Posts by Sanguma

Voyager 1 cracks yet another barrier: Now 150 Astronomical Units from Sol

Re: So when does Voyager 1 run into the "Truman Show" wall the aliens keep around our solar system?

Reminds me of one of Stephen Baxter's shorter stories, from his Manifold series. And one of Greg Egan's novels, Quarantine.

Re: Imagination and wishful thinking

Nah, the Demolition Notice would be the poetry, and we'd all go mad trying to understand it and demolish Earth ourselves in the process. The Vogons have not got a lot of style, but they're eager pick-pokets, and will pick-pocket any idea that'll save them from doing any real work. Real work might stop them from shouting in peoples' ears, "Resistance is useless!!!"

Re: Relics of the Space Age

FWIW, I was working as a volunteer in a community-run cybercafe in Chch NZ before the earthquakes demolished it, and a young chap comes in to do a bit of web surfing. He went straight to the Mars pictures then being beamed back by Spirit and Opportunity, and was clearly blown away by seeing another planet in the Solar System.

There's still hope for the younger generation.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Re: I haven't a funny quip to add to all these.

egg on his face?

Poached? Fried? Boiled? Scrambled? Enquiring minds wants to know!

I'm quacking up!!!

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

Re: "Please don't go down that rabbit hole, people."

Have a caucus race with a load of mice, on me!

Re: Mind control by 5G is not a risk

OMG, that explains the gaps in my memory, that insidious 3G with missing coverage! When I've been intending to do something, and I find ... now what was I going to say?

Oh, and have a nice day!

Re: Angels are real

How can one study a being that is allegedly superior to oneself? We study animals on the occasion we have the ability to immobilize them in one way or another, or we can get close enough while maintaining a necessary distance. We study natural phenomena either by constructing an environment where we can abstract unnecessary details (chemistry, physics, etc), or by using information we've already gained through those methods on situations where we just cannot get access - astronomy, geology, etc. But if an angel can simply come and go as it pleases, how is one to study that?

Re: let's get this into some sort of level headed reality

MAGA - you're referring to the famous electioneering slogan, Make Americans Gullible Again, aren't you? No wonder The Donald, aka Resident Rump, picked that up and ran with it.

Russia tested satellite-to-satellite shooter, say UK and USA

respectable clone of the B29

which in the fullness of time, developed into the Tupolev 95 and a similar huge turboprop airliner. Mind you, Stalin had asked for rights to it and was turned down, before some B29s landed in Siberia after bombing Japan - the Soviet Union wasn't involved in the Pacific War until very, very late, and like all military aircraft engaged in a conflict landing in a neutral country, the B29s got impounded, and unsurprisingly, cloned.

a "harpoon" device

In which case it would be nice to have a bit of consultation, wouldn't it? A little less friction ... I know dreams are free ...

Outer Space Treaty

doesn't forbid weapons in outer space, let alone anti-satellites in earth orbit. On the other hand - err, paw - the various arms control treaties including the multilateral one covering Europe from Russia to the UK, from Spain to Svalbard to Turkey, have a provision permitting the use of national technical means of verification, which amongst other sins, covers the protection of remote-sensing satellites against interference. If the United States leadership had half the gumption of your average twelve-year-old schoolboy, they would've turned that provision into a broader multilateral anti-satellite treaty at the time when they were undeniably the winners of the Cold War and were still not wasting their substance on chasing the will-o-the-wisp in Central Asia and the Middle East. And could effectively dictate terms as they did in the WTO ... but no, they were too intent on examining the contents of their innermost rectums ... and applying some self-satisfying rectal therapy ... Better them than me!!!

If they had had half the gumption of a twelve-year-old boy ...

US military whips out credit card for unmanned low-Earth-orbit outpost prototype (aka a repurposed ISS cargo pod)

Addendum ->Re: applications for Shooting Star are really endless

I forgot to add, the Pentagon have decided on a new designation for US Space F[a]rce vessels.

They will be henceforth known as United States Meteor Shower [insert name here] or abbreviated: USMS [Shooting Star], in honour of the Twenty Minute Club founded by Lord Flashheart during the First World War as chronicled by one Blackadder in Blackadder Goes Forth. Flashheart's Rejoinder, also known as Slackbladder Goes Forth, is clearly a fake and should not be relied upon.

applications for Shooting Star are really endless

Meteor Shower Shooting Star? sotto voce "Honey, I left the gas on again ... full bore"

Nothing new to see here. Anyone remember the DynaSoar flightless space plane the Pentagon was planning on launching around the time of Gemini? Complete with an orbital laboratory attached to the back, and provisions to last at least a week in orbit?

"All good things come to he who waits" ... :) and of course the interminable B-grade space movies of the 50s where the space ships would stop by an orbital bowser to refill their tanks before carrying on their insane adventurers ...

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Re: In summary

Humans can only have a limited amount of people in their bubblesphere

We're a @#%$^&%^* ape species, for pity's sakes! We need to go around in groups - it's not like it's something new! And we naturally choose our own group to bond to, or to continue to bond to - though as a fission-fusion species, we can bond more easily than many another social species can.

The problem is when power is concerned (wealth is just power condensed), and when various members of a group with power aims to keep that power for as long as possible - though the instant you make it obvious that you intend to retain your power for as long as you can, you recruit your opposition. (I keep expecting to hear that Xi Jinping has been deposed or in some other way terminated with extreme prejudice because he has made himself PRC leader for life, and that usually gets the destructive juices flowing in such scenarios, unless the opposition are very thoroughly cowed, and when they are, they are next to useless anyway.)

I expect anyone could've stolen the info and anyone could've set up the logs to point to the FSB - even dissident FSB agents. Humans are a social, aka political species, after all, and the near in blood the nearer bloody as someone might have remarked a few years ago ...

NASA delays James Webb Space Telescope launch date by at least seven months

Alternatives?

Wasn't there supposed to be some US spy satellites that weren't needed by the end of the Cold War, so they got donated to NASA? I read that a while back, somewhere, and have been waiting eagerly for news of their launch and the results to come flooding in, but no, nothing seems to have happened.

When Apollo met Soyuz: 45 years ago, Americans and Russians played together nicely... IN SPAAAAACE

Remember that well!

I being a space enthusiast at ten or so years of age, told my primary school teacher that the Americans and the Russians were going to connect their spaceships in orbit, and he told me straight that it would never happen, because the two sides were so anti each other. I missed the opportunity to tell him, "I told you so," because by that time I was no longer at the school he was teaching at.

These missed opportunities! When will they ever end! :)

ReactOS hits a milestone – actually hiring a full-time developer. And we've got our talons on the latest build to see what needs fixing

All of which goes to show

Microsoft has persistently misjudged a good part of its installed base, the hobbyists. They did manage to get the Visual [name your poison] Express, later Visual Studio Community edition, right, but they still haven't got the hobbyists lined up on the Operating System part of it.

Trump U-turns on foreign student crackdown: F-1, M-1 visa holders allowed to study online mid-pandemic in the US

Re: policy being legal

How about "Build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it"?

Amazingly, the Mexicans would pay - in their droves - for an opportunity to see Donald Trump himself, and no other, build his fabulous wall, from shore to shore, in a colourful orange jumpsuit and trowel and cement blocks and mortar in his hot little hands. Mexico's drug gangs might even stop their drug wars to tour the border and watch @realDonaldTrump do some @realWork @forReal @forOnce!!!

I think the Mexicans should be given the opportunity to see such an event. There should be some impresarios in Mexico City who'd leap at the opportunity to stage such a tourist event.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

s/from 1982 onwards/from 1882 onwards/g

There FTFY

Re: Job ad requirements

Are they asking for thermometers? Thermometers are graduated in degrees without needing any brains ...

Re: Windows 2000

You know, if you point that out to an HR Droid, you'll come across as significantly more aware of the situation than the HR Droid is, and the HR Droid will understandably feel threatened, and you won't get the job. Any hint that you can call their bluff and they'll send you out the door and themselves back to the factory for recalibration.

MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs

Re: c****e

"Covfefe"?

India bans 59 apps it says have privacy, national security problems. In a massive coincidence, they’re all Chinese

Anyone

could see that the next focus of conflict is going to be between India and China. This is just the preliminary skirmish.

Both are huge, both are rising from third-rate positions they were shoved into about a couple of centuries ago, when the European powers were rising. Both are fiercely nationalistic.

And both have long histories and long memories.

Question is, what do we non-Indian, non-Chinese nationals do about it? Take up seats on the sidelines and cheer on our favourite teams? Try to stop things getting any worse? Decide its all none of our business what happens and try to ignore it?

The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references

Re: FTFY

Resident Rump is what you get when you subtract the P T (Barnum) from him. There's one born every minute, P T Barnum prophesied, and Resident Rump is that One! Except he's dialed back the "born every minute" to save his dear deceased Mom from wear and tear, back to "born yesterday". I wish he'd man up and show us his LaLa Land Birth Certificate and Passport, though.

Re: FTFY

Further corrigendum:

s/The recumbent President of the United States of America/The recumbent Federal Secretary of Silly Tweets of the United States of America/g

There! FTFY! Cant' go wrong with calling it like it is, can you, innit?

FTFY

s/The incumbent President of the United States of America/The recumbent President of the United States of America/g

There FTFY.

Machine learning helps geoboffins spot huge beds of hot rocks 1,000km across deep below Earth's surface

Oh Noes!!!

They've discovered a meeting of out-of-work politicos and police commissioners. What else could be so dense?

What could possibly make a cranky crocodylomorph more terrifying? How about one that chases you on its hind legs?

Re: Cooktown - handbags and roast, anyone?

iAs a kid, I once heard my father talk about some PapuaNiuGinians he'd seen hunting river crocs. With a stone axe among other things. As they'd done so for the past 40 thousand years or more. Apparently they were getting a feed and some trade goods.

You need not doubt me that I held PNGians in very high respect after that. That's getting up close with one of the larger estaurine/riverrine predators.

I have very little doubt that PNGians would find a way to turn such bipedal croc into handbags and roast in very short order.

US Air Force wants to pit AI-powered drone against its dogfighting hotshots in battle of the skies next year

human emotions

The kill factor in WW2 dogfights was the "killer" instinct, the urge to close and make sure of the kill. It's what most of the high-scorers in the RAF possessed.

I suppose an analogy could be programmed into the AI piloting the drone, but I expect a lot of drones would be written off before it was successful. (Though mind you, a drone with no compunction about ramming the opposing plane - and probably with a self-destruct charge to finish the job - would be very useful in Power-to-Power conflict. Not so much in attacking wedding parties.)

Just one Nose-Picking moment

"autonomous aircraft" ... so it won't have a remote-control pilot? A la Reapers, and whatnot?

Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Will it write novels and get upset that nobody wants to publish them? Have unlucky love affairs and read bad poetry to hitchhikers strapped into Poetry Appreciation Chairs? Run away from conflict and hide in the deepest basements? (The AI used in the Lord of the Rings movies to animate the Orc armies, gave a lot of them very good survival instincts. They headed away from mass conflicts.)

This obviously needs deep, deep thought ... call the mice and find if they've got any good ideas.

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

Re: Another wombat reference from the Fortune program

Ogden Nash, none other! (Have an upvote - I thought it was Hilaire Belloc or GK Chesterton, woe is me.)

Talk about a control plane... US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use Kubernetes

Re: But why?

It's so the pilots/avionics managers on board the blessed thing can brush up on their chat-up lines with the local NS/AI (Natural Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence) while penetrating deep, deep into emeny airspace:

You will respect mah authoritah! The enema of mah enema is mah friend!

Defending critical national infrastructure... hmm. Does Zoom count as critical now?

Re: I've been saying this for over a decade

Have to say you're right.On a network where everything is connected, it's the Travelling Salesman Problem. Which is the quickest way in, and through? Alternatively, which way in is the least troublesome, and which leaves the least traces?

But of course, your submission was entirely in the spirit of the documents the Founding Fathers produced, even if they hardly believed in them themselves, and that spirit's the spirit of a terrorist these days - Corporations Good, Common Citizens Bad.

Just ask the US Supreme Leader before whom all the ... excuse me while I barf ...

Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'

Re: But what about...

The whole point of copyright is to reward authors

Which raises the question: how do they reward the author who's died in the meantime? If I write a novel or a history or a textbook of some sort, or a piece of music, then die, how am I to be rewarded? And the publishers sit on a vast number of texts of varying quality that have one thing in common - their authors are dead. How do they get rewarded?

Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia's election? There were no hacks

Re: Move on

that complete fabrication

I'm surprised you're surprised. The RIAA got several rather dead musicians to sign some rather public ads saying they liked what the RIAA was doing. The idea that the dead can vote in the US is merely a sign that they are not in favour of discriminating against the dead. I suspect though that the returning officers manning the polling booths ... learn to look ... the other way when someone three years dead wanders in off the street with his ID card and ticks off the candidates ...

I'm surprised that Hollywood hasn't made a hard-hitting documentary on it yet. We can but hope and dream. (Who would George Washington vote for in the coming election? That's what I'd like to know. And Benjamin Franklin, etc ... you don't suppose they'd apply for British passports and vote SNP just to get away from this unholy mess .... :)

Just one nose-picking minute

- in saner jurisdictions, someone who lies to the cops that a crime allegedly took place gets a sentence of some sort to remind him not to do it again. What's wrong with the g*damm United States of A?

Trump issues toothless exec order to show donors, fans he's doing something about those Twitter twerps

Re: Is it true

Thanks for the laugh. I gave you an upvote for it.

Piltdown Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human.

Nebraska Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebraska_Man

They then passed the tooth along to William K. Gregory and Dr. Milo Hellman, who agreed that the tooth belonged to an anthropoid ape more closely related to humans than to other apes. [...] According to these discovered pieces, the tooth belonged neither to a man nor an ape, but to a fossil of an extinct species of peccary called Prosthennops serus.

Re: Lets be honest, he is having a blast

Trump can't even run a casino.

In a world where the dice are always loaded in favour of the casino, that says a lot about Trump, doesn't it? When he couldn't come out on top when the dice were loaded in his favour, ... Poor, poor US of A.

Re: Trumpetsters Trumpet Drumpfs Lumps "veep"?

"veep"? - vat a "viper" becomes ven it has no more vindows to vipe.

Re: Simple Response.

The dastardly Democrats are heinously preventing him from drinking his Chlorine and Hydrogen Peroxide cocktails, made the way Mom used to make them. I've heard he's thinking of trying Fluorine cocktails next ...

Is it true

that Donald Trump is the direct lineal descendant of Piltdown Man? Or Nebraska Man? Or of them both? Inquiring minds wants to know!!!

Made-up murder claims, threats to kill Twitter, rants about NSA spying – anything but mention 100,000 US virus deaths, right, Mr President?

Re: The Federal government isn't all of the United States

s/we lopped off the head of our (former) King/we therapeutically amputated the head of our (former) King/g

There. FTFY

Someone somewhere else

concluded that President Donald J. Trump had promoted himself to Federal Secretary of Silly Tweets.

Wish I'd come up with that.

All we need now is for him to promote himself to Federal Secretary of Silly Walks. Anybody got any ideas of how to get that done?

Twitter ticks off Trump with new 'Get the facts' alert on pair of fact-challenged tweets

Re: Rootin' Tootin'

Actually, Twitter doesn't have to actually publish them outside of a very small number of known addresses, and likewise, only allow those tweets to be retweeted to an equally small number of known addresses. Twitter could effectively allow the Twit-in-Chief to assume he was having the huge influence he's been having, while providing him and his associates in Twittery and their associates with a huge echo chamber for none but themselves.

It's the way contagious diseases are confined.

Re: Rootin' Tootin'

Working in association with the partnership of Snatchit, Grabbit & Runn ...

Dude, where's my laser?

Re: ACME Corporation

Which is why wiser heads know it as Acne corp.

Forget BYOD, this is BYOVM: Ransomware tries to evade antivirus by hiding in a virtual machine on infected systems

well, well, well

three holes in the ground. With water at the bottom and rain coming down.

I'm thinking that is should be possible to roll this back the way that enterprising developer did with that phone call scammer chappie. Now they've been so kind as to give us some hints as to where their whereabouts are, or at least their hardware assets are, shurly one could track it down and - turnabout is fair play.

What do people think? Is it possible to infect the ransomware chappies with ransomware?