It’s more likely they have mined the dam to destroy the causeway across the top rather than the dam itself.

Logically that makes sense – the causeway provides a route across, but destroying it won’t affect water supplies to Crimea or risk drowning people on your own side.

What should do if Russia decides it wants the rest of Ukraine, or Estonia?

I hope he doesn’t decide to invade Estonia. It’s a NATO member and we, along with the rest of the gang, will be obliged to invoke article 5 and do something about it.

Putin clearly supports anything that helps prevent NATO, or EU members acting with a single voice and in lockstep. I’m sure he’s please with Brexit and the French being ticked off about AUKUS etc.

Taiwan’s defence ministry seems to believe that by 2025 the PLA would be in a position to successfully invade Taiwan. If that means they could walk in on a Friday afternoon, change the government, and everyone’s back at work on a Monday morning then I’d guess they could get away with it…

…But, given the size, training and equipment of the Taiwanese military (regulars and reserves) I don’t believe that would happen and it would be a shit show, compelling others to become involved, one way or the other – even if not directly/officially with ground or naval forces.

South China Morning Post

Frequent US deployments to Taiwan

I have two ipad mini 1’s sat idle in a drawer. Tempting, I might check they still work…

I picked up an Orbea Laufey for £1700 and it’s been great – definitely more trail than XC, IMO, but a lot of fun.

The H30 version with a lower spec fork and other bits is £1350, assuming you can find one in your size…

If you were sitting in coach C on the 1129 LNER Kings Cross to Edinburgh today, that wasn’t sugar in your tea.

This chap, his name didn’t happen to be Baldrick did it?

Would you have preferred he started to feel you leg and caress your ear with sharp nails?

Sounds like he only had your best interests at heart and was probably disappointed at your bluntly worded rejection. Maybe you should be more considerate next time?

Trespass with a firearm and trespass with a weapon are statutory offences. The law allows for reasonable excuses but doing it to intimidate someone wouldn’t be one of them.

I agree – its not just guns and knives – all sorts of weapons are a fetish object to people

If you are satisified to shot low power air weapons than it probably doesn’t apply. If you “need” a weapon far more powerful than is actually needed for your hobby or a collection of weapons then its probably is

Mind you I do fancy pistol crossbow. 😉

Ah, now I think I’m with you. It’s hard to judge though, do you need 6″ of travel for a tow-path kind of thing 😉

I know plenty of UK folk that are nerds about their hobbies, really getting into the nitty gritty of the equipment, what differences a certain tweak will make and so on. That’s no different for shooting as it is mountain biking. It’s not a fetish, unless this is a cycling fetish forum? Maybe best not to answer that. lol.

You are alluding to people who revere their weapons because it gives them the power to take a life – albeit game and not people. Not all people shoot game, and certainly not all shooters are Walter Mitty types who sit at home dreaming they are Rambo – well, I assume they aren’t – I can’t read minds. Most of the people I’ve met through shooting air-rifles seem about as interesting as the local cycling club membership. The same for my neighbour who shoots clays. Thousands of ordinary people shoot in some form or another, just like thousands enjoy cycling. I think you are over-playing this whole ‘power to take lives fetish’.

@tjagain,

I can’t say I’ve met any UK shooters that really applies to, not to say there couldn’t be a few. But, speaking with some Americans… you realise there are some who own a lot of guns, and stock piles of ammo, but don’t appear to be all that interested in actaual shooting or the application of the principles of marksmanship.

Now, that’s not to say that some people are far more into the mechanical side of things – like building their own guns, or making their own ammuniction which sounds a bit like an art in itself. But I have occasionally spoken with the odd person who seems like they look forward to the day someone breaks into their house.

It’s a yes and no, on the technology thing, but mostly a no IMO.
It’s not as simple as swapping to laser style guns as they don’t replicate ballistics, and the effect of gravity and wind on the round, or shot in flight. Neither would they replicate the kick and other charictaristics of a firearm. I know they are sometimes used in sports where a short range pistol would originally have been used, but even there I’d argue an air-pistol would be a better subsitute.

I shot a fair amount in my youth, on an ATC shooting team, then University OTC team and finally in the TA (as it was). I wasn’t brilliant but I did find it very enjoyable, when having a good day it was a similar feeling to when you have flow in any other sports. I get why people want to shoot and enjoy shooting – there’s nothing there about power over others as part of that. I’ve seen people act far more irrationally and dangerously when out cycling and finding walkers blocking their descent that I ever saw with anyone on a range with firearms.

These days I only shoot air-rifles and pistols, and not very often. My local range has lanes out to 50m for sub 12 ft/lb air-rifles which provides a nice challenge, but doesn’t compare to the fitness, skill and fun of doing a proper Service Rifle or Pistol style of competition.

I’ve done a few clay pigeon shoots and thought about applying for club membership and a SGC as I really enjoyed it, but TBH at the moment I’d sooner spend money on my bikes and other hobbies.

As for UK firearms laws and the process for applying for certificates. IMO they could do with a massive overhaul and the management of certificates given to a national agency better resourced and aligned to deal with them than the police. The laws in their present state are somewhat of a mess and can be illogical – especially when air weapons, airsoft and paintball guns are also factored in. I’ve known police officer mates be at a complete loss as to what I’m legally permitted, what I must have a certificate for, or is out right banned.

Unfortunately as the number of shooters is comparitively small I doubt there would be a proper, and sensible, overhaul of firearms laws and the certifcate issuing process and just more knee-jerk reactions to show that ‘something was done’ to silence the press. After this one I expect demands to inspect the social media history of all SGC/FAC applicants – never mind the fact that the local FAO is already swamped with a backlog of work, and not all nutters openly talk about their nuttiness on the web…

“insists the memory allowable to SQL is the default of 2147483647 MB. Despite there being 16GB on the server.”

Do they also tell you to set the minimum memory to 16GB and add the SQL server account to the “Lock Pages in Memory” local security policy ;-P

Pro SQL Server Relational Database Design and Implementation

Easily worth the money.

My company has adopted the unSAFE agile methodology, it’s the one where they tell everyone IT has adopted agile and then dictate what teams will be working on what, when their milestones are and when the project will be completed.

It’s basically the way we used to work but now with buzzwords…

…I cry into my coffee.

Apparently Louise translates quite well in Mandarin. It’s pronounced ‘Ling’.

Old computer porn is terrible, are you sure you want to revisit 😉

Provided you can connect the hard disks up you should be able to create raw images of them as files which can then be mounted into an emulator. I did this several years back with my old Amiga hard drives and can now mount them into the WinUAE emulator and boot up Workbench as though it was my old machine.

Unfortunately I’ve not touched mac Emulation since the ’90’s using Shapeshifter on my old Amiga. Strangely there are some people who use an emulated Amiga to emulate old macs. Something to do with WinUAE having better 68k CPU emulation than the Mac emulators.

You might find some useful info in here: http://vintagemacmuseum.com/services/file-transfers/

It’s already a thing – Expanding Earth Theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanding_Earth

Plate tectonics won out as far more convincing and backed up by better evidence. Still, it’s a good one for pub talk.

Nobody actually believes the Earth is flat. It’s just a wind up, the more people you can convince you are nuts the higher your rank in the Flat Earth Society.

Personally I like to try and convince people the Earth is round and slowly expanding. After a few beers I can get some mileage out of it.

1) Archaeologists are always digging, they dig deeper for older stuff,

2) You have to dig really deep for coal which was once a forest,

3) Wegener’s jigsaw works almost as well for a smaller planet as Pangaea,

4) You can big up the fault lines that move the continents apart,

5) Mountains are a figment of your imagination,

6) Where does all the shit go?

🙂

“As these are single bay only, if I buy 2 can they be run together as a mirror?”

I did ponder that, as it’s almost certain that WD wouldn’t support that or provide software to do it you would have to come up with a way of doing it yourself. Creating a virtual disk on each one and mounted them as RAID1 would work, but then they could only be used by a single machine.

Probably better off buying two and creating scripts to clone the data at set periods.

Tempting, and I need another SSD but scan.co.uk are now stocking crucial MX500’s for  a tenner more with slighty more capacity and performance ratings nearer the Samsung Evo’s… the p&p costs will probaby decide it.

I don’t really worry too much about bad reviews for cheaper/low capapcity SSD’s – I still have a 120Gb Kingston SSD that loads of peole slated. It’s not a patch on the 120GB 850 Evo in another machine, but unless you put the machines next to each other and watch them perform the same task there’s not enough in it to notice day-to-day.

BTW – The larger Samsung pro’s are worth paying for if you need to run several VM’s at the same time. Just storing your pron collection, not so much 😉

Thanks for the heads up, I enjoyed that. Reminded me of some of the Black Mirror episodes.. and of course Predator.

They had no interest in my technical nouse as apparantly the SAs where so up their own arses.

FTFY

@bwfc4eva868

I’ve just checked on my machine andenabling game mode definately can help maintain framerates for some games.

If you enter settings just search for game and then select Game Mode. The default setting is to enable the Game Bar and Game DVR so its probably enabled. With the game bar enabled you can hit WIN & G whilst in game to enable Game Mode for that game. If the Game DVR is enabled you can also start recording – it looks like Windows is alway buffering in the background when Game DVR is enabled to allow recording to start, so best to disable Game DVR unless needed.

I’ve not found much specifically about GTA and Game Mode but there are some videos on Youtube that suggests it does help to maintain ramerates.

If your problems only happen after a prolonged period it maybe other common background stuff starting up (but wny only GTA?) or that GTA is pushing CPU/GPU enough that thermal throttling is kicking in to keep temps down.

There are tools you could use to capture performance and game metrics which may help solve this. Sometimes I will game in a lower res windowed so I can keep an eye on system metrics in another window.

With regards to negative comments on 1440p, they must have only tried it on 27″ screens. Try on a 32″ and the pixel density is the same as a 24″ 1080p screen. I much prefer this than my older 2 x 24″ 1080p screen setup but each to their own 🙂

Is it just in GTA or other games as well?

If just GTA probably a quirk due to some update or another. One thing could be that the Windows update – the latest version now has all the gamer stuff to help record and stream games etc. I recommend disabling all that if you are not using it, also AMD bundles stuff to help streaming etc, again worth disabling unless needed.

Windows now has gamer mode stuff to set priorities for running software, some games seem to benefit others not. Worth searching Google to see if there is anything on that with GTA.

Your system sounds solid, shouldn’t be any need to upgrade for a while yet. BTW I love my 32″ 1440p screen, easily one of the best upgrades. Since you have an AMD card look for a model with the adaptive VSync compatible with AMD. avoid the more expensive GSync models which are designed for the Nvidia technology.

“You have to wonder why they didn’t achieve a restriction on firearms similar to Britain and Australia during their 8 year enlightenment, or Obama administration as it’s also known.”

Probably because the Democrats didn’t control both houses for large parts of Obama’s presidency, the controls previously introduced under Clinton had also been allowed to expire.

America is supposedly a democracy, albeit a flawed one. Compromise might eventually win out – the pro-gun lobby admitting that the second amendment doesn’t mean that semi-automatic firearms with changeable magazines are a constitutional right and the anti-gun lobby admitting that allowing the ownership of revolvers and bolt-action rifles might satisfy those who genuinely have need of firearms.

Given that Brexit is happening I think we’ll need the Dunkirk/WW2 spirit – if they don’t sort out the customs agreements in time rationing will return 😉

“Bit off topic but schools cant put in what parents leave out!”

Always excuses with teachers, if there is one group who should be excluded from 2 x £5k payments it’s them. Lazy work shy gits, they work 6 hours a day, get all that time off and then can’t even be bothered to teach my children how to manage their finances, utterly useless!

😉

<quote>
but 2 £5K handouts sounds like the worst idea imaginable!
</quote>

Not to my local high-street, it will sound like heaven to the book-keepers and take-aways 😉

Alaska has had an annual state-giveaway in the past. It supposidly works quite well with most people using it to help renenw expensive goods and saving a good portion.

I still think schools should have lessons on life-skills and managing your money, maybe they now do? The PHSE lessons I had 20-odd years ago would not have helped me how to budget 2 x £5k payments. Coke & hookers?

<quote>
Enough is enough! Public massacres and school shootings must stop!

Stephen Willeford grabbed his AR-15-style rifle after hearing the gunfire and went over to investigate. Confronting the shooter, Devin Kelley, Willeford shot him in the leg and torso before Kelley dropped his weapon and fled the scene in his SUV.

At Moore, Oklahoma, a man went crazy at a food plant and attacked a female worker, literally chopping her head off. He then went after a second woman. Hearing the screams, C.O.O. Mark Vaughan pulled out his firearm, ran to the scene and shot down the killer.

The Clackamas Mall shooting in Oregon, a psycho with a semi-automatic rifle opened fire. Nick Melli, a young man carrying a .40 pistol on a permit, drew and aimed at the gunman. Melli didn’t fire, for fear of hitting innocents behind the perpetrator, but the gunman at that point fled through an employee’s-only doorway and down an inside hall, where he then committed suicide. What could have been a high-casualty mass murder was apparently aborted by the mere sight of an armed citizen.

Jeanne Assam, armed with the 9mm pistol she was licensed to carry as an armed citizen was at Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2007 , she shot the killer on the run and dropped him, at which time he shot himself, concluding the matter. Assam was hailed for her courageous act, which indisputably saved many lives.

An enraged man entered a psychiatric clinic and shot a caseworker dead and wounded one of the doctors before the latter drew his pistol and shot the man down, limiting the death toll to one. The doctor recovered and, declared a hero by local police, suffered no consequences for being armed in a “gun-free” zone.

The lessons are clear. One fights fire with fire, and defeats force with force. Criminals make a point of striking in places where police are absent, and the police can’t repeal the laws of time and motion to get to the scene in time to stop the murders. If someone collapses with a heart attack, a citizen first responder with an AED is more likely to save him than waiting for a paramedic unit. The State of Maine and New Hampshire do NOT require a concealed weapon Permit. In these states, anyone can carry a pistol in their pocket, or in a holster, No License Needed!

Let’s save America, and abolish the draconian laws that restrict it’s citizens from protecting themselves.
</quote>

This was posted on the abovetopsecret forums. It’s pretty standard response to these events. There is little point engaging in a gun-control debate online, even a suggestion that simple things like performing basic checks or enforce cooling off periods are a good idea get no where.

From a UK/European centric stand point it is very odd and somewhat tragic.

@johndrummer

You’ll be able to make up your own mind, especially since you’ll have time to decide. If you don’t need the schools and large/expensive family home, I say have a good look around the surrounding areas.

Overall, living in Aylesbury doesn’t seem that bad to me. It’s definately not what I’d consider posh – there are plenty of ‘insert derogitory term for lower-than-working-class’ people who bring, erm, character (summer nights being favorite times for drunken arguments where I am) but in that sense it doesn’t seem any different that many other towns in the South. I’ve speant time in Slough, Swindon, Maidenhead, Uxbridge etc. All have equally bad bits. Bucks county council are definately one of the worst for road maintenance though. Buying a road bike with 33c tyres was a good investment!

As for all this talk about traffic – I rarely see anything I’d consider terrible, but I leave at 0630 for my commute and am back home by 1715. Before I moved to Aylesbury I’d mostly lived in the Hillingdon & Ealing boroughs of West London where cycling was nearly always the smartest way to commute – due to the number of choke points for commuter traffic.

I live there; it’s convenient for schools and shops, Milton Keynes is 30 mins away for the shops Aylesbury doesn’t have. As said some decent enough riding (for the South) not far away.

If you do end up moving down look carefully at where you want to live. Personally, I wished we’d looked at Wendover and Buckingham a bit harder, whilst the school is good we do regret moving onto a new build estate – the house is lovely, but the garden is small and some of the neighbours are, well, the less said the better! There are some lovely villages in the surrounding area, but with high prices on decent size properties we won’t be moving to any of them…

Thanks, I’m now stuck on a call 🙁

If you own guns, then cleaning them is perfectly normal. Robbing banks isn’t, but all good artisans look after the tools of their trade…

I’m in the same boat as the OP, my wife would struggle to know what policies are with who.

Truth be told I don’t like discussing this with her. She gets a glint in her eye when she realises how well off she’d be if I pegged it and all policies paid out…

Yeah, it’s like riding a bike. I had an 11 year break, was fine after the first hour.

Cycling and running fitness helped!

Did the driver try to claim it wasn’t his fault?

He’s full of shit.

IGMC…

Both of mine have been fine with gears from the age of 6. 8 speed rear with finger/thumb shifters. My lad has taken to it immediately, his sister used to obsess at looking at the numbered window a little bit too much. After the second crash she learned 😀

squirrelking is Homer J. Simpson and I claim my £5.

I often wondered about the sort of estblishment a chap like CFH would purchase staionary and typewriters from. Now I know, thanks CFH. I was in the market for some 1980’s graph paper 😀

Kids learn quickly as said, mine at home with joypads, sticks, WADS and mouse, touch screen and so on…

Joysticks are definately better for flight/space sims IMO. I’m now using CH Pro HOTAS and pedal setup. I need to sell on my (barely used and boxed) Thrustmaster T.16000M stick and T.Flight pedals 😉