Posts by David Kirkwood

Labour candidate tweets postal votes

I've just posted mine.

and I licked the sticky flap on the inner envelope and stuck it down.

Maybe things are different here in Scotland.

Tories drop opposition to UK.gov DNA plans

Do some homework...

PR does NOT necessarily mean that only parties can stand. It had that effect last time in Scotland only because of our ludicrous "list" system for additional members.

Proper PR in fully-elected multi-member constituencies (lke our council wards) means that the genuinely liked and the least-disliked candidates are elected, not just the one that everyone voted for to keep they one they really, really didn't like out.

Texas Instruments aims lawyers at calculator hackers

@Tom 11

"Hardly one of the above posts are spelt and structured correctly!"

Should be:

"Hardly any of the above posts is spelled or structured correctly!"

Kids today, I don't know!

Engineers are troublesome 'expert loners', says prof

@The truth hurts...

I'm a real enginer too - working a lathe at nine years old, MSc in the kind of real manufacturing engineering that used to make Britain wealthy, but I've also spent twenty years in IT (so far).

The team of which I am currently a part is composed of about a dozen people with differing skills. We have just completed a software project that has been welcomed with joy by our internal customers (they're buying us drinks tomorrow) and it was finished pretty much on budget and on time. If we had procrastinated a bit until the customer really understood what he wanted we would have delivered early and under budget.

The team members met once a day for a few minutes to discuss progress and problems and then split into mainly individual teams to get the work done. We would seek each other out when help or information was needed but mostly respect each others' expertise and not interfere. The same team has now started its next project and we have actually reduced the formal contact between team members.

We have several people with technical degrees, all of us have years of practical experience - we have no MBAs. Perhaps that's why we're successful.

Greenpeace: UK gov trying to strangle wind power

Really?

It's a bit difficult to believe that the UK government isn't keen on wind power, since here in South Lanarkshire we're surrounded by turbines.

We have Europe's (once) biggest on-shore wind farm at Black Law (OK, also in North Lanarkshire and West Lothian).

Then we have Europe's biggest on-shore wind farm at Whitelee.

Now we're going to have Europe's biggest on-shore wind farm (Clyde) at Abington.

Then once Whitelee is extended it will be even bigger than Clyde, and it will be the biggest on-shore wind farm in Europe.

And that's ignoring all of the other local ones that would have been Europe's biggest on-shore wind farms just a few years ago.

Last night's election result could have given me some hope, if it wasn't for the fact that the SNP are even more keen on wind than GB is.

(Did I mention that we have lots of turbines here?)