von.hitchofen

von.hitchofen

  • Commented on So ...
    Kongratshulashuns Mister Stross - another phallic thing for the mantleshelf! Kongrats to Kameron Hurley and Ann Leckie, too, in case they are reading this......
  • Commented on Down tools
    paws @ 175 Yes, I get what you are driving at...perhaps I've not made myself clear. The F-35B maybe more versatile that a SHar or a Tornado, but that versatility will have been gained at a cost - shorter range,...
  • Commented on Down tools
    No it wasn't, but it is one of aircraft to be replaced by the F-35B - 617 Squadron, will be the first unit to receive it. 617's Tonkas got quite a few sorties under their belt without having to fly...
  • Commented on Down tools
    and of course, if it all goes pear-shaped, the drone can be used as a missile itself Britain may want the F-35B, but it's not that much of a step up from a Sea Harrier FA-2 [scrapped by the Blair...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    Good short story that...I read it in an ACC collection in the 80s and wondered if it was plausible:D...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    Let us not forget that there was only one shooting war with the name of a sport in its name... "The Football War, or 100 hour war A simmering dispute over borders and immigration was brought to a boil by...
  • Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
    Sorry if I'm derailing the thread [someone had to do it] and invoking Godwin's law at the same time, but if enforced estrangement by virtue of boarding school were a powerful factor, nearly all of that class would have cleaved...
  • Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
    Lots of British people had plenty of "noblesse oblige" of the kind displayed by Johnny Dalkeith They just didn't have four castles [Drumlanrig, Bowhill, Dalkeith Palace and Boughton Hall] a quarter-of-a-million acres of Scotland and England, and a da Vinci...
  • Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
    also the commander of the Atholl Highlanders, the Duke of Atholl, Marquess of Tullibardine, Marquess of Atholl, Earl of Strathtay and Strathardle, Earl of Atholl, Earl of Tullibardine, Earl of ad nauseam, or Bruce as he's more likely to be...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    I've given up on football - not that I had much enthusiasm in the first place. I was only ever interested in the result - the 90 or so minutes of mucking about beforehand I could take or leave, and...
  • Commented on We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday.
    Is this an attempt by the Americans to retrospectively arrest Charlie Brooker via his wikipedia page? "I ended a Screen Burn column by recycling a very old tasteless joke ("John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley, Jr. – where...
  • Commented on Yet another bad idea
    well, Bashar al-Assad used them at Homs... that reminds me, under Putin-Palin, Bashar will be our kinda guy in the Mid-East - he should hammer out peace [of a kind] in no time...;-D...
  • Commented on A hypothesis
    How hard can it be to have multiple redundancies for aircrew comms to ATC, and multiple redundancies for the oxygen supply to the flight deck crew, who will inevitably take over in the event of inflight incident/emergency? Even if its...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    not any more... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_Act_2003#Retrial_for_serious_offences_.28the_.27Double_Jeopardy.27_rule.29 thanks, Mr Tony Blair!...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    flightradar24.com's view of MH370's flightpath X 12 www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnfXwyh-8KY There's no evidence to suggest that the point at 3.23 was necessarily the point where it came down, only when its transponder ceased broadcasting It could have broken up in mid-air, dived...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    9M-MRO was a Boeing 777-200ER so 199 ft 11 in (60.9 m) wingspan and 209 ft 1 in (63.7 m) fuselage length Even depending on speed of descent/ angle of impact only the engines would have enough mass to sink...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    ooops, sorry, old chap...I thought I had....%_% I'll just put the bare url in next time...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    If there's not much to report, the media usually don't bother to report it...
  • Commented on Circumstantial connections
    The Guay bombing was the second hull-loss of an aircraft due to an inflight bomb explosion, apparently. I always thought the first was an attempt to assassinate Zhou Enlai on an Air India Constellation in 1955 [which killed sixteen people,...
  • Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
    Apropos which, I suspect the situation was retrievable, until @wossy responded adversarially on twitter. Scared people complain, cause of fear responds combatively (the word "slander" was, I believe, used) ... things spiral out of control Having some of his twitter...
  • Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
    Good manners cost nothing - and therefore cannot be monetized ;-)...
  • Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
    Speaking as someone who has never attended an SF convention in the past [nor an awards ceremony], and has no desire to do so in the future,{1} I would have thought Jonathan Ross would have been ideal for loncon3. He's...
  • Commented on Publishing - We're All On the Same Side
    And much of the dead tree fascination seems to be tied to age. I'm 59 and still haven't read an ebook on any of my 5 computers or 2 mobile devices. Not necessarily - my mum is 73, and has...
  • Commented on "The next big thing"
    >The Culture is a reaction to the doom and gloom of the late 80s / early 90s. Some optimism is welcome in the face of recession, religious intolerance, and wars in the Middle East. possibly, but Iain's idea of...
  • Commented on "The next big thing"
    The writer's life in five stages 1 'Who the hell is Charles Stross?' 2 'Get me Charlie Stross!' 3 'Get me a writer like Charlie Stross!' 4 'What happened to Charles Stross? Is he still going?' 5 'Who the hell...
  • Commented on "The next big thing"
    ...and with ebooks, the content can be published almost as soon as it is written, no matter how good or bad it is [mistakes, bad grammar and padding included], and the music industry is probably the fastest of all, nowadays...
  • Commented on "The next big thing"
    Of course, William Gibson had never written a novel before, hardly ever used a computer [if at all], and saw the first 20 minutes of Blade Runner, thought he would be deemed a plagiarist and went into re-write frenzy on...
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    No, it does because the government appoints the judges who interpret and enforce the law in a way favourable to the government, or favourable to the establishment. Speaking for England and Scotland, separation of church, state and judiciary has never...
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    ...and of course many prisons were operated on a for profit basis - by the church! - like the Bishop's prison at Ely and Durham. Bishop's gaols were no better than others, and were frequently worse. They provided a source...
  • Commented on The cult of justice
    Of course British Justice also included the concept of the debtors' prison, where transaction between private individuals were redefined by the state as theft, effectively. The prisons were run for profit [of course], the gaolers fees effectively impoverishing the debtor...
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