philpo

So you literally linked to the Starts and Stripes, a newspaper by the DOD, and the Asia times which claims for itself to report on Asia "from a US perspective" and claim you found more information there while the first article is not even reporting on the cases mentioned in the original source.

Yeah. Sure.

Don't forget that artillery shells need charges to work. And these weight more than the actual shell.

And 8 subs that might not ever make it to Australia defend a coastline of 25.000km against the biggest navy in the world? With over half of it(and the important parts) are to shallow for nuclear subs to operate in?

Very possibly without US support because the orange got a wire transfer by Xi? Or another "cheque didn't clear"?

And no, they won't be able to limit the chinese navy go the south/east chinese sea - which are sea areas which again are hard for subs to operate in, especially hunt surface targets. And which are,by all means, very likely to be very very well guarded against subs via various installations. I would bet the chinese have something like SOSUS in place there - it's their home turf after all that has far less ingress channels as the GIUK Gap.

So... tbh: While I don't follow the conclusions of the author nuclear subs are still a bad idea.

The current South Korean government after the failed coup is caught between a rock and a hard place - first because they need to keep the followers of their domnestic mad man out, the fat mad man in the north out, the Winnie the Pooh lookalike madman out and the orange mad men out. All combined with a challenging internal and external political climate even without all these factors and you have a job none really wants.

So I can absolutely understand for them to defuse and hoping to weather the storm out and see how things develop - even more so,since the Japanese tried to have trade talks and found out the hard way that the current US administration has no idea what they want.

Funny enough, that's not even necessary in the short term.

Delta is refusing to take the delivery of various Airbus modells planned over the year unless Airbus guarantees to "pay for" all tariffs these might incur. Which Airbus of course won't. While it looks more like a cheap way out for them, various aviation news sources have already reported that Chinese airlines have declared their interest in these aircraft - both because the Anti-American sentiment and the lack in confidence in Boeing in their audience.

And ramping up the production isn't that easy - significant parts come from abroad and even with them, they would have to massively expand production - their production lines are fairly slow

Yeah. It's more than annoying, especially as it's the same old Vance joke again and again and again. Which isn't even clever.

I am not a Christian by any means but I worked with them quite often. Francis did change a lot of things and while he wasn't in no way perfect - he did have his drawbacks, for a fucking pope he was much better than anyone before him within the last few hundred years. People (especially on the internet)nowadays expect other people, especially political leaders to "check all their boxes" and if one thing is not going as far as they want, they are alienated.

Often I have the impression that as long as someone is not going "all the way" in the right direction they are seen as bad as someone who does not do anything at all or goes in the wrong direction. (Which is ironic because the church itself has evolved past the "saint or sinner" directive)

Francis has been going in the right direction probably 60% of the way and 10% in the wrong direction. Is the Catholic church there yet? No. Is there a big chance it might turn back? Yes. Would he been elected if he was so reformist it was sure he would topple everything and go 100%? Surely not.

But he did much more than any of his predecessors did.

Any much more most commenters do.

Besides: It's okay to feel sorry for an old man dying. That's called fucking compassion. I work in healthcare and have seen a lot of people die. I feel sorry for almost all of them.

In the end a human has died. Period.

Contrary to the others here,while I love Paperless,using it for textbooks and notes only worked "somewhat" for me - it becomes quite clunky after a while.

Personally I would rather go with Calibre if I were you if you have more textbooks than notes. Even for notes, they can be attached as well and better organised than Paperless.

(And don't get me wrong paperless is awesome and I use it heavily)

It's simply a power move to test out how submissive the UK government is

It's how public tenders work. That is the main problem.

You can structure tenders two different ways: You can set up a tender with both pricing as well as quality benchmarks. E.g. the company putting in an offer must proof they are experienced ship builders, have this and this certification, the offer has to have these points above the minimum standard, put it delay fines.

But that opens you up to a lot of liability:

• If one competitior gets awarded the contract the other will be claiming that the tender was fixed and he will sue.
• A new company will claim that it cannot enter the market if all public tenders require them to be experienced.
• Even with certifications above the national minimum it will be the same - why this certification and not that one? Why this standard and not this one? You can't simply define that arbitrarily.
• Additionally rating these criteria become often a matter of personal choice. Is this offer better or this one? It's not that easy.
• And of course you can add contractual fines for late delivery. But: Every bidder has to price them in. Because they must - their business insurance must be payed. And it can be a lot. For my business (consulting for healthcare and emergency services) I will price in 15-20% depending on the time frame.
• And if you do this: It does cost money. A serious bidder will price them all in and then the average citizen will cry about how the government is spending his hard earned taxes for something he doesn't need "as luxurious".

Or you can write a tender that basically says: "Yo, build two ferries according to national standards, be done by that date*, lowest price wins!" (*: TBF dates are often absolutely unrealistic and often made by political or budget promises some idiot made. I stumbled over a tender for a medical device these days... Which would be newly developed in two years. EU registration takes longer for an already developed and established product...)

Now, a serious bidder can come up with a well thought off bid and....they will loose. Because some asshole will come up with a lower priced one. Calculating with minimum wage for basically everyone, unrealistic timeframes. But they win, take the money and then it's a sunken cost falacy. Either let all the money go down the drain (and admit you fucked up bad) or spend more money to actually get something to show for.

Yeah, it's a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don't think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.

From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.

The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).

The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand...

Photoshop is a professional level software that is used by hobbyists as well - we compare affinity to this level as well and that's okay.

So we should compare FreeCAD on this level as well. And from that perspective it's sadly exactly what I called it.

The roughness from a commercial perspective is an issue as it costs money - because it takes people much more time to do things,even when they work.

And there are still way too many issues with it that sometimes are a result of infighting within the development community and exist for5+ years. To name a few:

• More complex imports are basically a nightmare especially with more complex facets

• Large file handling is unstable as f***. Our CAD files are commercial building size or "complex medical product" sized and despite having more than enough resources allocated FreeCAD crashes frequently without even proving any hints to the user why. The issue behind it is known for years, though.

• We had multiple issues with using older files that were saved on different OSes - really great if you can't access files that are 16 months old. Also a known issue.

• Standardised rollout is still basically impossible.

Just to name a few... It's simply not on the level even Solidworks has in that regards (which has it's own issues,yes, I am on the same page with you there). While I don't really like Siemens NC (or Solidedge for that matter) it's indeed a reasonably good software - but me disliking them might be the result of them dropping Linux support more or less unannounced. AutoCAD and it's sister products are imho worse than Creo,but again: More of a personal thing. In the end they sadly (!) beat FreeCAD in all aspects. By far. Which is pretty much a catastrophe as FreeCAD is the only Linux alternative atm.

But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa. We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).

And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it's massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.

The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it's just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is. In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.

And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.