Posts by lawndart

It's easy to tell if someone has sat down and really worked at producing good toilet humour or if they are just going through the motions.

Careful. It's entirely possible putting your tongue in your cheek may give you cancer.

Re: I wonder if...

This sort of thing seems to happen quite regularly with small boats, or so it seems if the sailing club I belong to happens to be typical. Even to boats properly secured to the trailer.

Last year one member who had been out to another venue with his dinghy was chagrined to find it was not attached to the trailer on return to the club. Fortunately, when backtracking the route a horse rider said she had seen a boat in the ditch a little way down the road. It survived the experience with just a couple of minor scuffs to the underside.

Re: Silver Spitfire

If it's out there then www.bookfinder.com is probably your best bet.

There is a book called The Eagle and the Hawk by Alec Carstairs, but by the book cover it is probably about a spitfire pilot.

Re: Smoke and Mirrors

Same here. Paying for 70, getting 77.7

Sort of makes up for the years that they wouldn't replace my 16Mbit max Motorola Surfboard even though the service I was paying for had been raised way beyond the capability of the kit supplied. Eventually it expired and the engineer was shocked when he saw it. He had thought them all retired some years earlier.

Re: Coincidence?

He was clearly trying to launder some money

Re: Crashing our junk in somebody else's backyard...

It may land on the back of a rukh, or be swallowed by one.

Re: A traditional point of view

Yours is an interesting take on the battle.

Glorious had been used to transport fighter aircraft to Norway to support the ground forces there. Once it was decided to evacuate Norway the aircraft were to be destroyed, however the pilots of the Hurricanes and Gladiators pleaded with the Navy to get their aircraft back to Britain. Without these pilots ever having performed a carrier landing before and with aircraft not fitted with arrestor hooks the planes were all landed safely. This meant Glorious had no space on her deck to launch or recover aircraft as the Hurricanes could not be taken down into the hangar as their wings did not fold. This is why there were no aircraft up to spot.

Re: Well, crap....

The failed orbital reduction manoeuvre does not affect the closest approach to Jupiter, so there will be no reduction in the quality of the spacecraft's data collection. The data will be arriving in 53.5 day intervals instead of 14 day. The spacecraft is in a 90 degree polar orbit intended to cover the entirety of Jupiter's surface during the 14 day orbit part of the mission so it may take many more passes to successfully complete the mapping. I'm wondering whether Jupiter's moons and other bits of gravel it has orbiting it will perturb Juno's path by much. The current orbit's apoapsis is in a gap between a pair of the major moon groups.

Re: answer machine

Dennis the bloody hero, slayer of one of the scourges if modern life.

How's that for work experience?

Re: He'd be shit out of luck in the UK

"Unless you sign your name "Stephen" instead of "S. Maturin"."

I always imagine Sir Joseph grinning from ear to ear when he writes his "apology" to the good doctor.

Nor Colonel White, for that matter.

Re: VM to gig BB in the UK

Superhub 2, black, loads of lights on the end and embossed VM logo on the sides.

Superhub 3: white, only one light on the end and has mesh sides for cooling.

I still have a SH1 and have only had that a couple of years, thanks to VM not upgrading my old Motorola Surfboard from 2001 until it finally died, even when requested.

It's clearly the Virgin Mary.

Giving birth.

Re: Safe Mode?

It's easy, they have a wireless keyboard.

Re: TV already is a drug

Marx would have seen it for what it is

Brilliant, thank you

Re: Stooopeed!

What you have is two drones. Each with two cameras. One camera for looking where it is going and the other watches the other drone to maintain line of sight at all times.

Re: "...taking it out to a lonely field at dawn and kicking the shit out of it..."

More effective than a gom jabbar, less hassle with the fallout from using the family atomics.

Re: Tech

I now have a vision of the Tour de France with all the competitors riding Colin Furze pulse jet bikes.

There probably wouldn't be much slipstreaming and the crowd would hand out small calor gas bottles instead of drinks.

Re: *Cough* FIX!! *Cough*

I have this odd feeling that if by some weird chance the people voted to leave the EU then this would trigger some previously unrevealed "Hotel California" clause in the membership terms.

I don't have a TV so I miss out on a lot of the political spin, but when we have foreign national leaders such as President Obama coming over and instructing us on how to vote then my mental alarm bells go off full blast.

Re: MS Band

"Anyone remember when Casio et al were advertising digital watches with a 10 *YEAR* battery life? Match that smartwatch manufacturers."

I have one of those Casios on my wrist. The only problem I find is the straps only seem to last two years, then it is a right royal pain trying to get another because, although they all look very similar, apparently nothing else fits.

Re: but they had such a great backronym!

Doesn't sound like enough cash to build three of them.

It was those weird signals it occasionally gave, like "This is SID. UFO detected, sector 4281 decimal 3."

Re: Acceleration pedantry - x 7

The usage of "knot" does imply distance per unit of time, however it is shorthand for "knots per hour". It does not invalidate "knots per hour" as a term. In the days when streaming the log and counting the knots and fathoms run off before the 28 second timer ran out the two terms could be, and were, used interchangeably.

"[When the wind has a relative velocity of some 40 knots per hour]"

Lieutenant W Gordon RN, The Economy of the Marine Steam Engine, 1845.

In this modern age of impeller driven speed measurement and GPS the usage has made the knot the standard term, however the ultra-pedant should mention that the modern usage should be "nautical miles per hour". The knot is a slightly shorter distance than a nautical mile (although the nautical mile distance is dependent on which country you are from anyway).