Sorry but the taking photographs is not the cause of thefts.

True. But if you put these photographs on Flickr then I can use them to case the joint without having to go there in person.

I could probably figure out, from these photos, where the exhibit I wanted to steal was and what security measures are in place. Having said that, I see the Museum of Army Flying allows you to ‘walk’ inside thanks to Google street view, which presumably makes it even easier.

There are reasons why the A380, B787, A350 and CSeries are late. Starting at the top.

Add the F111 to that list, because this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Perhaps this is a cultural thing? Britain lost out in the race for renewable technology because it adopted a bloated top-heavy approach to wind turbine research and design. The Danish had started making wind turbines in the late ’60s and ’70s (though the idea of generating electricity from the wind is older, adopted in the US during WW2). What they did was to build small turbines out of readily available materials, wait for them to blow down, then build them back up having learned a couple of lessons. In the UK we started out by trying to make the biggest turbine possible, with Taylor Wimpy providing the concrete body and various other stakeholders involved in various aspects of the design. A couple of these turbines were built on Orkney, laden down with sensors to monitor every single variable, a few of which I wager the Danish already understood very well. In the end one of the turbines developed structural cracks within a couple of years and all was forgotten. I remember seeing these things on Orkney when I was a child, but I understand they are long since demolished. Meanwhile the Danish were exporting turbines all over the world including the US whose own designs, such as those carpetting Altamont and the Tehachapi Pass, were inefficient and noisy.

I often hear that Germany exceeds in technology manufacturing because the managers and directors all could work a shop floor job. In my own line of work, IT (to put it vaguely), I had the pleasure of watching a director struggle to stick a MS Powerpoint presentation in ‘full screen’ mode. This is also the person we have to go to to get a port opened as part of our Firewall system, as if the director knows anything about ports…. The issue is that the director here is purely a director, and has been moved around businesses and our own business as a director rather than grow up through the company.

On a tengential note, some of my more anarchist-leaning buddies will suggest that this problem will get worse as more non-jobs are created leading to more top-heavy and bloated companies over time. They would argue that low unemployment is a negative thing and that in a post-scarcity society it is time to look beyond the concept that everybody has to work a non-job as part of a rigid working week, be it a sub-deputy-temporary-liason-management-coordinator for a company that sells printer paper or whatever. Food for thought.

At a time when the RAF are taking a kicking anyway, I would imagine that cutting off funding to the most visually prominent aspect of them makes good political sense.

A criminal act, and a fairly disrespectful one at that. Having said that, the comments on the Facebook RAF page are laughably stupid.

But are the “feelings” and the perception actually bourne out by the reality? Why, when offered a degree of regional autonomy, did the regions so comprehensively reject it?

As for the suggestion above, Glasgow and Dundee would have to merge forming the new Scottish autonomous state of Glasdee!;)

Glasdee works for me. We would rid Scotland of most of the sectarianism, most of the violence and all of the Dundonians in one fell swoop. Just make sure the perimeter walls are nice and tall, and relatively sound proof so I don’t need to keep hearing “aye, but people in Edinburgh are so unfriendly, ken?” or “try walking a mile in my shoes pal, I graduated from the university of life…” or even the hallowed “haw mate, I need 37 p to visit ma maw in hospital ken?”.

Bliss.

As for our rulers being too far away to seriously care for our needs, I don’t agree. The internet is the great leveller here, as well as cheap internal flights and a tolerable railway system. I think the bigger issue is that Scotland plays very well at the ‘we have it harder than anybody else’ mentality, and works a lot better as the plucky underdog than as a fully fledged country.

Slightly deceptive since it shows votes cast against land-mass; it would be interesting to see one of those maps that scales the land-mass to the size of the population.

It would look about the opposite to what is shown. Those vast local authorities have few people in them. With the exception of Edinburgh being fairly staunchly ‘no’, that map looks a lot like a population density map of Scotland. What would be a lot more interesting would be to compare the voting with deprivation. I wager that more deprived areas voted predominantly yes, whilst less deprived areas voted no. This is obscured slightly by the fact that remote rural areas are viewed as deprived as their access to services is fairly poor, whereas the occupants may well be wealthy land owners… watch this space.

A very poignant photograph.