Posts by Dave

Trousers Brown: Blighty faces 'food security' threat

sodding professional politicians

Thank you so much for the article. I still don't understand why this country has to import energy - didn't we have a thriving coal mining industry once ? Thanks Heseltine, Scargill and Thatcher. I hope you are all happy.

This man Brown really really pisses me off. He has never held down a proper job, run a car, nor scrimped and saved for a house. And now he pontificates about not throwing away food. Well bugger me. Here I was chucking away perfectly good food and not thinking about it. That's probably because I forgot because I was busy burning £5 notes. Seriously what planet does he think we live on. Yes we do all throw away food and it probably is too much. Usually its because we are busy trying to hold on to our jobs. We don't shop properly nor plan ahead enough. Yep guilty as charged. However I do grow some of my own food and I try not to waste food but sometimes I miss a bit of chicken thats at the back of the fridge. Get over it. Perhaps if he didn't waste so much of our money on stupid IT projects (ID cards , NHS , CSA etc) which result in our tax money going to American companies and offshore jobs for no measurable benefit for us we'd take him seriously but in the meantime Brown - go away !

Bloke crams 13 into Volvo S70

@David Roberts

Hmm whilst seat belts are important and I make sure that all occupants of my car wear them. And I go through the necessary fuss of the booster seats , plus I carry extras. However as a child of the seventies , I do find this fuss over seat belts and booster seats a touch nannyish. We didn't have rear belts until the late eighties yet we were not dying like flies. Sheesh the only people he'd likely to have harmed are the other occupants of the car. They did have FREE WILL. They did not have to travel in the car with him. He was not speeding and was unlikely to have harmed anyone else other than the passengers.

Glad to see that Plod is putting in lots of effort to catch the master criminals. Now we have proof that traffic cops do exist (cos I ain't seen one for years) can we hope for a campaign against the chavs who treat the residential roads in my neighbourhood as a racetrack. Or will Plod go after the fat nobodies in company cars who drive past my kids school at 50 mph? Fat chance. Needless to say PC Plod once again shows how he only goes after the easy crimes. Probably couldn't find anyone walking in a built-up area during the hours of daylight whilst in possession of a camera.

Blackswift hyperplane hits trouble in Washington

@Trevor Pott

I thought Brad was joking about the frozen zone troopers....

"Bombs need maintenance, systems tests, etc." - hmm true up to a point. However 10kg of iron (or perhaps a more sophisticated alloy) dropped from a few hundred miles up would do a fair bit of damage (as its energy would be 1/2mtimesvsquared) as long as you had some way of guiding it in to the target - the old "smart crowbar" idea that Larry Niven describes in "Footfall" but certainly pre-dates that. All you'd need would be some fins on the back and a GPS guidance system - all just extensions of existing tech. Of course knowing where to hit is the tricky part.

Sky One to resurrect Blake's 7?

sky has to do a remake ovf something

What with 24 delayed , BSG on its final season , Star Trek canned, Sky has to have a new sci fi series to keep all the basic package peeps paying ther 20 quid a month. If sky doesn't have the new shows then we might all start buying the box sets instead. Heck the only reason I haven't dumped sky in favour of freeview is to get BSG. Once it ends I goes to free sat.

so look on the brightside - there are a bunch of sky prog execs out there crapping themselves thinking of new prog ideas . it will be star cops and tomorrow people next....

BBC Micro creators meet to TRACE machine's legacy

Fantastic machines

One of my schoolmates had a BBC B with cassette drive. We dreamed of elite with a disk drive - all those extra ships you could see....

If memory serves me the Met Office were still using BBC Masters to display rainfall radar pictures in some of their out-stations in 1996. Anyone know when they were retired ?

Shows what you can do with only a little memory and processing power. These days you need a gig just to create a word doc.

Britt Ekland on board for 'Wicker Man 2'

@Daniel

I keep reading public as pubic....

Scottish Government to block wind farm plan

Things of beauty

Shame the Scots don't want them. I see the 2MW turbine at Reading every day, and I think it looks amazing,, majestic even - an engineering marvel. Having stood under the thing I cannot say what its sounds like as you cannot hear it over the M4 noise. How about taking those 100 turbines they don't want and putting them along the motorways and business parks in the south of England. IMHO they wouldn't blight the landscape anymore than all the pylons, etc we already have. They'd be prettier than Didcot power station that's for sure.

Rogue trader blows sox off control systems

Developer ?

Time out here - a developer ?Now come on. I checked his cv on the Telegraph website - it said there he had a degree and masters in Finance and had spent two years writing Excel macros. Whilst not wishing to demean his skills (losing 7 billion euros speaks for itself in that respect) calling him a developer is stretching the point n'est pas ? I can check the oil in my car and even change the bulbs in the lights (with much wailing and gnashing of teeth) but that does not make me a mechanic.

It does rather put all those failed government IT projects into perspective doesn't it - it takes EDS, Accenture, Cap Gemini and so on years of dedicated hard work and effort to get through that kind of cash and at least they employ people to move the bytes around while they do it (plus all the money that goes to hotels, catering companies , software vendors, lap dancing clubs and so on).

And the icon - well I must say I still don't see the IT angle.

DARPA whirly-wing jet gyrocraft hits noise snags

@@British Boffinry at it Best

"Yeah! What were the yanks ever doing back then?

Except going to the FUCKING MOON"

I didn't think the original poster was being anti-american. Not all discussions have to centre on the USA- the discussion has been around great stuff we have done and what might have been. By understanding what has happened in the past we might learn how to do things better in the future e.g. not putting square windows in a pressurised cabin.

Also some would say the Apollo programme's success owes a great deal to Wernher Von Braun and the other german rocketeers who moved to the United States after the war (and the bucketloads of cash) so maybe not the best example of American genius (of which there are plenty - the Liberty ships, the airframe of the P-51, ILM etc ).

those boffins had it good...

Fantastic film.

Aah the days before MBAs and outsourcing, when stuff got built quick and the future was shiny and bright, and the managers actually understood the stuff their minions built (or at least knew enough to keep out of the way). I doff my cap to the boffins , engineers and assorted technicians that made it happen. Am I alone in thinking that we'd struggle to build such a thing today ?

Getting my (lab) coat already...

Skills shortage: it's mind over matter

oh whats the point...

As far as I can tell the only skills shortage in IT is in management. / leadership. Idiots the lot of them. They'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes....

Darling admits Revenue loss of 25 million personal records

Looking on the bright side...

that should finish off the possibilty of ID cards anytime soon.

To echo many other commentators why did the NAO need this data ? Just what were they planning to do with it , who had access at HRMC etc ? This is not just incompetance , this is so far beyond that words just fail me.

X-Files movie sequel is go

oh but its so 1990's

I loved X-files in its time but lets face it , its time is past. What with Lost, 24 , Heroes, BSG etc it looks rather straightforward and pedestrian.

Mind you I could be persuaded otherwise if Scully gets her kit off...

Pentagon in orbital solar power plan for world peace

oooooh!

Sounds cool. I always wished I could have worked on the Apollo program. This sounds like it could be just as exciting. Where do I sign up for a job to help build it?

Boffins unveil sharpest ever stellar snaps

re boffins

Hmm at the Met Office we called them "twitchers" .

Seriously though, hats off to the boffins a. for having more fun at work than me, b. for the damn fine pictures and c. for breathing new life into legacy kit.

Stolen satnav guides thieves to owner's home

Darwin in action....

Why would anyone need a Sat-Nav to find Alton Towers ? The signposts for it start just outside Paris.

'al-Qaeda' puts on big shoes, red nose, takes custard pie

t-shirts - excellent idea.

I could quite happily go for one with Churchill and the motto about what he would have done.

Anyone remember a science fiction story by Norman Spinrad (I think) - published in the Destinies book/magazines in the seventies where a global terrorist threat is defeated by laughing at their incompetance - "Very Proper Charlies" or something along those lines. This fantastic article brought back happy memories of that and of the Judean Peoples Liberation Front from Life Of Brian.

Perhaps humour might be one of our best weapons against any supposed or real threat to our civil liberties from AQ and the Grey Men running the country. The second world war was no laughing matter for those going through it but it didn't stop us finding humour where we could ("Hitler has only got one ball....")

If this is how competant these docs were at following basic intructions off the net we should be grateful they are not going to be allowed anywhere near patients anymore. RTFM...