This reminds me of Janet Street-Porter being appointed editor of the Independent on Sunday; a figurehead who'll require a phalanx of good deputies to get the actual paper out. Usually you'd expect a title like "editor-at-large" or "consultant editor", but that wouldn't terrify May etc. as I expect this will.
It is absolutely unacceptable for him to remain as an MP. Like Blair, he has no sense of duty to party or country beyond how they feature in his career plans.
Behind the amusing tweets, you can sense this appointment has boiled Jim Waterson's piss. I expect every journalist who has done the profession for years is similiarly rolling their eyes right now.
I think this gets to the heart of a very key question though
Is the media there to report the news, or is it there to make the news. In the long run it is this type of appointment that weakens trust in the media as a reporting vehicle.
The Brexiteer side of the media is at it too, with their deliberate campaign to undermine Hammond as CoTE. That ain't just REPORTING the news either
A sad state of affairs.
The Standard under Lebedev is a personal hobby horse.
George Osborne editor of the Evening Standard and Rupert Murdoch taking over Sky will have labour in a spin.
No, what it will do is to give legs to Labour claims that the public cannot trust anything they read in the Tory Standard, undermining the credence anything critical of Sadiq Khan whether factually correct or not. Much better for Labour to have Osborne as editor than a dyed-in-the -wool Tory who the public has never heard of.
Osborne is indeed taking over from a Tory who no-one has ever heard of because she is becoming editor of Today.
Being an MP has to be the cushiest job in the country, an 86 year old can do it, now a bloke can do it whilst editing a daily paper (amongst other things).
This makes a mockery of parliament and in particular the conservative party
Breaking: BBC announces Jeremy Corbyn to present 'Gardeners World'.
I'd heard he was playing Compo in the relaunch of Last of the Summer Wine? Hillary Benn as Foggy and xxxxxx as Nora Batty [redacted for confidentiality reasons]
I though the Ozzy/Standard story was a spoof. That is bizarre! Does he have any journalistic or editorial credentials? An absolute hoot of an appointment.
I think he once did a bit of freelance journalism, that's it. If I remember correctly after uni he wanted to be one but nobody would have him and he ended up temping for the Tories.
I have just read the story. He is going to remain as an MP?! WTF?! The paper will become a europhile cell endlessly attacking the government. Surely May will just remove the whip? This is the most bizarre story I have heard for many a year.
Osborne must have a game plan. Perhaps he sees some way of using it to become the Macron of the UK?
It has to be part of a bigger picture. I should add that I don't necessarily think it's a bad appointment. His access to inside stories about the government will be almost worth it in and of itself. However, from a practical point of view, his remaining an MP is a potential snag. As his his complete lack of relevant experience in the field.
Once they get a few back and can see how they deteriorate with each flight, it should be (relatively) straightforward to improve them over time to deal with the stresses of multiple flights. My guess it that they'll use new ones for all the manned launches and refurbs for all the unmanned ones over time.
Saturn V 1st stage flyback would have been doable, if bloody difficult with the 1960s flight computers they were using. It never went that high (c. 200,000' from memory) but was absolutely enormous compared to anything landed before or since.
SS fuel talk would have been nearly impossible to get back to Earth though, it detached after eight minutes already half way across the Atlantic and with ridiculous forward speed - and no engines!
NASA are insisting on brand-new boosters for their manned flights to the ISS. I don't know whether they'd stick their oar in and insist on it for SpaceX's private manned flights.
(That link contains some great pictures of how the shuttle's design changed over time).
It became bigger to cope with the military's requirements, and the larger size meant the flyback booster became a behemoth: http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=11739
I do wonder how it would have ended up if Max Faget's original plans had been funded.
Breaking: BBC announces Jeremy Corbyn to present 'Gardeners World'.
I'd heard he was playing Compo in the relaunch of Last of the Summer Wine? Hillary Benn as Foggy and xxxxxx as Nora Batty [redacted for confidentiality reasons]
George Osborne editor of the Evening Standard and Rupert Murdoch taking over Sky will have labour in a spin.
No, what it will do is to give legs to Labour claims that the public cannot trust anything they read in the Tory Standard, undermining the credence anything critical of Sadiq Khan whether factually correct or not. Much better for Labour to have Osborne as editor than a dyed-in-the -wool Tory who the public has never heard of.
Which would apply to pretty much all of his predecessors.
"today's intelligence services capture, store, index, and transcribe essentially everything they can get their hands on"
Really? How do you know?
The scale of the operations are fairly clear from leaked documents.
GCHQ's Tempora is a 200 * 10 Gb/s system, storing three days of full data, and 30 days of metadata. It's described as "full take" and an "internet buffer". That's just one system, from 2012, that feeds into XKeyscore, which is the tool for searching across various data sources.
Another tool, the NSA's Boundless Informant, showed they were collection over 200 billion records a month, coming from over 500 sources.
You have programme's like MYSTIC which was an NSA programme to capture all of the phone calls in a target country, or which there were several, and store them for 30 days.
MAINWAY was another NSA programme with trillions of call records.
Those are the tip of the iceberg, there are many more similar reports about other programmes.
George Osborne editor of the Evening Standard and Rupert Murdoch taking over Sky will have labour in a spin.
No, what it will do is to give legs to Labour claims that the public cannot trust anything they read in the Tory Standard, undermining the credence anything critical of Sadiq Khan whether factually correct or not. Much better for Labour to have Osborne as editor than a dyed-in-the -wool Tory who the public has never heard of.
Exactly. Khan now has a free pass to dismiss anything the Standard print about him as "Tory Propaganda". Mrs May and the government on the other hand, can expect a very pro-EU agenda from the paper that everyone's reading on the way home, I imagine Osborne will get summoned to see the Chief Whip sooner rather than later. Evens on a by-election in Tatton this year?
With that all said, GO has no real journalistic experience - unlike say Michael Gove. What will he actually be doing on a day to day basis other than chairing a couple of meetings and watching the paper's budget?
I think it's great. He is an interesting, intelligent character who has immense experience and understanding of world views and also those of London.
Looking forward to his first editorial. I assume (and hope) the word "independence"will feature strongly.
Seconded - anything which annoys the London twitterati is definitely to be welcomed. He is very bright and twas one of May's biggest mistakes to sack him.
Not sure how anything as out in the open as GO's employments can be a conspiracy. All it means is that people think he still has influence now, or will have again in the future.
I wonder if this means that the Standard is going to change into something completely different from the current mix? As it stands today, it's hard, verging on impossible, to see what attraction it would have for Osborne and what attraction Osborne would have for it.
Being an MP has to be the cushiest job in the country, an 86 year old can do it, now a bloke can do it whilst editing a daily paper (amongst other things).
This makes a mockery of parliament and in particular the conservative party
Indeed, Mr Choose. To loosely quote Mr. Hacker: £70k a year for a job that requires no qualifications, has no compulsory hours of work and no performance criteria but provides a warm room, subsidised accommodation in London along with cheap food and booze. You could fill every vacancy twenty-times over even if people had to pay.
Mr. Ace, Miliband seems personally likeable, but he still would have been an atrocious PM (and likely would've been in Sturgeon's pocket into the bargain).
He was utterly inept as Energy Secretary, and his commodity price-fixing policy was rightly derided in the 4th century by Ammianus Marcellinus.
Behind the amusing tweets, you can sense this appointment has boiled Jim Waterson's piss. I expect every journalist who has done the profession for years is similiarly rolling their eyes right now.
I think this gets to the heart of a very key question though
Is the media there to report the news, or is it there to make the news. In the long run it is this type of appointment that weakens trust in the media as a reporting vehicle.
The Brexiteer side of the media is at it too, with their deliberate campaign to undermine Hammond as CoTE. That ain't just REPORTING the news either
A sad state of affairs.
The Standard under Lebedev is a personal hobby horse.
I have a hard time understanding why people are lamenting the lack of trust in the media. There never should have been such trust. All information should be queried, regardless of source.
It is impossible for any journalist, or any news outlet, to be objective. We are all biased by our experience and world outlook, mostly subconsciously. The mere selection of stories, no matter how much those stories might be seen as being purely factual, biases the news.
Jess Phillips MP @jessphillips 5m Flooded with offers of writing and media to comment on Osborne, the answer is No, I can't do anything til 8pm as I have a job to do as an MP
Once they get a few back and can see how they deteriorate with each flight, it should be (relatively) straightforward to improve them over time to deal with the stresses of multiple flights. My guess it that they'll use new ones for all the manned launches and refurbs for all the unmanned ones over time.
Saturn V 1st stage flyback would have been doable, if bloody difficult with the 1960s flight computers they were using. It never went that high (c. 200,000' from memory) but was absolutely enormous compared to anything landed before or since.
SS fuel talk would have been nearly impossible to get back to Earth though, it detached after eight minutes already half way across the Atlantic and with ridiculous forward speed - and no engines!
NASA are insisting on brand-new boosters for their manned flights to the ISS. I don't know whether they'd stick their oar in and insist on it for SpaceX's private manned flights.
(That link contains some great pictures of how the shuttle's design changed over time).
It became bigger to cope with the military's requirements, and the larger size meant the flyback booster became a behemoth: http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=11739
I do wonder how it would have ended up if Max Faget's original plans had been funded.
Ah okay, completely different design philosophy, more like what Virgin Galactic are doing to get the weight off the ground. Thanks for the links, very cool.
George Osborne editor of the Evening Standard and Rupert Murdoch taking over Sky will have labour in a spin.
No, what it will do is to give legs to Labour claims that the public cannot trust anything they read in the Tory Standard, undermining the credence anything critical of Sadiq Khan whether factually correct or not. Much better for Labour to have Osborne as editor than a dyed-in-the -wool Tory who the public has never heard of.
All this tizzy about GO and his editorship seems completely overblown from this side of the pond.
Labour supporters would already have dismissed stories and sources that do not fit their world view. No change there.
GO had no problems disseminating his dissent in Tory and other circles before this. No change there.
I wonder if this means that the Standard is going to change into something completely different from the current mix? As it stands today, it's hard, verging on impossible, to see what attraction it would have for Osborne and what attraction Osborne would have for it.
The Standard is a very low budget newspaper with a tiny reporting staff. Presumably, the thinking is that Osborne can boost its roster of freebie columnists and raise its profile, so boosting ad income.
For his part, Osborne gets something that has a circulation of over 800,000 in the richest, most influential part of the UK and one of the world's most important cities. he can be absolutely certain it will now be read religiously by absolutely everyone who matters in Westminster, the City and elsewhere. It looks to be a great roe for him.
It's probably a terrible decision all round, but it's extremely funny.
There are a number of politicians out there (from all parties) who seem rather keen to piss on Theresa's parade.
Given how Theresa May has behaved towards George Osborne, can you really blame him?
He's now given her an almighty short term headache (what does she do about his pledge to remain an MP) and a long term headache (how does she handle a newspaper editor who she has gratuitously made an enemy of).
"today's intelligence services capture, store, index, and transcribe essentially everything they can get their hands on"
Really? How do you know?
The scale of the operations are fairly clear from leaked documents.
GCHQ's Tempora is a 200 * 10 Gb/s system, storing three days of full data, and 30 days of metadata. It's described as "full take" and an "internet buffer". That's just one system, from 2012, that feeds into XKeyscore, which is the tool for searching across various data sources.
Another tool, the NSA's Boundless Informant, showed they were collection over 200 billion records a month, coming from over 500 sources.
You have programme's like MYSTIC which was an NSA programme to capture all of the phone calls in a target country, or which there were several, and store them for 30 days.
MAINWAY was another NSA programme with trillions of call records.
Those are the tip of the iceberg, there are many more similar reports about other programmes.
They do not add up to your claim though. Indexing and transcribing that amount of data would be an impossible task, just think how many people it would need. Someone up-thread described this bulk data collection as capturing the haystack in case you subsequently want to search for the needle, that seems a lot more reasonable than the idea that there is a hidden army of people indexing and transcribing billions of gigabytes of data.
For his part, Osborne gets something that has a circulation of over 800,000 in the richest, most influential part of the UK and one of the world's most important cities. he can be absolutely certain it will now be read religiously by absolutely everyone who matters in Westminster, the City and elsewhere. It looks to be a great roe for him.
But that's rather my point - as the paper stands at the moment, it's not particularly strong on political comment (though there is some), it's more a generalist mix with a large chunk of property-related stuff. So does this herald a transition to it becoming something different?
"today's intelligence services capture, store, index, and transcribe essentially everything they can get their hands on"
Really? How do you know?
The scale of the operations are fairly clear from leaked documents.
GCHQ's Tempora is a 200 * 10 Gb/s system, storing three days of full data, and 30 days of metadata. It's described as "full take" and an "internet buffer". That's just one system, from 2012, that feeds into XKeyscore, which is the tool for searching across various data sources.
Another tool, the NSA's Boundless Informant, showed they were collection over 200 billion records a month, coming from over 500 sources.
You have programme's like MYSTIC which was an NSA programme to capture all of the phone calls in a target country, or which there were several, and store them for 30 days.
MAINWAY was another NSA programme with trillions of call records.
Those are the tip of the iceberg, there are many more similar reports about other programmes.
They do not add up to your claim though. Indexing and transcribing that amount of data would be an impossible task, just think how many people it would need. Someone up-thread described this bulk data collection as capturing the haystack in case you subsequently want to search for the needle, that seems a lot more reasonable than the idea that there is a hidden army of people indexing and transcribing billions of gigabytes of data.
It's done by software, not people. Think of it as an army of robots if you like.
Since Tatton is part of the Greater Manchester hinterland, could there be some wider ramifications up there not least for the forthcoming mayoral election? Osborne is reportedly quite happy to carry on pocketing his MP salary while patently taking up a full time job on a newspaper that seeks to speak for the interests of Londoners.
"today's intelligence services capture, store, index, and transcribe essentially everything they can get their hands on"
Really? How do you know?
The scale of the operations are fairly clear from leaked documents.
GCHQ's Tempora is a 200 * 10 Gb/s system, storing three days of full data, and 30 days of metadata. It's described as "full take" and an "internet buffer". That's just one system, from 2012, that feeds into XKeyscore, which is the tool for searching across various data sources.
Another tool, the NSA's Boundless Informant, showed they were collection over 200 billion records a month, coming from over 500 sources.
You have programme's like MYSTIC which was an NSA programme to capture all of the phone calls in a target country, or which there were several, and store them for 30 days.
MAINWAY was another NSA programme with trillions of call records.
Those are the tip of the iceberg, there are many more similar reports about other programmes.
For his part, Osborne gets something that has a circulation of over 800,000 in the richest, most influential part of the UK and one of the world's most important cities. he can be absolutely certain it will now be read religiously by absolutely everyone who matters in Westminster, the City and elsewhere. It looks to be a great roe for him.
But that's rather my point - as the paper stands at the moment, it's not particularly strong on political comment (though there is some), it's more a generalist mix with a large chunk of property-related stuff. So does this herald a transition to it becoming something different?
Yep, sorry. I guess it must do. More politics and more Chelsea.
Incidentally, whilst the Standard may be read in London and by the great and the good elsewhere, if it becomes an EU-phile paper constantly trying to undermine May [severe conjecture, I know, but that's what we're doing before we see what happens], it may serve more to deepen the sense of division between London and the rest of England, between the great unwashed and the liberal metropolitan elite.
For his part, Osborne gets something that has a circulation of over 800,000 in the richest, most influential part of the UK and one of the world's most important cities. he can be absolutely certain it will now be read religiously by absolutely everyone who matters in Westminster, the City and elsewhere. It looks to be a great roe for him.
But that's rather my point - as the paper stands at the moment, it's not particularly strong on political comment (though there is some), it's more a generalist mix with a large chunk of property-related stuff. So does this herald a transition to it becoming something different?
Perhaps he's looking to use it as a spring board to Mayor of London? Given May's reported antipathy towards him, it may be the closest he gets to power before 2025.
So we will have Boris/Telegraph undermining Hammond and Standard/Osborne undermining May as the official opposition, and the official opposition now :> ?
George Osborne editor of the Evening Standard and Rupert Murdoch taking over Sky will have labour in a spin.
No, what it will do is to give legs to Labour claims that the public cannot trust anything they read in the Tory Standard, undermining the credence anything critical of Sadiq Khan whether factually correct or not. Much better for Labour to have Osborne as editor than a dyed-in-the -wool Tory who the public has never heard of.
All this tizzy about GO and his editorship seems completely overblown from this side of the pond.
Labour supporters would already have dismissed stories and sources that do not fit their world view. No change there.
GO had no problems disseminating his dissent in Tory and other circles before this. No change there.
So, he has a new title. Nothing else has changed.
No, I don't think that most Labour supporters do dismiss everything the Standard says. The Standard like all monopolistic regional papers can only maximise its sales by appealing across the political spectrum, and that moderates somewhat its overt political bias. Appointing Osborne - one of the most well known Tories and a highly unpopular one to boot - amounts to the Standard shouting its political bias from the rooftops and thus it will clearly carry a bit less clout from now on because it will be so easy to dismiss what is written in its pages.
Indexing and transcribing that amount of data would be an impossible task, just think how many people it would need. Someone up-thread described this bulk data collection as capturing the haystack in case you subsequently want to search for the needle, that seems a lot more reasonable than the idea that there is a hidden army of people indexing and transcribing billions of gigabytes of data.
Of course I'm not talking about people doing the indexing and transcribing, computers do it, the only reason this bulk collection of data can work is because computers automate it, it would be completely impractical if human beings were required to do the heavy lifting.
It is clear though that a huge amount of data is collected and stored permanently. Essentially every type of data passing through every network is a target. The collection is not targeted, the analysis of the data is only useful if the collection is as complete as is possible. Which is why phrases like "full take" are often used to describe programmes.
The point I'm making is this hoovering up of every bit of data they can get their hands on is not "mass surveillance" if you believe the people who do it. That is a barmy assertion in my opinion.
So we will have Boris/Telegraph undermining Hammond and Standard/Osborne undermining May as the official opposition, and the official opposition now :> ?
Let's face it, the "Official" Official Opposition appear to be neglecting their role somewhat at the moment!
Even by your standards that is poor. Nicola's mandate is based on the 2016 manifesto i.e. 300 days ago which was not only clear but a major party of the debate.
In a week where manifesto commitments have been rather important it is pretty conclusive.
So we will have Boris/Telegraph undermining Hammond and Standard/Osborne undermining May as the official opposition, and the official opposition now :> ?
Let's face it, the "Official" Official Opposition appear to be neglecting their role somewhat at the moment!
Yes, they are useless. The SNP, Telegraph&Tombstoners and now Osborne/Standard are picking up various batons.
I do wonder if, as the next few days rumble on and especially if the BBC run with it, that George's position as an MP will become untenable and he'll be forced to resign and trigger a by-election.
Even by your standards that is poor. Nicola's mandate is based on the 2016 manifesto i.e. 300 days ago which was not only clear but a major party of the debate.
In a week where manifesto commitments have been rather important it is pretty conclusive.
So Nicola lied in the TV interview but told the truth in the manifesto?
I do wonder if, as the next few days rumble on and especially if the BBC run with it, that George's position as an MP will become untenable and he'll be forced to resign and trigger a by-election.
Given comments about the unease of the Tory MP's I wonder if instead he'll say - "As Editor I not only need to be independent, but be seen to be independant - I am thus resigning the Tory whip but will continue to sit as the MP for Tatton as an Independant"
Looks like George Osborne took Theresa May's advice and learned some emotional intelligence, that's why he's so much in demand, first BlackRock now The Standard.
Even by your standards that is poor. Nicola's mandate is based on the 2016 manifesto i.e. 300 days ago which was not only clear but a major party of the debate.
In a week where manifesto commitments have been rather important it is pretty conclusive.
So Nicola lied in the TV interview but told the truth in the manifesto?
I do wonder if, as the next few days rumble on and especially if the BBC run with it, that George's position as an MP will become untenable and he'll be forced to resign and trigger a by-election.
Given comments about the unease of the Tory MP's I wonder if instead he'll say - "As Editor I not only need to be independent, but be seen to be independant - I am thus resigning the Tory whip but will continue to sit as the MP for Tatton as an Independant"
That wouldn't resolve the two jobs issue, which I think is more likely to annoy the public.
Even by your standards that is poor. Nicola's mandate is based on the 2016 manifesto i.e. 300 days ago which was not only clear but a major party of the debate.
In a week where manifesto commitments have been rather important it is pretty conclusive.
So Nicola lied in the TV interview but told the truth in the manifesto?
That's the argument is it?
Do you believe the words you type or are you actively trolling?
Comments
The world just gets weirder.
I can't put a cigarette paper between their politics.
Can't see Javid as Skywalker, though.
But wasn't an MP at the time.
A must read for all of us once the big O takes the helm....
Her speech is on next
https://twitter.com/kirstiemallsopp/status/842705364151943169
This makes a mockery of parliament and in particular the conservative party
Next in the weird news queue: Michael Gove to play James Bond.
https://twitter.com/callummay/status/842704086717923328
Or is that misogynistic?
The space shuttle was a very different beast when they were talking about full reusability - some of the early designs were beautiful:
http://www.nss.org/resources/library/shuttledecision/chapter08.htm
(That link contains some great pictures of how the shuttle's design changed over time).
It became bigger to cope with the military's requirements, and the larger size meant the flyback booster became a behemoth:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=11739
I do wonder how it would have ended up if Max Faget's original plans had been funded.
Meanwhile, Andy Burnham's been appointed Managing Director of Puzzler.
GCHQ's Tempora is a 200 * 10 Gb/s system, storing three days of full data, and 30 days of metadata. It's described as "full take" and an "internet buffer". That's just one system, from 2012, that feeds into XKeyscore, which is the tool for searching across various data sources.
Another tool, the NSA's Boundless Informant, showed they were collection over 200 billion records a month, coming from over 500 sources.
You have programme's like MYSTIC which was an NSA programme to capture all of the phone calls in a target country, or which there were several, and store them for 30 days.
MAINWAY was another NSA programme with trillions of call records.
Those are the tip of the iceberg, there are many more similar reports about other programmes.
Mrs May and the government on the other hand, can expect a very pro-EU agenda from the paper that everyone's reading on the way home, I imagine Osborne will get summoned to see the Chief Whip sooner rather than later. Evens on a by-election in Tatton this year?
With that all said, GO has no real journalistic experience - unlike say Michael Gove. What will he actually be doing on a day to day basis other than chairing a couple of meetings and watching the paper's budget?
https://twitter.com/iainmartin1/status/842705778649776129
He was utterly inept as Energy Secretary, and his commodity price-fixing policy was rightly derided in the 4th century by Ammianus Marcellinus.
It is impossible for any journalist, or any news outlet, to be objective. We are all biased by our experience and world outlook, mostly subconsciously. The mere selection of stories, no matter how much those stories might be seen as being purely factual, biases the news.
Jess Phillips MP @jessphillips
5m
Flooded with offers of writing and media to comment on Osborne, the answer is No, I can't do anything til 8pm as I have a job to do as an MP
Osborne's pledge to remain an MP 1/3
Hammond's Class IV NIC rise 9/4
The latter was officially timed at 6d 22h 17m
All this tizzy about GO and his editorship seems completely overblown from this side of the pond.
Labour supporters would already have dismissed stories and sources that do not fit their world view. No change there.
GO had no problems disseminating his dissent in Tory and other circles before this. No change there.
So, he has a new title. Nothing else has changed.
For his part, Osborne gets something that has a circulation of over 800,000 in the richest, most influential part of the UK and one of the world's most important cities. he can be absolutely certain it will now be read religiously by absolutely everyone who matters in Westminster, the City and elsewhere. It looks to be a great roe for him.
He's now given her an almighty short term headache (what does she do about his pledge to remain an MP) and a long term headache (how does she handle a newspaper editor who she has gratuitously made an enemy of).
Gosh. Eight clauses. Thucydides would be proud.
"If you vote for the SNP you are not voting for independence you are not even voting for another independence referendum
http://www.itv.com/news/update/2015-04-13/sturgeon-a-vote-for-snp-is-not-a-vote-for-independence/
It is clear though that a huge amount of data is collected and stored permanently. Essentially every type of data passing through every network is a target. The collection is not targeted, the analysis of the data is only useful if the collection is as complete as is possible. Which is why phrases like "full take" are often used to describe programmes.
The point I'm making is this hoovering up of every bit of data they can get their hands on is not "mass surveillance" if you believe the people who do it. That is a barmy assertion in my opinion.
Even by your standards that is poor. Nicola's mandate is based on the 2016 manifesto i.e. 300 days ago which was not only clear but a major party of the debate.
In a week where manifesto commitments have been rather important it is pretty conclusive.
That's the argument is it?
Welcome to pb.com, by the way.
It already feels like we've had the most by-elections in a Parliament for some time, and we're not even two years into it.
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