Barry Curzon

have u ever had an insane roommate like i mean actually Insane

A British company called Skycutter, based in the East Midlands, just finished first out of the entire field in the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program. Score of 99.3 out of 100. The largest order goes to them: two and a half thousand units, an initial Pentagon contract of twenty million dollars, with an option to scale up to two hundred million. Read that and really soak it in. It's something that rarely happens anymore. A small British startup beat the entire American defence-tech industrial complex on its own home turf, in a competition the Pentagon designed itself, against companies that get whatever they ask for from Washington on a Tuesday morning. It looks likely to be followed by something that always happens - Skycutter are, by the looks of things, going to pack up their talent and their operations and move all of it to America. Why? The MoD, they say, is too slow. The procurement cycle is too long. There is no clear pathway from "British company that builds something the world wants" to "British company that the British state buys from in serious quantity at serious speed." No byway through which you move from "A potentially world-toppling IP advantage" to "Complete and deserved domination of the global market." So we are about to lose them. Not because they want to leave, but because the country that produced them cannot organise itself fast enough to keep them. The MoD's response, by the way, was to issue a statement saying it wants the UK to be "the best place in the world to start and grow a defence business." It does not want to do this. Indeed it is difficult to convey, in polite English, how galling that sentence is when read alongside the news it is responding to. You're a serious country? You'd fight for a company like Skycutter. You'd fight to take them if they weren't yours, and you'd fight like mad to keep them if they were. A serious country has someone in Whitehall whose entire fucking job is making sure the next Skycutter doesn't end up in Virginia. We have, instead, a Defence Office for Small Business Growth. Which is the kind of name you give a thing that you created for no purpose other than taking the piss out of it.

Non-readers will never know how one perfect sentence can make you clutch the book, kick your feet, and grin like an idiot.

lolita is kind of a litmus test in that if you read it as erotic or a romance it reveals something deeply wrong with you

자료유출을 방지하기 위해 구멍을 뚫고 폐기된 기업용 SSD

I'm just finding out that a lot of you all wash your underwear with your clothes. And when it comes to body chemistry... I think that's just kind of nasty. To me, that's my personal opinion. I've always been taught to separate them... 🤷🏾‍♀️

George R.R. Martin explains how his Game of Thrones characters wielding power badly is his answer to Tolkien: "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? Real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king." What do you think Tolkien would have thought about such comments?