dragon – Member

I’d quite like someone to start a pro capitalism green party, then we might start to get somewhere.

Well, if you start it I’d probably more inclined to vote for a party that exists to promote libertarian values and smaller government. I believe that in some areas the existing Green Party is like this – I don’t think they are all communists in disguise… but I’ve yet to go to a meeting to check.

An internet that’s free of state or corporate surveillance.

What does this mean?

Just had a very quick flick through their website, they don’t really say. At a guess I’d say it means they are against mass survelance and data gathering without a warrant. In a post-Snowdon world I can see a lot of people supporting that.

Yep, once you push out past the M25 and into the Chilterns its pretty decent. There are towpaths and bridleways locally so putting a route together to get to the better riding avoiding roads isn’t dfficult.

If you are looking for a club West Drayton MBC are also in area and have lots of club rides etc.

Back in my TA days I had my troop(platoon) formed up and was notifed that the Princess Royal was paying a flying visit and we needed to look our best.

I turned round and spotted one of my chaps was wearing an ancient ’68 pattern jacket that was completely faded whilst everyone else was in their newly issued ’95 kit.

I shouted “Khan get to the rear rank you are the wrong colour”.

Yes, he was the only soldier in my troop from an ethnic minority 😳

…it was like I travelled back in time on my sofa to 1995.

There were a couple of bits that made me grin but the canned laughter was cringeworthy at times.

Were they ‘distressed’ by Royalty or perhaps wee’ed in by a unicorn?

Seems simple to me.

Pic from road-trip through Austria on the way to Italy.

It’s a shame bikes don’t increase in value as they age. I’d be laughing if the did…

I never used to pay much heed to pensions but always ticked the box and had an employers pension since I was 20 – by doing that I now have around £40k in the pot, apparently that’s not much 🙁

I’m now in my late 30’s and had a chat with a pension advisor. It bought home a few realities and now I am trying to find ways to stick more into it.

It’s unlikely I will retire before I am 65 or be able to take saga cruises when I do. But by making a plan now I’ll hopefully own the roof over my head and have something to live, rather than exists on when I do…

No offence but utter bollocks.
Its never been less likely.

No offence taken; I think you spout utter bollocks half the time too 😉

(and given the fact that everyone says there are no practical circumstances in which we could possibly contemplate using them, will go on making money out of them not being used)

IMO the scary thing is that no, not everyone does say that – especially outside of the UK. There have been numerous occasions when generals and politicians have argued for controlled use, actively threatened it, or dropped subtle hints that it is an option over the past 70 years.

The reality in the cold war period was that even limited use could be the tripwire to an all out response, hence MAD helped keep major powers too scared to directly fight each other. As weapons have got smaller, delivery systems smarter, and war – or undeclared war more unpredictable the likelihood of someone out there using a nuclear weapon in the not-to-distant future has unfortunately increased.

This will no doubt be part of the argument presented to MP’s when they next vote on this. And we’d hope they take a better informed view on it than compared to many members of the public to Brexit; weighing up all the factors rather than purely looking at cost or perceived national pride.

My view is that if the UK doesn’t vote to renew Trident with something similar it will have repercussions on how the UK is seen abroad – I don’t think unilateral disarmament combined with Brexit would send the right kind of message at this time and is unlikely to aid global stability.

I can’t really see anytime when we would use them. We would be killing millions of innocent people and even if IS had a bomb would we really wipe out half of Syria?

This is the understandable but incorrect thinking about modern nuclear weapons. Trident has a selectable yield estimated to be around 0.3-0.5kt, 10-20kt and around 100kt. You don’t need to kill millions if you only need to destroy an army battle group or the enemies H.Q.

For reference Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by air burst (which somewhat limits fall-out but maximises the destructive over pressure) both bombs were around 10-12kt give or take – so a single Trident warhead can be around 20 times smaller or 10 times bigger – each missile can carry one or many warheads. This means the PM has a number of options should he/she find themselves facing the unthinkable.

I’d happily see all nations retiring nuclear weapons, maybe one day…

How did you get on?

Some Asus motherboards have the ability to flash the BIOS/UEFI even if no CPU is installed; quite a handy feature. I am not sure yours does though, check your manual or the Asus website.

If the Linux USB won’t boot you might need to set the UEFI to BIOS compatibility, I’ve found some Asus boards a bit trickier to get right – needed to completely remove all previous Windows Secure Boot stuff.

If I was concerned about a virus in the MBR of the SSD I’d boot into Linux and use a USB adapter on the SSD so I can plug it in without risk and then use GParted to rewrite the MBR/GPT and wipe the drive.

If you only wanted a handgun that looked like it could kill someone, rather than one that actually could there are plenty of authentic CO2 powered air-pistols available for £100-£200. You only need to be over 18 to buy one.

What car do you drive and carry the bike on?

Volvo – 120mm will be fine.

Audi – 140mm minimum, but you might find 160mm is a better fit.

😉

£500 for 6 months? Sounds cheap, try being married for 8 years 😆

It’s quite straight forward to setup RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Doughnuts) under OSX:

Use Disk Utility to Create a RAID 1 (Mirror) Array

EDIT: It sounds like newer versions of OSX have dumbed down the disk utility so you might need third party software depending on what you run.

If you want the cheap as buttons solution (but messy to look at)you will find on ebay 2.5″ external USB 3.0 enclosures for a £3-5 each. A powered usb 3.0 hub shouldn’t cost too much either. Stick that lot together and plug it into your mac where you can create a simple RAID array out of them which is presented as a single disk.

My daughter (6) broke her arm yesterday roller-skating (ironically it seems the moulded peak on her helmet did it) and we were in A&E together until mid-night. She’s been spoiled today with chocolate, puzzle magazines and dad jokes. Back to school (and work) tomorrow 🙁

It’s the gardener…

He is hopeing you will pay for an extra hour at double-time to allow for him to clear it up before cutting the grass.

one day she’ll realise that it’s human nature that is scary – not ghosts

But the OP said she isn’t scared of the ghosts 😉

Apparently at any point in time there are between 3-5 serial killers in the UK 😯

Being more scared of people that are alive than dead is definitely more rational!

500 mph into concrete block:

That’ll buff out…

Indeed, this is a sad thread. There was some suggestions that some of the dead at Lockerbie survived the explosion and fall, only to die on the ground from exposure.

I remember reading about this in the book Chinook! and there were a few snippets in the media too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/267865.stm

Grim reading… and sounds unlikely but plausable, there were a few reported cases of WW2 aircrew surviving falls from altitude without parachutes too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade

My two (6,4) love all the Lego games, especially Lego Worlds and all the Rayman games.

They also like playing my PC games too, Tropico 5 and 8-bit Armies get requested a lot as you get to build things. My son is turning into quite the virtual dictator when it comes to generating more tax revenue 😯

I’d rate your chances of being able to fly from the UK into to Germany, but I doubt you’ll be able to get back in to the UK again 😆

I have a pretty pokey GPU (980ti), so my worry is that I’ve somehow installed a Ferrari engine in a Mondeo chassis. I’ll run the tests and see how my CPU keeps up.

A CPU upgrade would be a waste of time unless you are doing stuff other than gaming e.g. rendering. You have an unlocked CPU so you could always overclock.

Your money would probably be better spent on a new monitor, especially if you are still gaming on a single 1080p screen @ 60Hz.

Thanks for all the replies.

The cat will be discouraged from following the kids to the park in future. I’m pretty sure it was a territorial thing, the cat just likes being where the kids are – she’s tried to follow them on walks/bike-rides several times before.

Hopefully when I see the dog owner next he’ll be in a mood for a chat. I can’t be doing with grumpy neighbours just because of a cat.

Is the cat now strutting around the house like a big shot?

Sat in the doorway, guarding the threshold and all puffed up 🙂

If the cat was a dog and this had happened before I’d be inclined to want to have the dog destroyed.

Yeah, I didn’t phrase that right. I agree, what I wrote sounds daft. I meant if I owned a dog that repeatedly attacked and sent other dogs to the vets – even small dogs can do a lot more damage that a cat.

Was it a real dog or one of those rat on a lead things?

No, it was a proper medium sized family doc. Easily big enough to have killed the cat if it was so inclined.

The cat is scared of a neighbours yappy rat-on-a-lead.

This is going to be quite useful, in theory if I understand correctly you should be able to install most software from Ubuntu’s repositories. Now being able to run it all…

Are you sure you want a desktop? If so I would look at the smaller units, an Intel NUC, Gigabyte Brix or Mac Mini type of thing. You can get lot of power in a small form factor these days and £500 should see you with an i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM easily enough.

e.g. amzn.to/1okyMUG

…or maybe it’s not Nazis but oil and gas.

I think the annual cost of keeping the islands defended is approaching £70 million per year. To date no revenue has come from gas. Whilst there might one day be some tax coming into HMRC coffers from oil found down there the reason we pay to defend those islands is because the people who live there consider themselves British; pretty much the same as Gibraltar which has no natural resources and a diplomatically hostile neighbour.

If oil and gas is found in quantities in easy-to-extract locations it all needs to be landed somewhere. Dealing with on-shore facilities in the nearest country with infrastructure, capability and demand would be much better than trying to transport it direct to Europe or elsewhere. The Falkland islanders would also need to import labour to run any on or off shore facilities. At this current time Chile could do well from anything found but not so for Argentina due to her previous governments child-like actions.

I believe the Argentine governments only interest in the Falklands is its usefulness as a tool for stiring popular sentiment and distracting the population when needed. All the Argentinians I have met and worked with are nice people – there is no reason that at some point in the distant future a power sharing deal or similar would not work out to everyone’s advantage – but it will never happen whilst the Argentine government acts like a petulant child, calls the islanders names and seeks to make their lives as difficult as possible.

In these matters the Argentianian government seem to be daft. Successive governments take a short-term view on the Falklands and do things to get a populist approval. Why not take a longer-term view and be nice to the islands population?

If they had done this in the 1970’s/80’s the islands would most likely have been sold down the river by the UK government and the islanders would by now be British citizens living on an Argentian admisistered islands.

If they started this process now in 70-100 years time the islands could well be jointly administered or purely Argentinian. The only people who believe Britian wants an expensive military installation down there are the conspiracy nuts who think the Nazi’s have a base in the Antartic…

For backup purposes I’d just get an external drive, unless you’ve got a compelling reason not to. What benefit is a NAS giving you?

Also, what happens to your backups if your house burns down or you get burgled?

Well, if you are doing it properly it means you have your files stored on a resilient filesystem like ZFS that protects against corruption as well as device failure. Add to that your files are now accessible to multiple devices the extra expense definitely becomes worthwhile.

If worried about data-loss from fire or theft then choose from a plethora of cloud backup services too.

Job done 😀

She’s expecting and you don’t want to get married?

Want has nothing to do with it, you need to get married.

The law has yet to catch up with what is/is not fashionable 😉

Enjoy the holiday, now that I’m married and with kids foreign holidays are a thing of the past – apart from the weekend cycling trips with lads of course 😛

Yes, I have enough bikes, gadgets etc. and no interest in cars, and yet I always seem to need more money. I have children…

The only thing I am aware of in R is that you should have approximately three times as much RAM as the dataset. Since I’ve got to start writing some infrastructure architect docs on this soon could you confirm if that is true 😀

I suppose you could always create a temporary monster server in AWS or Azure to find out just how much RAM his query needs – it might be an expensive way to find out…

Samuel Windsor if you are on a budget, sometimes as little as £30 a pair. The trick is to buy several pairs and alternate wearing them.

I have one pair of Oxfords that are over 8 years old now, but I doubt they will last much longer as the stiching on the welt is going – they are not as well made as Loakes – you get what you pay for.

What’s that gain me?

Over using other installs – I’m not sure – it’s the only one I’ve ever used on USB sticks, just because…

It works really well and makes it easy to create new USB sticks from a Live DVD that you can boot from almost any machine. The sticks can have an encyrpted writable partition for storing documents etc.

It’s been ages since I’ve used it but Linux Magazine [Feb] had a live DVD with the latest version on – dead simple to set up, I’ve just created myself a new one using it – whilst reading this thread.

Surely Knoppix is the king of the USB Linux install? You should be able to create one, image it up and distribute.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix-flash-en.html