Posts by Dave Bell

And wet feet...

I suspect the range they've used doesn't adequately account for the fuel burned in actual combat, or the effect of flying at the speed of the bomber formation. Checking, the distance looks about right for a Bf109E without drop tank. For practical combat operations, you could reckon on losing as much as half that radius.

The Spitfire I had about the same range. And by the Battle of Britain the RAF was using constant-speed propellers (think of this as a gearbox for coupling the engine to the air).

It's Be Fair to Lewis Day

He's one of the people who had to use the results of the MoD procurement process. Though there were a lot of people who thought the RN, in his time, were rather good at dealing with mines. Which, to be honest, might have been a spin-off from the oil and gas business in the North Sea. Divers, you understand.

Unlocked Handsets

The Tesco SIM-only deals will work with unlocked handsets. And there are other supermarkets which sell cheap handsets, without a SIM.

A bit extreme...

In my experience, a polite and well-reasoned letter to an MP does have more effect than petitions and such, It shows you care enough to make the effort. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece of literary craft. A physical letter on paper is the best for this.

But sometimes your idea is a temptation. It's a temptation better denied, violence is the first resort of the incoherent, but if somebody wanted to organise a demonstration against police photography of political meetings, the Guy Fawkes masks might be worth using.

Second paragraph

It's that "if" which matters. If the WD software is just regular SMART diagnostics (hopefully making good use of Windows Help), then this isn't a big problem. As long as the information in the Windows help files is available in another format.

If the WD software does something extra special, maybe using proprietary diagnostic calls, I would be very wary of using their products.

If you're working in a Linux shop, it might be worth setting up a cheap test-box with Windows, though if you have to do that sort of work you need to be wary of viruses, etc. A linux LiveCD is one obvious answer to that. Being able to load a new image of Windows is another, but it seems dreadfully inefficient.

That's maybe where WD are going wrong. It's much easier to make a safe and secure Linux-based test box. With Windows, you're risking malicious code/data on the drive being spread via the testing process.

Maybe less common for Apple?

A few years ago, this was a well-known attack vector on Windows machines. There are a lot of different video players, and the codec situation was more fluid, so a new codec was a plausible requirement.

DMCA Not All Bad

There have been some shoddily-done DMCA takedown attempts, especially in the early days. But that process of notification by a copyright holder doesn't just get used by megacorps with pocketfuls of lawyers. If you're an author, and somebody has put out an unauthorised Kindle version of one of your works, you can hit Amazon with a takedown notice.

Or I could. I have stuff out on web pages, and if somebody decides to distribute a paid-for e-book version, make money out of my work, either pay me, or obey the DMCA,

Time and altitude needed

As others have already pointed out, such things need time and altitude to recover from, which he didn't have. But if the root cause was an engine failure of some kind, the "wrong thing" that set up this crash was the planned display routine, and Air Forces are known for older, more senior, pilots checking and approving those plans.

Cynicism? Or what?

The thing is, given the lead times on weapons procurement and the tightness of budgets, we maybe need well-funded, competent, intelligence services. Maybe we need cyber-police, rather than cyber Bond-age, but it's a part of the intelligence problem, whether attacking or defending.

Is it still called Special Branch? The Police in the UK have been dealing with terrorists for a long time.

Equally, we don't want to become so fixated on technical means of intelligence gathering that we forget how to handle people.

"Sadville" is such a biased term

This whole scheme doesn't make sense. The numbers don't add up.

There aren't enough people in Second Life, to make it worth spending a lot of money on advertising something local. This is the internet equivalent of advertising with a British DAB broadcaster.

But calling it "Sadville"? It makes me think that somebody at Vulture Central couldn't get laid.

Some people don't deserve to be aviators.

What I get from all that is that doing the wrong thing gets you killed.

Just like every other 'plane that ever left the ground.

And "borrowing" the nut that holds the rotor on? Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

Enter the Colonial Marines

It's a big short on the arm-replacement side, but that powerloader from the movie Aliens might be an example of a more likely use. I could see this being useful for the artillery, who can be handling compact, heavy, objects, while within reach of battery recharge tech.

And I can think of plenty of examples from history of where soldiers had to carry supplies up to the front line. That sort of last-mile supply delivery might be a practical application.

I don't see it as an answer for actual infantry combat.

An extra little detail

Many contracts between bands and record publishers require the band to pay for making the recording. Big money, and big costs, for the musicians. There was a time when that might have seemed a good idea: some groups in the late Sixties were very inefficient in their use of expensive recording studio time.But it means that your idea makes a lot more sense.

Though there's still the problem of getting publicity, so that a recording sells.

Not so daft...

Rolls Royce may have been the key.

They're still building and selling the best jet engines in the world.

In 1934 an air-cooled engine wasn't a silly option, and the USN preferred them, all through the war. Match a late-war Spitfire against an F4U Corsair, and I wouldn't like to say which was a better fighting machine. Most likely, the better pilot would win. The Bristol Hercules had the power to compete with the Merlin.

The Spitfire and Hurricane didn't come out of nowhere. Supermarine, Hawker, and Rolls Royce already had the telented engineers. And, in the aftermath of that era's Great Depression, the government was trying to keep those design teams intact.

And the staff sound very foreign

This is getting to be a nuisance, and it's hard to identify just who is making the call.

I can't afford to mess around with these people. And "f*** off!" doesn't work. I think they have more nthan one list they're working through.

Also to be a novel

I understand Charles Stross finished writing a novel entitled "Rule 34" a few weeks ago, a sort of sequel to "Halting State".

Potentially dangerous, but...

Agreed, we could do a lot worse. There's aspects where it could backfire, but we sound to have somebody combining some practical knowledge with a sensible attitude to the policing. I've seen some pretty fancy stories coming out of my local police service, maybe a bit credulously reported as well.

His ideas also seem more compatible than most with the looming budget cuts.

What the checks on Cumbria Police will say about his other work, I'm not going to guess at. And it's such an unusual situation.

Brazil is neither the UK nor the USA

It depends a lot on how much you can trust the legal system. The USA is a big country, with a lot going on, and we tend to hear of exceptional events, but those events include a lot of apparently dodgy issuing of search warrants.

On something such as this case, whichever country we're in, can we trust a judge to be more discerning than a plain rubber-stamped signature on a Police request?

And, if the NSA were unleashed on this problem, what could they say in court to prove that what they found was really on the drive? It's a kind of magic?

The UK system isn't all that good, but it's an attempt to get around that little problem. And in the USA one could invoke the Fifth Amendment, though that has pitfalls for the unwary.

In Brazil? Well, any country, this guy likely has enough money for lawyers that you'd have to be careful.

Good summary

It's the duration of patents, in a one-size-fits-all manner, that may be the biggest problem.

There's an argument, for instance, that pharmaceutical patents, because of the lengthy test/approval process before they can be exploited, should have a longer life. There are precedents for this--some patents on TV technology were extended because WW2 halted TV broadcasting in the UK.

And 17 years for a software patent is likely to be too long. It's not something that needs a couple of years to build a new factory before you can exploit it.

But I'm a fool. I'm expecting a rational decision on these issues. Just look at what happens with copyright.

Stop the cavalry?

By the end of WW1, there wasn't a big difference between cavalry and mounted infantry. And the tank hadn't quite escaped the siege warfare of the Western Front. Armoured cars were the AFV of choice for mobile warfare.

A century later, a modern cavalry/mounted-infantry could be a viable armoured force, more a reconnaisance regiment than a tank regiment. Something more like the Armored Cavalry of the US Army, more flexible than an armoured division.

And there was a Guards Armoured Division during WW2, The tank units of the 5th Guards Armoured Brigade were all manned by infantry.

Varying standards.

The card I have in my pocket is "Verified by Visa", which means I have to supply a password when I buy goods over the Internet. Except that not every retailer uses the system.

This would be an extra barrier against the use of stolen cards in the Internet context. Instead, it currently seems to be rather local, and more about settling liability for the losses arising from these fraudulent purchases.

I doubt it will work everywhere, but payment information can be an effective tool.

It's bad timing

The problem is that they've announced this at a stupid time, almost as if somebody needs to be told not to be silly. The big-three gun rampages of Hungerford, Dunblane, and Cumbria all involved long-term holders of Firearms Certificates, and I wouldn't want to spend money on any app to handle renewals until the politicians have done their thing.

I can think of other reasons why the idea might still be in a project plan, setting up the back-office IT. The officer, or officers, managing firearms matters need to be part of an IT system, just to have a chance of spotting warning signs. It could turn a bit into Big Brother, but having some sort of IT app for filling in the data also has the possibility of catching silly little mistakes. I'm sure we can all think of possible ambiguities from squeezing UK addresses into US-based database designs.

I would be quite happy to see an electronic form being filled in by the firearms officer, with the applicant present. That gives a chance of getting reliable data into the system. I'm not sure doing it remotely, iPhone or otherwise, would improve anything.

What the publishers do.

The costs of electronic publication, compared to paper, get argued about a lot. Many people expect a huge cost saving.

Printing is only about 10% of the cost of a book. By the sound of it, there's a bit of extra work in making this version: ensuring links in the adverts work when a user clicks on them, for instance. And there are often unexpected hassles in the ebook business. Often, there's a complicated exchange of information between the retailer and the publisher, so that a DRM-protected copy, a unique file, gets created under the publisher's control, and delivered to the purchaser.

Aguably, the publishing business suffers from broken thinking on the topic, but there's more to the problem than unimaginative corporate oversight. Conde-Nast might be in a better position than most, and this may be an indicator of the differences.

OK, that reference I got.

You are struggling with the scansion.

Different laws for different places

I think you're essentially correct about UK law.

This didn't happen in the UK.

(Similarly, the argument over who might be a journalist is rather more important in the USA than it might be here.)