* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

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IGotOut,

I was educated in the 80s - and we did our science in metric. Which I'm perfectly comfortable with. I can't now remember if what little cookery we did was done in metric or imperial - but in that case the greatest influence on me was Mum. She cooked in imperial and that's still how I think when planning a meal - if following a recipe it'll be metric - but when buying meat or fruit and veg I still estinmate in imperial and convert if forced to buy that way. It's not like converting 3/41b into kg is hard.

If I'm doing DIY, then the influence on me was Dad. Again, of an older school who thought in imperial. So that's how I mostly estimate distances, and the foot and inch are more convenient for imprecise measurements that mm, cm or m anyway. If I'm working out how much paint I need, or measuring precisely, then I'll use metric.

For work it's metric all the way. I measure water in litres, because 1,000L is a convenient 1m³ of water that conveniently also gives you a nice 1000kg. Pressure should be in bar, because the numbers are smaller, and litres per second is easier than gallons per minute.

I saw a survey in the Eurozone a couple of years ago that said that more than half of people still translate how much stuff costs into their original currencies to work out how much it should be, despite the Euro having been with us for two decades! I know I did it when I lived in Belgium, but then I had the disadvantage that I was only just getting used to the Belgian franc when they unsportingly turned them all into Euros while I was in Blightly visiting my family over Christmas/New Year.

It's not so much stubborness, as people being slow to change the ways they think. Especially when you're doing that kind of sense-checking estimation in your head that tells you if a proper calculation is actually in the right ball-park. Neither is it a uniquely British thing. It's simply people being people.

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Re: Tine to redefine Pi(e)

Shepherd's pie gets in under the fish pie ruling, as above.

My brother's pub has actually got this stated on his menus. He describes those half-arsed frozen puff pastry abominations as "casseroles with a pastry hat" - whereas he sells proper pies that he or the chef have made. Pleasingly square ones. The venison ones are particularly good.

The other investigation we now need is into the herertic who downvoted the OP - and seemingly disagrees that pastry hats are an affront against all that is decent in the world.

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Happy

Re: British football pitches

The offside rule is easy. If your team have just scored a brilliant, well-deserved and much-needed goal - it will be incorrectly ruled offside. Or in more modern cases, given by the referee, in order to cruelly raise your hopes, then overruled in a farcical and long-drawn-out VAR process.

On the other hand, due the to the dubious parentage of the referee and capriciousness of the sporting gods, the opposing team cannot under any circumstances be ruled offside, particularly when they blatantly are.

Ex-eBay security execs among six charged with harassing, threatening bloggers who dared criticize web tat souk

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Coat

Re: That's awful

Prude! Cockroaches have a right to bash the bishop too!

Or, if they don’t have bishops, how about mashing the mantis? They prey, after all...

I’m already getting my coat.

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

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The Chinese military own loads of normal civilian companies. As well as some of their armaments factories. It helps pay the bills. Or the massive illicit bonuses for top officials to squirrel away. They had cash back when state owned companies were being sold off.

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps had so much cash from their own factories and investments that when the government privatised the national telecoms provider they outbid everyone and bought it for cash.

In dictatorships, it’s useful to have alternative supplies of cash, for bribes or bureaucratic infighting.

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Re: Advertent FUD

Filters are actually an added risk. Admittedly a small one. If they aren’t regularly cleaned or changed. In fact several of our NHS England customers now specify almost all their kit without filters. Or require automatic self-cleaning ones, if there’s no option.

Ex-Dell distributor in Lebanon ignored ban on suing US tech giant. Now four directors have been sentenced to prison in the UK

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If arbitration is rigged, and you can show it, you can go to court and overturn it. Again you should have got legal advice on the contract when you signed it. But binding arbitration means no appeal if you don’t like the result.

Decent commercial contracts mean that there are processes where you can either pick or veto the arbitrators that are appointed. It’s not as one-sided a relationship as when companies try to force consumers into their own process that they call arbitration. Though obviously I’ve not seen this contract.

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They aren’t children. They agreed the contract. If they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t have signed it. The contract gives them recourse to English law, which has a decent enough reputation.

Obviously I don’t know if they’ve been screwed over, but if you piss off judges, they can lock you up. They know the risk of what they’re doing.

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They could, perhaps, if they bribed the judge enough. But it would be hard to enforce outside Lebanon. Whereas that English judgement is more likely to be internationally enforceable because it complies with the contract as agreed and signed. Unless there’s a reason to invalidate the contract, which isn’t what they appear to have argued in our courts.

If they couldn’t live with English law and compulsory arbitration, they shouldn’t have signed.

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Happy

Re: 'zillas

Then which company is Godzuki?

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You can’t enforce unreasonable terms on consumers, who don’t have the legal resources to deal with complex contracts. UK consumer law is now excellent, and I’ve so far saved 2 friends a total of £9,000 by reading the legislation more thoroughly than the scumbag companies who they’d contracted with did. Didn't even lawyer up, or have to go to court, just wrote the right threatening letter quoting the right passages.

But this is a cross border business contract. There are no stabilisers. You’re assumed to be competent, and able to employ lawyers. By definition the contract has to be under a specific legal system. It can’t be both. If you don’t like it, don’t sign it. You can get unreasonable clauses struck down in court, but picking a jurisdiction is unlikely to be one of them. It’s probably the first line of the contract, so you’ve no excuse for missing it!

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Re: 'zillas

Pre-installed bloatware-Zillla then?

Or can anything be truly called bloatware that isn’t a set of 1.5GB HP printer drivers. Well I presume the actual driver is just a megabyte or two plus a massive suite of bug-ridden shitware...

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John Savard,

No. This is perfectly normal. International contracts always specify the jurisdiction and legal system that applies. A poster above says this one was from a Dell subsidiary here anyway.

Actually it’s a large, and growing, market for UK international legal services as well. Our courts are I’m sure as bad as many other nations, but don’t have the reputation for unfairly ruling against foreign litigants. So many companies choose our system to use. Plus the City has many lawyers experienced in complex contracts (and eating big dinners) - and we have a large arbitration industry as well. Lots of Russian companies do their legal business in London for example, as Russia’s courts are likely to side with whoever Putin wants to win.

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

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Re: Dubbo is afraid

No. You’d apply for your license to kill if you were planning to make a wombat pie.

And how could a department so-named refuse you?

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Happy

A New South Walian wombat

Is unmatched in unarmed combat.

Bare-handed one can't match it,

But with the aid of a hatchet,

One may finally dispatch it.

Just don’t call in the army,

That decision would seem barmy,

In light of their failure against the Emu,

In the war of 1932.

[with apologies to poets everywhere...]

Trump's Make Space Great Again video pulled after former 'naut says: Nope

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Devil

Re: 450 cities protesting racism

If the USA is fake, then what diseased mind invented Washington DC? Or the Philadelphia cheese steak?

Barmy ban on businesses, Brits based in Blighty bearing or buying .eu domains is back: Cut-off date is Jan 1, 2021

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Happy

Wasn’t it Churchill who said something like, "if you want to shake your faith in democracy, simply have a conversation with the average voter."

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I deal with a medium sized London plumbing contractor who have a .eu as their main address. I think because they couldn’t get their name on .uk or .com. It was unlikely to be by choice, given they don’t even trade outside the M25...

Not the Wright stuff: Bitcoin 'inventor' loses bid to sue YouTuber who called him a liar

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Re: Judges names

None as good as, the I think now retired, Judge Judge.

Now if only we could find and promote a lawyer called Mr Dredd...

They've only gone and bloody done it! NASA, SpaceX send two fellas off to the International Space Station

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Re: Naming

He still delighted in the silliness though. For example in Excession there are lists of silly ship names. He wasn’t above a bit of pisstaking, as well as driving the plot.

I can’t think of any of Banks' books that aren’t full of humour. It’s just that in the darker and more serious ones, the humour is distinctly blacker to match...

Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way

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Re: Not so bad a function if you are on your way back into the UK...

Surely it’s nicer than Luton...

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Re: "turning left by turning right through 270degrees."

Also remember the guy on the throttles was a spare pilot travelling as a passenger. Who sacrificed a relatively safe seat in the cabin for kneeling on the floor with no seat, let alone a seatbelt. In the cockpit where the occupants are a highest risk in a crash.

He flew the plane on the throttles, while the original pilots wrestled the controls for what little they could get out of them.

Didn’t they land at something stupid like 300 knots, because they had no working flaps and slats?

There was also a cargo flight that copped a missile over Baghdad that had to do something similar and doing lots of right turns.

Guess who came thiiis close to signing off a €102k annual budget? Austria. Someone omitted 'figures in millions'

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Land is a tad optimistic. Plummeter perhaps?

International space station testing Wi-Fi links with incoming craft, with an eye on autonomous docking

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Re: "made available to the public"

One also hopes the "kill" command will be disabled when under the control of the general public.

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

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Re: We've reached peak fuckwit

We were approached on the street in Barcelona, must be 15 years ago now, by what turned out to be a perfectly legit company that organise your drinking for you. Bascially any large party of tourists will be assigned a person in a yellow t-shirt, whose job is to take you to the best bars (well the ones that hand the company the best kickbacks anyway) - and to talk to you in whatever language you can cope with and organise ordering your drinks for you.

As I said at the time, the day I can't organise my own trip to the pub* is the day I'll ask someone to put me out of my misery. It's not like it's hard. I mean even if you can't manage a couple of very basic local words (please, thankyou, bill and names of drinks / food items) - there's always pointing. A smile and an effort, plus a willingness to look a bit silly will get you what you want. After all, they know you've gone there to drink, and they have the stuff they sell on display. So pointing and waving money will usually get you what you want.

The skill is knowing what places not to go into, and there are usually pretty clear visual clues. But that is a reason to check reviews of places, if you're not local and have nobody to recommend decent places to you.

*"Organised fun" is a horrible contradiction in terms. Hiring a party organiser is perfectly acceptable if you're doing PR for a sales event or I suppose if you're rich and have a huge family wedding or something. But needing a party organiser to go to the pub is a terrible indictment of your social skills.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

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I was right in guessing the OP's list had missed North Korea. I also guessed India vs China for the earliest one, so right victim, wrong war. It was Pakistan, with the french submarine in the drawing room.

There’s been surprisingly little naval conflict since WWII. Compared to the amount of land and aerial warfare that’s happened.

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North Korea?

I could look it up, but that’s cheating. Also that incident might be too recent to make the lists, and the DPRK haven’t admitted it.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

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The Tories didn’t say anything. The guy mentioned in the article was a Labour MP.

As to your bizarre conspiracy theory, I’ve seen no evidence for it. Also the surprise and confusion of the government detailed in the couple of histories of the war I’ve read strongly suggest cock-up, rather than conspiracy. As is almost always the case.

Plus reports by military top brass of the first meetings after the invasion were that the Conservative Defence Secretary, John Knott, was for giving up because he didn’t believe recapture of the islands was possible. So it would have to be a "conspiracy" involving Thatcher without anybody else.

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Re: Remember Goose Green

The storming of the Iranian embassy in London ended up going out on live TV. Fortunately the people inside didn’t have time to react. As the SAS were already going through the windows.

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Re: Breaks it angle

Caspar Weinberger generously offered to lend us an aircraft carrier, if we manned it. Though I don’t know whether he’d got approval for that from Reagan. He did get various other kit, like Sidewinder and Stinger transferred across though.

The Navy decided it wasn’t practical. The US carriers have huge crews and there wouldn’t have been time to train them, let alone the poor pilots.

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Re: There is no such verb as "to author"

Mr Dogshit,

Verbing of nouns has a long tradition in the english language. As do many americanisms. For example all those z spellings, e.g. realize, are actually the usual english spelling from the seventeenth century. They kept it, we swapped in the esses later. Dropping the u in colour was a US idea though.

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Remember Goose Green.

The paras marched overnight to a farm within range of the Argentinian position. Carrying up to 130lb of kit. Since the loss of the helicopters on Atlantic Conveyor, they had to carry all their own mortar rounds. Plan was to sleep that day, and attack the next night.

Then there’s a BBC news bulletin, that elements of the Parachute Regiment had reached the Argentinian airfield at Goose Green. Cue emergency day attack with no sleep - on a garrison that outnumbered them by about 3 to 1!

Some enterprising Argentine mechanic took a ground attack rocket pod, and mounted it on a children's slide from the playground, and started using it as rocket artillery.

Microsoft has speedy portable treats for locked-down princes and paupers alike with Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2

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Woohoo!

Well done El Reg for the return of lappy. Even though much-hated by many readers. Now if you could start referring to desktop PCs as deskies, that would be perfect.

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Re: Exchange Rate

Ever heard of 20% VAT? Sales tax isn’t added to US prices. Given it's different everywhere it couldn’t be.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

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Windows

A bunch of crusty old gits with ribbons in their hair, in a desperate attempt to still look cool, like in the good old days. But probably smelling slightly of wee...

How about Grandad? Grandad Redmond? As in:

Oh Grandad! You’ve made me reboot the computer! AGAIN!

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Linux

Re: The wolf enrobed in penguin feathers.

To fit your brief, how about The Trojan Penguin?

'A' is for ad money oddly gone missing: Probe finds middlemen siphon off half of online advertising spend

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Re: No surprise, but what to do about it?

The problem with the publishers serving the ads, is that they don’t have the creepy user data collection that the advertisers want for ad targeting. Not that I see much evidence that this is effective from Google and Facebook. But the advertisers still appear to believe that it is.

So I’m sure what they’ll try to do is to drive down Google and Facebook's profits a bit. And maybe try to force them to deal with the click fraud that they facilitate and profit from. So that should mean a bit more cash for publishers eventually. But I don’t see major change happening until the next big buzzword comes along to replace big data in advertisers' dreams of perfect targeting.

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

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Happy

Re: Would China, North Korea be scared of starlink ?

They could play a real-life version of Space Invaders.

There's a good argument that Starlink satellites cost Musk less than the cost of the missiles to shoot them down. Plus he could put up even cheaper decoy ones.

Does anyone know the cost of the charges for that chemical laser the US had flying around on a 747? Which would seem the better bet - and much more in the spirit of Space Invaders anyway.

Then Musk would have to built satellites capable of firing back...

Anyway, I guess jamming the radio frequencies would be a lot easier and cheaper. Just more boring.

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

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I can never be arsed with paragraph styles. But then that's because the only time I've ever done any serious amounts of writing that wasn't emails was at university for essays (when I did use styles). Well I suppose there was the time I first started to write letters to family and friends - before everyone got email, but that was done in longhand with a fountain pen.

If I seriously needed to use word processors, I'd probably make the effort to learn to use the tools properly.

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Re: spare disk space

Geoffrey W,

I always type in the dark. In the sense that I'm not looking at my hands, and my keboard is usually hidden on a little shelf underneath my monitor. Moving my keyboard out of the office, when shutting it down and bringing the computer home a few weeks ago - I noticed that only half the keys now have writing on them to tell you what letters they are. Because the thing's 20 years old, and well used. But that doesn't matter, because the F and J keys have bumps on them, which marks the position for the index fingers, and leaves your fingers on the home keys - ready to touch type.

As jakes says, shutting your eyes was part of the course. I did it old skool, in a massive old Imperial typewriter. And you learned with boring exercises like juja[space], which was right index finger, on home key, then up, then back then left little finger then right thumb for space. And you typed that lots, until you'd got it stuck in your brain and could type while looking at the text you were copying and not the keyboard.

In fact if I look towards the keyboard when typing, even though I can't read it without my glasses, my brain tries automatically to take over the process, and I slow down to about 40 words per minute - which is about the most I could do until the point where I was forced to type with my eyes shut - and suddenly started to double in speed (admittedly with lots of errors at first). It's funny how the brain works.

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jake,

My favourite science fiction writer, C. J. Cherryh, used to go off on a big old rant about the Chicago Manual of Style - and how it was used by evil editors as a way to try and destroy her books. And change stuff that she meant to be like that dammit.

But it's not something that reared its ugly head this side of the pond. I've never been all that personally attached to my writing style, so I've never cared enough to get upset. I'm happy to change my style to suit, if there's sufficient reason to make the effort.

The only thing that annoys me is that if I'm trying to do something, I don't want my bloody computer to interfere, because the idiots who wrote the software think they know better. I'm happy to use a spell checker to make sure I've not made a mistake, but once I've been through and sorted that out, I don't expect stuff to still be underlined as wrong. And equally having the computer format stuff for me could be quite usefu, but having things changed as I do them is bloody annoying, as I want stuff to stay how I put it there, unless I knowingly change it. Because the computer might be wrong, and is too stupid to know! So I need the programmers, who think they are so clever, to ask my permission first - in case I'm in a hurry and not going to have time to go back and check they haven't fucked things up while I wasn't looking.

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Boffin

Aaaaarrgghhh!!!

MY EYES!!!!!!

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Coat

Three Spaces for the Civil Service, under the sky.

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.

One Space to rule them all, One Space to find them,

One Space to annoy them all, and in the darkness bind them.

sorry, I've spent all day trying to finish the end of year books to send to the accountants - and I think it might be starting to have an effect on me. I'll get my coat - the one with the, well you'll never guess what I've got in my pocketses...

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Re: Skype

I heard a semi-professional podcaster talking about it last week. Saying how much he liked Zoom and how he was slightly annoyed that this lockdown had caused loads of people to use it, becuase it had been his little secret before. His comment on Skype was, "how can they have failed to improve their product in 15 years?"

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Re: I don't know what you Brits got taught at school

'Tis an age thing I think. Not that I was taught how to use computers until I'd already been working for several years - and most of that was related to nearly sliding into becoming a database admin (the company went bust before I could start the job). So I got taught to do it on a touch typing course 35 years ago- on a typewriter. Presumably if it gets taught now, it's by people who learned the same way I did?

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Re: spare disk space

My primary school teacher taught me two spaces, because we learnt on typewriters. The school did have one BBC Micro - but I'm not sure I ever got to use that, because it was actually one of the teacher's, he only let the kids he liked use it, and he didn't like me.

35 years later, it's an ubreakable habit. I remember how much effort it cost me to type on other peoples' PCs when I lived in Belgium, and they used the Devil's own AZERTY keyboards.

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I very nearly failed a piss-easy basic Word course I was forced to do. Because I used minimal effort for my coursework - naturally. Asked to bang out a letter, I did exactly that because I could write the address after tabbing across each line to the right side of the screen quicker than I could take my hand off the keyboard to highlight it all and hit the right justify button. The legacy of learning on a massive old typewriter - back in the day. But then it got even sillier as I think I was marked down for doing the old skool Dear Sir / Yours Sincerely thing, rather than something more modern - as if that's anything to do with my competence in using word processors. Excel is all the word processor anyone needs anyway...

I did get a free copy of Lotus Smart Suite with my IBM 386, back in the early 90s. So I suppose Word can never be my least favourite word processor.

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Re: It may be a US "standard", but...

The two are separate entities?

The zombie apocalypse actually has upsides. Such as increased camaraderie and regular cardio workouts.

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Re: I chose "I don't care"

It doesn't matter - who uses Word anyway? I write all my letters in Excel. Plus use it for my shopping lists, notes and even once built a £20m invoicing system in it that connected to a massive database of all our purchasing contracts (Excel of course) that also linked up the management accountants clever stuff to work out how we could maximise our discounts by moving purchases around in time - plus printing quarterly invoices notn hideous spaghetti code because IT were too cheap to give me proper tools to do it... It took me 2 weeks, a pack of highlighter pens and a whiteboard to check all the formulae were correct. Mumble, mumble, I've used Excel for printing posters as well - double-spaced mumble, mumble...

One space after commas, 2 after full stops! Not that I really care, but I've hammered touch typing into my muscle memory and I can't stop it now after 35 years of repetition.

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

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Always good to post on here, because you'll get corrected if you get it wrong. I'd completely forgotten about Blue Steel, basically assuming the V force hadn't had any stand-off capability, because Skybolt got cancelled.