Affentitten

Of course horses and beasts of burden are not obsolete all over the place. They are still the preferred method in the 3rd world for those who can't afford a vehicle.

Jesus. I can't believe I'm agreeing with SO for about 3 posts in a row now!

Which was pretty much the case with my radio training. Within about 5 years everything had gone digital.

Some fun stuff in there. Particularly things that I learnt to do when training in analogue radio studdios in the late 1980s. Some of the things are a bit dubious though. How is 'using a longbow' an obsolete skill when some people still do it as a hobby? "Wearing a hat" is even more of a long bow to draw...

But the question still remains as to what damage these shore batteries could have done. Certainly when they were firing they were not able to harm the warships.

Yes they came ashore every night. But gently! No good for your boat to be ramming it at full pelt onto the shingle. Tends to knock everyone on their arse as well!

It's true. I may have blotted it from my mind. I always like how everyone comes into the beach at full sail. Lucky enough that the wind is always blowing in the right direction, let alone the perils of shoaling a boat at full speed and then controlling it in the swell.

I would have said the advent of the machine gun was more game changing than the tank. But it still never happened overnight. I also don't think the Taliban will be over-awed by a new piece of kit. They're not exactly fighting one even tech terms at the moment.

God I remember my last Marketing Director who would call us in for "a catch up" meeting. He'd then fire up the projector. He never knew you could maximise the slides so it would always be in outline view. You'd see Slide 1 of 78 sitting there and your heart would break. He'd have slides with about 300 words of tiny text on them and read it out. He'd have a slide with a pie chart entitled "Competitor market share" with all the percentanges clearly labelled and proceed to say "This slide shows our competitors' market shares. As you can see, ABC has 14.8 percent. BCD has 13.1 percent, DEF has 12 percent....."

Are they as good as the ones in Troy? Where they hit the beaches, dropped the ramps and then everyone got machine-gunned by arrows.

I can't believe this thing is still knocking around. I remember reporting on it about 15 years ago for Beyond 2000. I think then it was a combo weapon with a 5.56 rifle. The main problem was the interface and the bulkiness. The deployment of the rounds required quite a complex measurement of range to target, since obviously if you're trying to burst them above a ditch or just past the corner of a bulding, you need to know how far away it is. You then had to program that into the grenade launcher with your non-trigger hand. That seemed to be unrealistic for a rifleman in a firefight.

Has anyone got any tips for some free / open source flowchart software? Just looking to create a flowchart without all the muddling around with alignment etc in Word.

God it's not like it was some hot-headed profanity on the part of Brown. Is he never supposed to say a bad word about anyone and agree with every one of the hundreds of people he meets every week? I well remember Bob Hawke in a similar situation walking off from a shopping centre door stop and on-mike referring to the pensioner he'd just been accosted by as a a "silly old bugger".

Or Kettler Pancake

The location so awful that Britain wouldn't even send condemned men there.

I was interested in the denialist (as JonS puts it) quote as well. Especially when Ekin's old boss and mentor, Peter Stanley, pretty much bitch slaps that version. I'm surprised that someone like Ekins would jump to the party line of defending Bean when it is well known that his version of the truth (and his comprehension of the fighting man) was at times quite bogus. eg. His campaign against Monash.

Interesting to see the treatment of these two versions of the same story: that footage of NZ troops at Gallipoli had been wrongly identified as depicting Aussies by the official Australian war correspondent of the time. Note the small man syndrome NZ version: from the NZ Herald And the slightly more academic and humble take From the SMH I find it quite remarkable that given the paucity of footage, this hasn't been worked out before.

Just wondering about the decoy flares on the aircraft. Do they actually work? Have they worked in the field?

I'd rate Fowler's over Oxford when it comes to usage.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Communication is definitely about transmitting your meaning and having it understood by the receiver. But using overly flowery or archaic vocabulary interferes with this. Likewise being limited in your choice of words also interferes. I suspect that every generation bemoans the lack of language of those subsequent. But because kids today don't know what 'caliginous' means is hardly an obstacle to communication. The same kids will be bemoaning the fact that their parents can't understand what a web server is or that their own offspring of the future won't know what 'to friend' or 'da bomb' means.

Yes. Especially when she started taking her clothes off.

Yes I got into difficulties with 'hook up' recently. In my day, it meant to meet or connect with someone. As in "We'll both make our own way to the cricket and hook up once we're in the ground." But I said something like that to a young female friend of the family and she gave me quite a disturbed look.

If dekko is Hindi, I'm not surprised that it is less common in Australia where we didn't have that cross-contact with the sub-continent. My point is not how big Australian vocab is, but more on the currency of words. Certainly those two words, which seem from H-J to originate from the British / Indian army experience, would have had fairly limited exposure to Australians. When I have heard them being used, it was almost certainly by Brits of WW2 or National Service vintage (there in the UK or having come over here). When I was growing up, the slang for having a quick look included "have a gander", "have a geez" or have/take a Captain (Cook). These are pretty much out of use these days and I am only just 40. I always find amusing the out-of-date nature that Brits and Aussies have of each others' slang. For example, I have often had Brits say to me "go and have a tinny. They think that's what we call a can of beer. The first couple of times I had to think hard what they were on about. Because to me a tinny is one of these: But looking back to perhaps the early 1970s I think some guys did call cans of beer tinnies. I think Monty Python parodied it and the idea has stuck with Brits, even though slang here has long moved on. (And indeed, hardly anyone drinks beers from cans these days anyway.) By the same token, Aussies still think Brits say stuff like "apples and pears" or call each other "old chap" on a regular basis.

I'd point out that they are both pretty archaic these days. Not many people under 50 (at least in Australia) would recognise them.

I'm sure they'll get exactly the same result that Exxon managed after 20 years of legal obfuscation and appeals over the Prince William Sound spill.