* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

How do you securely exchange encrypted-decrypted-recrypted data? Ask Microsoft

P. Lee

Re: Fuck Off!!1!!

>But can it play Crysis 3 or Fallout 4?

Wrong question. Does Camilla want to play Crysis 3 or Fallout 4? Does Camilla playing either of those games lead to something better than the current situation? What OS wrapper does the application require.

Requirements first, strategy second, tactical solutions third.

Steam on Windows is unlikely to be that different than on Linux. Click the icon, off you go. The main reason I only buy games which run on Linux is so I don't have to reboot.

OMG: HPE gobbles SGI for HPC. WTF?

P. Lee

Ah the memories

I used the SG Iris machines during my exchange year to Texas A&M. Oh the horror when I came back to London and found the entire computer lab was filled with 256 shades of grey (well, green) PCs.

League of lawsuits: Game developer sues cheat-toting website

P. Lee

Sue all you want

but you have to build technical preventions.

Even assuming the best possible outcome for LoL, they could release the code out of spite.

Russia is planning to use airships as part of a $240bn transport project

P. Lee
Coat

>Let's not mention Zeppelin then.

Well that one went down like a Led balloon.

Adblock Plus blocks Facebook's ad-blocker buster: It's a block party!

P. Lee

Re: Where's the off switch?

> will bet a pint of three that it won't be long before we get devices that won't switch off until the user has viewed the required number of ads that day.

Facebook "mobile-basics"?

Isn't the point of locked-down mobile devices to stop users doing what they would do on a pc?

I've found that staying of anything for about a month enables me to lose interest in it. Avoid integrating spam-producers into your life - don't use FB for email or IM communication. Integrated solutions are more difficult to ditch. We really need an open-source presence system based on our own (self-managed) address books. I'm thinking smtp-based auto-responders, possibly redirecting to more real-time presence indicators.

P. Lee

Re: arms race

>I know the nuclear countermeasure would be to abandon Facebook, but for many it's the only way to keep up with remote family

Not quite the only way. You can... call them. They generally appreciate a call more than a "like" anyway.

I tend to use skype on linux - no ads there (at the moment). I'm rather hoping firefox webrtc is usable before MS kills the skype client. I'll probably invest in an mpeg4-encoding webcam.

Imperva under pressure to find buyer after disappointing results

P. Lee

Where does the money go?

Big tech companies like Imperva and Bluecoat always surprise me with losses.

They seem to have tiny development teams doing almost no work after the initial product offering, almost bog-standard PC-based hardware (often grossly underpowered), poor support and sky-high pricing and they still manage to make losses.

Is it just me, or is tech now run by beancounters, rather than managers who like technology and think its cool to make better stuff to solve problems better.

These companies need to be careful. Cloud companies will follow the supermarket model - they will use the brands to start with, then spin up their own solutions and cut the brands out. Cloud companies have the scale to do that.

Brexit Britain: HP Sauce vs BBC.co.uk – choices that defined voters

P. Lee

Re: Class divide

>There have been a number of surveys which have all shown the same thing. It's a repeatable result.

The data is the correlation, but the conclusion drawn may be inaccurate. Perhaps poor people with no taste for fancy cheese or no chance of jetting off to Paris for the weekend feel no need of political union or free-movement of goods or people between European countries.

In an interview with Freakonomics radio, a university researcher (I forget who, but the episode is called "The truth is out there... isn't it?") noted that increased education does not result in more data-based decision-making. Rather, the better educated are better equipped in searching out data which supports their pre-existing ideas (usually shaped by the need to fit in with their social environment) which merely leads to greater polarisation of views, not data-driven consensus.

As for free movement of people, perhaps we should ask the Irish how that went for them? A massive unrestricted influx, forcing house prices through the roof with supply unable to keep up with demand. Then everyone left again, demand plummets and the Irish are left with huge mortgages they can't afford.

The inbound movement looks like a boom, but "free movement" implies the likelihood of mass emigration as well as people swill around the continent looking for jobs. Of course, wanting to stop emigration is (a) creepy and (b) neither racist nor homophobic, so its entirely uninteresting to the BBC, but the emigration only happened because of the previous immigration. The problem may look like nationalism, but that may be just because wealth distribution and thus the impetus to move is based around historical national borders. I suspect we'd get the same attitude in Nottingham if a few tens of thousands of Londoners showed up on their doorstep.

I wonder if the Irish think that 25-30 year personal debt is worth (maybe) not getting your passport stamped on holiday?

Hitler ‘ransomware’ offers to sell you back access to your files – but just deletes them

P. Lee

Maybe this is a good thing

If everyone hears ransomware never gives you your files back, they won't pay, and (hopefully) scammers move on to more lucrative things.

/trying really hard to see silver lining

Breaking 350 million: What's next for Windows 10?

P. Lee

Re: Windows 10 a hopeless muddle

>Got any example of these "gratuitous Ads"?

Skype?

I have the linux client which is ad-free, but I understand the windows version isn't and the desktop clients will be going away. Does anyone think there won't be adverts on the website?

P. Lee

Re: What's next for Windows 10?

>So basically being more like Google?

Except that Google isn't my OS and only gives me ads when I visit their site. More to the point, Google don't own most of my (Windows) applications so that they can insert adverts.

Time to work on a new FLOSS application to provide managed presence information.

Your 'intimate personal massager' – cough – is spying on you

P. Lee

Re: Security research. Yeah, that's what it was

> Go forth and multiply

Maths freaks are no fun...

But seriously, cloud connected? Who didn't see that ship o' fail coming?

P. Lee

Re: Security research. Yeah, that's what it was

>Human drives exceed religious regulation.

Genesis 1:27 - God makes people

Genesis 1:28 - God tells them to have sex

Judging by your comment, it obviously isn't Christianty which is stifling the fun.

Liberals- all talk, no action. ;)

Windows 10 Anniversary Update is borking boxen everywhere

P. Lee

Re: Windows Editions

Windows 10 Anniversary Edition

Windows 10 Millennium Edition?

... Just as popular...

P. Lee

Re: @a_yank_lurker

>SaaS... More like Crash course in creating boot drives and doing full installations as a Service.

In SaaS solutions, the provider manages the stack right up to the application software layer.

W10 isn't SaaS - I'm not sure what it is, but a managed solution it isn't.

All those enterprise outsourcers who have difficulty managing their clients' OS estates? That's what MS is trying to do, for "free." How well do we think that will end?

IT analyst: Oz census data processed as plain text

P. Lee

Re: Human eyes and fingers have bee all over census data...

> the privacy of their census data is the least of their problems.

That isn't the only issue at stake. Unthinking cloud usage reduces our local IT capabilities so that when it is important, we no longer have an industry capable of executing. We also shouldn't be throwing cash at companies making such mistakes. If it were a custom local software instance there's a chance to get it fixed. One of the problems with cloud is that all customers are unimportant.

Forget security training, it's never going to solve Layer 8 (aka people)

P. Lee
Trollface

>As for mistakes, ONE mistake in the wrong place in the wrong time and it's Game Over, period.

And since I'm using a company laptop, try measuring my care level....

Samsung Note 7: Probably the best phone in the world. Yeah – you heard right

P. Lee

Re: 4GB? Really

>Just don't install anything made by Microsoft and you should be fine.

Indeed. That's the same as my daughter's surprisingly serviceable macbook air.

For a phone.

Now I'm torn. I like the fact that it isn't hobbled hardware, but what on earth do those little applets need 4GB ram for? Is android that inefficient?

Windows 10 Anniversary Update: This design needs a dictator

P. Lee

re: my main issues with Win10

Is it an OS for me to run my applications, or is it a market stall for MS to flog stuff to me and about me?

Just because its free doesn't mean I'll accept anything the vendor wants to take from me or shove in my face.

The Cluedo version of who dunnit: How did Windows die? In a VM, on Linux, with a last copy of Visio 2010.

Telstra CIO Erez Yarkoni quits to return home to family

P. Lee
Coat

>a clear road map for us to execute and deliver on our vision to become a world class technology provider.

Ah, the road less travelled...

I've putting my mobile away 'cos it can't connect to anything!

Going! going! pwned? 200! million! Yahoo! logins! leaked! allegedly!

P. Lee

Its probably better to have longer but more easily memorised and very different passwords than variations. Variations are pretty much standard in a dictionary attack.

My Microsoft Office 365 woes: Constant crashes, malware macros – and settings from Hell

P. Lee

Re: Thunderbird with Lightening

>Trying to make games run well into a VM is just looking for unnecessary troubles.

Most of the games I get run on Linux, but many systems come with some OEM version of windows or other. A windows partition is a small price to pay if that's important to you. Windows in a VM with exclusive access to the GPU is a great goal, but I don't think that ranks as an easy-enough solution for most people.

Give .gay to the gays, roars exiting ombudsman

P. Lee

>How is one not gay enough ?

You took el reg's click-bait as ICANN's reasoning.

If I read it correctly, "not gay enough" means dotgay LLC don't have enough support within the homosexual community, and "too gay" means dotgay LLC claims to represent interests well outside the homosexual community.

Pretty much meaning, that dotgay LLC is going for "anything but straight" which ICANN says isn't what the word "gay" means. Does gay mean "transsexual"? Not really. Does gay mean "bisexual"? Only half the time. Does "gay" mean "transvestite"? No.

And what is the point of TLDs? Really its to create namespace. I suppose "rainbow-warrior" might be different depending on the TLD, but I'm not sure a sexual proclivity warrants a TLD. A world of weirdness lies down that path and I'm not convinced it adds much in the way of namespace. .edu and .mil don't add much but they are historical artefacts from the origins of the internet. Country names do add a lot of namespace, .com and .org add a lot of namespace. I don't think .gay is likely to add much - I don't think having it will release or prevent the uptake of many otherwise ambiguous domains from other namespaces. That is the point of a TLD, is it not? Perhaps it isn't. Perhaps its just to allow companies to profit and ICANN is just trying to apply some logic in sorting out the registration between squabbling commercial entities who want profit from owning .gay.

Windows 10 pain: Reg man has 75 per cent upgrade failure rate

P. Lee

Re: Linux system upgrade may not be much better

>It's dead easy to upgrade/reinstall if you put / and /home on separate partitions to start with.

And leave a separate partition for installing fresh upgrades, maybe have an FS with snapshots for your home partition.

Gullible Essex Police are now using junk science lie detectors

P. Lee

Re: Ethics in Essex

>Bunk's photocopier trick in The Wire springs to mind.

and of course it doesn't have to work (producing reliable or evidence-worthy results).

The question is, do the crooks know it doesn't work and if they don't will it save more money in police time than it costs?

Even if it isn't used as evidence, perhaps for the number of times it gives some indication of potential discomfort, it might indicate possible avenues the police could investigate.

The fact that it can (often?) give false negatives or positives may not actually be an issue if it isn't going to be used for evidence.

How to upgrade cities to 40Gbps broadband without replacing today's fiber network

P. Lee

Yo! AU.gov

Try that with HFC!

Odds are your office is ill-prepared for network-ransacking ransomware

P. Lee

> Collecting money when the hostage is already dead is not nice.

This is where the kidnapping analogy falls down.

The main aim in a real kidnapping is the security of the kidnapped who is in danger. But the kidnapped person is a danger to the kidnappers as they have to maintain the welfare of the kidnappee and remain out of sight.

Ransomware doesn't work by hiding the data with the kidnappers and the kidnappers have no need to keep the data "alive" to get the reward. Hunting the kidnappers to force them to give up the keys probably isn't an option.

It is in the kidnappers' interest to give access back, otherwise no-one will pay. I've no direct experience, but rumour has it, you do generally get your data back if you pay the right people.

The other thing is that I doubt the paying/ransomware growth correlation is a thing. Real kidnapping is a huge risk with every person taken, whereas ransomware is pretty much the result of a mass attack which has already been successful.

'tis but a lazy PR exercise.

BlackBerry's licensing strategy looks smart – and a lot like Nokia's

P. Lee

Noobs

> If Chinese industry can out-engineer and out-manufacture the West, it hasn’t yet show it can out market an Apple or a Sony.

I remember when "Made in Japan" meant cheap, low quality rubbish.

Marketing isn't magic. Good quality products at reasonable prices backed not by startups, but by companies which have made billions in manufacturing and are in it for the long-haul, will arrive. Xiaomi is just the in the first wave. Chinese brands based out of China. Just wait for the good quality Chinese brands with European sounding names and European branches who know how to sell locally - they will be here shortly. Then it will be game-over, and not just for phones.

The IT market is maturing and slowing down. That means the gap between leading-edge research IP and market-commodities is narrowing. The value-add of market-leading tech companies will drop as the lower-end catches up and eats their bread and butter and large corporations with the skills in making things take the market, like Lenovo has. If you think Brexit will make people poor, you ain't seen nuttin' yet. Over the last 30 years the West has done the hard-work in globalisation. Now its an off-the-shelf product.

Tinder porn scam: Swipe right for NOOOOOO I paid for what?

P. Lee
Facepalm

Re: As a rule of thumb...

>PayPal excluded, I assume...

and "Verified by Visa"?

Shock news: "Site mixing Adult content and social media is dodgy. More at 10."

Oops: Bounty-hunter found Vine's source code in plain sight

P. Lee

Re: Wait a minute.

I'm not sure there's that much difference between storing the keys in the code and storing the keys in the deployment image...

Saudi Arabia to flog man 1,000 times for insulting religion on Facebook

P. Lee

Re: A right is something that is inherently deserved.

I wonder what would happen if you stood up in an English secondary or tertiary educational institution and said you thought Jesus was the only way to eternal life and sodomy was wrong.

Whether or not you think those statements are true, I think you'd quickly find find the limits of "freedom of speech" when departing from state-sponsored moral orthodoxy are not as far away as you might imagine. There can be no discussion of such matters, certainly not by staff and not by students either.

We aren't into flogging, of course, that's barbaric. We don't do evil by getting our hands bloody, we do it by shuffling bits of paper - an academic suspension, a dossier slanted in a convenient direction, business deals which bring in millions of GBP of benefit to one group, at the expense, hardship or deaths of others.

nbn™ talks up HFC upgrades to gigabit speed

P. Lee

>Why do it at home? It will almost certainly be cheaper and more reliable to use a cloud. And then your home broadband connection won't be an issue.

How about the principle of "my data, my control."

I run a vpn on my home system because its quite convenient to to have access to all my stuff from wherever I am. I could punt my desktops into the cloud, but I'd rather have it at home and just use VNC or RDP or SFTP when I need it.

One of the problems with cloud is that it isn't just a facility, its a particular application. Cloud storage isn't like a big remote SATA drive, it is a proprietary application. The onedrive doesn't work with linux (it barely works with windows), dropbox requires a particular proprietary client that only one vendor makes. It is like going back to the 80's where you had proprietary hardware that only worked with one vendor's system. In short, it isn't commodity because it can't be easily exchanged.

What if facebook is the victim of massive fraud and goes under? How many people use it as their only photo album storage. Even if they have their photo's stored elsewhere, how many people only manage their photo collections in facebook and wouldn't know (without the data in facebook) when and where most of those photos were taken or who was in them? How would you get all that data out of facebook, as it sinks under financial collapse. How much of the photo-management market has facebook destroyed... but despite appearances, it doesn't allow you to manage your photos, it allows you to manage the photos you have given to facebook.

How rubbish is the consumer IT compared to the enterprise? I'm not talking about scaling, that's easy, I'm talking about the poor quality of the facilities. Unless we encourage the lower end of the market to do IT, everything will be dumped on the the ever-more consolidated, ever more proprietary, ever more locked-in, ever-more data-abusing cloud. PC's are ever more powerful, but the PC software industry appears to be decline and as the alternatives disappear, the T's&C's and taking not just of operations, but data-slurping gets worse.

Alleged skipper of pirate site KickAss Torrents keel-hauled in Poland

P. Lee

Re: Big content: 3

Our video shop rents the old (six months or more?) content out for AU$1/week.

Even the latest releases are three for $8.

Streaming services are grossly expensive in comparison, the quality is awful, the selection tiny.

Or you can visit the second hand shops, buy for less than a stream and donate it back afterwards if you want.

The real cause of the industry decline is people spending all their time on facebook.

The cloud ain't making it rain for Intel right now: Tech giants pause server chip sales

P. Lee

>They've finished constructing their latest data centers and have more than enough workload capacity available for now, hence a cut in spending on Intel's x86 Xeon chips which investors didn't expect.

In that case, investors paid zero attention to the industry and the business and made all their decisions based on recent numbers.

Don't make beancounters the decision-makers.

EU Net Neutrality debate heats up as Tim Berners-Lee weighs in

P. Lee

>This is really so frustratingly simple.

Not really. The issue is that the carriers want to charge both the consumers and the suppliers. Who decides then?

Net Neut is about making sure only the consumers pay and therefore only the consumers have a voice.

For $800 you can buy internet engineers' answer to US government spying

P. Lee

>Seriously what kind of idiot actually puts their real date of birth on the internet with the full name and address.

Someone who wants to buy something with a credit card and have it delivered?

Ban ISPs from 'speeding up' the internet: Ex-Obama tech guru

P. Lee

Re: why can't I pay for "better service" ?

The issue is not faster links. The issue is that ISP's try to become toll-gate-keepers which locks in the current data *suppliers* as the only ones who can afford to pay for decent service.

That kills innovation "out there" on the internet since new suppliers can't get access to consumers. It adds cost where there doesn't need to be additional cost.

Take for example the current Optus advert - "Stream music for free" I'd wager that's not actually what's on offer. I'd bet if I streamed music to an Optus mobile from home, it would come off my data allowance. My home is excluded as a service because it isn't Spotify or Apple music or whatever company they've done deals with. That pushes up the cost for Spotify and Apple, which in turn gets passed back to the consumer via higher fees. It also excludes new-comers who may not be able to afford to pay Optus or be global enough to conduct business with every ISP in the world. So you pay for your ISP and then your ISP charges the provider who charges you (more) to use the service you've just paid your ISP for. It is double-dipping, dishonest (it isn't free, they are just getting someone else to charge you) and corrupt.

If you want fibre rather than adsl, knock yourself out. That's not what the article is about.

P. Lee

Re: Slow it down, speed it up

Forget the speed and the queuing priorities.

Ban pay-for-preferential-access and most other things resolve themselves.

Brexit has left a regulatory black hole for digital, say MPs

P. Lee

Re: Iain Wright MP, chair of the BIS committee, urged the government to set out its plans

>We can't copy and paste stuff from Brussels any more

Actually they probably can, and should, until there is a good reason not to and the capacity to get things together.

Brexit doesn't mean you *have* to reject everything from Brussels.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

P. Lee

>So do I get her a Win 7 version?

I understood that all the obnoxious bits of W10 have been backported to Win7

You don't need to upgrade to get slurped.

Others may be better informed than I.

Ad blockers responsible for rise in upfront TV ad sales, claims report

P. Lee

Re: Want people to watch your ads.

I seem to think ads in the 70's were better - catchy enough to sing and only 3 of them per 20 minutes of TV time.

I especially remember the Woolworths one from one Christmas "Harry's hover mower, just look how fast he's going! ... everybody needs a Woolworths so-ome time" So much better than, "OWN IT NOW ON DVD" (liars, its licensed...), and "THINGS YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS", er, yes actually I do want to miss it and I'm just plain tired of being bombarded by high-impact advertising which thinks it can force itself into my brain.

I don't know if I was more easily pleased or they were actually better ads, but they seemed fun. Now I"m likely to miss it all, because I'm playing XCOM instead of watching TV programs which have been spoilt by adverts.

Dear Tesla, stop calling it autopilot – and drivers are not your guinea pigs

P. Lee

Re: Do we want to advance or not?

This issue is not, "is it a good idea," but, "is Tesla misleading drivers with regard to its abilities."

My snake-oil detector goes off whenever I see "intelligence" applied to to IT stuff. "Autopilot" might work well on an aeroplane in an obstacle-clear sky with radar, objects in relatively predictable trajectories, coordinated air-traffic control and two pilots at the ready, but in a cluttered ground environment even speed-maintenance alone is dodgy around town.

Microsoft open sources Azure bill analysis tool

P. Lee
Windows

>Redmond under Satya Nadella is, however, still struggling to compete with AWS

FTFY

also

"Engineering for global scale is quite expensive! Maybe more than you need."

"Renters shocked that renting is more expensive than buying!"

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

P. Lee

Re: A legal work around?

I know this thread is going to go in the wrong direction, if it hasn't already.

The target is comms providers - those providing the e2e capabilities. There is no ban being proposed, "only" the ability to decrypt sessions. That means what they want is the ability to tell comms providers to subvert their client functions on demand.

My guess this would be something like: on a given signal, the client should turn into a comms tap or (if both ends are under the comms provider's control) (also?) use a "trusted provider's" key which can be intercepted and decrypted.

The targets are Apple, Facebook and the like, not Joe Bloggs with his FLOSS. This really isn't any different from the existing PSTN arrangement where telco's can tap on demand.

Moral: Do your own encryption.

A little image magic gets Curiosity's wheels turning again

P. Lee
Paris Hilton

Re: As the (no doubt made up) Chinese apothegm has it:

>And if a million people use 'data' as if the word were a singular noun, they are still wrong.

I would usually agree with you, but I think it is used as a collective noun rather than a singular noun. Even if not, it is so difficult to determine what is singular in IT.

Take, 65 (decimal) for example. Is it a single byte or is it a collection of 8 bits or is it two nibbles or is it the letter "A"? Perhaps its just part of a word or two digits. In the real world, it may be an abstract concept, whereas in IT, it may be many different things.

So is it a datum or a particular set of data (a collective noun)?

I'm not sure its all that important. What we should really be doing is hating those who use "of" when they mean "from" and those who use "was like" instead of "said" and those who use "like" instead of "um" or "er."

Facebook offers end-to-end encrypted chat – if you find the right setting

P. Lee

Re: Meh

>I don't anyone who would even be slightly interested in what I've go to say.

Now perhaps, but what happens when your government gets aggressive towards you because of a policy not yet implemented and no one has an infrastructure which supports privacy?

What happens when "if you're not for us you're for the terrorists" becomes an active policy?

Kotkin on who made Trump and Brexit: Look in the mirror, it's you

P. Lee

Re: "lazy economics ... allow migration to give us economic growth"

>Is the working class better off than 30 years ago -- on an absolute scale, or compared to their peers?

I think very few people are better off. In Aus, salaries have risen to twelve times their 1970 amount, but house prices have risen forty times.

I think we've spent more and received more stuff. But new iphones and other trinkets are nothing compared to the massive increase in debt (mostly mortgage and government). Now we *need* two salaries just to pay for the house and who can afford three children, even if you want them? You can forget the old meritocracy of the best and brightest going to uni because education is a good thing... now uni fees are just a mortgage for your job.

I suspect the immigration issue with Brexit is overplayed. I'm sure it plays some part - there's little financial benefit to be seen to migration into the UK for voters. More of an indictment is how the political classes and the chatteratti had no idea what most people think. The BBC doesn't help by being a very large echo-chamber for that sector of society. I remember reading an article on the reaction to the "you may beat your wife lightly" decree from some Imam in Pakistan. *All* (eight I think) of the "vaguely related" articles on the side bar were about homosexuality. Whatever you think of the debate, its actually not a topic which adversely impacts over 95% of the population. All the "woe is us for Brexit" from the BBC completely misses the fact that over half the population disagree. All the articles were also exceedingly speculatory - little more than random statements about things which had no reason to take place, "but might." There is so much ideological irrelevance to the lives of the populace ingrained in the institutions of the establishment.

Brexit isn't about immigration, its about control. Its about having a voice in politics and both Westminster (with its centralised party machines) and Brussels (with its "ever close union") demonstrably take power away from the not only the ordinary people, but even the grass roots political activists. It doesn't matter how "perfect" the democratic process is, if the decisions are made behind the scenes (hello TTPT, hello council of ministers) and if the details are manipulated (hello ward boundary changes) then people are quite within their rights to put a stop to the whole lot. Cameron accidentally gave the people some power in the referendum, never dreaming they would have the audacity to use it. Being under the delusion that people follow politicians, he thought people wouldn't follow Farage et al. They didn't follow Cameron, they didn't follow Farage, they just don't like where the EU is going. Europe's fine - a nice place to visit, but why cede control to it? How many of the voters trade with Europe? How many of the voters think Europe is financially stable? How many will be devastated if French Brie becomes more expensive than Somerset Brie?

Even in the worst case, with Brexit a mess, its our mess, and that's ok. Was it "populist"? Not in the sense of people being led (astray) by a charismatic leader - Farage is not, Boris is not, May is not, Gove is not. A hint of democratic power was given to the people and the result was self-determination. That is the point of democracy is it not? Though I'm pretty sure it will be quite some time before a politician makes that mistake again. Let's hope the next revolution is just as bloodless.

Blighty will have a whopping 24 F-35B jets by 2023 – MoD minister

P. Lee

Re: bad move.

>Yeah, and the AI was running on a Raspberry Pi, not an IBM Watson.

So it can beat a human who doesn't know how the AI makes decisions. I wonder how long that will last and if the human will get an RPi to help them soon.

As for out-of-date miltech... remember the battleships of the early 1900's? Useless by WWI. Miltech moves very quickly - you get what you can knowing it will probably be out of date before you use it. Part of the downside of drones is that they are strongly controlled from the centre. The likelihood of a pilot showing initiative is extremely low, which is probably a bad thing. The likelihood of a pilot refusing to do something unconscionable is also very low.

The other thing is that one-sided warfare can backfire. If you put soldiers in the field and you lose and go home, that might the end of it. If you can't be touched in the field, the enemy will be forced to go looking for your house to get rid of the problem at its source. Rant against terrorism all you like, but if that's the only effective method of fighting your operations allows, that's what you will get.

P. Lee

Re: Questions for a select comittee...

>Brexit pound means imports necessary to make exports are expensive again.

That isn't a problem - the worst case is if you aren't adding any value, so the status quo is maintained. In that case, don't expect profit.

The more value you add (perhaps reflecting more work done in the UK) the more competitive the export.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments

I'd say we actually need to do without stuff for a bit and correct our balance of payments. More expensive imports and cheaper exports are a good thing. And no, you can't blame those horrible figures on Brexit.

Something has gone very wrong with finance. In the 1970's one man's salary typically supported five people. House prices have grown four or five times more than salaries since then. Now on average two salaries support two and a half people. Are we better off? We have more stuff, but are we actually better off of have we just borrowed to buy things we can't really afford? All that government debt... we will have to pay it off one way or another.

P. Lee

Re: "preparing perfectly for the last war and ignoring developments that have happened since"

>That's hardly fair. Iraq is firstly several groups that pretty much hate/distrust each other,

... and you think any other part of the world is different? Do you think the US didn't know this beforehand?

Give them a secular government? That's pretty much what they had with Saddam until we destroyed it. Saddam had to use an awful lot of brutality to maintain it, as well, because the people don't want a secular government.

If Blair had studied History instead of Law he might have learnt what the British concluded last time they were in Iraq, "this place is not governable by civilised means."