"A Russian submarine officer disobeyed a direct order: he did not launch nuclear warhead tipped torpedos at the US fleet."
Actually he pointed out that the conditions for the SOP change to fire on other combatants were not met to another officer on the submarine. There were no direct orders to fire from the Supreme Soviet, but they do have discretion under certain circumstances, such as hull damage.
Valentin Grigoroevich was the officer that ordered the assembly under stressful circumstances (low air, high temperatures, no communications and constant depth charging from American destroyers enforcing the blockade).
"I imagine Special Branch were leaping at the chance."
MI5 are the agency in question, and yes, during that time the UK was very accomodating because of a little thing called the 'Cold War' and the 'European Theatre' that had most of the member states of NATO within a short tank drive of the Warsaw pact.
"I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened."
It's my country (the UK), and the US' relations with us are already in the crapper. As to the information, it generally relates to Lennon's antiwar activities during a time in the history of the 'free world' that such people were considered dangerous subversives and worthy of following around. Believe me, _we_ know that it happened, so there's unlikely to be anything worrying in the reports.
The same thing happened in the UK with nursing shop stewards during the strikes in the late seventies.
Railway sidings, by the side of the road, parents, other peoples parents, late night Channel 4 programmes...hell, I was renting it out to friends and swapping porn in secondary school.
Just to show that a continent on the other side of the world isn't that different from the UK.
Incidentally, Ashcroft has taken to prosecuting pornographers in states that legislate against them, so we can look forward to the balkanisation of the US shortly.
"keeping your kids from seeing stuff you don't want them exposed to."
Or using it to illustrate that the world is a terrible place full of people with beliefs they'd like to impose on you out of a misguided sense of moral virtue.
Personally I'd want my kids to have freedom of choice instead of kneeling in front of some dumbass's anthromorphic personification; especially one that freely kills, maims and acts in a fashion more becoming of an abuser.
Christians.... I have no problems with your wacky beliefs, but start trying to affect governence and I'll be gunning for every little 'fact' that you dredge up in support of your fiction.
We do, mostly. Tell me which bit of this is 'novel';
This invention involves a wearable computer having computer components movably located in a collar that the user wears around his or her neck. The computer components can be a display or monitor, or a microphone or any other computer component.
Apart from the weight of the 'wearable' computer impacting _extremely_ negatively on the collarbones, this patent is so overbroad and loaded with prior art that you have to question why the USPTO is bothering looking. So it would be quite interesting to see if we can get an over-unity patent.
"The culprit would confine herself to only those forms of electronic communication that can be encrypted."
Not necessarily...this would tend to hold true where the 'culprit' had knowledge of decent levels of security or any technical expertise. There are more spammers out there that know about the technologies concerned than 'terrorists', who've been getting unwarranted 'bigging up' by Hollywood.
The main problem with all of this is that people don't trust their government to take a dump without handy instructions, and are very suspicious of motive, as some revelations regarding the 'trade' uses of Echelon have shown.
Add to this the problem of quasi-governmental individuals having a go themselves, and essentially we're heading for a time of outrageous suspicion connected with every human endevour.
"Anyone here who has heard of ECHELON and CARNIVORE knows how unreliable and backlogged those two systems are."
Thank god we're limited to 2400bps, 386 processors, bus speeds of 7Mhz, and these things are never updated.
As quite a few people here use naive bayesian filtering on their email, it doesn't seem entirely out of sorts that Carnivore and Echelon could end up extremely effective in, say, pulling out corporate secrets from specific email addresses, or other such market cornering activities.
"Unfortunately, my approach makes spam and malware 'almost impossible' NOT 100% impossible."
Nice approach, but we discarded it a couple of years ago because of it's catch-all nature, and the uncomfortable problem of people *liking* HTML in their emails, not to mention the whole attachment problem.
Are you interested in talking about a different approach off-board?
"As long as there is an internet and the people using it crave 'easy money', there will ALLWAYS be spam and (zombie mail relay based) malware."
True enough, but that's just an evolution of society getting used to the internet; exactly the same flavour of 'dodges' can be used anywhere in pretty much any medium, which just indicates to me that the internet as a whole should evolve, just on extremely open standards.
"They must have got the designs for time-machine as well because 144 flew several months before Concorde."
I always thought that 'several' meant a few more than 'three'. I live and learn.
The maiden flight wasn't actually publicised at the time, just in case of failure; it was very much a belt'n'braces affair and shouldn't be considered anything more than actually trying to 'beat' the Europeans into the air, which they did.
The Tu-144 had some serious problems, though.
"delta wing instead of curved"
Compound Delta and 'Ogive'. Ogive's are a fairly computationally 'difficult' shape to get right. In terms of supersonic aircraft, French/European designs preferred the Caravelle ogive (which late became the Concorde wing design) over the flat delta, which has completely different separation characteristics. The Concorde was a lot more stable in flight; the Tu-144 required a canard refit (the stubby wings next to the cockpit) to increase low speed stability after one aircraft was lost in an overly fast approach on landing. I suspect that the -1G roll at the '73 Paris airshow that crashed a Tu-144 would have also contributed to this fairly rapid design change.
"one 4 engine compartment instead of 2 blocks of 2."
The only picture I have of the early Tu-144 is a side shot of it being escorted, gear down, by MiGs. It's difficult to see the intakes, but i'd question the single bay compartment simply on the basis of it being a lot of wasted space on an airframe where weight was a premium. Got a photo you can point me at?
Incidentally, Fabiew wasn't caught until 1977, when he handed over a cipher for the intercepted messages, one of which congratulated him on supplying a complete set of blueprints for the Concorde. I haven't checked through the Venona stuff, mainly because I haven't thought to link industrial espionage with military, but the major thrust of the KGB was about getting information from places where it was considered impossible to get information from, something they excelled in.
"Standard procedure is to make a water landing, bail out, and let the explosives inside (which are activated by being soaked in salt water) scuttle the plane."
This is something that confused me because it didn't match SOP, although I'd ask you if you were sure about explosives happening while the crew and plane were in the same bit of water? 'Concussive shock' springs to mind.
"Laughable also were the reports of the crew valiantly chopping away at the 'computers' inside, so China couldn't acquire them."
Yeah...I recall that the standard practice for disposing of starlight scopes a couple of years ago was putting a bullet through the optics if you feared capture, although melting the wiring looms would be a decent method of destroying the relationships between the machines.
"Anyone who knows anything would know that the crew was certainly only attacking monitors and keyboards, the real computers being stored in armored racks."
The storage is removable. Surely that's the point that would be attacked rather than the console mounted stuff?
"I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl."
All majorly different problems, and you missed 'Monju' in Japan, where they had a runaway sodium leak that was eating into the sub-basement. On the other hand, I believe that all the problems are solvable (with huge design changes that move away from complex cooling and safety systems) apart from low grade waste, which vitrification is supposed to cure.
Except glass is actually a liquid, and flows quite readily on a scale of centuries, let alone millenia, and you wouldn't want groundwater carrying any surface contamination off those glass blocks.
"After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale."
And the milk ban was introduced almost immediately on November 13th 1957, around four days after the accident (which took about four days to happen in total). The interesting aspect is that it was government run at the time, being shifted to BNFL in 1971, which is when things began to really accelerate downhill; they were fined £25,000 in 1996 for procedural problems and Sellafield/Windscale is currently being decommissioned.
"Virtually every democracy has its dark spots -- but I (and most the rest of the democratized world) never hold up the US as being a paragon of democracy."
You missed one aspect of American Democracy that has everyone on edge, and that's the relative power of corporations to influence a process that was intended to give the people a say in how they are governed, rather than being a race to see how much money can be raised by candidates. Large wodges of money paid to UK MPs tend to raise a few eyebrows and occasionally end up in court; Ironically Greg Dyke was in hot water for this when Blair was elected before losing his job over the Hutton report.
It gives industry a fairly direct means to control lawmaking or moderate laws that would go against them, depending on how much money that they stack on the table.
"US needs to improve, and as the most economically powerful democracy"
And militarily powerful. I hesitate to say 'belligerent' though.
"Just how come Tu-144 made its maiden flight before Concord?"
I suspect that comes down to airworthiness tests demanded by the flight authorities in the specific countries, but three months is not that long a time between the two flights. The espionage is actually a matter of public record, though, Mr Coward.
That the spies were caught quite well before the planes were finalised probably had more to do with it, but there is a fairly consistent mode of piracy that operated in the former Soviet Union and thrives in China, which was one of the conditions on entering the WTO.
I actually knew about the B-29s that were downed, because it led to one of the more interesting aspects of the cold war in terms of the idea of scaling arms. Before the TU-4, there was no way for Russia to get to the US, and Russia was already reeling from the attack of a European superpower.
Regarding the reverse engineering, there was a story that Rolls Royce supplied a Merlin aero engine to China on technology transfer that they copied down to the last bolt, and there's some speculation that the EP-3E forced down in China was heavily catalogued before Lockheed Martin engineers were allowed in to dismantle and crate the plane.
"Should someone who gains unauthorized entry to millions of citizens' computers, and who burdens the economic infrastructure (Internet) with garbage be considered perhaps a terrorist?"
I didn't see mention of 'arab' in there.
More seriously, doesn't this gel slightly with the windows Eula?
"there is too much money at stake for the credit card firms to give up 'subsidizing' spam."
Actually, the chargebacks from carding are one of the things they'd like to get rid of. For example 'chip and pin' is simply a method to shift liability rather than increasing security.
"As has been said elsewhere, spam is a societal issue."
And laws haven't been created to change social habits. Ever heard of the DMCA?
"why not use technological means to filter them out for good!"
That's what we're doing. Worked so far? No?
This isn't about the credit card companies, because they don't have a say. The orginal poster was on about attacking the companies that allow their services to be advertised by spam, whether they explicitly allow it or not; this will then shift the liability to the companies collecting the money and mean that they have to go elsewhere for promotion, in a similar fashion to the way that tobacco advertising has been controlled out of existence.
It encourages a clean house, similar to clean air acts making the polluters pay directly for their output, rather than taxpayers carrying the can for corporations unwilling to install scrubbers because it's 'uneconomical'.
Slashdot Mirror
"I do hope the people who selected these aren't doing any research papers on anything important."
Some of the names appear again and again, but you do seem to have picked up on a minor point that the Ig Nobels are run for a laugh.
You weren't even concerned that Coca Cola's 'purification' process involved introducing a carcinogenic product into _drinking_ water?
That's the serious bit. Concentrate on that rather than the gag reporting.
"What if it lands in dogshit?"
You do know what E. Coli actually is?
"A Russian submarine officer disobeyed a direct order: he did not launch nuclear warhead tipped torpedos at the US fleet."
Actually he pointed out that the conditions for the SOP change to fire on other combatants were not met to another officer on the submarine. There were no direct orders to fire from the Supreme Soviet, but they do have discretion under certain circumstances, such as hull damage.
Valentin Grigoroevich was the officer that ordered the assembly under stressful circumstances (low air, high temperatures, no communications and constant depth charging from American destroyers enforcing the blockade).
"There are nine exemptions to the FOI Act in which an agency can refuse to disclose information."
Are any 'embarrassment'?
"I imagine Special Branch were leaping at the chance."
MI5 are the agency in question, and yes, during that time the UK was very accomodating because of a little thing called the 'Cold War' and the 'European Theatre' that had most of the member states of NATO within a short tank drive of the Warsaw pact.
"I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened."
It's my country (the UK), and the US' relations with us are already in the crapper. As to the information, it generally relates to Lennon's antiwar activities during a time in the history of the 'free world' that such people were considered dangerous subversives and worthy of following around. Believe me, _we_ know that it happened, so there's unlikely to be anything worrying in the reports.
The same thing happened in the UK with nursing shop stewards during the strikes in the late seventies.
"Where did this pornography come from?"
Railway sidings, by the side of the road, parents, other peoples parents, late night Channel 4 programmes...hell, I was renting it out to friends and swapping porn in secondary school.
Just to show that a continent on the other side of the world isn't that different from the UK.
Incidentally, Ashcroft has taken to prosecuting pornographers in states that legislate against them, so we can look forward to the balkanisation of the US shortly.
"Hebrew Christian and Messianic Jewish dating"
Are the chicks hot?
(Apologies. Couldn't self-censor myself quick enough, even while typing out the apology, which is a lot longer than the original message).
"keeping your kids from seeing stuff you don't want them exposed to."
Or using it to illustrate that the world is a terrible place full of people with beliefs they'd like to impose on you out of a misguided sense of moral virtue.
Personally I'd want my kids to have freedom of choice instead of kneeling in front of some dumbass's anthromorphic personification; especially one that freely kills, maims and acts in a fashion more becoming of an abuser.
Christians.... I have no problems with your wacky beliefs, but start trying to affect governence and I'll be gunning for every little 'fact' that you dredge up in support of your fiction.
We do, mostly. Tell me which bit of this is 'novel';
This invention involves a wearable computer having computer components movably located in a collar that the user wears around his or her neck. The computer components can be a display or monitor, or a microphone or any other computer component.
Apart from the weight of the 'wearable' computer impacting _extremely_ negatively on the collarbones, this patent is so overbroad and loaded with prior art that you have to question why the USPTO is bothering looking. So it would be quite interesting to see if we can get an over-unity patent.
"The culprit would confine herself to only those forms of electronic communication that can be encrypted."
Not necessarily...this would tend to hold true where the 'culprit' had knowledge of decent levels of security or any technical expertise. There are more spammers out there that know about the technologies concerned than 'terrorists', who've been getting unwarranted 'bigging up' by Hollywood.
The main problem with all of this is that people don't trust their government to take a dump without handy instructions, and are very suspicious of motive, as some revelations regarding the 'trade' uses of Echelon have shown.
Add to this the problem of quasi-governmental individuals having a go themselves, and essentially we're heading for a time of outrageous suspicion connected with every human endevour.
Scary times ahead.
"Anyone here who has heard of ECHELON and CARNIVORE knows how unreliable and backlogged those two systems are."
Thank god we're limited to 2400bps, 386 processors, bus speeds of 7Mhz, and these things are never updated.
As quite a few people here use naive bayesian filtering on their email, it doesn't seem entirely out of sorts that Carnivore and Echelon could end up extremely effective in, say, pulling out corporate secrets from specific email addresses, or other such market cornering activities.
"Are all terrorists Arabs?"
Only if you work in Homeland Security
"Unfortunately, my approach makes spam and malware 'almost impossible' NOT 100% impossible."
Nice approach, but we discarded it a couple of years ago because of it's catch-all nature, and the uncomfortable problem of people *liking* HTML in their emails, not to mention the whole attachment problem.
Are you interested in talking about a different approach off-board?
"As long as there is an internet and the people using it crave 'easy money', there will ALLWAYS be spam and (zombie mail relay based) malware."
True enough, but that's just an evolution of society getting used to the internet; exactly the same flavour of 'dodges' can be used anywhere in pretty much any medium, which just indicates to me that the internet as a whole should evolve, just on extremely open standards.
"They must have got the designs for time-machine as well because 144 flew several months before Concorde."
I always thought that 'several' meant a few more than 'three'. I live and learn.
The maiden flight wasn't actually publicised at the time, just in case of failure; it was very much a belt'n'braces affair and shouldn't be considered anything more than actually trying to 'beat' the Europeans into the air, which they did.
The Tu-144 had some serious problems, though.
"delta wing instead of curved"
Compound Delta and 'Ogive'. Ogive's are a fairly computationally 'difficult' shape to get right. In terms of supersonic aircraft, French/European designs preferred the Caravelle ogive (which late became the Concorde wing design) over the flat delta, which has completely different separation characteristics. The Concorde was a lot more stable in flight; the Tu-144 required a canard refit (the stubby wings next to the cockpit) to increase low speed stability after one aircraft was lost in an overly fast approach on landing. I suspect that the -1G roll at the '73 Paris airshow that crashed a Tu-144 would have also contributed to this fairly rapid design change.
"one 4 engine compartment instead of 2 blocks of 2."
The only picture I have of the early Tu-144 is a side shot of it being escorted, gear down, by MiGs. It's difficult to see the intakes, but i'd question the single bay compartment simply on the basis of it being a lot of wasted space on an airframe where weight was a premium. Got a photo you can point me at?
Incidentally, Fabiew wasn't caught until 1977, when he handed over a cipher for the intercepted messages, one of which congratulated him on supplying a complete set of blueprints for the Concorde. I haven't checked through the Venona stuff, mainly because I haven't thought to link industrial espionage with military, but the major thrust of the KGB was about getting information from places where it was considered impossible to get information from, something they excelled in.
Look at the Manhatten Project.
"Standard procedure is to make a water landing, bail out, and let the explosives inside (which are activated by being soaked in salt water) scuttle the plane."
This is something that confused me because it didn't match SOP, although I'd ask you if you were sure about explosives happening while the crew and plane were in the same bit of water? 'Concussive shock' springs to mind.
"Laughable also were the reports of the crew valiantly chopping away at the 'computers' inside, so China couldn't acquire them."
Yeah...I recall that the standard practice for disposing of starlight scopes a couple of years ago was putting a bullet through the optics if you feared capture, although melting the wiring looms would be a decent method of destroying the relationships between the machines.
"Anyone who knows anything would know that the crew was certainly only attacking monitors and keyboards, the real computers being stored in armored racks."
The storage is removable. Surely that's the point that would be attacked rather than the console mounted stuff?
"Christ, is that urban legend still around?"
Dammit, they lied during my education. You have my thanks, sir, for pointing this one out to me.
"Like a standard lossy format with support for alpha?"
Because it's nigh on impossible to do? Lossy formats call for some compromise on quality, and alpha gradients wouldn't be that easy to translate.
"But those Brits are real experts."
Ha. Go check out our nuclear submarine fleet.
"I'd been getting a little nervous after things like Browns Ferry and EBR-1 and Detroit Fermi and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl."
All majorly different problems, and you missed 'Monju' in Japan, where they had a runaway sodium leak that was eating into the sub-basement. On the other hand, I believe that all the problems are solvable (with huge design changes that move away from complex cooling and safety systems) apart from low grade waste, which vitrification is supposed to cure.
Except glass is actually a liquid, and flows quite readily on a scale of centuries, let alone millenia, and you wouldn't want groundwater carrying any surface contamination off those glass blocks.
"After all, they've hardly had any nuclear accidents except Windscale."
And the milk ban was introduced almost immediately on November 13th 1957, around four days after the accident (which took about four days to happen in total). The interesting aspect is that it was government run at the time, being shifted to BNFL in 1971, which is when things began to really accelerate downhill; they were fined £25,000 in 1996 for procedural problems and Sellafield/Windscale is currently being decommissioned.
"Virtually every democracy has its dark spots -- but I (and most the rest of the democratized world) never hold up the US as being a paragon of democracy."
You missed one aspect of American Democracy that has everyone on edge, and that's the relative power of corporations to influence a process that was intended to give the people a say in how they are governed, rather than being a race to see how much money can be raised by candidates. Large wodges of money paid to UK MPs tend to raise a few eyebrows and occasionally end up in court; Ironically Greg Dyke was in hot water for this when Blair was elected before losing his job over the Hutton report.
It gives industry a fairly direct means to control lawmaking or moderate laws that would go against them, depending on how much money that they stack on the table.
"US needs to improve, and as the most economically powerful democracy"
And militarily powerful. I hesitate to say 'belligerent' though.
"Just how come Tu-144 made its maiden flight before Concord?"
I suspect that comes down to airworthiness tests demanded by the flight authorities in the specific countries, but three months is not that long a time between the two flights. The espionage is actually a matter of public record, though, Mr Coward.
That the spies were caught quite well before the planes were finalised probably had more to do with it, but there is a fairly consistent mode of piracy that operated in the former Soviet Union and thrives in China, which was one of the conditions on entering the WTO.
At the risk of being labelled a pedant;
"the Pacific" - Not Europe
"airfield in Russia" - Also not Europe.
I actually knew about the B-29s that were downed, because it led to one of the more interesting aspects of the cold war in terms of the idea of scaling arms. Before the TU-4, there was no way for Russia to get to the US, and Russia was already reeling from the attack of a European superpower.
Regarding the reverse engineering, there was a story that Rolls Royce supplied a Merlin aero engine to China on technology transfer that they copied down to the last bolt, and there's some speculation that the EP-3E forced down in China was heavily catalogued before Lockheed Martin engineers were allowed in to dismantle and crate the plane.
"Similarities in COncorde and Tu144"
Were actually down to industrial espionage rather than aerodynamic reasons. TU 144
"Soviets got hold of several shut down over Europe"
I may have missed that war, being British. When did that happen?
"Should someone who gains unauthorized entry to millions of citizens' computers, and who burdens the economic infrastructure (Internet) with garbage be considered perhaps a terrorist?"
I didn't see mention of 'arab' in there.
More seriously, doesn't this gel slightly with the windows Eula?
"there is too much money at stake for the credit card firms to give up 'subsidizing' spam."
Actually, the chargebacks from carding are one of the things they'd like to get rid of. For example 'chip and pin' is simply a method to shift liability rather than increasing security.
"As has been said elsewhere, spam is a societal issue."
And laws haven't been created to change social habits. Ever heard of the DMCA?
"why not use technological means to filter them out for good!"
That's what we're doing. Worked so far? No?
This isn't about the credit card companies, because they don't have a say. The orginal poster was on about attacking the companies that allow their services to be advertised by spam, whether they explicitly allow it or not; this will then shift the liability to the companies collecting the money and mean that they have to go elsewhere for promotion, in a similar fashion to the way that tobacco advertising has been controlled out of existence.
It encourages a clean house, similar to clean air acts making the polluters pay directly for their output, rather than taxpayers carrying the can for corporations unwilling to install scrubbers because it's 'uneconomical'.