

Why should they want to change?

[Proxi]

Admittedly I hadn't fully thought through the huge level of organization required for this heist (hiding the money for example). I know that the IRA is probably the most capable of all the paramilitaries and therefore the most likely suspect, but i'd still rather wait until at least some evidence was gathered to prove/indicate their involvement before pointing fingers.

You still havn't adressed the fact that it could have been the UDA for example, and no-one else does. Surely they are close to capable of being able to perform a heist such as this? Why has no-one accused them?

[Cannon_Fodder]

i could have hidden £26 million in my dorm room and noone would know.

[Proxi]

Originally Posted by sniborp

i could have hidden £26 million in my dorm room and noone would know.

Bloke: " Why are you carrying 24 bulging bags? You want a hand with those mate?"
sniborp: "Er no! Dont look in the bag! Your eyes will fall out! Bet you!"
Bloke: "Whats inside?"
sniborp: "Well Topman had a sale on..."

[flapjack]

should we call the cops now, or do we call them after someone stumbles onto the body?

[Cannon_Fodder]

every other week i take two big bags of dirty clothes home for washing and bring them home, noone ever even looks at my bag....

[Proxi]

If you could carry £26 million in two "big" bags, all in £50 notes and smaller demoniation, id like to borrow the device thats lets you compress time and space please. Id have me a tardis-like bedroom*







*shagpad

[flapjack]

you don't really need to compress time and space, that's way to clumsy. Do you know what could all happen if you compress space alone...

You're probably best off just having a pocket dimension in your bag, it'll fit a lot more and it won't be as clumsy, not to mention it'd only weigh as much as the equipment needed to keep a portal into the pocket dimension open, so you could stuff your house into and then walk away

[Yahwe]

sinn fein caused the end of the northern ireland assembly long before they were implemented in these thefts.

they lost all credibility then. the present stories are of no concern

[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Thats needlessly defensive of career criminals such as those within the lower and higher echelons of the paramilitaries in Ireland, and as someone with first hand experience of the troubles, I truly expected a less "Noddish" response Mr B Good.

Most of the newer ranks in Sinn Fein have little to no intention in any non-constitutional solution to the problems in Northern Ireland.


PS That's an unbelievably simplistic statement you've just made there yahwe so I'm going to pretend you just didn't bother elaborating because you were bored.

[MrL_JaKiri]

Originally Posted by flapjack

you don't really need to compress time and space, that's way to clumsy. Do you know what could all happen if you compress space alone...

Space and time are, for all intents and purposes, merely facets of the same basic thing. To say one is distorting space without distorting time is a meaningless and pointless suggestion.

Of course, it hasn't always been this way. As is common in this sort of thing, it was Einstein who postulated, or at least found a justifcation for, the similarities between the two sets of dimensions. Previous to the turn of the century, by and large people were still running on the Newtonian dynamics, which allows, and indeed suggests, an utterly relative concept of "space" (having said that, the real proponent of inabsolute space was Galileo, as Newton still, at least with some readings, believed in the concept of an absolute measuring system, or aether, which we have known for quite some time is not the case. Galileo is, of course, more famous for things like the invariability of gravitational acceleration with changes in mass, and developing Copernicus's systems) whilst time remained an absolute body. Change space all you like, and one second here will always be identical to one second elsewhere.

The beginning of the end for this point of view was signalled when the Michaelson-Moreley experiment was devised. Get yourself a lightsource. Split a beam of light into two, one moving at least partially perpendicularly to the other, and track when they arrive at a commonly distant, and specifically common, destination. As they found, it will take exactly the same amount of time either way; hence the speed of light must be invariant (if it weren't, then gravity would have had some effect).

If you assume that the speed of light is invarient for all observers, which has been shown to be true, then everything else falls into place. The Lorentz Transformations can be derived mathematically from this basic premise. E=mc^2, and the rest of Special Relativity, of course follows naturally.

As to does the concept of space time, although really it was only fleshed out to its current degree by the work Einstein did some 10 years later on the nature of gravity, a work known as General Relativity. GR plugged many holes in SR (most notably dealing much more comfortably with the Twins Paradox), and was generally taken to have replaced Newtonian Gravity as the paradigm when Lord Rutherford proved, during a solar eclipse, that light from stars "behind" the sun was indeed bent by an amount predicted by Einstein's mathematics.

However, GR has too run into problems. Quantum Mechanics has predicted, and found, the existance of a sea, a fuzz, a foam, of virtual particles popping into and out of existance out of ambient energy. Whilst this may not seem that much of a problem, mathematically it creates a nightmare. This, moreso than any other singular problem, is the driving impetus behind modern so-called "Theories of Everything"; some, such as M-Theory, are attempts to derive physical laws from axioms, to have an answer beyond the weak anthropic principle for those who question why the universe is so perfectly suited for life to occur.

Those of you not familiar with Blue Skies research may believe that this doesn't really affect anyone outside academia; this is, of course, not the case. To talk of a practical example, computer chips are starting to be produced at scales where the behavior becomes significantly affected by the whims of Quantum Mechanics. Getting faster and faster, and smaller and smaller, just doesn't work any more, although given that Intel were always more concerned with brute force than AMD, and that all the recent Intel desktop chip designs have been shite, the only real affect has probably been one of cost, as failure rates are higher when the performance is less easily predicted. However, I can't say this with any degree of certainty, as I don't really know enough about the mechanics of chip manufacturing, and the directions of the companies in question, to really say.

Hopefully, the jump to quantum computers will come sooner, rather than later, but nowadays it can be said of so many technological advances (fusion power, room temperature superconductors (something that would have an amazing affect on computer chips), improved techniques for genetic engineering, that kind of thing) it seems rather pointless to single out one area beyond others. Unfortunately, we're also talking about the kind of advances that come from Blue Skies research, and, given the rise of the "targets" in scientific research, less and less is being done, or at least being funded. Many in the scientific sector oppose this. I know I do, and, whilst I can understand the concern that, in a time when research is getting more and more specialised and expensive, money is not wasted, it rather breaks from the pure ideal of science, the gathering of knowledge, and turns it into a meer exercise in profiteering.

That seems to be the way of things though; results, and specifically short term results, are the targets in all walks of life, and particularly politics. I would probably say that it's a combination between the rise in sensationalism in the gutter press and the rise of Thatcherism in the major political parties. No longer is there room, it seems, for educated English gentlemen to gain a seat in the Commons after a lifetime of learning or craft. Now the tendency is to have a purely political animal, reared for the purpose since the end of the teenage years, as the footsoldier on the floor in Westminster Palace. Whether this is a result mainly of the increase in specialisation that all proffessions have seen over the past few decades is largely immaterial; the nature of politics now appears to be one where ministers have no control over their departments, and merely obey edicts handed down from on high, with the whips controlling the voting in the house more and more, and toeing the party line and todying to the upper echelons being the ways to success.

I may be being cynical, of course. It could merely be coincidence that there have been no major policy shifts in any department independent of the work of number 10. At the very least it seems likely that Blair is choosing the replacements for the increasingly turned over cabinet positions based on a similar idealogical stance to the party line and their predecessor, which certainly seems sensible in some ways, but also removes the possibility for a talented individual to achieve any kind of lasting effect on the world if they are not the Premier, or, at the very least, the Chancellor.

If only the whole world weren't going this way; whilst every generation has a tendency to look back on the past and see a golden age, this truly is a worrying time.

[Cannon_Fodder]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

*Shriek* Long post.... *Shriek*

My god, i actually understood what you said. Maybe Astrophysics wasnt so crap

[G.K Zhukov]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Your point is based on Devils Advocate - Making an argument for the sake of making an argument. If the evidence gathered by the police says "It was the IRA". theres a good chance the Police are right. Said paramilitary outfit are widely acknowledged as the main source of crime in Ireland in many areas, and the chances of an international criminal gang pulling off a heist of that magnitude, in their territory, with that degree of organisation, and them knowing ABSOLOUTELY NOT A ****ING THING ABOUT IT, is just a little beyond believable.

A report published on behalf of the british goverment a few months ago said otherwise.
The report said that several unionist paramilitarty organisaitions are far deeper involved in crime than Provisional IRA.

Im not saying PIRA havent done it, as you say, it clearly looks like their a prime suspect.
But I have always belived in killing the bear before selling the fur.

[Boogster]

Originally Posted by Kurashima

Dace , stop hiding behind some west coast catholic solidarity shield and admit they are BAD MEN WHO KILL PEOPLE AND STEAL MONEY.

You dont become a good person overnight because you dont have to bomb people anymore.

[Boogster]

Originally Posted by MrL_JaKiri

[Very Important Stuff]

From time and space to the machinery of parliament. Brilliant.