Alright Putin, calm down. It's pretty obvious you've been reading too much RT.

"You do realize that the USSR apologized?"

Yeah, they also promised not to harm Ukrainian territorial integrity if Ukraine gave up it's nuclear arsenal too.

It turns out that nothing that comes out of the Russian government's mouths is trustworthy.

"my view is not one-sided"

Except it is. Your anti-US rhetoric makes that pretty clear.

Is there a lot the US did wrong last decade? Fuck yes. Has it learnt lessons? Most definitely. Is it still the biggest problem this decade? Definitely not - Russia is clearly the biggest threat to world peace this decade and you're still harping on about last decade's fuck-ups.

"Which is fine, except that now any thief with some cheap equipment can break into keyless cars, clone a key fob within a minute and drive away with it."

Are you sure that's actually true given that car crime has seen massive decline in recent years? Even if true it's obviously not having any negative impact in practice.

I can't tell if you're ignorant, or just Russian, but what? -

"Regarding Crimea, and after looking at what is happening in the east, I fully support Russia's sending in of troops to avert the coup-powers treating the Crimean peoples as "subhumans"."

You realise that's exactly how Russia has treated that Tatars there right by marking crosses on their doors and gates, and disappearing them in the night much like Russia used to do when it ran the USSR?

"Crimea (and Sevastopol) was an autonomous region of Ukraine with a predominantly Russian population (which has been so since Catherine the Great). They chose to secede."

No it hasn't, it's was a primarily Tatar population until post-World War II when the USSR ethnically cleansed them from the region.

When even Chinese media, much more a friend of Russia then the West is even criticising the Russian annexation of Crimea you know it's a fact that it was wholly unjustified. The fact you're trying to justify it tells us one thing, that you only support the Russian point of view, and are wholly against the view of almost the entirety of the rest of the world. That's not balanced or rational, that's called being a Russian puppet. Even Russia's closest allies like Belarus fell strangely silent refusing to fully support Russia's actions despite being wholly dependent on Russian for the existence of the regimes running them. If that isn't a message I don't know what is, how can you have such a naive one sided view unless you only believe Russian media which is wholly contrary to what you're claiming?

Right, and I want a Unicorn, but thankfully we can't have all the things we want.

Oh god, I'm going to have to stop typing on my phone today, that's two embarassing auto correct fails in the space of as many hours :)

"First, you don't hit the target with the EMP device. You detonate the device overhead and let the EMP hit the target."

It makes no difference, you don't need to go for direct hits with shells, landing a nuke a few metres from them is still going to be just as effective as blasting an EMP above them, bonus points for using cluster munitions. In fact, this is exactly the road the Chinese have gone down with their carrier killers - multi-warhead high blast weapons that don't need the precise aim of a shell but offer ample ferocity to take a ship out of battle.

"Third, the goal of winning a battle is to win the battle, not rack up the highest kill count. Disabling your opponents ships takes them out of the battle just as effectively as singing them."

You inadvertently covered why this wasn't really true, hardening on ships regardless of how effective or ineffective means any impact of an EMP is going to still leave a ship largely repairable in relatively short order. That leaves them far more potential to come back and fight (everyone on board is still armed to the teeth and capable) than outright sinking the ship making it unrecoverable, and leaving it's crew clinging on in the sea for dear life, injured, and/or dead.

EMP has become some magical fantasy weapon because too many geeks have seen it sold as such in sci-fi, but in practice there are far cheaper and far easier ways of achieving the same goal more effectively. It has it's niche, as I say, when you want to keep non-electronic infrastructure and the populace largely intact, but for taking a ship out of battle? why when good old explosives do a way better job?

Yep, the exact same arguments were being made about the F-22 and Eurofighter. "Why do we need these high tech planes when all we're doing is bombing mud huts in Afghanistan?".

Those planes look like kind of a good idea now we have Russia flying within miles and sometimes literally outright breaching sovereign NATO airspace again with it's probing patrols in the Baltic, the North Sea, and English channel and with transponders off and no response to communications. We're also finding those mud huts are right in the middle of a high tech Syrian air defence network too.

So it's kind of a good thing we didn't listen to the naysayers and did decide to keep up with our 4.5th gen and 5th gen fighter programs after all.

Some people don't understand that you have a military that's prepared for what might happen, not what is happening or has happened in the past.

I used to think they were overpriced too, but apparently a couple of HS2 trains will cost as much as one of those aircraft carriers.

Now I can't figure out if the aircraft carriers are a fantastic bargain or the HS2 rolling stock is one of the biggest government orchestrated thefts from the public purse to private business in history.

I guess it depends on the role, if it's a ship whose job is wholly to protect say an aircraft carrier, then it has all it needs to just keep on doing that.

But yes, it doesn't mean ships whose job is to shell the living shit out of places from off the coast will have unlimited ammunition, it's true in a defensive capacity though.

And how do you propose to launch this EMP attack? EMP isn't a magical thing you can just conjure up and cast at someone like a wizard. Pretty much anything you could do to a hit a ship with an EMP would be no less difficult than just blowing up the ship with something explosive. EMP is only preferable if you then intend to send soldiers on bored the ship to seize it and retrieve if for yourself, but good fucking luck with that. I imagine the crew would scuttle it before you had chance.

Yes I am still using my Galaxy Nexus because performance-wise it's still entirely adequate, it can still run everything I need and it seems silly to blow a few hundred quid when there's literally nothing wrong with the existing device beyond poor software support.

Even if I did decide to replace it I really just do not know where to go. I can't stand the crap that Samsung and HTC et. al. throw on top and don't particularly like much of what they have to offer half the time anyway. Many of the cheaper manufacturers like ZTE et. al. offer crap OS support, but at least they're cheap so it's understandable. I've been burnt once by Google and just don't have enough faith to try again. I've been using and have defended Android since the HTC Magic was released in the UK. If my phone were to fail now, I think I'd probably jump ship, I doubt I'd switch to the iPhone because I hate the horrendously locked down and overpriced Apple ecosystem and don't frankly find their UI intuitive and productive (though it's most definitely feels nice). I never thought I'd say it but I think I'd have to give Windows Phone serious consideration. I've always liked Nokia's hardware at least, and if Android isn't a reliable platform then it almost seems worth putting up with Microsoft's OS.

And I know what the official Google line is on the Galaxy Nexus but I'm having a hard time buying it. I'm struggling to understand how a bug at the application layer affecting the browser cannot be fixed because of something to do with lower level firmware. I do not see why you even need the low level source code when you can still interface with the existing binaries you have for a general update in fact - this is something CM seems to have managed many a time quite successfully. It frankly sounds more like an excuse to not have to commit resources to supporting an older device because it would take just a little bit more effort than usual, and so how will I ever know if Google will make that arbitrary decision on the next device I buy from them? It's not my fault Google made a boneheaded decision so Google should've stumped up the cash to pay the extra staffing areas to work around that fault, it's not like it's a cash poor company. Good customer service is stumping up to fix or work around your screwups, not just saying "Ah, well, we fucked up, why don't you buy another of our products to replace it?". I don't think anything less than a contractual assurance that my phone would be supported for something like at least 3 years could pull me back to Google right now. It'd take a hell of a lot to heal the burn of the Galaxy Nexus.

But even beyond this I'm noticing Android becoming far less stable. Maps seems to crash incredibly regularly now, and Chrome does too. The on screen keyboard also seems to keel over now and again. Increased compartmentalisation of components into apps seems to have gone hand in hand with decreased stability. I see this not just on my Galaxy Nexus but on my 2012 Nexus 7, which at least has continued to see updates, but has also seen the widespread instability of Google applications.

I understand why Google is moving the way it is, to increase modularity of parts, and I think that's entirely sensible - as a developer and architect myself I'm a massive fan of modularity and do not like monolithic designs. I just don't like the quality of software I'm seeing come out of that, and I'm still a little peeved about getting screwed over the Galaxy Nexus.

I'm concerned that Google needs to start rethinking it's Android strategy to improve quality control, and to start rebuilding confidence in it for people like me who were early adopters, long time supporters, but who have also become victims of Google's failures also. If Google achieves this by giving a guarantee of future updates for a reasonable period, if stability improves, then within the next couple of years I'd probably buy a new Google phone, a new Google tablet, and also an Android smartwatch. Without any of that I'm likely to continue just sitting on what I've got until it fails, and just replacing the phone only with a cheap Windows phone or something.

I like the Android ecosystem, and I'm happy to pay for good Android kit if I'm going to get quality, but if I can't find any reason for my confidence to be restored in it I can also live without it - to me the Android ecosystem was and still could be a luxury I like, but it's not a necessity.

"This is the component that is riddled with security holes in 4.3 and earlier devices, but which Google can't update."

Why not? Google sold me my Galaxy Nexus, they wrote the software. No reason they couldn't update it, they just can't be arsed.

Which is a shame, because I bought a Google phone believing it'd mean I'd get 1st class update support from Google with the carriers cut out, but it turned out that Google is actually worse at supporting some of it's devices than even the likes of Samsung and HTC are.

It effectively means you can't rely on Android or Google if you want a platform that will remain secure, you could find yourself vulnerable with nowhere official to go after a mere 18 months.

Yes it was:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Pay more attention next time.

I think this is the SO distortion effect.

Effectively the more warts a language has and/or the more poorly documented it is, the more questions that are bound to be asked about it, hence the more apparent popularity if you use SO as a metric.

So if companies like Microsoft and Oracle produce masses of great documentation for their respective technologies and provide entire sites of resources for them (such as www.asp.net or the MSDN developer forums) then they'll inherently see reduced "popularity" on SO.

Similarly some languages have a higher bar to entry, PHP and Javascript are both repeatedly sold as languages that beginners can start with, it should similarly be unsurprising therefore that more questions are asked about them than by people who have moved up the change to enterprise languages like C#, Java, and C++.

But I shouldn't complain too much, SO popularity whilst still blatantly flawed is still a far better metric than TIOBE whose methodology is just outright broken (they explain their methodology on their site, and even without high school statistics knowledge it shouldn't take more than 5 seconds to spot gaping holes in their methodology).

I'm still amazed no one's done an actual useful study on popularity and simply scraped data from job sites each month. It'd be nice to know what companies are actually asking for, and what they're paying. That is after all the only thing anyone really wants to know when they talk about popularity - how likely is it to get me a job, and how well is it likely to pay? Popularity doesn't matter beyond that as you just choose the best tool for the job regardless of how popular it is.