The English are your conquerors. Show some respect.
Allen Turing recieves royal pardon
- Thread starter Mott the Hoople
- Start date
The English are your conquerors. Show some respect.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
He wasn't forced, he was given a choice of going to prison or undergoing chemical castration. Not a great choice admittedly but they were very different times. You might want to read this before saying anymore on the subject. I might also point that homosexuality was legalised in the UK apart from Northern Ireland in 1967. By contrast, the American Psychiatric Association only removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1973.
http://www.gvsu.edu/allies/a-brief-history-of-homosexuality-in-america-30.htm
Last edited:
They also jailed them! But they did other equally barbaric things to other citizens such as lashing people begging for alms "until the blood ran" and "condemning them to death" for a third offense. The object of such legal proscriptions being to get them to seek work and not to beg.
Nice of you to defend your country's barbaric behavior and legal proscriptions. You do understand that the APA is not a legal body and their definitions have no standing under the law! In other words comparing a law to a statement by the APA is a logical fallacy! And you want to pretend you are a scientist! A sloppy thinker such as yourself a scientist, HA! What a joke!
Smoke nice burn!
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Peter Thatchell, a gay campaigner in the UK was on the BBC this morning suggesting that Allan Turing was killed by the security services because they were terrified for what he knew and might do. It is an interesting theory that may have some currency, who knows?
cancel2 2022
Canceled
That's why I find it necessary to threadban his Dude personality.
Even if his brain was dead, I would venture that it would still be functioning at higher level than yours.
And you'd be wrong.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
I predicated my sentence on the understanding of "legend has it". Please re-read my post.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Isn't that pretty much the same thing in the south?
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Over 10,000 murders a year and a prison population of over 2 million is nothing to be proud of, that is happening now not 60 years ago.
Airstrip One
Completely Effed
It's also incredibly gay.
PostmodernProphet
fully immersed in faith..
all the way to Cleveland.......Isn't that pretty much the same thing in the south?
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Didn't you mean "Waaaay down south in Cleveland?" LOL
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Whilst Alan Turing has been rightly honoured for his contribution to computing, Tommy Flowers is still woefully ignored for the most part. He designed and built Colossus, mostly with his own money, in under a year and undoubtedly shortened the war by several years and saved countless lives in the process.
Colossus was used primarily to decode enciphered teleprinter traffic between German High Command and Army Group commanders in the field, so its intelligence value (Ultra) was of the highest strategic value to the Allies. This traffic normally passed over landlines, but as German forces extended their geographic reach beyond western Europe, they had to resort to wireless transmission.
TOMMY FLOWERS'S contribution to codebreaking in the Second World War was immense. He led the team that designed and built Colossus - the first electronic programmable computer - to break the complex encoded communiques between the German High Command and the field. The first model was demonstrated at Bletchley Park, the British forces' Intelligence Centre, in December 1943, with a faster version in operation by June 1944, days before D Day. Historians believe that the codebreaking facilitated by Colossus shortened the war by two years.
As the war progressed and the volume of enemy encrypted radio intercepts increased, it became evident that the manual method then in use for deciphering this material was woefully inadequate. The Post Office Engineering Department at Dollis Hill in London was involved in many different projects designed to further the war effort, and an approach was made by Bletchley Park for assistance in devising equipment to speed up the decryption process.
Flowers had joined the staff at the Research Station at Dollis Hill in the mid-1930s. A team-player with unconventional technical ideas, he had established himself as a man of considerable foresight in the field of telephone exchange switching design, and was asked to find an answer to this problem. He devised a machine, called a "Robinson" (as he described it later, it was "a Heath Robinson affair held together with string and sealing wax").
The use of thermionic valves was felt by many of those concerned to be a weak point in the design of this kind of machine. Flowers made the revolutionary claim that a valve left on all the time, and not switched on and off as required, would have a very long life. The Staff Engineer in charge at DH had faith in Flowers, and backed him. A small design team was formed in great secrecy to work on the first and subsequent machines, the last of which were the 10 Colossus machines, having 2,500 valves apiece, which were so successfully employed at Bletchley Park.
Colossus was designed to deal with the complex intelligence known as Fish, with messages sometimes 10,000 characters in length sent between Hitler's High Command and commanders in the field, and containing vital information on troop dispositions, ration strengths, and even details of leave arrangements for generals. The Morse-transmitted Enigma code, on the other hand, although very complex, used messages of a purely tactical nature, which were never more than 250 characters long. This work had no association with Colossus.
Colossus was engaged on the statistical analysis of the enemy teleprinter intercepts. A separate machine to use this data to decipher each message was needed, and Flowers arranged for me, a former member of the DH staff, then in the Army in North Africa engaged on another DH-backed project, to be posted home to join his team. Busy though he was, Flowers made a daily visit to his small band working in a small laboratory to observe progress.
The new machines, codenamed "Tunny", were to be fed with an enciphered message tape, and after being set up according to the Colossus data, were to produce a printed output on a teleprinter in clear German. To facilitate the testing of Tunny, one of the design engineers devised a certain set of code wheel patterns, and on his next visit Flowers was invited to type in the message "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party". His delight at seeing the machine print out "I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills" was reward enough for the small band, who like Flowers, did a 12- or 14-hour day without complaint.
Born in the East End of London in 1905, Flowers gained a scholarship to technical college, enabling him to stay on until 16. He served a four- year mechanical apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, gained a London University degree in Engineering through evening classes, and then joined the Post Office as an electrical engineer in 1926, aged 20. Besides his involvement with electronic telephone transmissions, he also did sterling work in the forward line of the DH hockey team in the immediate pre-war years. After the war, he continued his work at Dollis Hill, applying his expertise of electronics to telephone switching and signalling systems.
He was appointed MBE for his contribution to the war effort along with a rather meagre pounds 1,000 award, but, since the codebreaking activities at Bletchley Park were kept secret for 30 years, Flowers remained largely unknown to the public. Only later did his work receive recognition - he was presented with an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1977, and another in 1993 from De Montfort University in Leicester. A reconstruction of Colossus is now on view at the Bletchley Park museum.
Thomas Harold Flowers, engineer: born London 22 December 1905; MBE 1943; married 1935 Eileen Green (two sons); died London 28 October 1998.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-tommy-flowers-1184727.html
Last edited: