Posts by Badbob 123 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2009
OK, so Iceland couldn't muster a naval force during the cod wars to defeat the mighty Royal Navy, so they thought, lets just wait a couple of years then nick all their money and drop several thousand tonnes of ash on them. They won't expect that.
I always wondered why a country so near, so unthreatening and with so much in common was a sort of enemy. Now I know why! I would suggest dropping a nuke on them, but the fallout would apparently just blow back to us.
Unless you plan to move house at some point in the next 16 years (not an entirely unreasonable assumption), at which point you will have to have a photocard issued (at your own expense). I'm not even certain that your licence can even be endorsed now without a photocard having to be issued.
On another note, the photo on my drivers licence was taken 12 years ago, when I was a rather thinner and less bearded 16 year old. I bear little resemblence to said photo, so if I got pulled over by Joe Plod between now and my photo licence expiring at the end of the year, I'm done for. Also, my signature has changed a little (what 16 year old has a fixed signature?).
It's a withdrawal from a market that isn't core to the business. Who can blame them? VOIP didn't change the world, and probably never will, as landline providers will go all-out to defend their core markets. After all, someone has to pay for the copper that these VOIP providers were using.
VOIP has it's uses. I have a French telephone number from a VOIP provider, so that I can communicate with my friends and family that live over there at a local/national rate.
The current ICEC website is essentially the very same one put in place by GNER a couple of months before they went belly up. Just the logos have been changed. Most of the staff uniforms are GNER (i.e. the band on the guards hat was changed from red to silver).
I work on the upper end of the West Coast Main Line, and we have East Coast services running to Glasgow past my office window every 2 hours. It's always nice to see the logos of 2 failed operators covered over by the new UK.gov operation, as the NXEC and GNER logos are still quite clearly visible (under some paint) on the old blue 225's.
Also, in regards to what a poster said above in Scotland.... First ScotRail (who had almost repainted the entire fleet into their colours at their own expense) were instructed to repaint every train (even those in the Glasgow area, that haven't carried any BR or Busco's colours since the 70's) into the new government specified patriotic ScotRail "Scotland's Railway" colours, complete with pisspoor attempt at a Saltire. Guess who is paying for this? Taxpayers.
P.S. East Coast are still repainting 125's into NXEC colours, just without the NX logos. The last 125 carrying the GNER livery was outshopped in a fresh coat of NXEC silver only 2 weeks ago, months after NX left the franchise.
I have to admit, I had a good chuckle at the idea of the HMS Invincible being called into existence at the LHC, and while being unable to understand what it was doing there, went steaming straight into the magnets, before vanishing again and re-materialising as a faulty power coupler. (ala Hitchhikers Guide)
Looks like I am going to have to run some new cables.
200Mb/s sounds nice, but my home network which is mostly cabled, is only 100Mb/s, and of course the connection from the router to the modem is only 100Mb/s.
Seeing as that will cost me a fortune to replace and I can live without fresh holes in the walls, (and TBH I barely use the 50Mb/s I have), I think i will pass.
I'll run some Cat6 as I redecorate the house over the next few years, but I don't think i will be in any rush.
This technology is also required for the under-development technology of obstacle detection at Automatic Half Barrier (AHB) Crossings, the type of crossing which is the most common on our network. Unlike a CCTV crossing, which has full barriers and is overseen by a signaller, an AHB is not monitored and is entirely automatically controlled.
An AHB is operated by the passage of a train over a treadle, which starts the sequence of steady yellow, flashing red, closing barriers (If the treadle fails, an occupied track circuit will start an emergency lowering of the barriers). All this occurs 26 seconds before a train passes over the crossing at permitted line speed (Up to 100mph at an AHB crossing). Why the half barriers? As it is unmonitored, the half barriers allow a trapped driver to escape as only the barrier behind him/her closes, at a full or CCTV crossing, the signaller cannot clear the protecting signal until he/she can see that the crossing is clear.
It is very easy for someone to zig-zag around the barriers, or even to stop deliberately across the tracks (Ufton Nervet?). The DfT has recommended the development of radar obstacle detection equipment as a means of further protecting crossings. While this would be unlikely to bring a train to a complete stand before an occupied crossing (obstacle detection would only work after the barrier closing sequence has completed, giving a maximum of 15 or so seconds of warning to the train driver), it would slow it significantly therefore minimizing any fatalities.
In addition, while a GATSO style camera wouldn't stop these mindless idiots completely, it might deter enough of them to cut down on incidents, and save me from having to attend failures at my local level crossing where some tit has clipped the barrier as it is coming down.
Flashing wig-wag red means STOP! No exceptions! To quote my employer - Don't Run The Risk!
So that's where all that gold I put in an envelope went to! Glad to see it went to a more scientific use than being melted down into sovereign rings and name bracelets.
I for one bow down to our new strangely gold smashing, negative antihypermatter weapon bearing boffin overlords.
Paris - because if anything is negatively strange, it is she.
I work outdoors, and have suffered through some of the coldest weather I have ever experienced in my 28 years in the last month.
One day in mid-January, the BBC forecast for my area was mild temperatures (only in single negative figures) and overcast with heavy snow. So i duly put on my waterproof clothes (not very warm, but dry) and headed off to work. It turned out to be one of the clearest days I have seen this year, with a rather balmy temperature of -18.2degC (average temp taken on our calibrated monitoring equipment at 3 stations across a 5 mile area). Gawd only knows what it was with windchill (I reckon less than -30degC).
I know it can be tricky to forecast in mountainous regions such as the highlands or Pennines, but I work only 20 miles south of Glasgow, and my nearest Met Office weatherstation (and MoD listening post) is only 7 miles away.
I am based in the middle of nowhere (in fact, that assumes nowhere is a place with a beginning, middle and end).
I work in Fault Response for a large railway infrastructure owner, and often I am told to wait at a critical location for a report of a failure. This often results in long hours spent in a Transit van in a motorway service area waiting to hear which part of the railway network I need to dash to. Therefore I have a laptop and a 3G modem to hold off cabin fever. Coverage is patchy at best though, even on the motorway network. So an increase in coverage area and signal would be appreciated so i can load the network with more iPlayer downloads and avoid having to go do work.
Mine is the hi-viz orange one with the multimeter in one pocket and good book in the other.
Here we go again, another government, another pop at everyone's favourite Telco.
The posts above by AC and AndrueC are spot on! If there was a potential for a decent profit, you can be assured that BT Openreach would be the first to be digging up our roads and dropping fibre in the holes. The simple fact is, that with everyone having noted how VM's predecessors nearly bankrolled themselves out of existence doing that very thing (and in areas with high penetration rates), others are a touch weary about following suit, unless many £££'s can be made.
Don't be under any illusions about Sky, TalkTalk, Orange et al.. having any kind of public service ethos. It's all about bucks, and how to get them as quickly and cheaply as possible.
BT is and has been for a while now, a private company. Nearly all the equipment in its exchanges is the result of investment by a private company. A private company that has watched it's profits tumble as succesive governments hand it's business to the vultures circling above. It's competitors have had 20+ years to play catch-up while Oftel then Ofcom have held BT down.
If others want to compete with Openreach, that's fine by me, but they should be no more entitled to use BT's exchange equipment, than that of VM.
I just realised that my TV remote actually still has a Teletext button. It's a Samsung that I bought almost 12 months ago, and I can honestly say that I have never ever hit the button marked "Text".
But then, i've never hit the "Interactive" button on the Sky remote either.
To be fair to the original poster, I believe 1 catastrophic failure of a single reactor design type is 1 too many and any of this design still in service should be taken out of use. I know there are still a few reactors of this design used throughout the former soviet era, and even Chernobyl was still operational until recently.
However, in the world of EU planning, would it not have made more sense to improve transmission links between Lithuania and the EU first? Or even fund the construction of a new Advanced Gas-cooled or Pressurised Water Reactor?
Never mind, in 25 years time, when the UK stops dithering and actually builds some new nuclear plants, they can buy power from us.
Eurotunnel, or rather their open access freight subsidiary Europorte 2, have several ex-BR Class 92 Electric locomotives (which ironically they bought from Eurostar). These locomotives are the only electric locomotive cleared for operations in the UK, Channel Tunnel and France (several are also owned by SNCF, though these are leased to DB in the UK).
Why was this fleet not utilised to tow the Eurostars to St. Pancras? I don't believe they currently have the correct signalling equipment for the CTRL (which is being retrofitted), but they do have 3rd rail collection equipment, and could have towed the Eurostars to another suitable London terminus, or even to Ashford where another (working) Eurostar unit could have forwarded the passengers to London.
Also, while EUKL's parent company own's the CTRL, it is actually maintained and operated by Network Rail (CTRL) Limited, and is signalled from Ashford IECC. So Eurostar do not control the signalling of their trains at any point during their journey.
Seem unable to stop the tide of illegal immigrants into this country, but seem quite able to question UK residents on their intentions when arriving back in the UK.
As a quick anecdote... I was travelling via Stena Line from the UK to Ireland and under the apparent misunderstanding that both the UK and ROI were in the Common Travel Area. I mistakenly put my passport in my baggage which was stowed in the hold. Upon arriving at Dun Laoghaire, there was a single Garda giving a cursory look at Passports, I explained that I did not have mine and was given a "your fine sure, on you go". Very pleasant.
After my stay and on returning to Holyhead, I was sure to have my Passport to hand, which was very wise as the UK Border Agency were en masse at the customs point. 2 officers checking and scanning passports, and no less than 4 armed police officers. I got questioned on why I had been in Ireland (my father lives there), how long I had been there and where I was travelling to upon leaving Holyhead. I really wanted to be cheeky, but then I remembered that it is UK police policy to shoot you five times in the head before asking questions.
When I was "re-allocated" by my employer into a new post last August, it involved moving offices. I went from my lovely air-conditioned office in the centre of Bristol overlooking Temple Quay, to a Portacabin(tm) affair in a dodgy suburb (while we awaited the promised construction of our new offices).
I decided that I was taking my desktop with me (as I had waited months for a DVD-RW drive to be installed and was not waiting for months for another). The local IT chappie said OK, and I duly trekked across the city with my Dell.
When I got to my new desk, it already had an old Compaq desktop plugged in and ready to go. I promptly unplugged it and was horrified when I crawled behind the desk to remove the monitor leads and such. A growth such as cannot be described had formed between the air vents and the sides of the desk.
Dust, hair, cobwebs and crumbs from the many lunches of the previous occupant of the desk. The mass was at least 2 inches thick. Apparently, the previous occupant of the desk had had a hair loss issue as well as psoriasis, most of which had went straight into this machine.
On receipt of that news, I also disposed of the chair, keyboard, mouse and for good measure, the telephone.
I think we all know that France Télécom are the stronger partner in this merger (given that Deutsche Telekom have tried and failed to offload their UK unit), and as nearly all of FT's entire consumer facing operation is branded Orange, then it will be the Orange brand that continues. Even with the damage done to the brand by the pisspoor Wanadoo merger, I believe it is still salvageable.
I have no doubt that this is just a ploy for FT to get the bandwidth/customers/cellsites on the cheap and that they will eventually shove DT out of the company, the same way they managed to leverage Orange Group plc's shareholders out to take outright control of Orange in the first place. If I was an employee of T-Mobile, I would be somewhat worried.
I have been an Orange mobile customer for 9 years and have enjoyed faultless service in all that time. However, the employers have provided me with phones from various operators, currently O2, and I can only describe the service where I work (from the UK's largest operator) as patchy, and often have to resort to making calls on my own Orange mobile which is rarely out of signal.
When I was about 20, I drove a V6 Vectra. It looked the part (well as good as a Vectra can) and could shift, if it really needed to.
Every Saturday morning for four weeks I got stopped on my way to work (at about 5:30am). Once they claimed it was a spot check and kicked my tyres and stuff, once they thought I was going a bit fast off a roundabout and wished to impart some advice (Roundabout was very big and had a 70mph limit on it, and i was below that), and twice I was breathalised (with a negative result, had been days since my last drink). The reason they gave for breathalising me was that i was driving with the window open on a cold november morning.
I complained to the boys in blue in writing, threatening them with legal action for their obvious profiling (young male, powerful car, early morning) and was never stopped again. Well, not in that car anyway.
I got one of these here emails also, and I am in fact Scottish. Born and bred in Lanarkshire.
OK, I have lived in England for about 4 years in total now, and my accent has adjusted accordingly, but I'm still not English.
I'm currently composing a reply to TomTom... "Wha ye caw'in English, ya Raj? I'll come doon to yer HQ the noo an' pummel yer face in! All the best, Chris."
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