Slashdot Mirror

"15,000 years ago a group of our ancestors were munching on the flesh of other humans. We still do not know exactly why"

"About 15,000 years ago in Gough's Cave, near Bristol in the UK, a group of people ate parts of each other.

They de-fleshed and disarticulated the bones, then chewed and crushed them. They may also have cracked the bones to extract the marrow inside.

It was not only adults that showed signs of being eaten. A three-year-old child and two adolescents all had the tell-tale marks of being nibbled on.

Some of their skulls were even modified into ornaments called "skull cups", which may have been used to drink out of.

What was going on in Gough's Cave? Was this an example of human violence between rivals, a strange kind of ritual behaviour, or simply a desperate bid for survival?"

Article: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story...
Archived: https://archive.fo/JeZdl
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

No, the poster is confusing the religious-right-infected Republicans with Islamic terrorism. To be fair, that's an easy mistake to make.

Not sure if he's thinking of ELO, Boston had a lot of UFOs on their album covers, too.

But surely this dude should already know the real truth.
Because teh intarwebs tell me that that the Space People communicate to the great unwashed through the medium of Rock n Roll. David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and dozens of other examples have met the Space Brothers.

There's a radio interview with the Jolitzes in which they describe how they got involved with BSD.

Lightwave vs Notepad: http://web.archive.org/web/200...

This was back after XP came out and Notepad was starting to experience some feature creep in XP Notepad, like the view menu or the ability to edit unicode files. I don't think anyone expected one of the classic windows apps like mspaint to actually get 3d support.

. . . some very smart people ARE already working on this issue, and have been for a long time. See the Digital Preservation Network and Internet Archive for starters.

Yep. True.

Thank you, Vint, for once again parroting observations I made 8 years ago, and taking credit for them.

But Vint, you again missed mentioning my solution (patented). Ah, but if all you want is more fame, then you go girl.

That is beside the point. Films from that era weren't like published books or modern DVDs, which are sold to the public and so there are lots of copies floating around out there that you can duplicate. Copyright means the copyright owner controls distribution. And their distribution policy at the time was to make copies of the newsreels, distribute them to theaters where they were to be viewed for a few weeks or months, then the copies had to be destroyed or returned to them. Consequently, the only existing copies are usually in the copyright holders' film vaults. And if they're not interested in preserving it...

The situation is different for radio broadcasts of that era. Audio recording equipment was much more available to the public. So there are plenty of illegal recordings (copyright violations) which have allowed us to recover some of that history. The WWII news broadcasts are particularly good. As you listen to them, it dawns on you that our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't know if they were going to win the war. In retrospect that is obvious, but that uncertainty is not conveyed when you just read about the war in history books.

. . . some very smart people ARE already working on this issue, and have been for a long time. See the Digital Preservation Network and Internet Archive for starters.

That's why we have to support the Internet Archive library. Let's have a backup of everything there !! https://archive.org/

Robin Williams' Widow Susan Schneider Williams Pens Heartbreaking Essay About His Final Months

"It has been two years since Robin Williams died, and his widow, Susan Schneider Williams, continues to work to spread awareness of the brain disease that led to his suicide, Lewy Body Disease.

In a heartbreaking essay titled "The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain," Susan writes about her late husband's final few months and how the disease that he didn't know he had consumed his life. Sharing that Robin's many symptoms didn't fit any one diagnosis, Susan explains that he had to deal with not only physical limitations such as heartburn and poor sense of smell but also mental incapacitation.

"By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels - just to name a few - were settling in hard," she writes. "Psychotherapy and other medical help was becoming a constant in trying to manage and solve these seemingly disparate conditions.""

- Full Article:

http://www.eonline.com/news/79...

** Essay ("The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain"):

http://www.neurology.org/conte...
http://www.neurology.org/conte...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

** Podcast: Dr. Ted Burns interviews Mrs. Susan Schneider Williams
September 27, 2016 Download Podcast:
https://tools.aan.com/rss/inde...

- About the podcast: "Dr. Ted Burns interviews Mrs. Susan Schneider Williams about her editorial on learning to deal with her husband's (Robin Williams) Lewy Body disease. Dr. Adam Numis is reading our e-Pearl of the week about X-linked myopathy with excessive autophagy. In the next part of the podcast Dr. Andy Schomer concludes his interview with Dr. Eelco Wijdicks about prognostic models and clinical findings of myoclonus."

Someone please submit this story here. It won't allow me to submit the story unless I register.

====
Robin Williams' Widow Susan Schneider Williams Pens Heartbreaking Essay About His Final Months

"It has been two years since Robin Williams died, and his widow, Susan Schneider Williams, continues to work to spread awareness of the brain disease that led to his suicide, Lewy Body Disease.

In a heartbreaking essay titled "The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain," Susan writes about her late husband's final few months and how the disease that he didn't know he had consumed his life. Sharing that Robin's many symptoms didn't fit any one diagnosis, Susan explains that he had to deal with not only physical limitations such as heartburn and poor sense of smell but also mental incapacitation.

"By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels - just to name a few - were settling in hard," she writes. "Psychotherapy and other medical help was becoming a constant in trying to manage and solve these seemingly disparate conditions.""

- Full Article:

http://www.eonline.com/news/79...

** Essay ("The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain"):

http://www.neurology.org/conte...
http://www.neurology.org/conte...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

A fun read:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Ha ha, in fact, Samsung, and Korea techs companies have history tied with Russian/E.European professionals/scientists. They transformed from low quality outsourcing for Japanese to hightech country with Russian "helps".

I take this article to be good news. Renewable energy is finally contributing to the grid well enough to where emissions will drop below the carbon emitted from transportation. This is excellent progress and excellent news.

Now, here's how you fix the transportation part. A wonderful article you can only find on the Wayback Machine, from 2004. UNH Biodiesel Group, Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae, Michael Briggs, University of New Hampshire, Physics Department.

It's my favorite paper on the topic and I'll take any opportunity to post it.

TL;DR - if we really wanted to, we (meaning the USA) could utilize biodiesel entirely for our current transportation needs. It would be 100% renewable, carbon neutral, and all the money spent would stay inside our own borders. And any other country could easily do the same. There is absolutely NO need to haul oil out of the ground anymore.

Check the math in the paper. We really could do this.

Too bad this isn't his.

Fabian Hemmer (http://copy.sh/, copy@copy.sh)

I have no idea where the submitter got Fabrice Bellard from. This is hosted on a completely different site and authored by a completely different person. Yes, more than one person is capable of implementing an x86 emulator in Javascript. Bellard wrote his and never released the (editable) source; this guy, OTOH, wrote a more compatible emulator of his own (runs more than Linux) and open sourced it.

This is also old news, I remember seeing it quite some time ago. The site has been up since 2014. Slow news day much?

KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS Continue reading

KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS Continue reading

Since it'll be offline for a while, perhaps... Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years.

vDOS — a “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their targets.

The vDOS database, obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com at the end of July 2016, points to two young men in Israel as the principal owners and masterminds of the attack service, with support services coming from several young hackers in the United States. [...]

Good ol'e days never stopped :-)

i.e. 4am's "Passport" auto-cracking which uses the disk's own RWTS to read the rest of the disk.

https://archive.org/details/Pa...

> Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

Then why did Apple have a "Tech Note #141" describing how to install the Shift-Key Mod ???

* https://archive.org/stream/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification/II_II-Shift-Key_Modification_djvu.txt

Apple II and II Plus: Shift-Key Modification

Revised: 9/30/88
Security: Everyone

Apple II and II Plus: Shift-Key Modification

This article last reviewed: 26 September 1984

Probably all Apple II owners have heard of a mysterious "Shift-Key Mod". To
many it has remained nothing more than a rumor, possibly because most
modifications are thought to be costly additions. Not so the "Shift-Key Mod",
the most simple and least expensive addition anyone could do for their Apple
II. Of software recognizing this modification, there is a wide variety:
Apple Writer, most other word processing software packages, and the firmware
of most 80-column cards.

Software must recognize this alphabetic modification; the Apple alone does not
do it automatically. After modification, the shift key allows you to enter
uppercase characters as you do on a typewriter, without the need to precede
them with a press of the Escape key or some other control character. You can
still use the shift key to type the regular "shift" non-alphabetic characters,
such as &,*,(,), and so on.

With the "Shift-Key Mod", you use the shift key to signal the software from an
unused part of the Apple II Game port. The Port can address four separate
hand controls and three hand-control pushbuttons of which only two of each are
used by the standard game paddles and joysticks. This leaves unused two hand
control inputs and a hand-control pushbutton input. The "Shift-Key Mod"
exploits the address of this remaining pushbutton input. In practice,
software supporting the modification first reads the character value at the
address of the keyboard. Then, since joysticks use pushbuttons #0 and #1, the
software reads the state of the address of pushbutton #2 (PB2) . If the PB2
address is operated then the software simply makes the keyboard value
represent uppercase.

To keep things in perspective, please note that this does not modify the Apple
II to display lowercase nor enter lowercase characters into your programs when
the II is in its native 40-column mode. To read the shift key's new address,
the Apple II must have special software; without it, the II stays in 40-column
mode. Most 80-column cards have firmware to read the address and display
lowercase when in 80-column mode. When coding, you can easily enter lowercase

characters into your own program's output strings with 80-column cards
supporting the modification. However, when the program runs in 40-column
mode, lowercase characters will appear as "garbage" characters. Adding the
reasonably-priced "Lowercase Character Generator" on the motherboard allows
proper display of lowercase characters in 40-column mode. Apple Writer also
supports lowercase character generators.

Now to make the modification. Connect two micro test clips together with 8
inches of 28 AWG wire and solder the connections. Use micro test clips to
match the size of Radio Shack #270-370 clips. 28 AWG wire-wrap will do. Clip
size is most important; wire size and brands are less important. Once the
jumper cools, install it this way:

1. Clip one end to pin 1 of the IC located at motherboard location H14, a
74LS251 .

2. Clip the other end to pin 24 of the molex connector that connects the
keyboard electronics to the keyboard. Pin 25 of this connecter is at the
end away from the Apple's power supply. Pin 24 is to the left of pin 25.

Copyright 1988 Apple Computer, Inc.

Tech Info Library Article Number: 141

the issue maybe what is considered "poisonous", terrorism today and free speech tomorrow.

This site was once an anti-government screed and then an Osama bin Ladin fan site before becoming its current incarnation, a New Right/Alt Right blog.

It is still listed as a hate site for one of those earlier incarnations, meaning that it is blocked in most workplaces, and no amount of petitioning these services leads to it being permanently unblocked.

That is what we face: either user-reported or bureaucrat-driven censorship.

the issue maybe what is considered "poisonous", terrorism today and free speech tomorrow.

This site was once an anti-government screed and then an Osama bin Ladin fan site before becoming its current incarnation, a New Right/Alt Right blog.

It is still listed as a hate site for one of those earlier incarnations, meaning that it is blocked in most workplaces, and no amount of petitioning these services leads to it being permanently unblocked.

That is what we face: either user-reported or bureaucrat-driven censorship.

It would.

ACE magazine used to have a form of this in their Predicted Interest Curve, with their estimate of a game's hold over a minute, hour, day, week, month and year; but of course basing it on real measured data would be even better.

It's difficult to point out one paper in particular, as of course any animal researcher is somewhat biased towards the species he's most aquainted with. But I think papers like http://web.archive.org/web/201... really make some good points.

Here you go (archive version as the text has been changed on their blog):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.elementaryos.org/post/110645528530/payments

Note where it says "We want users to understand that theyâ(TM)re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software."

As far as the law is concerned, play it their way, *don't get caught* is all you need to know. Protect yourself by any means available. Luckily there's still Linux. Ultimately the government will end up outlawing general purpose computers to prevent the use of any unauthorized systems, and we'll be left hoping that we can print our own 3D electronics some day. The cat and mouse arms race will never end, until the ruling sociopaths just start exterminating any and all opposition, and the survivors will become caged medical experiments. The future does not look very rosy.

This ruling directly contradicts Tim Berners-Lee's express design plans for The Web. In 1997, Berners-Lee stated that

There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site

He even wrote this sentence in bold, inside a box, accompanying his Axioms of Web Architecture.

However he is most likely referring to linking to their entire page, showing their work in their original context. Excerpting their work and showing it in your context is something very different and we have conventions of quoting someone else's work and citing the source when that excerpt appears in our work. Linking to the full page seems fair use. Extracting a portion and embedding it in your content without quote or citation does not seem like fair use, it actually seems like plagiarism.

This ruling directly contradicts Tim Berners-Lee's express design plans for The Web. In 1997, Berners-Lee stated that

There is no reason to have to ask before making a link to another site

He even wrote this sentence in bold, inside a box, accompanying his Axioms of Web Architecture.

I'm not 100% sure since the customization button doesn't work. But there is a chance when I bought my laptop they had an option to not get an OS. I remember I could pick the OS as I think a month later Windows 7 became an option.

By the way, I don't know what's at the current pctorque site, but I wouldn't go there. They went out of business at one point I believe.

This one has the option.
http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np9152-clevo-p750dm2.html?startcustomization=1
No Operating System [Drivers & Utility Software Only](SKU: SGR12255)
Windows® 10 Home 64-Bit Edition Preinstalled (Clean Install | Drivers Only | No Bloatware)(SKU: SGR6823)
    [ +$70.00 ]
Windows® 10 Pro 64-Bit Edition Preinstalled (Clean Install | Drivers Only | No Bloatware)(SKU: SGR6825)
    [ +$120.00 ]

If we were to make a law requiring a refund, then I'd want to require resellers to itemize the cost of the bloatware if it offsets the OS cost. In other words, no refund in those situations.

You are looking at the wrong stats to support the claim, i.e. that men generally do worse in legal custody battles. It's not the percentage of time that the child lives with the father that matters, it's the percentage of time when both parents want custody and the father doesn't get it that matters. Otherwise you are including all the fathers who didn't want their children to live with them for any number of reasons.

Here's a page summarising the stats from your source, Macooby & Mnookin, and others: https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Trend: "In 1970, 2.8 million single mothers had custody of their children. By 1994 the figure had almost tripled. The number of fathers with sole custody practically quadrupled during that same time period."

So actually, between 1970 and 1994 men actually gained a greater percentage of custody than women. Unfortunately those are the most recent stats I could find, but it certainly seems that despite feminism being very strong during that time (remember that equality has actually declined in many areas since the highs of the 80s and early 90s, e.g. percentage of female engineering graduates) it wasn't negatively affecting men's ability to get custody.

Note also that only 4% of cases actually go to court, and only 1.5% are decided by the court. For most men, any bias in the legal system is of little concern because 98.5% of the time it isn't decided that way. Thus the often repeated claim that the law now favours women is actually making things worse for men by distracting from the more more common mediation route.

In SJW-world this would mean any contested cases should automatically go to the father right?

I can't speak for those people, whoever they are, and I certainly don't agree with that.

And you know it's paywalled! So why using that article at all?

If the main Forbes site gives you trouble (or you just don't want to patronize them), try the Internet Archive. Seems to work okay for me.

> It's not ironic at all if you understand the concept that "MS" is not a person

Legally, they are.

I would highly recommend watching the excellent documentary The Corporation

Balmer in his typical MS FUD fashion shoots his mouth out without thinking when he refers to Linux instead of meaning the GPL. He also makes makes several ignorant / false statements. The full quote is (emphasis added):

Q: Do you view Linux and the open-source movement as a threat to Microsoft?

A: Yeah. It's good competition. It will force us to be innovative. It will force us to justify the prices and value that we deliver. And that's only healthy. The only thing we have a problem with is when the government funds open-source work. Government funding should be for work that is available to everybody. Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.

There are several lies here:

1. Open source is not available to commercial companies.
a) Someone should notify their HotMail team! http://betanews.com/2001/06/18...
b) Tell that to Red Hat or Free/Open BSD whose ENTIRE business is based on open source.

2. If you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source
a) Had the man has never heard of Free BSD?
b) This is false; it gives the impression that you can't write close source software while using open source programs. You can.
c) Let's fix this statement so it is actually correct:
If you extend any open-source software, you have to make the rest of that software open source.

3. Linux is not in the public domain. /Oblg. "You keep using this word public, it doesn't mean what you think it means."
The public's rights is what is being preserved with the GPL. So while the GPL is not 100% free with no-strings-attached, like BSD, that is to prevent someone from hoarding their changes. GPL focuses on the public's freedom, BSD focuses on the developer's freedom.

Ironically, MS was complaining about the GPL while using BSD licensed code. Go figure.

This is the same company that obfuscated Windows 7 licensing so much that ZDnet wrote an article about it:
* http://www.zdnet.com/article/w...

I have been studying the topic of Windows licensing for many years. As I have discovered, Microsoft does not have all of this information organized in one convenient location. Much of it, in fact, is buried in long, dry license agreements and on sites that are available only to partners. I couldn't find this information in one convenient place, so I decided to do the job myself. I gathered details from many public and private sources and summarized the various types of Windows 7 license agreements available to consumers and business customers. Note that this table and the accompanying descriptions deliberately exclude a small number of license types: for example, I have omitted academic and government licenses, as well as those provided as part of MSDN and TechNet subscriptions and those included with Action Pack subscriptions for Microsoft partners. With those exceptions, I believe this list includes

Actually if you look at the math in this paper temperature anomalies of the 20th century were not in any way unusual fom temperature anomalies in the previous 8100 centuries:

http://multi-science.atypon.co...

Think about it, pick any two points on a line and you can show a positive, negative or zero slope and "prove" anything if you pick the two points correctly. For example using the noaa data post 2K you can show warming, cooling or no change *depending on what points you pick*. (The NOAA has a graphing calculator you can play with to prove this to yourself - if you can prove your opponents point with this tool as well as yours maybe the methodology was meant for demonstration to the public and not mathematical rigor, eh?

The fact they play fast and loose with the math is not confidence inspiring. Recall the statement "each of the past 10 years has been the hottest on record" - the president has actually said this (and you'll note has never used the word "pollution") but the numbers clearly show that 1989 was the hottest year and each year from 200o to 2009 was colder than the previous one. A clear decadal cooling period but still hot years this making the statement true, despite the fact it got cooler each year not warmer as they tried to infer. That's not science, that's marketing. If you have to lie about it, it's probably not true or you wouldn't need to lie you's just explain the facts. The facts are it stopped warming and we were wrong about CO2. Overall it has a positive effect, not negative and it created by an increase in temperature not vice versa. Only 4 billion years of fossils show this, argue with CERN and NASA if you disagree.
.

http://climate-math.science/.i...
http://climate-math.science/.i...

Here's ALL the temperature data all 4.5 billion years of it, so there's zero chance of cherry picking. The other point that kills the agw argument is there's no discernable human signature of warming in the thermal record. If you think there is, please point it out - it will be recognizable as a sharper slope than has ever occurred in the thermal record before.

http://climate-math.science/.i...

Co2 stopped rising years ago:
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

It was higher (by 40 ppm) 200 years ago:
http://climate-math.science/.i...
(See Beck 2008).

Articles keep saying "global warming" as if it were true. It's never actually been proved true, that was a hypothesis based on some incomplete models and now have 75% error between predicted and measured temperature. Even when CO2 ose temperature declined (2000-2009) for a decade, every year being colder than the previous despite CO2 rising sharply:

In a new interview with MSNBC he says: '"The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.'
https://web.archive.org/web/20...

There's a reason the link to the actual article disappeared. TL;DR another hothead on the internet libels someone whose opinion he doesn't share.

Cringely opined that MS should build it's next desktop environment and shell on top of Linux in 2003 :

http://web.archive.org/web/200...

But other than that.. yeah, not much call for it, except from the creative types who want their tools (Photoshop, mostly) on a decent OS.

He's not ignoring anything. Read his original essay on Boing rather than the Fastcompany summary. From his piece:

In 2007, Steve Jobs published his Thoughts on Music, in which he said, basically, that the record industry had forced Apple to put DRM in its ecosystem and he didn't like it..

James P. Hogan's comments from: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
=====
An Earth set well into the next century is going through one of its periodical crises politically, and it looks as if this time they might really press the button for the Big One. If it happens, the only chance for our species to survive would be by preserving a sliver of itself elsewhere, which in practical terms means another star, since nothing closer is readily habitable. There isn't time to organize a manned expedition of such scope from scratch. However, a robot exploratory vessel is under construction to make the first crossing to the Centauri system, and it with a crash program it would be possible to modify the designs to carry sets of human genetic data coded electronically. Additionally, a complement of incubator/nanny/tutor robots can be included, able to convert the electronic data back into chemistry and raise/educate the ensuing offspring while others prepare surface habitats and supporting infrastructure, when a habitable world is discovered. By the time we meet the "Chironians," their culture is into its fifth generation.

In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?

The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!

So I claim the credit. Forget all the tales you hear about the contradictions of Marxist economics, truth getting past the Iron Curtain via satellites and the Internet, Reagan's Star Wars program, and so on.

In 1989, after communist rule and the Wall came tumbling down, the annual European s.f. convention was held at Krakow in southern Poland, and I was invited as one of the Western guests. On the way home, I spent a few days in Warsaw and at last was able to meet the people who had published that original magazine. "Well, fine," I told them. "Finally, I can draw out all that money that you stashed away for me back in '85. One of the remarked-too hastily--that "It was worth something when we put it in the bank." (There had been two years of ruinous inflation following the outgoing regime's policy of sabotaging everything in order to be able to prove that the new ideas wouldn't work.) I said, resignedly, "Okay. How much are we talking about?" The one with a calculator tapped away for a few seconds, looked embarrassed, and announced, "Eight dollars and forty-three cents." So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest--all of it.

U.S. veterans reveal 1962 nuclear close call dodged in Okinawa

*******************

At the final moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, the U.S. nuclear missile men in Okinawa received a launch order which was later found to have been mistakenly issued, according to testimonies by former U.S. veterans given to Kyodo News.

In the fall of 1962, the Soviet Union introduced nuclear missiles into Cuba from where Moscow could target the mainland of the United States. U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his top advisers then seriously considered military options as a countermeasure, and the two superpowers were on the brink of nuclear exchanges.

The testimonies by the veterans, who gazed into the "abyss" of a nuclear war, shed new historical light on a nuclear close call which could have triggered the use of nuclear weapons, highlighting the potential risk of an accidental nuclear launch.

According to John Bordne, 73, former member of the 873rd Tactical Missile Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, several hours after his crew took over a midnight shift from 12 a.m. on Oct. 28 in 1962 at the Missile Launch Control Center at Yomitan Village in Okinawa, a coded order to launch missiles was conveyed in a radio communication message from the Missile Operations Center at the Kadena Air Base.

Another former U.S. veteran who served in Okinawa also recently confirmed on condition of anonymity what Bordne told Kyodo News in an interview last summer and in following e-mail exchanges. Bordne has mentioned the incident in an unpublished memoir based on his diary.

Eight "Martin Marietta Mace B" nuclear cruise missiles were deployed at that time at the Yomitan missile site, called "Site One Bolo Point" by U.S. military personnel. Bordne, who currently lives in Blakeslee, Pennsylvania, was one of seven crew members there.

There were a total of four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point. Each site had eight missiles which were commanded and controlled by the Missile Operations Center at Kadena.

The main daily mission of Bordne, one of the flight-control specialists called Mech2, was to maintain the ready-to-launch status of Mace B missiles. Normally, once they started an eight-hour shift at the site, they "recycled" a missile, meaning powering down a missile, checking parts of the warhead, nosecone and flight control systems and returning it to ready-to-launch status.

"Oh, my God!," Bordne recalled his colleagues as saying as they turned white with shock and surprise when they received a launch order before dawn on Oct. 28. The order was issued from Kadena to all four Mace B sites in Okinawa including Bolo Point, he said.

According to him, the three-level confirmation process was taken step-by-step in accordance with a manual by comparing codes in the launch order and codes given to his crew team in advance. All of the codes matched.

"So, we read the targets out loud. Out of the four missiles, we had only one headed toward Russia. The other three were not going to Russia. That, right away, gave us a start to wonder. Because the launch directive said you launch all the missiles," Bordne said. His crew team was in charge of four out of eight missiles deployed at the site.

"And we figured, 'Why hit these other countries?' They've got nothing to do with this. That doesn't make any sense," Bordne said. "So, our captain, the launch officer, said to us 'We've got to think this through in a logical, rational manner'."

When the launch order was issued, the five-level "DEFCON" scale, or defense condition, remained at level 2, one step from starting a war. Theoretically, a launch order should not be issued unless DEFCON is raised to 1, which means initiating a military counterattack against enemy forces.

The order under DEFCON 2 made the crew team, especially the launch officer, so dubious about its authenticity that the officer ordered suspen

* Hook 25th Anniversary Reunion @ https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
URL: https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/P1VnX
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...
WTF?: Hook (1991): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
@ Twitter: https://twitter.com/22Vision
@ Twitter / Hashtags: #Hook25th #22Vision
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ho...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/22...

#####

* Hook cast (1991): Where Are They Now? [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: 'Hook' Turns 25! The Lost Boys Reunite and Remember Robin Williams [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- 'Hook' Turns 25: Lost Boys Reunite For Photo Shoot, Remember Robin Williams
URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/22Bks
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: âHookâ(TM) Turns 25! The Lost Boys Remember Robin Williams on the Second Anniversary of His Death
URL: http://www.etonline.com/movies...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/a6AgT
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- Lost Boys to men! Hook stars reunite in emotional picture 25 years on... without their leader Robin Williams
URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvs...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/TWGcR
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

* Hook 25th Anniversary Reunion @ https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
URL: https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/P1VnX
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...
WTF?: Hook (1991): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
@ Twitter: https://twitter.com/22Vision
@ Twitter / Hashtags: #Hook25th #22Vision
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ho...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/22...

#####

* Hook cast (1991): Where Are They Now? [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: 'Hook' Turns 25! The Lost Boys Reunite and Remember Robin Williams [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- 'Hook' Turns 25: Lost Boys Reunite For Photo Shoot, Remember Robin Williams
URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/22Bks
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: âHookâ(TM) Turns 25! The Lost Boys Remember Robin Williams on the Second Anniversary of His Death
URL: http://www.etonline.com/movies...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/a6AgT
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- Lost Boys to men! Hook stars reunite in emotional picture 25 years on... without their leader Robin Williams
URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvs...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/TWGcR
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

* Hook 25th Anniversary Reunion @ https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
URL: https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/P1VnX
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...
WTF?: Hook (1991): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
@ Twitter: https://twitter.com/22Vision
@ Twitter / Hashtags: #Hook25th #22Vision
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ho...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/22...

#####

* Hook cast (1991): Where Are They Now? [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: 'Hook' Turns 25! The Lost Boys Reunite and Remember Robin Williams [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- 'Hook' Turns 25: Lost Boys Reunite For Photo Shoot, Remember Robin Williams
URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/22Bks
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: âHookâ(TM) Turns 25! The Lost Boys Remember Robin Williams on the Second Anniversary of His Death
URL: http://www.etonline.com/movies...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/a6AgT
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- Lost Boys to men! Hook stars reunite in emotional picture 25 years on... without their leader Robin Williams
URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvs...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/TWGcR
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

* Hook 25th Anniversary Reunion @ https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
URL: https://www.facebook.com/22Vis...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/P1VnX
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...
WTF?: Hook (1991): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
@ Twitter: https://twitter.com/22Vision
@ Twitter / Hashtags: #Hook25th #22Vision
https://twitter.com/hashtag/Ho...
https://twitter.com/hashtag/22...

#####

* Hook cast (1991): Where Are They Now? [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: 'Hook' Turns 25! The Lost Boys Reunite and Remember Robin Williams [Video]
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

#####

- 'Hook' Turns 25: Lost Boys Reunite For Photo Shoot, Remember Robin Williams
URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/22Bks
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- EXCLUSIVE: âHookâ(TM) Turns 25! The Lost Boys Remember Robin Williams on the Second Anniversary of His Death
URL: http://www.etonline.com/movies...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/a6AgT
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

#####

- Lost Boys to men! Hook stars reunite in emotional picture 25 years on... without their leader Robin Williams
URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvs...
Archived #1: https://archive.is/TWGcR
Archived #2: https://web.archive.org/web/*/...

FreeTel 1999 FTW http://web.archive.org/web/199...

Those dirty Ruskies!

None Dare Call It Treason

Who would have thought the Clinton campaign would embrace the birchers...

The answer was "rent our software"

Oh well. It's a hard road on platforms where the proprietor has lost interest. You'll just have to wait for someone to build an emulator, like the Internet Archive has done.

Better yet, start that emulator project yourself. Be the answer to your repetitive question.

10 000 is quite a remarkable number of games. Link to best of.

If you believe Adam Curtis, it goes back at least to Leo Strauss.

My site, Interguru.com , set up in 1995, may well be the first site to use then then-new file upoad facility. It performed a service, translating email address books from one format to another, such as Eudora to Pine, rather than just displaying information.

Does anyone know of a earlier site that used file uploads?

Hamster Dance

And the Goatse Pancake Bunny Dance. (analse.cx; now gone, but preserved by the Wayback Machine.)

The first really cool site that I remember was where a guy poured liquid oxygen onto his barbecue. You can still watch it at Archive.org...

There was a massive fireball -- and a huge rush of adrenaline. I was always kind of sad that they didn't find some way to keep the original web page on the internet forever...