Posts by Mips

American Accent?

Well there you go then. Sure sounds like F*UCK to me even if you know how Americans speak. It is one Anglo Saxon word the do seem to know how to say. So how is it the rest of the "singing" is not with an American accent?

I hate these sing along "developmental" toys anyway. Blame the lazy parents that's what I say.

Shaken...

..and Stirred. Of course.

Sharklets?

Back in the 1960s we used to call them speed tips. So there.

Yeh but....

... it's a US left hand drive model. So if you brought it to the UK it will cost you to get it converted.

And you though £200k was cheap.

Not quite:

You report "GA is now the only company in the world which knows how to make electromagnetic catapults". That is not true, we all know how the catapult works, but to actually make it work is another question.

Do you want to eread that first paragraph again?

Who has been using too much Christmas sauce then?

Semantics

Your comments are just much semantic bollocks. Any improvemnt is better than none.

When leaving Charring Cross to cross to the north side of Trafalgar Square I took to the practice of holding my breath to cross the road. Apart from the risk of getting knocked down (mostly by cyclist as nothing else was moving) the choice was of passing out or getting poisoned by the toxic cloud. I wasn't just the taxis I think the buses were worse.

Woah! Hang on a minute...

.. I am all for freedom of speech but has anybody considered this guy might not be as innocent as he is claiming. If he is innocent then he has nothing to fear. Why the threat of DoS.

It is anarchy writ large.

So if I bumped off Paris Hilton, but deny the fact, and now for proof I am going to bring down the Internet. Come on get real.

Pop-culture bitchslap for Cowell

Come on now! Get real. Cowell could not stay silent for 1 minute never mind 4' 33"

Of course...

... some stupid sod will hack it just because it is there or is actually doing something useful.

America of the bullet?

Hello!

Did anyone notice? American history apparently starts in 16th century. What happened to the 10 millennia before with Clovis points and all? Indians with bows and arrows and spears. South America managed a whole bloody history very nicely without a gun in sight.

X - Rated?

Well they all look about average to me. Seen a lot worse.

Time to remember

Time to remember that 60m years ago the day was somewhat shorter than it is now and there was less time for the high temperatures to bake off vegetation creating deserts. Now, high temperature do not necessarily mean high vegetation growth and development rates. It might well be too hot for too long. On the other hand we might see adaptation. Leathery leaves could be the in thing and ficus robusta plants might take over the world.

Mine is the rubber coat and grass skirt.

Telegraph

Was a bit confused the sub-head says PARIS released at 23mile height but in the body says 17miles. Typical Telegraph. The typos may have been spell checked out but what was the editor doing.

Now here is a thing: the media reporting on the media... who report on the media... who report on the media.. who eventually disappear up their own...

No substitute

Carbon trading is a mess. It was always doomed to fail as an impracticable and flawed process open to fraud.

As the article says the chief constraint to carbon use is the price of fuel. So if you want to get attention on carbon use increase the price of carbon. Tax it plain and simple.

OK, so it is not quite that simple but as an island nation we have an advantage we can tax at the border. I will not present the scheme here but it has all been worked out and need not be bureaucratic at all (all done by computers: IT angle).

Advantages:

We would have to carbon tax imports and tax rebate exports (think about that for a bit).

We would not need to encourage or subsidise or regulate for renewables or nuclear energy.

We would have huge pressure to develop low carbon and we would become world leaders in this technology.

'nuf said.

Boys Toys

Bragging rights strike again.

Harrier is Navy: Navy guys love it: it can do no wrong.

Tornado is RAF: Navy guys hate it, say it is no good.

The facts are ignored. This seems to be the default position in the modern armed services.

The facts are the Tornado has greater load, speed and duration, however, Harrier will fly from a makeshift runway. But in relation to Afghanistan it is irrelevant that a Harrier can fly from an aircraft carrier. Neither aircraft is particularly good at what it does, Harrier is very much a one trick pony.

The reality is that the Services cannot support such large forces and to meet the current task the answer is a no-brainer. If we talk about future tasks, about the Falklands and Argentina then we should be talking about how they may be defended not about how they may be won back.

When you wrote PARIS..

..I did not actually think you meant pariS: Space. Because that is what you just about got intentionally or not. The photos are fantastic.

LOHAN? 1. Please borrow a more reliable still camera. 2. Please don't launch it anywhere near me.

Compressed to the size of a marble..

..I mean, do I care? Does anyone care? Who would there be left to care? In fact think it is exactly what we need.

Pittsfield - Tittsfield

Nice pun. Oooh I like it.

Stop the recording at 1:14

and you can see a very small aircraft below. Might be a Cessna but could be a Jumbo. Oops! Bombs away chaps, beware the Hun in the sun etc. etc.

"The greatest weakness of the HULC thus far...

... has been the limited endurance offered by the batteries"?

I should have thought the greatest weakness is not being able to get up if you fall over or not being able to lie down if you are shot at. Not good in a theatre of war then.

Ambition?

Lagos style.

I cannot wait to get a laptop so I can scam the world.

Erm. How about learning English first.

Should have asked Dob Dylan

In "I shall be free"

"Well, my telephone rang it would not stop,

It's President Kennedy callin' me up.

He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?"

I said, "My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot,

Anita Ekberg,

Sophia Loren."

County will grow."

Somehow I can't see it happening this time

And I bet they use an Action Man as a pilot

1. Have you done a load test on the wing?

2. Have flight tested it yet?

3. How are you going to trim the glide seeing as everything is glued together?

4. Dihedral is a GOOD thing, makes aircraft fly in a straight line.

Lack of joined up thinking.

I should be writing this flames on, but here goes anyway.

There is no such thing a sustainable tidal power; anyone that says there is lying or short of a few brain cells; consider the following:

Earth has been rotating since it formed driven by PE of material accreting into the mass. We are no longer accreting mass and there is a finite amount of KE bound into the system.

OK so the mass is about 6x E24kg and that stores a hell of a lot of energy but it is continually being drained by tidal action. The gravity of the sun and moon drag at the surface of the earth causing tides and this dissipates the stored kinetic energy. Look at the moon, this once used to rotate faster but the energy has been dissipated by tidal action (on the moon) and the moon is now tide locked to the earth. We always see the same side of the moon; eventually this will happen to the earth and we will be tide locked to the sun.

Now we come to the difficult bit:

So the tides dissipate energy, so let’s put up a barrage and generate power, after all it is free. Ho. Ho. Here is the mistake. Pause a minute and think where that power is coming from. If you stop the water flowing freely this adds to the force of the tide to the earth. It is a bit like you trying to open the door whilst I am stood behind it. This takes energy from the rotating mass and the earth slows down some more.

You might think this is of little consequence and on a personal level this might be true. But if you realise that during Jurassic times the day was about 17hours you should see that a 25hour day is within easy reach and at some time 30hours. It is said: life as we know it will cease to exists. Is this worse than global warming? Yes it is terminal. Can we stop it? No but we should not make it worse.

Anyway TIDAL POWER IS A BAD THING. Is that message clear enough?

What's that you've got in your pocket?

A 7-inch tablet? Never heard it called that before. Something new every day. And there's me thinking you were pleased to see me.

Why wait?

As it happens I live just below high water mark so I have a vested interest in global warming. Fortunately there is a nice friendly earth bank which is just enough for now to keep the sea from visiting us. This is the situation for many people all over the world.

I do not want to wait the results for your grand experiment to prove that carbon dioxide is causing global warming because by that time I will be living in a pond and lots of other people will be refugees.

We want YOU to do something about it NOW and not to say later: Oh I am sorry, it seems I was wrong.

The sun output will wax and wane but carbon dioxide keeps on rising. It's time for YOU to do something about it.

Butterfly?

Would that be the one that flaps it's wings in the Amazon and causes tornadoes in Sussex and earthquakes in China?

I am suspicious of everything that Autodesk does.

Bragging Rights

You have found the nail, so smite it righteously on the on the head. Most of the MOD's problems stem from one interest group resenting occupation of the high ground by the other. The shame of it, and it is a shame, that everyone is let down by the self interest of a few individuals. The services personnel do not get what they need for the job, UK defences are weakened, and it all cost far more than it should. To paraphrase Churchill "never was so much injury done to so many by so few".

Time for a shakeout. A big shakeout.

Keep out of the Arctic

With so much information available about the loss of Arctic ice sheets and this causing the acceleration of glacier loss we go into the Arctic at the peril of our future. There are other solutions to the energy crisis (what crisis) so we should develop these before putting more heat into the Arctic environment.

I'm qualified

I've got a watch like that.

Time for a narrower focus

We do not have to fund everything, but what we do should be properly funded. Funding for big projects like the Large Hadron Collider is just mounting for bragging rights.

Ceiling?

Clearly it will have to fly above cloud top but below jet stream. I am a bit unfocussed about that.

How well does prop propulsion work at 65,000ft? How do you make a prop work all the way from sea level to working height?

Trident and the balance of terror

Trident carries multiple heads of small capacity and is essentially a battlefield weapon. It is not a city destroyer though it could be used that way; it is a weapon of response not of first use.

We are in an era of nuclear disarmament and the power size and number of warheads are being reduced. Our ability to reduce a nation to dust has gone. In actual fact Trident is just about UK bragging rights to ensure we get a seat at the world top table.

So who are we aiming at?

Be serious do the possibilities include other nuclear nations: USA, Russia, France, Israel, China, India?

The likely options are: North Korea, Pakistan, Iran; there may be others.

We could in fact achieve our defensive task with something far simpler than Trident. We do not need Trident and we underfunded on what we do need. So why Trident? Not only that why Eurofighter? Why new aircraft carriers? Why new tanks? They are all for fighting wars that no longer exist.

Then again it has been said that we have the worlds best fighting force; is this true? I do not doubt the bravery of the serving men and women nor the leadership, but the US forces seem to punch above their weight whilst we punch below. Clearly our troops have inadequate support. Perhaps it is a case of too many chiefs and not enough indians.

Mullti-million dollar satellite?

Surely not. It was just another lump of space debris. Best place for that is in the scrap yard, er..ocean.

"featherweight 10 grammes" ?

and most of that is glue

Overheads

There is a significant difference between a Gatso and ANPR: Gatso is standalone ANPR is network attached. Then there is a question of the application of the technology. The Gatso is simple two images at a timed interval, originally on film but recently digital. This can be analysed at any time. ANPR when not set up correctly and also sometimes when the vehicle is not obligingly in the right position on the road can produce spurious results: they might produce three number for each vehicle and one might be correct.

Now where is all this additional information traffic going to go and what about that remote camera in a country lane somewhere? Time to liven up all that dark fibre.