I don't know what I am jealous of more.
Your Playmobil collection or the fact that some of you got paid for doing this.
I want your job.
edit: Read this article to my cat. She rated it a 7.
Chilling evidence emerges of Kilocat weapon
Our recent speculation that it might be possible to hoist 1,000 cats aloft under a helium-filled, stadium-sized sandwich bag and then drop them from 32km to devastating effect appears to be somewhat more than idle Friday afternoon pre-pub musing. Sensationally, we at El Reg have obtained solid evidence that the US has indeed …
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Friday 15th April 2016 11:44 GMT pete 22
I've been saying for years that the way to defeat the Soviets is to drop a load of kittens on em. The ones that aren't overcome with a case of the "Aww, cute!" will instead be tripping over them and unable to go anywhere. Paris cuz its a lot of pussy.
EDIT TO ADD: Stadium-sized sandwich bag? Thats a mighty big sandwich, would that be the post-pub nosh?
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Saturday 16th April 2016 09:31 GMT Stoneshop
Cats
Obviously you've been saying it for so long that you failed to notice that they were defeated in 1990. No cats required.
No? It was actually a border guard accidentally leaving the gate open after a moggie that wanted to be on the other side (there were no cat flaps in the Berlin Wall, big mistake). Then one phrase in the permission from Krenz "Yo, you cats are free to go" to install cat flaps was misinterpreted by Schabowski, and the rest is history.
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Friday 15th April 2016 12:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
PDF version?
That was brilliantly silly! Thank you for making me smile on what has been a trying day at work! I don't suppose there's PDF versions of your various Playmobil escapades, especially this one?
Esme (looking to see if she can get a job as a cat wrangler at a kilocat-weapons making facility)
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Friday 15th April 2016 12:42 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Dear sir, My Fridays consist of sitting at a desk being sneered at by thirty-somethings who think Unix is hard, computers are clever and older mainframe era staff are shirt thick.
At my desk my job is to look for the dumbass mistake made in the latest script written by "our best script guy" and fix it, while being yelled at by people who think I am responsible for the code in question.
My daughter has announced her intention to move 1700 miles away, leaving her sizable collection of Playmobil behind. Said collection includes many items long out of production and hence rare, and also many items only sold in Canada.
In short, I have the motivation and the equipment, and a strong desire to leave Mr Coder neck deep in his own work.
Gissajob!
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Friday 15th April 2016 23:00 GMT Stevie
Re: Bah!
"Donate"?
Donate the Innuit family and sled team? The three different colored dragons with broken chains? The lear jet that seats 8 plus two pilots? The Viking ship with crew? The Pirate ship with crew and working cannons and a secret compartment in the poop deck c/w treasure chest? The three foot wide, two and a half foot tall castle "with everything"? The farm? The polar reasearch station?
Dream on. They are mine for research purposes now.
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Friday 15th April 2016 18:59 GMT Michael Thibault
Re: simple comedic timing
>shark?
Technically, there is a shark--but it's a whale shark. A filter-feeder. Who the hell would equip such a useless shark with frikken lasers and send it to do bad-ass shit? Seriously! The only thing bad-ass about it would be the laser.
There's a serious problem in personnel.
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Friday 15th April 2016 21:35 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Re: simple comedic timing
It's just as well that US Patent 5443036: "Method of exercising a cat" (using a laser pointer) has lapsed!
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Friday 15th April 2016 13:14 GMT Pascal Monett
Brilliant investigative journalism at its Friday finest
A hearty congratulations, El Reg, for a very in-depth article on yet more DARPA shenanigans. I do hope that, when the cat is finally let out of the bag, people will remember that it was revealed here first.
Well done. Very well done.
P.S. need a cat icon - or maybe a kilocat one.
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Friday 15th April 2016 16:45 GMT insertusername
I head originally they were planning to use tax evasers and corportae at part of the wcds (Weapons of Cat Destruction) but sadly the technology isn't around to lift the weight required. Tom was also considered but he is in intensive therapy for mouse trauma and for being a useless cat who can't even catch a single mouse
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Friday 15th April 2016 22:46 GMT Destroy All Monsters
Seeing how State is splurging on this new weapon of mass destruction, they will have to find quite a few "tax evasers" lest the Central Bank printshop need to shit out yet another container of greenbacks. On the other hand, they are in form now, not long till the burning shit hits the hoi polloi.
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Saturday 16th April 2016 00:17 GMT harmjschoonhoven
Suicide Bomber Bats
In fact the U.S. Navy experimented with bat bombs, not cat bombs. Ten- to eleven-gram Mexican free-tailed bats carried a 17.5 gram napalm time bomb designed in 1943 by Louis Fieser.
Researchers planned to pack the bats into five-foot-tall steel bombshells the size of a Standard 500-pound bomb. Each shell was filled with circular steel trays about one and a half inches tall, subdivided into small rectangular bat-sized niches and fitted upside down one on top of the other. Hibernating bats with napalm bombs attached to their breasts with surgical clips -thought to simulate the teeth of a baby bat- were to be placed in each compartment. Timing and safety wires connected each bat to the tray above and to the compartment walls. Strings two- to three-inches long connected the trays. On release, a parachute deployed and a mechanical device jettisoned the casing. Trays fell to the bottom of their connecting strings like an accordion and released the timing wires. As the deployed bat bomb descended into warmer air, the bats were expected to wake up, wiggle or fall out of their cubicles, and fly away in the process removing the safety wires and arming the bombs. Each shell could carry 1,030 bats. A twin-engined B-25 could carry twenty-five shells: almost 26,000 individual bat bombs. A Del Mar, California, company owned by entertainer Bing Crosby and his brother Larry was contracted to manufacture the devices.
Napalm, An American Biography by Robert M. Neer, page 48. Photo's after page 86.
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Tuesday 19th April 2016 21:55 GMT Public Citizen
Re: Suicide Bomber Bats
Followup:
The project was terminated before it became operational because a group of bats equipped with napalm charges escaped from their cage, nested in the roofs of the temporary wooden buildings that the facility was built around, and burned most of the base down.
In one accident demonstrating that the idea worked and that it was too dangerous to deploy, leading to the decision to abandon the program before it could go operational.
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Saturday 16th April 2016 13:00 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Very nice indeed!
Have you ever considered sending this stuff to a scientific journal? Like Annals of Improbable Research? Fits right in with classics like "Feline Reactions to Bearded Men"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
