Posts by I ain't Spartacus 11544 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
Hyperloop's a bit slow. I have a different idea. Now hear me out... How's about a rocket? You could have small escape rockets all spread about the place, that people could jump on and zoom off into the sunset, solid rocket with a range of a few miles, to get you to safety right quick. I'm sure there are no worrying safety implications of this idea at all!
LogicGate,
You're right that an MRAP is going to offer better protection than a civilian SUV. That's obvious. But an MRAP is also slower. And in this case, there's a good argument that speed is armour. The best way to avoid the earth-shattering kaboom, is to be elsewhere. Armour is going to save you from some bits, but not from fire, lack of oxygen, or big chunks of metal shrapnel moving at supersonic speed.
MRAPs are also hard to get into, as they have some protection - although most of their armour is on the bottom to save the crew from mines - they're not designed to be protected from artillery. Mine Resistant Amush Protected, is what MRAP stands for.
Not that a Cybertruck is any easier to get into. Personally I'd either pick the fastest small minivan/people carrier, or use a full armoured personnel carrier - which have rear ramps for getting in, and more armour on the top.
To be honest, I'm not sure an MRAP offers you a great deal of protection from an exploding rocket. They're resistant to small arms, I'm not even sure they'll stop a heavy machinegun. The biggest bit of armour is on the bottom, as they're designed to protect the crew from a mine exploding underneath - the vehicle is unlikely to survive the experience, but the crew will - they tend to have wedge shaped hulls to deflect the explosion to the side. But in an exploding rocket situation, your worries are coming from above - where the vehicle offers some shrapnel protection. I certainly wouldn't describe them as bank vault like though.
Speed might be better than armour here?
The Williams Renault Espace would be ideal. Name matches job. It's a big people carrier, so room for everyone to jump in quick. It's got a detuned 1990s Renault F1 engine, and was eventually used as a track ambulance, due to being able to do 170mph. I wonder if it's still running?
Genuinely curious: what was the intent behind this?
Showing the hellscape of Coventry for what it is - by having the AI show giant, man-eating, mutant cockroaches on the map, alongside the burning wreckage of the horrible concrete city centre!
Haven't lived there for 35 years. I'm definitely over it though...
That's just the Milley 3-day war meme, or the usual 'full scale military invasion' thing. So If you believe that, you believe that Russia seriously intended to capture and hold Kiev, a city of around 3m with a force of <50,000 vs Ukraine's 600k UAF, police and militias. Russians might be crazy, but they're not that crazy.
The 3-day war meme, as far as I remember, comes from an article posted by one of the Russian papers - which got auto-published after 3 days and started with something like, "now the Kiev regime has fallen and the operation is over...' So the assumption was that it was a pre-written piece.
But it turns out that Russia are that crazy. They invaded Ukraine with a tiny amount of troops on a massively wide front, with no concentration of force or unity of command. 200k is an estimate from the military sources I was reading at the beginning of the war (mainly Michael Kofman and Rob Lee) - based on their counting of about 120 battalion tactical groups plus some Rosvgardia (interior ministry paramilitary troops). It may actually be much less, given that the Russian infantry were under-strength, and the BTGs seem to have gone into combat all mounted in a lot of cases early in the war, and not dismounted and deployed when attacked. So it's possible they went in with lower numbers.
This still might not make them stupid, as the Ukraine number of 600k you give is after mobilisation - if this really was supposed to be a short operation, then they'd expect to face mostly the much smaller number of regulars. The only big city that fell at the start was Kherson, so the operation may have just been to fix-in-place the enemy while Kyiv was attacked from the raid on Hostomel airport. That and some small groups of troops in Kyiv kill the government, nobody fights for the "evil Nazi regime" - Russia imposes someone more friendly and leaves.
That's the only scenario that makes logical sense to me, i.e. Russian intelligence (or Putin's unique strategic genius) said Ukraine was mostly divided and wouldn't fight, so decapitate the government. But nonetheless they did that massive invasion, over multiple different fronts, and lost thousands of troops and tonnes of equipment launching multiple armoured thrusts to surround Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Kherson, Odesa, Lymon etc. Which apparently surprised the Ukrainians - most of who's forces were deployed around Donetsk and Luhansk - where the Russians didn't launch their major attack (as Ukraine expected) - which I guess is the other reason the Russians did it that way. They attacked where most of Ukraine's army wasn't - but the plan was still stupid, as if the Hostomel raid failed they were now in tiny groups deep within enemy territory - and so far apart they were unable to mutually support each other.
You really need to get over your best Russian propaganda talking points. Things are much more complex than you seem to allow. Ukraine's army is not "NATO trained", or it would operate much differently. US, UK and Canadian training in the years between 2014-2022 was mostly about training troops. As has been UK training (60,000 so far) of troops here. There's been some higher training of units in France and Germany - and some Ukrainian formations went through NATO training exercises before the war started. But the Ukrainians aren't NATO, or anywhere close. Although NATO would struggle against them now, because they've got so much hands-on drone experience, that nobody else but Russia and to a lesser extent Azerbaijan and Israel have. It's pretty clear that Ukraine hasn't been able to scale up its army to its new size, by producing enough staff officers - they're still struggling to bring in a corps system after 4 years of war - and that's 3 years after their big offensive failed, partly because they weren't able to coordinate large numbers of troops in single operations.
Russia has the higher formation headquarters, and staff officers - but hasn't been able to come up with a tactical doctrine that would allow them to operate in large numbers without getting droned to buggery. So, rather like WWI, breaking through the front line just results in the line retreating a few hundred yards, and then reforming. After 2022, tactical and operational mobility only seems possible on bits of the front that are virtually undefended (like when Ukraine attacked into Kursk). This could be the new normal - but I rather suspect that as anti-drone defences will get rapidly better, and it will become possible to achieve mass at the front line again, without getting slaughtered. All the tech already exists, we now have anti-drone drones and we just need more anti-drone canon and/or lasers. My money's on the guns personally...
citation needed
Jellied Eel,
Citation not happening, because I can't exactly remember. I think I heard it from Michael Kofman (who is a good source who doesn't tend to exaggerate or over-dramatise) on an episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. As I remember it he was discussing comment from Russian the kind of Russian mil-blogger Telegram channels that he follows - which are of varying reliability themselves. And of course, they were using Telegram to sometimes criticise the Russian Ministry of Defence - so it's also in their interests to say Telegram is vital. But I've seen other stories of units having to resort to Telgram to get through, from Russian sources for years. The only sources I read that quote from Russian Telegram are Mark Galeotti (a Russia analyst who I've a lot of time for), Rob Lee and Michael Kofman - who I came across discussing the Russian military build-up in 2021-2022 and were the ones who convinced me Russia was going to invade. Galleotti was sure they wouldn't.
The stories of crap comms within Ukraine have been consistent from Russian sources throughout the war, and from the very beginning. And is well corroborated by the very fact they were using Starlink at all, given the very real risks that you identify. I also remember Igor Girkin talking about it a lot, who's consistently criticised the conduct of the war in Ukraine from the POV of a Russian nationalist who thinks that they're doing a pisspoor job; He used to call Shoigu, "the Plywood Marshal" and took to calling Putin, "our unique strategic advantage". The man might be a war criminal, but he seems to have been a decent military analyst, with a sharp tongue, and you also can't deny his personal commitment, skill and bravery - given the success he achieved in starting a civil war in 2014.
But there's also the typical neo-Orientalism and assumption that Russians are ignorant 'orcs'. Not a nation who's rapidly developed and fielded Starlink competitors and other EWAR systems, has arguably better radars than us
No neo-orientalism here. I just happen to agree with Igor Girkin that the Russian army leadership are pisspoor at their jobs, and both their strategy and tactics in Ukraine have sucked. They invaded on about 13 axes of advance, with less than 200,000 troops on a front of over 1,000km! That pretty much guaranteed a disaster! Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov is supposed to be an old tank general - he ought to know better than that! Their logistics (and thus planning) at the start of the war was also an absolute disaster!
On the other hand, the tactical retreats from Kyiv, and later Kherson, were conducted brilliantly - retreating in the face of the enemy is bloody hard. Particularly in Kherson where the Ukrainians were on the offensive, and Russia had tens of thousands of men on the wrong side of a very wide river. Clearly Russia's staff-work is much better than Ukraine's. Also Surovikin was brought in as overall commander and made an immediate difference, including putting up an extremely good defence against Ukraine's counter-offensive - which showed that Ukraine's staff-work sucks, which makes sense given how ad hoc Ukraine's war effort is.
I don't see any Russian equivalent to Starlink doing them much good in Ukraine at the moment. Nor do I see any argument that Russia has the best radars, it wasn't true in the Cold War, and I don't see any evidence it's true now. Russia's electronic warfare has been consistently very good, they were better at it than NATO for much of the Cold War, although some NATO countries have made big advances in EW in recent years - and I get the idea that Russia is still fielding mostly old EW kit, which is still good, but less effective than modern software defined radio based kit. However I'd be prepared to be proved wrong, because as a civilian without specific clearance, so much of EW and radar is secret that it's very hard to know much for sure.
Russians are no stupider than anyone else. But dictatorships do tend to do stupid things in similar ways. And Russia is not the Soviet Union, which had a lot more resources at its disposal, and so we able to keep up (or just behind) NATO in lots of different technological areas. The only areas that I can think of that Russia are still around technological parity with NATO would be submarines and drone warfare (once they get over their reliance on Starlink). They've still got good EW, air defence and aircraft, but are steadily falling behind. And being almost as good, and having numbers, is often going to be good enough. They also started the war with lots of specialist capabilities like military engineering and mine warfare, which I suspect have taken a lot of damage, and will be hard to reconstitute afterwards.
Sproggit,
I doubt this is any kind of "false flag", in the sense that the Russians are trying to replace Telegram with an app they control - and have been doing so for a couple of years. And Ukrainian intelligence really has been recruiting civilians in Russia to carry out acts of sabotage or do recce for them. Also while they've recruited some willing volunteers, it's pretty clear they've also coerced and/or tricked people into it. The Crimean bridge bombing, for example, was done by having a Russian delivery company move a massive package across the bridge, and then detonating it right as the truck passed a petrol tanker train. Doing severe damage to a legitimate military target, that was a key part of Russia's military logistics - but rather hard on the poor driver (and those of the couple of cars he was next to at the time) - who were just going about their normal night's work.
Of course, none of that may have used Telegram. The Russians have also been massively reliant on both Starlink and Telegram for frontline military communications, which means they can't just ban it. Losing access to Starlink hurt them a lot - from stuff I've read it's been suggested that a sudden stop on Telegram would also do major damage to their military comms - which they've never managed to get fully working in Ukraine.
On the other hand, getting ahead (or just surviving) in business in Russia often involves dodgy contacts with the FSB - so it's equally possible the answer could be "both".
Maryland, USA,
Generally speaking, a blind person will walk around with a white cane.
Most don't. Lots of (most?) blind people don't use them, and the ones that do, don't use them all the time.
The definition of blind is anyone with less than 5% vision - which means that a large number of blind people are getting around by using their eyesight - it's just considerably worse than everyone else's around them.
If you're using a cane, you need to have some kind of idea where you are - as the cane is to stop you bumping into stuff and help you orient - you need an idea of where stuff is for it to be of much use. Most guide dog users, for example, will learn a bunch of set routes (e.g. from home to work and shops), with points to orient themselves and navigate by - which they can then safely repeat. Braver people can use satnav, but that's bloody hard. The dog is there to prevent you walking into obstacles, but obviously can't read the map or street signs. The person walks first, and the dog stops them if there's danger.
Helcat,
It ought to be possible to just buy a symbol cane (white stick but for others to see not to help you navigate), whether you're blind or not. The RNIB have a shop on their website in the UK that sells canes. It's also possible to get walking stick versions of the symbol cane - basically a white walking stick so you can both lean on it and signal to people that you can't see well.
Oddly I saw a combined walking stick umbrella the other day. Seems an odd idea, to give you the choice of falling over or getting wet...
Flight Refuelling Ltd were founded in 1934. By 1939 they refuelled 16 cross-Atlantic flights with the Empire flying boat service - although that was all mail (not passenger) services.
WWII stopped the trials, but I suspect longer ranged aircraft would have done so anyway.
Pirate Peter,
It very much depends on the tech in question.
Drones are still changing on a weekly basis. That's mostly not actual technology changing, so much as people learning how to operate them, how to counter them, how to counter that counter and so on... Which means that your $500 civilian drone that they started the war adapting is now pretty much useless on the front line, and that Ukraine are using everything from $2,000 customised FPV drones, up to $20,000 interceptor drones to kamikaze into Russia's drones. Not to mention various flavours of cruise missiles (some improvised some the product of big defence contractors), which are just more expensive drones
Look at the enormous changes in aircraft and tanks throughout WWII - although in that case - the underlying technology was also changing incredibly rapidly. Since the war we've only had 5 main battle tanks in 80 years (we were using more than that in 1944 alone): Centurion, Chieftain and Challengers 1, 2 and 3 (same name almost totally different vehicles).
Peacetime procurement is slower, but also you don't have the crucible of tactical change that a long war provides. Also, with something like a tank, you know the basics of what you want when you start, a big gun, some good armour a big engine. What changes is whether you now include a recce drone on top of the turret and definitely you have to include a active protection system to shoot down incoming missiles and drones. But good peacetime procurement means you spend big on your initial tank, so it's got more power and weight capacity than you need - so when you add all the crap to it that you turn out to need later - you have space to do it.
Example, the initial weight of Challenger 2 was something like 61 tonnes (from memory). By the time you bolted on all the extra upgraded armour bits that have been added over the years (the Theatre Entry Kit - as it's known) it's up above 71 tonnes. Challenger 2 is now a very fat old tank, hence the upgrade to Challenger 3 - which has been sold as a fancy new turret - also meant new armour, new engines, new gearboxes etc.
Does he speak English?
It's contractor speak for spiral development. Which is defence-speak for anything from continual improvement to continual billing - depending on the company and skills of the procuring organisation.
Take Eurofighter. Tranche 1 was air-to-air only - which was fine, we had a Cold War need for a fighter aircraft on permanent quick reaction alert. Shame the Cold War ended... As happens that has never quite gone away, and we do more QRA now, than in years. Tranche 1 had "austere" air-to-ground capabilities added - it could drop some bombs.
Tranche 2 was always going to be designed to do both, at full capability. And did. It also got the capability to fire Meteor, so got even better at air-to-air.
Tranche 3 was better than both. Tranche 4, the latest, has an incredibly shiny radar that can also do "electronic attack" (i.e. jam other aircraft's radars while still doing radar things itself) - and tranche 5 will be the so-far German only electronic warfare aircraft. They refuse to buy the cool new British radar, so have only got the (still-good) new "Common European Radar" (German version of). God knows how many different versions of the F16 they're up to - I think they're up to the letter V...
Just got my Mum a new Brother colour laser, because I was sick and tired of fixing her horrible cheap inkjet. Literally every time she tried to use it - which is of course the problem with an inkjet that doesn't get regular use. I didn't have the heart to tell her that one set of cartridges is basically a lifetime's supply...
To be fair, when Nan was a year younger than Mum is now, Mum took her out clothes shopping. Suggested a new coat, and Nan said, "but I'm not going to live long enough to get decent wear out of it."
That's the same Nan who wrote a birthday card to every grandchild on the 1st of January. Put £5 in it, when that would get you a beer and a half (or two in a student bar) - and told her relatives where it was. So if she died halfway through the year, none of the adult grandchildren would be disappointed to miss out on their fiver! Morbid, much...?
She managed to die after the sequence of birthdays, so I didn't get the bizarre experience of a fiver from beyond the grave - and she got 6 years out of the coat, and died at 93. Top work Nan! "The worst thing about being bombed [September 1940], I'd just got new saucepans." That Hitler, what a bastard!
I'd apologise for the dubious taste, but as you can tell, I blame the grandparents.
ravenviz,
It took me years to master the art of getting the paper off the sweets in one piece. Hence impatience often had me eating half the wrapper...
I'd forgotten Pacers. Yum!
Softmints are almost as nice. But I can't be trusted with them. Too easy to scarf the whole packet in about 30 seconds.
Just saying, but doesn't gold get harder and harder to mine too (with escalating costs)?
LionelB,
If true that's not an artificial limitation? Plus I'm not sure it's actually true. There are still gold deposits where the river does most of the work for you, and you just have to collect it. In other deposits - mining has always been expensive.
However it's also irrelevant because gold also makes a shit currency. The hankering for the "good old days" of the Gold Standard is one of the fundamental misunderstandings of economics that leads to people thinking Bitcoin is a good idea as a currency. This is because they're obsessed with inflation - which at even quite high levels is bad, but manageable. And totally ignore deflation - which is much, much worse, and far harder to manange. Look at the long 1870s global deflationary depression as an example.
Also, Britain coming off the Gold Standard in the early 1930s was one of the reasons Britain did better than most other major economies in the 30s. Japan did even better, by using a form of QE - that's where Ben Bernanke got it from in 2007 (him being an academic expert who literally wrote the book on the economics of the Great Depression). And that's why not being on the Gold Standard meant we had better policy options in 2007 - and avoided a global depression. With the side-interest being the Eurozone, where they'd imposed a sort-of Gold Standard, by having a shared currency that no individual member nation could control or print. Which is why they had to wait until they'd caused a 30% collapse in the GDP of Greece (worse than any peacetime economic collapse in history, including Germany and the US in the Great Depression) - before realising that printing more Euros would fix the problem. Which it promptly did.
My apologies that your joke triggered a mini rant. Perhaps I should support trigger-warnings after all...
Sampler,
Bitcoin style proof of work is designed to artificially limit the number of Bitcoin that can be mined. It keeps getting harder each time, which is one of the many reasons that Bitcoin makes a shit currency.
If you're operating your ledger as an unchangeable record of events, then you don't have to do all the unnecessary work, and waste all that vast amount of electricity - so presumably you can massively improve the performance of the ledger.
I'm also presuming that it wasn't going to be a distributed ledger, because in that case - what would be the point of having an Exchange run by a company that charges you fees? Unless management were literally stupid enough to build themselves out of a job? I mean they were stupid enough to buy a pointless fashion-tech option rather than just getting a faster database using well-understood existing tech - but that's a different matter...
The ledger is designed for transactions without having a trusted third party. As a stock exchange, your whole company schtick is that you are a trusted third party - and that everyone should give you money for being it.
There was a journalist in the late stages of the Falklands campaign who was going up towards the front with just an officer as minder. Officer needed a rest, so he was driving the jeep at night while the guy slept in the back. Suddenly he's surrounded by armed Gurkhas, who are asking questions about why a civilian is driving round the rear areas of their unit with military kit. His minder woke up and gave the password and all was well. But he described it as very scary, and he said the Gurkhas seemed genuinely disappointed that they couldn't finish him off.
They were one of the SAS partner units in the Malaya Emergency. The SAS did deep jungle patrols to mess with the insurgents directly, and not allow them a safe haven to operate in. Meanwhile teams would go to the villages and kit them out with radios to call for help. They'd then do an exercise where the village would use this new radio, and 15 minutes later, helicopters full of Gurkhas would turn up to defend them.
There's a story from SAS history about this. In the 50s in pre-independence Malaysia, they were sent to help deal with an insurgency in the North (see Malaya Emergency). So they're getting in some much-needed jungle training somewhere "safe". A patrol goes out and comes back to the main camp using an improper approach procedure.
Rather than just opening fire the guards sort it out by talking to them. For which the Colonel fines them. Jungle warfare is horribly close-range, so you have to have procedures to keep the enemy at a distance. In the SAS everyone gets fined for everything, and the money is used to pay for end-of-deployment piss-ups.
Colonel then goes out and returns using incorrect procedure. Gets fired at by guards. Fines them for missing...
Jellied Eel,
Are the Russians even producing T-14 Armatas? I've seen the suggestions that they've got several tens (maybe even as many as 50?) SU-57s - and they're in low-rate production now. So out of prototyping. But I was under the impression the Armata had never left the prototype stage? So they couldn't send it, even if they wanted to.
I believe an SU-57 has shot down one of its own stealth drones near the front lines in Ukraine, presumably to stop it going there and being dissected. But I've not seen any other news of SU-57 being used. And it it was operational, then it really does make sense to use it. There's some juicy targets that would definitely be a lot easier to hit with a plane with any decent level of stealth. Of course it also has the above-mentioned flying wing stealth drone, which might be the actual weapon the Russians would want to risk in Ukraine's air defence network. But there ought to be sufficient gain to make it worth using that technology, even where the T-90's they're making are probably good enough for what tanks get used for in Ukraine.
BTW - I hadn't seen your War Thunder joke, before I made pretty much the same one below. Oops.
I wonder what would happen if <<insert enemy country here>> decided to publish details of what they had found about <<insert allied country here>> military hardware and secrets on the public internet.
You don't need to ask. It hasn't been blocked. I think you'll find it's called War Thunder...
Fruit and Nutcase,
This is one reason that Western countries have been so reluctant to give Ukraine their latest kit. They've got fully state of the art air defence and artillery - which don't go on the front line. But we've only given them older model tanks and IFVs, old F-16s, older models of AMRAAM - and not the good stuff like Meteor (to be fair that would have required different aircraft or a lot of work, neither the Mirage or older F-16s have a good enough radar to fully use it).
Even in missiles, Britain and France have donated Storm Shadow / SCALP - but, older ones, and the replacement is in testing and should be starting to arrive in the next couple of years. The Germans don't want to share their Taurus, which isn't a twenty year old design.
It's complex, because obviously cost is also a factor, plus some politician's massive fears of escalation. But I think not wanting to give the Russians access to our latest and greatest is also a big worry with donations.
People are less worried by sharing the shiniest drone tech, partly because Ukraine are responsible for quite a bit of it. And partly because nobody expects today's state-of-the-art drone to still be state-of-the-art in a year's time.
I can't help but wonder if Tesco is actively angling for the Competition and Markets Authority to investigate the vendor's behaviour, purely out of spite
It's exactly what I'd do. For reasons of both tactics and spite.
Competition authorities are busy, and have limited budgets for investigations. They have no choice but to assess new mergers, but investigating an existing market is something they've only got limited resources and time to do. So they'll prioritise. Also, to be able to investigate they have to establish that there's a likelihood of a cartel or a monopoly being abused. Quite hard to prove a monopoly exists. There's all sorts of tests and theories on this. But one of the definitions of a monopoly or cartel, is the ability to charge monopoly profits. Were VMWare a monopoly when bought? Don't know. But if they can get away with quadrupling their prices overnight - then they have pretty much proved that they both have a monopoly, and are also abusing it.
I'm sure Tesco are lobbying for an investigation behind the scenes as well. And maybe getting together with other companies unfortunate enough to be dependent on Broadcom. Beating the anti-US drum has got to be a pretty open goal in the corridors of power everywhere in Europe as well, and were I Tesco, I'd be trying to influence the European Competition Commissioner as well. Talk to Siemens.
Not only is this good on its own terms, but any evidence that comes out in an enquiry is going to be very useful at trial. Plus if the CMA can establish that the behaviour was deliberate and planned - you have half the battle of proving your case paid for by the taxpayer...
Once the court case starts, both sides have to agree to settle. This would piss me off so much as the screwed over customer, that I wouldn't settle out of principle. At least if I had the money. IT contracts are really important to a big company, so I could justify this to big shareholders. Sure, they're offering me a billion, but this is insurance - we're totally reliant on big IT vendors. And changing everything is expensive. So we want to keep them worried about us being happy. Plus we get discovery, and get to rape and pillage Broadcom's internal email servers. And these modern execs just don't seem to be able to help themselves in bragging to each other in emails about quite how greedy they're being.
IBM managed to hold off anti-trust investigations for decades, by not having written anything down. Maybe that's because it went back to the days of typed memos. Microsoft barely lasted 5 years, because they'd all emailed each other everything. Google and Facebook have done no better.
I'm always careful what I write down after complaining to one of our buyers about a supplier who were being bloody annoying - and he just forwarded my email to them with, "please sort this out". Funny, but embarrassing - and now I'm on the sales side I'm even more worried about what might get forwarded to a client. I don't get involved in fraud either - but even discussions of profit margins can be inflammatory. But these guys just can't help themselves, I guess because deep down they're proud of what they're getting away with.
The one time I was involved in discussions about breaking monopolies law, we were the victim of the monopolist, and none of it got written down. We were offered an illegal payment to save a supplier who'd accidentally undercut Dixons - back in the late 90s when they had 70% of retail electronics sales in the UK. We considered taking the payment, and then immediately reporting it. The squealer gets off scot-free to encourage the break-up of cartels. But we worried that we might take the money and then get reported by Dixons - so we decided it was best not to get involved.
stiine,
Adams produced a Trilogy in 5 parts - of which only the first two books were any good.
Whereas Pratchett had a setting in which he told a whole bunch of mostly unrelated stories. Sometimes with the same sets of characters. Although DEATH is in almost all of them I suppose. There's a few duds - but I'd rather have different stories in a good setting, than a continuous adding to one character's story, seemingly forever.
Plus, if an author is writing their fresh new story, and suddenly decides that they want to change something, or not make it fit into their existing universe, it's very easy to just not do that - and have it in the far past or future, or just not part of the canon at all.
retiredFool,
That sounds like proper barrack-room lawyering. I don't like it, so it must be illegal. I think they're reneging on a contract, but while they have legal advice that says there's a loophole to let them wriggle out of that contract, then they're not acting illegally. A court might rule against them, in which case their behaviour could possibly become unlawful (at least in the UK) which is different to illegal, because still not necessarily criminal.
"If a party enters into a contract without any intention of fulfilling the terms, this may constitute fraud."
As they didn't sign the initial contracts (that was VMWare), the idea that this constitutes fraud is laughably silly.
This is all contract law, which is civil law, and therefore civil penalties - not criminal ones.
I'm proud of everyone here - a whole thread of useful dongle advice and discourse, and not a single immature snigger.
I'm not! I'm disgusted! Damn it! This is El Reg! If only I still had the IT gravestone icon to use!
Nobody even made a smutty gag about a virtual floppy! God this place has changed!
I'm off to snigger childishly at the Masters of the Universe film. I'd completely forgotten that He-Man had a character called Fisto... I mean, really? I know it was the 80s, but bloody hell! I think I came out of the cinema at least 10% stupider than when I went in, but the film was great fun (if a bit too long).
cookiecutter,
The CMA is part of the reason the ARM sale was stopped. Too many regulators were sniffing round that deal, and they would have been investigating for years. If you mean the sale to Softbank, that happened before the CMA even existed (regulation was done by the European Commission back in 2016) - but as Softbank weren't a player in any of ARMs markets - it wasn't a competition issue anyway. That would fall under an industrial policy to stop the sale, something that would have been mostly illegal inside the EU - and still not a matter for a competition authority.
I doubt they had the ability to stop Microsoft buying Activision either. Given that neither of those are monopolies in a very large games industry. Remember that CMA are only legally allowed to operate within their remit, as set down in the legislation that created them. They have to decide on relatively objective terms, and are subject to legal challenge if they obviously start making decisions for reasons other than stopping market abuse from monopolies.
I don't really know the market well enough to know whether they could, or should, have stopped the VMWare sale. Even if VMWare were a monopoly (have market control and over 25-40% of the market share depending on complex criteria), if Broadcom were operating in mostly different markets - it's not actually illegal to have a monopoly. It's abusing it that is. So buying a monopoly is also fine, if you're just going to use it for the nice money. If you can use that monopoly to somehow take power in another market (say the way Google have abused their search monopoly to get a browser monopoly or the way they've used their mobile phone monopoly to dominate mapping). Also if you have a monopoly and start price-gouging. But again, you have to be able to prove in court that there are good grounds to think that's what Broadcom were going to do, you can't just say "we're blocking the deal because they're wrong-uns".
But until courts start serving justice that punishes the crime equal to the crime, I don't see bad behavior changing
retiredFool,
Nobody is accusing Broadcom of committing a crime here. They're going to face Tesco in civil court, for breach of contract. The court is only able to "punish" Broadcom for what they've done to Tesco. If someone else wants restitution, they have to go to court themselves. In fact, the court's job isn't to punish anyone here. The court's job is to enforce the terms of the contract. There are circumstances where a party to the dispute has committed such an obvious breach (and done so knowingly) that the court might up the compensation (exemplary damages) - but this is purely a case about a specific contract.
Big companies are supposed to be big boys and manage their own contract disputes - the courts are there to enforce agreements when one side misbehaves. And make it public, so other companies can learn who not to deal with.
For government to get involved, we're talking about competition law. For which we have the CMA in the UK. If they deem Broadcom's VMWare to be significant market player, then they could look to see if these price rises are an abuse of market power - and force it to stop. But it's a pretty high bar to even start that kind of investigation. As I said elsewhere, this might give Broadcom problems next time they try to buy a big player. Past behaviour can impact on future merger approvals.
Your points 1 and 2 contradict each other though. If corporations were more powerful than governments, then how come you accuse one of only sacking a guy to get what they wanted from a government that they're supposedly more powerful than?
Corporations move faster than governments. And it's much harder to stop something that's been happening for a while, and is now peoples' meal-ticket, than it is to ban something before it happens. Companies also lobby governments. But if a government wants to ban social media for under 16s, there's nothing the companies can do to stop it. Similarly they can avoid complex tax rules by moving themselves around the world, but some governments in large markets can just levy a tax on them, and short of paying Donald Trump to make threats about it - they've so far failed to get one of those governments to stop.
Governments are also much quicker to stop large companies abusing consumers in this way (partly because they're voters) - and some of that is probably because so few modern politicians have experience of normal business. But also, because the law assumes companies don't sign contracts without lawyering up first.
David132,
As you say, there's no way a court would order all that from one case. They're not able to, they've not seen the evidence. However, after a few high-profile court loses - where they're shown to have acted like this - and their internal corporate emails have been embarrassingly published into the evidence - well next time they try the same trick the Competitions and Markets Authority might well not allow the merger. On competition grounds that Broadcom are likely to destroy the product by ramping up prices and thus reduce overall competition in the market.
So it could have a long-term impact. Even worse, if they're considered to have bought a monopoly and abused it, the CMA could even launch an investigation into current market conditions. That's something it's been less inclined to do, its concentrated more on the mergers side, but it's also starting to build up the ability to do both. Bit of lobbying from Tesco to government about the evil US business taking advantage of us poor souls - similar from Siemens in Europe. The EU Competition Commissioner is far more openly political than the CMA are in Britain, because they're a politician who may still want to make a name for themselves and go back into national politics.
Remember that Google had the Baroso commission desperately trying to get them to do a deal on the specialist search market monopoly investigation. They really didn't want to fine them. Google kept proposing solutions that gave more power and money to Google, the victims of their monoply abuse were literally being asked to pay them money for Google to give them preferential places on Google searches, rather than Google assigning them to themselves, as before... Anyway the new Juncker commission came in, and in order to get support in Germany - they had the backing of Axel Springer (big German media corporation) and thus Google got the big fine stick. Trump, and by extension the US (and in particular big US tech companies), are not popular in Europe. There's political capital to be made by hitting them with the big fines stick.
Many out of court settlements occur in the last 48 hours before the trial starts.
This is true. It's when the reality sets in, and all the stuff your barrister has been banging on about like, "risk of the court deciding against us" starts to really penetrate peoples' brains. If one side has a bang-to-rights case, it's also when the other side start to listen to their professional legal advice, rather than wishful thinking. This is also true in the criminal sphere, when the accused stops listening to bravado and/or their Mum telling them how wonderful they are, and starts listening to their barrister about how much time they're about to spend in prison.
But the later you leave it, the bigger the offer has to be - given the other side have now wasted months of senior management time on coping with completely rebuilding their IT systems, and then on gathering the evidence, building the case and multiple meetings with the lawyers. At which point £600m starts to look like a lot less money. You've just spent that on the new IT system - and certainly in my view I'd like my powerful IT vendors to be a bit afraid of me. People always say how, "it's your fault for falling for vendor lock-in". But even if you've got contingency plans, if you bet on a system that works for you - then you're locked in - even if you've got an escape plan, that leaves you spending valuable time and money on actually using it - and ends up with your systems having changed and you having to retrain your staff. So having a reputation for taking no shit from vendors is worth the pain of the trial, unless you're being offered truly stupid amounts of cash.
