Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: ... the area is rarely visited by boats with location-transmitting AIS equipment switched on ...

Isn't part of the Brexit fishing dispute with France, that lots of their smaller fishing vessels don't have AIS (or even commercial GPS), and so couldn't prove that they'd been fishing in British waters for years - and should therefore have a right to continue to do so?

So it could be true. Particularly given how the Irish fishermen cut up so rough about this excercise and "forced" the Russian Navy to move parts of it away. Else they were threatening to turn up and fish in the middle of the excercise while the Russians were doing live-firing drills. Which could have gone very wrong.

Sweden and Finland have worked with varying degrees of closeness to NATO for decades. While maintaining their neutrality, it made sense to have the option to call on NATO help - and also to make it look credible to the Soviet Union that they might still join NATO if pressurised too much.

However it's becoming a serious issue again. I believe that for the first time ever polling in Finland now has opposition to joining NATO dropping below 50%. Equally significantly the same poll also said that if the the Finnish government recommended joining, then that opposition fell away and support for joining hit 50%.

I still don't think it will happen, but then I suppose there is a logic to it. Now they're members of the EU and there's such a large cross-over between EU members and NATO members that the EU is likely to be collateral damage in any serious dispute with Russia. There's also more reason for NATO to want it. It's not like allowing Ukraine in, which faces much more of a threat than it has forces to cover (so you could argue makes NATO net weaker). Sweden and Finland have decently resourced armed forces that are also well trained. Plus they would make defending Norway and the Baltic States a lot easier, and really screw up Russia's ability to operate in the Baltic Sea. Plus that extra power in the arctic circle makes it easier for NATO to act offensively in the Norwegian and White Seas - which means they can spend less time defending Northern Norway and more time screwing with the Russian Northern Fleet, which is where most of its best submarines are, and incidentally also a lot of its sub-launched nuclear deterent.

Putin by sabre-rattling in Ukraine may do the opposite of what he says he wants, to push NATO away from the Russian border. And actually persuade the doubters in NATO that we have to station serious forces in Poland - and maybe also push the neutrals of Sweden, Finland and Ireland closer to us.

Ireland have already asked the RAF to patrol Irish airscpace for them. It's a bit unclear, but possibly after September 11th, when they realised they couldn't shoot down a terrorist controlled airliner? They also don't have primary radar, so when the Russians fly military aircraft around their coastline with their transponders off, it's a serious danger to commercial aviation. So the RAF have agreed to intercept the Russians doing that, as we'd probably being doing anyway - just we can use Irish airspace to make it easier. The big advantage is that the intercepting jets will have their transponders on, so air traffic control are then able to see where the Russians are. I think the last big incident was in 2015, and it turned out the Russian bombers in question were nuclear armed (although it could have been a practise round painted to look like a real one). It seriously disrupted civillian air navigation, but just buying a primary radar would mean they could track the Russians, even if they can't intercept them. I can't see them joining NATO, but they might cooperate further?

Re: "It is considered deeply unfashionable to talk about Western cable tapping"

We are the good guys. No sarcasm needed.

Sadly we're not even close to being the perfect guys. But if you compare our governments to even relatively enlightened despots (say the Chinese Communist Party before they made Xi President for life) then it really is no contest.

Also the big worry about Russia isn't that they're going to tap undersae cables to spy on us. Although of course they are, everyone who has the capability does try. It's that they might start destroying undersea cables to fuck with our economies.

The USA of course converted an old ballistic missile submarine into a cable-tapping spy sub many years ago. I'm sure I read that that had been decommissioned, due to age - but that doesn't mean they haven't built another one.

Re: 512MB ram minimum memory requirement

I think the other problem was drivers. Despite the fact they had a long alpha and beta program, many manufacturers left it to the last minute - or just took ages over it. I bought a new PC a year after Vista's commercial launch - and so at least 18 months after the public beta, let alone the private stuff shown to Microsoft partners. And yet the drivers for the soundcard weren't released until 3 weeks after I bought it, so it couldn't do 5.1.

Re: Do you have to use HP ink?

You can buy other ink cartidges, as normal. I didn't have many problems with fake HP ink - back when I bought cartridges regularly. But to be fair to HP (gags!) Instant Ink is a bloody good deal. And is so even at this new price. I used to buy 3 sets of cartridges a year, where even the fake ones were about £10 each. So that's £90 a year. We're a low-medium use office, so we're on an inkjet, because we want a little more image quality that we got when we had a laser. Now we've been paying £30-£40 a year for all the ink we need, and getting genuine cartridges without having to think about it too much. What's not to like?

I've been expecting them to put the prices up for some time, given we've been on it for 3-4 years and this is the first time they have. I guess the upside for them is regular direct debits and no danger we'll buy fakes.

Also they screwed up when I signed up. We got loads of credits, that were only supposed to last for 3 months. The idea being that you didn't need to worry if you'd gone for too few pages per month, you had near infinite extra credits. But they forgot to time-limit the credits, so I had 20 months of free ink.

Re: "If it ain't broke..."

Snake,

While I agree with you that users are resistant to change - this is perfectly understandable. Change adds confusion. Now there are some good reasons for changing things, but what they've done to the start menu and the taskbar have just made them objectively worse. They've not added anything new, you could already make them pretty much do what Win 11 does, in Win 10 - it's just that most people chose not to. And what they've done now is remove choice and make users have to click more buttons in order to do stuff they're obviously going to want to do. Hence I say objectively worse, this isn't a subjective matter of taste. They've not simplified anything, or made anything quicker or even made some parts of the OS that were unused more obvious, they've just stuck sand into the works of everyone's workflow.

Now where I might agree with you is the hatred of the ribbon in Office. Although again, continual tweaks and changes to it are confusing and annoying. But I've a different perspective on this, as I've both cursed it and praised it. I used to be a heavy Excel user, and knew where everything was in the menus. But now I use Excel a lot, but only for very basic stuff. As a basic user, the ribbon is close to perfect. It pretty much shows all the stuff I ever use, in a very easy to reach way - and once I got used to it is quicker and better than hunting through menus. For a person who's not good with computers, that's a godsent, as they're not the type to hunt though menus looking for lilkely options until they find what they want. So for them, the ribbon makes basic use much easier for them. Once you talk to a power user of course, it becomes a crap UI, because they already knew where stuff was - and now have to completely re-learn the UI, and would I'm sure prefer it to stay the same. That's when I've cursed it, the few times I've had to do the more complex stuff, and it's much harder to search for a function through the ribbon's messy mix of icons, than a nicely structured menu system. But I'd argue the ribbon serves a useful purpose, they should just have allowed you to fall back to a menu system if you wanted to - as I can't imagine that would have taken much extra coding. In contrast, the UI changes to 11 are just shit, with no redeeming features as far as I've seen so far.

Re: Works for me

I've just installed StartAllBack on a colleague's computer, and it's pretty nice. Weirdly it seems to default to making everything look like Windows 8 (but with a Start Menu) - which is odd, as Windows 8 was surely the least popular release. But you can make things look more like Win 10 or Win 7.

Startdock's Start 11 fixes the Start menu, but that's the least annoying of Microsoft's changes. It's the forced grouping of icons on the task bar that's most annoying - so you have to hover the mouse over them to switch windows - so ungrouping them so you have an icon for each window is available in StartAllBack but not Start11. And it's at least 50c cheaper...

I didn't try OpenShell because it wasn't finished, and StartAllBack had already made the user happy. It's also on a month's free trial. Though I imagine OpenShell might end up being the best and certainly the most flexible.

The new settings menu is also terrible, but I've not got Win11 on my computer yet, so haven't looked into something to fix that.

Hopefully I can ride this out until the inevitable Windows 12, where they put things back with only a few changes kept for pride's sake - as with Win 10. Although I think I slightly prefer 10 to 7. Oh and Windows ME was still worse than 8 - but only just...

Re: Day of the Dolphin?

Mum walked into the sitting room when that was on TV sometime in the early 80s to find my brother and I bawling our eyes out at the end of that film. It's the only film I can remember crying at as a kid, even though I remember none of the plot. Who cares about ET going home, or Bambi's mother getting shot. I must have been about 8.

Not seen it since, which I suspect is the correct choice.

States already tax robot owners. It's called corporation tax, dividend tax and capital gains tax. i.e. the profits of companies and the profits of their owners.

If the normal companies in the economy get as good at avoiding corporation tax as the mutli-national IT companies like Google, Apple and MS - then we'll have to move more taxation to the shareholders (who find it harder to avoid) or to consumption. So more VAT or taxes on land/property.

Of course it's possible that governments will create robot tax inspectors, who will fight Google/Apple/Microsoft's armies of robot security guards and the winners will rule the scorched remains of the Earth and all its surviving cowering peasants...

Helcat,

Your thing about speed limits doesn't surprise me. As of the last time I heard, the local councils and government don't have an accurate database of the correct speed limits on all their roads, so there's nothing to give to the car manufacturers for any kind of accurate speed control.

Google are more accurate. However they've achieved that by crowd-sourcing the data. Like lots of stuff on Google Maps it asks users if this speed limit is correct, and then once a certain number of people have clicked in a correction, they must update their database. Which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't seem acceptable to use for a legally mandated safety system. Unless they also used the Google Street View cars to create their database?

Or maybe the government have updated all this, but the car manufacturers are fitting their cars with old data, and not updating. Like in the old days of in-car sat-nav, where it was out of date when the car was new, and only got worse as time went on.

Re: you mean

Chris G,

Greece didn't get into trouble and get nailed to the wall because it didn't use crypto. It got into trouble because its government borrowed money and lied about it. Of course it was made much worse by getting caught during a massive global recession. But the main point was that the Greek government couldn't fulfill its normal spending obligations without borrowing more money. And at this point, nobody would lend to them. So even if they'd been able to default on all their exisiting debt, they'd still have had to make massive cuts and make the recession in Greece much worse, because they weren't able to borrow.

Now admittedly being in the Euro took away all the options to deal with this crisis, and left the Greeks relying on their supposed partners in the Eurozone for any possible solutions to their problems. Because those solutions were basically printing money to stop their banks collapsing and QE. Both of which were the policy tools the UK and US were using at the time, but the European Central Bank were rejecting out of incompetence and stupidity, only to adopt them later anyway after having done massive damage to their own economies and credibilty.

So had Greece been using the Drachma, which they controlled, they wouldn't have suffered the biggest economic collapse in a modern economy in peacetime history (worse than the 1930s Great Depression in any country). But instead they'd joined the Euro, and it turned out their "partners" didn't give a fuck.

But if they've been using Bitcoin as a currency, they wouldn't have been able to print that either, so it would have had a similar, or worse, result. Plus running an economy on Bitcoin is insane anyway, becuase if your money supply doesn't increase with the size of your economy every year you get deflation, which is way worse than inflation for destroying economies.

If they'd been running a sovereign crypto currency then they could have acted to save their economy, but then why bother when you can just run a proper currency.

Re: Bond! Bond?

The Daniel Craig Bond films are, well, not fun. They are brooding, somewhat morbid, a modern interpretation of a "super hero"

Actually the Craig Bond films, are much more looking back to the books for inspiration. As were the Dalton ones, but much less successfully, because they had low budgets and worse writers.

If you go back and read some of the books (I've only read a couple of the early ones), they're a lot darker and much more connected with the nasty realities of some poor sod on the ground getting shot at than the wise-cracking Bonds of yesteryear. Though it should also be pointed out that the first couple of Connery films also had a couple of nasty moments, because he was capable of playing Bond either way.

There's a lot of wish fulfillment in the early books, such as Bond having breakfast of 8 scrambled eggs with toast, coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice - which make a lot more sense when you realise it was probably being written in a grey 1950s London under rationing.

I also remember being surprised by Bond's internal monologue, which gets pretty damned close to being whiny, as he moans on about M dumping him in the shit and nearly getting him killed, yet again. Not that you'd blame him.

Anyway tastes vary, but I think that Bond needed a refresh after the Brosnan era, so why not have a try at something a bit harder edged? Having done what was as close to a 5 film story-arc as the franchise will allow, perhaps now would be a good time to go back to the 50s and tack towards something a bit more light hearted. But I very much enjoyed the Craig experiment. Then again I'm one of Dalton's few fans, so what do I know?

Bond for me used to be FUN. A total escape, a good frolic of excitement, a bit of sexy attraction, fun deux ex machina toys, vehicular chase sequences, and a "villain" that gets what he/she deserves.

Then what are you complaining about? Craig killed all but one of his baddies - and Blofeld got locked up at the end of the previous one rather than killing him, to keep him handy for this one. All had car chases and silly toys, plus a bit of available nookie. The only problem with your list here is that the baddie in Quantum of Solace was rubbish. The film had good bits but made no sense, but a crappy baddie was what really let it down.

Re: If it is a hut

[Geordie accent]

Day one in the Big Brother lunar hut, and all the contestants have died of asphyxiation.

[Geordie accent]

Re: Fake.

Steve Daives 3,

The whole point of the carrier and F35 purchase was to replicate what was seen as the success of the Joint Harrier Force. Thus allowing the Fleet Air Arm to be augmented by RAF squadrons when you needed more planes on the carriers. But that can only safely be done with VSTOL/STOVL aircraft - otherwise you'd have to spend ludicrous amounts of time training the RAF squadrons to do arrested carrier landings - when you might only expect to deploy them once every few years.

This way every squadron can do carrier deployment for a bit, and normal squadron duties the rest of the time. With much less training and practise required. And you have the ability to surge-deploy any of the squadrons out to the carrier at zero notice, without having to give them a few months of landing refresher-training first.

Re: Fake.

buying aircraft carriers with no catapult so they are forced to buy the expensive version of the VSTOL aircraft

Wrong. They chose to buy the VSTOL aircraft, and designed the carrier round it. They did this for very good, if possibly wrong, reasons.

France, only having one aircraft carrier, are forced to use US carriers to keep their pilots in training for CATOBAR flight operations - when the Charles de Gaulle is off at the repair shop. You only expect a ship to be operationally available for a third of its time. So even with the 2 carriers we bought, we might struggle to keep pilots qualified. Under-practised carrier pilots often end up dead, or swimming.

Second they decided to keep the idea of a joint pool of aircraft between the RAF and Navy. Again this is insanely dangerous with CATOBAR ops, but much easier with VSTOL. So the carriers will normally operate with a couple of squadrons on them, but will be able to deploy with 4 if required for high tempo operations. Meanwhile the RAF can be using the other planes. There's not much cross-over in parts betwen the F35B and the other models, so you're effectively having to run logistics for two different aircraft types if the RAF have A's while the Navy operate B's. Or you have to have more, because you need a full complement of B's for the carriers and another complement of A's for the RAF - and then you can't operate both carriers together unless you've bought way more B's than you normally expect to use.

I suspect they wanted the shiny electronic, sensor and command and control abilities of the F35, which I've read are actually quite impressive. So that meant they've need to buy some, or develop that very expensive tech alone and bolt it to the Typhoon. So the RAF may well use F35s in a mix with other aircraft as force-multipliers. Again this probably wouldn't have been affordable if they'd had to go for a different aircraft type for the carriers - though they could have bought all F35Cs - and just accepted they'd have fewer carrier-capable pilots and no ability to surge both carriers with air wings.

Then discovering they can't land vertically cos they melt the deck and can't take off with the fuel weapons load.

Wrong again. They can land vertically, and do most of the time. They can also take off with a full load. Although that load is less than than non VSTOL spec of the F35 obviously, but it's still way more than Harrier and with roughly twice the range.

However the UK forces have tested a "rolling landing" in order to be able to land with greater payloads. This means being able to carry more weapons on board and not having to expensively dump them into the sea before landing back on the carrier. I've seen it done on the tellybox, on various documentaries, but don't know how often they use it operationally, as I'm not sure what weapons load it requires to make it necessary.

All very good, hassling your supplier, but it did not seem like Simon got his problems sorted out.

I think you're mistaking Simon for someone that cares.

I'm sure that in a theoretical sense he'd like all his systems to be operating perfectly. So long as that didn't get in the way of trips to the pub, lager, bhaji consumption and foreign holidays.

But sometimes you need to focus on higher things. Sometimes, when a supplier has treated you badly, it's not about getting the system fixed. That may only be a subsidiary system whose failure will only annoy some marketing people, who barely merit their ration of oxygen in the first place... What matters is emotional intelligence. Knowing that a good network manager will be much happier having exracted revenge from the deserving wretches who failed you than they would be with a fully working system to allow the marketing department to catalogue their crayons accurately.

Finally of course, it's all about respect. If you ain't got respect, you ain't got nothin'.