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message 5701:
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Marc
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Jun 26, 2017 12:39PM
George Osborne has seen "Austin Powers"?
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well it's a nice change. Instead of spending English money on Scots who just want to leave the UK and blame us for everything, we can spend it on the Northern Irish, a lot of whom don't want to leave the UK and blame each other for everything :-)
"Instead of spending English money on Scots who just want to leave the UK and blame us for everything..."It's the Welsh I want to get away from, not the English :)
And besides, Fisherman's friend are made in England, so that's one redeeming feature about England :)
R.M.F wrote: ""Instead of spending English money on Scots who just want to leave the UK and blame us for everything..."It's the Welsh I want to get away from, not the English :)
And besides, Fisherman's frien..."
Thanks caller, really enlightening contribution
Well England is a buffer zone between the Scots and the Welsh, what more do you want?
Lynne (Tigger's Mum) wrote: "Well England is a buffer zone between the Scots and the Welsh, what more do you want?"Free cake and a free back rub :)
Marc wrote: "R.M.F wrote: ""Instead of spending English money on Scots who just want to leave the UK and blame us for everything..."It's the Welsh I want to get away from, not the English :)
And besides, Fis..."
Thank Marc. I draw inspiration from your own work. It beats watching paint dry.
And in more news today, it seems that the Royal Navy's new Aircraft Carrier, a cool 3.5 Billion quid, runs on Windows XP.
Jim wrote: Instead of spending English money on Scots who just want to leave the UK ...Given the Indyref1 winning margin, rather more of it gets spent on Scots who don't want to leave the UK. Does Northern Ireland have a bigger Unionist majority than Scotland?
Whilst don't the Irish "blame it on Cromwell and William the Third", neither of whom had more than a passing connection to the Emerald Isle?
Will wrote: "And in more news today, it seems that the Royal Navy's new Aircraft Carrier, a cool 3.5 Billion quid, runs on Windows XP."Not sure about aircraft carries, but when they leave here the subs it's not connected to the internet so old software it doesn't really matter. To hack a sub, you've literally got to make physical contact with the computer on-board.
Having used XP for years and loved it for its stability, I'd rather they ran XP than Windows 10
At least we don't run the risk of a carrier being disabled because all the computers are doing a microsoft update and then reset to Western Standard time or whatever :-)
I just find it amusing that the money tends to be made in London, traditionally a Labour city, and is being used to fun Northern Ireland for which most Londoners seem to have nothing but contempt :-)
David wrote: "Whilst don't the Irish "blame it on Cromwell and William the Third", neither of whom had more than a passing connection to the Emerald Isle? ..."All depends on which part of Ireland you're talking about. William the third is virtually a saint in some areas
Whilst Cromwell somehow upset the Irish by massacring English Royalist soldiers
I don't have contempt for Northern Ireland, my next book is set there and despite family/community pressure as a child to concern myself with the Middle East, I grew up obsessed with Northern Ireland which was happening on my doorstep and had the same style of road signs & car number plates as where I lived...
Yes, Northern Ireland was and to some extent is part of my life because we have so many people of Irish extraction round here
I'm sure there will be loads of military computers still running on Windows NT, if anyone remembers that. Quite apart from military project delivery lead times being measured in mega-aeons, the systems themselves have operational lives measured in decades, and there is a culture of re-use. The first time we decided we didn't need Aircraft Carriers any more, the Gannets that flew from them and carried the Early Warning Radars were scrapped, so the radars were redeployed in the even older Shackletons.
Our Geoffy knows about the sub stuff. But if he told us anything, he'd then have to kill us.
Jim wrote: It's a dedicated Windows versionAccording to the article, 'Windows for Warships' had recently (2015) been adopted by the Navy, and it is a specialised version of 'Windows 2000', the predecessor to 'Windows XP', which first appeared in 1999. It would be interesting to know if the bugs exploited by the recent ransom-ware attacks had been patched before they were leaked from the US NSA.
The carriers apparently have a BAE-designed system whose provenance is unclear from the description.
of course the provenance is unclear from the description :-)
Marc wrote: "I don't have contempt for Northern Ireland, my next book is set there and despite family/community pressure as a child to concern myself with the Middle East, I grew up obsessed with Northern Irela..."It's a pity you didn't visit Northern Ireland. You could have bored both sides into submission and stopped the Troubles.
Was the Brexit vote the warm-up act for Russian hackers trying to get a lunatic elected President of the United States? Ostensibly English Pro-Brexit Twitter Account Actually Russian?
cannot see the article because I'd have to sign in and there may even be a pay wallFrankly I would imagine one twitter troll making much difference to either side
Interesting to look at twitter users. Technically I am an active twitter user, because my facebook account and blog automatically post to my twitter feed to my 139 followers
But I don't go onto my twitter page every month and never see what the 50 people I follow are actually doing :-)
http://www.rosemcgrory.co.uk/2017/01/...
"Other independent research gives us figures of 45% of UK Online Adults using Twitter, with 37% of those account holders logging in daily. Using the ONS figure of 45.9 million for the UK’s online population, that would give us a user base of around 20 million. That seems plausible, if maybe a little generous, compared to the last “official” UK figure of 13 million which was provided in 2013.
The same research reports a surprisingly young demographic, too: 64% of users are 18-29, 57% 30-49, and 33% 50-61. The more affluent citizens are also over-represented on Twitter, with 62% in the 48K+ household income bracket – bearing in mind that the median UK household income this year was just over £26k.
If you’re interested in how people are actually using Twitter, there’s a really good, and up to date, report here from the BBC. From that we learn that a relatively small number of highly active users dominate in terms of posting content – 1% of accounts are responsible for 20% of all tweets, and 85% of all tweets are accounted for by just 15% of total accounts."
I'm probably in that 1%/85% cohortTwitter influences very little. FB on the other hand... That Cambridge firm that datamined for Trump's campaign to bespoke target their election communications relied on FB data I understand
Funny, I didn't need to log in to read the link. But I had a Facebook session open; maybe that was enough.That one Twitter troll was definitely in the 1%, and Twitter's curation algorithms put its tweets on the first page of every Brexit-related Twitter hashtag search that I have executed.
I have thousands of 'followers' and in turn follow thousands. Many must be 'bots', and many of the others use 'Round Team' or similar to auto-generate tweets. As I am sure you can imagine my Twitter 'feed' is useless. It is a vast stream of adverts and random musings, often in languages I need auto-translate to understand. Nevertheless I find the number of visits to my book page correlates with my Twitter activity, so I persist.
I am sceptical of the Trump Facebook success claims, since I understand the Tories followed the same approach earlier this year, I saw lots of Tory adverts on my Facebook page, and they didn't seem focused on my buttons. But maybe they thought I was a supporter.
FWIW I have received advice that one should tweet 4 times a day, 2 original and 2 re-tweets. That way you avoid pissing people off with a stream of inanities and you show engagement with 'the community'.
I have zero interest in Twitter. Facebook and Instagram seem to be the platforms of the moment.
being a platform of the moment would be exactly why I'm not on them.Tbh these are the platforms our generations favour, the kids are on others, though FB (inexplicably) persists in popularity across the generations
2 billion Facebook users, I believe.Certainly not a platform that someone with a product to sell should snub.
*shrugs**cuts nose off to spite own face*
Marc wrote: *cuts nose off to spite own face* Cosmetic surgery?
Facebook is invaluable for me for diary purposes, with local literary events often being organised exclusively on FB.
Meantime, we are now going to be subjected to 9 months of inane press coverage of what should be a private event of no interest to anyone outside of Mrs Windsor Junior's close family.Bring on the Republic!
Will wrote: "Facebook is invaluable for me for diary purposes, with local literary events often being organised exclusively on FB."there is a situation developing now where people think that once they've told the world about something on facebook, it's all they need to do.
I was talking to a chap who is on facebook, checks it at least a couple of times a day, and was complaining that he'd missed a local event he was interested in because it was only mentioned on facebook, but not the bits that he saw
Along with the 'Henry VIII Powers' in their Repeal Bill the Tories have now voted to give themselves majorities in parliament that the electorate did not deign to give them at the ballot box. The excuse given: Brexit. Thus Mrs. May acts to give effect to her ambition to 'go on and on'; damn you pesky voters!In other news, the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, points out that the destruction of living standards for all but the mega-rich continues apace.
And Len McCluskey likens himself to Ghandi and Mandela.
WTF?
a country without a clue, without an identity, without hope, what you cite above sounds about par for the course
Still, we can all be glad that McClusky hasn't chosen to dress in a loin cloth like Ghandi
As an oppressed working-class Northerner, of course he wore a loin-cloth at the bottom of his swamp. He would still be doing so had his employer not bought him a half-million-pound flat on the South Bank.
Only half a million? No wonder he's identifying as the champion of the represssed underclass,
Half a million? K's son in law has a half million pound flat in Wanstead. To call it tiny is to exaggerate the fact it is a shoebox with delusions. And a stacked shoebox, at that, at the top of nearly 40 stairs!
Lynne (Tigger's Mum) wrote: Only half a million? No wonder he's got delusions.To be more precise, he has been given £507,000 and he bought a flat. He may additionally have put in an unknown (to me) quantity of his own or his partner's dosh.
do you know if there were any reversion of ownership clauses? They are quite common, and frequently overlooked, even though they mean that there is no long term ownership for the recipient of the money
It's a good point WillIn theory, if the £507,000 plus any capital gain went back to the employer or whoever when he quits work, then it would almost certainly be a good move for the employer. They use capital which they'd probably have invested in pension scheme or whatever anyway, use it to provide convenient accommodation for their employee convenient to his work, AND get a capital gain which will almost certainly pay better than most other investments
The Union has stated that it's a shared ownership scheme. The first £90,000 was paid when he relocated to London from the North, and seems reasonable enough. He moved to Willesden. But it looks as though the trigger for the £417,000 payment and the move to the South Bank was the end of a long term relationship. I'm not a member of Unite, but if I was I would consider this an entirely inappropriate use of scarce resources regardless of whether or not it is a sound investment.
if the money is coming out of the pension fund (which has to be invested to provide an income for pensioners,) it strikes me as reasonable enough.There is a little more detail here
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/...
I thought the long term relationship was with Tom Watson. They flat shared until recently but fell out over Corbyn's policies.
Exactly what I suspected, Jim. The union has already made £ 100k profit on the property value, so nothing to see here
Scarce resources? Aren't they claiming to have a massive strike fund for paying strikers were they to go on strike & forfeit their wages?
Scarce resources; exactly so. If I was a potential striker, I would much rather the half-million quid was available to feed my family rather than keep a South Bank roof over the head of the General Secretary. He won't be on strike (though he may perhaps forgo the difference between his salary and the strike pay as a gesture of solidarity for the duration of any strike, especially as the modern approach to strikes is 'little and often').
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