More recently, a co-worker of mine was sitting in a large, empty board room at a high-powered New York law firm waiting for a meeting to begin. Another old guy in a scruffy suit (who could have been a security guard) walks in and they start a friendly conversation. The meeting starts to get together and its turns out this old guy was to be our client.
Reminds me of a story I heard from my grandad.
As I remember the story, there was this guy in Liverpool in the fifties and sixties who used to run a building company, and, being himself an Irish immigrant, tended to employ other Irishmen just off the boat (hence how Grandad knew him). Also, he was in the habit of going to work alongside the men he employed from time to time so as not to lose touch with what was going on.
He's been planning to buy a new car, has this fellow, and one day after he's been working on a building site he sees a Jaguar showroom across the road. In he goes - still in his working clothes.
Of course the three guys in there already want nothing to do with this scruffy Irish builder and send the most junior employee they have to deal with him. Said junior is ecstatic when scruffy Irish builder writes out a very large cheque on the spot and drives away in an expensive sports car...
"I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."
Given the rumours about the setting of episode 12, Bad Wolf, and given that we know that there are unexploded Schlechter Wolf bombs all over east London, which particular house full of morons might we reasonably hope to see blown in by the Bad Wolf?
Several unexploded WW2-era bombs are apparently being uncovered in east London. Supposedly the plan was for them to remain unexploded for a long period, then detonate, to act as Hitler's revenge long after the war was lost. Nasty.
Are you kidding? Those fucking limeys are talking about banning dangerous "assault knives". Ireland is beautiful, but it's not worth putting up with UK bullshit.
Ireland isn't part of the UK, or at least most of it isn't. It's been a separate country ever since its independence was won from the British by, er...
I'm in the UK, and thinking maybe Ireland. Dublin, nice city, good beer, euro money, no godawful biometric ID card about to be imposed... Looks good to me.
Let's face it - weather is usually BORING, and can usually be summed up in very few words: "It was sunny and hot today. Tomorrow will be sunny and hot at first, with the possibility of storms in the evening. Over the next week it will probably be sunny and hot, with possible storms in the evenings, until midweek, when it may rain."
In Kansas, maybe that's true... in the UK, you really can't expect the weather to stay the same for more than a few hours at a time.
Of course over there you get the occasional tornado, so I can't see how you're thinking of weather reports as 'boring' as opposed to 'might save my life from being ended in a rather gruesome way by horribly berserk winds'.
Except you just gave your plan away. The government is already tapping your phone.
Point.
So, this to the lads at GCHQ reading this thread: no, I'm not planning to bomb the Channel ferries. But if I was, what exactly would stop me, assuming I wasn't damn fool enough to tell the world about my plans on Slashdot?
Am I the only one who thinks that airline security is a red herring?
Hijacking is a mug's game now. In the old days, when terrorists were generally of the communist variety, they'd demand that the plane be flown to Cuba or wherever was currently flavour-of-the-month, and there they would get off and the plane would be allowed to go on its way. Or else they'd sit on the tarmac surrounded by armed police and hold the passengers hostage while they issued their demands; then either the police negotiator would obtain their surrender, or the demands would be met, or the SAS go in and kill all the bad guys.
Whatever the outcome, your best chance of survival as a passenger is to sit tight and not cause trouble.
The rules changed in 2001. Now, if someone attempts to hijack a plane, the assumption has got to be that it's a kamikaze mission. In which case your best chance of survival is to have a go at overpowering the terrorists. You may die in the attempt, but if the mission is completed you're dead anyway.
Moreover, not only will the passengers on a hijacked airliner be prepared to fight now; governments will have no qualms about shooting down an airliner if necessary.
September 11 changed the rules of the game. Aircraft hijacking has got to be a thing of the past for any sensible terrorist. Bombing airliners, perhaps, Lockerbie-style, but not hijacking them.
Personally, I'd be thinking about ships. What if I could get a couple of decent-sized carbombs into the hold of a Channel ferry and detonate them halfway across the Strait of Dover? Not only do I likely kill a great many people as the ship sinks (though some will get to the lifeboats), I also leave a large hazard to shipping on the rather shallow bed of the busiest bit of sea on earth. Economic havoc.
Or what about the supertankers? Is there any reason that the hijack scenario of The Devil's Alternative is unreasonable?
Even if you know where all the keys are, sometimes you may brush the keyboard to one side, and lose orientation, thus needing you to look down at the keyboard anyway to get it back.
Bah. You should be able to do that by touch. That's why they've put little studs on the f and the j keys - to give you a tactile point of reference.
I mean, aren't *some* countries a bit oversensitive about their space?
Perhaps, but these photos would be taken from orbit. Outer space belongs to no nation, and there are commercial imaging satellites available for hire. So Kim Jong Il won't be happy that Microsoft have photographed his gulags and published to the world? Screw him. So Dubya won't be happy that we can all see the layout of Guantanamo Bay? Screw him, too.
Maybe when this happens people will actually pay more attention to computer security, instead of just putting up with the inconvenience.
What will do that is a virus that replaces all.jpg files found with goatse, tubgirl and lemonparty.
So many people have stored their digital camera photos on vulnerable Windows PCs. The only thing that will get them to secure those boxes is the threat that little Sophie's birthday photos, or the last time they went on holiday with Grandma before the illness, might be replaced with hideous porn by some virus...
I'm bored of this one. I mean, OK, it's a time-honoured classic, and the bit about defragging ext2 still brings a smile to my face, but can the trolls please come up with some new material?
This is like watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail - yeah, it's good, but I've seen it too many times now.
Re:Wake me when they have language-shifting
on
Television Reloaded
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· Score: 2, Informative
There is a lot of anime I'd like to see properly dubbed (or even subbed, for some of the older stuff). On-the-fly translation with a similar-sounding voice would be a killer app.
Jayziz. You don't ask much, do you?
Subtitles might just be doable, if we can get a computer to watch a minute or so ahead with a decent voice recognition software, and then piped the output through babelfish. But dubbing? Even The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer used human voice actors. Realistic human voices are an absolute bugger to synthesise.
They will do what they need to in order to move on, in a manner that will net them the largest profit - revenge for revenge's sake is not the path to the largest profit.
If that was so, they would have bought out SCO long ago. It would have been far quicker, simpler and cheaper than the legal road they've actually taken.
IBM, however, are smart enough to realise that if they do that then a hundred more SCOs will try their hands at getting bought out in the same way, with great profit for the executives. Therefore IBM have decided to show the world exactly what happens to asshats like SCO, in the hope that others will be deterred from trying the same in future.
If the legal option was available, IBM probably really would ask the judge to stick Darl's head on a spike over Traitors' Gate. They want everyone in the world to know what happens to people who ask IBM for danegeld.
What it really it is a Martian TV satellite that proves that advanced life on Mars exists!! They are advanced enough to have designed and launched their own satellites, to pick up our TV shows.
Hang on... the Martians are intelligent, and yet they're watching our TV?
If you ment sent sattelites flying past the planets in our solar system, then you have a remote chance of being right..
But he's not. American probes have flown past the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; orbited the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn; landed on the Moon and Mars; landed with human crew on the Moon. In addition, a European probe landed on Titan after having been carried to the Saturn system by an American mothership.
AFAIK no American probe has ever been to Pluto, or landed anywhere except the Moon and Mars (oh, and the asteroid NEAR wound up on).
Soviet spaceprobes have landed on the Moon, Venus and Mars, and achieved a robotic sample return from the Moon. However, I don't think they ever launched any missions to the outer solar system or to Mercury.
After getting proper marksman training and getting my hands on a NES with a zapper, Round 30 on Duck Hunt Clay Shooting barely tires me.
Proper marksman training, me arse.
I played Duck Hunt, got to level 30ish, lost. Then I bought To The Earth...
Ouch.
That game was ferocious. The speed of the missiles that get fired at you is incredible, and towards the end you need to be shooting nearly all of them down or you just lose.
I completed it, and then played Duck Hunt again. It was suddenly just trivial. I played through until I got bored with it, there being no end in sight...
but could they make a professional-grade UI to stick on the front end, or are we talking the mid-90s UI of KDE 3.x?
Because of course the Windows UI has moved ahead in leaps and bounds since the mid-90s. You look at a Win95 interface, and then at WinXP - well, you wouldn't think it was the same system at all!
now now, Robin Hood didn't take money back from the Capitalists, he got it from the corrupt government (the Sherrif).
Actually, the government wasn't especially corrupt. I mean, John wasn't exactly in line for the Best Regent of the Dark Ages award, but he wasn't that bad.
You know how Robin Hood was always waiting for King Richard to come back from the crusades, and he never did? You know why? He was in prison, that's why; he'd been taken hostage - in Austria IIRC - on his way back to England from the crusade. His captors had demanded a literal king's ransom for his release, and that ransom had to be raised by heavy taxation of the English.
Richard would probably have been released a lot sooner if the outlaws of Sherwood hadn't kept nicking his ransom money...
I'm going to get a mind-piloted Evangelion someday!
No you're not. You're too old. Some irritating teenager's going to get a mind-piloted Evangelion and won't even appreciate it. The best you can hope for is to be one of those guys in Central Dogma whose job it is to look terribly shocked whenever a new and more powerful monster turns up to whack the crap out of Tokyo-3.
But, then again... you get to hang around with Maya and she's pretty cool and I don't believe any of the rumours about her at all. And the fringe benefits are good, what with the indoor heated swimming pool on-site full of naked Reis...
Slashdot Mirror
This, you post on Slashdot.
Comedy gold.
Reminds me of a story I heard from my grandad.
As I remember the story, there was this guy in Liverpool in the fifties and sixties who used to run a building company, and, being himself an Irish immigrant, tended to employ other Irishmen just off the boat (hence how Grandad knew him). Also, he was in the habit of going to work alongside the men he employed from time to time so as not to lose touch with what was going on.
He's been planning to buy a new car, has this fellow, and one day after he's been working on a building site he sees a Jaguar showroom across the road. In he goes - still in his working clothes.
Of course the three guys in there already want nothing to do with this scruffy Irish builder and send the most junior employee they have to deal with him. Said junior is ecstatic when scruffy Irish builder writes out a very large cheque on the spot and drives away in an expensive sports car...
"I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in."
Given the rumours about the setting of episode 12, Bad Wolf, and given that we know that there are unexploded Schlechter Wolf bombs all over east London, which particular house full of morons might we reasonably hope to see blown in by the Bad Wolf?
Heh heh heh...
Several unexploded WW2-era bombs are apparently being uncovered in east London. Supposedly the plan was for them to remain unexploded for a long period, then detonate, to act as Hitler's revenge long after the war was lost. Nasty.
Ireland isn't part of the UK, or at least most of it isn't. It's been a separate country ever since its independence was won from the British by, er...
... would you believe, terrorists?
I'm in the UK, and thinking maybe Ireland. Dublin, nice city, good beer, euro money, no godawful biometric ID card about to be imposed... Looks good to me.
In Kansas, maybe that's true... in the UK, you really can't expect the weather to stay the same for more than a few hours at a time.
Of course over there you get the occasional tornado, so I can't see how you're thinking of weather reports as 'boring' as opposed to 'might save my life from being ended in a rather gruesome way by horribly berserk winds'.
Only for Daily Mail readers.
Point.
So, this to the lads at GCHQ reading this thread: no, I'm not planning to bomb the Channel ferries. But if I was, what exactly would stop me, assuming I wasn't damn fool enough to tell the world about my plans on Slashdot?
Hijacking is a mug's game now. In the old days, when terrorists were generally of the communist variety, they'd demand that the plane be flown to Cuba or wherever was currently flavour-of-the-month, and there they would get off and the plane would be allowed to go on its way. Or else they'd sit on the tarmac surrounded by armed police and hold the passengers hostage while they issued their demands; then either the police negotiator would obtain their surrender, or the demands would be met, or the SAS go in and kill all the bad guys.
Whatever the outcome, your best chance of survival as a passenger is to sit tight and not cause trouble.
The rules changed in 2001. Now, if someone attempts to hijack a plane, the assumption has got to be that it's a kamikaze mission. In which case your best chance of survival is to have a go at overpowering the terrorists. You may die in the attempt, but if the mission is completed you're dead anyway.
Moreover, not only will the passengers on a hijacked airliner be prepared to fight now; governments will have no qualms about shooting down an airliner if necessary.
September 11 changed the rules of the game. Aircraft hijacking has got to be a thing of the past for any sensible terrorist. Bombing airliners, perhaps, Lockerbie-style, but not hijacking them.
Personally, I'd be thinking about ships. What if I could get a couple of decent-sized carbombs into the hold of a Channel ferry and detonate them halfway across the Strait of Dover? Not only do I likely kill a great many people as the ship sinks (though some will get to the lifeboats), I also leave a large hazard to shipping on the rather shallow bed of the busiest bit of sea on earth. Economic havoc.
Or what about the supertankers? Is there any reason that the hijack scenario of The Devil's Alternative is unreasonable?
They'll send us to the spice mines of Kessel for sure...
Bah. You should be able to do that by touch. That's why they've put little studs on the f and the j keys - to give you a tactile point of reference.
Perhaps, but these photos would be taken from orbit. Outer space belongs to no nation, and there are commercial imaging satellites available for hire. So Kim Jong Il won't be happy that Microsoft have photographed his gulags and published to the world? Screw him. So Dubya won't be happy that we can all see the layout of Guantanamo Bay? Screw him, too.
What will do that is a virus that replaces all .jpg files found with goatse, tubgirl and lemonparty.
So many people have stored their digital camera photos on vulnerable Windows PCs. The only thing that will get them to secure those boxes is the threat that little Sophie's birthday photos, or the last time they went on holiday with Grandma before the illness, might be replaced with hideous porn by some virus...
This is like watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail - yeah, it's good, but I've seen it too many times now.
Jayziz. You don't ask much, do you?
Subtitles might just be doable, if we can get a computer to watch a minute or so ahead with a decent voice recognition software, and then piped the output through babelfish. But dubbing? Even The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer used human voice actors. Realistic human voices are an absolute bugger to synthesise.
If that was so, they would have bought out SCO long ago. It would have been far quicker, simpler and cheaper than the legal road they've actually taken.
IBM, however, are smart enough to realise that if they do that then a hundred more SCOs will try their hands at getting bought out in the same way, with great profit for the executives. Therefore IBM have decided to show the world exactly what happens to asshats like SCO, in the hope that others will be deterred from trying the same in future.
If the legal option was available, IBM probably really would ask the judge to stick Darl's head on a spike over Traitors' Gate. They want everyone in the world to know what happens to people who ask IBM for danegeld.
Hang on... the Martians are intelligent, and yet they're watching our TV?
Music, movies, microcode and... yep, here it comes. It'll be robots doing the delivery and not samurai or skaters, but near enough I suppose.
Careless! No, I think you'll find it's 3,600 square seconds.
But he's not. American probes have flown past the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; orbited the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn; landed on the Moon and Mars; landed with human crew on the Moon. In addition, a European probe landed on Titan after having been carried to the Saturn system by an American mothership.
AFAIK no American probe has ever been to Pluto, or landed anywhere except the Moon and Mars (oh, and the asteroid NEAR wound up on).
Soviet spaceprobes have landed on the Moon, Venus and Mars, and achieved a robotic sample return from the Moon. However, I don't think they ever launched any missions to the outer solar system or to Mercury.
Proper marksman training, me arse.
I played Duck Hunt, got to level 30ish, lost. Then I bought To The Earth...
Ouch.
That game was ferocious. The speed of the missiles that get fired at you is incredible, and towards the end you need to be shooting nearly all of them down or you just lose.
I completed it, and then played Duck Hunt again. It was suddenly just trivial. I played through until I got bored with it, there being no end in sight...
but could they make a professional-grade UI to stick on the front end, or are we talking the mid-90s UI of KDE 3.x?
Because of course the Windows UI has moved ahead in leaps and bounds since the mid-90s. You look at a Win95 interface, and then at WinXP - well, you wouldn't think it was the same system at all!
Actually, the government wasn't especially corrupt. I mean, John wasn't exactly in line for the Best Regent of the Dark Ages award, but he wasn't that bad.
You know how Robin Hood was always waiting for King Richard to come back from the crusades, and he never did? You know why? He was in prison, that's why; he'd been taken hostage - in Austria IIRC - on his way back to England from the crusade. His captors had demanded a literal king's ransom for his release, and that ransom had to be raised by heavy taxation of the English.
Richard would probably have been released a lot sooner if the outlaws of Sherwood hadn't kept nicking his ransom money...
No you're not. You're too old. Some irritating teenager's going to get a mind-piloted Evangelion and won't even appreciate it. The best you can hope for is to be one of those guys in Central Dogma whose job it is to look terribly shocked whenever a new and more powerful monster turns up to whack the crap out of Tokyo-3.
But, then again... you get to hang around with Maya and she's pretty cool and I don't believe any of the rumours about her at all. And the fringe benefits are good, what with the indoor heated swimming pool on-site full of naked Reis...