* Posts by Dave 15

2135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2010

UK warships to have less firepower than 19th century equivalents as missiles withdrawn

Dave 15

Re: MRV HMNZS Canterbury has a 4.5" gun

Could have done that with any ferry or passenger ship, didnt need a gun.

The gun etc. is useful only when you need to kill someone else, for evacuating tourists or delivering food the gun is just surplus weight and its ammunition wasted space.

If we are only going to use the navy for such humanitarian things then get some suitable ships for the job.

Dave 15

Agreed, if i can only defend at some point i will run out of defence and lose. I HAVE to be able to kill the enemy. If not I should stay at home and defend that when they arrive. . Same stupid thinking as when they scrapped the harrier. We had that because we COULD kill things with it! and we could still kill things even after we had no airfields.

Dave 15

Re: Battleships

Not totally true, the gulf war vsn 1 showed a use. However they DO need anti aircraft missile systems (preferably ones that work not the useless things we deployed in the falklands). Perhaps having the ability to fly an offensive version of a drone would also be good... a drone shooting an aircraft down would be fun to see and might allow us to use cheap shells rather than expensive missiles to wreak havoc in the enemies coastal areas (and 20 to 30 miles inland).

Dave 15

To be honest

Between Labour and Conservative...

We have one aircraft carrier... aka one torpedos worth... with a need for large amounts of oil which we cant get because we cant defend the ships bringing it to us. This aircraft carrier might have a couple of second rate american planes and wont last more than 5 minutes in any conflict. The second aircraft carrier will still be in mothballs and the conflict will be over before it is able to be at sea.

We have a number of other ships which are pointless whether they have or dont have offensive capability because any time they go anywhere the enemies planes or subs will sink them.

Anyway, as i recollect the drill for firing the gun involves standing fingers in the ear and shouting bang... which of course only ever worked for Monty Python

Besides we have an army of 10 people sharing 2 guns and 1 bullet. An airforce with 2 radio controlled planes.

Pointless the whole lot.

If I had my way we would have fleets consisting of 2 large and 4 small aircraft carriers flying bucanners from the large and harriers from the small. All would be nuclear powered. They would also have a couple of dozen frigates and destroyers and half a dozen cruisers ALL of the ships would bristle with ship to ground, ship to air and ship to ship missiles and depth charges, torpedos and some proper guns (the old ww2 battleships that the US deployed in the gulf were lobbing tons of high explosive shells practically for free all over the enemy, we can copy that). We would have fleets for the north sea, north atlantic, med, south atlantic, antartic, north pacific, south pacific, gulf, indian ocean. A spare fleet or two and a stack of cruisers, destroyers and frigates for random use. Then we actually have a navy worth the name. Anything less is just a waste of money

British banks chuck smartphone apps out of Windows

Dave 15

Re: I like your spelling

If you ever had one of their accounts you would say satan as well... in fact, i think satan is probably preferable. They really are a terrible terrible horrendous unpleasant and nasty bank

NHS IT bod sends test email to 850k users – and then responses are sent 'reply all'

Dave 15

reply all should

Reply all should as a side effect format your hard drive if there are more than 30 people on the chain (perhaps less, I don't mind)

Russia shoves antitrust probe into Microsoft after Kaspersky gripes about Windows 10

Dave 15

windows 10

I have it on a new machine, about to upgrade it to windows 7

10 is crud. For heavens sake even trivial things like playing a dvd are now impossible without going and downloading new software. Each time I try and use office it wont let me do this that or the other without clicking some pointless popup... for heavens sake if I want to edit a damned document let me! If you can't fix your damned software so that it doesn't allow some other person to screw my machine over then recruit some proper engineers.

Perhaps I might scrap that upgrade and go for linux

Brexit judgment could be hit for six by those crazy Supreme Court judges, says barrister

Dave 15

Re: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Pardon...

Regulation 2257/94 says something on the lines of "free from malformation or abnormal curvature."

Now what abnormal curvature is I don't know (I am sure that if we drop the banana part of this then we could have much more fun with the meaning

Zuckerberg says just one per cent of news on Facebook is fake

Dave 15

Facebook... nope, I use Daily Sport for my news

Or at least did when it was still around.. much better pictures

Virgin Media boss warns Brexit could hamstring broadband investment

Dave 15

Re: Christmas Time is here!

We haven't left so we are still paying the millions to be in a club we rejected. Frankly the politicians should have already pulled the plug on that but they haven't the balls.

Add to this that the government are failing to stand by people wanting to export (yes, I did some applications for help exporting to get squat, while at the same time - purely for comparison - did the same with the German government and was offered a significant package of financial and organisational help).

Dave 15

And in other news

Fred from the Cross Keys reckons Brexit could affect the chance of a sewage blockage at the Dog and Partridge down the road.

Marmite's not the only national treasure hit by Brexit. Will someone think of the PCs?

Dave 15

Re: Ah, the year 1 school of thought

Wrong on a number of counts.

a) There is no evidence that it was intellectually a sensible idea to vote to stay, there is no evidence that there is an upside to staying in a club that has consistently failed to deliver anything good for you.

b) No they wont put the prices up... if they do they lose business, if they put them up too much then competitors emerge who under cut them and they go out of business (at least in the UK, which is a massive market). Sure the prices might bob up and down as they normally do but nothing extraordinary will really happen.

Yes oil and gas are in dollars (why there was a gulf war... because certain countries threatened to sell oil in euros). But if the price is too high we travel around and frack some gas or drill some more holes in the north sea

Dave 15

Stupid?

OK, lets go through it....

a) Pound down, imports down, exports up, jobs up.

b) Jobs up, benefits down, tax (or deficit) down

c) Payments to EU eradicated, tax or deficit down

d) Freedom to do what we like, more freedom to create jobs, support critical industry etc. more jobs.

e) No rules used by government to justify buying Spanish tanks, more British tanks, more British jobs, more British investment, more British exports, less tax

f) The list of good goes on for many pages.

And yeah, I am sure the EU will continue to spout bull about 'no access to the single market without our rules" but bull is exactly what it is. If we can't sell there we stop them selling here... no spares for a bmw, no french wine, no italian cheese etc etc etc, they export more here than we do there, they will hurt most. We then offer country to country trade deals, I don't care what the rules are they club wont stick together... and even if it does there are massive markets outside the EU for us to sell to. And if we can't buy bmw spares we will make them, if we cant buy french wine we will make it, if we cant buy italian cheese we will make more of our own... more jobs, less tax, no losing for us here.

Now, put all that benefit against the fact you might buy a PC every couple of years and it might cost you a bit more than it did... I think the balance is clear. (Besides with the lower tax you can afford 3 or 4 new PCs anyway).

Have fun :)

That UK law that'll share Brits' private info among govt departments? Yeah, that'll need oversight

Dave 15

Re: Bureaucrats

There is no need to share any of this with the energy companies. Get rid of the stupid ideas in the first place.

If we had single flat tax and single flat benefit then we would all have more money (less collection overhead), those on benefit could (and would have to) move to where it is cheaper to live (housing is cheaper etc) and then would likely escape fuel poverty.

In addition renationlise the whole energy, rail, water etc etc industries which are essential, any over manning, any over charging and profit making will directly benefit the treasury allowing the national debt/tax to be reduced... again benefiting all.

Frankly the civil service and government seem to spend a hell of a lot of time coming up with glorious new ways to justify giving non-jobs to people by expanding departments for no good reason.

Take a look at the apparent need for hundreds of thousands more civil servants to deal with brexit... nothing to deal with here at all. Its simple, sign the article 50. Tell all the nations of the EU that they are welcome to set up a trade deal directly with us, if they hide behind the EU and stop importing our goods or imposing tariffs then our immediate reaction will be to stop ALL imports of anything in any form from their country (i.e. no spares for your bmw, no french wine, no irish butter etc etc etc). If the Americans can trade with the EU without freedom of movement then so can we... or else. Nothing more is actually needed.

Simplicity, thats what is needed. Dont forget that we ran an empire right around the entire world with less people than the dept of education needs to fail to teach our kids to add up!

Mercedes answers autonomous car moral dilemma: Yeah, we'll just run over pedestrians

Dave 15

The sea level thing is a bit odd, the other, well, I think it is better than a phone number in a kiosk, a description and finding something entirely different...

Dave 15

Yes but

I think the point the merc guy made is what happens next... sure the merc may choose to hit a tree in order to avoid killing the pedestrian, but does that immediately put the car coming the other way in a fix and cause another accident maybe spilling onto a pavement and killing a dozen school kids...

Russian hackers target MH17 journalists for embarrassing Putin

Dave 15

They really need to learn

The British government is much smarter at rubbishing stuff without people linking it.

EU ministers look to tighten up privacy – JUST KIDDING – surveillance laws

Dave 15

Didn't we...

Instruct people in the 'French resistance' on what to do and when using broadcast of plain language on radio the whole continent could hear?

Wouldn't parts of the German government at the time have suggested that blowing up trains, convoys of equipment, roads, bridges etc was terrorist incidents?

Really, all of this is just crud,

European human rights court rules mass surveillance illegal

Dave 15

Re: The UK government ... would lose international standing and reputation

As if it cares... the US says invade everyones privacy (or we will), the UK government does.... doesn't actually stop to ask how far it needs to go just gets rubber gloves on and away it goes.

No spine, no backbone, and a bunch of people here pushed around by a bunch over there when both ends go further than Stalin or anyone else would have dreamed possible

Apple: Samsung ripped off our phone patent! USPTO: What patent?

Dave 15

Re: Taketh away

Fit for purpose... thats certainly NOT prior art

Reavers! Google patent would affix pedestrians to car hoods

Dave 15

dont miss...

dont want to be stuck up do you

Dave 15

I like it... high speed hitch hiking

Pity about getting them off at the end of the lift though

Kind of like the idea that you could stick some fat **** to the front of your car and use them as an extra bumper (and yes wit my bulk I could protect against a large impact, but your fuel economy is going to suffer).

I do wonder how it will cope with car washes, kids playing football and other such normal things?

Revealed: The true horror of being a big CEO

Dave 15

Best thinking

My best thinking is done on the throne... if I am highly productive I am highly productive... :)

The wait is over: MoD releases latest issue of Ship Paint Monthly

Dave 15

oooh now I know how to classify the corrosion on my old Moggy

Thought it was simple...ooh look a blister, ooh heck a hole, oh hell the floor is missing...

High rear end winds cause F-35A ground engine fire

Dave 15

oh heavens

Thats not the sherpas fault it is because your maintenance department didnt know squat about setting up the toe in.

Struth.

TBH at least if we bought BL (or perhaps even built a fighter ourselves... tsr2 would still show the existing fighters up, and a modified supersonic harrier is certainly feasible), around a British engine (yes, Rolls Royce can still make engines), using some British computer trickery for the weapons (and British, not outsourced to India) we would have a product we could sell to others, have some money left in the bank and would have people in Britain employed by the British tax payer, spending their hard earned in the local community etc etc etc and perhaps we wouldnt be a broke country heading rapidly down the u-bend.

Ordinary punters will get squat from smart meters, reckons report

Dave 15

that would require

The companies to have some flat price per kwh and you to have continual access to all prices, and if that were possible we could devise software that kept switching all the time which would give them all a big headache

Far better to join you in the leftie revolution and take the whole lot into public ownership. Frankly I don't really care if that means employing too many people as that would mean paying less dole, and I dont mind if the company makes too much money as it would go back to the exchequer and mean less of an overdraft on the countries finances.

Unfortunately no political party is run by mere plebs who have to work to pay the bills, they are all run by the rich who have shares in all these companies and dont give a rats about the UK or the UK economy as long as they are richer by the week.

Dave 15

Re: Many sellers, with identical products

Market... pah, no its not. **they** know we **need** the power, they also know they can cartel well enough (like the supermarkets) so surprise surprise prices go up in case prices go up, prices stay up because they bought at a higher price, they go up because there might be an issue, they stay up because they had hedged their bets, they run the generator is a different company so the supplier can claim it is making nothing out of over charging youl

Valid logins to your workplace are on the net, right now

Dave 15

iOS or Windows? Why?

TBH we all know that it is the popular OS that get attacked because there is most chance not only of success but also profit. If you have a pathetic market share (Windows) then you will not be attacked for a very long time (brings us back to the Nokia idiot who dropped a phone with a large market share for one with none and said he was clever).

iOS is not too far behind Android and I suspect also has its hacks and exploits despite the walled garden protection.

I want to remotely disable Londoners' cars, says Met's top cop

Dave 15

Re: Why would the Met would need this capability considering....

They only blew the doors off

The thing about London is that on the few miserable ordeals of 'driving' through the hell hole I can confirm escaping by crawling on hands and knees would have been quicker anyway.

Personally I would just build the M25 up 300feet and fill in the whole thing and turn it into a giant lake... problem solved

Dave 15

Re: On-Star

Break off chases... seems that the only time the police stop the chase is when the police have killed a number of bystanders by not driving properly...

Sometimes of course they are also only training when the kill others

Dave 15

Re: Because Criminals will follow the rules?

Most of the boxes have lots and lots of cables coming in... all potential antenna. (Have been doing some testing with a car box which uses a modem we wanted to cut from the outside world ... harder than first thought ... and that was only against mobile phone radio waves.

Still, yup, a good old fashioned no electronics diesel powered car would be fair... and probably can be made pretty quick without the weight of all the safety equipment.

Dave 15

Re: "without having to smash the windscreen and pay damages to an innocent man."

Or beating a newspaper salesman to death because he was somewhere in the general area of a demonstration

Accenture leans back, receives £86m Met Police contract

Dave 15

Accenture

They win the contract because the civil service refuse to allow any new company to win a contract on the stupid clause that 'they havent done it before'... of course they havent because only one company hs.

They then pass the work out to a bunch of engineers in Bangalore (further destroying British industry, further draining money from the UK).

Those engineers will never have done anything like this before (the company has, but not the teams used).

The engineers will get paid nearly the same a month as the police are paying accenture a day.

And so the rich fat cats at the top get richer, the lubricating money slides to the civil servants and politicians who ensure the cosy relationship is protected

The tax payer ends up paying a huge bill for nothing much, gets some platitudes, pays unemployment to engineers here that should be doing the job, and sees shops etc. going bust because the engineers who should be being paid but are on the dole aren't buying anything. Then the taxpayer pays housing benefits to the whole damned lot who should be working but aren't

Then the 'powers that be' insult our intelligence by telling us this is all in the name of 'best value'. Not just the computer systems but police cars, army uniforms, guns, tanks, planes, ships, wall paper.. everything is handled in the same way.

Britain goes down the pan

In the meantime OTHER countries go and buy local and their economies survive and sometimes even flourish (find a foreign build cop car in Germany or France... just try, you will fail)

7,800 people's biometric data held on police anti-terrorism database

Dave 15

er... what

What about the biometrics the home office takes from vistors and all those police records which are never deleted of the biometrics taken when you happened to walk past a police station on a day of the week containing 'y'

Samsung’s consumer IoT vision – stupid, desperate, creepy

Dave 15

Re: Brainstorming here....

Get a life... things out of date!!!!! Food goes off but most food that is out of date is very very far from being even slightly dodgy. I prefer to check the food by smell, texture and so on and decide if it is fit for eating or fit for the bin.

And as for everything else.. I have light switches which I can use when I want to put a light on because it is dark (or if I want to turn them off when I have finished reading), I can judge when I need light for a particular task or if I am watching TV and don't care. I can also judge when the room will be used so that when the person walks in they don't have to wait freezing their brass monkeys off for the heating to warm it up! I also know what washing needs to be done and if I need to put on a half load because I need a particular item, or if the jeans are dirty because I have been fixing the car... I have a perfectly acceptable mk1 eyeball and use it!

Dave 15

Re: Yeah, but...

Dont be too sure... the politicians are all happy to take a back hander to introduce legislation to force manufacturers to only make the things the person giving the back hander profits from.

And yes it IS the case, just look at the number of MPs and Lords in the UK caught by regular sting operations by the press doing JUST what is described... but who get elected time and again (or in the case of the lords just left in place)

Dave 15

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

Oh come now, drifting off topic, but really, do you think having some bloke in a dirty overall tut tutting over your car and insisting you have several hundred quids worth of pointless repair that he benefits directly from actually helps safety?

Oh that rubber on the anti roll bar looks perished ... yes, the outer surface was no break, no dirt getting anywhere, no problem, no looseness, no safety issue.

Oh there is some oil on the bottom of the sump... yup, I was careless topping it up the other week, look its clean oil... oh no, even though it is clean and clearly never been through the engine you need to have all seals in the engine checked...

Balls to both, a wipe around with newspaper and a re test in another garage... no problems.

Dave 15

Re: Why....just why?

Of course not... it is a cheap machine with an expensive label, and no more reliable than the cheap one.

Dave 15

Re: Why....just why?

BTW when tempted by the highly expensive Miele have a check on the internet what other appliances the same company makes, look at the parts in both the cheap and expensive machines, conclude that the only substantial differences between the cheap and expensive are the logs and shape of the plastic buttons... and use that to realise that expensive is not always better... yup... Miele is a cheap machine with an expensive label.

Dave 15

Re: Why....just why?

Cheaper if you learn the skills to do the job yourself.... changed the pump the other day on mine... same pump in the very expensive appliance the wife was convinced was best as in the very cheap appliance that I told her was the same... still, told her she could pay the difference, she did, but I still had to fix it.

All that shite aside, its not just the cost of replacement but also the cost of the EU regulations... now new washing machines will only fill from cold ad use electricity to heat it up... no more filling from the hot water tank. (And for those environmentalists who think that is great... a summary of the old fashioned way.... cold water, gas boiler, hot water... washed clothes. And the new way... cold water, gas heater, steam, steam turbine, condenser to cool the boiling water that wasn't converted to energy, rotational energy (and hot bearings etc), electricity... lossy switches and cables... my house... cold water, electricity, hot water). The ONLY thing I see is more waste and a hell of a lot more cost.

Dave 15

THeromstats and radiator valves

Having rented a house with a 'smart' heating controller with remote operated valves et al I can inform you that you want that less than having your knee caps done good old IRA style with a hammer drill.

The software is awful, the stuff doesnt work and you end up paying a massive bill for the house to be too cold to use.

She cannae take it, Captain Kirk! USS Zumwalt breaks down

Dave 15

Re: weapons?

Could use the Royal Navy technique of shouting bang with your fingers in your ear... doesn't waste so much expensive ammunition, doesn't break the ships hull, doesn't get anything dirty... top job

Or (again as with royal navy) you can fit the necessary tools to fire the weapons but save money by not having any missiles or shells.

Dave 15

Re: Displaced, by gad.

Probably only a dribble

Dave 15

Re: OK it looks small to radar

We tried using optics in ww1 and ww2, didn't really work too well in either.

Radar was a big improvement.

Dave 15

Re: With this tonnage...

Obese? It is American so what do you expect?

The next Cuban gristle crisis: US Navy warship powered by beef fat

Dave 15

WHAT A WASTE

Fry your chips in beef fat.... they taste SO much better than those miserable veggie oil fried things.

THEN use the chip fat to power your ship (or landrover)

Microsoft deletes Windows 10 nagware from Windows 7 and 8

Dave 15

Windows 10 downgrades

Yup, my machine 'updated' itself... the result half of everything didn't work, the settings were all destroyed, went back to foreign language and wrong keyboard etc etc

And as for the latest versions of office... FFKS what do Microsoft not understand about I opened a word document so I can edit it, print it, read it... WHY OH WHY OH WHY do I now need to find different options in a pile of different places, click on 2 dozen different banners in order to do what I obviously wanted to do in the first place!!!!

An opportunity for linux etc. to take over... if only that weren't just as bad

MI6 to hire another 1,000 bods 'cos of private surveillance tech

Dave 15

Struggle to recruit...

Not surprised, salaries are so low as to e a joke, then there is the above mentioned 'buggins turn' and 'never mind the quality see the length of service' matched with the idea of joining in with unmitigated spying on everyone and anyone just because it can be done.

Going, going, done: Trio of prolific auction fraud fraudsters jailed

Dave 15

Re: Bank security

Strange, I have NEVER been asked about what I am taking money for or where I am paying in from.

Yes I had to provide some id when opening the account but that wasn't exactly a lot.

Dave 15

Wonder how it compares

A quarter of a million theft and the sentences... how does that compare in hours per pound to other thefts?

OF course the BIGGEST thefts... the banks, the fraud of taking payment for goods then pulling the plug and going bankrupt (think world of leather, land of leather, leather world.... etc etc etc who have done this many many times) ... these huge corporate scams are totally un punished... not one single bank boss, ceo or minister has been sent down for these massive scams.