UN Resolution 1973

Or to put it another way the current Libyan civil war, I suspect the recent announcement to send ten serving officers of the British Army and a similar ten from France to Libya to organise the rebels, will increase although it will fall short of an "occupation force" no doubt there will be soldiers out there using laser designators on selected targets. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if there are already "British troops" out there in a non official capacity.

I don't think the current no fly zone is working, hence the military guidance requirement, sure Gaddafi's forces have taken a hammering, but this guy isn't going to go without a very bloody fight. The situation is simply too fluid with very little to distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys" hence the recent friendly fire incidents...

Personally I think UK/NATO/France/US want more accurate intelligence as to what is actually going down on the ground at the sharp end, and the only way to ensure that is to put military people at the sharp end......

However it smacks of.... 

November 1, 1955 — President Eisenhower deploys the Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the ARVN (South Vietnamese Army). The rest as the saying goes is history.

Although Libya is not even in the same ball park as Vietnam, you would think lessons had been learned. It's a difficult situation and what do we as a nation think we should do? Turn our backs? Or try to minimise the death of innocent civilians?

It's a difficult call to make, and everybody knows that air strikes/bombing do not overly effect a war, of course it can demoralise the other side, but many times in the past it's been proven that air strikes alone cannot win a war.

Make no mistake about it the UK is getting dragged into this despite certain politicians saying there is "no mission creep"

But the really insulting thing underneath all of the "protecting civilians" banner carrying and jingoism is the real reason

OIL

It’s a plain fact and more cost effective to help rebels wage a war against a dictator than watch your country suffer financially with spiralling oil prices.

It’s very simple maths when you look at it cynically

It's starting

Apple sues Samsung

Apple is running scared it seems, as I predicted in a post a while back on here, basically they are taking Samsung to court over "blatant" copying of the iPad and iPhone. The fact that Samsung supply a LOT of hardware to Apple to make their iPad and iPhone including memory doesn't seem to matter.... This smacks of a company that can see their profit tumbling and are pulling out all the stops including legal ones to try and stop the erosion of their market.... but it won't work.... Android is too big to squash now. Apple has felt this downturn in profit first because they are smaller. Microsoft to be honest have never had a viable product porting their bloatware across to a phone that requires the computing power of a small planet to run it at any decent speed, so any erosion of their minuscule market share probably won't be felt as harshly as Apple's.

Lets face it you can have the best designed bit of kit on the planet but if its pegged at the wrong price it won’t sell next to something equally well designed but at the right price.

Android is approaching critical mass after which it will be impossible to stop and the only thing Apple can do is bring something else out that beats the competition at the right price point. But I can’t see that happening to be honest…..

Click to see larger road map

The ironic thing is that both the iPhone and the iPad run a variant of  FreeBSD, whereas Android is a fork of Linux which is clean in that Linux isn’t derived from any other operating system, but follows POSIX standards, it did adopt “some” features from Minix but it’s kernel is clean. So they come from the same stable so to speak.


In March Apple sued HTC alleging patent infringement over the iPhone. if that isn't a company running scared then I will eat my hat.... (if I had one)

I can see a bumpy ride for the likes of any company in the phone market that isn’t Android and eventually all that will be left are the crumbs that Android didn’t want

This Google trends graph shows that Android apps (blue line) have already overtaken iPhone apps I can see the blue line going way past anything Apple ever managed and that's even AFTER apple released the iPhone 4 to market.. it's just a steady decline for them.... hence taking Samsung to court...... too little..... too late a classic example of a company resting on its laurels....by pricing their kit too high (consistently....) they excluded a vast swathe of the population and now it's coming home to roost with them......


Addendum:- Apple has just posted record profits for the iphone.... that may be the case, but considering Android phones outsold iPhones it's a drop in the ocean comparing one companies profits against several.... Apple would have to seriously sell some iPhones to compete with the Android market.... it's slowly slipping down the league tables, and when you throw in Apple sueing Samsung (their only serious tablet competitor) and their recent case against HTC.... they are digging in their claws to hang on to the emerging robot.....


Oh and look as of today 25th April "The Register" has reported the very same thing .... I'm way ahead of them ;¬)

It had to happen

I bought Andrea her new Android phone and the day after I walked into the corner of my desk (with my phone in my pocket) and completely smashed the display on my phone... all you can see on the display is a crazed multicolour pattern with nothing showing except what looks like a supernova explosion.... ahhhh well... I don't make a habit of destroying phones in fact my last one was lost by my wife which she replaced with this one..... but I can quite honestly say I've never "lost" a phone, and as far as I can remember this is the only one I've killed outright personally... it still works as in that it takes calls, but that's about it. My memory isn't good enough to remember how the menus worked and sending a text would be purely guess work, so it's a no go.

So for the time being don't expect any calls from me until I replace my phone... not that I ever made any calls on my phone, I'd say the majority of use I made of it was to send SMS messages.

We've had our first phone bill in our new house and after sitting down and hyperventilating for a short spell, I fired off an official complaint because we had been told that as long as the new house had a BT socket there would be no connection charge, and considering the BT Openreach engineer took all of 10 minutes to reconnect us on our old line and number .... £93 extra seems a little steep....So we shall see what my complaint produces. I'm very draconian when it comes to utility bills especially ones which are wrong, as the £512 one we got off British Gas for our last 2  months of electricity we allegedly used at our last address, it turned out they read the wrong meter and the bill was really £138, but had I not queried it and put my foot down when they rang to ask if we were paying it anytime soon, I asked for the final bill only then did it surface the bill was wrong and had we not queried it we would have been none the wiser.

on the Marathon front Andrea went out running last night for the first time in about 2 weeks because of a quad injury she seems to have managed it without crawling back into the house screaming in pain, so hopefully it's on its way to getting better. Living with an injured runner is like living with a heroin addict who can't get their fix.

The only other news is that my parents went away to Jersey for a week, and Andrea and I had been plotting to clear their back garden while they were away. Now my father is a hoarder, he's from the generation where nothing goes to waste, or that something will come in handy at some point, needless to say the "handy" things build up, and build up until you find yourself hopping and picking your way through the "handy" things in the back garden.... now we knew that this was not the "ideal" situation for my mother who likes nothing more than to sit in the back garden and relax with a cuppa, but when you've got old workbenches and bits and bobs strewn over every open bit of ground, it kind of detracts from the "relaxing" bit... So before they left Andrea "interrogated" my mother in the back garden asking what plant was what and saying things like "ohhhh this place needs a tidy" prompting my mother to spill the beans about what she would like done.... needless to say they left on the Sunday morning and we where there a few hours later digging and filling rubble sacks, all told we spent about 6 or 7 hours up there over the space of a week and filled 30 rubble sacks and got rid of countless brambles and bits and bobs.

We waited for them to come back, and eventually the phone rang with a very tearful mother, who seemed to appreciate her garden being sorted out... We wanted to do a lot more but what we might have liked she might not have liked, so instead we said if she wants anything else doing she only has to call us and we'll come up and strain some more muscles…

Life is good :-)