Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10158 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
My Grandad used to turn his hearing aid off, so he didn't have to listen to his wife. However, he could still hear Des Lynham or Dickie Davies talking about sport on telly perfectly - by dint of having turned the TV volume up to 11.
However he could still divine from the ether when a cup of tea was on offer, even if it was happening in a different room.
Because she was the first British astronaut - I guess and Cosmonaut. Also, which I hadn't realised until looking it up, the first woman to go to Mir.
She wasn't a paying passenger either. She was the winner of a selection process - funded jointly by a consortium of sponsors and the Soviet space program. And she must have had some of the right stuff, as she made the shortlist when the UK were selecting Tim Peake, when we joined the ESA's manned spaceflight program.
but a drink to each of the 'nauts for having the drive to get them there, and back again.
I believe it's a tradition that the ground crew bring the Soyuz crew some nice vodka to celebrate their safe return to Earth. As is only right and proper!
They've certainly earned it.
I got upgraded to business on a flight from London to Barcelona once. It's such a nice feeling to be handed a breakfast with eggs and bacon at 9am and say, "Yes, I'll have a glass of champagne please."
Worst I ever saw was a Christmas breakfast my company sponsored for public health engineers in London. 6am we get to the pub in Smithfields. Get in to set up, guy who's organising has his first Guinness. As I was working I had half a glass of bubbles with orange juice with the brekkie, to show willing. Which I regretted when standing on the roof of a 20 storey hotel in a howling gale an hour later...
But the organiser polished off 5 Guinnesses, as well as his bubbles, by 9am! At least he wasn't working that day. I saw several people drink several, then go to work - I always wondered how much design work happened that morning, that was badly compromised by engineers under the influence...
Not in the airline industry, where everything has to be expensively certified and continually tested - and where everything also requires regular scheduled maintenance. There are no simple answers here. Everything you do has safety implications. Make rules too onerous, and pilots will cheat - because the cockpit is their office every single day. Anything waterproof has still got to be waterproof after the third maintenance check and the twentieth of the maybe hundred in its lifetime.
Not whisky and porrige, but cranachan - where (all praise to the mighty Scots!) they prove they can make anything more unhealthy. They took meusli, and made it much, much more delicious - but also much less healthy, and also a lot less breakfasty. Oats, toasted with honey, with raspberries, whisky and cream. Yum!
I'm told deep frying Mars bars also makes them more delicious, and even less healthy than they started. And post-pub deep fried haggis pakoras for breakfast is a thing in my sister-in-law's highland family.
Everyone's food standards allow for rat hairs and insects in food. It's literally impossible to remove them all. There are almost no food standards that say "this food must be totally free from" - you have a minimum amount that is regarded as safe that's allowable in testing. Though hopefully there'll be a lot less than that actually present.
Food processing isn't fucking magic!
That's why people who have serious peanut allergies buy their chocolate from companies that produce it in a a building that doesn't ever contain peanuts - because just washing the production lines doesn't remove all traces.
And why even bleach companies only claim to kill 99% of bacteria. Because, again, all foods have minium levels of bacteria, because eliminating it all is practically impossible.
Whether UK or EU law is stricter than US law is one matter - but there will be minimum limits for everything written down somewhere.
sed gawk,
Firstly the USA itself exports food into the EU now. How can that be possible if its supply is contaminated? Obviously the downside of allowing rules for our internal market to differ from Single Market rules are that our exporters may be forced to do more paperwork, in order to prove their supply chains comply - and this would make exporting more expensive. Although one of the big upsides of leaving the EU is the opportunity to allow food into our market at much lower prices - as we're no longer required to protect the interests of the french and other EU farming lobbies with high tarrifs. The downside of that is the damage to our own farming industry - so as with everything it's a trade-off. But the ability to offer our internal food market is also a lure for trade negotiations, including with the EU themselves - and the upside is cheaper food. We don't have to take chlorinated chicken if we don't want to, though equally I'm not convinced it's that much of a horror, given that the same process is already used in the EU for salads, and I believe soon to be allowed for chicken? But we can always insist that it be labelled, and then consumers can make their own choice.
The point is though that this becomes a choice we get to make as voters. Economically, the best thing to do is probably totally free trade - take the advantages of cheaper imports and let the competition strengthen our own companies. The more efficient your companies, the richer the country. But politically that's an impossible sell - and the short-term pain would be high. So even if it's the best long-term policy, as Keynes said, "in the long term we're all dead."
So yes the US will be seeking lots of things from any trade deal. If you don't ask - you don't get. They'll ask and if we don't give all they want, they'll not give us some stuff we want. This is normal in trade deals, and is why they take so long to negotiate, as different political/economic interests play off against each other.
But Rome wasn't built in a day, and constructing a brand new trade policy will take years. As a first step, constructing a few easy but shallow trade deals might be a good idea. Doing anything deep and complex is bound to take longer.
I guess the problem here is the "all or nothing" pisspoor quality of so much of the Brexit debate. If you only read the Guardian, it's an absolute outrage if the government doesn't accept every demand made by the European Commission negotiating team - and any demands our government make in return are unreasonable red lines caused by Brexiteer idiots trying to "have their cake and eat it". Meanwhile ignoring that the EU are trying exactly the same thing, because who doesn't want to get concessions from the other side in a negotiation at zero cost?
One of the things that happens in any negotiation is that you find out what the other side's real "red lines" are as you go, and where they're prepared to be flexible. As the EU discovered, where even when May capitulated to the withdrawal agreement, because she thought a no deal exit would be a disaster, she was still unable to get it through Parliament. But after negotiation Johnson removed a bunch of the more unacceptable bits, and hey presto! An agreement! Even though it contained elements the EU had told May were literally impossible.
Now the currrent EU policy is to say that we must submit to EU law, as interpreted by EU courts, in perpetuity. That's simply ludicrous and more than they demand of Canada - who they recently signed a similar agreement with. Is that really what they expect? Or is it what they want? In my opinion is so extreme as to poison the negotiations, and in fact it has. We're likely to end up signing a much shallower agreement (if we even get one) because of it. Johnson has deliberately decided to go for the minimum trade deal, he thinks actually possible to agree. Despite the fact that industry on both sides would like something a lot closer.
By being so hostile the EU have destroyed the political chances of the very people in the UK who would be most sympathetic to what they want. Clearly the obvious compromise after a narrow vote to leave was either continuing membership of the Single Market or something a bit looser than that which allowed the UK some control of immigration policy. Sadly too many people on the remain side gambled everything on reversing the referndum result, rather than settling on a compromise position that most people could live with. While the EU hollowed out the centre ground even further by making continuous shrill demands for everything on their terms - thus undermining any chance for the very compromises they wanted us to make.
A US "deal" would be the final nail in our coffin.
This is the kind of hyperbolic language that's made the whole Brexit debate so bloody annoying.
There won't be any final nails in any coffins. The whole issue is about whether we'll be a few percentage points of GDP richer or poorer or if our voters have a little more or less democratic control of our laws. Either option has its good points and bad points - and of course now that Brexit has happened we're finally getting to the details of what the future relationship will be - something which we should have begun discussions on 3 years ago.
Even if everything goes right we'll probably find there's no final agreement on whatever agreement gets made until sometime a few weeks after the transition period should have ended - that's assuming Johnson doesn't change his mind and go for the 1 year extension on offer, or even agree something longer. At which point we still won't have a final deal until a few days after that new deadline. That's how international negotiations tend to work. Diplomats just love the sound of deadlines whooshing past.
But do we really believe there's going to be some complex new free trade deal with the US anytime soon? And any minor deal will have minor effects. Trump changes his mind on what he wants between lunch and his final tweets (after he's watched Fox for a bit on his bedside telly). What are the chances of him agreeing something complex? A quick and easy deal to get some cheap PR now? That's more like it...
There'll likely be no Brexit triumph or disaster. Just life moving on. And as with all economics - you can never bloody prove what works and what doesn't - because you can never test anything properly. So for example since voting to leave the EU we've been confidently told that GDP is now 2-3% less than it otherwise would have been. But those figures include the higher growth in Canada and the US - and ignore the fact that our economy has grown faster than France and Italy's since the Brexit vote - and about equal to Germany's.
Investment in our economy has fallen since the vote, and that must have had an effect on growth, along with uncertainty as to the final deal(s) - but I suspect that those looking for a disaster will be disappointed. As with all the predictions about voting to leave causing an immediate recession - often from the same organisations who said not joining the Euro would be an economic disaster.
As the saying goes, "Economists have predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions."
Went to my brother's the other day, to babysit and fix their PC while doing it. Sorting out the sister-in-law's account, and she'd given me the wrong password. Couldn't log in. Of course, the 11 year-old has known Mum's password since the day they got that computer... I know this, because it was him that told me her original password last time I fixed it - several years ago...
If she ever leaves her iPhone downstairs, he quickly logs in and disables the time lock on his and his brother's iPads, that won't let them use them after dinner.
The scary thing is, I sort of am LastPass. I fix a family PC, and then six months later they phone me to ask what their password is. I don't write them down - but remember them better than their owners.
If Australia can be in the Eurovision Song Contest - why can't Canada be in the EU space agency? Then they can be even more smug about refusing to let the UK in...
Shouldn't we have all our space facilities in Australia anyway? That's where the original Space Force launched from - back when Jet Morgan was in charge...
I had an aftermarket sliding cover for my Nokia (the bigger forerunner of the 3310) - and if you flicked your wrist just right, you could get it out of your pocket and flick it open with one movement. Until the mechanism broke and a piece of plastic flew off into the sunset.
With practise - and I'm ashamed to admit I did practise this - I could get my RAZR out of my pocket, insert the side of a thumbnail between the two halves of the clamshell, so that you could flip the phone open one handed on the way from pocket to ear. As it had a screen on the front, you could even see who was calling as you did it.
I’m pretty sure I remember the original RAZR being quite noisy. I don’t remember the hinge being silent, though not loud or anything - but it always closed with a lovely satisfying snap. Which felt like a nice definite way to end a call. I loved my RAZR. Sigh. Ergonomically perfect. Shame about the software...
Watching the screen bend in those videos makes me feel queasy. I really can’t believe they’ll last long. Especially if people keep wobbling them open and closed like that.
DiViDeD,
See my other post somewhere on here about the different highlights available. But the set the NFL do where only times when the ball is actually in motion are shown lasts about 25 minutes. There being 60 minutes on the game clock, but the clock doesn't alwasy stop between plays - and you have a 20 second timer before you have to snap the ball and start the next play.
In the last 2 minutes of a half you have the 2 minute warning - which is basically a mandatory advert break - in case things are getting too exciting. Plus each team has 3 time outs - which stop the clock and give them a chance to get together for a quick chat - and these are often saved for the end of the half - when time is most important. So the 49ers used all three of theirs in the last couple of minutes, trying to stop the Chiefs from running down the clock, leaving them no time to score twice as they needed. Time outs allow the players to chat and the TV companies to sell more adverts. And give viewers vital snack preparation time.
You also get delays when the ball changes hands - because you don't so much change ends, as change teams. Each American footie team being made up of an Offense, a Defense and a Special Team - all of 11 players. Plus backups and tactical replacements. An NFL squad is a maximum of 53 players.
I used to watch American footie a lot. And had a subscription to the NFL Gamepass. I think it was about £130 for an entire season, which also gives access to every single archived game since they started streaming 15 years ago. So pretty reasonable. If you live in the US they'd even sell you a $70 package that was just the games involving one team - which is way more value for money than UK football can be bothered to provide its fans.
One of the great features is the different ways you can watch. So live, including US adverts (4 hours). Or "as live" with the ads cut out (3 ish?). Or a highlights package with all the actual gameplay but also some of the punditry/analysis (1 1/2 hrs).
Or the funny one, which is just all the time the ball is in motion i.e. between the snap and the end of the play - which usually lasts about 25 minutes. So there's an hour on the clock, but you only get about 25 minutes of the ball doing anything.
However that misses the times when the clock is running and the players are doing stuff - which is also fun, such as when you get the quarterback changing the play because he's now seen the defensive set-up and doesn't think the called play will work, and then the defensive captain's response to that. If players are miked up, that can be really interesting. Such as trying to work out why every other word Peyton Manning said was "Omaha"...
Also trying to watch 25 minutes of solid play like that is actually a demanding test of concentration - sometimes you need time to eat your snacks and drink your massive margarita / glass of port.
I watched it at my brother and sister-in-law's place. Margaritas, snacks, port, more snacks, margaritas again, some emergency coffee when the 1am tiredness kicked in...
But the NFL network failed after about 5 minutes, so we were forced to watch it on the Beeb too. Not that the NFL have bothered to apologise, or even admit it, but it looks like they had a global streaming failure for most of the game.
However sister-in-law being from the US does like the ads, and was rather annoyed to miss them. To be fair, when I used to subscribe to NFL Gamepass (which is pretty good value) some of the ads were fun. At least advertisers actually make an effort to be entertaining. Except the truck ones for some reason - where it's just massive Ford pick-up, bloke in boots and checked shirt doing outdoorsy things, then belting child into car seat to show his sensitive side - then drives through more mud / river. All to the sound of the most gravelly voiced announcer they can find.
I did learn a new phrase from one of the US pundits on the Beeb. On suggesting that a team shouldn't change a winning strategy halfway through a game, he said, "you gotta keep dancing with the horse that brung you."
Discos must be very different over there...
I think there's some similarities between Sumo and American football. At least from my poor understanding of technical discussions about what the big guys on the line of scrimmage (front row) get up to. If you're on the offensive line blocking the naughty people trying to jump on your quarterback's head, or if you're on defence trying to push past them in order to get at said QB - it's about getting up from your crouch faster than them and getting your hands in position to block them before theirs are in position to do it to you. Hand speed and positioning is And then it's about using your bodyweight, strength, speed and leverage to control that contact - and it's all over in a few seconds - ready to do it all again on the next play.
They also all eat big dinners...
It's not free banking, when your interest on positive balances is less than the money the banks are making on lending that out.
Loyal Commentard,
When I lived in Belgium I paid for every transaction on my current account and got zero interest on it. Admittedly the service was way better, and I had a named contact in the branch who I could phone up for help and who would deal with it personally - and if he wasn't at his desk would phone me back within the hour if I left a message.
Compared to our last business account in Blighty (Barclays) - who assigned us a business advisor when we joined. We had £100k odd in there. Turned out this person was real, just they were one of several people in a call centre - and I presume they assigned their names randomly to companies - and they never answered the phone, rang back or were allowed to do much of anything useful, even if you did get hold of them.
So we left. Part of the reason our big banks are shit is that we as customers won't go the challenger banks like Metrobank (who have better service) - because we're nervous of change. Despite the fact that they have government guarantees to protect us, even if one does go bust.
Loyal Commentard,
I believe this is the first time I've ever typed the neologism "remoaner". And it's as stupid as "brexshit". You're welcome to trawl through my back catalogue of comments and prove me wrong - but I try to be all fluffy and polite online. In general preferring to stoop no lower than sarcasm. Oh and bad puns...
I've used "remainer" and "leaver" as shorthand to describe groups of people. But I try not to indulge in this childish culture war stuff. It's incredibly depressing.
You're right about the pot meet kettle thing though. There's a small group of arseholes on both sides of the argument - who like to ramp up the rhetoric and the childish name calling. And then use the other side doing it back as an excuse for their own. And it's toxic to democracy (and polite discussion) where it takes hold outside tiny cliques. The internet has made it worse, I suspect because the noisy shouty idiots are the ones who post the most comments.
Hence you get the fools on the left of Labour calling members of their own party "red Tory scum" - and making their own side of the internal party debate look awful. And of course, a whole bunch of their voters did just fuck off and vote Tory - partly because they thought those people genuinely represent the whole left of Labour. And of course their justification was people calling them loony lefties. And so it goes on - but somehow it's never people's fault they're being rude - it's always because somebody else did it first.
Also, if you really do think that Brexit will be a total disaster and should have been stopped, calling the people who voted for it stupid, racist and gammons probably wasn't the best way to persuade them to change their minds and vote your way.
Oh and as a final point, I'm a soft leaver, who would have been perfectly happy to stay in the Single Market. Something that was still well possible until the middle of last year. But that required the more committed remain supporters to be willing to consider compromise - rather than risking everything on reversing the referendum result.
It now looks like the minority of people who wanted us to leave with a minimal trade deal will be the ones getting their way - because the "soft leavers" and the "soft remainers" (the people who don't particularly like the EU but thought it was too risky to leave) were so put off by the posturing of the more hardcore remain types that they ended up going that way because it looked like the only way out of the logjam. So how's that polarisation and shouting worked out for you?
Finally to quote a remain columnist in the Grauniad yesterday, Rafael Behr:
On we went, rubbishing the idea that Brexit was a bounty of freedom, sovereignty and control, irritating more than we converted, until Boris Johnson came along to lift the siege. By December, the liberation he could realistically offer voters wasn’t from Europe any more, it was from the argument encircling them. It was from us, the remainers.Johnson’s winning formula was to downgrade the promise of Brexit from reward to relief, which was easier to deliver and still sounded marvellous. His opponents complain that the “Boris” brand of optimism is fraudulent, but that doesn’t matter when it is unrivalled in the market.
macjules,
Article 50 of the Treaties states that a member state choosing to leave has 2 years to make an agreement about the technical aspects of leaving that takes into account the future relationship.
That two year period started in March 2017 - after a bit of post-referendum thinking about it. It was then extended in March last year until October (with a small detour for a mini-extension first) and then that extended again to tomorrow - after Johnson agreed the revised withdrawal agreement but Parliament didn't.
So there's a transition period in that agreement up to the end of 2020 - with an option to extend it for another year after that. Although to be honest they can extend it to any amount they want, within reason - but Johnson is currently signalling that he wants to get it done very quickly.
Sadly the EU decided that they wouldn't even discuss the future relationship until July 2018 - and it was then discussed for about 2 months and a 26 page document on the "future relationship" agreed - but that basically talks about "making best endeavours" to agree only vaguely specified stuff. The Commission claimed that it would be illegal to even discuss the possibilities of a trade agreement until we were no longer a member - and we wasted the first 9 months of the 2 year Article 50 period pissing about discussing whether we should pay an extra few billion quid to settle various bits of left-over spending with the Commission refusing to even discuss the withdrawal agreement until that was done.
So sadly we haven't really got much of anywhere on the future relationship. If you take Johnson at his word, which I'm not sure about, it's going to be a pretty basic free trade agreement - because he's decided that whatever deadline is set the EU will push it up to the wire in order to try to gain maximum advantage from playing hardball. So he's going to cut that game off from the start (I admit I'm guessing here about his plans) - and see if he can't get some movement on the negotiations by forcing them to be too quick.
He says he won't sign up for the extension to the transition period - which he's now got the majority to do, if he wants to. But nobody likes to look like they've backed down - so I suspect (but have no way of knowing) that his plan is to negotiate some of the easier stuff quickly, then ask for an extension on negotiations on the longer stuff that amounts to a different transition period - but only in certain sectors. But hopefully one long enough to actually get the negotiations completed with nobody able to fuck about with the deadlines.
However he may just have decided that a quick and very shallow trade deal is what he's going to go for - on the betting that the British government can move faster on counteracting the disruption than the EU can - with the hope of maybe bringing them back to the negotiating table in a more accommodating mood.
That's assuming he actually has a plan of course.
However May has taken a lot of the blame for how badly the negiations turned out. And yet it was the Commission which exclusively designed the timetable - and rejected every suggestion May made - sometime without even officially studying them. Including proposals on the Irish border that they've since agreed with Johnson, having said they were literally impossible to May. So personally I blame the Commission for a lot of this, and May's biggest fault may have been accepting their timetabling. So although I have little faith in Johnson, I don't believe that the Commission have even been honestly negotiating until the final deal done with Johnson - and have little trust that they weren't going to start playing similar games in the transition period.
Except there is competition to the big banks. There are lots of small players out there, and if you don't like what they charge for overdrafts, then go to one of them.
Also, overdrafts are expensive because we have free banking. And that banking isn't free to the banks - so it's all swings and roundabouts.
Several banks have tried to re-introduce charges and given up in fear of losing all their customers to the other ones. The same thing may work with phone companies. Or not, as people may only go to Europe once ever year or two - and so not care too much about reasonable roaming costs. The ones that do, might get slightly more expenisve packages from smaller players, that cover it - in which case they're paying for the service they use, rather than being subsidised by all other users.
'Competition lowers prices'.Remind me, how has that worked out...
dervheid,
Pretty well actually. Well we've got the lowest energy prices in Western Europe - so that's not exactly been a disaster.
Meanwhile BT were charging 70p a minute for peaktime calls and 30p for off peak ones before they were privatised and you had to buy one of their answerphones at something like £1,200! They claimed it was illegal to connect a commercially bought one to their network.
I've lived in Belgium, and our broadband and mobile prices are cheaper than theirs, despite the general cost of living there being lower, but I've not looked up stats on that.
Admittedly not all (or even maybe not much) of that is down to competition. It's actually the privatisation that matters - because even large companies that are good at ignoring their customers aren't as good as governments at ignoring theirs. But also investment is a serious problem in a nationalised industry. The government is under pressure to spend cash on schools and hospitals, and often starves nationalised industries of vital investment cash.
Which is why our water industry was in a terrible state when it was privatised, with leaks and raw sewage being dumped onto bathing beaches. The great thing about privatising it, is that the government could create Ofwat, and tell all those private companies that if they didn't invest x amount into sewerage upgrades, they wouldn't be able to even raise their prices to cover inflation. And when it's the treasury that has to pay to meet those regulations, they nobble the government department in question to make them less onerous, so they can divert the cash to areas that are seen as more important. But when the government are doing it to private investors, there's no incentive to under-regulate, so hopefully you get better legislation.
Shuttle was about $400m per launch.
The $1.2bn number comes from adding up all the assocaited costs, including R&D and dividing them by the number of launches. Obviously, the more flights you have - the lower the cost of each will become, counting it by that method.
By the way SpaceX aren't $60m any longer, I don't think. They were talking originally about dropping prices by a third for those who took re-used rockets. So I'm assuming that all their launch costs have dropped by now - unless you insist on specifying a brand new rocket.
kipwoo,
There's no accounting reason not to put £500k through the books - and just report it as some other kind of revenue.
However if you put £500k through the books for hardware sales - you're going to need a significant provision for if that hardware fails. Plus a bad debt provision, if they're buying it on credit. And if it fails before they've paid for it, the two issues can interact in complex and expensive ways, like them refusing to pay up.
When I worked in finance I think the average bad debt provision was about 2% of total invoiced amount. A reasonable seeming provision for hardware failure might be 5-10%? So your profit is £50k if all goes right, but you'd need financial provisions for if something went wrong of at least half that - which obviously are moved to profit if nothing goes wrong, but it does show you the risks you're taking.
If you're the contracted seller of said hardware, then you're obviously the people contracted to fix it - even though you may have your own contract with who you bought it from to get them to. So for a small sale, you might not care - for a large one, you might start to get nervous about this risk. As working on a percentage provision is like insurance. The idea is that taking a little from all your jobs insures you against the risk of the one going wrong. But if you only have one £500k hardware sale, and that goes totally titsup, you're on the hook for the whole £500k - with no other profits to offset against it.
So I'd guess they were just being cautious, and deciding £50k wasn't worth the risk.
Anon,
It's not a criminal prosecution. The Crown Prosecution Services didn't pursue a trial on the grounds of insufficient evidence / chances of getting a conviction.
This is a civil action on the part of HPE against the directors of Autonomy on the lower standard of evidence required in civil trials - i.e. "in the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt" (as required in criminal law).
No. He was an expert witness on acceptable accounting practises under IFRS. Normally UK courts only appoint one for both defence and prosecution, but in this case they weren’t going to. But both agreed that accounting for HW sales this way was both legal and acceptable. The difference is whether it makes a material difference to the accounts.
GrumpyKiwi,
Which is also why fighter planes have been getting generally slower since the 60s. I don't think there's many frontline aircraft left that can do Mach 2 - which used to be reasonably common.
Presumably for all sorts of boring reasons. Though having fewer types and therefore not having the luxury of stupidly fast interceptors with incredibly short ranges and horrible maintenance requirements has got to be one of them.
Mike Richards,
You describe HTP as horrifying, and I've got to agree. The Navy built two test submarines in the 50s to use it - as a possible alternative to nuclear propulsion. HMS Explorer (nicknamed Exploder) and Excalibur.
Apparently Explorer's first captain never even got her to sea, due to all the problems. And the thing gave off so much smoke when you first started the engines (a tricky and dangerous process) that they once didn't notice that they were on fire - until the chief engineer walked into the control room and noticed people being overcome by fumes.
There was a lot of general rocket research going on. The problem with developing our own nuclear missile was felt to be that Britain was too small for many missiles to survive a first strike. At which point having an independent balistic missile to throw at the Soviets within the first few minutes of them attacking was no cheaper than using the V Bomber force we'd already got - just with exending their range by giving them an air-launched cruise missile.
Particularly as the US were developing Skybolt. Until Kennedy (or was it Eisenhower?) cancelled it. At which point we were quite pissed off because the US had promised it as an option when we cancelled Blue Streak. There was some thought that this was deliberate, because the US wanted to maintain a monopoly on strategic nuclear strike within NATO - and I'm not sure that opinion from within Whitehall is completely unfair either. This is covered in part by Peter Hennessey's brilliant book (all his stuff is great actually) 'The Silent Deep'. Which also covers Chevaline - mentioned in this article. Incidentally Chevaline (a "cheap" alternative to a full MIRV) cost £5 billion to develop, over the 70s - that's in 1970s money. Maybe the equivalent of £20bn today?
Incidentally Kennedy offered to hand over the Skybolt stuff for the UK to continue developing it, but as MacMillan said, it's pretty hard to sell the public on spending loads of money on a system the US has rejected as a failure. Hence the Americans were talked into sharing Polaris, in return for a nice base for their subs in Scotland - and a promise that the British nuclear deterrent could be put under joint NATO command with the UK having the final say on firing it - something that never happened. In the end I think NATO had some "dual-key" systems, like the B60 gravity bombs, where say the German and US governments would have to jointly agree to use them - but other than the US, UK and France kept control of their own stuff.
Anyway the reason I think that the UK abandoned the rockets is that they gave very few options - because you only had a few minutes from detecting an incoming attack before being forced to take the decision to retaliate. Whereas the submarine based nuclear deterrent is safe and much harder to knock out with a first strike.
Obviously Britain maintained a missile industry, hence the mention of things like Seaslug and Alarm in the article - but nothing bigger.
I do know now. Which is good - for me. But no bloody use to the millions of other people who use them and haven't worked it out. It's no good giving your device an ability, if nobody can work out how to use it. In this sense Windows Phone was also quite bad because the back button has too many jobs and behaves inconsistently.
In my opinion Apple have this one right. Where if you need a back button, it's an arrow on the top right of the screen you're in.
I'd been using an old Droid as an mp3 player (on about v6 I think), where the back button is on the right hand side of the screen instead of the left. But Android is inconsistent in other ways - so some apps have that back arrow at top right. Sometimes pressing the back button just takes you out of the app to the home screen, other times it takes you back a step within the app. Although some of that may be down to the app makers and not Google of course.
You really need to take criticism of Android less personally. I'm sure Google can cope that I'm occasionally rude about some of the things they do.
Tigra 07,
The back button literally changes shape when the keyboard is on screen buddy. If you can't spot that then you haven't used Android.
Oh yes, so it does. Oops! I'd never noticed that before. The reason I hadn't noticed though, isn't that I've not used Android, it's because I only have 5% of normal vision. And the 5x magnifiaction required for on my reading glasses means they can only focus on a small part of it. So a small difference between an arrow pointing a different way is easy to miss unless I'm looking for it.
I'd still argue that it's not the best bit of UI design, because it relies on people noticing unobvious changes. And doesn't even do anyhing to make it noticeable, such as changing the colour (or filling it in as a solid block instead of an outline). And also the few tips that Android gives you when you set up a new phone (as I did last month) are all about pointing out the notification shade and the various places you can swipe from to control the major bits of the UI.
I seriously doubt that non-techy people who can see properly notice that sort of subtle control change either - given my experience of teaching friends to use their computers over the last 30 years - I'm pretty confident I'm right about this.
As for your headslapping, feel free if it makes you happy. Personally I find that being a bit more polite and respectful makes social interaction a lot more pleasant...
Tigra07,
Thanks for the advice. Despite the unhelpful sarcasm. Yes, I’ve used Android a bit. It’s still not as good a UI as Windows Phone, but it won so it's either Google or Apple now.
The back button isn’t exactly an obvious but of UI though. What I actually did was turn the screen to landscape, scroll sideways and then I could just get a fingernail on the edge of the button I needed.
The downvotes are all a it sad though, I thought we were passed the days of tragic fanboyism...
I've seen plenty of dialogue boxes in Android where the keyboard pops up and covers the submit button - and Android doesn't have the button to get rid of the keyboard that iOS has on the bottom right, so it's a bugger to fill in the form and submit it sometimes. So it's not like this problem is unique.
Or those fucking annoying websites with floating banners that slide down, and then when your keyboard pops up, you're left with precisely one line in which to see the text you're entering. Often a line that's about 3 words long. Mobile UIs are still a bit of a mess, even with bigger screens.
Although having defended MS, I still struggle to see the point of this. Doing the two screens thing with one being a sort of keyboard is horrible, in comparison to a laptop, and is the extra screen real estate actually that useful in a protable device? If you need all that info available at once, you're probably better off at a desktop with multiple screens. Not that I'm saying nobody will want it. Just that it looks like a solution in search of a problem. Something shiny for the sake of it, rather than something to solve a burning need.
Whereas a phone that unfolds into a decent sized tablet is obviously a useful thing. I'm just not sure we've got the tech to currently do it well.
I'm actually happy to give people answers to surveys - but only if I've got the time. Because in some cases is does improves service. And you can usually tell from the survey pretty quickly.
Biggest clue is time taken. If the survey says it takes 2 minutes, and you hit question 10 and it still says 1% done - then you know it's all bollocks.
Or if you get one on the usablity of a website and the second question isn't about page loading times or menu placements but asks "how did your interaction with our animation style make you feel? 1. Emporwered; 2. Awesome; 3. Soaring like an eagle; 4. Fantabuloso; etc...
So I close the survey as soon as I come to a question that I can't understand or that's written in such obvious marketing bullshit that I know the answers are going to be transcribed into an unreadable graph on a powerpoint slide to be shown at a training meeting in Hell's boardroom.
I don’t think the series really hits its stride with Wyrd Sisters. After which it’s consistently excellent right up until the not really finished final book. My favourite early one is probably Pyramids. Others disagree though and suggest people start with Mort.
I seem to remember one of the charges against King Charles I was "mischiefs", the little scamp. Still not a patch on sourcery though.
Well there are some interesting coincidences in that it was the National Enquirer who had the videos and weren't publishing them but trying to get some sort of agreement out of Bezos. And of course it was also the National Enquirer who were allies of Trump buying up the stories of women that had alleged they'd slept with him, then not publishing them. Which may turn out to be a breach of campaign finance law.
So there are some interesting coincidences at least - if nothing more sinister.
And neither the Crown Prince or Trump like the Washington Post, for different reasons.
However I'd not get involved in a conspiracy with Trump - given that he's not exactly either competent or discrete. But on t'other hand, Bin Salman and his cronies aren't exactly what I'd call exemplars of competence either...
Saudi politics still doesn't beat Iran's for oddness. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was President (I'm not going to lie - I had to look up the spelling) he had a bit of a falling out with the Supreme Leader. Not too major as both are from the most authoritarian wings of the state, meaning things had to be kept in bounds - so the move made was to charge one of his ministerial allies with Sourcery. Not something you see on a charge sheet every day.
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