Posts by Desk Jockey 264 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
But surely that is a short range thing? Over distance, the stirred air would merge with the normal air pattern and the wind currents would revert back to how it was before the wind turbine? As wind turbines are built high and as I expect the 'stirring' to be rather short in duration/distance, this would have a negligible effect on warming the local ground air?
"Per decade"? As wind farms have only really been operational the last decade and measurements did not start until 2003, I would question the timelines and associated measurements quoted! Aren't most wind farms in Texas only 3-5 years old in any case?
Also since when did wind turbines "stir the air about"? I thought the idea was for the air to stir the turbines thus generating power! Sure farmers can use helicopters to warm the ground, but those helicopters use high powered engines to do it. No such thing on a wind turbine... The reference to friction by an earlier poster made more sense!
I do not claim to be an expert on physics, but I think this study is rubbish and the supposedly simple physics do not stand up to scrutiny.
What I am puzzled about is why they are descriminating on the basis of age? It is not exactly as if an OAP or a 16 year old could not do the job while reading the newspaper or browsing their phone/tablet! Going to have to do better than that if you don't want the EU regs breathing down your neck! Being currently unemployed/low earner would be a better discriminator...
The NAO has just told the Cabinet Office a blunter version of what most of the Government Departments have already told them. "We are meant to be shedding staff and in the meantime we are meant to be putting more data out there. Which is it?"
Just another example of incoherent policies. It is all very noble having more data for the public and business to use, but when Government is hopeless inept at properly managing IT and at the same time savagely cutting down the workforce, you end up pulling people and resources away from the primary jobs such as actually delivering a service, crap as it may be at times...
Forget wifi, as correctly pointed out this is dependent on the kit used which BT are only nominally responsible for or in my case (Infinity user with another ISP) totally nothing to do with them.
The reliability of their so called premium network is shocking. I have seen the message from BT Wholesale on my browser saying the web is down a few times too often. I went with another ISP to avoid this problem. Instead I find that both the ISP and I are powerless to stop BT fucking things up. At least I have someone else with a direct line in to help me whinge, but it does not compensate for their unreliability and shows that infinity customers have no real choice...
Apple established a distribution monoply (ipad coupled with itunes) and then tried to get all the publishers to set a common price. Amazon set up various distribution points (kindle, phones, ipad, PC readers etc) which only relied on having a legitimate Amazon account to purchase from any sellor you wanted in their store and then Amazon tried to establish a decent market share by undercutting the competition by selling their stocks of ebooks at almost to no profit.
Dislike Apple or Amazon all you want, one of these tactics (if proven) was illegal, the other was not. They are both very predatory and they are both very good at integrating their products/services. They still need to play within the rules.
I watched a TV documentary over a year ago about the rivets being of a cheaper, poorer quality. This wasn't exactly cutting edge or scienfically topical TV so no doubt the 'finding' was at least a few years old. It is just being regurgitated now for a bit of bandwagon effect and probably to pretend that the said publication/researcher are important.
At least El Reg does not pretend its scientific analysis is important, just irreverent!
What TV services don't benefit from the licence fee? ITV? Channels 4 and 5? Sky? Virgin? You may be surprised to know that they all get something from the licence fee. Sure, they don't get the billions that the BBC does, but the BBC is obliged to work with them to ensure that they can broadcast their services or have access to BBC services. I think they get cash from the licence fee fo things like broadcasting news, but I am not sure about that.
The BBC is not the sole beneficiary, just the biggest one.
Maybe it will help you if you think of it like a driving licence - you can use any legal car on any public road that you like, but not without a licence. Don't want a licence? You can't drive, except on private roads. Your choice...
You are off your rocker! Granted, the licence fee is the worst payment mechanism there is, apart from all the other ones! Sky or Virgin media cost more per year than the BBC and although occasionally they produce good stuff, their general output is less than the Beeb and considerably worse quality. I bloody hate adverts too, I am willing to pay money to avoid adverts on TV, that is how much I hate them! Against that, the Beeb is good value.
Who makes most of the decent documentaries? Who tries at least to provide unbiased media coverage? Who was the first to put TV and catch up services on the internet in the UK? Which single organisation does that despicable man Murdoch hate so much? All these arguments support the BBC being funded on a non-commercial basis.
For those who don't want to pay the licence fee - DON'T WATCH LIVE TV THEN! You are allowed to watch catch-up services on the computer, read the bloody website/guidance which tells you this. You don't have to pay if you don't want to. Just like you don't have to pay if you don't want Sky. No one is forcing you, really!
There was no competition, that was the point. No matter which shop you went to, all the CDs cost the same because the shops had to play ball with the publishers who all agreed (legal partlance - colluded) on the price.
The price went down when people began downloading free copies on the internet on mass. Competition did not do it, new technology did. Apple, to their credit, changed the rules of the game with the Ipod, but not after having to sort of play to the same rules for a while. It should have not happened this way, the EU/US should have slapped the music publishers to allow price competition, like they are doing now with ebooks.
What this case shows is that Amazon played competitively (agressively so but it is within the rules) and anyone else is allowed to do the same, but Apple attempted to set the price with the publishers who in turn tried to dictate that model to Amazon. If everyone starts to set the same prices, you have effectively little to no competition.
Any bets that in the future, cyber warfare will fall into a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) style doctrine? "Wreck our infrastructure and we will do the same to you" sort of thing. Unlike nukes, there is more of a willingness to use this particular weapon. I think Israel already has as seen when they took down Syrian air defence radars before bombing their secret nuke production plant.
All countries use commercial organisations to deliver military products, usually modified from the commercial equivalents. The Chinese are well known for being very good at just using normal commercial products for military purposes. This report is indeed nothing new.
I would say that knowing the performance of ministers both in Parliament and in running their Departments would be a good thing, but as pointed out in the article, this is highly subjective. Really the data should exist already, the app should only be there to collect and then present it in an easy to understand way. You can't 'retrospectively' create data to suit the app. As the saying goes, " Garbage in, garbage out!"
But since Government ministers aren't even appointed on merit or necessarily with the competence to actually do the job (does any other industry appoint people without formal qualfications and interviews?), this app is pointless. Ministers usually get fired when they get caught doing something naughty. Unless the app stores all their misdeeds along with a probability calculation of being caught (boy would I love to get hold of that data!), the data will be useless.
The author might know, but hasn't France signed up to the big international treaties on copyright? If so, I think this law is going to get a kicking from the relevant international body as well as the EU. The Yanks in particular will go nuts and probably advise US companies not to trade in France.
This is about French politics. I cannot honestly see this proposal actually become law as the French would be shooting themselves in the foot as no one would want to trade with them.
I fully agree. Sadly, those project leaders are completely crippled by public rules obliging MOD to bend over backwards and allow themselves to be shafted. You try getting a business case past the politicians or senior management saying that you would penalise any of those big companies for poor performance!
If it was up to me, I would bankrupt them with penalty charges for poor performance, but the Government is "not allowed to do that"...
Those maths calculations are seriously off. £8k per year for a pension?? Didn't you mean to put a 1 or a 2 before that 8? Also £31k as an average is actually seriously low for the civvies. The MOD got rid of most of its low level staff ages ago. Now everyone is expected to handle the big boys stuff and to do their own admin. Sitting around and shuffling paper is a very rare luxury indeed! Sadly, there are no tea boys anymore either!
The military will have a lower average because they have a much higher proportion of lower level grunts than the civvies. You don't exactly want squads of junior officers charging down machine gun fire or doing maintenance! Their senior ranks are completely out of proportion however, so agree with Lewis that they need trimming.
As for the consultants saving the MOD money? Seriously?! Most of them earn upwards of £60k per year and their company puts a nice profit margin on top of that. Most MOD f***-ups of the last two decades can be traced directly or indirectly to consultants parachuting in, dispersing their management speak and then buggering off before it all went wrong! The day when the consultants are paid in shares from those long military projects is the day when they will be properly punished for their screw-ups! On a like for like basis, civil servants work out a lot cheaper and they are still around long enough to learn from those mistakes.
Rather than blaming the civil servants or middle military ranks for all the cock-ups, blame the senior military for playing power games/revolving doors and those mandarins who joined in. More importantly, blame the politicians for piss-poor decisions and for continually putting in sub-quality people to do the work because they 'contributed to the party coffers'! Consultants do not fix these problems, they make them worse!
Selecting green companies by using a darts board? I like that. It explains how their policies work anyway!
I (very briefly) did work with some greenpeace people once. On the whole they were quite nice (they smoked a lot of hash!) and seemed to attract lots of pretty and gullible girls! I have yet to ever see a coherent policy backed by proper analysis and evidence from them though. The Scottish Government did ask them to produce some once on how they could economically recover area around the Clyde submarine base if they got rid of the nuclear subs. It was perhaps the worst, publicly funded document it has ever been my misfortune to read!
Why are we surprised? Now pass over the pipe good chap!
AC - You are missing the point. I know what I am talking about as I used to process FOI requests. Over 80% of the requests I processed were dealt with no problems, we mostly sent people what they asked for. Where we refused to release stuff, we generated a large audit trail proving why we took that decision. They were good reasons which I won't bore you with as they were actually quite mundane.
I broadly agree with the principles you set out in your last post that where you said comparison with the private sector got us into this mess and that you should know what policy makers think your interests are. I think we are sold down the river by the politicians on a daily basis, I don't like it any more than you do.
But just because you pay for something, it does not give you the automatic right to everything. Presumably you are using a Microsoft or Apple product to access this (humour me if you use Linux!)? You paid for that product, but you have no right to access its source code. That is made clear in the small print. Your rights with Government follows a similar principle in that you have the right to hold it to account and to request documents. It does not mean to have the automatic right to every single detail. The FOI Act sets this out and openly publishes its exemptions. A lot of thought went into it, they weren't written on the back of a fag packet!
The fact that people will abuse the act to avoid proper scrutiny means it is not enforced properly, it does not mean that whole thing should be changed to fully open access. You may not think the UK is open enough, try asking another country's government for the same level of openness. Not many of them will oblige!
I will resist making insulting comments about your post and simply suggest you go to your company's managers (assuming you work in the private sector) and ask for details, including contract value, of every single supplier. Then ask for their strategy on how to undercut the competition or any agreements they have. Finally ask for the detailed tech specs of their products. I bet your company tells you where to go! There is no way they will give you information (which will cost them time and money to produce) that you can then give to a competitor. Government is exactly the same, only on a large scale. If you think your interests are served by Government putting every single sensitive information on the internet for anyone to rip off and use against them, then you are a moron!
The arguments about the Government hiding stuff that should be legitimately available to you so that they can avoid scrutiny is a completely different one. I make no excuses on their behalf, they can be total w****rs on this. Not the same issue.
Watch the first episode of Yes Minister which covers the issue of Government being open and transparent. I like one mandarin's quote, "The thing about Open Govenment is that you can either have openness or Government."
Jokes aside, FOI is not a clear cut. Many people ask for documents that could be useful and allows them to do all sorts of things. It is also a way of holding Government to account for decisions. Unfortunately, it is also easily abused.
I will let you into a little secret about FOI... Who processes them? Well that would be civil servants (or local government officers but let's keep this simple)! Who pays for civil servants? Well that would be you, the taxpayer! Want to gues how many FOI requests the anti-nuclear crowd put in? That would be in the hundreds PER YEAR! Tabloid journalists put in thousands each year. Tabloids are making a profit on this information provided by civil servants, the anti-nuke and environmentalists crowd are costing the taxpayer millions through the sheer volume of requests. This is your money being spent here whether you agree with it or not.
Sometimes people get good stuff through FOI (proper journalists such as those of the Private Eye ), but transparency comes at a price. With fewer civil servants now, your nurse, doctor, soldier, scientist etc has to spend their time providing the raw data which the even fewer civil servants then sort out for the FOIs. The anti-nuke crowd have a deliberate policy of spamming pointless requests just to be nasty. MPs are equally guilty although they don't have to use FOI. I wish to emphasise that THEY DO NOT MIND WASTING YOUR MONEYTHROUGH FOI FOR THEIR SELFISH ENDS!
So yes, let's not throw out something that can be very useful, but for god's sake let's find a way of stopping these inconsiderate b****rds from wasting taxpayer's money and draining resources. Suddenly, that Yes Minister joke looks horribly accurate and not so funny when you think of all the money that is being wasted.
No probs, happy to help. Be warned that the 3.5 days figure is for central government and based on a generic working calculation. The accurate figure is £600 for central government and £400 for local. I have to confess to not knowing which one the universities fall under, I suspect local.
Sadly, government departments don't exactly use an equivalent to Google as a central search engine! Even if the data is stored electronically, it can still take ages to find. Imagine I want to find a document titled "climate data" because someone wants data for climate change in India. Now imagine I enter Climate data query into a database (can do more than that because it is crap!) and get 500 returns. I might have to scan every single one of those records to find if one relates to India. According to FOI guidance, I can calculate that I should estimate 2 minutes to examine each record. That is 1000 minutes of effort or 16.6 hours of man effort. Let's say two days of work for one person. Now imagine I have to do that for two more databases and suddenly you are way over the limit. That is how that works which is why phrasing an FOI request properly is very important. For example, "I want documents showing climate change data for India produced in the last two months" may yield a result rather than something more open ended.
For anyone that says these professors did not have the training or resources to handle FOI requests, you have just made my point for me. Complying with FOI is a legal requirement for all public bodies covered by it. It is not optional. Don't like it? Blame Labour for bringing it in, blame the coalition for not getting rid of it or reforming it! Blame those unreasonable requestors if you want! Some things have to be put up with if you want 'open government'.
Correct me if I am wrong, but are a bunch of scientists trying to play at being publicly accountable information managers? If so, they are well out of their depth and should give the job to someone else who is actually qualified for this work! They can go back to their fixing their dodgy models too...
This ruling is not landmark, it is actually quite straightforward and easily recognised by experienced FOI practicioners. ALL information held in recorded form can be judged as within the scope of the request if that is what the requestor is asking for. Whether in backup, CD, memory stick or email is irrelevant, if it exists it must be considered. The ruling simply emphasises this well known rule.
Information is exempt if: commercial sensitive (Section 43 exemption) and you need to have a audit trail to prove this is the case (document signed with X saying information is commercially sensitive) plus an email from the originator confirming it remains the case. Information is also exempt if it costs too much to retrieve (Section 12). In this case you have to prove that it would take one person more than 3.5 days of effort to retrieve the data because they have to search X cabinets of paper archives, for example. It being stored on a memory stick shoots down that argument pretty quickly!
Just to clarify for people as well - "We no longer hold this information" is a legitimate response where it can be shown that it is likely that the information has been destroyed. For central government, it is not a conspiracy to hide stuff, just that they have a standard policy that all archived information not judged to be relevant/important gets destroyed after 10 years. It is a simple matter of housekeeping. Deleting information which you know is subject to an FOI request is against the law though...
I think some professors are due some serious FOI training...
..another bit of dodgy accounting on its way! Getting pensions to invest into capital projects? Like those lovely banks and big companies do for those PFI (Private Finance Initiative) projects? Of course they insist on making a nice healthy profit so the taxpayer ends up paying much more than if the Government fronted up the cash itself.
And they want pension companies (with a very patchy record on making good investment decisions) to get in on this game as well? We are well and truly shafted either way now. No wonder civil servants are striking, they can see this mess coming!
As for letting China 'own' our infrastructure, WTF are they thinking? Haven't they just seen the politics over in the US where they have realised that China is now giving 'instructions' to the US Government on the basis of "We own all your debts and a chunk of your country too". They would be selling the infrastructure off cheap too as we know China would just nick all the intellectual property and copy it back at home. Double shafted here too!
Short story is that if the product is not Military Listed, it is not controlled and no export licence is needed. Dual-use items get flagged up as dual use (usually by customs) at which point the supplier then needs to get an export licence. Slightly different rules apply to dual-use than to Military Listed although the assessment criteria is mostly the same.
No point criticising the Government for not controlling commercial software that has a variety of legitimate uses. If they did that for everything, the export business would grind to a messy crawl and you would hear the screams of anguish from the companies losing customers because of bureaucracy. They should only control what they realise can be used for nefarious purposes, sadly usually after someone else has figured it out first.
So the question that should be asked is should this software be made dual-use because there are examples of this happening? A good example to use is the sale of xboxes to Iraq under Husseing. They were blocked, even though they had no military connection (playing war games does not count!) because the Government realised that they could be dual-used to do number crunching for WMD programmes. The point is, that they have to know about it before they can control it. Does the Iran example provide 'sufficient cause'? ;)
For those of you who have watched the film Blood Diamond (I promise not to praise anything else that has Leonardo Di Caprio in it!) you might remember that they did a similar thing for Sierra Leone and what happened was that the stuff got smuggled over the border and the dodgy merchants bought the stuff with all the paperwork neatly signed. The money still went to the militias. As the credits to the film highlighted, the problem only really got solved when the Brits went in and 'accidently' decimated the big militias.
Legislation is always pointless in the absence of real world action and this case just proves that point again! As with anything in Africa, doing something half hearted does not work and means the people at the bottom suffer. Something the NGOs should have taken into account as they know this full well as they have seen it often enough. They should have blocked the law going through until it was worked up properly, they don't need an army, but they do have a lot of people with PHDs and Masters who are paid to do this work.
That they are not rolling out these rifles to infantry divisions en masse as opposed to spending the money on shinier planes and subs? No not really.
A) The makers of the shiny stuff throw more dosh at our corrupt politicians and military types.
B) I bet this rifle (and the ammo) and anything else of this vein is really expensive. Possibly fine for special forces, but horrifically expensive when you start ordering hundreds of thousands of them.
C) Soldiers break things. Frequently. Making your rifle of solid metal (and heavy) makes it last longer and easier to fix. Light, weaker things turn out to be more unreliable.
D) The physics behind brass cases has been around for a long time and they are tough enough to get loaded into rifles without taking damage and for the bullet to remain accurate as it leaves the barrel. Plastic is a whole different ballgame. I can't see the vids at work, but did anyone mention anything about muzzle velocity, bullet rotation and accuracy? If not, any military person will ask as these are_kind_of_important!
It is possible to be killed by your mobile phone, but the pre-requisite is that you need to have p@ssed-off Mossad first! Or use a phone belonging to a terrorist where Mossad have planted a small explosive charge in the phone...
Either way, I don't think Mossad gives out the numbers it uses to do this (presumably this is irrelevant?) and I don't think they have a particular vendetta against Nigerians! ;)
Not many post offices around anymore and the buggers are useless at being open outside of working hours. Their depots are ok though, at least I can dive into my nearest one early in the morning to collect a parcel while on my way to work. I actually do pay more and specify the Royal Mail over say Citylink, because their depots are always in the roughest parts of town, miles away from anywhere. Fine when they deliver and you are there, totally crap otherwise though.
This Amazon idea is a great one. I work for a bloody living and can't hang around the house during working hours and getting stuff delivered to the office can be tricky. If they set up these collection points, say in the big supermarket opposite where I work, I can nip there during my lunch break and collect my parcel. Or heck, any location that is on my commute back home will do. Win-Win for both Amazon and myself. For those of us who work and don't have a stay at home/wife/partner/porter etc, these delivery companies make the whole online buying experience more of a hassle than it needs to be.
The fact that journalists hack voicemail (NOTW ones and many others) is possibly the worst kept secret in the newspaper industry! The Murdochs would have known that more than one NOTW reporter were at it, and in fact that Sun reporters had been busted doing it too (read Private Eye). They have only settled the cases where they could not bury the evidence such as the For Neville email.
Right about now every single newspaper editor is looking pretty shifty (well more than usual anyway) and it simply comes down to proving what everyone knows, either first hand or anecdotally. Sadly, the newspapers have had a fair few years now to bury the evidence thanks to the corruption/incompetence of the police...
You would have thought that all the recent and high profile publicity surrounding these sorts of muckups would have made them take extra care. Just goes to show that you can set up all the policies you want, but if you employ monkeys, they will fling peanuts and poop all over the place!
Wandered out into the field and took a randomn photo of some grass and trees? Stealth is a 'relative' thing as you can't exactly make a 60 ton tank completely invisible and even a deaf person is going to 'feel' it coming at over 200 hundred yards away! Until they get rid of those gas turbine engines and drop the weight a little, that is never going away.
Lewis must be slipping, he seems to be praising a BAE invention? Granted, not a British BAE one, but BAE all the same. Maybe he has needed to go and lie down after this article?!
Now thermal reduction on a warship and disguising it as a fishing trawler is a great idea. Might just give those Type 45s a sporting chance against super sonic sea skimming missiles, assuming the Russkies did code it to have a smart warship identifier seeker rather than a 'kill anything it sees' one... Or is it only the Western powers that are that considerate?
@ AC "...effectively led to Britain losing its position as the world's premier naval power." What the hell are you going on about? Dreadnoughts WERE British ships! Don't you mean when aircraft carriers and planes started to show how effective they were in WW2 was the point when Britain started to lose its premier naval power status? The U-Boats don't count as they were only effective in a limited way.
While I will not dispute your financial claims that aircraft carriers are very expensive to run, if you attend that course at RAF Cranwell now (and if they are teaching you properly) you would know that UAVs and UCAVs suffer serious technical limitations, particularly when it comes to independent decision making and having enough bandwidth to control a large number of them over long distances. They may well change airborne warfare, but probably not until between 10-20 years when all the technology (and financial) issues get sorted out. I have also not mentioned the legal issues surrounding allowing an AI to decide when to kill someone!
I echo the call for Lewis to show himself. We want to mock him! The article was far too balanced and accurate!
Actually what you find is that going single source is a great idea in theory, as you get to cut the admin costs, but in practice you are then locked into a single company that suddenly loses the will to be competitive. It doesn't matter who you pick, it always happens.
Thus forcing companies to beg for each contract, keeps them competitive. Of course this could also be a destructive process, depending on what industry you are in. The other problem, is that only big companies can compete (the most dishonest ones usually too!) as the small ones can only go for small local contracts not the big central ones. That is why Parliament committees are now telling the Government to give up on the big central white elephants and to let smaller companies in at the local level.
The central contract should only be there as an enabler to allow police forces to know how to run a competition and secure the quality of service they need. The actual buying of stuff should be competed and not given to the central contractor.
Look up the KC Tankers deal where Airbus beat Boeing in the competition (because they offered a far better plane that was bigger and cheaper). The whole thing went into an unholy mess when, following complaints from Boeing, the Amercians did an audit and then cancelled the competition award because they claimed it was run wrong.
Second time round, the requirements were re-written to suit Boeing's offer and so Airbus gave up competing in disgust. The presidential helicopter is very much the same thing. The lawyers/accountants/military running the competition judge the bids based on their evaluations. Congress doesn't like the answer and so scuppers the competition and puts in a new evaluation team to give the 'right answer'.
It is all about money and 'patriotism'...
My point was badly made so I will clarify. You send you car to the garage who you pay ££s each year on a monthly basis to repair and maintain the car. It is their job to find the spares and they lose money every time your car breaks down. You then decide to help by buying a chopped up car to repair some bits of your car. You pay for it and the garage does not pay you back because they did not source the spare parts and so cannot guarantee its quality, plus it being outside of the contract. So you have just spent money fixing something that you pay someone else to do on a fixed price basis. To add to the fun, the exhaust pipe of the chopped car is a bit different from yours because a chav jazzed it up a bit and so the garage has to chop and weld it to fit your car. It works out very slightly cheaper than buying a genuine part, but it breaks off after a few months because the welds failed! As the garage could not guarantee the quality, they don't have to make good the repairs without extra dosh from you.
Got the point I was trying to make now?
For those in the know (ie. not Lewis!) the Yanks deliberately sabotaged the project and made it go hugely over-cost by driving up the requirements. US101 won the competition because it best met the specs, but of course the Yanks don't see it as an 'American' solution so they found ways of wrecking the project, at a high admin cost. Protectionism is indeed a defining feature of US procurement and pisses off the Europeans no end.
The UK MOD seems to be very found of 'contracting for availability' these days when it comes to getting stuff supported. In theory, this means the contractor takes a financial hit if they don't keep the aircraft up and flying. Buying additional airframes to cannibalise them is sheer desperation and just shows that the support arrangements are piss-poor. I have no idea whose fault that is, but suggesting that the UK should do it is about as sensible as asking a garage to fix your car by taking parts from another, not quite identical model of car that has been involved in a car crash!
Maybe you would get mad too if you discovered that your pension is being slashed, but your managers are keeping their gold plated ones! There is an eloquent headline in the Guardian today pointing out that MPs are keeping their very nice pensions (they are supposedly public servants too!) while everyone else is having theirs slashed. Maybe people would swallow the pension cuts better if they actually saw the lords and masters sharing in the pain...
This of course ignores the fact that civil servants get paid less than their equivalents in the private sector (don't give me that crap about average pay, compare like for like and you will see that most skilled civil servants are paid less than skilled private sector monkeys) and that a decent penion is part of the contract that is signed between them and the government when they join. If I signed a contract with you for some work and then dropped the payments in the middle because I 'might' not have the money for the whole contract, you are going to quite rightly drag me through the courts in no time. Private companies get away with this because they pay lawyers to write contracts that can be used to shaft you, your fault for signing up to it! If they change the contract without permission, then you would drag them through the tribunals. Why should civil servants have less protection than you? A contract is still a contract and you should get what you signed up for.
For your info I have met a lot of civil servants who work damn hard and are pretty sharp operators. I have also met a few private sector dicks who are supposedly intelligent who worked in the public sector for a bit and then quit because they could not handle the pressure or deliver to the required standard. You should stop reading the Daily Mail, it is bad for you and makes you sound like an idiot!
Have to laugh. It seems like such a clever idea, using birds to hunt down dead corpses rather than training dogs. There is the slight flaw that dogs actually have brains and can be trained! Seems like man's best friend has not been retired just yet! Not until the German police get a better bird anyway!
Finally, something that pretends to give a good kicking to where it is deserved. I say pretend because I only see this as a political sop rather than any meaningful way of solving the problem. Is naming a project on the naughty list really going to fix it or just make everyone competent give it a wide berth? Expect to see some project never leave the list until they are cancelled then!
I can tell you why Typoon is not on the list, it is because it belongs to BAE who donate to the political parties. Do we honestly expect this government to name and shame those companies that provides all those 'political donations" and kickbacks/directorships etc? Are they going to spell out the reasons why those projects are failing, including those occasions where Ministers over-rule project teams in favour of a politically beneficial solution?
Don't think so!
Like the decades worth of pissing about by the Government and the utilities companies on this issue. Forget the leccy side of things, our bills were going to go up because no one has been investing properly in electricity so we are going to need to build everything at once at huge cost. All that past privatisation of the electricty supply into a series of local monopolies stinks and we are now paying the price for under-investment and the profit motive shown by those greedy co-oporations.
Wind power can be used, it is just not really what the grid wants which is a lot of nice, stable and consistent power. Using wind for commercial use is probably viable as large industrial estates could use nearby wind farms to subsidise their electricity costs during the day and just tap into the grid when they need to rather than all the time. In the event of over-supply, such as outside of working hours, they could sell that to the grid. This works as it allows companies to reduce costs, thus selling stuff to consumers/business cheaper. That leccy can then be shoved into the grid during consumer peak hours when people are heading home after work.
The consumer market is basically an in-competitive market. Consumers need leccy to suit their lifestyles. Taxing them just for having to use leccy when they get home doesn't give them any choice of when to use the leccy. Working hours are what they are and consumers can do sweet sod all to change that. Higher prices for peak demand just means more profit for the utilitiy companies. This market just needs a stable, always on supply that peaks in the evening unlike commercial which peaks during the morning/day. Wind/Storage will not address these issues at all.
The attorny general is talking about 'privacy injunctions' not 'super injunctions'. The former was set up to anonymise victims during the proceeding of a court case, the latter is more of an injunction on an injunction stopping anyone knowing about it, which is then sent to a whole load of media and lawyers just in case...
The arguments are all about people abusing this system, like Giggs or [insert name of bad person/company here]. MPs are using Parliamentary priviledge to out them as have people through twitter. This is a current political debate raging around about how open the system is to abuse etc.
What the attorny general is saying, is that if someone breaches a privacy injunction, through any means including twitter, and say for example gives out the name of a rape victim, he will aim to prosecute that person. They will have committed a criminal offence so it is a fair position in my view. If they do the same for cases like Giggs, those injunctions were taken out by an individual relating to a civil (not criminal case) and so that person (or their legal team) would aim to prosecute the offending person. This is a different situation and not really under the remit of the attorny general as he cares more about criminal proceedings rather than civil.
I suspect that is an urban legend, but there are so many types of these stories it is hard to tell.
Certainly everyone uses smoke launchers and have done for a long time. Arm the drivers and gunners with thermal cameras and they can see fine, unlike the cannon fodder trying to use rocket launchers! I suspect that dust could also interfere with this kit, thus making smoke much more practical on several levels.
Of course, many anti tank rocket launchers now have thermal sights and so tank/APC designers now have to try and reduce the thermal signature of those monsters. I believe even land rovers have smoke launchers, but there are only so many times you can use them and in Afghanistan that probably means you can't drive anywhere until the smoke clears.
Using dazzle camo is sort of a nice idea in theory, but as 90% (or whatever the real statistic is) of vehicles are taken out by IEDs not RPGs, rather pointless. Also would not work against an RPG fired from the front or rear and from what I hear, some of those Taliban RPGers are pretty damn good shots. Putting your faith in a theory that the paint might make them miss more is not a good idea! Better armour that does not add crippling weight is the answer for RPGs and quite a few exist already, hence those grills on the side of trucks etc.
For those with more sense (no pun intended!) than money, you will see that Amazon has just dropped the price of the HTC Incredible S by £120 so it is now £380. Looks like the Sensation has taken the Tier 1 spot at £500. As far as I can tell, the Incredible is pretty much a single core version of the Sensation, making it a bargain buy. I suspect the battery life is better too.
I honestly cannot see what the benefits are of dual core on a phone, but I will admit the phone looks lovely.
I think you will find that the MOD DID contract a British firm who then outsourced some of it abroad. Don't delude yourself into thinking banks, supermarkets etc are any different. At least the MOD probably put the words "Must comply with security provision xxx" in the contract so at least the company didn't send it somewhere really dodgy! There was a recent case of a bank (forget who) who outsourced to South Africa and the backups disks containing thousands of customer details were lost.
This really isn't much of a story (slow news day huh?) and if the Germans, French and US want to devote lots of resources to data mining the jollies of military and civilian personnel, it is their money to waste!
Five eyes is about PROPER information, some of which might even be true and interesting! ;)
The reactor buildings do have defences should an extra large wave come from the sea. They also have thick walls in case of airplance strikes and they are probably earthquake proof too, just in case. Admittedly they probably could not take a direct hit from a nuclear weapon, but then preventing release of radioactive material would be rather moot at that point!
Flooding ponds, containing water and spent fuel rods, while not a brilliant scenario from the perspective of contaminating the water, isn't exactly going to be a major issue as the fuel rods still remain wet! Draining the water is more likely to cause problems, flooding more water on top of water already there less so!
The probability of the UK's nuclear power plants leaking radiation from a tsunami style event are so ridiculously small, it is not even worth factoring for. Loss of back-up facilities (which can happen from a wider range of events) is what happened to the Japanese and caused them all the problems. In fairness, it was a bloody big wave that took out a large chunk of the country!
What the report recommends, is that the back-up facilities are made more 'event' proof because they are far less likely to survive any kind of event than the nuclear plant itself, which makes the point of a back-up rather....well... pointless! Should we get hit by a 6m high wave, we are going to have bigger problems that a few nuclear power plants getting rather wet!
Now I know why steam have that player rating system, presumably those caught cheating would be forced to pay extra under this idea while those with a good credit score (like me!) would get a discount? Not a bad idea, but I can just see people setting up new Steam accounts to get round it so it would not be easy to enforce.
I don't think micropayments are broken. The Total War crowd have used Steam and micro-payments very successfully, EA lesser go, but that is because of their wider problems of being evil!
The CIA realised a few years back that all their expensive satellites and electronic gizmos, although great, could not replace proper human intelligence. They were shadowing the couriers, they must have had people on the ground as following people around "Enemy of the State" style has serious limitations. This is an example where the US took its time (Obama was first briefed in September) and did the HUMINT thing properly rather than blowing things up or just grabbing the couriers! They would have had people watching the compound and standing around in the street all day is rather obvious! This is an operation where the US would have used everything they could and electronic serveillance can never tell you everything, no matter how good it is.
Yes the Pakistani ISI would have been trying to monitor every CIA operative, but the CIA know this, the Pakistanis know that they know, they pretend they don't know. The CIA is still skilled enough to be able to use/recruit people that the ISI wont know about. This is an op where the skill of the operatives (both shooting and covert) is far more important than technology. ;)
Not really a surprise that they lost a heli, trying to land one in the dark, in a built up area is always highly dangerous. That is why the special forces learn how to rope (zip line) out of them onto the ground. Looks like they learnt their lesson from the Iran hostage rescue fiasco and took several spare helis. I think the journos figured there was about 4 in total which is rather high for a covert mission.
We can all speculate about what kit the US used to transmit all the communications and no doubt air assets were flying around to provide overwatch. However, the US had plenty of time to prepare so the CIA probably rented out a nearby house and discreetly shoved a satellit dish on the top. Set up a base station for the Seals to use and voila, a forward covert base to handle communications and chuck out a unit of Seals to prevent any escape until the reinforcements arrived from the helicopters. The CIA could then grab all the gear and jump onto the helicopters right after the end of the gunfight. Why make it any more complicated than that? Heck, they could have probably tunnelled their way under the wall, just in case!
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