Vulch

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• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Some yearsago when printed newspapers were still more of a thing, the Cambridge Evening News (who were normally very car friendly) published a letter from a woman who lived in Petersfield which is an area of Cambridge with back to...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  "DONT ARSK US ABOUT: rocks troll's with sticks All sorts of dragons Mrs Cake ..." Tomorrow being the Glorious 25th of May “Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!” should get a mention too. Tends to be...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Friend and his brother were both Customs Officers, friend specialised in excise duty on oil tankers but his brother spent a lot of time on the arrivals desk at various airports. Brothers sense of smell had been disabled due to...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  I have some odd brain wiring which means I partly lip-read and struggle to rely on audio only so avoid dubbed films and TV and can't comment on Netflix. If I can't get original language with English subtitles I tend...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  Especially Scottish for Russians. (The Hunt for Red October is a big one there.) Pedantically, most of the Russian officers on the Red October had English accents. Ramius was Lithuanian (IIRC, one of the Baltics anyway) so had a different...
• Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
  If an American speaker asks an English speaker to "Write someone" they'll be handed a bit of paper with the word "Someone" on it. What they probably meant was to ask them to "Write to someone"....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  You may want to look up Belisarius, similarity of names is unlikely to be a coincidence. Recaptured much of Italy and North Africa for the Byzantine Roman Empire but was eventually put on trial for a supposed conspiracy against Justinian....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  The Kremlin drone may just have been a rehersal by a private entity of course... The founder of a fintech company in Ukraine is offering a $500,000 prize for the first to land a drone in Moscow's Red Square. Competition...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Prince John of Wales for instance? Never higher than 5th in line though, younger brother of Edward VIII and George VI. 246: Princess Michael of Kent is nowhere in the line of succession. Prince Michael was 15th in line at...
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  No "has to" about it for the Netherlands monarch, it's just become traditional. Age 75 for Beatrix, 71 for Juliana and 68 for Wilhelmina. Willem-Alexander has just turned 56....
• Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
  Richard I was the first King of England to claim the throne by right of primogeniture, up until then it was still technically an elective monarchy. One of the excuses William I used for invading was that Edward had promised...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Maybe he's driving an old post office vehicle? Also whatever he's wearing appears to develop a hood and a front opening.......
• Commented on Minor updates
  Hmmm, Galba made a bunch of promises to supporters and failed to follow through on most of them including not paying the Praetorian Guard their promised bonus. Otho (formerly a Galba supporter) tried his best to stabilise things but lost...
• Commented on Minor updates
  during the year of the 3 emperors Year of the Four Emperors. Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  The latest from His Muskiness is that they started building a water cooled steel plate to go under the launch mount, but that based on the data from the static fire they thought they'd get away without it for this...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I don't know about Starship in its current form, but Falcon 9 launches do not have an RSO in the loop. They use Autonomous Flight Termination Systems, AFTS, where the rocket is monitoring where it actually is and where it...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  The flip at stage sep is derived from the Starlink deploy method where they put the second stage in a slow flat spin and then release the satellites. It's not supposed to happen until after MECO though, and that hadn't...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Not familiar with cons? As Bellinghwoman's name appears in https://glasgow2024.org/about/committee-and-staff/ I suspect a bit of familiarity has transferred Alan's way......
• Commented on Place your bets
  Too bad they didn't bring in clown shoes BJ in some form or fashion. Tricky as he won't even say how many descendents he currently has, whereas with HRH it's fairly well documented as 7....
• Commented on Place your bets
  If he doesn't get the party nomination I suspect it's likely he'd stand as an independent anyway which would be interesting......
• Commented on Place your bets
  Apparently SpaceX now have, or did for a while at least, their own camera production line rather than using GoPros, though I wouldn't have thought it was worth their while for the number required and the source for the claim...
• Commented on Place your bets
  High bandwidth and solid state sensors FTW. See any SpaceX launch (eg tomorrow at 21:11 UTC) that isn't for NASA* for the advantages over recovered vfilm. Still using ground stations for the cameras on the rockets so they switch between,...
• Commented on Place your bets
  The cameras were mainly for engineering analysis, spectacular images for public consumption were a beneficial side effect. For camera housing design there's a lot to be said for those actually on the rockets that filmed stage separations like the S-1C...
• Commented on Place your bets
  a $25 1:144 scale model Revell kit $25? Luxury. When I were a lad it used to take me 3 weeks to save up for an Airfix Series 1 kit at 1/6. I think my Saturn V might have been...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I'm betting there are more than a few 1000 people who will not get the next paycheck on time SVB ran payroll services for many of their customers. There are already comments in threads in other places from people whose...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I'd forgotten that their description of the Telegraph readership was "thought the country was already [run by another country]". Some things haven't changed in 40 years....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Newspaper readers according to PM Jim Hacker....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Of course, if the wrong person is driving the car Ah, but access to the car is only possible in the first place when the face recognition system in the vehicle matches the potential driver to the biometrics from their...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  when I see someone like PM Sunak walking around in range of Russia This do you?...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Upward adaptors for SIMs are commonly available, frequently in a little set with the pointy thing you need to eject the SIM tray when you don't have a paperclip handy....