Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
I would have hoped that someone would have been able to calculate the thrust correctly, ensured that fuel did not freeze, shield the avionics, etc.
Oh, come on you grumpy old git (*). Stop telling the kids to get their bikes off our lawn as if it is reserved for our mobility scooters. It is a reality that nobody keeps to Bismark's old saying: "Only idiots learn from their own mistakes, smart people learn from the mistakes of others".
(*)I am in that category myself nowdays too.
US Congress and Eu ride to your rescue: https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2018/02/07/big_tech_biz_back_us_proposals_to_ease_overseas_data_transfers/
All hail the cavalry.
Courtesy of the CLOUD act doing the Waltz with GDPR, after an elementary legal due diligence a lot of shops especially on the continent will much more in house than predicted by this study. If they do not, they will get nuked with up to 6% global turnover.
Disclaimer: I am pretty good plumber already so I do not need to "go get that" as a job. So based on your 3 point program my opinion may be a bit biased.
Whatever side of the fence one sits on, the target deal should be balanced and fair to both sides.
It cannot be. The UK economy is addicted to financial services the way Russian and Saudi economy is addicted to oil. Do we like it or not, it is a matter of sovereignty. Eu will NOT allow a non-Eu country to run the core Eu financial services. This is not negotiable, not subject to change and not subject to any rabbits out of a hat.
From there on, any deal to the UK is guaranteed to be very damaging. The amount of collateral damage from trade, tariffs, free movement, manufacturing, etc may vary, but they do not constitute the core damage from "drug withdrawal" for the UK economy.
The reality of Brexit will be "cold turkey". Same as for Russia or Saudi to be stopped from selling oil overnight. Go and ask anyone who have gone off anything (from cigs to meds to hard drugs) on what cold turkey looks like.
That's the UK, not Tory MPs, some of whom may engineer something to get punished every evening. Allegedly.
Come on, check the mash next time before posting. It has gotten there AHEAD of you: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/rees-mogg-alarmed-and-aroused-by-eu-punishment-20180207143912
With any rational government at the helm it shouldn't have to be used. So it could very well get used.
Not quite. This is slightly different. Great Britain (and England before it) as far as the rest of Europe is concerned is well known for not holding their end of the bargain in treaties all the way back to the Plantagenets. The current lot in charge - doubly so. They cannot spend more than a week not trying to wobble off what has been agreed so far.
What we see is a natural product of the Eu being absolutely confident that without a massive stick May (or whoever comes after her) will not hold her end of the bargain. That's all that there is about it.
They have reasons to do that because she failed to keep it even for a month. She is already trying to roll back what was agreed in December.
The problem is that the stick the Eu has prepared in this case is so massive that there will most likely be no bargain and no agreement to start off with.
BoJo's latest estimate was over £400,000,000
If you read the Eu conditions for transition as leaked, the likely result is WTO from March 2019. While I am on the Remain side, I find it difficult not to notice that they are clearly designed to be unacceptable.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/06/brexit-eu-power-punish-uk-transition-period-sanctions
They will not be accepted regardless of who is at the helm in the UK. There will be no "transition period" ladies and gentlemen.
That leaves UK to WTO cliff scenario which the LSE (and several other economics shops) estimate to be at least -8% GDP (*). It is a reasonable assumption that 8% drop in GDP is at least 8% drop in tax receipts. That is 1.1 Bn per week less in terms of budgetary expenditure. So BJ should give the total difference after subtracting UK contributions to Eu of -800M to the NHS. That is a grand idea. It will bring the total NHS weekly budget to 1.2Bn (from 2Bn).
So looking at these numbers I am off to punch in some passport data into the BA website. Got a meeting with a realtor on the other side of the channel on Monday afternoon to pay the deposit for an apartment(**).
(*)I could not care less what the political arse licking stink tanks come up with as numbers, let's stick to what major economics shops/universities calculate on this one - they more or less agree on 8% or worse for a WTO cliff-drop
(**)I wish this was in jest. It isn't.
Assuming Strava’s user base is made up of serious cyclists who invest heavily in the best equipment, the app can be used by criminals as an accurate map of where to find expensive bikes they might want to steal.”
According to a cyclist-fanatic colleague it is already being used. It is not the only one - so are other "boast about my fitness" apps.
There is stuff to explore and more importantly there is stuff to mine
Forgot one more. Energy in abundance.
The biggest issue with colonising Mars (let's put the terraforming aside until it is colonised) is that the energy input required for it has to come from elsewhere. It is far from the sun so Solar is barely a trickle. No plate tectonics so no concentration of radionuclides by the same geological processes as on Earth and (most likely) no water for fusion.
Compared to that, the Jupiter system is the energy junkies dream. The IO flux tube alone is > 2 Terawatts and it is by no means the only energy source in that system. Add to that abundant water and other materials suitable for both energy and reaction mass. Add to that active plate tectonics (and potentially geological processes to produce ore deposits suitable for mining) on 3 out of 4 of its large moons. Add to that the potential of mining Hydrogen and or 3He for fusion from Jupiter itself. Add to that...
well, there's still the possibility of terraforming, but that would take a LOT of effort with tech we don't have yet.
It is not just tech. It is also presence of key substances like water to start off with, magnetic field, feasibility of protecting the initial stations from solar flares and hard radiation.
By the time we have the tech to terraform Mars we are likely to have colonised Europa while mining Ganymede and IO (or some permutation of these).
The biggest problem with a Mars colony is that the likely scientific and potential monetary value is barely hovering above zero.
Compared to that, a colony on one of the Jupiter or Saturn moons has significant scientific and monetary potential. There is stuff to explore and more importantly there is stuff to mine - both for the purposes of supporting the colony and for the purposes of shipping back to Earth as raw or refined materials.
Once money is involved, there will be people doing it. That is pretty much guaranteed.
Compared to that Mars has only one possible application - a penal colony. Not today of course. But sometimes in the near future when our survival gear improves sufficiently. (*)
(*)If you do the math how much does it cost to keep someone like Peter Sutcliffe for 30 years in a HMG all expenses paid hotel, it is cheaper to load that person on a one way ticket to Mars and give him "fend for yourself" survival gear (after that we wash our hands).
I see lot of jerks around exactly because their parents believe they were grown up enough to take care of themselves.
I see definitely more of them in the generation of pansies produced by the RSPCC which sues anyone and their dog if they have left a child under 16 unattended for 5 minutes.
Our generation went to school in cities with population of 3+ million across half of town on public transport from the age of 7 and came back home with nobody around so we had to warm up lunch for ourselves. With gas. As there was no frigging microwaves. There were less jerks, not more.
There is a difference however. Our parents did spend some time with us even after they came back home knackered after 6 O'clock. Probably more than a lot of stay at home parents do as it is the TV raising the kids while they are having their intravenous [ prosecco | lager | cider ] drip.
Like it or not, you might be a little behind the times on this one.
I disagree with this one. Nothing personal, but I have seen more than enough results of Testosterone doping from the "Golden Age of Eastern European SportDope". Close and personal.
So I definitely beg to differ on the claim that it is not a behaviour altering substance. The fact that it is not gender specific - that is something that book gets right. Women also produce it and some produce in ample quantities too. The ones that don't sometimes have it prescribed as a supplement too. It is one of the things ladies get prescribed if their sex drive is too low and they would like to fix it. If THAT is not a behavioural change use case, dunno what is.
The real world shows that engineering and abstract thinking is an occupation best left to the male brain.
Bollocks. I believe Sophie Kovalevskaya put that one to bed 150 years ago.
By the way, do you realize that you literally quote the orang-outang in charge of the Department of Mathematics in the University of Heidelberg at the time. +/- whatever is lost in translation from German to English.
Maybe equality is just never going to happen.
Maybe we are not equal to start off with?
Like it or not testosterone is a behaviour altering substance. While it does not change your IQ (unless you overdose on it), it does change your attitude.
Sure, the genders statistically come out equal on IQ, memory, etc tests. That is however only one side of the coin. It is possible to devise an aptitude/attitude test where one gender will get better scores (*). There can be a test which skews results in favour of the ladies same as there can be a test which skews them in favour of the male(**). It is a physiological and biochemical fact, claiming it does not exist and leading a militant crusade against it Andrea Dworkin style is just stupid.
(*)The social side is actually where ladies do better. This is a fact. We have that from our simian ancestry. If you observe a bonobo (to a lesser extent normal Chimp) group there are two societies - an extremely complex one run by the females and a simplistic hierarchy run by males in parallel. Just like a proverbial high school (but with more sh*gging)
(**)The funny bit here is that the ladies are way better than us men in altering their behaviour to game rigged tests like this. This is also a fact.
What the hell...
... is going on in that picture???
WW1 PTSD therapy using the favorite weapon in the prehistoric psychiatrist arsenal - electric shock. Why on earth did someone decide that it is the right picture for this story is beyond me. Considering the time it was posted most likely getting the afternoon beer drip and the morning espresso drips mixed up.
Does that seem a little steep to anyone else?
Not really. The cost of 100 developers + supporting testers and admin personnel and an office in UK for a year.
If it is a real robotic warehouse and they managed to finish it in 100 man years that is actually quite impressive. The man year numbers for similar projects VW and other places have tried in the past are much, much higher.
When did email and social media become more resource intensive than streaming video??
Around the time when video drivers and infrastructure enabled the system to use the hardware decode and scaling in the video.
This is now across the board. I can easily view a full HD stream on a 6 year old vintage 1.0GHz E-series AMD. At the same time, if I try to use it for web surfing, I have to take coffee breaks until it loads a page if I do not use both adblock and noscript.
plus nasty slides for off-brand tablets.
Everybody has been burned at least once. Everybody has said "never again". Even grandma who was wondering why the grandkids frown at a 70$ tablet from Tesco as a Christmas present.
Same story as with computers - in the 90-es the brands controlled < 20% and everyone was assembling clones. Today, only geeks assemble their own and brands control 95%+.
All in all - Quelle surprise.
And the funniest aspect of that is that bombers are pretty much obsolete as a concept in symmetrical conflicts because they're too vulnerable; they only have value in highly asymmetric conflicts where the opposing side has no means to shoot them down.
Indeed. They are lost even in highly asymmetric conflicts. Way too many manpads floating around and some of them now have the capability of hitting targets up to 8km altitude nowdays.
as 'military', without clarifying their purpose
The purpose of the sabre rattling rhetoric (and the paranoia around it) is that if a modern naval patrol aircraft with a modern ASW sensor suite passes directly over a submarine, especially a large one it has a significant chance (above 50%>) to pick it up and light it up. From there on it is known and can be tracked defeating its purpose as a nuclear deterrent. Russia and USA take this into account by a combination of sheer number of submarines and keeping subs on-station outside primary patrol zones like the high arctic.
UK, however, has barely between 1 and 2 nuclear deterrent submarines on station at any time. Compromising the location of the one that is presently on station is pretty much in the "here went our nuclear deterrent" territory. That is the real reason for all the investment into tracking and escorting the Bear patrol flights.
It is also a reason to which nobody in the UK military will admit as it questions the whole wisdom of the Trident programme compared to the alternatives of having a fixed installation with appropriate missile defence or not putting all of the eggs into one basket target.
and we do have a bunch of Storm Shadow missiles.
30m above sea level, no stealth to speak of so visible from 50+ miles away and no terminal dash evasive manoeuvring.
but I'm sure they worry Russian Navy captains.
Or they are worried senseless you know. They do not even need to power up the VLS with modern AA missiles for these, the AK630s will deal with them. It is well within the design spec.
It is not surprising that the Storm Shadow are not even considered for F35 and various alternatives including the Turkish SOM are considered instead. It is for all practical purposes an archaeological exhibit in this day and age. Any self-respecting AA will take it out.
All six of them. With one in refit and one in port, the remaining four are going to be very thinly spread
One in refit, one in port, one on station in the South Atlantic, one on its way there to relieve it or on its way back after being relieved.
That if my math is right means TWO. Not "remaining four". Spread they shall be indeed. On a toast.
Better solution is to hack it so that your ships aren't picked up.
You will need to hack:
1. Feed from Norwegian radar stations - 3+ of them
2. Feed from Iceland's radars - 4+ of them
3. Feed from other UK installations
4. Feed from 30+ observation satellites
5. Feed from magnetic and acoustic seabed sensors - there is LOTs of those in the North Atlantic placed by both sides.
6. Feed from ...
There is only a handful of places in the world which have a more dense sensor coverage than the North Atlantic. That radar for military purposes is surplus to requirements (as in fact is about half of them in this region - it is over-saturated). There are better positioned radars elsewhere.
So any fleet asset there is for all to see and no hacking, cruise missiles or commando ops can stop that. This, by the way includes submarines. It is a well known fact that a significant fraction of both NATO and USSR submarines in the North Atlantic have failed to conceal themselves and their approximate and sometimes exact whereabouts are known to the adversary. Both sides take this into account in their "doomsday scenarios".
The radar is definitely valuable for classic civil defence purposes though - search and rescue, semi-automated ship tracking and verification that transponders and coordinates actually match, etc. Military - not so much.
You forgot to mention submarines and aeroplanes...
No I have not.
1. The latter do not presently EXIST. How many operational F35Bs does UK have to load on Queen Lizzy? Nil. Even if it had any , none of its stand-off missiles will penetrate the AA umbrella of a modern fleet (even if they get close enough to fire them). Given a choice of a stealthy, manoeuvring in final approach sea skimming (sub-2m above wave ridge) missile of the type Norway bolts on anything that floats and UK non-exist fleet aviation... I do not think there is a choice actually to start off with. The first one stands a chance. The second does not even exist and even if it existed its chances would be barely hovering above zero.
2. The subs are a more interesting proposition, however the Northern Fleet is not the Argies. Its ASW is on par with NATO. Even if we assume that there will be no Bears patrolling the immediate vicinity leaving solely the ship's ASW capabilities, the chances of doing a General Belgrano and torpedoing Peter The Great while it is in international waters are rather slim.
The Admiralty is living in the past. It is still reliving the sinking of the Duke Of York + the Repulse and the glory of torpedoing a second hand WW2 light cruiser US sold to a 3rd world country with WW2 ASW in international waters. Neither one applies to the budget available and the threats at hand. Going back to "sorry Norway" - their patrol boats alone have more anti-ship bite than the entire UK fleet. They are similar to the Chinese missile boats just with MORE missiles per boat and MORE stealthy.
Military fixed radar installations have a gazillion of civilian uses. I used to play as a kid around a radar installation (my mother worked most of her career as a radar operator) and I have seen plenty of cases where military hands over to civilian and back because it is needed and people's life are at stake.
Tracking the Russian fleet is probably the least important use case - all of its assets have at least one satellite trained on them 24/7. There is also a number of much better positioned radar stations from which UK as a NATO member gets data in real time. Norway alone has several.
There are however others uses for tracking. To put it bluntly, we live in a time when hijacking a large container or merchant vessel and carting a couple of multiple rocket launchers onto its deck is clearly no longer in the realm of "terrorist state" capabilities. It is in fact, within the capabilities of half of the fringe groups out there. Ships need to be tracked and not relied on transponders. We learned that lesson with aircraft on 9/11. It is better to not need to learn that lesson the hard way with ships.
In all cases the risk to a radar installation itself is zero so it is useful to have it and fixed installations are usually significantly more capable than mobile ones.
Whoever controls the GIUK gap can either bottle up Russia's Atlantic fleet in a relatively safe place (sorry, Norway) or let it rampage across the world's seas.
Somebody still lives in the delusional glory days of the 18-19th century. That somebody is also forgetting how "successful" that was in bottling the Dutch, the Free Trade Alliance, the Swedish (in their hayday), etc.
The only way you can bottle a fleet armed with supersonic (and shortly hypersonic) nuclear tipped cruise missiles in international waters outside the 200 mile economic zone of control is diplomacy. Failing to realize that and trying that for real equates to WW3.
I am leaving out of the equation the fact that one of the Russian Peter the Great class nuclear battlecruisers alone can probably sink everything UK can scrape as "fleet" at the moment. All it takes is for it to open fire in earnest (even without resorting to tactical nukes which it has as well). This is without adding its escorts into the equation. The only chance UK stands is if instead of "sorry Norway" it is "thanks Norway and the rest of NATO please". Norway actually makes PROPER anti-ship missiles which stand a chance to penetrate Russian AA defences and has "frigates" (really should be destroyers) armed with them. Compare that to the UK fleet which does not even carry anti-ship missiles any more (not that the ancient Block 1 Harpoon it used to carry would have been of any use against modern AA).
And even then, it the event of "bottling" it would be "only" WW3.
Just to be clear - the fact that the radar site is in place is good on a gazillion of fronts including tracking the Russian Northern Fleet. Coordinating search and rescue operations, tracking and intercepting "peaceful merchant ships" by some er... psychotic countries. Bottling the Russian Northern Fleet however... Someone needs to be put on the suicide watch and/or run through a medical exam to be discharged for psychotic delusions.
Not to pass on the fact that certificates are signed, and it's part of the design
Slightly different angle. In addition to being signed, they can contain a nearly arbitrary amount of metadata. You are limited solely by the size of the parse buffer which in GNUTLS if memory serves me right was around 32k (larger in openssl).
Passing data INTO the target this way is esoteric. If you are able to extract it you own the mark already. That still leaves a few applications such as sending instructions to a bot herd or a RAT though.
This is more interesting as an EX-filtration method. Certificates can be used for authentication and supplied by the client. That is a channel nobody checks. It will work once or twice courtesy of being obscure though. If it is used, it will become target for the firewall and AV vendors.
Anyway, how do they explain satellites in orbit, how GPS works, how compasses work, that we can measure our rotation relative to the moon, sun and planets, observe them with telescopes, the phases of the moon, and the above point how otherwise could you sail or fly round the planet?!
None of them produces "youtuber ad revenue". Move along.
No thanks, I am not keen to commit suicide by DVT.
If the flight is longer than 5h I and it is not (at least) premium economy I am not flying. Simple reason - If it is more I pay. Or to be more exact my back pays so the trip becomes a waste of time and money. Instead of doing what I came for I spend half of it tending to my back. I am not alone in this either.
In any case, the lyrical musings about Charles De Gaulle to JFK are misplaced. This aircraft has a different use case. It has HAJJ written all over it. To Mecca and back (and who cares that you die a few days later from DVT).
Freely distributable software != Open Source.
The first systematic approach to open sourcing large software ecosystem is BSD which will be 40 years old in March.
That predates amiga, usenet, etc which were more about software being free as in beer than software being free as in "you can take it, modify it and build on top of it".
WD has been a pain in the backside to deal with
I tried to report to them a reproducible crash of their storage software 4 or 5 years ago on similar kit. It was crashing reproducibly during uPnP query. Proper crash - to a full reboot.
They DID NOT GIVE A F*** about the fact that it crashes.
They DID NOT GIVE A F*** about the fact that crash may be potentially exploitable
Their answer was: "You are doing it with Linux? We do not support this". The fact that their software crashes in a potentially exploitable manner was somebody's else problem as far as they were concerned.
So nothing has changed. WD being WD.
Might need to stop by Morrisons and then go to a chippy I know is happy to batter random shit
You missed a step. In order for pizza to deep fry successfully it needs to be deep frozen first.
Despite the fact that even a bit of this will kill me courtesy of my coeliac methabolism, I put down as "eat it as I am deviant". Out of principle. I wish I could though :) Especially the deep fried version for the sheer perversity of it.
Very wrong. If you just report "facts", you're just a scribe.
Indeed.
In the past, the hallmark of a high quality news source used to be that it always tried to differentiate between news and analysis. Sure, news sources in this class were still biased, by choosing what to report and what not. They, however, made it clear what is news and what is analysis, point of view and interpretation. An example of such news source from 40-odd years ago was International Herald Tribune. As a result, you could buy it on the other side of the wall from a newsagent (though only in large cities due to limited amount of print being shipped).
The age of Facebook and Faux News is deforming this. Even news sources which used to be reputable now unashamedly mix position and analysis with the news to a point where the distinction simply disappears. One of the reasons for this is that the readers are now being conditioned to this. News sources which do not fit, do not survive.
This is the greatest danger of the age of Facebook and Faux News. All news are becoming fake by the nature of position and interpretation being embedded throughout in a form where it is indistinguishable from the news. That in turn leads to 99% of the population having their opinions gradually polarized further and further because they never see a piece of information which deviates from their chosen position. Social news platforms actively assist in this as they get enough ad views only by showing articles that "fit the view". So this is exactly what they do. Regardless of the truthfulness of the contents of course.
It is embedded within. The endgame on this is clear - we will be on each other's throats. Not a question of if, but a question of when and which fractions grab the pitchforks first.
Frankly, I do not see how we can stop it too.
I just had a look in the user reviews in the Ubuntu Software Centre (software installation manager) and most of them are saying it doesn't work.
Works here (100% Debian household). I have to keep it because of several education sites that still rely on it.
It will be gone the moment 3PLearning finally switches to HTML5.
#DoesNotCount
Concur. It is pretty clear that in this area USA is about a decade behind Israel (despite Israel literally giving Raytheon cheat sheets) and probably around 5 years behind Russia.
If memory serves me right the Russian's last years tests of the new A-135 were successful. Not that their system is usable - it is a case of "cure worse than the disease" as it uses 10kt nuke warhead. That was OK when the first generation was designed in the late 60-es. It is definitely not OK in a world full of electronics (*).
In either case - both the Aegis and the A135 are white elephants. What would be really interesting to see is what is the real capabilities for the most recent crop of "normal" AA for ICBM interception (f.e. S400 or its closest NATO equivalents). That can be deployed in quantity, something which you simply cannot afford with the MDA and it is not allowed by treaties for the A135.
(*)They apparently intend to switch to conventional warheads on that within the next 2-3 years.
who WOULDN'T lobby for a tax cut?
THIS tax cut? The Trump one? Anyone who manufactures.
Read through the most recent results. ANYONE who manufactures has taken a significant hit. Seagate, AMD, etc took multi-million hits as a result. Only companies that do services (the less productive the better) who are reporting immediate positive results from the tax "cut".
That is not surprising too - the cut was self-serving and designed to favor "president's industries" first.
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