Posts by Commswonk 1777 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2015
Truss was selected because she actually espoused policies that the party membership could support.
That may be true, but for myself I would have preferred policies based on pragmatism rather than party dogma.
I feel more than a little let down, but at my age I doubt if I have any right to be surprised. She would have been better to find a policy / policies that would have the support of the wider electorate, not just those who happen to be card - carrying members.
,,,that they are meaningless in the face of the 50-plus percent increase in household bills and a further 80 percent next month in the UK.
That is simply wrong; the only unknown is whether its wrongness is accidental or wilful. The House of Commons Library document linked within the above makes it clear that it refers to household energy bills, not "household bills".
The situation is bad enough without avoidable misleading statements adding to the misery.
Worked for many years but they had to close it down because it wasn't going to last much longer.
For some reason this rang a recent bell; see
https://www.roofingtoday.co.uk/34-hospital-building-roofs-at-risk-of-collapse/
The description of the material in question sounds very like "cinder block".
What epic stupidity to build a hospital (at enormous cost whichever way you look at it) when critical parts of it only have a 30 year life before failure is likely? This goes well beyond negligence and is more like wilful stupidity both from the point of patient and staff safety and from the point of long - term costs to the taxpayer; save pennies in the short term so that there is a mega - cost in the future because the whole building has to be demolished, hopefully after a replacement has been built.
Having said that the fact that Grenfell Tower happened is a deeply painful demonstration that the problem is deep - seated.
What other horrors await us?
Tens of thousands of BT Group engineers and call center workers...
Had this been about a group of employees in the US I could cope* with the use of the word "center". However, it is about a group of UK employees working for a UK business.
I am getting to the point where I see the enforced Americanisation on this site (and anywhere else for that matter) as being insulting and offensive.
* Just about, anyway...
...engineer has cabinet open to make changes... passing idiot points and says "look at all those pretty light"... spark jumps from end of his finger and kills the switchboard stone dead!
When I worked at <redacted> the carpet tiles were very effective as a means of acquiring some considerable static charge, particularly if one dragged one's feet across them rather than walking properly.
Approach secretary with outstretched finger, uttering the Magic Words those are nice earrings; the outcome was entirely predictable, at least to those with an understanding of physics.
In the changed times in which we live that would probably now result in instant dismissal...
And strangely, it seems to be paying a lot less for the Russian reactors it's looking to build than we're being forced to pay for ours in the UK.
Not all that strange IMHO. Russia will expect a quid pro quo of one sort or another at a time of its choosing.
For "expect" read "insist on and get".
Next day there was a sign over each copier saying "to print duplex - press this button", to shrink A3 to A4 - press ... this other button.
Thank you for the opportunity of linking to one of my favourite "Dilberts"...
https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-04-25. Oo-er; 28 years ago. :(
FWIW I have used the same technique for producing double - sided copies using a copier that definitely didn't have a duplex unit. I always did it in small batches just in case things went awry; apart from anything else they were colour copies.
An article about a British company and one of its (presumably) British employees, and yet it has the word "fibre" misspelled 23 times.
However, what has really puzzled and annoyed me most was the curious mention of multiple dBs of spectrum margin. When did the measurement of spectrum availability start to be quantifiable in dB for <deity's> sake?
How long before I have to ask for a few more chips to go with my fish by specifying the requested extra in dB?
Grrr.
I think you'll find that is worth considerably more (to the right players) than whatever share promises they issued to the hospitals to get it.
Quite. I would like to think that the deal was that the hospitals would provide the data, but that it would remain "NHS property" at all times and that the organisation to which they gave access would have no title to it whatsoever - i.e. it could not be sold on or otherwise disposed of to any third party.
OK, OK, hopeless optimism...
...so whats wrong with what they're using at present?
I will take that to mean "what's wrong with TETRA / Airwave".
The data capability of TETRA is rather less than modest, and this was seen as a potential problem 16 years ago when I retired from "emergency communications". How much of a limitation it has been in practice is something on which others may be able to comment.
On paper TETRA can handle video but again the capability is modest and bandwidth hungry; quite how necessary video really is I'm not sure. Even static images can be a problem; again there is a bandwidth requirement to send them. The original TETRA equipment had no camera capability (and that might still be the case) but the screens on the mobile terminals (mobile here including hand - portable) were so small as to make viewing a still picture of a known suspect (etc) sent out by a Control Room close to pointless.
TETRA was a quantum leap in police (etc) communications capability, but that did not stop the users (or at least their high - level representatives) from proclaiming its shortcomings as show - stoppers.
Oh how I wish I'd have brought shares in Motorola, they're lapping it up!
Quite. It's hardly Motorola's fault if there is not really a competitive market in TETRA equipment and networks.
The Home Office is likely to find the same in trying to find 3 potential suppliers of mobile terminals. IIRC many years ago (when TETRA was very new) there were 4 then; Motorola (surprise!) Cleartone (for vehicle equipment only) Sepura and Nokia. Again IIRC Nokia soon dropped out leaving (by simple arithmetic) just 3. Then Cleartone decided to do likewise and their (singular) product (the CM5000 if memory serves) was taken over by... let me think... Motorola.
With Sepura now being owned by Hytera it might no longer be acceptable for secure and sensitive communications to have overlords in the Middle Kingdom; if it has fallen out of favour that leaves just 1; Motorola.
Not Motorola's fault; just a function of the way the cookie crumbles.
This latest Home Office plan (if it can be said to be a plan) is IMHO unlikely to achieve the intended result.
@ David 132: One has to hope that the Russian kleptocracy puts aside just enough of the Russian oil to immolate Putin in the grounds of the Reichstag Kremlin.
That's all well and good but it is very far from certain that his replacement would be any warmer towards adjacent democracies than Putin is. If Putin is toppled it is more than likely that it will not be for attacking Ukraine but for failing to succeed.
RRH Portreath in Cornwall?
Good point!
Dear Cornwall County Council,
Please nicely can we have our runway at St Mawgan back?
Love,
The RAF.
Joking aside I would have thought that St Mawgan would be a good location for Typhoons to be based; a much shorter route for patrolling around Ireland than anywhere else on the UK mainland.
Aldergrove would be even better, although that might be too busy with civil air traffic for the Quick Reaction Alert role. That said, a few minutes delay in getting off the ground would be less than waiting for a couple of aircraft to fly across from Cornwall or wherever, and would give a much greater loitering time over the Atlantic.
Couple of sources for you.
Many thanks for posting those; very informative indeed.
Perhaps a previous (UK) government was a bit too quick to cancel some of the planned Typhoon deliveries... along with stopping pilot training with some only just short of qualifying.
Ah well; that's politicians for you.
Ireland have already asked the RAF to patrol Irish airscpace for them. ... They also don't have primary radar, so when the Russians fly military aircraft around their coastline with their transponders off, it's a serious danger to commercial aviation. So the RAF have agreed to intercept the Russians doing that, as we'd probably being doing anyway - just we can use Irish airspace to make it easier.
Have you got a source for that; I'm not actually doubting you but I'd like to see it somewhere else!
Assuming it to be correct, it might be something of a headache for the RAF; AFAIK there is no Air Defence Radar providing coverage to the west of the UK south of RRH Benbecula, and all the airfields from which Air Interceptors (i.e. Typhoons) operate are on the eastern side of the UK, unless of course they have been quietly basing aircraft at RNAS Prestwick (HMS Gannet) or RAF Valley in North Wales, or even the rather underused airport at Blackpool, which was once RAF Squires Gate.
...but how many strokes or MIs do you expect in the same household?
I hope I don't have to reply on you for any first aid. I cannot for the life of me imagine what good a defibrillator will do for a casualty who has suffered a stroke. Please do tell...
See earlier posts about MIs.
How was it an obvious MI?
In a sense it doesn't matter. A defibrillator will not administer a shock to a heart that is generating a normal pulse; neither will it give a shock if it cannot detect a "shockable rhythm" in the casualty.
When fibrillating the heart muscles stop working with their correct rhythm and sequence leaving a residual rather chaotic series of small ineffective "trembles" and if the defibrillator cannot detect the basis of a working rhythm then it will advise that chest compressions should be continued in the hope that the external pumping will restore enough of a normal rhythm for a shock to be worthwhile.
The Ambulance arrived 18 minutes later, the defibrillator, over an hour later - no-one knew the code to get into the storage box!
Isn't that something that the 999 operator is supposed to give you?
Yes, but... Actually the Ambulance Dispatcher, not the "999 operator", but this only works when the 999 call is made from beside the defibrillator enclosure, so that the caller can give the correct (previously agreed) description of the location, which IIRC is also displayed. Without that the dispatcher has no idea which code to give the caller.
Unison southeast regional organiser Joshua Cooper told the BBC: "Ambulance and control room staff are working tirelessly to respond to every emergency call they receive and doing all they can to keep patients safe. Lengthy delays are causing much distress to NHS staff. Staff are already at breaking point after months of 'winter-style' pressures." (My bold)
While I don't doubt that Unison's statement is true, I cannot help but feel that it was rather ill considered; I suspect that the stress felt by people awaiting ambulance attendance and their families was somewhat greater.
In the BBC, up to at least the 1980s, we used butterfly fuses...
Ah the nostalgia... those fuses were used on anything operating from the - 50 Volt Station Battery...
Too many years ago I worked in the (then) BH Ext in London, more or less overlooking Duchess Street. What I was doing at the time is long forgotten but on one occasion I was working on something on a temporary feed from one of those fuse panels, and in simple terms things weren't performing as they should.
Switch off; check supply voltage; nothing wrong there. Switch on again; problem still present. Check voltage with equipment connected... aha! That's a bit low.
Some comedian (longer in the tooth than I was) has replaced the fusible link with a resistor, rendering the "fuse" somewhat useless.
For the uninitiated the fuse wire (or resistor, as the case may be) was actually invisible as the butterfly's wings concealed it when the wire (or resistor) was soldered in.
Oh happy, innocent days... mostly anyway.
Could installation of a robust mobile be cost-effective?
Hardly; if a phone box is too little used to be worth retaining when connected by line how would it become worth retaining if converted to a "robust mobile"?
Some of the boxes that are likely to be decommissioned haven't been used at all in the last 12 or even 24 months.
And before anyone asks I do not and never have worked for BT.
It would be interesting to see the letter that "97 per cent of parents, carers and children had consented to the use of facial scanning".
Indeed it would, and the concept of consent is meaningless if that consent is not properly informed. IANAL but given that a "child" cannot sign a contract (for example) I am far from convinced that a child can consent to the use of a photograph without being fully aware of the attendant risks. Having said that I am equally unconvinced that a parent would have sufficient knowledge or be provided with enough other information for their consent to be any more "informed" than their child's agreement.
Given the fact that some people - often (I understand) children - seem to be perfectly happy to post wholly inappropriate photographs of themselves to anyone who asks, it would seem to be clear that on balance the wider population has simply no idea of the risks associated with "personal information" being given away for less than convincing reasons.
Golden Rule of Data: Where data exists there will be attempts to misappropriate it and once that has happened there is simply no knowing how, when, where or for what reason it will be misused. But it almost certainly will be.
Offering price reductions without a corresponding reduction in scope is the same as saying you were overpriced to begin with.
Well yes... perhaps; it all depends on the starting point. When TETRA / Airwave rolled out there will have been a significant part of the cost allocated to amortising the costs of site acquisition and mast / building construction. It seems unlikely that the payments allocated to paying off those costs would be based on a assumption that the contract would be extended at all, never mind for as long as it has been so far.
I don't know for sure either way, but Motorola should have been able to reduce the annual charges paid by the Taxpayer because all the initial expenditure had been covered, with "just" maintenance costs chargeable thereafter.
On the face of it Motorola ought to be been able to offer a reduction some years ago, even allowing for the fact that some of the electronics might have to be replaced, but I strongly suspect that they didn't.
Would the "corporate you" if you thought you could get away with it?
For those who don't know what the 6 P's are "Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance". Something that those who promoted Brexit seem to have completely ignored/forgotten.
Um... IIRC (and it is if) there were no cries of "we'll finish up with a shortage of HGV drivers if we leave" from the pro - Remain camp.
One possible reason for this might be that the current shortage has got something between little and bugger all to do with leaving the EU...
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