Posts by Paul A. Walker 46 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2007
I quite like DAB for the rock stations etc. I have an older car with a non-powered antenna and a small powered amplifier / splitter I got on eBay for about a tenner connects both the DAB and analogue ports on the header unit, providing a much better signal than the adhesive antenna that came with it. It works well all around the north east, and I've travelled up and down the country with reasonable success with it, although you don't half notice how crap the sound quality is even at its best when you pop a CD in!
There are two issues that are counter-intuitive. Firstly, how we all add velocities in a normal common-sense way is wrong. It is nearly enough right if you are dealing with slow things like cars or bricks but it is in fact incorrect, and the proper way to add or subtract relative speeds can be derived in a straightforward way, see Lorentz instead of Galilean transformation.
Second, the maximum speed limit (that the first point relies on as an assumption) actually falls out of the nature of spacetime - it is a fundamental parameter of our universe, in the same way as the strength of gravity or the value of the charge on an electron is.
So, sadly, you can't just strap more rockets on and keep getting faster til you break the limit.
The article says, somewhat misleadingly, that they were mammal-like. They were part of a group called mammal-like reptiles, which were ancestral to mammals. They possessed some physiological characteristics not seen in other reptile lineages, and the groups would ultimately diverge into mammals, birds, dinosaurs etc. You certainly wouldn't look at one of these critters and think it resembled a mammal.
This happened to me as a child, my uncle's business was next to the sewage works and I strayed into the sludge lagoon. It can look like solid dry mud when in warm weather but under the crust it's like quicksand. Managed to crawl out losing only one boot, but I had to ride home in the back of the pickup, and then strip and get hosed off in the yard. Golden days of childhood indeed.
...and I'm not ashamed to admit it! I did have my servers at my last place named after characters from Norse mythology, but no-one could spell so it was a problem. My routers were named after Marx brothers but after Zeppo I had to use Karl, which segued nicely into Engels, Lenin, Trotsky...
Read about this stuff in MCN - the police are tracking them down, and possibly taking their bikes off them. Now I'm not in favour of our ridiculously tight speeding laws, but the fact is that idiots like this give the rest of us motorcyclists a bad name and just give more ammunition to the groups campaigning to restrict what vehicles can do.
"Our stores have come on leaps and bounds over the last two years since we stopped paying commision to make sure that we offer impartial advice to customers."
Bollocks - its more than 2 years since the old commission structure was changed - and it was changed, not scrapped. All that guff about service team bonuses and store bonuses so you have demotivated sales staff who feel they aren't rewarded for their job and service staff who feel pressured to be selling. I know, I was there.
We weren't called Tech Guys when I worked there but we damn well had sales targets, especially when we were pushed to offer more expensive instant repairs when the shelves were empty of jobs anyway. All the best techs were eventually pushed out and replaced with cheaper part-timers anyway. Compare how many staff in a PCW are over 20 now than a few years ago.
I can definitely state that here in Newcastle area, we've been saying charver since at least the early nineties - chav was new to us much later. We always understood it to be a contraction of "chart raver" referring to the hordes of pilled up scallies that invaded the rave scene and spoiled it for everyone else.
I choose the smiley due to the obvious drug culture reference.
I can guarantee you it does happen - I used to work in a repair centre (I'll give you a clue, cheesy TV adverts) and was present when a colleague found a load of child porn on a laptop brought in for a wipe. The guy was arrested and had a house full of kiddie porn tapes. I have to say I don't feel bad that we invaded his privacy.
In my place the only ones that wear ties are managers and customer-facing sales - ie people who have to look professional and have some authority. On civvy Friday we still wear polo shirts, how much respect can you have for a manager in a football shirt or whatever?
Granted not everyone in a suit is competent (most aren't perhaps) but many companies simply don't want scruffy-looking employees and that's up to them.
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