Carlos

But don't worry too much, doing 47 in a 30 zone, overtaking cars stopped at a red light and knocking somebody over on the crossing does not get you up to "dangerous" in real life. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7058736.stm

Rama is smaller than predicted?

As people have posted, probably most of the duties placed on the council would be to act "in a reasonable way" rather than any fixed requirements. If the road conditions predicted during the day were correctly interpretated and did not warrant salting, then there is likely no fault on the council for not salting again. If there was some error there, or predictions were ignored, then there may be a case. The lack of a gritting service on Christmas day would not seem to come into things for me in this case, unless this was a factor in not salting when the predictions did warrant it. The wider picture as to whether a regular gritter service should be kept in place for the 25th and 1st is maybe a better one to debate. An emergency service is still available, and I understand that this was called out and the road was salted after the first accident, although it would seem that the weather conditions and/or low traffic meant that it didn't thaw the ice enough to prevent the latter accidents.

The council may well be leaving themselves open to action, as I understand that their duty to grit roads is hedged in fairly ambiguous terms, but I am not sure if the circumstances in this particular case are so much against them.... As far as I know the road was salted on Christmas eve, and only a short length of road was affected by ice. The council uses some form of ice prediction software using the weather stations you can see online, so it's not very certain to me that they would have been gritting that road on a day with normal service - it would depend what the system said, and as it was localized icing, it might not have said anything that would have called out the gritters anyway. The balance of salting or not really comes down to costs, should salting be carried out more/less often at a higher/lower cost? The winter maintenance budget is quite a big chunk of money as it is, and with cuts being looked at..... maybe we will have to stop assuming the roads will always be ice free?

Actually the compositing work is pretty poor, the perspective and lighting on the bridge is way off and the bridge shadow looks like it took 30 seconds, I was very disappointed when I saw that in London - whatever the idea it'd be nice to have it executed well.

Ah.... Spain and Portugal...... 2 or 3 cafes on every street, and mass desertion of customers if the price dares go above 35p for an espresso......

Do fans really enjoy arguing about refs decisions and bias too much to want it all certain one way or the other?

From the other point of view, if there are rules that do not need to be enforced correctly/consistently, why are they there? Too hard to judge offsides? Get rid of the rule then. If the rule is a good idea in principle though, then aids to help judgment should be a good thing?

My impression was certainly that legally nobody knew quite where the issues stood and that all sides, SIC, LPA, Edinburgh and the judge, were firefighting their ways through it. I THINK that the ultimate authority and most of the issues of legal processes required were not fully determined until the judge said they were..... At the moment I see it was equivalent to A objecting to the planning application of B because it will interfere with their own application, that objection being upheld and permission refused to B, then later permission being granted to B on appeal..... B might be able to sue on the basis of incompetent administration of the process, but I don't see how they can sue A for objecting....... we shall see.....

I think the interdict was applied for on the basis of one thing - "breach of an agreement" - and ultimately refused on another - "lack of jurisdiction". The judgment had plenty of information on the back and forth about who agreed what at what time and what they (thought) they meant, but I don't remember much being presented by either side about the issue of jurisdiction, which I remember more as something coming from the judge...... but it has been a long time..... luckily IANAL, and might get away with not knowing what I am talking about I'd say it'd be "interesting" to see how the claim for compensation proceeds, if it were not going to be another big mess that benefits nobody

My understanding of what happened at the time was that the interdict was refused on the basis that the LPA had compete authority to act as they wished within the harbour, and the SIC and court had no powers to restrict that.

There have been lots of poorly handled issues with the bridge project for sure, but this one at least does not seem to fall on the SIC to me. They asked for an interim interdict, the court decided they were entitled to it, and then 6 months later the court decided they were not entitled to it after all? Regardless of the merits of the issue, it seems the legal process was followed correctly, but in this case seems to have created the contractual problem because of the time it took to be finally resolved. I would be interested to see how the council could be held liable for the extra dredging contract costs on that basis.

Those Ings are a terrible bunch though

There's no doubt that people should be using lights when the conditions require it, but if you read up on some of the research on the net you'll see the jury is still out on whether there are benefits to using dipped headlights all day. Reductions seem to come from multi-car junction accidents, but maybe at the cost of more accidents with cars hitting motorbikes, pushbikes and pedestrians, who do not stand out so well if you are just looking for headlights, and that has caused some countries to backtrack on compulsory dipped headlights. I think I'd rather stay with appropriate lighting than a simple blanket "answer".

Sleep is the big time waster, 1/3 of your day just disappeared..... I'm always tempted to try the "4x 30 minute naps spread though the day" idea, but of course..... I love my sleep too much....

It's easy to imagine how it could work, but not so easy to get the technology in place and working efficiently on an industrial scale: - just catch all the CO2 > compress it > pump it down old oil wells for handy storage. I remember something about a new coal fired power station proposed for the south of England, that will be "CO2 capture compatible"...... in other words they can't do it at the moment, hope they have some idea how it might work, and will try to not mess up that future chance in the design. It'd be nice if it did turn out that way, seeing as we have some coal left.....

I see (correct me if I am wrong) a lot of support for the idea of independence as a way of increasing wealth in Shetland. If the hypothetical deal on table instead left us just a little bit worse off, would you support that as a price worth paying for Independence?

It's hard to see how to do anything about centralization. Improve the roads so that it is practical to work in Lerwick and live further away, and you also make it easier to shop in Lerwick (closing local shops) go out in Lerwick (closing local halls) and have kids go to School in Lerwick (closing local schools). Also as it becomes easier to travel to Lerwick, and people are doing more things there, the reasons for not living nearer to Lerwick become harder to justify. SIC moving some offices farther out of town will come up about now, but that will end up costing more, so not less. It could act as a subsidy to try and sustain rural areas, but as far as cutting the budgets go, it moves the wrong way. Easiest way to cut budgets without reducing overall services is to centralise...... but as this week has shown that has it's political difficulties. Not centralising means making heavier cuts to the "average user" than might have been the case thought, and will have it's own headaches for the councilors...... In the end they will likely make token cuts where they think it will not be noticed too much and keep topping up the budget from the reserves.

I saw 2 police pulling in cars for random checks the other week, but 8am on a gray morning and no reflective vests, just all in black....... HSE would not be happy.

Costs would go up then, less pupils per school

Assuming the target of getting down to Orkney's spend per pupil is reasonable (25% cut is that?) how should it be done, if closing schools is not a (political) option?

I remember reading of a motorcyclist doing an experiment on his morning commute. He did 1 month riding as normal, and counted how many times he had cars pull out "not seeing him" He did the next month with his headlights on and a reflective vest..... but the numbers stayed the same..... The final month nobody cut him up at all...... when we started wearing his police uniform

1 Maglev turbine can replace 1000 normal wind turbines ?

I'd like to see more movement on those kind of practical options while we develop, argue about and ignore the changes that'll have to come in the end.

I think councilors are like most people, they are far happier to accept expert advice if it agrees with their own views, otherwise they tend to look for reasons to ignore it.