Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Martin 66,

Your info on UK gas supplies is completely wrong. I did a quick bit of googling to get some figures, and this looks like a decent link.

So firstly we have over 3 months of stored gas at the beginning of the winter drawdown period, but that storage can only be withdrawn at a certain rate - as it's a long term store. So I don't know what they've got in the way of emergency storage - but the on demand short term storage seems to have about 10% of the capacity of that one, so I'd imagine that's where your week's capacity figure comes from.

However, we draw 40% of our gas supply from the UK bit of the North Sea. And that's from multiple platforms and pipelines, which makes it pretty robust.

The linked page doesn't show it, but iirc our next biggest source of supply is Norway's bit of the North Sea.

We then have several LNG terminals in the UK and so are able to buy liquefied gas from the US and Qatar, amongst other places. This can obviously be bought at short notice should we suffer a supply interruption.

As I remember Russian gas via Europe is probably the smallest component of our supply mix. You are correct that most of this comes from Russia, although there are supplies coming in from Libya as well I think. Also there are 2 main Russian pipelines - as there's Nordstream through the Baltic which the Germans and Russians built in order to be able to bypass Ukrainian supplies in case of disputes.

It also bypassed our allies in Eastern Europe, but belatedly the Germans showed concern about this, and the EU's common energy policy means it's now connected up in a grid so that supply can be shuffled around to help those countries closest to Russian gas - who naturally are most reliant on it.

Because of Russia's unreliability Europe is also investing in more LNG capacity, so that gas can be bought into this network, if required. Many other countries have higher stocks than us, partly because it makes more sense to have smaller capacity pipelines and store locally, but also because they don't produce 40% of their demand from domestic sources.

Re: Noodliness

No, I think you've misunderstood. The idea is that the scanner is looking for life. So what it does is to extrude some tasty, soupy, noodly goodness. Then warm it up with the laser, and see what aliens are attracted by the aroma.

Basically this rover is the first interplanetary delivery service. I wonder why they didn't choose pizza?

Re: You are shitting me

Destroy All Monsters,

Lest I be accused of playing the man and not the ball - which I was in that last post to be fair. Though Galloway deserves it, and is not a credible source.

All that the piece you linked to says is that Google confirmed that RT had not broken the Youtube terms of service with any of their videos.

It didn't mention that they'd spent $100k on promoted tweets and some amount I've forgotten with Facebook, which both of those companies have said were related to the election. Though of course they may just be covering their arses.

But it also did not rebut (or even mention) any accusations about Russian involvement in general - and therefore is totally irrelevant to the discussion in hand and does not even remotely support the argument you are trying to make.

0/10 - must try harder.

Re: Can Sean Connery do a Scottish Chinese accent?

Erm. What Highlander sequel would that be? Next you'll be telling me that those long-rumoured Martrix sequels are actually going to happen...

Re: Ship, meet Tip

Bob,

THAT scandal looks to be over. Unless someone serious re-opens the investigation. And as her career is going nowhere, it may never resurface again. So far you've got Clinton on incompetence - but no charges being brought.

Some of Trump's advisors have worked for foreign governments and failed to register the fact. Which may or may not be common, but that doesn't matter because they're caught-up in an investigation about serious matters - and so are going to get charged.

It may just be that Russia were sowing mischief, as they've done in many recent elections. But the people willing to work for Trump appear to be such an ill-disciplined rabble, that they may have strayed beyond the bounds of the law, and been too stupid/disorganised/arrogant to cover their tracks.

Or of course some of them may actually have been working directly with Russian intelligence, in which case there may well be an impeachment coming along.

Re: "Boffins befuddled..."

NO! NO! NO! The knowledge has to be arcane, I'll grant you. But there also has to be a certain suggestion of sheds, leather elbow patches and pipe smoke.

Also I think in general that boffinry also has connotations of making do with a certain lack of funds, and building clever stuff out of ordinary household objects. So accountants are also too well paid.

If you can't build a radio telescope out of army surplus radar gear and bed frames, then operate it from a shed while drinking tea out of a thermos and smoking your pipe, then you ain't a boffin!

Re: Affront

If the Affront are invading Earth, I for one am turning traitor.

Partly because we're inevitably going to lose, so I may as well be on the winning side and live. But mostly because since reading that book I've really wanted to eat dinner with knife, fork and harpoon.

Re: This bit always confuses me....

Steve K,

Yup. The Europeans were warned that the €500 note would be a massive help to criminals and ignored the other governments asking them not to do it. Then again they also ignored all the warnings about how the Euro would be a financial disaster, so I guess it's only a minor point.

Re: Why the Assange hate on El Reg?

Poncey McPonceface,

Not all that much right back at him. As you haven't given any specifics of what vitally important data you think Wikileaks has published in order to offset the downsides of what they and Julian get up to.

Off a cliff and with rocket assistance, maybe. But you'd need a very tall cliff, or lots of rockets.

Also, to qualify for these speed records, the same vehicle is required to perform the journey in reverse within an hour. It's possible this may present a few problems for your Corolla...

I suggest you get sponsorship from a manufacturer of Gaffer tape. That'll fix anything.

Re: Any war with Russia probably will be a Nuclear War

Nick Z,

Depends on what Russia wants. Mutual nuclear annihilation doesn't appear to be the case.

However, they do appear to want to dominate those countries that they are close to. In particular they have an interest in those places with a large Russian-speaking minority left over from Soviet days. And in the case of Putin and some of his cronies a bit of a nostalgia for those days too, when they were big, scary and powerful.

How much they care about these ex-Soviet citizens and how much they wish to leverage them as an excuse to kick some arse is a matter of opinion. And doesn't really matter anyway, it's the practical upshots of their policies that matters.

So in Georgia they gave Russian passports to Russian speakers in northern separatist regions - which they then leveraged into an excuse to "defend the interests of their citizens", which then led to them invading. In Ukraine they invaded and annexed Crimea and have poured weapons and volunteers into the Donbass - though so far haven't shown any indication they want to annex that, so much as just generally fuck the place up.

Now to the important point for us. The Baltic states are all NATO members. They all have large Russian-speaking miniorities. Who in many cases would rather be Russian. We are treaty bound to defend them. That's an area that we, or Russia, may consider the employment of conventional weapons. In Russia's case, if they can conquer the place in a couple of days our only recourse would be nuclear weapons or a full-scale land invasion of Russia (not going to happen) - retaking them amphibiously could be made virtually impossible.

Hence we'd have to swallow our pride and do no more than impose sanctions. However, if we're serious about carrying out our treaty obligations, we need to do it with conventional weapons - or convince the world that we're willing to launch full on nuclear armageddon in retaliation.

Hence for nuclear weapons to be considered a credible deterrent for anything other than a direct attack on your own country, you generally need conventional forces as well.

Re: This article = manginism, at its best

Yep. Downvote all you want, but all this article does is imply that you do NOT have a right to defend yourself, and that you're a bigger asshole if you even try.

There's nothing wrong with denying stuff and saying you're not guilty. Everyone has a perfect right to do that - and if falsely accused should probably do so.

You're on very dodgy ground if you then go and badmouth your accusors. Though obviously that's going to be very tempting if you have been falsely accused. But tactically almost certainly very stupid.

However whatever you do needs to be carefully thought through, and carefully worded. It's going to get heavily scrutinised, and if you're at the end of a media witch-hunt, that scrutiny is going to be very hostile.

If you're actually guilty (or at least somewhat so) then, of course, you're going to need to word things even more carefully. And as you now can't issue a blanket denial without risking destroying your credibility, which may prove important at say an upcoming trial, you'd best shut up. Given that if you only deny some things, you're looking like you're admitting to others.

If you want to do a partial denial publically, and try to salvage some of your reputation, then you're going to have to try total honesty of what did and didn't happen, and apologise and explain what you're going to do about turning your life around and making amends. A lot to ask of a blog post.

So wording is vitally important, for example not making a basic error in your first bit of self-defence would be a really good start! Yes you can sexually harrass anybody. As an example by repeatedly asking them out / making sexual comments when they've made it clear that they weren't interested. Obviously groping people is sexual assault. Maybe he meant workplace sexual harrassment, which is a bit different - but then even there he's got it wrong. At least in the UK an employer can be done for workplace sexual harrassment if a customer harrasses one of our staff, if we don't do anything to prevent it happening again - or haven't taken reasonable steps to deal with it.

So now he just looks like he's wriggling around defining terms to suit him, and has destroyed any point his blog post had by paragraph 5. Ooops!

I can't be arsed to read the whole of his post, life's too short and he appears to be too much of an arsehole for me to want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I had no particular opinions about him until I read his own words - but after 6 or 7 paragraphs of it he'd made an awful first impression.

Re: Criminal sentences following

If it's authorised, it ain't criminal.

If not, it is. Simple.

I eat real food all the time, and I don't eat chip butties. This is something that I must urgently change! Particularly as my Mum gave me her old deep fat fryer, so I can now eat deliciously crispy chips whenever I want them.

Re: 'Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen'

Well Netflix say they intend to spend $6-8 bn this year on their own content, with them producing an average of 50% of their output. Not sure if they'll be able to scale up that fast, and maintain quality though. Obviously they'll be using outside production companies, which is what the big broadcasters do as well, but even so it's a big change in commissioning and oversight. Or they could do co-productions and become just like studios.

I do know that kids don't watch much broadcast telly. But they do use the websites. As they still watch lots of telly content, just not in the traditional way. It will be interesting to see how those habits change as they grow up, and are old enough to have their own telly in their own living room. I guess they'll all have smart TVs and watch a mix of Netflix / Amazon mainstream telly.

But the broadcasters are still in the game, still produce some content and still have some options left. They're not yet at the stage of losing 10% of their viewers every year (as print media are) and ten years into that horrible decline in with no solution yet worked out.

However the reaction to "Fake News" may drive people back into the arms of the print media. I believe that the New York Times claimed a huge jump in subscribers after Trump's win - so maybe the trend of apathy about politics will reverse, and help the print media recover a bit? Plus people might decide that if you want decent news coverage, you have to pay for it somehow. And that will give the old print media a chance at a revenue stream.

Re: "the murky world of licensing and software asset management"

I know the system at Computer Associates, before the dot-com bust and having to rebrand to CA, used to be that sales people were only allowed to keep an account for one year. So they had no incentive to keep customers happy, but to screw as much money out of them as humanly possible. If that meant audting their licenses and making them sign a 5 year extension (with a tiny amount of unwanted "training" thrown in to sweeten the pill), then so be it.

Of course that strategy is also improved when you keep buying all the opposition, so that people who move to less horrible suppliers then end up with you again anyway.

I don't know if things have improved now. My friend left them many years ago, as they treated their staff worse than they treated their customers...

Re: Good luck

Plus you've just introduced another electronic part (worse with a battery as well) to the plane. This will need regular maintenance and will require an update of all procedures so it can be shut down in event of fire/power-surge etc.

So you're actually introducing a small extra risk to all aeroplanes in order to find the 2 planes in the last 20 years that have gone down in water and couldn't be found.

Re: Meh

But the inability of others to supply their customers with the patched software should never be an excuse for holding back a release.

Why not? Surely this is something you should risk assess. Rather than adopting rigid rules, you should look at the risk and particular circumstances and choose the policy that exposes your users to the smallest risk you can.

That means taking the real world into account. MS decided on one patch day a month in the hopes that more of their patches would be applied quicker - as there was only one set to test per month. On a schedule when people could plan for it. It has a risk, in leaving people unpatched for vulns that are known about, but the upside is that more patches will actually be applied. They also retain the ability to do emergency patches, if they deem that necessary. It's not a perfect solution, but that's because this is the real world, not the perfect one.

One historian's description of anglo-saxon warriors, based on the things they were buried with = psychopathic peacocks.

That's a very un-historian-y thing to say. Also strikes me as incredibly unfair - and probably not terribly accurate - as well as being rather anacronistic.

It was a different time, with different expectations of violence - i.e. there was a lot more of it in everyday life. Something that didn't really change in this country until the 18th Century. Plus of course there were regular invasions, mainly of vikings, and conflicts among the various British kingdoms.

The anglo-saxons had a pretty rich life going on. As well as some quite sophisticated crafsmanship, they were starting to develop a literary culture in ango-saxon, as well as latin. Obviously amongst a limited number of literate people. They also had a stable coinage and government administration going on by the 11th Century - which was one of the main attractions that drew William the Conqueror in the first place.

They had a class of what you might call professional warrirors, who were mostly retainers to the various earls - and you'd expect them to be buried with war gear as well as whatever shinies they could afford. See the comment about the flowering of anglo-saxon craftsmanship above, for details of just how shiny that might be. The British Museum and Sutton Hoo have lots of it on display.

The peacocks thing might be fair, but they'd managed to build a sophisticated society, so psychopaths seems unlikely. At least there being more than the usual number of them.