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OME hypotheticals are fine and are good to promote some critical thinking about what happened in history...the problem with hypothesizing is just that...you need proof...like govt documents prision records etc and trying to egt them now from that long ago would be a hard exercise I would think. History is written by the winners not the losers and unless there was some actual proof history is normally taken to be the truth. It obviously sometimes isnt but it seems to me you are having a argument just like if the Yunger Dryus happened or not or even if there is a second Sphinx like they are hypothesizing now. Or even that there was a noah and a ark. Good luck with your efforts

Well, positives are things are slowly moving forward. Currently preparing for Wednesday's flight to Melbourne. I realise it has been 8 years since I have been to Aus. Ship! Time flies. Not going to tell you which day in case you alert immigration 🤣 Although I could be out for as much as a month, I will be travelling light - hoping to get away with carry on only. I don't think I will, so it will probably be a small backpack. Also, on the reno front, things are picking up. I am not sure if I mentioned the need to rewire a floor of the house. Not a terribly big job, but more cost. That was found when they pulled a fuse board out to replace with one up to current regs. The spaghetti behind it, including a circuit that bypassed it altogether made some of my early coding deliverables took well written. We have found a tradie who is working through stuff. He has done these doors we had to put in for building regs; but the building inspector allowed us to not procure fireproof doors or even install them to be a barrier against fire spreading as the listed (heritage) building officer would be dead set against them even being installed. And that is the regulatory environment we are up against. Now, the downstairs loo and bootroom, that I made major progress on until work really heated up are done, and the formal living room is under way. If this fella keeps it up, I think we will be done by mid August and ti will be on the market. And he is doing a good job, too. And on the work front, an opportunity to climb the greasy corporate ladder opened up. I was invited to apply, but because of my plans, declined. I was supporting the application of a colleague, but it looks like he won;t get it either, and it will be an outsider. Which is fantastic, because that person will be both of our manager. Things are transforming at work where it will slim down in the not too distant future. I have already been implementing a succession plan where today, apart from being the doyen of our delivery function, my reports are coming right up the curve and even a contractor has been earmarked to be a sucessor. So, a new person in that almost exec role will want to stamp his or her authority and make changes - and as I don't feel I owe that person anything, the conversation will be something like "don't let anyone go on my account." Employment laws will mean they will have to make me redundant - and that will mean enough to accelerate this reno and put it on the market and take a little while to sell. Even if the latter (which I have been trying to engineer for about 12 months now) doesn't work, I am hoping by the end of the year, it will be all done and dusted.

Hope the flying went well.

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/motoring/motoring-news/peugeot-suspends-australian-car-sales-amid-pressure-from-cheaper-chinese-rivals/news-story/194491500cf89f20e2a560fe73013f08

Crap day for me. I went to use my lathe and it wouldn't turn, headstock bearings jammed for some reason. So I took my old car for a drive instead, and went through one of those cameras that spots your phone on the passenger seat, where mine was. Then got home and, being annoyed, scraped the paint on the garage door. First damage to the perfect paint job in 25 years of ownership. I'm going flying in the morning, hope my luck has changed by then.

We already know Cook observed Venus in Tahiti as a guise to setting out to the Great Southern Land to claim it for England. The "politics" was evident even then. So it shouldn't be surprising that politics played it's part in the transportation of convicts to a far away land. We also know the French were cruising off the East Coast at the time. Is "politics" the right word? It seems like "land grab" is more appropriate. I just wish the Poms had not depleted Australia of all the Red Cedar trees, there was none left for repairing antique Cedar furniture in the 1900s when I was dabbling in selling old furniture.

The best form of testing is to release to production

Just when you make it foolproof........ along come smarter fools. Oh, wait.... did that happen to USof A last year?

Also known as Murphy's Law.

That is the myth I am attacking. Britain had plenty of old ships it could use as prisons. They had hulks in many ports around England. A few more would not have mattered. Also, the hulks were not run by the Government. The running of the hulks was contracted out to private entrprise. Those operating prisons in hulks had to meet minimum standards of care. I'm not sure if the convicts were hired out to do work for the government, or if that work was simply part of their sentence to hard labour. The roadblock in the system was that Courts were sentencing people to transportation which meant that once convicted a person had to be held until a destination was available. The government was unable to send more convicts to the colony until word arrived from Governor Arthur Phillip that the new colony had survived. Concentrating the debate on the crowding in the hulks distracts from my thesis that the reason an effort was made to establish a presence in Australia was political. That presence was aimed at preventing other European powers from gaining footholds in new lands. If Britain colonised Australia, it provided locations for naval bases and the possible opportunity for the production of materials needed to maintain ships. Those ships could be used to block the activities of other powers.

Because you can't cover EVERY Possibility by simple LOGIC. Nev

Wash his mouth out with Soap? . Nev

Every country has a different situation to cope with. You can't just apply one Places solution to all places. Australia has about the same area as the USA which has about 13 times the Population. and uses Gasolene like there's no tomorrow, and a Leader who loves to Pollute because he has $#!t for Brains. Nev

A Crook amongst Crooks. How does Pentecostal fit with Hindi? It's an American construct to justify GREED and the Worship of MONEY. Nev

What about the Incredible Hulk.? Also after the USA broke away from England Another place to take the So called BAD people had to be found as a matter of urgency.. The Irony was that Here became a better place than back home and wasn't Gov. Macquarie admonished for doing some of that? Norfolk Island was also a Penal Colony Like Port Arthur in Tasmania. the Natives looked after some of the escaped convicts I believe. Nev

I agree Peter - part of a previous job was system testing changes to a large organisation's primary database before they were deployed. For five weeks at a time we'd try to break it by doing the stupidest things humans could do to it. After deployment, when the programmers had applied fixes to any weaknesses we'd found, inevitably some moron still managed to break it.

There were no experiments in prison reform at that time. The call for prison reform wasn't heard until the mid 19th Century. The use of hulks was a convenient way to house prisoners without the need to go to the expense of building new gaols on land. The hulks were ships that could still float, but were condemned for use at sea. I thinbk, too that we don't have an idea of how big those hulks were and the available space to accommodate people. Also those prisoners provided a cheap source of labour to carry out tasks for the Government on the docks of England. Did you know that hulks were used in Sydney Harbour to hold the worst convicts? As in England, these convicts were taken off the hulks in chain gangs to do the more arduous work. I am of the opinion that most well-behaved convicts moved about the colony unfettered by chains. The pictures in the history books of convicts in chain gangs no doubt depict these hulk residents. I hope that you have used that link I posted to get a bit of truth about the use of hulks in Britain.

Sometimes that is a big asset!

I hope I didn't sound too 'conservative' - that term has negative political connotations these days. I do prefer tactile interaction with controls. That won't stop me playing/learning other kinds or locations of controls. Of course I'll adapt. But I hope the other automated facets of new vehicles gets very thoroughly tested. I spent a lot of my career testing and commissioning complex automation and I know there will always be users who can bring about unforseen results. A bit like MrMusky's unplanned post launch disassembly of his rockets.

So many threads this could go in. I chose Silly Pics because 'tis silly to allow vested interests to control political narrative..... Oh dear. The forum prohibited me posting a meme that said something like: 'twitter allows exposure of Nancy Pelosi's trades, but not Donold's trades' Have I been found out by the Deep State?

It's not just EVs that have LED and similar tablet type displays in front of them.. most new cars to these days. That really is not the issue. A speedo cable can snap on an analogue system and you have the same issue - I have had it happen on a Saturday arvo and no speedo until Monday morning. I would hope there are no controls on that screen. Sticking yuor hand between the spokes of the steering wheel is not a good thing. On the controls, using touch screen doesn't give you a sense of magnitude of change (e.g. temperature, etc) without looking. Well, at least for some time, anyway. Also, early model Teslas were infamous for the depth of menu setting one had to go through to get to whatever function was required. Muscle memory will only go some way.. as it does on analogue or tactile type inputs. How many times (in an old 4 or 5 on the floor, or even a 3 or 54 on the column) have we crunched the gears or almost stalled the car going into the wrong gear. However, the physical/tactile approach allows us to correct without reverting to looking at the gears (unless we really stuff it up and have lost spatial awareness of where the gear is). So, the Atrick household vehicle mix is chaning. Daughter just wants an old banger (UK speak)/bomb (Aus speak) of a car as she will be in a house in the next academic year, won't have a driveway, and will not want the hassle of a nice car getting road rash from an inner urban environment. Good on her. So it will be a petrol Ford Fiesta (most likely); manual, a/c, power steering and otherwise minimal. Mrs Atrick is in for a little shock... She is getting an EV - Probably an MG4 to replace her mini. She doesn't know it yet.

We don't know the details of the deal he has.. They will have done their homework. My guess is they only service they are paying him for is access to his address book.

Indeed.. and as the technology improves, they will continue to change.

Until now (thanks, OME) I have never given it much thought. Except maybe something didn't quite seem right about the populat hulk-convict story. I never believed the Brit government would go to all that trouble and expense just to carry out a social experiment in prison reform.