I want Volkswagen to start making computers and writing software…..why?

Well I’ll tell you…

I’ve got a VW Golf TDi, it was built in 1995, I bought it second-hand in 1998, it’s done 189000 miles (166000 of them with me), it’s never been serviced by VW since I’ve had it (I just change the oil and filters every 5000 miles although I once went 13000 miles without touching it), I drive it really hard and drove it into a river once (at a ford) and sucked water into the engine, I hardly ever wash it, sometimes it doesn’t get run for weeks at a time, usually standing outside in all weathers and until two years ago it had never been stored in a garage, the battery is seven years old…

…but tomorrow morning at 06:00am I’ll bloody guarantee it will start, come rain, snow or shine…

…and it costs me less than £0.17 per mile to run (including every penny spent on it except insurance) and with the all the diesel plus the £10K I paid for it costing at least £0.13 per mile of that!

I trust my life to that car every time I use it, it has never hurt me (except when I’ve been servicing it) and in the last ten years (in an estimated 18000 turns of the key) it has only failed to start once…

…once…..and that was due to a copper starter-motor cable that had literally corroded to dust…..I replaced the starter-motor quickly and cheaply the same day.

If I was a car…..I’d want to marry it so it could have my babies! 🙂

My computer on the other hand is brand new, it was very expensive, everything is genuine, pukka, non-pirated, it sits snug and warm in the safest room in my house, it has expensive software to ensure that it is protected from anybody who would wish it harm, nobody is allowed to touch it, I don’t ask it to do anything that remotely stretches it and I never visit dodgy websites (except this one)…

…it is pristine, pampered, immaculate…

…but will it get through just one week without some appalling, fathomless, time-consuming, illogical, designed-in, entirely-avoidable, crappy nervous-breakdown…

…will it b°ll°cks! 😡

[/RANT] 😀

Yes, I had my doubts about it being fresh water also.

Wasn’t the other Skua (the other Skua…..listen to me! :rolleyes:) recovered from fresh water (in a lake)?

And yes, it is exciting. Hope somebody has got a video camera handy! 😀

Interesting pictures, clearly illustrating the theory…and reality…of recovering historic aircraft from even fresh water…

…and I’m not knocking the recovery team here!

It is a remarkable achievement and they are to be congratulated even at this very early stage (of what I hope will be the ‘restoration’ of a complete aircraft).

“…the United States…have been building these 129 bases day and night, unceasingly, since the early 1940’s. These bases are basically large cities underground connected by high-speed magneto-leviton trains that have speeds up to Mach 2.”

Why?

“The average depth of these bases is over a mile, and they again are basically whole cities underground. They all are between 2.66 and 4.25 cubic miles in size.”

Has anybody noticed 129 new mountains appear in the United States since the 1940’s?

“They have laser-drilling machines that can drill a tunnel seven miles long in one day.”

No they don’t!

Is a ‘DUMB’ the sort of person who wrote this?

Difficult to say if it was a ‘success’ as it was I think quickly superseded by ships being ‘degaussed’ (neutralising their magnet influence by passing current through a cable fixed around the hull of the ship). Degaussing was extremely expensive so if it replaced the anti-magnetic-mine Wellingtons that could show how effective (or not) the sweeping by aircraft was.

I suppose the main problem with sweeping by aircraft is that you have to keep all the sea you want to use swept, all of the time (at least the shallow sea where magnetic-mines are effective). And then you’ve got to keep the enemy out, all of the time; one dark night, one Heinkel, and you’ve got to start all over. Or you could limit the ships to specific swept lanes but this places great restrictions on your operations.

With degaussing you only need to worry about the bit of sea the ship is actually floating in.

The RAF sowed thousands of mines in European waters (far more than the Luftwaffe) and the Luftwaffe had similar minesweeping aircraft (Ju52/3m) but again I don’t think these were used much, or for long.

As for damage to the aircraft, I’m not sure how low and slow they would need to fly. The magnetic-mines would need to be quite sensitive and the aircraft had a third engine in the fuselage to generate electricity for a powerful magnetic field so the aircraft could probably fly high enough to be safe.

The US were using helicopters to tow anti-magnetic-mine (?) water-skiing rafts during the Vietnam War so the idea of sweeping with aircraft did obviously have some merit!

Apparently only fifteen Wellington DWI (Directional Wireless Installation – a cover name) were built…

…so either extremely effective or not considered worth converting more…..take your pick! 😀

“There is no native (supplied by Microsoft) support for USB in Windows NT!” – Wikipedia.

Well I didn’t know that…..and would explain why I couldn’t get the USB ports to work! 😮

Shows how long since I’ve used NT…..however, Wikipedia also had a useful link to a USB driver for NT (nice one!) which I burned onto a CD, all 5MB of it!

I then loaded the USB driver onto the laptop via the docking-station CD drive (which is working but cannot write to a CD so didn’t help me) and hey-presto…

…the USB port is working! 🙂

Problem solved…..data transferred…..it only took me about three hours…..still, better than watching TV!

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I remember the wheels sticking out of the dunes by the fire dump…and ascertained that the aircraft was (had been) a Varsity.

I thought possibly Valetta / Varsity but assumed single main wheels on both…

…always forget the Varsity has tricycle undercarriage…..damn!