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* Posts by Dave 15

2135 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2010

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UK energy minister rejects 'waste of money' smart meters claim

Dave 15

Its rot

If I need to cook dinner or wash my clothes I will, I do NOT care what some 'smart meter' says. I will NOT be changing my washing machine until it is beyond repair (after all the modern ones insist on using electricity to heat the incoming water instead of cheaper and more efficient gas available in my house).

The whole concept is flawed, expensive and pointless.Technology for technology sake... like a lot of things today.

Add to this that I have zero doubt, that the meters will all be made overseas by foreign companies so once again the British government will be forcing British citizens to provide employment to others while paying their neighbours to sit at home with no jobs.

British governments of ALL current political shades should be lined up on the wall and shot.

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Dear Santa: Can gov.UK please stop outsourcing?

Dave 15
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Re: There's one born every minute

You are right. Frankly the council don't have to provide a profit and the outsource company must, so the council can ALWAYS do it cheaper (sometimes they need to learn how).

Worse than this - outsource often means transferring UK tax payers money outside the country - while going to the same tax payers and forcing them to pay unemployment, housing benefit, medical costs etc etc etc etc etc etc etc to the UK people who could and should be doing the work!

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Směrť Špionam! BAN Windows 10, it SPIES too much, exclaim Russians

Dave 15

They are probably right

Pretending that hiding a few settings in the back of beyond, probably badly labelled that the user 'could' change to stop the spying means it doesn't spy is ludicrous.

MS and many other providers already share your data. Google does as well... seems a favourite hobby of US companies (but not limited to them).

My Android device spent £15 in about 48 hours uploading Chirst only knows what to the server... without once asking me... it is a good job I hadn't put any data on the device.

That the Russians and Chinese spy on their folk does NOT make it more acceptable that the UK spies on its people or the US spies on everybody (often with the help of the EU.... who share ALL your bank details, ALL your flight details with the US)

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Global spy system ECHELON confirmed at last – by leaked Snowden files

Dave 15
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And how good is it anyway

After all in ww2 the BBC sent a message in the news that alerted all the resistance to the dday invasion but the Germans missed it. Perhaps taking my auntie a cake just baked could mean taking a bomb to blow up the queen...

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Dave 15
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Re: @moiety.... google et al

Google et al are probably even doing the spying directly for the nsa these days.

Microsoft and Apple are there too...put all your data on a US server and then the US have the right to read it... stick it on an Irish server and the Americans think they also have the right because it is an Amercian company... basically put it on the cloud and then the Americans will read it easier than they can with their viruses and backdoors. What they do with it is anyones guess but there have been rumours of American companies profitting from knowledge about what other companies are doing.

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Dave 15
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If...

If any of this spying really did stop any bullets flying it might even be worth considering if it was valid. It isn't.

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Austria joins the long list of Pirate Bay access deniers after court order

Dave 15

Pay

We all end up paying.... paying for a bunch of numpties to pretend the world is the same as it was 50 years ago. Perhaps if they were not as greedy in the first place?

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What balls! India blocks 0.00008 per cent of web in anti-pr0n move

Dave 15

Government

The world would be best off without them. They start the wars, they spy on people, they clamp down on rights and freedoms.

Most of the thickos seem perfectly happy as long as they can watch east enders or other monotonous drivel and get a pint of beer.

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Driverless cars banished to fake Michigan 'town' until they learn to read

Dave 15
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Re: Fantastic projets

Didn't really answer the point of the question... the point was that the car is made by reliant and the model is a robin... so it should be Reliant Robin. For some reason the mistake persists and because we are English and English is a wonderful language we don't care enough to avoid the problem

On to your other point... the Bond Biug was a pretty looking car but exactly like the Robin it falls over because the design is fundamentally wrong - the laws of physics say any car with this configuration will fall over at the first decent attempt to go round a corner.

To remind folk the 3 wheeler was (and actually still would be) a good idea because of the strange UK taxation rules that make it cheaper to tax.

Strangely I also don't understand the design for more practical reasons - the differential that is required is far from efficient or cheap to manufacture/source so why use it? The single steering wheel is also a completely custom creation. The approach taken by Morgan with their 3 wheeler (even the updated version of the original) and the German 3 wheelers...

Basically :

take the front suspension of any small rear wheel drive family saloon for the front two wheels

take a motorbike engine and transmission (maybe use a propshaft thats a bit longer than normal)

And then you have all you need... pretty near straight from a parts bin and perfectly stable.

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Dave 15
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Re: Fantastic projets

If your Robin fell on its side you forgot the Top Gear stabilizer wheels

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Dave 15

Need other cars

Both self driving cars from other manufacturers and themselves along with something imitating real drivers - could be done using remote control and a fixed computer program (press accelerator now, turn left now, stop now....) Some of the cars should have defective lights and lazy 'people' who don't indicate (I don't :) )

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World+dog will soon watch 'at least 200 pr0n vids a year'

Dave 15

at least

While watching porn they aren't reproducing... we should encourage more

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German army fights underground Nazi war machine hidden in Kiel pensioner's cellar

Dave 15
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Re: Indeed

Would love to have a tank with a gun able to blast things apart... just imagine how much fastrer the M25 would be if you could blow the overtaking lane hoggers and the 3 abreast lorry drivers from here until kingdom come... What fun, problem would be with such a prolific number of targets fitting the criteria which would you choose?

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Attention dunderheads: Taxpayers are NOT giving businesses £93bn

Dave 15

Tax system

Indeed the tax and benefits system is just plain broken.

I as an individual pay tax on the money I am given... why are companies only paying tax on 'profit'? Why can't I write off the cost of my car, fuel, transport, clothes, training (degree) etc?

The current situation allows large companies to offshore their profits to low tax countries... not illegal but hardly fair - I can't offshore my salary to pay no tax.

What we need is a simpler system.

A single flat benefit for all people legally in the UK

A single flat tax on all earnings/takings for people or companies in the UK.

This would be simple, transparent and so easy my laptop could run the system from the corner of the kitchen. I would not need to have a huge paper shuffling group of people processing benefits claims and tax.

Further doing it this way would allow people to go fruit picking in the summer, or take low paid jobs (allowing us to ditch the minimum wage) and to take a chance on a business idea without worrying their family would starve. It would also mean that those with only benefits would move from London etc. to cheaper areas so balancing the cost of housing over the country.

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Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high'

Dave 15

Its still a wonderful excuse to tax some more

Which is after all the ONLY thing that western governments have ACTUALLY done about the much vaunted threat. I STILL have to travel to work in an office doing EXACTLY what I could at home. I STILL have to sit in a traffic jam caused because fixing it means sorting out 2 or 3 rules and a few junctions (stop lorries using 3 of the 4 lanes of the M25, restrict them to 2, 1 in rush hour, make lane hogging a hanging offence and hang people at the side of the road for breaking the rule).

Then of course we look at the electric generating... could be run off methane from the sewers (supposedly worse than CO2) but no, lets build windmills and solar parks where we once would grow crops... while selling the coal burning plant direct to China for them to use....

When you add to this the naturally occurring peat fires and volcanoes that drown the drop in the ocean humans cause and you have a recipe for misunderstanding and ever increasing tax.

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China unveils Internet Plus plan for FIRST time (actually third time)

Dave 15
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no, no, no.... you have it all wrong

What you need to do is to spend billions on foreign trains and then pretend that adding to the countries debt was a really good idea while you pocket the bribes and take up the nice shiny attractive position in the european gravy train.

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Look! Up in the sky! Five Brit satellites on one Indian rocket!

Dave 15
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Re: The natural result of abandoning a space program

All those reasons are just as valid for the UK.

As would recreating our motor industry, ship building, mining, aircraft and promoting without shame our military production.

Instead our governments (Labour, Conservative, hybrid) all seem to actively embrace getting rid of as much British know how as possible

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Dave 15
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Re: The natural result of abandoning a space program

Using our aid to make space rockets, nuclear missiles and buy British companies...

I guess though we also give billions to the EU so they can write rules the UK paper shufflers can use to ensure we buy foreign while they don't...

Frankly the worrying things are:

a) We seem to think we can afford to give money away when we have a massive deficit and a colossal debt.

b) We have so little self respect

c) The Indian run companies appear to have a better grasp of basic management than the over paid fruitcakes that run the few remaining UK companies

d) The people of the UK have so little in the way of balls that the situation continues government after government with not one of the governments being held to account for it

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Dave 15
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Re: The natural result of abandoning a space program

So the Indians are making the rockets as a loss leader?

And France still makes some for fun... and the Americans, Russians...... et al.

Of course rockets are profitable, if they weren't these other countries wouldn't do it.

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Dave 15

A country that can't afford

So a country that can't afford a space rocket of its own is using the rocket of a country it sends billions of pounds of 'aid' each year... you couldn't make it up

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Do svidaniya to public record as Russia passes NEED to be forgotten bill

Dave 15

Where we are heading

Wait for the first 'google didn't remove me quick enough' law suit and the EU law will become like this.

We have censorship here already, the Germans are now trying to restrict when certain books can be sold, the UK shut down website access all the time. The Russians are just a bit ahead of us. Just because the web could be a useful source of un-molested information doesn't mean that governments of any flavour will ever allow it. Those who think that digital books, news sources and cloud storage are a good idea forget how easy it is going to be to manipulate them and deny you access .. the ministry from 1984 will not have to do any 'real' work to rewrite history :)

For myself I buy books and paper ... and keep it, sure a fire could destroy all but I hope to get away with it for a bit longer than waiting for some arbitrary government manipulation of data.

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Polish plane IT attack? Apparently not, just a simple DDoS

Dave 15

simple...

Yup... sounds like simple to bring all of europes planes to a halt even more effectively than Iceland :) Perhaps a suitable attack could stop America flying...

The terrorists will be watching and thinking by now

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RBS sticks it to customers once again as IT woes continue

Dave 15
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Re: Well perhaps...

Which generally means an old long in the tooth engineer like myself stands half a chance... where as most kids are used to object obfuscation programming and stand no hope of working anything out without a degree in pointless buzzwords making the obvious sound impressive

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Dave 15
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Re: Consequence

Frankly Santander screwed up my credit rating by refusing to take several payments sent to them and then reporting it as my fault. And still haven't/ won't make the correction.

Of course the mistake was made by having anything to do with Santander in the first place... their 'security'.... name on the account, account number, address (look on a stolen statement for all of these), single or joint (50/50 and as many re-goes as you need) and then the killer... what was the last cash withdrawal/ payment/ transaction.... well, if you are like my dad and keep all paper it is in the stolen wallet with everything else, if like me you don't take the slips then it is a matter of your memory...

The approach is neither sensible nor secure and basically is a good reason to scrap any account with them before you are robbed blind.

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Dave 15

Well perhaps...

Perhaps these banks should try employing some new IT people? After all there are plenty of posts advertised but you always have to have 25 decades of banking experience to get an interview... no new blood in here please is the message.

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Microsoft sez soz over Windows 10 'freebie' balls-up

Dave 15

Expect more problems

Already have the situation where I have had to install windows on a new drive in an existing machine following drive failure (caused by an over zealous wifes fist when she was frustrated by how very very slow the OS was).... and the OS now claims not to be genuine and keeps sticking stupid messages everywhere.

I think MS secretly want to close the company and are doing their utmost to drive customers away and into the arms of linux. Perhaps an opportunity for a new company? After all MS are a mess and Linux crowd are wildly unpleasant (what... were you not born with that knowledge in your head... then you are an idiot who doesn't deserve to breath)

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What a Zuckin' drag! 'Frisco queens protest outside Facebook HQ over 'real names' policy

Dave 15
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Re: Yes, good point

Forms that force people to fill in all sorts of 'required fields' and obey rules about names, dates etc. are programmed by complete idiots and are best avoided.

IF someone forces me to fill in an address and phone number when I don't want to I go and look up the companies address and phone number and use that.

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Dave 15

pointless rule so ignore it

Everyone else does.

Most ridiculous thing ever (well nearly)

Just try using paypal... I used it for years and years buying hundreds - probably thousands of pounds of stuff then they decided suddenly they needed a copy of my passport to prove who I was... told them to go forth and reproduce, I have no intention of sharing copies of my passport with people that will lose it

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Sacré bleu! Parking machine labels French mayor ‘thieving bastard'

Dave 15

Insult? How is the truth an insult?

Any car parking charges foisted on motorists by the 'authorities' who already s****t the motorist at every available excuse is just another piece of rude theft.

come the glorious day.

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Belgium trolls France with bonkers new commemorative coin

Dave 15

Good for the Belgiums

They have gone up in my estimation

Pity we rerouted the eurostar into St Pancras... can never understand why we stopped rubbing the collective French nose in 'Waterloo' when they visited :) Good fun

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Indie review of UK surveillance laws: As you were, GCHQ

Dave 15

STUPID stupid stupid

For heavens sake what do these people think about all day?

If I want to communicate with Fred and John about something 'naughty' then I can do so quite simply with coded phrases on my facebook status or a chat room... for example going to see auntie suzy might mean all sorts of things if you know what code I am using. The government themselves used a similar innocuous phrase to alert the resistance in France to d-day on the bbc radio news....

monitoring everyones communications will not stop a brainy terrorist, and these people might be misguided but they are NOT stupid. Proper thinking police and intelligence officers are needed not mass surveillance.

Besides, I don't trust the security services, police or politicians as far as I could throw the lot of them..

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Couple sues estate agent who sold them her mum's snake-infested house

Dave 15
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Re: "Broseker is Van Horn's mother"?

I knew an old woman who swallowed a fly........

oops sorry everyone, just seen I was beaten to it :( can't 'see a delete button though :(

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Dave 15
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Re: Inspections dont work in the UK

Yup, had the same, never bother with the untrustworthy leaches myself... frankly also avoid estate agents (the yankee ones are overly expensive anyway). Do it your self. You can also save a pack on the lawyers as well... used one once who charged me stacks for drawing up the contracts, when the vendor broke the contract and took hundreds of pounds of fixtures and fittings the contract clearly said were to stay... the answer... well you could sue but you are unlikely to get my fees covered or all the money back... so the contract was fit only for toilet paper,

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Forget black helicopters, FBI flying surveillance Cessnas over US cities. Warrant? What's that?

Dave 15

Land of the free

What cobblers, to be honest usa and europe have overstepped the mark by miles with their surveilance and control of the population. The thing that annoys me most is the vast bulk of the criminally stupid who ramble on about being kept safe and nothing to hide nothing to fear.... they should fear me ever getting to power, anyone who has ever posted comments stating that crap would be shot to prove they were wrong.

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Not pro-Bono: Russian MP wants Apple to face stiff action for cramming 'gay' U2 into iCrevices

Dave 15

Wouldn't want u2 or any other tunes forced onto my phone but

Are the Russians seriously wondering whether a man ever cuddles his son? I admit the picture on the cover is a little creepy... actually just plain revolting... but really, not my issue, not me, not mine, not going to buy it... if someone else thinks they like it then good luck to them, plenty of things I like and buy they wouldn't want.

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Bye bye, booth babes. IT security catwalk RSA nixes sexy outfits

Dave 15
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Re: "Wouldn't wear it in the CEO's office?"

In my dreams my secretary doesn't wear that much :)

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Dave 15

I hate this 'exploitation' bullshit

For heavens sake who is exploited? No one forces the women to dress like this and generally they are making a huge amount more money than the engineers they are tempting. The only people exploited are the gullible males and frankly I don't mind being exploited in this way! (Far better than the other forms of exploitation we are all put through daily as our management prostitutes us to the highest bidder while giving us a pittance)

And I would love to book a booth so I can have some fully naked booth babes... after all they only worry about revealing attire, not revealing non-attire, it isn't a 'public' event being ticket only so there is no issue of public decency :)

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KFC takes legal axe to eight-legged mutant chicken claims

Dave 15
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And that is precisely why...

The stupidity of KFCs claim is beyond me.

We need to stop this stupidity, the Americans (and recently the British) seem to think they need to sue someone for everything from a stubbed toenail to injured pride.

IT is pathetic and only a strong reaction from the courts will stop it. At the very least I would want PROOF (not hearsay but real proof) that there was ANY change in KFC sales anywhere in the world that had a PROVEN link to this particular rumour. When they can't (and they can't) then charge KFC something like their years turnover as a fine for wasting the courts time.

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Milking cow shot dead by police 'while trying to escape'

Dave 15
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Re: Dan 55 Robocop

The police close roads because someone broke a light bulb, they do it pretty quickly, far quicker than tramping from local house to local house looking for a suitable bedroom to tramp their muddy boots through before they litter the floor with tons of discarded cartridge cases.

You can't defend the police here, it was a stupid thing they did... in keeping with their general behaviour

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Dave 15
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Mushroom

Re: Lots of stupid in this thread

1... does it matter if the farmer (or perhaps a vet) owned the animal, I am quite sure they could have dealt with it until the real owner was found

2.... yeah, same applies to a broken down car, children crossing, people on pushbikes, trees... I suppose it would stop the population crisis in the world if we shot everyone who might possibly cause a problem...oh yes, forgot the police are trying this

3... Yes bullets do go through things but if you are shooting from a height it would go through the cow and into the earth (well, possibly, most likely it would deform on impact with the bone mass of the skull and stay somewhere in the dead cows head). If you shoot parallel to the ground then there really is a chance of it going through and hitting an innocent bystander... however I doubt there were a massive number of school children in the field watching the police shoot the cow... the police don't normally like an audience for this sort of behaviour.

4... The fact that the bolt is poor as a method of killing is another (important I admit) subject and doesn't mean we want the police wandering around farms all over the country randomly shooting any animal they find in order to save it distress in the slaughter house.

5... Amazingly I see SINGLE farmers herding large collections of cows (herds :) ) every day... Part of the reason this is successful is they don't use nooses and try hanging on to several tons of running cow. But maybe this is because while farmers have an extraordinary collection of blindspots and blame badgers, foxes and other wildlife for every ill imaginable they actually do know how to handle a cow.

Personally I like thinking before kicking off, although I admit things like facts are also useful before a really good rant can hit home :)

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Dave 15
Flame

Precisely why

This is precisely why we should remove all firearms from the police, they have neither the intelligence nor the ability to ask those who do have the brains what to do in any circumstance. I really give up on the country where we have police of this low a standard able to tot guns and take life because they don't have the brains to find a farmer or vet to cope with a cow who is chewing the cud.

Personally I would actually go further and disband the British police services altogether - probably just lock the lot of them up... what with shooting people on tube trains, kettling pregnant mothers who dare to protest and killing newspaper salesmen I think the country would be safer without them. It would also rid the motorist of one form of parasitic growth and free us of worry about speed cameras and spying all over our road network (except of course the areas around our schools which obviously need no speed control or similar)

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Last flying Avro Vulcan, XH558, prepares for her swan song

Dave 15

The biggest shame of all

Is that our government believes that 'Britain is an incompetent crock of shit' and the only thing they can do is buy from those 'wonderful, intelligent and far sighted Americans'. One day those Americans will produce a plane as good as the Harrier, TSR-2 or Vulcan but they haven't yet. If the British managed to reassemble an aircraft industry and prove once again that we can produce world beating aircraft you can bet your last bottom dollar that the UK government would still go begging the Americans to let us have some of theirs... even when they are ALWAYS delivered late, over budget and under specd

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Dave 15
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Metal fatigue

Can't we xray scan things these days and detect the cracks that are the issue?

Shuttleworth has planes from the beginning of the 1900's still flying so there must be some way we can manage.

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SourceForge sorry for adware, promises only opt-in in future

Dave 15
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Re: . too late.

I tried to get filezilla from SF and having had to spend a day getting rid of the resulting trojans and viruses commented direct to filezilla about it. To date no info.

It is a wonder that google can block all sorts on government instructions but doesn't just block SF for being the worlds biggest distributor of computer viruses.

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Dave 15

Stopped using source forge

After downloading one app and ending up with several gigabytes of trojans, viruses and other crap.

If I ask to download ONE thing I do NOT want to have have to 'opt out' of downloading a pile of other crap. Worse still when it has undergone ZERO vetting and is full of undesirable extras. Cost me a day to clean up my machine. A total disgrace, whoever thought it was a 'good idea' should be sacked and preferably beaten with wooden sticks to an inch beyond his life.

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Titsup UK Border IT causes CHAOS at air and seaports in Blighty

Dave 15

Its a wonder anyone noticed

I have arrived at Stansted and been unable to get off the shuttle because the passport hall was too full, a quarter of the stands manned and a guy peering over his glasses at the disaster looking pleased.

Of course, the Americans can do all of this better than anyone else... I arrived at SeaTac with wife, kid and dog to be faced with a queue of over 6 hours for the 1 man immigration desk. When they eventually (after about 4 hours) found a second person they directed a newly arrived aircraft full right around the existing queue to him!

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Microsoft's Azure cloud goes a bit wobbly in West Europe

Dave 15

Maybe the service is having trouble uploading the data to the nsa

Why don't American corporations cut the middle man out and ask the NSA to provide the storage, that way at least there is only one copy of all the data not 2.

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Microsoft: 'Google's secret government meetings let it avoid import ban' - Report

Dave 15

Microsoft should keep its mouth shut

Its revelation that its security algorithms are so bad they can be got around, and that it tells others how they can have killed it off so it should die in peace and quiet.

ex-msft

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Universal Credit? Universal DISCREDIT, more like, say insiders

Dave 15
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Re: CYA

Thats the old one...

The guy at the bottom says its a crock of shit...

by the time it gets to the top it is a top quality product that will make everything grow - sure you could look it up on the old internet

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Dave 15
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Re: All this pain might be worth it ...

@LoyalCommentator

The 'lucky' ones have mainly worked damned hard to have their own house, and even harder if they have managed to put money away as well. What they haven't done is had holidays, been drinking down the pub, smoking like chimneys etc etc because if they have they wouldn't have the money.. There are of course a very very very small umber who happen to know the right person at the right time and are CEO of some bank or other... but they are such a small number that while annoying they aren't really relevant.

The hard workers pay for their house and savings with sweat and time, they then see both taken away in taxes, funding old age or other things while being told that they have so much money they don't need the money that is given freely to the lazy feckless few who you see pissed as parrots every night of the week.

If the welfare system was actually doing the job you allude to - helping those on hard times - then I wouldn't mind. And no, I don't have a house, I don't have thosuands (or even hundreds) in the bank, I do work 2 jobs and a lot of hours - so one day I might - but a massive chunk of what I earn is taken in tax to pay for the rest.

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