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Kenneth

Listed below are comments made by Kenneth between Friday, 12th June 2009 and Thursday, 10th December 2009.

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'Not quite' D-Day 9:03pm on 10 Dec 2009 "To be fully fair to Mr Gray, his original statement had stressed that he was arguing for capital acceleration contingent on the Scottish government demonstrating that it would make productive use of such spending, creating jobs."

Why should capital acceleration be contingent on the Scottish Government demonstrating anything? Isn't one of the principle tenets of devolution that the Scottish Parliament has complete discretion, subject to existing legal obligations, to spend the money it receives from Westminster in whatever way it chooses.

This is like, "Please daddy. Can I get some more pocket money?"
"OK son, but only if you spend it on books. No more sweets or toys for you. You've bought enough of those."
Freight fright 11:25am on 26 Oct 2009 The final sentence spoils an otherwise balanced and reasonable post and really does make the author seem biased against the SNP.

But anyway... is the English market not low-hanging fruit from a Scottish perspective, and thus probably already fairly well tapped (whilst also being familiar, easy to research, etc for anyone in Scotland looking to increase their volume of business there)? Does it not therefore make sense to spend limited public resources encouraging and supporting the establishment of additional trade between Scotland and slightly less easy-to-tap markets, such as Germany (and other EU member states), the US and China?
Trams off the rails? 10:52pm on 30 Sep 2009 "And meanwhile, it goes on the buses, with the drive to put the tram company under the same corporate heading as Lothian Buses, to be known as TEL."

Eh?
Changes to international pages 6:19pm on 13 Jun 2009 To quote sweezely's point:

"Part of presenting the news is actually determining what is news and that presentation is now gone, so as far as I'm concerned one of the most pieces of content is now gone."

All the words from Mr Herrmann about customizing don't respond to this basic and fundamental concern.

Perhaps a comment on this next time Mr Herrmann?
Changes to international pages 1:07pm on 13 Jun 2009 Just to reiterate aishihab's point #1:

"I like the "editions" idea. Not sure I want to customise; I like the idea of mass-produced "editions" or "composition of news". This whole personalisation/customisation thing is taking over the world."

And point #2:

"When I'm abroad I want to be able to see the news like I'm in the UK, and when I'm in the UK, I want to be able to see the news like I'm abroad - in one step."

Simple, huh?

Now, Mr Herrmann, are you seriously saying that that is not possible? Or even that it is technically difficult? Coz I know for a fact that it is not, and the people telling you otherwise are leading you up the garden path.
Changes to international pages 11:55am on 13 Jun 2009 So you are going to all the effort of liasing with goodness knows how many multinational companies to work out which particular ranges of their IP address should be identified as UK-originating (which I suspect isn't even possible in all cases), but you won't go for the much simpler change of just having a few extra page templates, some of which contain space for adverts and some of which don't.

I'm not sure who is feeding you this stuff about "technical complications" but it sounds like baloney to me.
Changes to international pages 6:37pm on 12 Jun 2009 I notice that the Business section also has a much more international flavour now.

If I wanted generic international business news, I would visit Bloomberg or CNN.

I specifically want to visit the BBC News Business section to see what are the interesting global business stories from the perspective of a UK audience.
Changes to international pages 4:29pm on 12 Jun 2009 To homerbutbright:

Do you mean you are part of the ill-informed minority?

It is simply NOT now possible to view the UK front page if you don't have a UK IP address.

And please don't confuse this with clicking UK in the left-hand bar - that gives one the UK section front page, which contains only UK stories, as distinct from the UK front page which gives a mix of a UK and international stories but with an editorial judgement about what is interesting to a UK audience.
Changes to international pages 1:56pm on 12 Jun 2009 Ah yes, so anyone accessing BBC News from within the UK using Opera Mini now also can't see the UK version. That is quite a lot of people Mr Herrmann.

But does any of this matter to you? Right now, it appears not.

As an IT professional myself, I suspect that what happened here was that some group of developers asked for permission to make this change because it would make their life easier and they bamboozled you with some overly-technical PowerPoint presentation and you agreed.

Well, I suggest you go back to these developers and tell them that what they have come up with is not good enough and that they need to think of something more intelligent.

In the meantime, please revert the changes...
Changes to international pages 1:00pm on 12 Jun 2009 To Steve Herrmann (#347):

You simply haven't addressed the number 1 complaint of people on this thread, which is that it is now no longer possible to see a spread of both UK and international stories assessed for their newsworthiness to a UK audience.

Why on earth not? How "technically challenging" could it really be to provide this?

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