What about forwarding them to some random number in North Korea? That'd give them pause.
Hardly. There are very very few phone lines to North Korea (ISTR a few thousand has been mentioned). After all, what possible purpose would someone have for calling out of the country, or for calling in?
1. Port the application to Windows 2. Get people addicted to it (that's the hardest part). 3. Make sure that new developments are always available on Linux first (so that there's a real incentive to switch to Linux).
There is a considerable proportion of users of AnyAPP [fake link, for effect only! Do not follow.] who actively, and vigorously and vocally DO NOT WANT NEW FEATURES. While bug fixes, and security updates are a sad necessity, feature upgrades are often a serious annoyance to users. What is often required is to get AnyJOB done by AnyAPP, a program that works well enough AND THEN STOPS CHANGING! Learning curves might be fun for some people, but they're normally just an impdiment to getting the damned job done and getting home to the family/ bar/ disco/ land. Which reminds me to buckle down and learn the 473 new features of this week's new version of the data management system.
4. At some time, introduce Linux-only features. 5. After enough users have switched to Linux, drop Windows support.
Ah, Zealotry. Very nice. I think you'll find that you and your fellow Zealots are on the 6th circle down, along with the Christians, the Atheists, and the Taxmen. Sorry, but the Jews were right after all.
(Sorry - watched Rowan Atkinson's stage show last night.) And for those of you who didn't go before you died, may I point out that the advert is for Eternal Torment WITHOUT Relief.
6. ??? 7. Profit!
What is the purpose of these final steps? Something reserved for future developments, or some horrible kludge for compatibility backwards with some archaic system?
(Sorry, the last two lines just had to come!:-))
Ah. Humour. I see. Very good. Most amusing. "Droll" is hardly the word.
Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.
So, he's tracking what US Government computers are doing, and he travels abroad. What better evidence of nefarious intent could you have. Straight to Gitmo for you, do not collect £200, do collect an orange boiler suit and a pair of ear-muffs. Don't ask where the toilets are - you'll be hosed-down later.
Oh, some USB keyboards take a long time to startup as well. But if a keyboard is not present, it's pretty easy to connect one and hit the damn F1 key, so I don't know how stupid this actually is.
With a USB keyboard, that may be true (I don't have any machines with USB keyboards to try it on.) Try that more than a few times in a room full of PS/2 keyboarded-and-moused machines any you'll pretty soon have a fried motherboard to contemplate the joys of plug'n'pray over. You've got to power down before connecting a PS/2 device. Well, if they're your own machines - you can do what the fsck you want to the machines at your work.
[/self] checks the works which laptop I'm using this week - USBs only. Must be one of the newer ones (as the #24 serial number and the XP desktop installation suggests).[self]
Since I'm looking at building a new machine for the wife, with a Cyrillic keyboard of course, this was worth a look. Budget for the whole machine was in the order of £500 / US$1000/ 800. I think I'll order a Cyrillic/ UK keyboard, and a spare, and then cease to worry about it. Hmmm, hunting around, two UK suppliers ; one with 50% bad reviews on PriceRunner, the other with 99%+ positive feedback on ebay. One with a phone that's engaged and a complex register-before-you-get-to-talk-to-sales system and one with the usual eBay forms. Phone is still engaged - oh well, Kikatek lose, the ebayer wins.
4) Apparently the computers which control a nuclear plant are connected to the public Internet, allowing anyone in the world to send them commands, viruses, or random garbage,
Might I recommend you to RTFA? The "data storm" appears to have been on a internal network (not seemingly connected to anything apart from other internal networks), where a data acquisition and control device barfed on some bad data and started to spew garbage onto the network. Inadequate data validation combined with inappropriate or ineffective error handling. Software fault.
Pay per message text messaging seems like something from the 1980s.
Now, why do I get the feeling that you weren't paying phone bills back in the 1980s? (Actually, after 1987 and until 1993, I wasn't either - my flat mates and I decided at various times that getting a phone into the flat was a waste of time and money.) While some of the planning and groundwork for GSM was being laid in the 1980s, mobile phones were
the size and weight of bricks. Large bricks.
Analogue-only;
Extremely expensive.
On the other hand, the first mobile phones I dealt with in 1989/ 1990 were capable of getting a fax and data connection to shore from 80 miles out at sea. (Given that there was a 300ft tall mast in the middle of your boat, and an electronics technician and a crane operator to run the co-ax up to the antenna on the crown block assembly). One of the phones was damaged in shipping the communications system - the repair bill was in the order of £1200, and took about a month ; replacement was not an option because there weren't replacements available. When did SMS messaging become available? I think it was just rolling out (as a side-effect of GSM mobiles), in 1995~1996. I got a mobile in late 1996 IIRC, when it was the best part of a week's wages and that's when I discovered how tremendously effective text messaging is. Of course, that phase only lasted about a month. Until the first bill came in, to be precise. SMS messages then were about £0.25 each - about $0.5 US? - which was a great encouragement to decide what was the most effective way to communicate the information you wanted to send - mobile voice, mobile text or payphone? It's education. Seeing that the offending person with the $1000+ phone bill was an adolescent child, then a pre-paid phone is definitely the appropriate answer. My daughter has exactly that, and manages her life and her phone perfectly well with having to choose how much of her allowance to spend on telephony and how much to spend on clothes. She also choose to spend this year's birthday money on a new phone. All in all, an effective educational experience.
We thought the same thing until we had two periods this year with no cell service for a minimum of three days each. One was due to storms and flooding, the other was due to wind storms. Because we live a bit outside of our metro area, we were among the last to have cell service restored. We had relatives that had no way of contacting us to see if we were OK. No cell, no cable modem, no dial up because we didn't have a landline.
Never thought of calling one of the relatives (probably the nearest-residing one, or the most-likely-to-be-called one) using a payphone, to tell them that you're OK, and if there's anyone else asking, to pass the message on... Worked for us on a variety of occasions, if only because there's one retired family member who's likely to be #1 on anyone's "whats going on" call-list, so we can be pretty confident of getting a message through on someone's second call.
In some ways, the BBC in the UK operates like scientology. You have to pay them money for pretty much the rest of your life, and it's almost impossible to leave.
It is difficult to get away from the Beeb's fees, but not impossible - I did it for a number of years in the late 90s and early 00s. In respect of getting away from their paid importuners, they're no worse than the Mormons. And they do a really good line in looking miserable as the rain runs down the back of their neck and they beg for permission to enter the house to check for licensable equipment. (Do they use "resting" actors I wonder?) Much more importantly for invalidating the comparison, Auntie has a long history of selling their product to other people in the same business around the world (how else did the LeftPondians get to hear about Basil Fawlty?). When was the last time that you heard of anyone other than a certifiable lunatic buying a Scientology book. Come to think of it, I don't recall ever having seen any of their clap trap in second-hand bookshops. I smell an NDA.
So - there's a Scientology place in Edinburgh? Well, that could be amusing for an afternoon of twat tormenting. (More fun than pulling the wings off flies, but the same basic amusement.) Now, whose identity should I assume for the mission?
Having said that, if it came to war with scientology everyone would back it.
Watching Scientology Inc get into an arse-kicking competition with Auntie would be quite amusing. Could well be the death of Scientology outside the US. Is there significant Scientology outside the US? I mean, I admit that there are a number of poor sad pathetic deluded fools in Britain, but are there enough, and sufficiently deluded, for Scientology to actually make a profit on it;s british operations? It is, after all, all about profit to exactly the same extent that Iraq is all about the oil.
I don't know if it's Cox cable or too much interference, buy I've been having some hellish stability problems lately.
A few months ago - maybe a year ago - a bunch of my colleagues were having a chin-wag during a course at work. One is a proper radio ham (Morse code license, 10m antenna hanging out of him parents house, that sort of thing), and the other was a serious hi-fi dork (one of "silver-coated power lead" brigade). All of us were bitching about how the reception on the (FM) radio has been getting worse over the last few years. The most likely suspect to our minds was the amount of RF garbage leaking out from all sorts of sub-GHz clocks and signals wafting through the sub-ether. [GROUP SIGH] [GROUP reluctantly looks at the looming need to get into digital radio] Then again, would that be so bad? 13:15-13:30 A Short History of Ireland... Episodes 81-82 of 240. Maybe not.
For instance, the layout of nuclear facilities, the locations and materiel of defensive bases, or the site layouts and security measures of critical but vulnerable civilian infrastructure (dams, nuclear plants, hazardous waste facilities, fuel refineries, chemical plants, etc). It used to be that taking high-resolution pictures of such installations, systematically mapping the civilian and military infrastructure, and giving them out to foreign governments was considered treason.
Fair enough point. But not particularly relevant. A number of years ago I was flying home from work, and by coincidence my helicopter passed over a high security prison which was undergoing some building work (Peterhead prison, for what it's worth.). Everything in plain view, and if I'd wanted to snap a couple of pictures and sell them to criminals looking to bust their boss out of there, I could have. About 30 seconds later we flew over an old granite quarry near Boddam. Normal quarry, about 200ft deep into solid granite, stopped quarrying when they got to sea level and the water problems got too bad - just the sort of place you'd want to build a hardened NATO bunker into, which the rumour mill has as exactly what they were doing in there. Look down into the quarry - and all I can see is the roof of an industrial marquee covering the whole base of the quarry. All the building work going on under cover from prying eyes. Regardless of whether they're 40,000km up (geostationary), 150km up (Space Shuttle and US military spy satellites that the Shuttle launched so many of), 500m up (us in our paraffin budgie), or 5m up (Jimmy Bond about to abseil into the quarry with his camera and a white cat). I was driving round the perimeter fence of the Spook-HQ at Cheltenham a few years earlier on the way to the pub, and I thought "what would the Spooks give to be able to put their listening centre 10 miles from the nearest public road?" I guess the answer is both "A lot" and "Not enough", because they've not done it. Then again, they simply couldn't do it without leaving the country. I was exploring in some popular stone mines near Bath a few years later when we came to a flooded stretch of passage. Then we spotted the little red light at the far end of the straight tunnel. "Oh dear - that's the back door into the UK Government's main nuclear bunker. We must have taken the wrong turn at the 5-way junction a couple of minutes ago." Bye bye, wave at the squaddies watching the cameras.
The military have been camoflaging buildings while building them, and disguising their nature by misleading or anonymous construction patterns, since at the latest the First World War. You're lucky to be living in a country that has room to put Spook bases 50 miles from a town, or to build a nuclear processing plant without everyone in the town you build it in knowing it's ground plan in some detail. But if your military planners have gambled on that distance being enough... well frankly they've been fools.
Of course, if you look at the satellite versions of those Google links, you'll see one of the other problems. It's not censorship (per se), it's the fog that we call "the Haar". Might be that someone has persuaded Google not to buy-in new photos of the area, but since everyone in the area knows what happens in that quarry, so what?
so if an infinite number of cheneys were given shotguns and sent to hunt with a party of lawyers, would one actually hit an animal, or would the faces of the lawyers absorb an infinite amount of birdshot?
You'd never know - Halliburton would bury it all in cement and drop it into the bottom of the sea.
(Just having a dig at the Schlumberger cementer on the workstation next to me. Halliburton's big cementing competitor, for those of you outside the business.)
I also don't quite see how faking a Russian passport is a terrorist activity.
You're obviously attempting to establish a false identity with the fake passport that you and your associates are conspiring together to acquire. Abundant reports from America (and the UK, as I can attest, and other parts of Europe as some of my workmates tell me) are that the authorities take an extremely dim view of anyone making any attempt to establish a false identity. Getting a fake passport is a pretty high-end step towards establishing a false identity.
If you don't think there's something wrong, them try substituting "the price of bulk cocaine" for "the price of a fake Russian passport" in your previous discussion. Does it sound as if you and your associates are planning on doing some pretty heavy drug dealing with that substitution? After all, you've gone as far as trying to establish how much cash you'd have to up-front ; evidently you've already been investigating sources for acquiring the passports. What's that phrase in the American constitution? "Prior cause", or something like that? Sufficient grounds for the casually-listening spook to think "there's something suspicious going on here - better do some further positive investigation". Enjoy yourself explaining your activities to your local authorities.
I don'q quite get the source of hostility. [SNIP] Since all government in Russia is based on bribery, this is just how things are done there.
At one end of your comment you can't get the source of the hostility, and at the other end you accuse my wife of having been a participant in a bribery-based government. If you can't see the grounds for hostility there, then I'd suggest that you get the bus to your optician, because you're sure not safe to drive with vision that poor. Does it shock you that if you make a blanket condemnation of 150 million people, you'll find that some people find your remarks insulting and are willing to hold you accountable for your remarks? So sorry for not pandering to your racist stereotypes. Not. I have to put up with this sort of comment every rig I go to work on - some people assuming that all Russians in the UK are whores ; other people assuming that they're all theiving oligarchs. Just like all Americans are uneducated, self-obsessed, gun-toting Dubya fanboys. Nice being on the receiving end of a stereotype, isn't it?
Oh dear, Slashdot's submissions system can't handle Cyrillic script. The first line of my comment read (in anglicised pig-Russian) "Kak Interesno!", which translates as "How interesting!"
Given this and the fact that it takes less money to get a fake Russian passport (under $200) than to bribe an official to get a real one (about $500), this just increases the registration cost for any foreigner wishing to get a domain.ru
! I take it that you shopped around when you were breaking a multitude of laws in both your home country and Russia. I wonder about that because my wife's new passport is going to cost between £93 and £140 (that's approximately USD 180 to 280 depending on how far the dollar has fallen today). Legally. Or is it just possible that you're repeating uninformed bullshit picked up from the depths of the internet and as reliable as a blood transfusion in a Dar es Salaam hospital. (Incidentally, I've had to spend far more bribe money in one visit to the former UK colony of Tanzania than I have had to in four visits - 6 months - to the former Soviet Union. Which doesn't say much. I can't comment on the transfusions though - didn't need anything stronger than kaolin+morphia in my 8 weeks there.) I hope that the various police forces involved have noticed your claimed involvement in terrorist-related passport fraud. Which country would you like to be interrogated in ? Or perhaps some of those nice international flights that the CIA specialise in where you don't need any passports and you can get interrogated by everyone with an interest in your claimed knowledge.
As somebody said a couple of elections ago, we're faced with a choice of being forced to eat s*** and being forced to eat s*** with razor-blades.
Then do something about it! Run for office yourself. Setup your own party. Try to convince people to vote for the existing third-parties.
You mean that one should lend credence to "the system" by participating in the shit-eating competition? Besides, in the almost incredible circumstance of a new political party suceeding (which it would have to do in the teeth of frenzied opposition and undermining by all of the existing parties), then look at the company that you'd be keeping : politicians - the lowest of the low, scum-sucking thieves and criminals. I've got more respect for the crack dealer upstairs than for politicians.
I wouldn't dare walk around, for a simple fall could kill.
A simple fall in 1.0g on Earth can kill. All it takes is one well (poorly?) placed lump of rock dinting the head and you're meat.
2.5G would be a problem, but not insurmountable. But I suspect that the depth of the gravity well would be more of an issue than the surface gravity - it would be very expensive (in energy & reaction mass terms) to get anything from the surface up to orbit. For refuelling/ re-supplying an interstellar mission, a rich asteroid and/ or comet belt would be much more useful.
The first discovery of this cyclicity in the appearence/ disappearence of fossil species or genera was published in approximately 1982 by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (a project that pre-dates the Alvarezs' KT impact hypothesis). They see a 26 million year cyclicity. (Note - that link is to a proponent of the "Nemesis" hypothesis ; don't take this as endorsement of that theory. But the man provides an accessible summary of Raup & Sepkoski). A few years later people looked at essentially the same data set through different statistical goggles. They came up with a 24 Ma cycle. Others have come up with figures around 30 million years, from the same data. Now someone is extracting figures of around 64 million years. Whoopy-dee! As a geologist, I'm perfectly open to this sort of hypothesis. Space effects on life-on-Earth? Hey, I've been to Nordlingen - tick the box that says "space can affect life on Earth". But being open to this sort of idea does not mean accepting any presentation that's made. It's entirely possible that the observed variations in historical biodiversity levels are as much a product of variable preservation as of variable historical biodiversity. My guess - there's a lot of statistical effort applied to "damp down" the effects of the big spike in extinctions at 63~65 million years ago courtesy of (amongst others) the Chixulub impactor ; but the studies all show a spike in extinction frequencies at half, one, or twice the period of the biggest spike in the data set. That sounds to me like over-correction or under correction of the data, not helped by the data set being one-sided (we don't know biodiversity rates for the next 100 million years).
If Putin pulled the plug on an anti-Putin web site inside Russia, the anti-Putin web site could simply be migrated offshore to a server in, say, the United States.
... and Putin remains pissed off. So he puts a modest (say 20%) tax on oil being exported by companies based in or exporting to the site's hosting country. The speculators turn that into a 30 or 40% price rise on the spot market. So the oil price goes back up to $70+ per barrel, then carries on going. Bush is doing fine out of this personally, but as US gasoline prices approach reality the riots on the streets start shutting down cities. What was the price of free speech again? $75/barrel? $85? $95? The magic double-oh?
Hey, what are the chances of some oil trading systems having an oil-price "millennium bug"? When I started in the industry I wouldn't have considered a 10-fold price increase realistic. But I've seen 8-fold already, and with prices on a steady rise (BBC commodity prices) it could be back into record-breaking territory by mid-May. $100/barrel by New Year? Party time!
the big corporations are usually the last people to move on major upgrades like XP->Vista, often taking several years to do it
Sitting here on a oil rig, browsing on $BigCorporation$ computer system now that my part of operations is finished and I've 2 days to wait ofr the helicopter homewards...
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195] (C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp. C:\WINNT\system32>ver Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195] C:\WINNT\system32>
To the best of my knowledge, $BigCorporation$ has no plans at all to break their systems by moving to XP, let alone XPSP2. If you see a box running XP here you know 2 things immediately - the box was an emergency issue which the IT department didn't have time to wipe and re-image before putting on a chopper out to the rig, and it's not connected to the network.
First rule of engineering - if it works, don't fuck with it.
First rule corollary - TFA : Touch Fuck All.
Naturally, since $BigCorporation$ are major customers of ours, with an attitude typical of the industry, our in-house software people are only starting to think about Vista comaptibility testing. Their thinking has got as far as "testing before Service Pack 1 is out would be a waste of time and effort".
I'm more afraid of the neglected patches MSFT deems behind closed doors as not important enough to reveal to the public. How many zero-day exploits is MSFT discussing behind those closed doors right now, and what are they deciding about the fate of security to my machines?
A good reason to be worried, but you're not thinking about the liability issues appropriately. If MS were to make a deliberate decision to not work on a bug they knew about, and the bug was exploited leading to damage, and the internal MS decision came out... then their communal ass could be sued for knowingly selling a potentially dangerous product. Therfore, I'd expect the MS legal department to prowl the corridors in plain clothes, asking programmers at random if they're looking for bugs ; any that are found looking for bugs... as the BOFH would say "" and the lime pits get a little fuller.
So if I buy some XBox or something, I pay taxes on it. So if I sell it to somebody else, I have to pay taxes on it again? Where's the fairness in that? I'm getting screwed twice.
Ah, that's where you're getting confused. You seem to be under some misapprehension that there was a sign above the metaphorical doorway into life when you were born/ conceived/ became self-aware (wherever you care to put the line), and that sign read "Welcome to the Real World, where honesty is welcomed, fair treatment is the norm, and the cheque really is in the post."
Whoever told you that the world was like that, lied.
Welcome to the Real World ; feel thankful that you're only getting screwed twice, and that they use lubricant.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. There are very very few phone lines to North Korea (ISTR a few thousand has been mentioned).
After all, what possible purpose would someone have for calling out of the country, or for calling in?
There is a considerable proportion of users of AnyAPP [fake link, for effect only! Do not follow.] who actively, and vigorously and vocally DO NOT WANT NEW FEATURES. While bug fixes, and security updates are a sad necessity, feature upgrades are often a serious annoyance to users. What is often required is to get AnyJOB done by AnyAPP, a program that works well enough AND THEN STOPS CHANGING! Learning curves might be fun for some people, but they're normally just an impdiment to getting the damned job done and getting home to the family/ bar/ disco/ land.
Which reminds me to buckle down and learn the 473 new features of this week's new version of the data management system.
Ah, Zealotry. Very nice. I think you'll find that you and your fellow Zealots are on the 6th circle down, along with the Christians, the Atheists, and the Taxmen. Sorry, but the Jews were right after all.
(Sorry - watched Rowan Atkinson's stage show last night.) And for those of you who didn't go before you died, may I point out that the advert is for Eternal Torment WITHOUT Relief.
What is the purpose of these final steps? Something reserved for future developments, or some horrible kludge for compatibility backwards with some archaic system?
Ah. Humour. I see. Very good. Most amusing. "Droll" is hardly the word.
So, he's tracking what US Government computers are doing, and he travels abroad. What better evidence of nefarious intent could you have. Straight to Gitmo for you, do not collect £200, do collect an orange boiler suit and a pair of ear-muffs. Don't ask where the toilets are - you'll be hosed-down later.
With a USB keyboard, that may be true (I don't have any machines with USB keyboards to try it on.) Try that more than a few times in a room full of PS/2 keyboarded-and-moused machines any you'll pretty soon have a fried motherboard to contemplate the joys of plug'n'pray over. You've got to power down before connecting a PS/2 device. Well, if they're your own machines - you can do what the fsck you want to the machines at your work.
[/self] checks the works which laptop I'm using this week - USBs only. Must be one of the newer ones (as the #24 serial number and the XP desktop installation suggests).[self]
Might I recommend you to RTFA?
The "data storm" appears to have been on a internal network (not seemingly connected to anything apart from other internal networks), where a data acquisition and control device barfed on some bad data and started to spew garbage onto the network. Inadequate data validation combined with inappropriate or ineffective error handling. Software fault.
Now, why do I get the feeling that you weren't paying phone bills back in the 1980s? (Actually, after 1987 and until 1993, I wasn't either - my flat mates and I decided at various times that getting a phone into the flat was a waste of time and money.)
While some of the planning and groundwork for GSM was being laid in the 1980s, mobile phones were
- the size and weight of bricks. Large bricks.
- Analogue-only;
- Extremely expensive.
On the other hand, the first mobile phones I dealt with in 1989/ 1990 were capable of getting a fax and data connection to shore from 80 miles out at sea. (Given that there was a 300ft tall mast in the middle of your boat, and an electronics technician and a crane operator to run the co-ax up to the antenna on the crown block assembly). One of the phones was damaged in shipping the communications system - the repair bill was in the order of £1200, and took about a month ; replacement was not an option because there weren't replacements available.When did SMS messaging become available? I think it was just rolling out (as a side-effect of GSM mobiles), in 1995~1996. I got a mobile in late 1996 IIRC, when it was the best part of a week's wages and that's when I discovered how tremendously effective text messaging is. Of course, that phase only lasted about a month. Until the first bill came in, to be precise. SMS messages then were about £0.25 each - about $0.5 US? - which was a great encouragement to decide what was the most effective way to communicate the information you wanted to send - mobile voice, mobile text or payphone?
It's education.
Seeing that the offending person with the $1000+ phone bill was an adolescent child, then a pre-paid phone is definitely the appropriate answer. My daughter has exactly that, and manages her life and her phone perfectly well with having to choose how much of her allowance to spend on telephony and how much to spend on clothes. She also choose to spend this year's birthday money on a new phone. All in all, an effective educational experience.
Never thought of calling one of the relatives (probably the nearest-residing one, or the most-likely-to-be-called one) using a payphone, to tell them that you're OK, and if there's anyone else asking, to pass the message on
Worked for us on a variety of occasions, if only because there's one retired family member who's likely to be #1 on anyone's "whats going on" call-list, so we can be pretty confident of getting a message through on someone's second call.
It is difficult to get away from the Beeb's fees, but not impossible - I did it for a number of years in the late 90s and early 00s. In respect of getting away from their paid importuners, they're no worse than the Mormons. And they do a really good line in looking miserable as the rain runs down the back of their neck and they beg for permission to enter the house to check for licensable equipment. (Do they use "resting" actors I wonder?)
Much more importantly for invalidating the comparison, Auntie has a long history of selling their product to other people in the same business around the world (how else did the LeftPondians get to hear about Basil Fawlty?). When was the last time that you heard of anyone other than a certifiable lunatic buying a Scientology book. Come to think of it, I don't recall ever having seen any of their clap trap in second-hand bookshops. I smell an NDA.
So - there's a Scientology place in Edinburgh? Well, that could be amusing for an afternoon of twat tormenting. (More fun than pulling the wings off flies, but the same basic amusement.) Now, whose identity should I assume for the mission?
A few months ago - maybe a year ago - a bunch of my colleagues were having a chin-wag during a course at work. One is a proper radio ham (Morse code license, 10m antenna hanging out of him parents house, that sort of thing), and the other was a serious hi-fi dork (one of "silver-coated power lead" brigade). All of us were bitching about how the reception on the (FM) radio has been getting worse over the last few years.
The most likely suspect to our minds was the amount of RF garbage leaking out from all sorts of sub-GHz clocks and signals wafting through the sub-ether. [GROUP SIGH] [GROUP reluctantly looks at the looming need to get into digital radio] Then again, would that be so bad? 13:15-13:30 A Short History of Ireland
s/paranoid/sensible/
Fair enough point. But not particularly relevant.
A number of years ago I was flying home from work, and by coincidence my helicopter passed over a high security prison which was undergoing some building work (Peterhead prison, for what it's worth.). Everything in plain view, and if I'd wanted to snap a couple of pictures and sell them to criminals looking to bust their boss out of there, I could have. About 30 seconds later we flew over an old granite quarry near Boddam. Normal quarry, about 200ft deep into solid granite, stopped quarrying when they got to sea level and the water problems got too bad - just the sort of place you'd want to build a hardened NATO bunker into, which the rumour mill has as exactly what they were doing in there. Look down into the quarry - and all I can see is the roof of an industrial marquee covering the whole base of the quarry. All the building work going on under cover from prying eyes. Regardless of whether they're 40,000km up (geostationary), 150km up (Space Shuttle and US military spy satellites that the Shuttle launched so many of), 500m up (us in our paraffin budgie), or 5m up (Jimmy Bond about to abseil into the quarry with his camera and a white cat).
I was driving round the perimeter fence of the Spook-HQ at Cheltenham a few years earlier on the way to the pub, and I thought "what would the Spooks give to be able to put their listening centre 10 miles from the nearest public road?" I guess the answer is both "A lot" and "Not enough", because they've not done it. Then again, they simply couldn't do it without leaving the country.
I was exploring in some popular stone mines near Bath a few years later when we came to a flooded stretch of passage. Then we spotted the little red light at the far end of the straight tunnel. "Oh dear - that's the back door into the UK Government's main nuclear bunker. We must have taken the wrong turn at the 5-way junction a couple of minutes ago." Bye bye, wave at the squaddies watching the cameras.
The military have been camoflaging buildings while building them, and disguising their nature by misleading or anonymous construction patterns, since at the latest the First World War. You're lucky to be living in a country that has room to put Spook bases 50 miles from a town, or to build a nuclear processing plant without everyone in the town you build it in knowing it's ground plan in some detail. But if your military planners have gambled on that distance being enough
Of course, if you look at the satellite versions of those Google links, you'll see one of the other problems. It's not censorship (per se), it's the fog that we call "the Haar". Might be that someone has persuaded Google not to buy-in new photos of the area, but since everyone in the area knows what happens in that quarry, so what?
You'd never know - Halliburton would bury it all in cement and drop it into the bottom of the sea.
(Just having a dig at the Schlumberger cementer on the workstation next to me. Halliburton's big cementing competitor, for those of you outside the business.)
You're obviously attempting to establish a false identity with the fake passport that you and your associates are conspiring together to acquire. Abundant reports from America (and the UK, as I can attest, and other parts of Europe as some of my workmates tell me) are that the authorities take an extremely dim view of anyone making any attempt to establish a false identity. Getting a fake passport is a pretty high-end step towards establishing a false identity.
If you don't think there's something wrong, them try substituting "the price of bulk cocaine" for "the price of a fake Russian passport" in your previous discussion. Does it sound as if you and your associates are planning on doing some pretty heavy drug dealing with that substitution? After all, you've gone as far as trying to establish how much cash you'd have to up-front ; evidently you've already been investigating sources for acquiring the passports. What's that phrase in the American constitution? "Prior cause", or something like that? Sufficient grounds for the casually-listening spook to think "there's something suspicious going on here - better do some further positive investigation". Enjoy yourself explaining your activities to your local authorities.
At one end of your comment you can't get the source of the hostility, and at the other end you accuse my wife of having been a participant in a bribery-based government. If you can't see the grounds for hostility there, then I'd suggest that you get the bus to your optician, because you're sure not safe to drive with vision that poor.
Does it shock you that if you make a blanket condemnation of 150 million people, you'll find that some people find your remarks insulting and are willing to hold you accountable for your remarks? So sorry for not pandering to your racist stereotypes. Not.
I have to put up with this sort of comment every rig I go to work on - some people assuming that all Russians in the UK are whores ; other people assuming that they're all theiving oligarchs. Just like all Americans are uneducated, self-obsessed, gun-toting Dubya fanboys. Nice being on the receiving end of a stereotype, isn't it?
Oh dear, Slashdot's submissions system can't handle Cyrillic script. The first line of my comment read (in anglicised pig-Russian) "Kak Interesno!", which translates as "How interesting!"
!
I take it that you shopped around when you were breaking a multitude of laws in both your home country and Russia. I wonder about that because my wife's new passport is going to cost between £93 and £140 (that's approximately USD 180 to 280 depending on how far the dollar has fallen today). Legally.
Or is it just possible that you're repeating uninformed bullshit picked up from the depths of the internet and as reliable as a blood transfusion in a Dar es Salaam hospital. (Incidentally, I've had to spend far more bribe money in one visit to the former UK colony of Tanzania than I have had to in four visits - 6 months - to the former Soviet Union. Which doesn't say much. I can't comment on the transfusions though - didn't need anything stronger than kaolin+morphia in my 8 weeks there.)
I hope that the various police forces involved have noticed your claimed involvement in terrorist-related passport fraud. Which country would you like to be interrogated in ? Or perhaps some of those nice international flights that the CIA specialise in where you don't need any passports and you can get interrogated by everyone with an interest in your claimed knowledge.
You mean that one should lend credence to "the system" by participating in the shit-eating competition?
Besides, in the almost incredible circumstance of a new political party suceeding (which it would have to do in the teeth of frenzied opposition and undermining by all of the existing parties), then look at the company that you'd be keeping : politicians - the lowest of the low, scum-sucking thieves and criminals. I've got more respect for the crack dealer upstairs than for politicians.
A simple fall in 1.0g on Earth can kill. All it takes is one well (poorly?) placed lump of rock dinting the head and you're meat.
2.5G would be a problem, but not insurmountable. But I suspect that the depth of the gravity well would be more of an issue than the surface gravity - it would be very expensive (in energy & reaction mass terms) to get anything from the surface up to orbit. For refuelling/ re-supplying an interstellar mission, a rich asteroid and/ or comet belt would be much more useful.
The first discovery of this cyclicity in the appearence/ disappearence of fossil species or genera was published in approximately 1982 by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski (a project that pre-dates the Alvarezs' KT impact hypothesis). They see a 26 million year cyclicity. (Note - that link is to a proponent of the "Nemesis" hypothesis ; don't take this as endorsement of that theory. But the man provides an accessible summary of Raup & Sepkoski).
A few years later people looked at essentially the same data set through different statistical goggles. They came up with a 24 Ma cycle. Others have come up with figures around 30 million years, from the same data. Now someone is extracting figures of around 64 million years. Whoopy-dee!
As a geologist, I'm perfectly open to this sort of hypothesis. Space effects on life-on-Earth? Hey, I've been to Nordlingen - tick the box that says "space can affect life on Earth". But being open to this sort of idea does not mean accepting any presentation that's made. It's entirely possible that the observed variations in historical biodiversity levels are as much a product of variable preservation as of variable historical biodiversity.
My guess - there's a lot of statistical effort applied to "damp down" the effects of the big spike in extinctions at 63~65 million years ago courtesy of (amongst others) the Chixulub impactor ; but the studies all show a spike in extinction frequencies at half, one, or twice the period of the biggest spike in the data set. That sounds to me like over-correction or under correction of the data, not helped by the data set being one-sided (we don't know biodiversity rates for the next 100 million years).
Silent observer = WOMBAT [note] = NULL
Vocal observer = CORPSE.
[note] Waste Of Money, Brains And Time
What was the price of free speech again? $75/barrel? $85? $95? The magic double-oh?
Hey, what are the chances of some oil trading systems having an oil-price "millennium bug"? When I started in the industry I wouldn't have considered a 10-fold price increase realistic. But I've seen 8-fold already, and with prices on a steady rise (BBC commodity prices) it could be back into record-breaking territory by mid-May. $100/barrel by New Year? Party time!
A good reason to be worried, but you're not thinking about the liability issues appropriately. If MS were to make a deliberate decision to not work on a bug they knew about, and the bug was exploited leading to damage, and the internal MS decision came out
Therfore, I'd expect the MS legal department to prowl the corridors in plain clothes, asking programmers at random if they're looking for bugs ; any that are found looking for bugs
Ah, that's where you're getting confused. You seem to be under some misapprehension that there was a sign above the metaphorical doorway into life when you were born/ conceived/ became self-aware (wherever you care to put the line), and that sign read "Welcome to the Real World, where honesty is welcomed, fair treatment is the norm, and the cheque really is in the post."
Whoever told you that the world was like that, lied.
Welcome to the Real World ; feel thankful that you're only getting screwed twice, and that they use lubricant.