Posts by Vinyl-Junkie 460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Dec 2013
Actually the EU have indicated on several occasions that they would be happy to negotiate a new deal if the UK removed its "red lines". It is my belief that any second referendum should have 4 options:
Revoke A50
Accept May's Withdrawal Agreement
Leave the political EU but remain in the single market and customs union (which would clear the way to negotiating a new WA with the EU)
Leave on WTO terms
The referendum should be single transferable vote.
If the referendum had been legally binding it would have said so in the Act. This is an extract from the (legally binding) Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011:
The Minister must make an order bringing into force section 9, Schedule 10 and Part 1 of Schedule 12 (“the alternative vote provisions”) if—
(a)more votes are cast in the referendum in favour of the answer “Yes” than in favour of the answer “No”
There is no such statement in the European Union Referendum Act 2015. Furthermore had there been such a statement then the irregularities discovered by the Electoral Commission regarding spending and data misuse would have been sufficient grounds to declare the outcome null and void. The government would then have had to decide if it wanted to re-run the referendum. Because the referendum was advisory the Electoral Commission can only report, not act.
Many, many years ago, long before anyone had heard of data protection or privacy BR used to have a mainframe based personnel system named PEARLS (I forget what it stood for). BR being one of the first to get involved with networked PCs with interfaces to mainframes they were able to update records from any depot, office, etc that could get access to the mainframe. Offices that did not have mainframe access could still submit changes using a standard form; the output from which was saved to 5.25" floppy disk, sent to the nearest depot or office with a mainframe connection and processed there. In the early days it was not at all unusual to receive a batch of change forms (for filing) with the relevant details on and the floppy disk all stapled together!
It's not just IT Helpdesk systems, either. Back in 2005 I took responsibility for the library management system covering over 50 local libraries. The customer entry had a free text field for notes. Not only did this have some extremely rude comments regarding customers in it but an upgrade (from a thick-client interface accessible only by library staff to a web-based system) meant that the field became visible to customers who could now manage their account via the Internet. I had to get the developer to write me a script to purge the notes field!
Pretty sure that as the High Court has already ruled the IPA as incompatible with EU law (this) there will be no adequacy deal, let alone an "adequacy-plus" one unless substantial changes to the Act are made.
Especially as the six months the High Court gave the government to amend the act seems to have expired today with no changes having been made!
...extremely poor resolution on the cameraphone that took the picture, but I can't see a single cable coming out the back of any of those keyboards! If that is the case then either it's a very large load of wireless keyboards (unlikely!) or whoever disposed of them carefully cut off all the cables first. In which case: WTF?
Can you please leave GPUs to us gamers instead of driving up card prices by using them for cryptocurrency mining or, in this case, deep learning? The latest generation graphics cards are expensive enough without people creating shortages by using them for other things.
You want deep learning? Develop your own damn chipset!
The annual subscription to the OS app (which includes both Landranger and Explorer maps) is about the cost of two printed OS maps (which you always need for anywhere you are visiting as you can guarantee that it will be on the boundary of two maps!). You can download as much of the map as you wish to your device, so you are not reliant on having a data signal, and you can use the credentials you create your subscription with to log into the OS website, where you can print off as many parts of the map as you like, if you wish to have a printed version with you while you walk.
Unless someone turns off both GPS and the phone system it will always be able to triangulate you and so it is impossible to get truly lost. It will also track your activity if you wish it to so you can see how far you have walked (including vertically, it has the best terrain height information of any mapping app I've used). You can plot routes in advance and then follow them without either ruining your map or discovering halfway around your walk that the pencil you used to mark it has rubbed off.
It also includes an augmented reality function where holding your phone up to the view will tell you precisely what you are looking at.
This is one area where new tech really does beat the old tech hands down.
I think they're pathologically afraid of it in some areas. I had a friend who lived in Palos Verdes, south of LA, and she reckoned she'd call the police if she saw someone walking around the area, as "no-one walks here". I did walk down to the local mall a few times whilst staying there and got stopped twice by the police to ask what I was doing. As soon as I opened my mouth they realised I was just a crazy Brit who didn't know any better.
I totally agree; I am rather partial to S&G, and although my music tastes mostly cover the rock spectrum I find Disturbed somewhat too heavy. I was therefore horrified when I heard they'd covered The Sound of Silence...
...until I actually heard it! I still prefer the S&G original, but The Disturbed's version is one I'll turn up on the radio, rather than down or off.
Of course if you'd rather play it than watch it
Also Tallboy and Grand Slam were precision weapons, only dropped by 2 squadrons (617 and 9), and required much training to use effectively. The HC bombs were purely designed for area bombing and did not even have fins or streamlining.
Tallboys were not considered expendable; crews were under orders to bring them back if they could not drop them on the designated target (which must have made landing interesting!).
There's a lovely story in Paul Brickhill's The Dambusters. When the first Grand Slam was completed the RAF and Wallis wanted to examine the in-flight stabilisation provided by the fins. It was therefore decided to bury a high-speed film camera on the range, pointing vertically upward, in order to capture the required footage. After much debate it was decided that the safest (if also the most cynical) place to put it was in the centre of the target. Of course, 617 proceeded to release the bomb in precisely the right place, ensuring that with Wallis' superb design the bomb arrowed down, striking the target less than 10' from the centre of the aim point. Bye-bye camera...
"The 300-strike-equivalent bombing was presumably much more localized than a typical thunderstorm.."
In the latter days of the war, once we'd developed precision bombsights, H2S, Oboe, Pathfinders, "Christmas tree" marker flares and so forth then yes. Early days of the war? Not so much!
The point about designing by computer is it allows you to test the aircraft's performance in flight without putting test pilots' (or other pilots') lives at risk. Have a read about the yaw damper problems found on early 707s, one of which killed four people and another of which would have killed many more had a Boeing test pilot not been on board at the time.
The first Boeing 707 crash occurred a year after it entered service during a training flight simulating a variety of landing problems. Boeing modified the rudder on existing and future aircraft to give a greater degree of lateral control at low speeds and power settings.
With the modern design process both the yaw damper and rudder problems would have been identified and solved before the first aircraft left the production line; as the aircraft would have "flown" both in purely computer simulations and hooked up to a full motion simulator.
Looking at the museum on Google Earth it seems that the outside collection of the museum is pretty amazing, not just the US types but a whole host of other nations' aircraft too. So far I've spotted a Hunter, a Lightning, a Vampire, a Hunter, a Gnat. the Shack and Gannet already mentioned! Plus a whole host of former Soviet stuff.
No, that's a good landing. A great landing is one where you can use the aircraft again afterwards and a perfect landing is either a)one where the occupants don't notice you've landed until the nosewheel hits the deck or b) unobtainable; depending on which of my instructors I was flying with that day. The theory behind b) is that a good pilot will always think of something he/she could have done better, no matter how good the end result.
So you totally missed the part about wasps being general pollinators? I often see wasps alongside the bees on the flowers in our garden, flying in and out to collect nectar and in the process pollinating the plants. Given the reduction in bee numbers we ought to think twice about reducing the numbers of other pollinating insects, aggravating or not.
The only one of those my S9+ doesn't have is a user-replaceable battery. Otherwise it has the 3.5mm jack, the battery lasts two days with average use (phone calls, messaging on a variety of platforms, social media, camera etc) and it has a micro SD card slot which will support cards up to 400Gb.
Don't know about the others...
No pirate radio stations were allowed to become legit following the implementation Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in 1967. Radio Caroline, the only surviving UK pirate radio station, did not become legit (as an Internet only broadcaster) until 1991. They did not get their MW licence until last year, some 50 years after the passing of the Act.
That is absolute rubbish!
CAMRA has this definition: Real ale is a beer brewed from traditional ingredients (malted barley, hops water and yeast), matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide. (Emphasis mine)
Beer that is secondary fermented (which includes traditional lagers) in the barrel continues to generate enough CO2 to maintain the beer in good condition throughout the serving life of the cask (which should normally be about three to five days). The beer can be drawn direct from the barrel (gravity), via a traditional handpump/beer engine, or by electric pump (frowned upon by purists :) )
You do not (and never have) needed extraneous CO2 to dispense proper beer; brewers prior to the widescale bottling of CO2 managed to get on pretty well without it!
The lines in a traditional pub or bar were short enough to allow the drawing of beer by hand without the need for extraneous gas (yes it needed some muscle power but not much - I've worked in numerous pubs with unassisted handpumps and I'm no Hercules!). It is only modern pubs built since CO2 dispense became normal (those massive 60s estate pubs, shop conversions of the Wetherspoons type) that some pubcos have resorted to CO2 assist to dispense real ale.
According to what I read it was down to weight to volume; you could reach MTOW with average density loading before the cargo space was more than 2/3rds full. So unless you had a market for something carrying lots of low density items it was unlikely to be viable.
"If anything our prisons do the exact opposite, taking in petty criminals and spitting out hardened ones."
Or dead ones. I came across this article when playing around with the Random Article button on Wikipedia, and couldn't believe what I was reading. This reads like something from a Japanese PoW camp in WW2, not a supposedly civilised country in 2009.
Disgusting.
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