No need for the task force. Their country is so close to collapse all it would need is a gentle economic push off a cliff

I’ve been watching him for years, but then I’ve disliked the EU since I was a kid 🙂

I completely agree with his EU stance, but there is something more valuable in Farage than that. He is a “big figure” who isn’t a career politician, and didn’t study at Oxbridge etc. He also says what the majority of the people in the real world actually think and is willing to rock the boat to do the right thing. It would be great to leave the EU, but it would also be nice to see this trend continue, with more people in government coming from non-political backgrounds, and more politicians speaking up for what is right, rather than what is easy.

The BBC are still quite UKIP-phobic, then they wait until the end of a campaign and make a half hearted attempt to be more impartial. Take the London mayoral debate, the parties invited were Lib/Lab/Con/Greens, but UKIP has a much bigger share of the vote (~13%), far larger than the Greens. At the European Elections UKIP came second, the Greens were beaten by the BNP (1 seat vs 2)! And of course Sayeeda Warsi’s implication about similarities between the BNP and UKIP, probably not the wisest thing for the deputy chairman of the Conservative party to be saying considering how many Conservative MPs/MEPs and voters are very close to UKIP.

If you like Farage you might also like Godfrey Bloom (UKIP, MEP) and Dan Hannan (Conservative, MEP).

Here’s how close the other leaders are to the average person:

Nick Clegg
College of Europe, European Studies
University of Minnesota, Political philosophy of the Deep Green movement
Cambridge University, Archaeology and Anthropology
Caldicott School and Westminster School (Both private schools!)

Dave Cameron
Oxford University, BA Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In the Bullingdon Club!
Heatherdown Preparatory School and Eton College (Both private schools!)

Ed Miliband
London School of Economics, BA Economics
Oxford University, BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics

The main problem I see is another gap developing between construction of the last Astute and the first Trident successor…we all know how that kind of thing affected the Astute program!

Agreed, they need to look first at the industrial factors, then base their procurements on that. If they want to be building submarines then they need an industrial strategy to ensure work is in place to maintain those skills.

I would much rather see 12 or more Astutes, each of which could carry a couple of nuclear armed Tomahawks, or you could have one Astute designated as a bomber with a dozen or so on board.

We can have 3 Trident subs or 3 Astutes. Buying a cheaper one doesn’t mean you’ll get more, you just create a surplus which goes to bail out some bust banks.

There is very little chance of Britain ever using nuclear weapons, and if we do, it will not be against a superpower. The possibility that our carrier force will see action in their service lives is 100%, yet we will not spend the money to equip them properly, but the government would rather spend billions on submarines which will never be used. The omnishambles continues.

As I said, there is very little chance of us having to use nukes, and I stand by that. If we ever do, it won’t be against the USSR, it will be against rogue states such as Iran[

We get use from their very presence in our forces. Then again, there’s very little chance of your house catching fire or being robbed, so I presume you didn’t waste money on smoke alarms or house insurance… right? We cannot predict the future, many thought they could, and many were proven wrong, often with terrible consequences.

As to your point on TLAM, they are very easy to shoot down! A Tor-M2 will eat them with ease. The difficulty is detecting them, but with a modern air defence network that problem is significantly reduced. Their strength is in their large numbers, but when each one is packing a nuke it becomes a whole lot more worthwhile to knock every one out of the sky! In this case Britain would need a rather large number of missles to ensure a hit against a heavily defended target. Also, assuming we’re in a proper war, our inventory of both conventional and nuclear TLAMs is going to make the enemy think… is that a nuke, or a conventional wave of TLAMs?

As amazingly effective (at what they are designed to do) as SSBNs are, the question still must be asked…….if they are so expensive that building them scraps the effectivness of the rest of your navy, are they truely worth it?

But you’ve assumed that the budget saved from scrapping Trident would go into the forces, which as I’m sure should be obvious to us all, is simply not the case. Remember its a budget, meaning spend what you need to and give the surplus back to me, not keep the surplus and use it as you wish! You create a 3 billion surplus, its goes to another department that overspent it’s budget, probably black holes like the NHS or foreign aid.

@mrmalaya
The UK reduces it’s warhead total because it helps get Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and other leftists get more votes. It has little to do with other countries.

@Lincoln 7

It’s not advisable to run two anti-virus programs at the same time. You should be able to use comodo cleaning essentials and malware bytes with the existing anti-virus in place. If they all come up clean then the chances are there’s nothing there. You could use the RootKitRevealer supplied with the SysInternals download to check as well. Also, you could use something like CleanAfterMe to delete your temporary internet files in case any virus is lurking there. If after that you are still worried just reinstall windows, and run your internet browser in a Sandbox such as Sandboxie in future which will essentially isolate it.

SysInternals RootKitRevealer
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb897445

Clean After Me
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/clean_after_me.html

Comodo Cleaning Essentials
http://www.comodo.com/business-security/network-protection/cleaning_essentials.php

Malware Bytes
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Sandboxie
http://www.sandboxie.com/

Bikinis and beaches are rather rare in Southampton. 😉

Bournemouth is ~25 miles away from Southampton and has a beach, so perhaps redirect her to there?

@Lincoln 7

Best software firewall is Comodo, it’s free. I don’t see much point paying for AVG, the free one from AVG is fine. IMO a better paid antivirus would be nod32. In terms of free ones, either Avast or Microsoft Security Essentials, both are excellent.

I don’t think those people are hacking into the CIA directly through the security, probably through a weak link like someone bringing in a malicious file from home, or downloading it from the internet. Then there is DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, which just stop a website from being accessible for a while due to flooding, which was done to SOCA recently, and isn’t really a concern.

Also, if you download sysinternals from microsoft (free) it has some useful tools for finding and dealing with viruses. Malware bytes (free version) and comodo cleaning essentials (free) would also be good for helping find anything the main antivirus (MSE or Avast) miss!

Bruggen130 . I would like to see Anna in a Bikini.:eek:now that WOULD be worth putting on here.:D
Jim.
Lincoln .7

Still a bit cold for that 🙂

20*+ next week though, so you might be in luck if she makes another visit to Southampton!

@EGTC

They certainly sound like top blokes, and a definite credit to the Navy! It’s a shame all public services don’t follow their lead, they are a shining example.