I'd like you to explain to me the relevance of being able to fiddle with a dangerous piece of machinery (try engaging reverse at 70) while driving, to competence in things like anticipation of traffic ahead, interpreting other driver behavior, observing road signs and the like. The manual transmission is simply an artefact of the invention of the car having preceded the invention of a good way to get the power to the road. There is simply no reason to believe that the ability to use it correlates to the ability to drive.
And before you start - long history of manual motorbikes and cars ranging from Triumph T100 to BMW, also long experience of automatics ranging from Kia to Merc, and now a Prius. I have also driven extensively in the US and Europe, on both sides of the road. My conclusion? For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment. When you brake, you brake; no remembering the "clutch" or to "change down".
The ability of an architect isn't measured in terms of her/his ability to bake bricks.
OK, so that rules out flying with anything powered by RR, or indeed a number of GE engines. Or on an Airbus. If you hang around with the seriously rich, you'll have to avoid a lot of their yachts. ARM is purely a design house, but I think you should avoid phones because they almost all have ARM-design cpus. I doubt you can afford an Aga, but you might manage a Rayburn. I assume you prefer NASCAR to all that F1 stuff.
I could go on. Burberry is a cheapo Chinese knockoff nowadays, but Barbour isn't. You can buy just about all your clothing needs made in the UK from our local farm co-operative, who tend to be a bit patriotic - shoes are the main problem, and people are starting to make them again as the Chinese start to want real British goods. Most of my clothes are made in the English Midlands or in Scotland; I wouldn't touch cheap imports, but often the price difference is quite small.
Despite the worst our banks can do, there is a surprising amount of UK manufacturing and it is mostly upper market. Some of it is quite old; there is a company very close to us that has been in business continually since the late 1700s. We have always been quite good at this; we are also crap at the low end, because anybody with any pride in their work naturally wants to work for a reputable company.
Incidentally, "The IT Crowd" is an arts graduate's fantasy of what IT is like. We have plenty of them available for export...they seem to do well in the USA.
So, bloviating aside, you're saying Slashdot readers tend to oppose monopoly capitalism and support variety and individual rights? And that the European Competition Commission agrees with them?
Incidentally, over the next few years for much of the world outside the USA, the primary means of computing and access to networks will be a very small computer (phone or tablet) running a POSIX-compliant OS. Linux on the desktop is happening; it is just happening on the next evolution of the desktop.
Nowhere in the source does it say "know with 100% certainty". Talk about a straw man argument. The difference between "know" and "believe" is that belief exists independent of evidence, whereas knowledge is somehow grounded in experience. We "know" how to ride a bicycle, but that didn't stop me falling off one a few weeks ago. Although clearly I do not know how to ride a bicycle with 100% reliability in all conditions, only the ultimate picker of nits would argue that occasional falling off means I do not know how to ride a bicycle.
And in any case it wouldn't be hyperbole. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, hyperbole is wild exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Claiming that something is 100% reliable rather than, say, 99.5%, is not hyperbole. It is just slight overstatement.
Now please remove yourself from my philosophical lawn.
I am not suggesting that Apple is not now a very valuable company. It is. It has large sales of high margin products. It has a lot of cash. But its stock price is still a bubble; it is inflated by projected earnings on the apparent assumption that it will have no competition for years to come. That is probably true of a Microsoft or an IBM, but unless Apple can prevent it, smartphones are pretty much interchangeable.
In view of the actual lifetime of a mobile phone, and the Apple cash mountain, I'd suggest a realistic valuation is between $200 and $300 billion.
In order to maintain the appearance of invulnerability Apple must sue, sue and sue again - just like SCO - as part of the preservation of the image that no other company can (or will be allowed to) possibly compete. If it starts to lose too many patent suits, its share price will suffer, and if, post-Jobs, it has somewhat lost direction (or is up against growing technological barriers like battery life), it doesn't really have a counter.
While the Chinese economy continues historically weak I don't thing the rulers of China will rock the boat - but at some point I suspect they will look at Apple's profits and say, in effect "Hey, we do all the work, we deserve some of that". One option would be a dramatic rise in factory gate prices. Another would be a slow rise in the currency.
If you know shouting "Fire" is likely to cause injury to others, and you do it, you may not be arrested (but you might be taken into custody for your own safety), and you may not be subject to criminal proceedings. But expect civil lawsuits that may well ruin you, and the bar for proof is lower than for criminal activity. Since damages in civil lawsuits in the US tend to be much higher than in the rest of the world, you could argue that, unless like the Westborough Baptists, you investigate the law beforehand, the consequences of anti-social behaviour can be much worse.
A former colleague once spent six months in the Soviet Union as part of a technology project. One of the staff at the engineering company at which he worked was always pestering him about life in the West, asking questions and saying "isn't it true that such and such is much better than here in Russia". So he formulated the idea that this was some sort of KGB plant trying to get him into trouble so they could detain him.
When the time came for him to leave they had a big party and he asked someone if this guy really worked for the KGB, only to get the reply "No, no, so-and-so is the KGB rep, he's OK, that other guy just thinks everything is better in the West and keeps trying to prove it to us."
As my colleague remarked, imagine an American engineering company where one of the engineers kept trying to tell everybody that life was better in the Soviet Union. All right, he would be massively wrong, but he would also get fired very quick.
In fact Confucius dates to around 2500 years ago, the same as the Buddha. Both preached philosophies rather than religions. Compassion is important, but to many religious people it is not enough. Feeling someone's pain is not the same as fixing it. But to fix it, you need a society where people have enough material goods to be able to afford more than just to exist. Jesus could preach active charity because the Palestine of his day was relatively well off, and a merchant like the Samaritan could afford to be charitable.
Going back to Kung fu-tse would be a step backwards, one that the neocons like - which is why they claim to support "compassionate Conservatism" and oppose what they call "socialism", which involves the New Testament demand to love your neighbour.
Yes, for its time the Kingdom of Granada was a success. Arts and sciences were encouraged, the status of women was relatively high (a Jewish prayer book with feminine pronouns was discovered there some years ago), and the Muslim rulers tolerated (rather than encouraged) other religions. But I suggest it was a relatively small beacon of light in a dark world, more like Switzerland than part of an empire.
The Crusaders were a very mixed bag, but a number of them were younger sons who wanted to carve out empires in the East. The "Muslims" were the militarised followers of Mohammed who had...carved out an empire in the East. In fact, some historians argue that the reason that the Crusader kingdoms lasted as long as they did was that the Westerners actually treated their subjects better than the Muslim rulers (lower taxes, for a start).
Nowadays in the Middle East we have the bizarre situation that many countries have governments imposed, ultimately, by the victors of WW1 (and still being defended by them), being opposed by relatively democratic Muslim insurgents with the support of the EU and limited support by the US. All of the warring forces claim to believe the teachings of the same book, but with a range of more or less optional add ons (Mishnah, NT,the Fathers, the Qu'ran, Book of Mormon). At the end of the day, and I write this as someone who very nearly ended up ordained, there isn't anything to choose between any of them in terms of good or evil.
If I "utterly missed your point", why did you write that stuff about "reams" of risk assessment and "write only documents"? I can't help it if you appear to be Libertarian trolling and then say you aren't.
However, I doubt someone who can't spell hydrazine is not best placed to comment on its risks. (And yes, I do know how to make hydrazine, but I haven't done it since I ceased to have a fume cupboard and suitable glassware handy. The precursors themselves are no fun, in volume.)
Think about it this way, every time you use the stuff you're generating reams and reams of risk assessments and paperwork.
Bollocks.
Do you generate reams of paper every time you fill your car? No. Did you have to sign anything before doing it? No. Has a surprising amount of R&D gone into the design of car fueling systems to make them safe even for soccer moms? Yes.
Despite your libertarian fantasy, it doesn't work like that in reality. You do the risk assessment. You eliminate avoidable risk. Then you work out safe procedures. Then you train people on them. If something does wrong despite that, repeat till done. It is of the same order as basic hardening of your code to prevent SQL injection and buffer overrun, stuff you expect to do because it makes sense. The simple fact that right-wing fruit cakes pretend that somehow having to avoid killing your workers is an infringement of your liberty, doesn't make it so.
In my career I've worked with, among others, high power engines tested to destruction, simulated lightning test of electronic systems, and chemical plant. The only injury I have ever suffered was a broken finger when an emergency stop system failed while we were testing it, which was my fault for not checking that the big red lever was off on the power supply. I would prefer that other Slashdot readers who choose to pursue a career in engineering have the same safety record, or better. Degrading our safety systems to Chinese levels to make a billionaire slightly richer is not a preferred option.
Quote by Isaac Asimov. Sorry about the extract-from-pdf bad formatting
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outs t a n dingly ma d. I d o n 't m e an ga rden-va r i e ty crazy or a merely r aving lunatic. I me an a r e c o r d - s h a t t e r i ng e x p o n e nt of f a r -out insanity.
T h e re a r e, after all, some chemicals t h at explode sha t t e r ingly, some
t h at flame r avenous ly, some t h at c o r r o de hellishly, some t h at poi son
sneakily, a nd some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, t h o u g h, only
liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful p r o p e r t i es combined into
o ne delectable whole
Correct. I can't mod you up further but I'll support you with an example. An early oxidiser (hydrazine is a reducer, yes I know) was hydrogen peroxide. The British space effort (do not laugh, there was one) relied on H2O2. When fuelling or doing maintenance, the drill was to have a second guy standing by with a fast running hose. When rather than if the stuff fell on someone, his job was instantly to flood with water before fire broke out/skin burns. When we wonder how a previous generation (the generation of engineers before mine, in fact) got to the Moon, we need to remember that after two World Wars risk acceptance was much higher and life was cheaper. The people who rant about this (and modded down my last comment on this subject) have probably never had to put their lives on the line in support of the day job, and can't understand why nowadays somebody perhaps wouldn't want to risk an unpleasant death for an underpaid job.
When I was at school, one of the exam questions in S level chemistry was to estimate the maximum temperature reached if a stream of hydrazine hydrate was mixed with a stream of concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Of course, after the exam we had to try it... two carefully aimed pipettes over the centre of the biggest Belfast sink in the lab, three quarters full of cold water. I'm not disclosing how we released the liquids safely. If you can work it out, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here. There was a white glow at the centre. I guess nowadays with the fear of terrorists no school exam would dare ask the question, whereas in those days I suspect the exam setter thought "Well, if they've done the work for S level, they deserve a little entertainment."
Suppose, like a couple of people I know, you had in-depth knowledge of an ERP system that is still in current use and likely to stay that way, and your employer decided to switch to a Microsoft product in the belief that now MCSEs would be able to do the work?
You know who is going to be blamed when it all goes pear shaped. You have 10 years of experience in a mainframe product. Do you:
Stick around, work 80 hour weeks for the same pay and wait to be fired?
Leave and become a well paid contractor until a company you contract for makes you an unrefusable offer?
Some of the people posting here obviously think that changing architectures is just a five minute job. Perhaps, given the relatively simple applications on offer, that's the case for phones or tablets (I doubt it, in reality). But, say, a switch from SAP/Oracle to Dynamics for a senior developer? Not so simple.
If more people would share my company's software. So long as they know where to find us when the users discover they need training and the management realises they need consulting to make use of what they are now finding out, because these are the hard things.
Actually, our local farmers do tend to let people watch their sausages being made (hint: Wessex possibly has the world's best pigs, and most local farmers seem to make foodie sausages ). Laws and sausages should be made in public.
Look it up. The sad fact is that if a resource isn't protected, people will abuse it. Example
In our village we have a surviving section of a Roman road, and a small, protected wood of ancient hardwood. They are open to the public all the year round. The preservation committee has enough cash to go to the High Court for an injunction against people who might try to damage them, but almost every year we get some moron trying to destroy the road by ploughing it up with a Range Rover, or trying to vandalise the wood. We are prepared to defend both, but we have to be.
The problem is that a nasty minority spoils things for the majority. Security at the Glastonbury costs a fortune because of the people who try to destroy the security fence - which is needed because those same people used to break in and try to wreck the festival.
This isn't a rant against file sharing. I think the recording industry is its own worst enemy - it is purely entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs should never have special rights over real property. But, at the end of the day, the real answer is drastic: if you don't want performance to be free, do not encode it digitally and accept that restraint.
I suspect this is an infrastructure issue. Phones need to use more power to talk where the tower signal is weak. My wife's phone goes days without needing recharge (strong signal for her carrier) while my company BB only lasts two days (weak O2 signal at home, stronger at work) and needs a daily charge in rural Devon where the signal is frequently missing.
That's basically what a Prius does, except it uses an electric motor in traffic. OK, a Prius doesn't have a V12 as the main engine, but the principle is the same. I can if I like go to the store in EV mode, and cruise at [redacted] on the motorway.
Before that, many cruising boats have a large outboard or inboard for open water, and a small outboard for the harbor or trolling. So the electronics industry is finally playing catch-up to a lot of small boat sailors.
The V2 ran on hydrogen peroxide and alcohol. Now, how do you think you make those chemicals? Fairy dust?
And the developments in accelerator technology since Feynman and Dirac died are enormous - just the way the computer systems triage the data up through successive levels is a vast advance on anything available in his lifetime.
part of tiresome environmental guilt trip prattle
Ah. That's it. You don't like the suggestion that we might be energy limited, and all you can manage is abuse.
Unfortunately, the almost free source of energy that did not damage the environment that we needed to make spaceflight practical - turned out not to exist. The Earth's gravity well remains the obstacle to going anywhere in large numbers with large masses. Meanwhile easily obtainable energy sources that are highly concentrated with good specific impulse get more and more expensive.
It's worth remembering that the V2 effort helped Germany lose WW2 - the energy needed to produce the fuel meant shortages of fuel for aviation and transport. The private space initiatives are relying on the custom of a few billionaires - and once they start getting sued for environmental damage, and the price of their fuel is driven up by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, I doubt they will have a future.
The sources of energy that are rapidly declining in price - solar and wind - or are already economic - nuclear and gas - are not suitable for space vehicles. On the other hand, the attempt to produce low cost, low power universal communication tools has been successful beyond the imaginations of people even thirty years ago, and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it. There has been great endeavour in science and engineering, it just turned out that space exploration wasn't it.
If Turing had belonged to the right regiment or club, it would all have been hushed up. The reason he was arrested and convicted was that, as a mathematician and electronic engineer, he was excluded from the inner circle of the British Establishment, whose view was that scientists and their like were not out of the top drawer.
Perhaps equally importantly, the background was one of gay-bashing in the US Establishment, who regarded homosexuals as a security risk (because, in typical backwards thinking, the Russians might blackmail them...which could not happen if their behaviour was regarded as unexceptional.) The US was already very worried about UK agents with Russian links spying on them, and was demanding a purge of unreliable elements from the British security services. Turing was high enough profile to show that we were "doing something", but low enough status to be thrown to the wolves,
This is the real background: class solidarity and stinking hypocrisy. Not much has really changed in the upper echelons of British society; it still comes as a shock to them when the British public turns out to be years ahead in their attitudes. And the actual workers in the security services are still treated like shit - Peter Wright wrote his book, Spycatcher, because as a mere surveillance expert he didn't qualify for a pension, unlike the higher-ups with their Eton and Oxford backgrounds.
That was exactly what the British advanced City and Guilds programming exam consisted of: A defined program space for which you had three hours to design a program. I imagine it cost a lot more to mark that a multiple choice questionnaire.
So is a BB 9810 or 9900 not a smartphone? I went down this route because many of our customers are of an age that they still use voice when I wouldn't, and the telephone functions on BB are still excellent. I have quite bad hearing, but my 9810 works perfectly for me.
Slashdot Mirror
And before you start - long history of manual motorbikes and cars ranging from Triumph T100 to BMW, also long experience of automatics ranging from Kia to Merc, and now a Prius. I have also driven extensively in the US and Europe, on both sides of the road. My conclusion? For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment. When you brake, you brake; no remembering the "clutch" or to "change down".
The ability of an architect isn't measured in terms of her/his ability to bake bricks.
I could go on. Burberry is a cheapo Chinese knockoff nowadays, but Barbour isn't. You can buy just about all your clothing needs made in the UK from our local farm co-operative, who tend to be a bit patriotic - shoes are the main problem, and people are starting to make them again as the Chinese start to want real British goods. Most of my clothes are made in the English Midlands or in Scotland; I wouldn't touch cheap imports, but often the price difference is quite small.
Despite the worst our banks can do, there is a surprising amount of UK manufacturing and it is mostly upper market. Some of it is quite old; there is a company very close to us that has been in business continually since the late 1700s. We have always been quite good at this; we are also crap at the low end, because anybody with any pride in their work naturally wants to work for a reputable company.
Incidentally, "The IT Crowd" is an arts graduate's fantasy of what IT is like. We have plenty of them available for export...they seem to do well in the USA.
Incidentally, over the next few years for much of the world outside the USA, the primary means of computing and access to networks will be a very small computer (phone or tablet) running a POSIX-compliant OS. Linux on the desktop is happening; it is just happening on the next evolution of the desktop.
And in any case it wouldn't be hyperbole. If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, hyperbole is wild exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Claiming that something is 100% reliable rather than, say, 99.5%, is not hyperbole. It is just slight overstatement.
Now please remove yourself from my philosophical lawn.
In view of the actual lifetime of a mobile phone, and the Apple cash mountain, I'd suggest a realistic valuation is between $200 and $300 billion.
In order to maintain the appearance of invulnerability Apple must sue, sue and sue again - just like SCO - as part of the preservation of the image that no other company can (or will be allowed to) possibly compete. If it starts to lose too many patent suits, its share price will suffer, and if, post-Jobs, it has somewhat lost direction (or is up against growing technological barriers like battery life), it doesn't really have a counter.
While the Chinese economy continues historically weak I don't thing the rulers of China will rock the boat - but at some point I suspect they will look at Apple's profits and say, in effect "Hey, we do all the work, we deserve some of that". One option would be a dramatic rise in factory gate prices. Another would be a slow rise in the currency.
If you know shouting "Fire" is likely to cause injury to others, and you do it, you may not be arrested (but you might be taken into custody for your own safety), and you may not be subject to criminal proceedings. But expect civil lawsuits that may well ruin you, and the bar for proof is lower than for criminal activity. Since damages in civil lawsuits in the US tend to be much higher than in the rest of the world, you could argue that, unless like the Westborough Baptists, you investigate the law beforehand, the consequences of anti-social behaviour can be much worse.
When the time came for him to leave they had a big party and he asked someone if this guy really worked for the KGB, only to get the reply "No, no, so-and-so is the KGB rep, he's OK, that other guy just thinks everything is better in the West and keeps trying to prove it to us."
As my colleague remarked, imagine an American engineering company where one of the engineers kept trying to tell everybody that life was better in the Soviet Union. All right, he would be massively wrong, but he would also get fired very quick.
Going back to Kung fu-tse would be a step backwards, one that the neocons like - which is why they claim to support "compassionate Conservatism" and oppose what they call "socialism", which involves the New Testament demand to love your neighbour.
Yes, for its time the Kingdom of Granada was a success. Arts and sciences were encouraged, the status of women was relatively high (a Jewish prayer book with feminine pronouns was discovered there some years ago), and the Muslim rulers tolerated (rather than encouraged) other religions. But I suggest it was a relatively small beacon of light in a dark world, more like Switzerland than part of an empire.
Nowadays in the Middle East we have the bizarre situation that many countries have governments imposed, ultimately, by the victors of WW1 (and still being defended by them), being opposed by relatively democratic Muslim insurgents with the support of the EU and limited support by the US. All of the warring forces claim to believe the teachings of the same book, but with a range of more or less optional add ons (Mishnah, NT,the Fathers, the Qu'ran, Book of Mormon). At the end of the day, and I write this as someone who very nearly ended up ordained, there isn't anything to choose between any of them in terms of good or evil.
However, I doubt someone who can't spell hydrazine is not best placed to comment on its risks. (And yes, I do know how to make hydrazine, but I haven't done it since I ceased to have a fume cupboard and suitable glassware handy. The precursors themselves are no fun, in volume.)
Bollocks.
Do you generate reams of paper every time you fill your car? No. Did you have to sign anything before doing it? No. Has a surprising amount of R&D gone into the design of car fueling systems to make them safe even for soccer moms? Yes.
Despite your libertarian fantasy, it doesn't work like that in reality. You do the risk assessment. You eliminate avoidable risk. Then you work out safe procedures. Then you train people on them. If something does wrong despite that, repeat till done. It is of the same order as basic hardening of your code to prevent SQL injection and buffer overrun, stuff you expect to do because it makes sense. The simple fact that right-wing fruit cakes pretend that somehow having to avoid killing your workers is an infringement of your liberty, doesn't make it so.
In my career I've worked with, among others, high power engines tested to destruction, simulated lightning test of electronic systems, and chemical plant. The only injury I have ever suffered was a broken finger when an emergency stop system failed while we were testing it, which was my fault for not checking that the big red lever was off on the power supply. I would prefer that other Slashdot readers who choose to pursue a career in engineering have the same safety record, or better. Degrading our safety systems to Chinese levels to make a billionaire slightly richer is not a preferred option.
When I was at school, one of the exam questions in S level chemistry was to estimate the maximum temperature reached if a stream of hydrazine hydrate was mixed with a stream of concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Of course, after the exam we had to try it... two carefully aimed pipettes over the centre of the biggest Belfast sink in the lab, three quarters full of cold water. I'm not disclosing how we released the liquids safely. If you can work it out, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here. There was a white glow at the centre. I guess nowadays with the fear of terrorists no school exam would dare ask the question, whereas in those days I suspect the exam setter thought "Well, if they've done the work for S level, they deserve a little entertainment."
You know who is going to be blamed when it all goes pear shaped. You have 10 years of experience in a mainframe product. Do you:
Some of the people posting here obviously think that changing architectures is just a five minute job. Perhaps, given the relatively simple applications on offer, that's the case for phones or tablets (I doubt it, in reality). But, say, a switch from SAP/Oracle to Dynamics for a senior developer? Not so simple.
If more people would share my company's software. So long as they know where to find us when the users discover they need training and the management realises they need consulting to make use of what they are now finding out, because these are the hard things.
Actually, our local farmers do tend to let people watch their sausages being made (hint: Wessex possibly has the world's best pigs, and most local farmers seem to make foodie sausages ). Laws and sausages should be made in public.
In our village we have a surviving section of a Roman road, and a small, protected wood of ancient hardwood. They are open to the public all the year round. The preservation committee has enough cash to go to the High Court for an injunction against people who might try to damage them, but almost every year we get some moron trying to destroy the road by ploughing it up with a Range Rover, or trying to vandalise the wood. We are prepared to defend both, but we have to be.
The problem is that a nasty minority spoils things for the majority. Security at the Glastonbury costs a fortune because of the people who try to destroy the security fence - which is needed because those same people used to break in and try to wreck the festival.
This isn't a rant against file sharing. I think the recording industry is its own worst enemy - it is purely entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs should never have special rights over real property. But, at the end of the day, the real answer is drastic: if you don't want performance to be free, do not encode it digitally and accept that restraint.
But perhaps that's what you meant?
I suspect this is an infrastructure issue. Phones need to use more power to talk where the tower signal is weak. My wife's phone goes days without needing recharge (strong signal for her carrier) while my company BB only lasts two days (weak O2 signal at home, stronger at work) and needs a daily charge in rural Devon where the signal is frequently missing.
Before that, many cruising boats have a large outboard or inboard for open water, and a small outboard for the harbor or trolling. So the electronics industry is finally playing catch-up to a lot of small boat sailors.
And the developments in accelerator technology since Feynman and Dirac died are enormous - just the way the computer systems triage the data up through successive levels is a vast advance on anything available in his lifetime.
Ah. That's it. You don't like the suggestion that we might be energy limited, and all you can manage is abuse.
It's worth remembering that the V2 effort helped Germany lose WW2 - the energy needed to produce the fuel meant shortages of fuel for aviation and transport. The private space initiatives are relying on the custom of a few billionaires - and once they start getting sued for environmental damage, and the price of their fuel is driven up by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, I doubt they will have a future.
The sources of energy that are rapidly declining in price - solar and wind - or are already economic - nuclear and gas - are not suitable for space vehicles. On the other hand, the attempt to produce low cost, low power universal communication tools has been successful beyond the imaginations of people even thirty years ago, and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it. There has been great endeavour in science and engineering, it just turned out that space exploration wasn't it.
Perhaps equally importantly, the background was one of gay-bashing in the US Establishment, who regarded homosexuals as a security risk (because, in typical backwards thinking, the Russians might blackmail them...which could not happen if their behaviour was regarded as unexceptional.) The US was already very worried about UK agents with Russian links spying on them, and was demanding a purge of unreliable elements from the British security services. Turing was high enough profile to show that we were "doing something", but low enough status to be thrown to the wolves,
This is the real background: class solidarity and stinking hypocrisy. Not much has really changed in the upper echelons of British society; it still comes as a shock to them when the British public turns out to be years ahead in their attitudes. And the actual workers in the security services are still treated like shit - Peter Wright wrote his book, Spycatcher, because as a mere surveillance expert he didn't qualify for a pension, unlike the higher-ups with their Eton and Oxford backgrounds.
That was exactly what the British advanced City and Guilds programming exam consisted of: A defined program space for which you had three hours to design a program. I imagine it cost a lot more to mark that a multiple choice questionnaire.
So is a BB 9810 or 9900 not a smartphone? I went down this route because many of our customers are of an age that they still use voice when I wouldn't, and the telephone functions on BB are still excellent. I have quite bad hearing, but my 9810 works perfectly for me.