tolien

To be fair, I think it's moot either way because the Russians aren't (as far as I'm aware) sending manned aircraft into Ukraine in volume any more (probably in no small part due to PAC-3s but also the MANPAD threat). Instead, they're lobbing missiles from Russian airspace or sending in low-cost drones.

> To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk.

Agreed, I think the biggest issue is the political and strategic risk. In the early days of the war, there was a lot of "it worked for Iraq, just set up a no-fly" chat though.

> but a no fly zone over Ukraine would be pretty straightforward (even just flying out of Germany)

It's anything but straightforward.

Ukraine is about 800 miles east-west and 550 north-south; Rammstein's another 800 miles from Kyiv. At Mach 1.2, you're talking about an hour to get to Ukraine and another hour to get to the eastern extent of it, plus the time it takes to go to an in-flight refuelling aircraft multiple times along the way.

It'd be equivalent to trying to establish a no-fly over the whole of Texas, basing out of Chicago, while there are SAM sites in Mexico and California waiting to shoot you out of the sky and aircraft launching missiles from within Mexico with the chance of starting WW3 if you retaliate.

The number of aircraft you'd need would be massive - not just fighters, but AWACS, tankers, search and rescue, you name it. You'd have to have coverage all the way down whatever corridor you were using to get aircraft in and out of the area too.

Now sure, you could (instead of scrambling to intercept) fly combat air patrols over Ukraine and shoot down anything that comes in which might reduce the time-to-intercept to something more acceptable. You still have to cover a massive amount of airspace though!

Roy Chadwick was responsible for designing the Avro Aldershot (massive biplane, first flew 1924), Lancaster (1941) and the initial stages of the Vulcan (1952, he never saw it fly). Then in 1947, barely two months after Chadwick was killed in an accident, Chuck Yeager goes through the sound barrier. That's a hell of a rate of change!

> Stick to working on programming languages that nobody uses

This is why I always find it a bit funny when people start blowing smoke up his ass. He's just some old guy who spouts points at this thread as a perfect example ideological nonsense and when challenged on it digs in harder in the face of evidence to the contrary - just what you'd want to lead a project (/s).

All of that is irrelevant when we’re talking about software distribution, which was the subject of your anecdote.

If you want to look at Amazon’s “referral fees” though:

> Computers 7%

Still significantly less than the 100% you’re claiming.

Edit: Christ, this could’ve actually been an interesting conversation about how the business of selling software has been utterly revolutionised by the internet, digital distribution and payment platforms like Stripe, none of which existed in any meaningful sense 40 years ago. Instead you seem to think we’re still ordering Visual Studio by posting off a coupon from last month’s PC Magazine and a money order for 1000 of your local currency and waiting weeks for it to arrive on enough cassette tapes to crush a person.

43% is a hell of a difference from the 100% you were claiming it was impossible to beat!

I don’t deny that the app stores don’t have the same costs - sounds like you accept my central premise that software distribution has changed since the 80s? Glad we finally agree.

How many of the major app stores make a 100% markup? Apple doesn’t, MS doesn’t, Steam doesn’t.

That’s before we get into the specific case you mentioned, where open source and the likes of intel/Sun/Oracle/MS have driven compiler prices to near-zero.

Yeah, it shouldn't really be too surprising that software distribution, and indeed retail generally, have changed radically in the forty years since Walter's anecdote but here we are.

Another echo of XKCD 2347 [0], except this time it's pretty much the entire live streaming ecosystem depending on a bunch of volunteers.

0: https://xkcd.com/2347/

> The really strange thing is that people also see the massive growth in student housing in Scotland. Again, very good for politicians: more conservative foreign students can't vote, domestic students will vote left-wing.

That's a conspiracy theory and a half!

A lot of the new student accommodation being built is privately owned. They're chasing the (pre-Brexit/pandemic) overheating market for student accommodation that resulted from the universities targeting international students for the inflated tuition fees they can charge, and in some cases have features explicitly advertised to international students as positives (e.g. some of the ones in Nottingham have built in rice cookers as standard).

However, some of the properties are at risk of becoming unviable (i.e., lying empty or having to be turned over to housing non students [0]) because of a combination of Brexit and tightened immigration rules reducing international student numbers.

If they're being built as some kind of social engineering it would be a really convoluted way of going about it.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3l09p664ro

> I don't know if I'd say they have an even, predictable quality

Euphemistically at least, considering they're frequently known in car circles as "Found On Road, Dead" and "Fix Or Repair Daily". It used to be seen as an advantage that Ford spare parts were dirt cheap, although I don't know if that's still the case given the trend to have Chips With Everything.

A quick search has Walmart selling a 14.5 oz (411g) bag of Doritos for $5 [0], which according to the back of the packet is 15 servings. Obviously that's comparable to a single piece of beef and a potato (/s)

While we're at it, on the $5 Hershey's bar - Walmart has a 7.56 oz (214g) one for $4.52 [1] which claims to be eight servings so again obviously just like a single banana.

[0] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Doritos-Nacho-Cheese-Tortilla-Sna...

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Hershey-s-Special-Dark-Mildly-Swe...

It didn't help that there was a sense that it was a non-job compared to direct flying duties - "what do you mean PTSD, you spend all day playing DCS!" etc.

Shaking it All About... no wait, that's probably taken by Shack Shack.

> Essilor Luxottica has messed up an iconic name and brand.

One can only hope that part of fixing this is the observation that EssilorLuxottica is a monopoly in the markets around eyewear (sunglasses, prescription glasses, lenses) and should be forcibly broken up.

Nah, it's just you that's holding it wrong.

> I could still have 8.8.8.8 routed to me in v-next, and then later do something with 8.8.8.8.1

"v-next" 8.8.8.8 isn't the same thing as IPv4 8.8.8.8, so you now have two "interfaces" running different versions of IP with identical addresses.

> because most devices will implement the minimum. Android doesn't support dhcp6. My router is like most and has no option to enable dhcp6 or nat6 anyway.

Sucks to be you but irrelevant to the protocol.

> Ipv6 spec also says that a router could either default allow in or not via its firewall.

Just like in IPv4 - in the pre-NAT world (or if your ISP assigned you a block of v4 addresses), if you were connecting a device to the public internet it would have be assigned a routable v4 address and it would be up to the administrator what traffic they accepted.

> We didn't have requirements 4. change all the pre-existing addresses

So your alternative does something you said you didn’t want, while being worse than the original?

> 5. make addresses randomly assigned

and

> 7. give every device its own public IP by default.

Both of these are optional. Don’t want them? Don’t use them - if you don’t configure them, it won’t happen.

> 6. make routers accept inbound connections by default

That’s not a new feature with v6.

> Like I own 8.8.8.8. You want to add more bits, fine, I'm 8.8.8.8.0.0.0.0 now. If anyone switches to the new thing, they know where to find me.

Now you (and everything in between) have to be able to handle packets addressed to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.8.8.0.0.0.0, so you’ve done point 4 without knowing it.

If anything demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect on this forum, it’s the “just add more bits” crowd.

Your ignorance is hanging out.

> The author could not find the elusive videos of maniacal Whites stabbing, beheading, assaulting, machete-ing or raping non-White strangers in the streets because they do not exist

Literally today - man charged after suspected anti-Muslim attacks in Edinburgh https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2xg6lwz5jo

> This is nothing compared to the original "magic" roundabout of Swindon, Wiltshire.

There should be a law (I'd suggest Dougal's Law) describing how any discussion of road design will inevitably lead to a mention of the Magic Roundabout :D

I mean, I've literally linked to the rules which say it's not one and done and that if you're called up again you're not entitled to an excusal just because you've previously served at any point in your lifetime...

But yes, I do also know people who have been called up at most once. That is the nature of random selection.

> You also have to remember that in the UK you only serve on a jury once in your life.

Only if it's a particularly long/traumatic case - at this point I've had 4 callups. Certainly in Scotland the rules are [1]:

* People who have served as a juror in the last 5 years

* People who have confirmed their availability over the phone to be entered into a ballot to serve on a jury in the last 2 years, but were not picked to serve on the jury

* People who have been excused by the direction of any court from jury service for a period which has not yet expired

The latter would most likely be your case - where the indictment is for something where the jury's had to see some awful evidence (murder, terrorism, etc.), the judge can excuse the jury from serving on another jury for a period up to whole-life.

1: https://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/coming-to-court/jurors/excusal...

Some lunatic will take it as a challenge :-) (and become a statistic)

Absolutely, doing it in half that time would be madness though!

I did see a Reddit thing where some tourists were planning to stay in the Lake District and visit Edinburgh and Stonehenge, all during winter.

Could've been ragebait, to be fair - they weren't interested when people pointed out that things like weather, hours of daylight, travel time were all going to be against them (or even that the Lake District is a pretty tourist-friendly place to start with).

Google Maps says between 5 and 6 hours and 227 miles - doing that in 3.5 hours would be averaging 65mph. Good luck with that, especially when the speed limit on the A9 itself is 60 mph for cars!

The US interstate is probably more comparable with UK motorways.

Other than a time lag (and petrol prices don't generally change often enough to matter IME), I can't say I ever noticed any of them being that inaccurate.

myAutomate (the owners of Petrolprices.com) talk about having "over 60 years combined expertise in the fuel industry", so I suppose I'd be surprised if it's all crowdsourced data - they've probably made arrangements with at least the big players, in which case the forced publication is much of a muchness?

> I think it's exactly that, the UK has never had this so people there either choose by brand or just convenience.

We've had it for years (as noted in other comments there's a few different people like the RAC, AA and Petrolprices.com all maintaining their own lists - a quick check of my email has messages from the latter going back to 2011). The new part is that this is from the government and the data is freely accessible (Petrolprices in particular covered their pages in ads, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't a way to exchange money for the data).

The context to this is that, especially since the pandemic, there's been a complaint with the Competition and Markets Authority that the petrol stations were quick to raise prices, slow to lower them, and weren't competing with each other[1]:

> The CMA found that retail prices tended to "rise like a rocket, but fall like a feather" in response to increases or decreases in the cost of crude oil.

Independent petrol stations have virtually disappeared and you don't have to look too hard to see that in an area they tend to all raise or lower their prices in virtual lockstep. Gathering this data would make the case significantly easier if the next step were that some of the petrol station operators had to be broken up to encourage more competition.

1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp80dpzdg37o#comments

Edit: Petrolprices was founded in 2005 (!) [2]

2: https://www.myautomateapp.co.uk/