Top Cats Hat

If this thread is becoming a petrol station moanfest, may I ask why people take so long to drive off after paying for their fuel when someone is waiting behind them to use the pump? When I've done, I get into my car, put the key in the ignition, start the engine, stick it in gear, check my mirrors then drive away. It takes no more than 10 seconds max. Why do some people struggle to do this in under a minute?

I heard an interesting interview a few years back with a physiologist who said that human performance improvements are quite linear and governed by some absolutes like maximum rates of metabolisation of energy sources. He said that if you factor in improvements in technology and the aerodynamic advantages in skin suits and helmets, a fairly accurate graph can be drawn from the 1930's to the present day of performance increase with time. If you then superimpose real results over the top of it you can see the two curves diverging around the time of the 'Armstrong era' which if available at the time would have alerted people to the fact that something was not quite right.

I believe that police response times to forecourt drive offs reflect their low priority, in which case you will be well paid up and away by the time it gets official.

Such as? The irony is that even if a negotiated Brexit means we remain in EASA, we will still be subject to the European Court of Justice but without any say over how it is run. That's why this whole Brexit thing is a nonsense. Like it or not we live in an integrated world and to disengage from it is not only going to be deeply damaging to our country's wellbeing but will also be impossible to administer. Like it or not, the Brextremists in government can scream and shout all they want but there are going to be all sorts of compromises made and it is still going to end up looking like a dogs dinner!

And how come the wrong engines were found if no bits of the plane were found? Much of the plane was found including the flight data recorder which mirrored exactly the flight path which air traffic control secondary radar had recorded. And a video simulation made using data from the data recorder also corroborated a number of independent eyewitness accounts of the last minutes of the flight. Unfortunately the NTSB handed over responsibility for the crash investigation to the FBI and no report has ever been published. However, there is more than enough information in the public domain to support the assumption that American Airlines Flight 77 did indeed crash into the Pentagon including mobile phone logs to and from the plane in the last minutes of the flight.

The only alternative narrative which holds any kind of water is that elements within the US government knew in advance of the attack plans and allowed it to go ahead for whatever reason. Everything else is just crazy talk.

Including the thousands of friends, family and acquaintances of the perpetrators, very few of whom would be in the slightest bit interested in backing a US government/New World Order/Illuminati/ Lizard conspiracy theory.

That's very true but while we still have enough to fill kids' party balloons AND cool MRI scanners, we ain't going to be getting it from outer space any time soon.

So do lots of places in space but while it costs 1000s of times more to fetch them than they are worth, no one is going to bother. It cost Elon Musk something like $100 million to launch his old car into space and even that is supposed to be a third of the price of most commercial space launches.

Given that the vast majority of people detained in 'terrorist' raids are very quickly released without charge, that is one hell of a lot of innocent people you want to lock up! And given that you also bang on about lenient sentences and 50% remission, where on earth are you going to imprison all these people? Dude, you need to do less shouting and more thinking!

What did they say when you asked them?

Because they belong to their own aviation safety organisations that are recognised by EASA and as already pointed out, some airlines are already banned from European airspace if their operations or maintenance standards fall below a threshold set by EASA. At the end of the day it will be the airlines' own insurance companies which will ground them. Once the UK ceases to be a member of an internationally recognised aviation safety organisation IT WILL BE ILLEGAL to fly in most international airspace and as such airlines will have no valid insurance. Another consequence of this is that without that insurance, they may also be prevented by IATA from selling any airline tickets. The Brexit crazies may bang on about how 'it won't happen' but if the UK leaves the EU and its organisations without a deal this is exactly what will happen! That is why Ryanair is stressing about it. Although an Irish registered business, they operate a ton of flights in and through the UK. In the event of a no deal Brexit, UK airspace will become effectively 'unregulated airspace' and as such, Ryanair and other airlines will not be insured to fly in, over or through it. There'll certainly be no need for a third runway at Heathrow!

Wiggins used intravenous triamcinolone before the 2012 Tour de France on advice of the Team Sky doctor. That is very much to do with Team Sky. It also doesn't help that Wiggins' Team Sky medical records now seem to have vanished.

Interestingly, despite the blind faith in capitalism in the US, NASA decided to let the contract for navigation software development for the moon landings to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That still leaves the questions - if triamcinolone is not appropriate for Wiggins' condition(s), it has potentially more harmful side effects than Sambutamol and there is NO performance advantage, why on earth was he taking it? Scientists often disagree but I suspect Team Sky, their backers and their own scientists all found a measurable advantage in it's use. At that level (again, as in Formula One) they are dealing with combinations of small advantages to make a decisive difference in competition and have very highly paid, highly skilled people working for them with access to cutting edge research tools.

Posting a link to a crank website is not the best way to advance an argument lol

Most likely a healthy vote to remain. Most studies of those who didn't/couldn't vote put them in the remain camp and that is before you factor in the under 16's as in the Scottish independence referendum. I remember someone saying at the time that it is easy to stir people up to vote against something. Much harder to stir people to to enthuse about something which is rightly or wrongly not massively loved, even by remainers. I certainly have no love for the EU but it has largely been a force for good and in 2016 it made no economic sense whatever way you looked at it for the UK to withdraw. In fact going back to your initial point, I would go further than a compulsory vote and have made the result compulsory but only as long as there was a quadruple lock on the result, ie. it would have to have produced a simple majority in ALL FOUR constituents of the United Kingdom. Despite Brexiteers screaming and shouting 'we won the vote!' and 'respect the will of the people!', the WHOLE of the United Kingdom is being dragged into this madness by a slender majority made up of English and a handful of Welsh votes.

If there's a 'no deal' Brexit, nobody will be flying anywhere other than within the UK. And before people say that our good friend Trump will let us fly to America, we won't be able to do that either. Once we drop out of the European Air Safety Agency, UK registered planes will not be legally allowed to fly in any airspace other than the UK's.

That's a ludicrous thing to say. A second referendum would cost millions at the very worst. Brexit has already cost the UK economy 30 billion and counting and no one knows how bad the eventual economic damage will be. It is a huge decision that is being made without the backing of the majority of the population so there is an absolutely democratic imperative for the process to be reviewed.

That isn't nonsense. That's not what happened and if it had been, things would be much clearer. The system says simply that if you have a condition you can take medication to help that condition. What it doesn't say that the medication needs to be appropriate which is why Wiggins was allowed to use triamcinolone. Therapeutic use exemption should be done on a case by case basis with heavy focus on 'appropriate'. Like countless others, Wiggins used Sambutamol for his asthma and allergies until he moved to Sky where he started receiving triamcinolone injections. It is common knowledge that triamcinolone has much greater performance enhancing properties than Sambutamol. Think of it like having a mild headache. An aspirin will take the edge off but codeine phosphate is much stronger and works more quickly. The aspirin is a more appropriate analgesic but both are available, although the risks with codeine phosphate are higher. In Formula One, teams are constantly taking advantage of weakness in the rules to gain an advantage. If enough teams kick up a fuss the advantage is either banned or allowed, in which case all teams then adopt it. At the end of the day no one then complains that Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher or Sebastian Vettel are not deserving champions. So is Wiggins (and Sky) culpable of cheating? Legally no. What he used was undoubtedly performance enhancing but was also allowed under the rules that existed at the time. Morally, who knows? If you are allowed two alternatives one of which gives a distinct advantage even though it's riskier and not appropriate what would you choose? The problem cycling has is the legacy of Lance Armstrong. I suspect that what Team Sky did was to focus so obsessively on complying with the letter of the law, that nobody took a step back and asked themselves "Should we really be doing this?"

You do realise that it is precisely because of people like you that a new identity and all the costs that go with it are necessary?

Why on Earth would the US fake the moon landings? They had the technology (albeit a bit clunky) to do it for real so why bother faking it?

So what? As leaving the EU looks more and more like a very bad idea with every week that passes, why shouldn't people be allowed to have a re think of the whole idea?

Interesting point. A lot of people were fooled into voting to leave the EU. Should they be blamed when it all starts to fall apart or should blame be saved for those who stirred the pot?

That's the problem with the fashion for 'ready to use' screen-wash. It's way too dilute for the temperatures we are getting at the moment.