Posts by I ain't Spartacus

It's possible certain that the UK government will pass all sorts of rubbish laws in the future. As will the EU. The difference is that we can get rid of UK governments at regular intervals, and replace them with ones that will fix some of those laws. It is admittedly true that democracy is a blunt instrument, unless you go for the Swiss referenda-on-everything model, so only a few bad laws are going to get enough public focus to be changed.

But that's still better than the EU model. Where once the hugely complex rigmarole of passing EU laws has happened, there's not only no political will to fix the problem, but there's active resistaance from teh system to go back and look at stuff again. And there's no democratic pressure that reaches that level. Youth unemployment in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain has been over 40% for more than 5 years now, and there's still no serious moves underway to solve the Eurozone crisis. And that's despite massive political turmoil in those countries. What chance anything like patent law problems getting any political attention?

Not that there aren't many good reasons to stay in the EU, and shape policy. But if you can't at least see the huge democratic deficit then you're just not looking properly.

Re: ...behaviour and welfare of a man. A man subsequently died.

A man gets a name once there's been a chance to tell his relatives.

Gizmo, obviously.

Or if you want a word that's a bit more old fashioned, gewgaw.

Greek geeks grok great gyrating gewgaw.

Re: Not very inflaty

The skin is multi-layered, and therefore quite thick. And this is only a test module. Bigelow Space have got either one or two (can't remember) already in orbit themselves, for testing purposes. But this is only a little one to go on the ISS. Remember it was only a portion of the cargo in a normal Dragon re-supply launch, where as the full-sized beastie will want a launch all to itself.

Weight is the issue. You can't make the walls of a metal spacecraft thicker without dramatically increasing the weight. So everything in space is pretty bloody flimsy. At which point, you're going to be working with composite materials anyway, so why not use something flexible and expandable. That means you can get something the right size to stick on the top of a rocket that'll expand a bit in space. The gains might not be huge, but you're still doing better than you otherwise would have been - and your living space is no longer limited to the diameter of your rockets.

Inflating your walls - and them thus being thicker (even if now less dense) is also an advantage in improving both radiation and impact protection. There are also gels that can be applied that expand on exposure to air - so if you apply these in the right place, punctures below a certain size will be self-healing. Maybe not enough to save the habitat, but enough to save the astronauts inside it, who can seal the airlock and bugger off to a different bit of the station. They can then either write the habitat off (and replace it), or fetch the puncture repair kit and go space walking.

Re: These 10 Reasons Are Why Your Clickbait Site Might Be F**&ed

Surely the headline should be: 140 Million Reasons Not to Act Like Total Bellends

Re: sometimes I'm easily pleased

I'm still on Windows Phone 8. And so far avoiding upgrading. Incidentally, to be fair to Orlowski, he's been a fan of Win Phone, but been consistently rude about 10 as well.

I'm happy at the value end though. I don't believe in spending north of £400 on a phone. I want something cheap and cheerful, that works well, with decent battery life. Apps are for the tablet. For me it's a phone first, with texts, email, calendar and sat-nav in that order. I sometimes use it for the internet, but I'd much rather tether my iPad. My Mum really likes hers too. I've recommended Droids to most other people that have asked, or iPhone if that floats their boat.

But Microsoft just don't seem to be properly arsed. It's like they've bought into the idea for the last 15 years that they need to be big in mobile, they've made enough effort to be big players (they had half the "smartphone" market in 2004), and as soon as they get something half decent out there - they just stop working on it. For all the upgrade nagging, Windows 10 is nice. 7 was great. 8.1 would have been good too - if only they'd spent the effort on hitting us over the head with Metro on the desktop on Win Phone instead, then it and Win Phone 8 might have been brilliant.

But again, they're failing to bring out nice new handsets - and not bothering to put the final polish on Win Pho 10. And they'll deserve to fail. I'll be sad. And I guess my next phone will be a Droid. Which is fine, but I'm not a huge fan. I do lust after a Galaxy Note, but I don't believe in spending over £200 on a handset.

Re: Chinese Manufacturers

So are lots of Samsung's. But that's not the point. The interesting thing is that Chinese companies are doing their own design and marketing.

Being the outsourced manufacturing destination of choice is not a long-term strategy for the Chinese economy. Their wages have gone up, and so they're now facing competition from elsewhere. Those jobs won't all disappear overnight though, they just need to start moving up the value-chain, if they want China's economy to keep on improving.

Re: Seriously...

You clearly don't understand competition law. The Commission clearly do. Which is why they're doing what they're doing.

Whether they're right or not, is another matter. These things are rarely black-and-white. But most countries have laws against abuse of monopolies, because all economists recognise an abuse of monopolies as bad for the economy. It makes markets less efficient, leads to overpricing and restricts innovation. This is why we have regulators - and mergers of big companies have to be approved by government.

Re: hold the opinion that Snowden is a traitor,

I certainly agree with you, that Snowden is innocent unless proven guilty. So by that definition he's not a traitor. And not being a court of law, I am in no position to determine whether he's a traitor or not.

My argument wasn't about that. In fact your post supports my argument here. I was saying that a US media source calling him a traitor does not invalidate its credibility. To call him a traitor is clearly a rhetorical device in this context, as they aren't a court of law either. My only argument in this threat is with the ludicrous claim of some equivalence between the faults of the Western media (which are many) and the deliberate design of the Russian media to hide the truth.

In almost every way imaginable, our political system is better than the Russian one. It is best that we concentrate on fixing our own problems, and dial down the preaching to everyone else. But I refuse to put up with this moral relativism crap. So I'll argue against it.

As for Snowden, it's complicated. In my opinion he did a great thing in telling the world about mass data collection. But then he's also released information on US (and UK) legitimate electronic spying on unfriendly foreign powers. The first one of those is whistle-blowing and a good thing. The second is treason. He seems to have released an enormous amount of information, some of which would have been better kept secret. I personally wouldn't call him a traitor - but I also don't approve of everything he's done.

Re: "Trusted"

And yet you know about this, because it was reported by a free media!

Proving the point I was making.

The media has biases. But different bits of it have different biases. Which is also self-correcting.

<blockquote.I initially said that you could hold the view point that all media lies and that it should all be ignored.</blockquote>

You could hold that viewpoint. But it would be bollocks. And when the Russian government pay people to espouse that viewpoint it's for malicious reasons. Which efforts we know about partly because of the Western media. I've seen interviews with the people that work there.

Also, there's an important difference between deliberate wrongdoing, and people making mistakes. The Sun didn't deliberately lie about Hillsborough, at least so far as we know. They reported lies told to them by the police. Their reporting of those lies was however horrible, because Kelvin McKenzie is a horrible man. And that was their house style under his editorship. The rest of the press called them out on it. And the market forced them to issue various grovelling apologies. Not that it helped their sales in Liverpool.

Now I'd not particularly trust the Sun. It's not really about news. But I would have a lot more trust in the Guardian, the Times, or even the Telegraph (despite their recent plunge in editorial standards). They have biases, so you need to know what you're reading, but they're more likely to get the facts as correct as they're able, given the pressures of time and budget. And if you read them the next day, they'll have more of a complete picture. They will get stuff wrong, but in the main they are trying to report stuff as it happens.

I wouldn't trust Russia Today at all. They are deliberately setting out to lie to me. That is their purpose.

It's a completely differnet thing. One system is imperfect, but is mainly attempting to disseminate accurate information. With constraints of time and money. It has checks and balances, and often corrects itself when it screws up. The other systems is deliberately designed to conceal and to confuse. In intention, execution and outcome there is no fair comparison between the systems.

Re: The Diff

The Western media isn't a disgrace, because it reports on this stuff. Nobody has ever doubted that WEstern governments have been spying. Stuff like Echelon was in the public domain for years. The press make periodic efforts to find stuff out. When the Snowden stuff got revealed, the Western press covered the story. So what exactly have they done wrong?

They can still hold the opinion that Snowden is a traitor, and cover the story and not do any damage to their credibility. Whereas Russian state media regularly get caught lying, and don't even apologise. They simply deny it and move on, because it's deliberate. Thus you should never trust Russian state media at all. But you can usually trust Western media, a least to some extent. So long as you're in a position to verify their story. If they do make a mistake (or even lie deliberately) it's usually their rivals that catch them at it. So you may not be in possession of the facts immediately, but you'll usually find stuff out relatively quickly.

This equivalence point is utter bollocks.

Re: "Trusted"

Remember those timeless hits such as:

"1 in 5 Muslims' Sympathy for Jidadis"

"The Truth" (the infamous front page from The S

...snip...

wolfeone,

We do remember these stories. Which is precisely the point. BIts of the media screwed up. Or you might argue with any story based on a survey, were misleading semi-deliberately. But the other bits of the media reported on the stories, and after a very short time the story was correct. In the case of the guy who was libelled, he got apologies and compensation for the mistake.

A free press (which we broadly have) is not perfect. Neither is it free from error - or sometimes malice. But the individual outlets have commercial rivals to help keep them in check. Rivals who'll point and laugh when they screw up. And we also have police, court and political systems for redress as well. So in the case of the phone hacking scandal the police initially failed, but the Guardian didn't.

That's a free system of checks and balances working. It's not ideal, but tell me a better system? And compare and contrast to Russia, where there are much worse checks and balances, a lot of journalists get murdered and the government frequently puts out propaganda unchallenged.

Re: Been caught both ways on this one

Ah, the Stalingrad approach.

According to that nice Mr Anthony Beevor, the prudent quartermasters in the Germany 6th army at Stalingrad put asside rations for a snowy? day. They had a feeling that Winter wouldn't be going too well, and they were awfully far away from Germany when the inevitable Russian counterattack came. Lots of units had had to fight surrounded during Jan/Feb 42 - after the Moscow attack broke down. And they were closer to air supply.

What happened once the pocket was formed, was that army HQ took over all the individual units' food, and distributed "fairly". This meant that those who had saved it lost, and those who'd doled out all the food they had got the benefit. Their troops also had a tiny bit more body fat, and so the death rate from starvation was higher in the units with the prudent quartermasters.

Re: New Orderly World Orders AI …. for Live Operational Virtual Environments ‽

I suspect actually the biggest threat isn't from asteroids, but from the very technology we would develop to repel them. Once we get a better control and footing in space it will lead to a militarization that hasn't yet happened. Id be more worried from a species survival aspect about a future war in which nukes or something nastier pour from orbit onto Earth, Mars and other colonies than about the danger of a single giant asteroid hitting us today.

If we have spaceships able enough to be called military ones - then nukes aren't going to be required for planetary bombardment. You simply drive over to somewhere that's got a source of rock with some metal in it, stick that in your linear accelerator / rail-gun, point it at your target and Kaboom!

After all, assuming you have spaceships, ICBMs suddenly become a damned site easier to intercept from space - but ships in orbit will only be dropping limited numbers of warheads - which might be within the capabilities of even current missile defence systems to deal with.

If you're really feeling particularly militant, you could move an asteroid into the orbital path of a planet - and wait for the bang.

In which case your original argument about asteroids might still stand. You're doing survivable damage, with resources on hand to rebuild with. Or the victor's space marines land and create a new imperial slave-planet.

Re: cold, dry and nasty

Then they're helping to terraform theplace. Doing something useful. Their corpses will also provide excellent materials to create a viable topsoil. If it turns out that the place is too habitable too early, well I sugges that we utilise NASA's recently demonstrated ability to create nuclear powered laser tanks. NASA can charge people to have a go, thinning out the herd, and incidentally make a nice profit to spend on science.

I'm struggling to see any downsides really. This is an almost perfect way to bootsrap the space industry. And ensure this new commercial phase is not as patent-encumbered as the tech industry has turned out to be.

Re: cold, dry and nasty

Elon Musk has stated that he'd like to retire to Mars. So I suspect not.

Well actually he put it rather more pithily. "I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact".

Re: Pah!

That's a bloody bad idea.

The moment that humanity cracks that code, is the time that the aliens know we've deleloped sentient computers, are now a threat, and so it's time to destroy the Earth.

Or it's a practical joke, and designed to send our nascent sentient computers insane. In which case we also lose, as we're stuck on the planet with them - while they deploy all the drones, robots and internet 'o' things crap in an effort to destroy us.

Re: McSheepFaces.

What's the collective noun for the group of people who resort to the clichéd 'sheep' epithet?

Stupid Flockers?

Actually although the phrase is annoying, it does provide a useful guide to what to ignore. Like a spam filter scoring on words like viagra, my bollocks-filter level is raised by use of such terms as, sheeple, MSM, EUSSR, New World Order (which seems to be making a comeback of late), Zionist media, a recent survey says, etc.

Has anyone else seen the classic German film Das BootyVonBootface?

Re: Two steps forward...

This is the Russian response to US plans to put an anti-ICBM launch site in Poland

No it's not. That might be their official whine, but that system is not designed to deal with Russian missiles. It's designed to defend Europe from Iranian ones. Russian missiles live in Siberia, and would be fired over the North Pole.

This is part of the system the US have been working on to deal with threats like Iran and North Korea. Which is why they've so far deployed only someothing like 20-odd missiles, to Alaska and Guam. Although the US and Japan both station several Aegis ships around, specifically to deal with North Korean missile threats - as the SM3 can shoot ICBMs in space. Again Russian ones would be going the wrong way, and anyway there are too many of them for one or two ships only able to launch 1 or 2 SM3 at a time.

Obama cancelled the Polish site at one point. To keep the Russians happy. I think it only came back on the agenda after the invasion of Ukraine, though I've forgotten the current status.

You are however correct that the SS18 must have needed an upgrade pretty soon. Trident is expected to be upgraded in the 2030s, and that went operational in the 90s. But it's solid fuelled, so I'd have thought would expect to last longer. Also it goes to sea, but sealed inside a warm sub, whereas the SS18s have to live in Siberia - and I bet their silos aren't all that well heated.

Re: Translation

I was approached in Clinton Cards yesterday. I could have 4 cards for the price of 3. Very nice. Tthank you. As I've got about 7 birthdays to go to this month, that's actually quite useful.

Please just give me your mobile number. Huh? My email sure. I've got a spam folder, and an unsubscribe button if your mail is annoying. But nope, you don't get the mobile, so you can call me with pointless crap when I'm busy.

Just getting this from estate agents now, as they've a legit reason to ask for my mobile when booking viewings, but of course I also have to suffer the weekly "courtesy call" to see if I like the look of one of their places, but somehow am too dim to be able to phone them and book a visit.