brett-dunbar

Website: brett-dunbar.livejournal.com/

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Commented on 9/11
If the towers had lasted longer it wouldn't have made much difference. By the time they collapsed nearly all of the staff below where the planes hit had got out. While nearly everyone above the impacts was dead. In any...
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
There is some precedent for acts restricting dissolution of parliament. In 1640 the Long Parliament was so named as on first sitting it passed the Triennial Act 1641 which had provision that that parliament could be dissolved only with its...
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
Community Charge wasn't an income tax, it was a poll tax or head tax, everyone paid the same amount. Council Tax was like Rates a property tax. The student loan introduced a heavily subsidised loan on extremely generous terms to...
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
What a lot of people don't know is that the Parliament Act can only be used on House of Commons bills, the Lords can veto any bills originating in the Lords, this is about half of all legislation. If you...
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
Strangely the rate of decline of coal under Thatcher was lower than under either her predecessors or her successors as shown in this....
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
The Prime Minister has had official recognition domestically since 1906, when it first appeared in the order of precedence. The earliest official mention was in a treaty signed during Disraeli's second term. The first lord of the treasury and the...
Commented on Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.
The PM doesn't have to be a party leader, however it's unusual. Churchill wasn't the Conservative leader in May 1940, Chamberlain remained the leader until October when he became too ill, he died a month later. In 1916 Asquith remained...

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Charlie Stross commented on 9/11
It doesn't matter how vile the incumbent dictator's regime; nobody likes being invaded or having an invader's occupation troops on their streets. Welcoming invaders with flowers only happens when the invaders are allies who happen to be kicking out another bunch of invaders -- and even then, only if they're notably less brutal. Germany, WW2? It took multiple millions of occupation troops a few years to nail it down. Japan, WW2? It took the even worse threat of a Soviet invasion and/or atom bombs, combined with the Emperor's decree of surrender, to make them accept it. I am not sure...
Charlie Stross commented on 9/11
David L: hit the "Leave a comment" link and the iPad will take you to the comment entry form ... which is right at the bottom. (I need to look into updating the page template to include a suitable anchor and a "go to bottom" button.)...
scentofviolets commented on 9/11
(I need to look into updating the page template to include a suitable anchor and a "go to bottom" button.) Off-Topic: Charlie, how much of your site is tinkering by hand, how much of it is using something like Adobe Dreamweaver, and how much was just a straight template with the appropriate buttons and boxes checked off? I'd like to think that at the margins, hand-coding is still the way to go (at least, if you have some background as a professional tinkerer), but I could be way wrong. I had to help my wife last semester[1] when she had...
Moderator Alan commented on 9/11
Oh, an interesting spam variant there - using www.google.coN as the link target. Oh, it's now dead?...
Charlie Stross commented on 9/11
Off-Topic: Charlie, how much of your site is tinkering by hand, how much of it is using something like Adobe Dreamweaver, and how much was just a straight template with the appropriate buttons and boxes checked off? Wash your mouth out with soap! The hand-coded bits are mostly done by me using vim on Linux. (Hint: I've been hand-coding HTML since 1993.) The blog runs on Movable Type Pro with MySQL as a back end; templating mostly by Feorag but I do chunks of maintenance on it from time to time and keep the perl installation ticking over. There is...

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Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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