Posts by Jimbo 6 343 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009
The IRA never, ever, EVER used radio-controlled explosive devices (because of the possibility of interference): always timers, or cables.
Which made the SAS claim that they pumped scores of bullets into the Gibraltar 3 in cold blood because "we suspected they had a radio-control detonator in their pocket" just an obvious bit of BS to justify extra-judicial assassinations to the News-At-Ten public. Plus ca change...
Well no, actually. Hate to jump to BT's defence but this is obviously a ban on changing anything that *is happily working*. Things that are *broken* are to be fixed as normal. (When the strike is on, nothing will get worked on, broken or not !)
Boffin icon, cos it's not rocket science, people.
You're saying that John is some intellectual snob ? Is it too much to expect that people have even a basic knowledge of the world they live on (i.e. that tides are caused by the moon, and therefore don't run to a daily timetable, with none on Sundays) ?
I suppose I'm an intellectual snob too then, for my opinion that anyone who goes to an outdoor event in Scotland, but takes no precautions lest it *rains* or even *gets a tad nippy later*, is a twunt of the highest ordure.
You must have missed yesterday's story about Robert Napper. His *own mum* rang the police and told them he'd confessed to rape, and they did absolutely nothing.
Given that level of, ahem, dedication, there's just two chances that they'll go speeding to investigate a workplace lottery: fat, and slim.
I'm sure it was, but seeing as the news wasn't put in "Hello !" magazine, most of the people who actually worry about their BMI are woefully ignorant of that fact (and probably many other facts too). "It's a mathematical equation - with a square in it ! - so it MUST be scientific !"
(Ditto the 'Bradford Factor' beloved of Human Resource oxygen-stealers everywhere)
/rant
I'm going to launch a 500 gigaton thermonuclear weapon into the Sun, send it nova, and take out the whole Solar System !
Please come and get me coppers... I'll happily pay a £300 fine if you can get a jury to take that as a credible terrorist threat.
Not AC, for obvious reasons.
I'd agree with your comment if you didn't take the chance to indulge in a little light racism.
Let's face it, Government departments based in England are hardly paragons of efficiency and respect for customers, but I don't tell them to get back to the marshes of northern Germany whence they came, and take their sausage-scoffing royal family too.
...it's not just the UK that has an appalling education system !
Mind you Nu Labour is obviously just a front for hardline Moscow Marxists, so hardly surprising that our kids general knowledge is on a par with Siberian peasants. (Or is it the other way round ?)
Mine's the one with a copy of the Daily Heil !
Is that just a nom-de-plume - you're actually a Polic3man ?
What's the chance that we'd have ever heard about this if El Reg hadn't published ? Sounds as if Gwentplod weren't even aware that they had sent it to the wrong person until they were advisd by El Reg, which suggests that they send confidential data in an unsecure manner *all the time*. I seriously doubt "the IT systems would have been adjusted" in any way, or have been even now.
Gwent Police : redefining the word EPICFAIL.
Paris, cos even she has more of a clue when it comes to not revealing secrets to the world.
A: "he was pressure-washing his driveway". Unless he has a serious case of Obsessive Compulsive regarding his driveway, he's probably not doing that for more than half an hour a week. A lot of people do leave their garage door open if they are, say, working in the garage or running a hosepipe out of it - it doesn't mean they make a habit of it.
(Caveat : although I hate Google nearly as much as my ex-wife, there is still only a 'correlation', not proven cause-and-effect)
Slightly off-topic, but analogous :
Several years ago the UK Gov't made steps towards having mandatory life sentences for carrying a loaded gun. IIRC this was opposed by the police on the (quite reasonable) grounds that as there would be no difference in sentencing terms, between having a weapon and committing murder, perps would have no disincentive to opening fire, rather than just waving a weapon threateningly.
The anonymous grammar pedant was correct. An acronym is when initial letters of the phrase form a new word, such as 'laser', or mimic an existing word, e.g. 'AIDS'.
An abbreviation *can* be a shortened version of one word, such as 'Dr', but also means reducing several words to their initial letters, such as U.S.A.
So, as it is pronounced Arr-Tee-Eff-Emm, not 'Rutfum', it is NOT an acronym.
Ah-thankyou.
...one of my mates, anytime he got a sales call, would always say "hold on, I'll pass you over to the householder" and then put his three-year-old son on the line, who would just say "Hello ! Hello ! Hello !" repeatedly (as toddlers do). Worked a treat and gave him a laugh at the same time.
‘ "Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries," Mitloehner says’
Really ??? Not according to other scientists...
“Most of the cereal production in the United States, Canada, Russian Federation and Australia ... is used to feed livestock which are used for dairy products, eggs or slaughtered for meat. This process of creating food is highly inefficient...the efficiency of animals to assimilate food energy is less than 10 %. In fact, it takes about 16 kg of grain and soybeans to produce 1 kg of edible beef. “ (Source : http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kagan/phy367/P367_articles/Agriculture/210-4-4-3.html )
So, let’s assume that the 350 million Americans all eat meat all the time (a reasonable assumption, I’d say). If they all went veggie, the amount of grain/soy freed up would feed 16 x 350 million people = 5.6 billion (fairly close to the current world population).
Therefore, my conclusion is that there aren’t “too many people on the planet” (as the ‘maximum population’ axegrinders allege). The problem is, there are too many Americans.
(Ok – “people living an Americanised lifestyle”, which includes most of us Brits and Yurpeans.)
Use that spare cash to buy some gold, and bury it on a Welsh mountain. That stops you having problems when the banknotes get withdrawn and irredeemable, as they do about every 10 years in the UK (some of my gold coins have Napoleon III on them, but they're still as good as cash !)
Mine's the one with the quarter Krugerrands sewn into the lining
There's no explanation of how the survey is done (presumably - as it is carried out by the BARB - it involves a sample of people manually recording their watched programs, rather than being recorded centrally through feedback from their digi-boxes). Given that 1000 people is usually considered a representative sample of the 60 million people in the UK, and the population of Wales is approximately 5% of that total, and the number of Cymry Cymraeg* is around 20% of that, this conclusion might well be extrapolated from only 10 people's responses.
I also note that the original article does state that "A zero rating means...watched by fewer than 1,000 people" - so to extrapolate the other way, it's the same level of popularity as a BBC2 arts program that's watched by <100,000 people across the UK. Probably not, in fact, zero.
*That's Welsh-speaking Welsh people to you Saxons
Flames, cos we likes our real fires, us.
...one of those lovely buzzwords isn’t it ? It smacks of democracy, power to the people, two fingers to Big Brother, isn’t decentralisation just great ?
The railways were decentralised to start with, that’s why they all used different track gauges, and each company’s trains couldn’t run on another company’s tracks. How their passengers *adored* having to change trains in the pouring rain ! Eventually the train companies realised that such a ‘choice’ was a pile of cobblers : in order for anyone to get anywhere efficiently, they all had to agree on a national standard track width (and on the continent, inter-national standards).
This is effectively the way that IT was implemented in the NHS for a number of years : every local area bought their own system – who cared if the NHS in the next city used something completely incompatible ? Why would a hospital in, say, Manchester *ever* want to access the health record for a person who lived in Liverpool ? Eventually some bright spark realised that there had to be a national standards to allow data to be transferred, or we may as well stick with typewriters/liquid paper/envelopes/stamps, and people dying unnecessarily in A&E because their medical records are in filing cabinets at their GPs (which are 100 miles away, and closed til Monday morning).
So now the bright sparks in the Tory party want to roll back that centralisation, on the grounds that NPfIT has – gasp ! - cost *some money* (£12 billion over 10 years – a whole £20 per UK citizen per year ! What an absolute fortune !!!). This is nothing but political point-scoring that flies in the face of any technical logic. Which is, of course, what we pay politicians for...business as freakin' usual in the sinking ship SS Great Britain.
Mine's the one with the passport.
...doesn't have at least a day's cash in their wallet in case their bank's pooters fail ?
Oh yeah, I live in the UK. I'm surrounded by early-adopters who expect every bit of technology to work all the time, and are also paranoid they'll get mugged if they have more than 50p on them.
Paris, cos when she goes down, it'll last 10 minutes at most.
...that statement by The Committee flies in the face of the whole principle of centralised spending. "Why should my taxes pay for (e.g.) ambulances for people who live 50 miles from a hospital, when I only live 1 mile away ?" And it's not people living in huge country mansions, AnonCoward#2 - I come from a fairly piddling town in the middle of nowhere, most of my former school mates are either unemployed or doing crap factory/supermarket jobs AND having to put up with dial-up when they get home...
One thing mentioned in the headline but not in the article though, is that this is a regressive tax (like any flat-rate charge such as the Poll Tax, or the TV licence fee) : progressive = richer you are, the more % you pay ; regressive = richer you are, the less % you pay. Regressive tax is BAD, mmm'kay.
...this scam was actually pioneered by the great Frank Abagnale (as played by DiCaprio in "Catch Me If You Can"), he would (using suitably euphemistic terms for the era) advertise kiddy-pr0n and then send return cheques from a similarly incriminatng-sounding company. I heard him tell this story in an interview and he said it was one of his all-time favourites, as all the victims were scum who totally deserved to be burnt (literally as well as financially, I'd say)
Judge : So you’ve ‘phished’ credit card details and looted people’s bank accounts, but you’re saying that although you live in England, your victims all live in England, and you spent the money in England, that doesn’t count because you sent your spam from a Tuvalu email account ?
Spammer : S’right.
Judge : Get to f**k.
(I am of course paraphrasing the Judge's response.)
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