As I mentioned earlier: both implied acceptance and express acceptance of Sealand's Claim of Right of Sovereignty have occurred. To repeat myself yet again: Sealand HAS been LEGALLY RECOGNISED IN BRITISH COURTS as a Sovereign Principality by virtue of the 1968 finding *and* by specific LACK of ANY finding or declaration to the contrary.
When a State or individual makes a Statement of Intent and Claim of Right to Sovereignty, the State it is seceding from has a fixed amount of time to raise objection (usually thirty days) otherwise by virtue of lack of response, the Claim is regarded as accepted by implication thus satisfied. The 1968 ruling, however, was an express acceptance of the Sealand Claim, only a complete reversal of that decision would be any kind of indication that the UK does not recognise the Sovereignty of the principality.
The Royal Navy is only there to protect British shipping, for the simple reason that when a vessel flies the Jack it is bound by UK Maritime Laws and falls wholly under UK jurisdiction, hence also expects and enjoys its protection both legal and physical. Anything that threatens the Jack on the open sea becomes fair game to the Navy. The only reason that the pirates aren't sunk right there and then is because to arrest them and haul them into a court involves less paperwork than attempting to justify wasting a nine million Pound torpedo on a thirty thousand banana piece of shit rustbucket.
No, it does not require recognition of sovereignty, but it does require acceptance of jurisdiction.
If you as an external Sovereign body want to sue the UK or obtain an injunction against the State you have to do it in the ICJ. If you want to prosecute the UK for a criminal act you have to do that through the ICC as a complainant State - individual citizens CANNOT use the ICC or the ICJ, UNLESS YOU HAVE EXTREMELY UNUSUAL OR SIGNIFICANT ISSUES such as State-sanctioned child snatching and trafficking, systemic abuse and murder/genocide (been there, had the death threats made against my family).
If you ask nicely I'll happily post the entire complaint I and one other individual made that got 1500-odd arses twitching in Westminster Palace through the entire back half of 2010 and the entirety of 2011.
For a taster, here's what the Telegraph[PDF] had to say in 2010.
How about the MANY artificial islands lining the coast of Dubai? There's the Palm Deira, Port Rashid, The World Islands, The Palm Jumeira, The Palm Jebel Ali, and the one place I would love to spend my last night on Earth, the Burj al Arab Hotel.
All completely manmade from the sea bed up to the roof and all recognised sovereign territory of the Arab Emirate of Dubai.
Oh, and according to the treaties, the sea territory extends from the outer edges of these islands not the natural coastline - which means Dubai claims more ocean every time they build another resort.
Apart from the fact that Falklanders are British in every sense of the word? They might live the other side of the planet (almost), but they are as one vocal in their wish to remain British. They carry British passports. They depend on Britain for defence, for a lot of supplies, and Britain is the sole primary export destination for raw Falkland sheep wool.
The more I'm reading this the more I'm thinking that the UK would have to open a diplomatic channel to Sealand for any legal process - as a result of those two judgments and through some quirks in domestic and international law (previously discussed). To invade (which is what any storm of the structure would be) would be an overt act of war, even if it's against a single man armed with a.22 rifle. He is still, literally, master of all he surveys.
that's right... oh, and British sea territorial limits, in that area at least, only extend 6 miles. To extend 12 miles would overlap France's 12 miles coming the other way by 3-4 miles. Sealand's is still only 3 miles. There is a dead zone around Sealand of 3 miles radius which the British Government have studiously demapped. I've not been able to find it on my Ordance Survey. That thing has plenty other close offshore features such as the North Sea wind farms...
The structure in question (Sealand) stands outside of the three mile zone which at the time it was built stood outside the territorial limit - hence the 1968 ruling that the structure fell outside UK jurisdiction hence was subject only to international maritime law; by the same law, any natural or manmade structure, be it boat, island or lagoon, lies in the jurisdiction of its dependent nation state (which the structure currently did not since it was abandoned by the state!), therefore it fell lawfully either to general salvage under IML or it fell under the jurisdiction of the individual occupying the highest covered deck (ie, the Captain or whoever thereafter claims the salvage).
In short, since the State abandoned Sealand, the State had no legal claim to it nor did they have claim to salvage after it was claimed as a residence by a private individual.
Which is Debian based, IIRC. As is Knoppix, to which Kanotix is closely related. Knoppix was there first and is by far the more mature (and way better looking/performing).
Exactly. Plug it in and it's a fucking toaster. No more complicated than that. Microsoft are still nowhere near toaster-level ease of use OoBE, but they're closer than any Linux distribution given the undeniable fact that the vast, vast majority of new hardware ships with Windows! Apple are marginally closer with Mac OS but they're still not there either. To me, the reasons for this difference in out of the box user experience is obvious:
Microsoft: watches what Apple do with their interface, bundle as much as *they* can get away with, lets the vendor throw more junk in that will likely either be ignored completely or deleted by the user, quality control is limited to the first Tuesday every month.
Apple: releases when the whole package is *ready* - hardware, software, the whole shebang. It's almost a toaster. Thing is, it's close to toaster because Apple control what goes in the hardware and they control practically every aspect of the software load, from kernel to DVD decoder. When you have that level of control you have the ability to fine tune and debug with precision and quality assurance Gates and co. can only have wet dreams about.
Linux: Where to begin? So many different colours, will that be two slice, four slice, sixty-four slice, one continuous element or one for each slot, battery, solar or line powered... the choice for the end user is bewildering. End user might sometimes want only two slices, why would he want to buy a sixteen slice toaster?
That's the problem with Linux. In my opinion, there are quality distributions (for what I do, I use Debian, Mandriva and SuSE), and there are some absolutely shite ones (I stay right away from the pimped ones such as K/Ubuntu because I think they're clunky, bloated and ugly). Wherever you look, there are far too many distributions, far too many packages that do essentially exactly the same things as one another - some with IDENTICAL feature sets! - and far too many ways as a result to make the wrong move if you don't know what you're doing and breaking any minor or essential component which could result in anything from a minor inconvenience to a complete system breakage.
Now, for me, I have my ideal desktop. SuSE 11.4, Beryl/KDE3 custom desktop, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, Thunderbird, IceCat, xbmc, GIMP, Kino, and little else. When I want to run win32/64 native (eg games) I use the VM to run XP or 7. When I want to run OSX native (media player - I also mix a lot of music) I use the VM. It's very little different to running them on a cold boot - which option I also have. I don't have to fuck about with anything because it all works, but it has taken me several years to get to this point. I don't think Joe Average would have that kind of patience.
Mandriva is a very good platform for headless applications such as remotely monitored CCTV systems (I speak from experience, having deployed Zoneminder several times). Perhaps the vendor ought to be considering specified hardware solutions (not just Mandriva, all of the major distributions)? I can certainly help there with a spec for a multi-source CCTV system (32 cameras!)
...well, let's clear things up: I was always an AMD fan. Their CPUs rocked. I had a seriously great time overclocking my SS7 gear until it boiled.
The graphics cards sucked though. I'm talking about the old Radeon AGP cards. Put down your paddles, lads, 2006 was the last time I bought an ATI branded card (an X1800) and IMHO it sucked monkey balls. I couldn't even get it to perform at low resolution on Unreal 2002. That's why I went straight back to the store and swapped it for an NVidia 7600GT. Oh, yeah, life was sweet after that.
A couple weeks ago I bought a secondhand Sapphire HD3650 with 512MB DDR2. OK, it's a bloody old and very low spec card by tech standards, but it blows my GF 7600GT right out of the water - even on a slower, single core 64-bit processor running 32-bit platform. That made me a fan of ATI/AMD graphics right there. The old machine (Core Duo) with the NVidia is now collecting dust.
That's not at all what I said. From the outset the US' goal was to *land a Man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth*. That was *the* milestone. What the Russians did was prove two things: that it was possible to fly round the Moon without disappearing into a black hole, and to land a piece of hardware without destroying it (which would, had it happened to a LEM, have made getting off the Moon slightly difficult). Orbiting three men 60 miles over the Lunar surface was nothing: the orbital mechanics problem was vindicated by what the Russians had already done several years previously. What the US were doing was taking things one step at a time (read up on the evolution of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, then ask yourself: why after all that did the US then restrict its Manned space program to orbits of less than two hundred miles?) whereas the Russians were prepared to go for a one-shot landing and retrieval - something they might well have succeeded in had the four N-1 launchers not exploded on the pad during unmanned firing tests.
cartridge-load sidearms: illegal if you're a civilian, not if you're a police officer or a soldier on duty. Police officers and soldiers are therefore criminals. Tasers: illegal if you're a civilian, not if you're a police officer. Police officers are criminals. Class A drugs: illegal if you're not a pharmacist or prescribed user. Pharmacists and prescribed users are criminals.
Oh, the doozy:
Any blunt or sharp tool, hand drawn or powered, that is used in carpentry or metalwork or masonry or food preparation: illegal if you're not on site and actually using it. All metalworkers, carpenters, masons, builders, hobby mechanics, bicycle repairers and housewives are criminals.
EDIT: first paragraph. Minimum required primary diameter can be calculated to resolve a diffraction pattern using that same formula. Using a larger primary does nothing to improve resolution, all that does is improve the *quantity* of incident radiation hitting the sensor.
It's not a question of optical quality, it's a question of physics. You can not get an angular resolution better than sin [Theta]=1.220(lambda/D), where D is the primary diameter, Theta is the angular resolution, lambda is the wavelength used and 1.220 is the first zero of the Bessel function: this is used to resolve distance between two points. If the distance is less than sin[Theta] then the two points cannot be resolved (separated).
For a spy satellite to be able to read newspaper headlines over your shoulder, even in LEO, would require a primary several km in diameter and it would require that far UV is not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.
It's clearly impossible for an optical telescope on the Earth to resolve any of the Apollo hardware on the Moon, since the best systems, using adaptive optics in the near-infrared, can resolve details of maybe 0.02 arcsec. A lunar lander of width 5 meters, at a distance of 382,000 km, subtends an angle of 0.003 arcsec. The Hubble Space Telescope isn't appreciably closer the Moon, and its best resolution is about 0.03 arcsec in the near-UV. Not good enough. In fact, out by a decimal place.
About the best you're ever going to get without walking up to the hardware itself is such as you'll find in NASA image AS15-9377[P]. This shows a resolution of something like 15m/pixel - not enough to make out the hardware or its orientation, but enough to describe a low shadow thrown by the lander stage. And *that* was taken from low lunar orbit (Apollo 15 CSM).
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to the Arab Emirate of Dubai.
As I mentioned earlier: both implied acceptance and express acceptance of Sealand's Claim of Right of Sovereignty have occurred. To repeat myself yet again: Sealand HAS been LEGALLY RECOGNISED IN BRITISH COURTS as a Sovereign Principality by virtue of the 1968 finding *and* by specific LACK of ANY finding or declaration to the contrary.
When a State or individual makes a Statement of Intent and Claim of Right to Sovereignty, the State it is seceding from has a fixed amount of time to raise objection (usually thirty days) otherwise by virtue of lack of response, the Claim is regarded as accepted by implication thus satisfied. The 1968 ruling, however, was an express acceptance of the Sealand Claim, only a complete reversal of that decision would be any kind of indication that the UK does not recognise the Sovereignty of the principality.
well, no. Sealand has its own flag. As with any Sovereign State or individual, it is governed by its own set of Laws.
Self-governance does not preclude trade, and is the entirety of Sovereignty.
The Royal Navy is only there to protect British shipping, for the simple reason that when a vessel flies the Jack it is bound by UK Maritime Laws and falls wholly under UK jurisdiction, hence also expects and enjoys its protection both legal and physical. Anything that threatens the Jack on the open sea becomes fair game to the Navy. The only reason that the pirates aren't sunk right there and then is because to arrest them and haul them into a court involves less paperwork than attempting to justify wasting a nine million Pound torpedo on a thirty thousand banana piece of shit rustbucket.
ACTS of war are illegal.
DECLARATION of war makes it legal.
NEITHER make war LAWFUL. It's still MURDER.
No, it does not require recognition of sovereignty, but it does require acceptance of jurisdiction.
If you as an external Sovereign body want to sue the UK or obtain an injunction against the State you have to do it in the ICJ. If you want to prosecute the UK for a criminal act you have to do that through the ICC as a complainant State - individual citizens CANNOT use the ICC or the ICJ, UNLESS YOU HAVE EXTREMELY UNUSUAL OR SIGNIFICANT ISSUES such as State-sanctioned child snatching and trafficking, systemic abuse and murder/genocide (been there, had the death threats made against my family).
If you ask nicely I'll happily post the entire complaint I and one other individual made that got 1500-odd arses twitching in Westminster Palace through the entire back half of 2010 and the entirety of 2011.
For a taster, here's what the Telegraph[PDF] had to say in 2010.
How about the MANY artificial islands lining the coast of Dubai? There's the Palm Deira, Port Rashid, The World Islands, The Palm Jumeira, The Palm Jebel Ali, and the one place I would love to spend my last night on Earth, the Burj al Arab Hotel.
All completely manmade from the sea bed up to the roof and all recognised sovereign territory of the Arab Emirate of Dubai.
Oh, and according to the treaties, the sea territory extends from the outer edges of these islands not the natural coastline - which means Dubai claims more ocean every time they build another resort.
ONLY if it is made retroactive. Which is RARE.
Apart from the fact that Falklanders are British in every sense of the word? They might live the other side of the planet (almost), but they are as one vocal in their wish to remain British.
They carry British passports.
They depend on Britain for defence, for a lot of supplies, and Britain is the sole primary export destination for raw Falkland sheep wool.
The more I'm reading this the more I'm thinking that the UK would have to open a diplomatic channel to Sealand for any legal process - as a result of those two judgments and through some quirks in domestic and international law (previously discussed). To invade (which is what any storm of the structure would be) would be an overt act of war, even if it's against a single man armed with a .22 rifle. He is still, literally, master of all he surveys.
that's right... oh, and British sea territorial limits, in that area at least, only extend 6 miles. To extend 12 miles would overlap France's 12 miles coming the other way by 3-4 miles. Sealand's is still only 3 miles. There is a dead zone around Sealand of 3 miles radius which the British Government have studiously demapped. I've not been able to find it on my Ordance Survey. That thing has plenty other close offshore features such as the North Sea wind farms...
probably an oversight... the limit was extended very recently if I recall, 1986? '87? Plenty time since for someone to spot and correct it...
The structure in question (Sealand) stands outside of the three mile zone which at the time it was built stood outside the territorial limit - hence the 1968 ruling that the structure fell outside UK jurisdiction hence was subject only to international maritime law; by the same law, any natural or manmade structure, be it boat, island or lagoon, lies in the jurisdiction of its dependent nation state (which the structure currently did not since it was abandoned by the state!), therefore it fell lawfully either to general salvage under IML or it fell under the jurisdiction of the individual occupying the highest covered deck (ie, the Captain or whoever thereafter claims the salvage).
In short, since the State abandoned Sealand, the State had no legal claim to it nor did they have claim to salvage after it was claimed as a residence by a private individual.
Which is Debian based, IIRC. As is Knoppix, to which Kanotix is closely related. Knoppix was there first and is by far the more mature (and way better looking/performing).
Exactly. Plug it in and it's a fucking toaster. No more complicated than that. Microsoft are still nowhere near toaster-level ease of use OoBE, but they're closer than any Linux distribution given the undeniable fact that the vast, vast majority of new hardware ships with Windows! Apple are marginally closer with Mac OS but they're still not there either. To me, the reasons for this difference in out of the box user experience is obvious:
Microsoft: watches what Apple do with their interface, bundle as much as *they* can get away with, lets the vendor throw more junk in that will likely either be ignored completely or deleted by the user, quality control is limited to the first Tuesday every month.
Apple: releases when the whole package is *ready* - hardware, software, the whole shebang. It's almost a toaster. Thing is, it's close to toaster because Apple control what goes in the hardware and they control practically every aspect of the software load, from kernel to DVD decoder. When you have that level of control you have the ability to fine tune and debug with precision and quality assurance Gates and co. can only have wet dreams about.
Linux: Where to begin? So many different colours, will that be two slice, four slice, sixty-four slice, one continuous element or one for each slot, battery, solar or line powered... the choice for the end user is bewildering. End user might sometimes want only two slices, why would he want to buy a sixteen slice toaster?
That's the problem with Linux. In my opinion, there are quality distributions (for what I do, I use Debian, Mandriva and SuSE), and there are some absolutely shite ones (I stay right away from the pimped ones such as K/Ubuntu because I think they're clunky, bloated and ugly). Wherever you look, there are far too many distributions, far too many packages that do essentially exactly the same things as one another - some with IDENTICAL feature sets! - and far too many ways as a result to make the wrong move if you don't know what you're doing and breaking any minor or essential component which could result in anything from a minor inconvenience to a complete system breakage.
Now, for me, I have my ideal desktop. SuSE 11.4, Beryl/KDE3 custom desktop, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, Thunderbird, IceCat, xbmc, GIMP, Kino, and little else. When I want to run win32/64 native (eg games) I use the VM to run XP or 7. When I want to run OSX native (media player - I also mix a lot of music) I use the VM. It's very little different to running them on a cold boot - which option I also have. I don't have to fuck about with anything because it all works, but it has taken me several years to get to this point. I don't think Joe Average would have that kind of patience.
YaST
Mandriva is a very good platform for headless applications such as remotely monitored CCTV systems (I speak from experience, having deployed Zoneminder several times). Perhaps the vendor ought to be considering specified hardware solutions (not just Mandriva, all of the major distributions)? I can certainly help there with a spec for a multi-source CCTV system (32 cameras!)
...well, let's clear things up: I was always an AMD fan. Their CPUs rocked. I had a seriously great time overclocking my SS7 gear until it boiled.
The graphics cards sucked though. I'm talking about the old Radeon AGP cards. Put down your paddles, lads, 2006 was the last time I bought an ATI branded card (an X1800) and IMHO it sucked monkey balls. I couldn't even get it to perform at low resolution on Unreal 2002. That's why I went straight back to the store and swapped it for an NVidia 7600GT. Oh, yeah, life was sweet after that.
A couple weeks ago I bought a secondhand Sapphire HD3650 with 512MB DDR2. OK, it's a bloody old and very low spec card by tech standards, but it blows my GF 7600GT right out of the water - even on a slower, single core 64-bit processor running 32-bit platform. That made me a fan of ATI/AMD graphics right there. The old machine (Core Duo) with the NVidia is now collecting dust.
That's not at all what I said. From the outset the US' goal was to *land a Man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth*. That was *the* milestone. What the Russians did was prove two things: that it was possible to fly round the Moon without disappearing into a black hole, and to land a piece of hardware without destroying it (which would, had it happened to a LEM, have made getting off the Moon slightly difficult).
Orbiting three men 60 miles over the Lunar surface was nothing: the orbital mechanics problem was vindicated by what the Russians had already done several years previously. What the US were doing was taking things one step at a time (read up on the evolution of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, then ask yourself: why after all that did the US then restrict its Manned space program to orbits of less than two hundred miles?) whereas the Russians were prepared to go for a one-shot landing and retrieval - something they might well have succeeded in had the four N-1 launchers not exploded on the pad during unmanned firing tests.
oh, I can think of so many analogies...
cartridge-load sidearms: illegal if you're a civilian, not if you're a police officer or a soldier on duty. Police officers and soldiers are therefore criminals.
Tasers: illegal if you're a civilian, not if you're a police officer. Police officers are criminals.
Class A drugs: illegal if you're not a pharmacist or prescribed user. Pharmacists and prescribed users are criminals.
Oh, the doozy:
Any blunt or sharp tool, hand drawn or powered, that is used in carpentry or metalwork or masonry or food preparation: illegal if you're not on site and actually using it. All metalworkers, carpenters, masons, builders, hobby mechanics, bicycle repairers and housewives are criminals.
Mod me down. I double dare ya! :)
EDIT: first paragraph. Minimum required primary diameter can be calculated to resolve a diffraction pattern using that same formula. Using a larger primary does nothing to improve resolution, all that does is improve the *quantity* of incident radiation hitting the sensor.
It's not a question of optical quality, it's a question of physics. You can not get an angular resolution better than sin [Theta]=1.220(lambda/D), where D is the primary diameter, Theta is the angular resolution, lambda is the wavelength used and 1.220 is the first zero of the Bessel function: this is used to resolve distance between two points. If the distance is less than sin[Theta] then the two points cannot be resolved (separated).
For a spy satellite to be able to read newspaper headlines over your shoulder, even in LEO, would require a primary several km in diameter and it would require that far UV is not absorbed by Earth's atmosphere.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/09/apollo_17/
Go nuts.
They're not milestones - they're problems to be solved to reach the milestone.
It's clearly impossible for an optical telescope on the Earth to resolve any of the Apollo hardware on the Moon, since the best systems, using adaptive optics in the near-infrared, can resolve details of maybe 0.02 arcsec. A lunar lander of width 5 meters, at a distance of 382,000 km, subtends an angle of 0.003 arcsec. The Hubble Space Telescope isn't appreciably closer the Moon, and its best resolution is about 0.03 arcsec in the near-UV. Not good enough. In fact, out by a decimal place.
About the best you're ever going to get without walking up to the hardware itself is such as you'll find in NASA image AS15-9377[P]. This shows a resolution of something like 15m/pixel - not enough to make out the hardware or its orientation, but enough to describe a low shadow thrown by the lander stage. And *that* was taken from low lunar orbit (Apollo 15 CSM).