Apech

Money for old rope?

Can I borrow your rope?

OSX El Capitan is ok but Yosemite was rubbish. Apple as you say have lost their sheen. Used to be very reliable and worked for everything. But I think I would still buy a new one if I had to because I've experienced Windows 8, 8.1 and even 10 which is still crap.

Aliens: Greetings earthmen. Mankind: Oh hi! Like your spaceship! Aliens: Yes we flew half way across the Galaxy to your tiny planet. Mankind: That's nice - what you going to do now? Aliens: Cut some big stones and pile them up into a pointy thing. Mankind: Oh! Well ....

I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that there were skills from earlier times - and the more ancient dating of the older and superior stone work. It's well established that sacred architecture is placed on earlier sites - so no problem with the sites of sphinx and pyramids being much earlier in line with the Egyptians own timescales. So happy with all that - or at least open to it as a possibility. Given the size and number of stars with planets in the universe it is more likely than not that life elsewhere exists and also more advanced than us. have they visited? what's the evidence? if it was frequent there should be hard and fast evidence surely which there isn't.

I met Denys Stocks when he was working at Manchester University Museum he had reproduced the Egyptian method of using tubular copper drills to work hard stone. He also convincingly showed that did have the necessary skills and equipment for large scale projects and the site survey and so on. Nothing magical or alien required. Graham Hancock (while being rather hopelessly inaccurate in the Fingerprints of the Gods) reached the conclusion also that alien involvement in pyramid construction is not indicated or necessary to explain what they did. So for once main stream Egyptology and alternative history concur.

I don't wish to draw attention to how bad it is when a man needs to go on the internet to discover his partners birthday. I think we should move on without mentioning it.

Live long and prosper, Mrs. Spoke.

Slightly unpleasant ... but all the same best wishes to you.

Islamist is a made up word which is more or less meaningless. Islam is a world religion of about (I think) 1.6 billion people. You said we are at war with Islam - so you need to explain what you mean before I can either agree or disagree with you. Otherwise it's as meaningless as 'war on terror' ... or even worse according to Hollande after Paris and the Belgian PM (who may or may not be called Plastique Bertrand) just 'we are at war' ... without even saying with whom.

That's not a war on Islam either.

that's not a war on Islam.

War with Islam - how do you see that working? What's the strategy?

I completely agree that the Isis high commend (wherever they are) should be taken out. Given there only 20 - 30,000 ISIS soldiers (we are told) and we hopefully know by now how they operate, how they fund themselves and so on - I am fairly confident that the combined forces of Nato and (possibly) Russia could destroy them in about two weeks. The anaesthetic of political correctness is part of the problem - but really what makes you think this would be any different in or out of Europe. Your Brexit solution is no solution.

Yes exactly I agree. The EU has been hopeless over this - that is exactly what I was saying - not sure why you felt the need to repeat.

I hate to point out the obvious Karl, but these bombers were not new immigrants. The London bombers were from Bradford were they not? So you are conflating two different issues. I agree the immigrant/refugee crisis has been an utter clusterfuck from beginning to end by the way. But for me its not an in/out Brexit deal breaker.

As regards the geocentric model - in a relative sense for an observer on the surface of the earth you see the stars and planets moving in arcs around you. From your point of view you are the still point of observation and so you have a geocentric frame of reference experientially. What was convincing about the Copernican model was not the fact of putting the sun at the centre so much as the way in which it simplified the planetary orbits in comparison say to the Ptolemy model with large circles and small circles and so on - and allowed eventually for the simple laws of newtonian physics to be applied to the solar system. The idea that the sun is a fixed centre is also not correct as we now know. However what we do know is that none of these objects is flat. Unless you think that all the laws of physics are a giant conspiracy then it is impossible for them to be disks.

He's toast.

Did I say toast - obviously I meant taoist ....

We are toast.

Whoever you vote for the Government gets in.

Balanced half way between two equally unctuous individuals.

We are dust.