Surprised it’s not Crapita.

And if the school hadn’t been run like this for years and it being known it was like this for years there wouldn’t have been a TV programme to make. I think you’d have to be pretty gullible to believe their statement.

Presumably it has taken over a year because:

Cdr Dominic Murphy, head of the Counter Terrorism Command, said it had been an “extremely complex investigation”

An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

$ ls -l
sh: ls: command not found

So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

# rm -rf / tmp/*.log
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
# ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
# stat /bin/ls
sh: stat: command not found

A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

That’s nothing new, that’s the very basis of how a firm works out how to price an item or service, at the maximum price the market will bear. It has been this way since the year dot.

Collaborating with “competitors” however must be prevented or the market won’t work. (This is the reason we have anti-monopoly laws, and anti-collusion laws). The laws exist already they just have to be enforced.

It was the kid breaking into the substation to get his frisbee that was stuck in one of the insulators that did it for me. “Jimmmmmyyyy!!!” while smoke was pouring out of his shoes.

Post-industrial depression landscape in the Cumbrian mountains? Or Yorkshire? The Pennines?

As a workaround, you could use OBS and use OBS’s virtual camera so Discord is streaming what it thinks is a camera, and set up whatever you want to share on your desktop through OBS.

How old is “older?”

I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).

Probably a clusterfuck.

Sigh. Yet another thing that must be sacrificed on the altar of the almighty motor car.

The OP is clearly using hyperbole. But only 1% of the welfare bill goes on unemployment benefits, so even if absolutely everyone on unemployment benefits is cheating and you cut them off, you don’t save much. In reality the majority of people on unemployment benefits are not cheating the system - a system that already sanctions the unemployed for not actively seeking work.

Not only that, but they will make an ungodly racket while doing so. Multi propellers all turning at a slightly different RPM, with all the annoying beat frequencies this will create. They will also likely be almost as expensive as helicopters (only a very small amount of a helicopter’s cost is its fuel, the overwhelming majority is maintenance and insurance).

They both do significant business in the UK. To continue doing business in the UK, they must abide with UK competition laws.

A road rage conviction should result in a lifetime ban or until a medical professional can certify that the person is mentally fit to drive.

I love the arguments about tolerances, how “having to stare at the speedometer will make things less safe”.

The average 17 year old is expected to be able to drive at a steady speed while dividing attention effectively and NOT staring at the speedometer, and demonstrate this skill on their driving test. So basically all the people going on about how they will “have to stare at the speedo” are saying: “Speed limits shouldn’t be enforced because I’m too incompetent to safely drive at the speed limit”. It makes me think that it would be a good idea that driving licenses really expire at their expiration date, requiring a new driving test.

Anyone who thinks driving at the speed limit needs to stare at the speedo seriously needs some remedial training from a driving instructor.

I’ve never forgiven that arsehole for what he did to Andrew Sachs.

No, not just housing is mentioned but a boulevard and you cannot overlook that very important word and say the article only mentions “housing” because that is a seriously bad take on this article. By definition a boulevard is wide. It wouldn’t be a boulevard if they made the road narrow by building houses on the road rather than by the side of the road, so while the article doesn’t explicitly say it, by calling it “boulevards of new housing” implies that the thoroughfare does indeed remain wide, and becomes tree lined rather than car-lined.

The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a boulevard as:

“A wide road in a city, usually with trees on each side or along the centre”

(And not only is a “boulevard” mentioned in the article, the article also includes a picture of what a part of Rochdale would look like. The housing is on the side of the road, and some of the car lanes have been converted to pedestrian/cycling space, and trees are added).

I don’t think the idea is to build houses on the wide roads, the idea is to build them beside the wide roads but remove space for private cars and instead repurpose that space for pedestrians and cyclists (in other words, have wide pavements ideally tree lined but instead of 4 wide lanes of cars maybe 2 narrow lanes with most of the space turned over as a public space for people).

Look at it from his point of view. His plan probably went no further than the escape, so once he was off the lorry it was “Now what?” If he had a real followup plan he probably would have got much further. One of his former school mates was quoted as saying “One thing I will tell you though, he’s not a terrorist. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow”. The fact he even tried to escape (which anyone with sense would know would only make things worse) let alone do the original crime suggests he’s probably not the kind who ever thinks ahead.

He had a window of about 2 hours when he could have used public transport to move around (after which too many people would be looking for him) - but during that time he has no money, and given pretty much every station in London has ticket barriers, he’s not going to be getting around by train or by bus unless he can lift someone’s Oyster card or contactless card without being noticed, and from quotes about his past, apart from the idiotic fake bombs that got him into this mess in the first place, he seems to be a first-time criminal, so successfully pulling off thefts or shoplifting was probably not something he was practised or good at.

After that time he’s pretty much limited to travelling on foot in places where he won’t get a second look, or at night. He probably found a poorly-secured bicycle on Saturday morning and gambled that people wouldn’t give someone cycling down the towpath a second look, and it’s faster than walking.