No Brainer
This is a no brainer - I wonder why you even bothered to write this in a rag for professionals. More appropriate for the back pages of the Beano.
154 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Feb 2014
Looking for European Wars?
Balkans not so long ago, Moldova with its breakaway territory, likewise Ukraine [officially Europe streches to the Urals]. simmering Catalonia, Corsica. All of which have Russian encouragement or active participation.
Peace is a fragile thing and not necessarily to the advantage of the the great & powerful.
You are quite correct.
In a geopolitical context, the USA sees this split and is alarmed at this flexing of German strength especially with Germany making friendly overtures towards Russia (Ukraine & Nord Stream II as a couple of examples).
Conspiracy theorists would contend that Dieselgate, Hungsry's & Poland's ideological traumas with the EU, and Brexit are all part of an attempt to prevent the resurgence of Germany which has always considered Middel Europe as its fief (colony). Now it's German hegemony of Western Europe that needs to be completed: luckily for Merkel, Macron's doing it nicely. It makes you wonder whether some elections are "aided & abetted" to ensure an appropriate result.
One thing is clear, the .eu domain is a precurseur to far greater fireworks in the near future.
"the current deal we have with the EU is the best anyone has,"
I don't believe that is correct, the best deal is with Deutchland, they pay but they effectively run the show. It's cheaper than using military might whch they've already tried unsuccessfully. This is why the Yanks are against Merkel especially as she's cuddling up to Putin.
The UK should be voting afresh until the UK attains the "right" result that would be the preferred EU choice, The EU has already used this approach with Eire when it was told to jump a second time but somehow the UK doesn't want to jump in the right direction and all the EU treaties barely paid lip service to the unthinkable idea that anyone would leave.
Currently it looks as if Brexit is the first of several exits (Hungary?) to avoid a Geman controlled super-state. Mercifully the Germans don't have a viable army at the moment so the Sudentland is safe for the moment. The EU are however making progress having found a modern Chamberlain aka Macron. He clearly understands German needs less so France's.
That's exactly what will happen in the case of Northern Ireland. The UK will tell the EU that UK integrity is a higher good than an EU regulation and if the EU wants a border then it should make Eire a "special" case just as the EU wants Northern Ireland to be a special case.
That such a solution will leave a big hole in the EU's walls is not a UK issue and there are plenty of holes already in the EUs barriers already including the VAT carousels.
"Do you think there might possibly be a good reason for Germany having a shit army for all those years? And where's the threat supposed to come from since the Soviet army bankupted the USSR?"
The reason for US army bases in Germany is to remind the Boch of its place militarily however that shouldn't stop Germany from have a working army & airforce. Other countries have similar readiness issues.
You forget Russia's recent actions all around its territory including annexation of Crimea and earlier parts of Georgia and even Moldavia. In other countries including many European ones it's purpose is one of generating chaos; think of the Balkans. Putin's using the old tactic of foreign agression abroad to bolster his position @ home. A clear readiness to respond to any aggression is paramount for one's safety and having decent armed forces is one of them.
Showing your age there with NDB! I made lots of journeys flying via NDB signals; quite fun too even though the routes tended to be somewhat circular and that's before you took the wind into account. Still long for those days of intrepid journeys when you really had to be a real pro to successfully navigate through the clouds.
All the fun has gone out of navigating with GPS whichever format you use. Personally I'm for dead-reckoning:)
In France Phillips & Co (and they all do it), have the simple solution to give the same model a slightly different model number to every different distributor and which of course by coincidence have the same price. You look up say a LG washing machine on the manufacturer's web page then you find that stores like Darty, aka Currys etc, do not have the exact model number but at that price there happens to be a similar model from the same manufacturer.
Wonder if the EU will ever decide to investigate such practices?
Can anyone explain how its possible to take a $1 million (or equivalent in Roubles for that matter) out of a ATM in a day? Surely this would require many a barren of mules and manyt ATMs.
This could only have occurred abroad as luckily we have NatWest in the UK - the ATMs would just stop working or should I say TSB?
Good idea, there are sensors available that can measure the weight of lorries as they are moving (sensors in the macadam). We use them to catch overweight lorries. Shouldn't be too challenging to do someting simaltar for a plane (ie measure the load on each of the undercarriage legs) and that can give a fairly good CoG. Only issue will be the stiffiness of avaition authorities.
You must be joking! We only have a DR plan and I'm sure we have two complete days to recover. Customers , yeah we're B2B so we do not have to listen these wimps unable to storm the bar and drown their misssed meetings / shortened holidays. They should take their punishment like a man, We're sure they deserve to suffer for something they did.
Oh, by the way we're still within our SLA's, BA wanted a low price and that equals a feeble SLA.
Bottom line is you get what you pays for BA!
Putin has a big problem, namely that of a declining population. He has a a master plan to reverse this trend. One of the ways round it is via acquisitions such as Crimea. This population issue is much grater than that of the West. Merkel tried to solve her manpower issue with open borders, Putin prefers having larger borders. If in doubt look around the borders of Russia with the exception of perhaps China, there's meddling going on.
I suspect Trump's meeting had on the one hand North Korea in mind as the principal prize or on the other perhaps it was an attempt to thwart a new Ribentrof/Molotov agreement, this time an economic one. Heaven knows what was promised in return; a new Yalta.
Only the Yanks will fine a car manufacturer. The other countries are quite happy with a telling off. Look at how impotenet are the French and most certainly not to a company with French links. The German fines of VAG were symbolic in comparison to the US approach.
Unfortunately its a case of too big to fail as regards the car inducstry.
Putin issued the same sort encouragement to his citizens for the World Cup. Luckily for IBMers the penalties for not adhering to this advice is merely the sack back in he Motherland its a labour camp.
Mind you, as a male, I wouldn't mind running the risk of sacking with a selfie with Ginni in the ladies "powder" room. I'm sure I'd be able to sue for a monstrous amount for unfair dismissal.
They're all at it, humble IoT devices need the internet to function! This is only done to gleen even more marketing data for flogging you more stuff. Just waiting for the day my local chemist will contact me because my sleep monitor tells him (for a price of course) that my sleep pattern indicates I need something more effective than a cup of Ovaltine.
Of course with such a huge single point of failure the rewards for a bit of holding to ransom a few million punters is really tempting. Anyone know how to open a bitcoin account?
I've been hearing that this year will be the year of Linux et al every year since the 1990s and it still ain't happening. Can't believe that you can really put the blame on Wintel though - maybe the real reason is that the Linux platforms (and there are a lot of them) are really niche products.
As the article points out Chipzilla has issues and they're not going to be resolved by going BSD,
"plants often plan their maintenance shutdowns over the late spring and early summer months when fertilizer demand is lowest."
All the plants that I've ever handled plan their maximum usage of fertilizer during spring and summer so surely this is incorrect or have I misunderstood?
The EU is not at all coherent- examples abound probably the worst is that over immigration: Germany invites and southern Europe assumes (wanted to use another word but we need to be PC).
The Germans lost the war and are now winning economically - the UK is well to avoid the coming fate of France and Greece has already been taken over and on the cheap! The rest will will follow. The new members in the Balkans are just cannon fodder for Angela.
Not at all. This is the great misconception in Blighty,; It's the EU that needs a deal.
I personally would stare the EU out on Brexit. To take a simple example, France can't afford to take back its citizens as they already have a dire unemployment situation particularly with the millennials. Would you believe that at he "pole emploi" (French of where you sign up for the dole) actively encourages the unemployed to go to the UK.
As for NI, I'm totally in favour of no border and telling the EU to propose a solution. Instead these UK negotiators are doing the job of solving EU issues. For the UK a no-border is obligatory for all the good reasons, if the EU doesn't like it then they should dream up some sort of solution.
The EU specialises in dreaming up solutions. Did you know that according to the EU (suggested by the French, could it have been anybody else) snails are classed as fish! Hows that for thinking out of the box!
Unconventional he might be, certainly unpredictable but it seems that the Donald method has better results than his predecessors' and even the famously negative press coverage that he gets can't escape the fact that he's getting more results than those dither's Obama & Clinton. At the moment he seems even capable of ignoring his own backers which the Bushes failed to do.
For a laptop roll out I organised a beauty contest between HP/Dell/Lenovo. Most of the laptops did not impress on the company's main badly written application used as the main benchmark. The reason all these nice shiny laptops under-performed was that this application (from a blue chip auditor) did more writes than reads and the suppliers had used SSDs optimised for reads which in normal circumstances would have been fine. Would you believe that the suppliers replaced the SSDs to handle the situation. In view of the few thousand laptops potentially to be ordered they had no other choice.
Size does count.
Small planes are ferried, that is flown across the Atlantic on a regular basis. There are two fundamental routes allowing these small planes to handle this type of challenge: via Greenland (Great Circle route) or via the Azores. You don't even have/need inflight refuelling as the average small plane doesn't have access to flying tankers. In case you ask these small planes are often, mostly singles even the small twins aren't ETOP.
Clearly we're buying museum pieces but at these prices I'd prefer a Picasso; its more likely to go up in value and I don't need an Erdogan for maintenance.
Big?
Geographical size is irrelevant. Most important is the number of potential fanbois. Taking the fact the population of Russia is in decline (alcohol?) and the limited number of oligarchs (by definition limited) and above all a lack of a middle class with a sufficient disposable income, the loss of a "huge" Russian market will not dent Apple's turnover or profit: a mere blip on the horizon.