Posts by GrumpyKiwi 461 posts • joined 21 Jul 2013
Back in the mid 90's when contracting for a part of Brutish Rail I got sent to Bletchley (no not the park) to the depot where a terminal had "stopped working".
Got there, wiped the inch thick layer of dust off the screen that was preventing it from being viewable and job done. Even got a nice cup of tea out of it, so I considered that a pretty decent result.
All the ex-GCHQ people I worked with were dodgy-as scumbags who thought nothing of cheating on their spouses and taxes and several of whom were heavily involved in a corporate fraud liquidation/phoenix rebirth scheme that cost several of my friends and ex co-workers a lot of money.
GCHQ could tell me that the sky is blue and I wouldn't trust a word they said.
You'll note that almost all of the companies in this list are tech companies that invest heavily in R&D.
R&D Tax Credits are a bipartisan favourite in the US. The last major revision of them was done under the Obama administration which (rightly IMO) valued the long term effects of greater R&D spending. One of the reasons Amazon pays relatively little federal tax is because it spends so much on R&D.
For a long time because I was a tight bastard, my range bag was also my cabin bag for travel.
I'd regularly get stopped and swabbed while travelling with it (usually between NZ and Aus), often within 24 hours of it being used to store magazines, ammo and so forth.
Never once asked any questions or any other consequences. Makes me wonder just how much of the process is psychosomatic.
That said I also have anecdotal evidence of an Australian Army engineering team coming back from Iraq having spent their time there doing BDA and other demolition work being stopped by a particularly unimaginative Australian Border Patrol officer who could not understand why a group of soldiers (in uniform no less) kept dinging the machine, even after they showed him their various paperwork on their role.
Yes that would explain why in 1997 I got them thumping on my front door telling me I had a TV and no license. At the time I had no TV and told them to go f*** right off.
Clearly it was very "easy" to detect. So easy one might suspect that they were in fact just making it up on the fly.
I got lucky, I take exactly zero credit for how easy it was in the end.
It turned out that all the stuff I had been doing over the past 2 years - laptops for all, managed external supplier VPN, Teams rollout, RDP apps for the ERP, remote device management - were exactly the things needed to let the whole company work from home.
I also look after IT for a charity dealing with mental health. They were in the unfortunate situation of needing a lot of laptops all of a sudden at a time of low availability. They had to go to a local consumer electronics shop (sounds like Noel Lemons for other kiwis) and got a hodge-podge of massively overpriced and underspecc'd random brands and models. Luckily they too were already set up for VPN access and remote desktop so at least that aspect of it worked OK.
You can judge just how important Huawei is to China's intelligence networks by how loudly they've shrieked over their equipment being banned.
When Trump banned it in the US it was as if he'd wiped his ass on the Chinese Flag, said Xi looked like Winnie the Pooh on crack and that the Chinese Communist Party had spent all of WW2 hiding from the Japanese except when selling them opium*.
When Trump threatened to ban Tik-Tok you got a little pro-forma theatre and nothing else.
Quite clearly Huawei is strategic to them.
* this is exactly what they did, they just don't like acknowledging it.
Ex-GF (from a very long time ago) youngest brother worked there too until it was closed down. When I visited him his house was full of all the latest and greatest in IT tech of the time with WANG logos slapped on everything. He said that when the place closed down everyone grabbed an empty shopping trolley and walked out with a full one.
Dunno about you, but when I tried just throwing a WAP into the middle of a road, it didn't provide me with any wireless. I ended up having to attach it to a pole, provide it with electricity and an ethernet connection to the internet. Which might have some costs associated with it like labour/permits/materials. Just saying.
***The argument is that drugs are expensive to create, so they need to be priced high to recoup the cost. Well, some free time on the world's biggest supercomputer (x600) should knock off a bunch of development costs.***
The biggest chunk of costs are getting FDA approval - something that can take up to 10 years. No amount of super/ultra/mega-computing time will cut that type of paperwork.
They're not protected in NZ, they're a major pest - you can hunt them any time of the year using any method. They're also smart enough that they're bloody hard to do pest control on. They're big enough that shotgun rounds designed for ducks are shrugged off, and cunning enough to not let people get close enough to use larger rounds. The best bag I ever got required sitting with a supressed rifle on a hill more than 200 meters away from the pond - I got just two. The remaining 30 or so took flight.
Any Canadian goose dinners we get are well earned and have required teamwork, a good dog and more than a little luck.
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The Canadian fighter was the Avro (Canada) Arrow. Which was a potentially very good interceptor for shooting down Russian bombers that had the misfortune to enter testing at the moment that the USSR demonstrated Sputnik - showing that bombers were no longer the primary threat to be concerned with.
It's critically important that your local council can demand that you unlock your phone so that they can prove it was you who was walking your dog nearby when the highly trained nose of the nearby parking warden smelled s*** (don't ask about how they're trained, it involves senior council management, a tonsilectomy, a rabbit shaped jelly mould and a corgi called Dai).
The FIB has a long history of lying about this. They claimed at once stage they had over 8,000 locked phones that were preventing crimes from being solves. The actual number turned out to be about 10% of that - none of it terrorist related, almost entirely down to the "highly sucessful" war on drugs.
It's pretty safe to run on the assumption that when the head of the FIB says something, it's a lie.
Don't know why you got downvoted. Leigh-Mallory should have been awarded the Iron Cross for his services to Germany while in charge of Fighter Command. The Middle and Far East were crying out for good aircraft and crew while he was wasting them in pointless sweeps.
That being said, when Spitfire pilots did first clash with Zero's, they got the same bloodied nose as everyone else who tried to dogfight with a Zero.
Interesting - especially as the "nothing East of Suez" dated long before Thatcher - back to the 1960's and was used to justify the end of the RN's carrier fleet. And was exactly the reason why there wasn't any significant RN presence in HK.
Then you have the small fact of the treaty that had only a 99 year lease on most of Hong Kong. The UK could have ignored/broke it. All that would do is demonstrate an utter lack of respect for treaties. There is no possible way that could rebound right?
I think you are perhaps misremembering things.
Not quite. Aircraft carriers were part of the 5:5:3: ratio. They were also limited to 8" guns just in case anyone decided to build disguised heavy cruisers. It turned out that 8" gunfire and aircraft are not a happy mix and most such carriers never fired their 8" guns in anger. Only the Japanese and USN even bothered to fit such weapons - probably on the principle that the most likely foe for an aircraft carrier in the Pacific was an enemy cruiser.
Singapore was a mixed of a military and a civilian screw up.
For example the military wanted to employ a whole lot more dock workers to get goods off supply ships as quickly as possible when they arrived. The Governor General of Malaya was opposed as it would almost certainly raise the wages of the people working in the rubber plantations and tin mines - the owners of which were his golfing chums. The result - a number of freighters loaded with urgently needed supplies were sunk at their berth, still unloaded.
On the other hand the military was also being run on a peacetime basis, even after the Japanese attacked. A story is told of an Australian unit that tried to get mines and barbed wire to help protect the shore they were guarding. A unit was sent to the supply depot to get some - it was closed because it was Saturday.
It was not the Empire's finest moment. The US at least could point to Bataan holding out until April - exactly what it was supposed to do under the old War Plan Orange. Singapore, "the Gibraltar of the Far East" lasted a week.
It wasn't the Kido Butai that the PoW and Repulse were up against, but land based naval bombers.
I do totally agree that had pretty much any force in the RN at the time come up against the Kido Butai they'd have come off second (if not third) best. The RN's carriers could probably have survived a dive bombing attack, but the IJN's torpedo bombers and torpedoes were top notch and very few ships survive multiple torpedo strikes.
I've just been re-reading Bloody Shambles, a history of the air war in SE Asia during 1941 and 1942.
The RN had realised a year back that only a minimum of three battleships, a carrier, three heavy cruisers and at least ten destroyers would represent a serious and viable task force against the Japanese. However almost none of that was available at the time, and those that were, were not necessarily the best choices for the role.
For example HMS Prince of Wales had been designed from the start for service in European waters. Her cooling was entirely inadequate for tropical service and among the first things to break from the heat were her radar systems. HMS Repulse on the other hand was designed to serve anywhere in the British empire - conditions onboard her were significantly more comfortable than on PoW. When other ships of the KGV class were sent to the Pacific in 1944, they were first given a major upgrade of air conditioning systems (and a nice "harmless" protective layer of asbestos).
The RAF had offered to have a CAP of 6 Buffalo aircraft overhead during daylight hours at all times. This was turned down by Admiral Philips because he was a desk jocky with zero recent experience of ship operations and didn't understand the need for top cover. He probably would have done equally poorly had a carrier been available. Even just 6 fighters could have caused a lot of havok with the unescorted Japanese torpedo bombers.
Finally the IJN pilots of the time were first class while the training of the RAF pilots in the region ... left a lot to be desired. (For example there was almost no aerial gunnery training as it wore out the guns and required more maintenance than was available).
Transfer pricing is what enables my IT team's work to be charged to our Australian subsidiary where 90% of the support is needed. If that wasn't the case, the CFO would be demanding that we relocate to Australia - a fate worse than death.
It's not some kind of unmitigated evil - it's a normal accounting practise, especially where services are spread over multiple countries. The devil as always is in the details.
Meanwhile also in NZ, a combination of Police and SAP incompetence resulted in personal details of all firearms license holders being made available to any dealer who logged into the system - rumour has it that it wasn't just dealers either, but any bozo. Thanks very much Plod & SAP for handing out a shopping list to the local crims.
***Even during the war, the German economy never really went onto a war footing - mostly because they couldn't afford to - all the resources that they gained by invading other countries (including slave labour) didn't make up for the fact that they were living way, way beyond their means.***
The big problem they had was that there just weren't enough resources to go around - especially with steel and the coal you need to make it. So in 1940 a large percentage of the steel had to be diverted to ammunition making as they were running very low on it. Meanwhile aircraft and vehicle production suffer. The next year ammuniton was plentiful for the invasion of the USSR, but it was only by looting the crap out of France and other occupied nations that they could get sufficient vehicles to even attempt to invade. (And of course having 600+ different designs of vehicles in service was a really bad idea when it came time to logistically support such a vehicle fleet in the field).
Of course stealing all of France's trucks, cars, trains and coal meant that the French were no longer able to make and supply steel so instead of adding to Germany's overall power the French were a drain. And this was a pattern repeated in the other occupied states - a crippling of the state for a short term gain followed by a long term liability in which slave labour became the only thing they were good for supplying.
Germany did end up hitting it's peak possible performance in 1943 as far as production was concerned - every available man was in the armed forces or production, and there was effectively no civil economy. By that stage they'd given up any pretence that they could keep their economy under control - inflation rose massively while living standards plumetted. It was all to be sacrificed in the name of the Gotterdamerung on the Eastern Front.
***Well, when WW2 started Germany was also very strong so the excuse of "free American money" (which wasn't really free) doesn't really cut it.***
Germany was very definitely NOT economically strong at the start of WW2. It was barely being kept afloat by the looting of the Austrian and Czech treasuries and a great deal of financial shenanigans.
There is a very good book called "The Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze that goes into the pre-war (and wartime) German economy and how they were (barely) able to to pay for rearmament and what this meant for the average German worker (hint - poverty, especially compared to the likes of a British worker).
***TSR2 - a world leading design that was cancelled...***
On the one hand the TSR2 was indeed a world leading design. On the other it was very much a bleeding edge design with all that implies for costs and development time. At the time of cancellation it still had massive issues to overcome, some of which they weren't even sure if they could be overcome. An endless financial black hole is not something the governments of the day could look upon with calm soothing thoughts. Especially when the F-111 was being developed with American money and at American risk.
Yes if there is one thing governments are good for it's protecting our privacy. Well obviously not everyones privacy. In fact not anyones privacy.
In fact they're notoriously shit at it, and unlike Google or Facebook have been known to send the odd drone or special operations teams to kill people when they get things wrong (or right).
Asking the government to safeguard our privacy is like asking a bunch of foxes what kind of protection chickens need.
Here's a nice 3 seconds of googling from 2017.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11798314
Here's the muppet shooting his own police station.
https://www.ipca.govt.nz/Site/Outcomes/2018-19-summaries-of-police-investigations/2019-mar-18-accidental-discharge-of-firearm.aspx
Local police firearms training consists of 35 shots a year from their Glock's and a single magazine from their AR's at targets "as far away" as 35 meters.
Of course when you shoot yourself in the bum, that's a sign of competency, not that you should be charged with a crime.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/09/police-officer-accidentally-shoots-himself-in-the-buttock.html
Or a place where local youfs favourite activity is playing "stab the stranger". Or places where the penalty for being an infidel is to have your concerts exploded or shot up. Or a place where "rape the westerner, they're all asking for it" is a common weekend activity. And so forth.
Or for that matter, living in a place where the local cops are a lot better at shooting themselves in the foot or bum, or shooting the police station or their own car than they are at hitting an actual threat (which I do).
The Glock 17 was the Liberator of its time. "Undetectable" even though it had large amounts of metal.
"That punk pulled a Glock 9 on me. You know what that is? It's a porcelain gun made in Germany. It doesn't show up on your airport X-ray machines here and it costs more than what you make in a month!"
Which is at least 4 lies for the price of one.
Issues order that the tides may not come in - aka that things posted on the internet must vanish.
The LIberator is a piece of plastic crap. I am however aware of people using metal sintering 3D printers to produce far stronger and more useful components - something the NZ government has decided to acknowledge by putting it's fingers in it's ears and chanting "la la la la, I can't hear you, our arms confiscation program is 100% successful".
Sigh!
When you want a hammer that doesn't EVER generate sparks when you're using it to adjust a fuze in an environment full of gunpower. When you want a toilet seat that goes into an airplane that doesn't put out toxic smoke in the event of it catching fire or shatter into razor sharp fragments.
Like most things designed for specialised environments where the product run is short, the costs per item are high.
There are many many things you can criticise various militaries for spending and/or wasting their money on - spending money to make things safer for their solders, sailors and airmen is not one of them.
1999? Contracting for the British MoD rolling out ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS*** on a ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS*** platform.
The best bits were the ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS***, but that sure didn't compensate for ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS*** and the worst of it was that my line manager was ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS*** and Welsh.
Looking back on it, I can only shake my head and ***DELETED FOR SECURITY REASONS***.
Hey kids, remember when the FIB were the defenders of democracy and justice because they investigated the Trump that one time.
Wait, oh yeah, they never were. They only just admitted to abusing the NSA's surveillence systems, using it thousands of times a day. This means they can totally be trusted with this system to never abuse it because they learned their lessons from the last time right?
The FIB have repeatedly shown themselves as scum. They're hated by the rest of US law enforcement as the guys who "show up after all the work has been done to claim the credit". They only existed because in 1920's it was too hard to co-ordinate between local, state and federal agencies - that time has long since past. Got to be time to think about breaking them up and shuffling their brave defenders of justice off to any agency that would take them.
**Pedant alert
Green actually means 'You may proceed if it is safe to do so'**
Nope I'm pretty sure it means "look up from your f***ing phone which you've been checking Faecesbook and messaging about that wicked parti after everyone behind you starts honking the horn because it's been green for 5 seconds FFS and slowly progress forward leaving just enough time for one more person to get through safely".
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