Posts by Psyx

"designed to head up the exhaust of a gas turbine"

Modern ones will quite happily lock on to the front of one too, if that helps!

But that has me thinking that some form of unguided rocket with a continuous rod warhead may be the way to go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous-rod_warhead

Re: What if...

"And finally: No one is dumb enough to fire a gun in a built up area anyway, the chance of hitting someone is FAR too high for even the most STUPID person to consider it. "

I admire your faith in humanity.

However, last week called to say that you're wrong:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/two-shot-dead-gangnam-style-wedding-dance-yemen-110021588.html

Re: Oh deer!!

"These rounds are supposed to be almost as accurate as standard rifle rounds."

If your rifle is only as accurate as a smoothbore sabot round, I recommend straightening the barrel.

Re: Weapons

..22 rimfire != .223 NATO.

I love the way the bootnote telling us just how awesome Lewis is weighs in as being nearly as long as the article.

Frankly, the article and bootnote read as an ego-pumping exercise for Lewis. I can't wait for next week's article: "Why you can't satisfy your wife and I can".

Re: "nothing illegal to be wearing Google Glass"... yet.

I'm of the opinion that anyone driving around with a pair on that is switched off needs to be fined just as much for being a sad poser as they would be if they were driving without due care and attention with a pair switched on!

Honestly, the defendant is either a lying butt-weasel or pretty pathetically in need of attention to be driving around with them switch off but still on her face.

"I am sure Assange knows this and stays away from windows lest he be assassinated by one of the snipers 500 meters from the embassy....just waiting patiently for him he forget as he admires the view from a window."

Tinfoil hat, sir?

Or are you seriously suggesting that the US of A is camped quarter of a mile away, happy to blow away an Australian, sat in an embassy, in the UK?

Re: Rumours

"Snowden has taken front place is stealing all the limelight."

Quite right, too.

Snowdon is an ex-NSA employee who got his own story, got it out and made himself a wanted man.

Assange just passed on what someone else is rotting in jail for getting and rolled around the world on the back of it, lapping up media attention.

Re: And of course....

"Nope he won't go to UK jail"

He possibly will, before being extradited. He broke his bail conditions. I don't give a toss about whatever else he did and what happens next, but the fucker stuck his fingers up at our entire legal system and cost us a fortune when he decided that he didn't agree with what the court said.

Money and fame gave him far more chances than any of the rest of us would have got, and I despise the little shit for it.

Re: this should be good

"This one clearly has a long way to run"

Unlike Assange, who only has about twelve feet to run before he hits a wall...

Re: I am wondering...

You get lasered by your X-box.

Or you would, if the laser worked.

Re: No Such Thing as Profanity!

"YOU do not have the right to censor ME for ANY reason! That is the very basis of free speech!"

Yes I do.

No its not.

It's a service provided by Microsoft, and they can censor you over their airwaves just as much as they fucking like, and there is fuck all you can do about it, because you elected to use that service. So basically, you're talking rubbish.

You appear to be one of those people who whine about 'free speech' and 'rights' without actually understanding what is and is not covered, nor what level of responsibility such freedoms levy upon on you.

It's you who's the whining panty-waister.

Honestly, there should be a new 'Godwin's Law' for people who start to bleat on about 'free speech' inappropriately.

Re: No Such Thing as Profanity!

"in the company of consenting adults."

Ummm... you just hit the nail on the head: I think that the issue is that people who merely happen to be playing the same game as you *aren't* consenting to be swore at and many of them aren't adults.

Re: One point that is often conveniently forgotten ...

"when they are used in my vicinity, I can feel the affects of the nicotine."

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/psychosomatic

Re: @dogged (was: One point that is often conveniently forgotten ...)

"Do you really think sharing your addiction with all and sundry is a good idea?"

Do you go and hide in the cupboard when having your morning coffee or evening pint, then?

Re: One point that is often conveniently forgotten ...

"No matter how you you look at it, these narcotic drug delivery systems are evil."

I can look at it in plenty of ways that aren't evil.

What you are saying though is that your drugs of choice are fine, and everyone else's are evil. If you do happen to be tee-total and don't consume other mind-altering drugs like caffeine and chocolate then I might consider retracting my statement, but until then you're just being a massive hypocrite.

Re: One other benefit...

"your eCig might get snapped in half if you sit next to the wrong person...me for instance."

You might get punched in the face for doing that to the wrong person... me for instance.

There is no rational reason to lash out at someone smoking one of these things any more than there is for a tee-total person to lash out at someone drinking a pint near them.

Re: > so bright ... because it was so close to Earth

New Scientist reports 3.6 billion. Mainstream news 4 billion.

I love the way that mainstream media casually rounded up by 2,351,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles!

"I'm actually writing a book now and thinking of the title. "

How about:

'Care in the community through my own eyes'

Or maybe

'Under the tin-foil hat'

Re: There WAS a female driver in the past...

It's actually perfectly legit for women to drive on private property, such as compounds, or within ARAMCO.

Re: A Call to action

"Have the Saudi authorities considered a policy of mass lobotomisation for their women folk?"

I believe Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying a trail scheme called "shoot girls who go to school", which is half-way to being the same thing.

"At the time your correspondent, then a young trainee telecoms engineer, spent five months on secondment to Bahrain in the late '80s, the Saudi driving test purportedly involved driving five metres forward and five metres in reverse – together with the payment of a modest bribe (baksheesh). It's unclear how far things have moved along in the 25+ years since."

It's now 100m forward, reverse into a parking bay and a bottle of Black Label.

Re: Solitary Confinement?

"Maybe Obama will hound this guy to suicide, too."

Yeah, because he's personally responsible for every one of your laws that put the guy in jail in the first place. You should totally blame him for everything.

Re: AaRGHH - how standards have been perverted

"I can scarcely credit what my eyes saw."

The entire point of the survey was to find a decent work brew, made under work-brew conditions. Not to take high tea. Now you might drink from fine china and consume the finest loose leaf in the confines of your office, but the vast majority of us make it in bags and drink it by the half-pint.

Re: says

"Brit tanks had them as standard fit."

HAD? Still have, you mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_vessel

(Although it appears that the idea they were present in WW2 in any numbers appears to be a complete myth)

Re: Surely (...don't call me...)

"4 minutes in a mug is truly excessive (and the tea would be cold by then). Brew tea in a teapot (properly seasoned, of course) for 4 minutes..."

The point of the exercise was to evaluate the 'work brew', which is why the idea of using a pot was previously discussed and discarded during lengthy debate (Rightly too: Although a few have such things at work, most of us don't!). I don't remember signing off on a 4 minute brew time, though!

I tend to leave Yorkshire for a minute or two, because you get that lovely clay-red colour.

But 4 minutes is insanity. It only gets left that long if I go for a slash while it's brewing and decide to have a dump instead!

I can only assume that the testers don't really like tea!

That or the 4 minute brew time is making the decent stuff taste of too much tanin and is making the undrinkable dishwater into something nearly drinkable.

Re: An oldie, but a goodie

"The crossbow disarmed peasants, put skilled archers out of work and fixed powere even more firmly in the hands of feudal lords."

That's a bit of a simplistic over-reach tainted by modern mythology surrounding both weapon systems. I don't disagree that the author is an ass with a stupid view of history, but not strictly for the reasons you outline.

Firstly, the crossbow didn't kill off the longbow in the medieval period in Britain *at all* (there wasn't anything to kill off elsewhere, so I'm assuming we must be talking about Britain). The 100 year war came to the end and reduced the need for quite such a large dedicated corps of Yeoman, but they carried on in use as the primary ranged weapon of armies in Britain until gunpower took over, as evidenced by the findings on the Mary Rose and plenty of sources. So the author was flat-wrong there.

"As the author states, any bellend can be reasonably certain of hitting their target with a crossbow. This means you can round a bunch of brainless thugs and use them rather than pay money for soldiers who've spent years learning how to shoot properly with a longbow. Nice, right? Suddenly the people are free?"

The author is mistaken and playing to longbow vs. crossbow mythology. Crossbows are not magically immune to windage or trajectory or flight-time. Genoa was famous for its crossbowmen for a reason: It's a skilled job, still. So much so that it was worth paying guys to protect crossbowmen and even sometimes do the loading for them. Don't think that shooting with a crossbow is any less skilful than using a bow. Remember also that the longbow was the machine-gun of the era, used for firing indirectly at tight formations, not for robin-hood style antics as portrayed in film. Archers shot at flat targets on the ground, not nicely upright ones at close range, like we see today. Hitting a dense formation is not hard.

The reason why Yeoman were valuable isn't because of some uber-level of hand-eye coordination: It was physical strength and grunt-power. Firing a powerful longbow requires powerful shoulders. THAT'S where the training comes in: You need strong and practised men to bend a bow. Crossbows were an easier weapon system to use because you didn't need to be as strong to load them, and you could still load them while hungry and suffering from dysentery. You can pick up a crossbow and use it, but it takes skill to hit anything, especially given the kick they give.

“Compared to a longbow - which is, when all is said and done, a stick”

Not really. It required skill to make. It required specific materials to make, which were a major import to the UK. We purchased an awful lot of bowstaves from the continent to fill the need, and they also wear out and break pretty quickly so yeomen needed to carry spars on campaign. Then there’s the materiel: Arrows. Again, not just sticks. And the rate of fire of the bow (machine-gun, remember), required that a bow-equipped army needed to be supported with a staggering amount of ammunition. We made bows and arrows on an industrial scale, and with a great deal of effort.

“What a crossbow actually is, is "seriously fucking expensive".”

That is correct. They were not a peasant weapon. Even though Europe was nicely deforesting itself in order to make steel on an industrial scale, the crossbow was expensive, and most certainly NOT a peasant weapon, in the same way that mail was not peasant armour. (If you want ‘seriously expensive’ kit, consider how long it takes to make a mail shirt without access to spools of wire and having to rivet every single ling!)

“So you get rid of your skilled retainers, hire a bunch of thugs, issue them with crossbows for the duration of any time spent in missile combat and then collect them all up again afterwards.”

Except they didn’t do that. Again, your view of crossbows is tainted by modern, incorrect views.

“Or anyone who has a longbow because hey, outnumbered!”

If the Hundred Years War taught us nothing else, it’s that longbowmen don’t give a sh!t about being horribly outnumbered!

“The crossbow was not an instrument of anyone's freedom but an iron boot on the neck of the peasantry.”

It wasn’t anything like that. The Feudal system was the iron boot. The Church and Serfdom were iron boots. The crossbow did nothing at all to repress peasants. If you wanted to repress peasants, you just rode up and burned everything: It worked for William in Yorkshire, just as it worked on the French in the Hundred Years. You don’t need a crossbow.

Mind you, workers wages actually rocketed in late-medieval times due to the plague and lack of skilled workers. Far from it being a time of increased repression, workers suddenly had a power that they never had before.

Re: Pretty much as expected then

Not without it being intercepted, no.

Re: Hidden in a truck?

"These things don't fit in briefcases. They fit on the large back of a particular muscular marine."

SUITCASE != Briefcase.

You've just done the equivalent of turning a truck-mounted weapon into a Smartcar mounted one! And anyway, they're not that heavy. I'm pretty sure that you don't need to be a burly marine to carry 23kg:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Re: As an intellectual and technological excercise...

"As for the UK health lottery, I didn't realise that. I don't do any lottery, but thanks for the heads-up - I will bear that in mind if I discover any friends do."

Please do!

I nearly purchased a ticket once, by way of "I've had a crap day, I fancy daydreaming about having a million quid, and can legitimately do so for £1. This new health lottery seems more focused in expenditure and a good idea."

Luckily, I decided not to and instead spent the evening googling -aghast- stuff on the health lottery.

Firstly, it's not run by Camelot, and not an official national lottery, despite the similar branding and marketing. It is run by Richard Desmond's company: Porn baron and now owner of OK! magazine, the Express and the Star.

It's not a traditional 50:50 lottery and only gives 20% to charity, instead of the National Lottery's 28%.

Finally, it's basically only legal because the lawyers found a loophole. A true lottery requires a government license, and only Camelot have one. Instead it's run as a number of local lotteries, to effectively skirt the law.

Probably the worst thing about it is the sheer deception: Trying to portray it with adverts and marketing deceptively similar to Camelot's so we assume it to be an off-shoot, the false inference that it gives more than the National Lottery, and the legal shenanigans behind it.