2.5m is the eaves height, it doesn’t have eaves.
I’m getting worried here!
No it’s 2.5 total within 2m of a boundary.
3m total unless it’s pitched anywhere else.
If it is attached to the building and not higher it does not matter
Me too. We were lucky, in a sense, in this country in that we separated AEA, who did energy, from AWE, who did weapons. Of course there was some cross-talk, especially in the early days, and if you had several thousand weird scientists cooped up in a field in rural Oxon it must have been hard stopping them from pursuing the odd idea after hours. But our lab sites weren’t like Livermore or Sandia or Los Alamos in the US where all sorts of off-the-wall stuff was going on alongside people actually screwing the bombs/power plants together.
VB
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You’re right, so if it’s considered an outbuilding then it might be marginal.
Interesting problem, at least it’s easy to adjust if necessary!
All of the regulations being quoted here are applicable to sheds, summer houses, garden offices etc.
*I would suggest that ther is little chance of a specific regulation applicable to climbing frames and it will probably come under something like unclassified structures.
It would have been prudent to get initial advice from your local Planning Dep’t, but I guess you’re now at the stage of build it and hope for the best.
*It’s a few years since I was involved in planning application matters (and even then, climbing walls did not feature)
I want to say something about if we hadn’t separated those functions, maybe we wouldn’t be asking China and France to build new power stations for us and maybe we wouldn’t have had to privatise energy production and go begging to America for our strategic deterrent, but I’m slightly in my cups so perhaps it’s best not to.
Shhhhh I’m trying to make him paranoid.
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You’re succeeding! Playhouses fall into the outbuildings category.
Meh
Running an independent bomb programme is eye-wateringly expensive, even compared to buying them from the Yanks I believe.
Guessing the future of nuclear power after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl must have been a nightmare, especially in the context of fossil fuels becoming unacceptable and renewables waning (too unreliable) and then waxing again (wind might turn out to be cheap enough and PV works too). Magnox are running a successful business cleaning up the mess, with much of their experience coming from cleaning up their own mess. Believe it or not the buildings in the top left corner of the pic are, and have for decades been, a primary school. The SSE is a public playing field now.
VB
Of course it’s expensive, difficult stuff always is, it’s the nature of the beast. But other countries that are seemingly less rich than us, if we truly are the 5th/6th richest nation on the planet, seem to be able to facilitate these things, without having to sell everything off.
They treat it as an investment, rather than a drain on resources. Hence they end up owning our infrastructure and we end up exporting vast amounts of profits…
I should stop now, or I’m going to start mourning the disgraceful destruction of our previously world leading aerospace industry…
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The only states poorer than us that have publicly said they make their own bombs are India, Pakistan and N Korea. There are strong suspicions about Israel too. I’m not sure their capability is sufficient to count as a deterrent in the face of the big players though.
VB
Err, France?
Doesn’t take too many nukes in your stockpile to make other countries (especially next door neighbours) take notice, especially if you can stick them on top of a reliable delivery system, I would guess. So India and Pakistan (both have orbital capability iirc) are sorted there, and N Korea seems to be able to lob stuff in the general direction of Japan fairly reliably. They really only have to have the capability to create havoc somewhere for their deterrent to be credible.
I’m getting distracted from my premise, however, which was that cross fertilisation of technology from the defence and energy industries might have not been a disaster. And we might have our own Death Star by now.
We design and build our own warheads, it’s the Trident delivery system we buy. So probably the worst of all worlds.
As a country we seem to love to come up with an idea then give it away or sell it then become beholden to the new owners. Or am I just a bit jaded?
Nope. We invented this technology
It’s finger-prick blood glucose testing - perhaps the single biggest advance in the treatment of diabetes in decades - and the guy who did the work ended up having to take it to Abbott, who are HQ’d in the US (although they do have a significant UK presence) to get it commercialised.
VB
It wasn’t just the electrochemical measurement that pitted inventor against corporates.
Photo above looks like the device uses a capillary fill cell - which has its own little story
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I remember reading about this, but before he had been successful. I’m glad to see he got something out of them. Saddening to see that even after the judgement, Unilever are still expressing sour grapes about it, despite the figures. Stingy fucks.
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I don’t know the details, but in the end how the pie is divvied up between the corporation that employs an individual and the individual (who has the idea) themselves will be part of the Ts and Cs that they sign when they take the job. Unilever’s point was that they were paying him, and giving him bonuses and that was the ‘due’ he had agreed with them in advance. They might argue that it allows them to employ loads of other people too, none of whom ever has an idea worth that much.
All that said, £2m is nothing to Unilever and they do sound like they’re being mean in this case.
I remember the first versions of the tester which didn’t use the capillary cell. You just plonked a drop of blood on the end of a similar sized stick and let the chemistry happen. They worked well enough, but the results weren’t quite as reproducible as they are now. I don’t know how much of that improvement is down to the capillary cell though.
VB
The issue that I have is that this will not be a balanced contract. The company will have employed an army of lawyers when drafting this, whereas the individual will have read it over quickly at best, in most cases. In rare cases the individual might have some legal training and raised a couple of points, only to be told that it’s the standard contract and isn’t going to change for them. Unless they are a superstar (unlikely for a scientist, sadly), they will have no clout.
In any reasonable world it would be obvious to have a reasonable split of the unforeseen profits of someone’s work. I have no issue with this split being 99:1 or more, as the company is taking 99% of the risk (the individual is getting paid all of their salary, after all, and the company may get nothing for the work at all), but where the profit is in the billions (wasn’t blue LEDs a similar case?), clearly the individual who made the breakthrough should get a significant sum.
What gets me is that the company should be able to trumpet it as a success story for all, saying how this person got a life-changing sum for their genius discovery, what a great place to work and do research etc. Instead they just come across as miserly bastards that will rapidly go to the bottom of the potential employer list for any aspiring research scientists. It doesn’t even make business sense.
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It certainly provides more controlled conditions for the test - not just sample volume, but electrode contact area (for e/c detection) or defined pathlength (for optical detection), less evaporation and better temperature regulation.
More suited to mass fabrication too.