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My eye! Sweet Jesus, Ouch!


Sledge

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I used to volunteer to work Xmas day when I was single and significantly more bitter than I am now. I got double pay plus *two* days in lieu, so essentially for days' pay for one day of being in work on the quietest day ever.

Did it a few years in a row and usually didn't have to answer the phone more than once each shift, I just sat and watched dvds on the computer.

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7 hours ago, Hedganian said:

Surely they wouldn't be using those in the field on Ops?
 

Ha!  Of course they do.

We've got all sorts of *suitcase* that doesn't work or do the job it's supposed to do.
My favourite are the ones that "meet" a statement of need - at the lowest bid and on a technicality while other pieces of equipment could do a job 5 times better for 150% of the money for twice as long before breaking and with cheaper, easier to fit spares.

However, short-sighted budget controllers make life difficult or impossible for the guys on the ground due to utter lack of subject matter knowledge.


On the subject of xmas - I hate it.
More every year.  I gladly vacuumed up xmas shifts when I was a young man.  Now I am required by company policy to use up 6 of my precious leave days on mandatory xmas leave.
Pointless.

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However, short-sighted budget controllers make life difficult or impossible for the guys on the ground due to utter lack of subject matter knowledge.


Same everywhere, mate - military, police, NHS, every government department and most private sector companies too. "This month's cash flow" is more important than end of year profits. Nice predictable expenditures are preferred over uneven ones even if the total outlay would be lower.

The world is being run by idiots.
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I've spent Christmas arguing with drunks and then fighting them. That was fun though, as I didn't give a *fruitcage* about them and they brought about their own demise. 

Growing up, and as a young adult, it was ace. Family galore and booze too. Then dad went, and other family, not the best, but tolerable after a couple of years. 

Now, I'm jaded, but my wife loves it, and my boy is 5 so it's still really magical for him. He thinks it's all real so I make a proper effort, and that is good. He has one of those effing elf on the shelf things, and really believes he moves around and gets up to mischief. That has saved Christmas for me. 

However, I'd happily spend it on my own with a box of wine and some decent paté, and not have to suffer the *suitcase* that is seeing the in-laws. Edit, I would let the wife and child be present, I'm not completely heartless! 😂 

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On 12/9/2018 at 12:44 PM, amateurstuntman said:

At work we have Iveco trucks and they are fitted with the standard NATO starting socket.
The usual SOP is to plug the dead truck into a live truck and start it.

If you do that to the Iveco it will catch fire.  You have to turn on all the electrics in the dead truck (lights, horn, wipers, heater, the lot) for 5 minutes before and after you start it.

Imagine that in a harbour area with the Russians looking for you.
You'd be dead to artillery before the truck even got started.

 

I work for IVECO.. couldnt agree more. Why they are every chosen over a Volvo or Mercedes is beyond me. MAN used to be up there with the greats but recently one small electrical fault will take the vehicle off the road for weeks as they're just SO unnecessarily complicated. If only we could go back to mechanically controlled trucks rather than 80% electrically controlled! 

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It would certainly make sense for a military vehicle but there are 3 problems.

1 The MOD lost its "Crown Immunity" to things like safety law and is therefore still required to comply with things like the Euro emissions regs.

2 The manufacturers don't make them any more and nobody is falling all over themselves to design and tool up a new vehicle just for a military contract of 10 or 12 of them.

3 The MOD through ALC now cares how much they can sell these things for at end of life.  The used to be written off and bought by handsome, intelligent people who had a need for an over-engineered military vehicle.  Now they need to be as close to civvy spec as possible for re-sale.

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So our wonderful Audit department has decided it's going to hold our roughly quarterly audit this coming Friday and Tuesday. Not sure how we got this information as it's meant to be unannounced.

 

We are definitely in the Christmas build up so don't need an auditor on site for two days to count both wet and food stock, the holding levels of which are going to be high (probably looking at 50K wet stock alone, cost price), check our people standards, compliance and generally get in the way.

 

Add in to that Fridays are one of our busiest breakfast services so even taking away a single member of staff to assist an auditor count (and heaven forbid our deliveries turn up mid count as they get dropped in the middle of the customer area before heading to the appropriate store rooms).

 

The most annoying thing is our current auditor is a decent guy and I know it's the head bods at Audit that have told him he needs to "DO IT NAOW!", especially as the other week he told me we probably had 8/9 weeks to help bring the food stocks back in line.

 

Good idea fairy strikes again.

 

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What idiot decides to do an audit in the middle of the December rush?

In other news, I found out why we haven't got our new car yet. Apparently, VW in their wisdom decided to change the engine specification from a 1.4 to a 1.5 without telling anyone - even their own dealers, according to the guy - so all the new cars are sitting at the port and can't be delivered until the new specification has been tested by the government and insurance industry issue the categories, etc.

Once *that* is done, Motorbility have to alter the records for the vehicles to reflect the new specification and update everyone's order. Which apparently has to be done case by case. Manually.

So, we're almost certainly not getting the new car we ordered in July before Xmas. The dealer man said he's got a retail customer who ordered in April and is still waiting for delivery, and I'm sure the mobility orders will be behind the retail orders in priority.

Stupid car manufacturers.

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I only went to VW after Vauxhall discontinued te Zafira and hadn't started taking orders for its replacement. So I literally couldn't give them the order if I wanted to.

Then I found out they'd be acquired by Puegot Group, so I was happy not to give them my business anyway.

I'd have gone to Ford but they're too expensive.

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Got stricken with the good old "pocket behind wisdom tooth removal area that never gets fully sealed decided to get infected again" case, just as I was looking forward to going out tonight with my fellow workers to the local eatery/bowling alley.

The cyma 40d ak105 arrived, and under the excuse of checking to see if it was damaged I got to open the box and inspect it.  I am a bit worried about its origins though, as despite it have the sight block pin removable and there isn't 4 screws underneath ala tm style, there are a few things that puzzle me.  One is that it has two additional screws below that seem to, alongside the screws holding the hop up block togther, secure the hop up to the metal barrel portion inside the receiver (which brings to mind the older styles of assembly).  Another point of concern is the fuse.  On most cyma models and in every video of the cm40 family of models, the fuse is the automotive type.  The fuse inside is of the cylinder type inside a black plastic protector however, which doesn't add up.  In short, I am led to believe that this is either some sort of older stock version of the vfc style cyma with an older gearbox inside in turn, or the store in question has swapped bits about.  I'm trying to find imagery of the Lancer tactical rebrands internals to see if perhaps it is one of them but not in one of their boxes.

EDIT:  Upon further reading apparently the vfc style cymas have lct trunnion assembly mishmash, which explains what I saw save for the fuse.

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Was anyone else shocked at how utterly unprepared the police/government were with this whole Gatwick drone incident?

'We didn't want to shoot it down in case of stray bullets'  With police hanging around with shotguns that can use buck or bird shot....

We have portable mobile signal jammers but nothing for the frequency of drones?

We have no counter drones?  How hard is to fly a drone out out to it to track it or whatever.  Even if it went dark, I refuse to believe we don't have drones with thermal...

I just don't get how they weren't able to catch it.  I mean, civilian drones don't exactly have massive battery lives.

At least this problem was brought to light by some bellend wanting to cause a bit of travel disruption rather than a nutter with drones drop explosives or something.

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You know, I wasn't going to go as far as saying it was 'false flag' type of deal but the thought did cross my mind it was possibly some 'helpful' person bringing attention to the threat of drones in a manner that the government can't simply file away.  Still, I think it's most likely it was a *rickroll* or group of *rickrolls*.  The time period involved had to require the use of multiple drones/battery swaps and not just buzzing up and down every now and again.  More than one person I reckon.  

The more I think about it, the more I don't get why no drone was caught.  Surely the batteries or motors give off enough heat to be tracked?

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Cops and fire have drones with thermal capability. Not every force though, but I'm guessing the met do. 

Tracking a drone with another drone is apparently a bit tricky. Not sure why. 

I'm guessing the guns were for show. Loosing off rounds in densely populated areas isn't a good idea. I've been hit with bird shot in the past, and it stings, even when it had lost its initial energy and was powered by gravity. I can only imagine the billions of lawsuits against anyone who fired some in London... 

No idea on jammers. Most drones run on 2.4 or 5.8 gHz wifi. I'm guessing there is tech out there to block that already... 

Battery life can be half an hour+ on some high end drones such as those from DJI. Swappable in seconds. Combine that with GPS way points and there will be minimal input from the tosspot who is flying this and transmission time will be low, so DFing him will be hard. Low battery means they auto return. A quick swap and it's back out. 

I don't believe it was a false flag op, just some knobber ruining kids trips to lapland. 

 

Edit, mad Friday is s**t for those who work it, I fully agree twitch. 

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The mentality of some people just nukes my mind.

So, you think it'll be funny to fly a drone near an airport...

OK, it goes all over the news AROUND THE WORLD

You see it, all the chaos you caused for the ordinary folks, and then...

You do it some more.

Another suspected sighting, they've closed Gatwick again. 

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*swearing in Finnish* They shut down Gatwick AGAIN? I'm supposed to fly there on Sunday with my mom, for Christmas trip.

Utter knobarses.

Tracking drones... Not sure it's as easy as some guys think. Military surveillance drones have cameras, sure, but think of this, how well can -you- follow a soccer ball sized object in sky few hundred meters away? There's a reason why they put so many LEDs on the play drones andthose competition ones that they use in the racing....

And yeah, shotgun can take down a drone, but it's not going to do much good if that drone is hundred or more meters away. And even if it's taken down, unless the ubar was daft enough to stencil their info on it, there's very little on the drone itself to connect it to perperator.

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Yeah, to be fair, I don't know a whole lot about drones.  But when you look at the tech we had on AH-64s back in what, the 70s and how that stuff has developed for modern target acquisition in UAVs etc.  You'd think tracking a drone would be a trivial matter.  But as I said, I'm talking out of my *albartroth*. 

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Jamming the frequency range in use by commercially available drones should be easy enough - the problem is that it would interfere with a bunch of other things as well. The EM spectrum isn't neat little boxes, if you pump out jamming on one frequency it will leak out onto nearby frequencies as well.

I think this incident is going to cause legislation to be rushed through regarding drones, which have been pretty much unregulated upto now.

On the face of it, that would be good, but when has any knee-jerk law ended up being effective? They'll end up penalising a bunch of legitimate users who just want to mind their own business and the scoff-laws won't be affected.

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