Posts by Lapun Mankimasta

HUGE SHARK as big as a WWII SUBMARINE died out, allowing whales to exist

"I saw a TV documentary about this, it was a huge shark that ate a battleship, a jet plane, and the Panama Canal."

Was that Jaws 3 or Jaws 4? I'm getting forgetful these days.

Not a loyal follower of @BritishMonarchy? You missed The QUEEN*'s first Tweet

Gee, and since the late seventies I've been under the (mis)apprehension that the UK (and some of the Commonwealth nations) had a BritishBollocky. Shouldn't trust the Sex Pistols to teach one constitutional theory, I guess ... (I suppose that would mean we now had Bollock Butterflies ... you just can't win!!!)

Prehistoric swingbelly KANGAROOS were TOO FAT to jump – scientists

It's not actually:

Flipper, Flipper

Flipper the Bush Kangaroo

Flipper, Flipper

Flipper, our friend ever true.

More like:

Waddler, Waddler

Waddler the Bush Kangaroo

Waddler, Waddler

Waddler, our friend ever true.

Secret U.S. 'space warplane' set to return from spy mission

deja vu all over again

You know, in the late fifties and early sixties the USAF had this little spaceplane planned, the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar. Likewise it had very little in the way of missions planned, and it got canceled.

Facetiously, the only real uses for space have been biological research, communications, navigation and remote sensing. If this X-37B can't fill any of those roles, it's just a waste of money.

Swiss wildlife park serves up furry residents to visitors

I'm irresistibly reminded of someone I once knew whose name was an acronym for Soup: he never forgave me for reminding him of it. Voila!

http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=26906

"A magical Wasilla evening after the post-prom MOOSE SHOOT with Sarah Palin. The loons, Sarah! Can you hear the loons?"

Then there was the photo-opportunity of him and Sarah Palin about to chow down on a tourist they had downed with bow and arrow ... but I'm afraid I don't have that cartoon strip any longer.

Israeli spies rebel over mass-snooping on innocent Palestinians

Re: How interesting

"Palestinian groups that seek nothing less than the death of every Jew in Israel."

And your views on the Jewish Israeli groups that seek the death of every Arab in Palestine and Israel? Ever hear of a low-life called Kahan? And his band of vicious thugs called the Kahanists?

Re: A joke, or some form of Israeli PR right?

"Stern Gang and Lechi. It was never the policy of the main independence movement which condemned and abhored their activities."

Riiiiight, and backed them up with military aid when it suited them, like the Deir Yassin pogrom.

Re: A joke, or some form of Israeli PR right? @h4rm0ny

"the deaths of Palestinian civilians are equally tragic"

Except it seems to you that they're not.

There's a thing called "proportionality" in military law. To put it bluntly, the law states that only the force necessary should be used to defeat any given foe. Anything more is not only disproportionate, it is a waste of military force. And there's no defending Israel's assault on Gaza as "proportionate".

" 2) When you allow gunmen to hide amongst your children, in their schools, hospitals, and homes, you must realise that more of them will die when the counter attack comes"

Right, so where are they to hide? Tunnels? So they're hiding in tunnels, and your pet military the IDF comes along and demolishes a hospital where there may be injured Hamas military men getting treatment. Read up on the British response to the German Empire's policy of unlimited submarine warfare in relation to hospital ships in WWI.

Re: A joke, or some form of Israeli PR right?

Let's see:

"Israel was made war on about 5 minutes after it was formed after WW2."

Correction: the Zionist project implied the expulsion of the Palestinian Arab population. It was modelled after the expulsion of the American First Nations during the "Winning of the West" by the United States. Before the State of Israel was declared on the 14the of May, the Yishuv had already expelled most of the Arabs in the parts of Mandatory Palestine it controlled. And that expulsion accelerated after the pogrom at Deir Yassin on the 9th of April. There was a month between Deir Yassin and Israel's Declaration of Independence. It took that long for the reluctance of the Arab League leaders to be overcome.

"It was subsequently made war on several times by its Arab neighbours up until the 70s, each of which it won, and could have occupied these neighbours if it chose."

Like the 1956 Suez Crisis? I've seen Zionists refer to that as an Israeli existential crisi. Tell that to Eden.

"Israel beleives that without the buffer zones of the lands it occupies it would be made war on again."

Yeah right. Like the occupation of Soutehrn Lebanon? Like the occupation of the Sinai? I suppose that is why the Egyptians are constantly making war on Israel? Because Israel returned the Sinai?

I've got a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you. How much is two times two?

Read The Gods of War for every tired cliche you never wanted to see in a sci fi book

Has anyone chewed his or her legs off yet to survive this book?

"Thirty-one years old, with straight black hair, olive skin and green eyes,"

"Thirty-one years old, with straight olive hair, green skin and black eyes,"

There. Corrected it for you. I always find the green-skinned girls get the most interest as love interests.

Re: When I really want to geek out

Hard SF divides itself between Baxter and Egan.

Re: SciFi Channel

Lexx outranks all the other SF movies, TV Movies, TV series, etc. It was at least funny, with a sly, in-the-ribs "geddit!" tone. Most of the dreck Hollywood excretes doesn't have a sensavuma.

You are here => Earth is in 'the suburbs' of an immense heaven

Laniakea

Now let's see, in Tahitian it would be Ra'iatea and in Te Reo Maori it would be Rangiatea:

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/hawaiki/page-3

Location Location Location. Now where are those beads I had for sale to the nice gentlemen in that UFO ... ?

CNN 'tech analyst' on NAKED CELEBS: WHO IS this mystery '4chan' PERSON?

Re: Discrimination.........??????

Ah, but you left out the tie. Face it, birthday suits without ties are just not cool any more.

pa££word

or you could ufe the dreaded paffword that nobody'f going to gueff:

PAFFWORD

Women-only town seeks men

"Sons are sent away when they reach 18 and no other men are permitted to live in the town"

sounds very much like any number of matriarchal mammal species ...

Re: Beware, O horny IT types!

Casa de los Tarantulas e Crocodylos

should read:

Casa dos Tarantulos e Crocodylos

It is Portuguese-speaking Brazil, after all. De los is Spanish, which you'll speak when you cross the border to the south or the west or the north - you can try crossing the eastern border, but that depends on how long you can hold your breath, I'm afraid ... :)

April 1st months ago/next year

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Just looked at my passport - no, wasn't born yesterday.

Hello, police, El Reg here. Are we a bunch of terrorists now?

the crucifixion scene

Damn! there goes my copy of Guernica! PC Plod'll mistake it for an instruction manual.

That green gooey gunk

precisely. sedition occurs when rocks are weathered and the sediments get washed down into a lake or the sea ... as happens in, you know, CJ Dennis' The Sedimental Bloke

Re: So if the BBC show an excerpt from it on the News

Already been done, in Godzone ... TVNZ just made the entire population of New Zealand "terrorists" according to the thin but incredibly dense blue line in the UK.

Re: if I planned?

while I walk like an Egyptian ...

boys n girls in blue

Ah, you must remember that it's not only a thin blue line, it's also incredibly dense. Its density is much, much greater than that of a neutron star.

Hollywood star Robin Williams dies of 'suspected suicide' at 63

Now I'll never get to hear him talk about life as an only twin ... nanoo nanoo, Mork.

(However, there is still time for an unauthorized, posthumous autobiography ...)

IBM boffins stuff 16 million-neuron chips into binary 'frog' brain

Re: The first thing to do...

And write Vogon poetry in its spare time, if it can't manage Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings' quality and quantity ...

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

Re: Lancaster vs B17

And if they had been Confederate Ships they would've been Slavery Ships. /SNARK OFF

Actually, speaking from a Pacific perspective, the Japanese lost the war but won the peace, and they remade Asia. After the WWII the European empires in that part of the world collapsed.

And the Japanese rather punctured Churchill's reputation - sinking the Prince of Wales and the Repulse - which led to the total collapse of British power in Singapore ... no, the British presence in the Pacific was quite secondary to that of the Americans, and that was largely possible to the Indians not going over to the Japanese, and the Australia New Zealand combination providing an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Americans to retake the Philipines.

There's a Lanc sitting inside the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Used to go look at it on occasion. "G For GEORGE" is awesome.

https://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/george/

http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/RELAWM31788/?image=1#display-image

https://www.awm.gov.au/units/unit_614.asp

Then just a few years ago I got to sit inside a Bristol Freighter's cockpit at Wigram, and thought how it must've been for the big bombers as well, with the engines roaring in your ears ...

Call off the firing squad: HP grants stay of execution to OpenVMS

What I would like to see

I would like to see HP release the VAX VMS source trees under the GPL v3 for several reasons, the first and foremost being one of making some sort of sense out of the massive threat posed to world IT by patent trolls in the US and the US govt's insane wish to infect other countries with the software patent legal malware. The second one of course is it would be nice to read the VAX VMS source trees to see where DEC's programmers got it right, without the threat of legal action if, heaven forbid, one decides to adopt best practices in the raw, and use the same or similar algorithms. The third is of course it would make running the VAX VMS hobbyist licenses so much easier on SIMH and the like - you would be released from the onerous necessity of applying for a yearly license and the hobbyist organization would be freed from the onerous necessity of maintaining records on their fellow hobbyists.

(Of course, to really extinguish the software patents legal malware one would need to get Microsoft (Windows NT aka VMS under Microsoft and MS OS/2) and IBM (IBM OS/2) to do the same with their segments of the unholy mess that came from the IBM/MS OS/2 which then turned into MS WinNT through VAX VMS with Cutler midwifing, and IBM OS/2 with the breakup between IBM and MS. But one can dream.)

Forty-five years ago: FOOTPRINTS FOUND ON MOON

Go Buzz!

I was heartened to see Buzz Aldrin, old as he was, take on that noxious weed. I remember quite well seeing one of the Apollos in descent from the Pacific night in the late sixties or early seventies, a meteor in flight, only much bigger. I wouldn't mind walking on Mars ...

Use Tor or 'extremist' Tails Linux? Congrats, you're on an NSA list

> Well of course you're an extremist if you run Linux.

Queen Elizabeth is mortal

All frogs are mortal

therefore

Queen Elizabeth is a frog

Re: they're a spy agency

> The way the NSA plays it

they're a bunch of misfits that need medication.

Re: Just Because I'm Paranoid The Inevitable Conclusion

You know, surveilling everybody strikes me as a sure sign of paranoid schizophrenia, as defined in all the appropriate medical handbooks used by medical doctors and students. I sure wish The Man would look in the mirror for once, don't you?

Re: Whither the mission creep?

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

A real load of fun when it comes to human biology ... "I was hammering down all the ... extrusions, Doctor."

Re: And if I actually USE Linux..........

Should set up a honeytrap in a vm box on a super-secure Linux. Then set up the honeytrap with 777 - though if you're particularly diabolical, you could set up a vm box with a halfway secure OS, then have it point to "the real goodies", and then get them arriving at a vm box that automatically chroots them, and then changes permissions to 444, and logs them onto an 0900 number.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and this is guaranteed to produce some heartwarming yowls.

> If I was exchanging semi secret stuff in the clear, I'd use brainfuck just to mess with them

Always include something from Monty Python in the sig: then randomly misspell. Let them go slowly mad trying to work it out.

The truth on the Navy carrier debacle? Industry got away with murder

Price of Wales?

LOL. How much is it actually? Have they really put Wales up on ebay?

Re: Really?

You need a good idea of what you ned the aircraft for before you lay down the big ones. I'm sure this is a novel thought to the MoD and whitehall.

Blame WWI, not Bin Laden, for NSA's post-9/11 intel suck

Re: There's a big difference though

"And you have to put a hell of a lot of filters on the data before you can get down to the point where even with 10,000 agents you are looking at some significant portion of information about the general public."

Seriously, you need an algorithm that filters on What I Mean rather than on What I Say.

Who has such an algorithm? No one I know.

Re: Actually it goes back much further than that. Alien and sedation act.

Actually the Alien and Sedation Act was exercised during the filing of the doco E.T. The US Congress argued that the little alien could not be operated on if there was no law covering sedation and medical misconduct.

Then of course Alien turned up with his sedatives, and sedated most of the Nostromo crew before lunching on them ...

NSA: Inside the FIVE-EYED VAMPIRE SQUID of the INTERNET

Re: He has a point though

Interesting, the mention of the "Nothing to hide" meme. Should really be asking the snooper scoopers, if they aren't doing anything wrong, then since they have nothing to hide, they by extension, have nothing to fear from being completely free and open with us.

Or is it the fact that they are hiding everything they possibly can, proof positive that they are doing something terribly wrong? What a place to hide, for ... various sexual predators ... amongst the machinery that snoops on everybody else.

Re: Lets not forget who is to blame

"It is easy to characterize the NSA and GCHQ as some sort or Orwellian super power out of control targeting at removing our freedoms."

Such as the right to anonymously support political parties, candidates, positions, etc, which are usually out-of-favour with the party in power? Unless of course you can buy the watchers off, in which case the only political and civil rights left belong to the rich.

"But actually they are more an expression of our fears and anxieties."

Fears and anxieties that have been deliberately fostered and developed over the past half-century, based as it happens on a set of fears and anxieties that have been fostered for over a millenium in Western Europe. I don't like being manipulated, sorry.

"The reason these programs were setup in the 1st place was because we the people demanded it after events like 9/11 and 7/7 when it became clear that organisations like al-qaeda were using things like the internet to co-ordinate their followers.:

Did we? I don't remember being asked, at any point. And I certainly didn't express any such wish to be surveilled a la the KGB, the Stasi, and the various forms of uselessness that permitted the likes of the French Revolution to occur.

"After 9/11 questions were asked why the CIA, NSA FBI etc did not see it coming and the answer was because they did not have the capabilities to monitor mass communication. So they built it."

When in truth they had been keeping an eye on Al Qaeda for a fair few years. They just did not have the elementary HUMINT to understand Al Qaeda. Which they still don't. The "non-intervening" intervention in Libya has spread Al Qaeda affiliates all across North Africa - someone everybody else at the time could see. Just not the doofuses in charge.

"Now you could argue that they went way over there brief, but that is fault with the oversight not the organisations themselves."

When you have an organization tasked with two completely self-contradictory tasks - the NSA - namely securing the networks, and breaking the networks, that line of reasoning shows up as just an empty excuse.

"Then again with the fear and paranoia following those events it would be a brave politician who would put their career on the line who would limit powers which might stop the next 9/11."

Why are we paranoid? Paranoia's a medical condition, in case you were unaware, and paranoid schizophrenia - where the brain disconnects from its environment and sees threats everywhere - is one of the more dangerous of the mental illnesses. If we as a group of people are paranoid enough, then we should undergo a medical examination and probably, undergo a course of medication.

"We also would be clamoring to now why our security services had let us down if another event like that happened."

We are clamouring to find out why our security services now consider everybody to be guilty. Or at least I am.

"In a naive world populated by Edward Snowdens, the transgressions look inexcusable, but in the real world these organisations daily stop us getting killed or injured by the forces out there."

Or rather, they set up policies and environments that we understand only too well, are precursors to repression.

"The question therefore is not whether these powers should exist, but how they are overseen, the range of their use, and when they should be used."

Let me tell you about the lady who rode a tiger. A very exciting ride, but she could never sleep and she could never dismount. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Evidently since we're not paying such a price, we don't have freedom, only a simulcra of it.

Re: "what sweden has to offer the US"

"the Swedish security agency has one Russian defector whose information they can trade with the US"

Every time I see the word "defector" I find myself substituting "defecator". It seems to fit with the sh*tload of garbage certain Iraqis fed everybody prior to the last imperial cockup in Iraq, of just a decade or so ago.

Son of ACTA pours fuel on IP trade fire

However, the European Commission has said that it intends there to be no harmonisation between US and EU intellectual property laws. On investor-state dispute provisions, it states that countries can still pass their own legislation: “at most, it can lead to compensation being paid"

Intellectual Property, parsed:

I P

U P

He Ps

She Ps

It Ps

We P

U P

They P

(on us, natch, and they call it "rain"!)

Russian deputy PM: 'We are coming to the Moon FOREVER'

Re: Could not have timed it better

> I had no idea Parliament was looking to impose sanctions on the US.

It IS a bit late, now that Hawai'i's a state instead of just a territory ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hawaii

Re: oh yes..

Now why the H#&( would the Chinese waste their population on a frontal assault on Washington DC? The NSA has thoughtfully opened the Internet of Things to infiltration, and the Internet of Things is attached to the Internet of (non)Things, which amongst other things, is attached to financial weapons of mass destruction such as the Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs. They don't need to send anyone into battle. The 1% in America will do it all for them, out of love (of financial mass destruction)!!!

Re: Much Ado About Nothing - it's OK

Oh Lord! Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the rest on top of Palin? I now know real terror!

Re: @Lapun

My point - which you've missed in its entirety - is that there are good solid PHYSICAL REASONS why the Outer Space and Moon treaties read as they do. Simply that exercising exclusive control over the Moon is impossible. It's one of the reasons why I tend to ignore SkiFFy books and films - you need to blanket Near Earth Orbit with weaponized satellites to prevent a breakout. The Brilliant Pebbles of the Gypper's SDI - Raygun's Star Wars for the incognescenti - was a valiant attempt to do precisely that, only it would've bankrupted the US to do so and kept them from trusting Near Earth Orbit, let alone their National Technical Means of Verification (spy satellites) that various arms control treaties rely upon..

Treaties that last tend to take physical realities as seriously as they take political realities.

Bit late for edit, but for "The British Empire had very serious doubts about annexing New Zealand in the 1930s"

read "The British Empire had very serious doubts about annexing New Zealand in the 1830s"

FWLIW, I serously doubt the Russians can annex the Moon. The British Empire had very serious doubts about annexing New Zealand in the 1930s, due to the length of time getting there and back. Now imagine getting the commissar to the Moon when you're dealing with weather getting in the way all the time ... there was some very serious intelligence behind the Moon Treaty of 1979:

http://www.oosa.unvienna.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_34_0068.html

Article 11:2

The moon is not subject to national appropriation by any claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

a restatement of the Outer Space Treaty of 1966:

http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/SpaceLaw/gares/html/gares_21_2222.html

Article II

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

If you can't get there in force, you can't enforce your claims; you can't prevent anybody else getting there.

FWVLIW, I always laugh when I read Space Opera talking so blithely of Interstellar Empires - if you can't get there in a timely fashion, you can't be said to control it in any meaningful fashion, and they're only being polite.

Internet-of-stuff startup dumps NoSQL for ... SQL?

And they discover that NoSQL - essentially the same tech as either hierarchical or network database management of the 70s - hasn't got the same ease of management as a relational database ... ? surprise, surprise!!!