Posts by Lapun Mankimasta

Not so strange, after all

I thought an ejection seat that breaks the pilot's neck was an anti-terrorism measure. You know, a pilot ejecting over hostile territory can't be tortured - sorry, forcefully interrogated - for incriminating information such as the colour of their SO's underwear or the size of their wotsit if they are dead.

Actually it sounds like a rehash of the Imperial Wallies Back In London's view of the importance of parachutes in the First World War, or the importance of not having the bloody thing go up in smoke after it's been hit by incendaries during the Battle of Britain. WWI - don't be such a pussy. You're off to war to die, dontcha know? BoB - Rinse, repeat.

Way back in the day

in 1979, the Yanks were joking about being able to afford only one aircraft for all four services in 2001 - and swapping it between them on alternate days, with the US Marines getting it on weekends - if they behave.

2016 and it looks as though dreams/jokes can come true. I can just see the pilots of the RAF/RN tossing coins to see which one's going to fly the one serviceable plane for that day.

Oh, and immigrant-seeking missiles? Nah, the RN's going to strap politicians into bomb casings and drop them on anything that might contain a migrant or refugee ... first national level, then regional, then local, then they'll go for the party lists ...

posthumous copyright extensions

has anyone found out where the dead are banking their cheques? How do they get them?

Or are the corporations banking them themselves and pocketing the money?

And, copyright is supposed to return the investment of time and energy to the people doing the work, so they can continue producing it. Or at least according to the precise of copyright the US Constitution proffers. As far as I know, only Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote something from beyond the grave: there might6 be a few others like Cleopatra and the like, but they've all "produced" works well beyond their lifetime thus are not covered by copyright as such. Does Disney have a medium on staff to receive film scripts from Walt Disney himself?

I think Jaron Lanier's taking himself far too seriously.

OT praps?

You know, the difference between a wonk and a wanker is "o" "a" "er" ....

Guarantees for each individual event sounds a lot like "classical" gangster politics to me. Thought we had something like the "rule of law". Apparently that's one of those comic superstitions us yokels have.

Personally, I think the best way of getting around the on-coming asteroid is to spot it in time - nice idea, but we're talking about bozos, politicos, and whatnots here, who wouldn't know an emerging threat if it bit them in the bum, and then only when it becomes an electorate issue - send up a pair of Soyuz converted to carry reasonably high-powered lasers and several months of thrust, have one behind and in one front of the asteroid, and ablate enough off the asteroid to change its orbit significantly.

Could also be used to capture said asteroid and mine it.

Only works when politicos aren't bozos, but that's a mighty big ask.

"Mr. Lazăr violated the privacy of his victims and thought he could hide behind the anonymity of the Internet," said US Attorney Dana Boente of the Eastern District of Virginia. unquote

Umm, now didn't he get the memo? The one that stated there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet, and so on and so forth? The one that the NSA, the FBI, and the rest are pushing like crazy?

Didn't think so.

Any thought given to the picture? It's a P-51 Mustang shooting down a P-86 Sabre. Blue-on-blue.

Maybe that's the whole point of intelligent cybersecurity, because feet are the favourite targets, after all. Particularly once they have been inserted into one's own mouth. It's the only way to get a hundred-percent strike rate, and that is something very much appreciated by head office.

And speaking of "all hands on deck", are feet included?

"All hands on deck! All feet as well!" the captain loudly roared.

"Run up the rigging quick and throw the maindeck overboard!"

"Go fetch the lifebelts out of hock and save yourselves," said he

"And as I have no one to love me, you can leave your wives with me."

had to happen

All it needed was to see Monkey Boy off the premises. It doesn't surprise me in the least. And yes, I expect it is Azure-focused. Frankly, MS SQLServer's been one of the more secure of all of Microsoft's product lines. I half-expected that division to do a management buy-out if Monkey Boy had hung in there for longer. It can survive on its own: now it's in theory free from its "Siamese Twinnage" to MS Windows, it can grow even faster.

Speaking of alternative heavy-weight SQL server DBMSes, I'm surprised no one's mentioned Ingres, to wit:

https://www.openhub.net/p/ingres

http://esd.actian.com/product/Community_Projects/Ingres_Database

It used to be one of the "Enterprise" contenders. And it comes with a good number of the goodies people want.

For what it's wo5rth, I decided to see what the fuss was all about, and am now downloading the installation iso. That way I can say quite truthfully, I've gone the extra mile ... Microsoft can't fault me for that, can they? (The polite word is "gullibility" but I don't mind ... :)

I do wish I could get ahold of a Windows 8.1 iso, though, so that I can wipe the current installation with Sabayon or something of that sort and run MSWin 8.1 in a virtual machine for those things that Linux still can't do as well as MSWindows ...

BTW, do you think now is a good time to register Microsoft Widnows 3.1?

First Datum: Customers'data

What I want Microsoft to do is establish as a general rule that any given company does not and never can "öwn" its customers' data. It is only and can only be, a custodian of that data, and to the degree and extent that it makes a profit from those customers' data, that is a liability that is unregistered - that is, those customers own the company to that degree and to that extent.

This can be established by answering the simple question: what does a finance company do for example, when you apply for finance? Require you to update them on changes of address. And what would happen if a company didn't bother with following its customers like that, and instead made up its own data? What do we call a company that is busy making up its own data from whole cloth?

And in consequence, the only situations where it is liable to pass that data on, are matters of public safety and criminal connection. The rest of it, the government must apply to each and every individual concerned using the time-tested special warrant method delivered by hand to said individual that has worked so well, for access to that data.

Slartibartfast and Zaphod Beeblebrox playing snooker with planets?

Aliens mining a superjovian for materials sufficient to build a Dyson sphere by dropping it into a close-enough orbit that it boils itself to pieces?

Frankly, putting increasing efficiency together with using renewables when and where possible is the long-term solution.

That said, how many companies building motherboards and/or cases for rackable servers have engineers who understand elementary aerodynamics? Elementary thermodynamics? Cold aisle plus hot aisle, so the air and the heat differential does more work than the fans, would seem to be elementary. Even better if the cases and the building is designed to speed cold air through the hot parts - someone called Bernoulli and something called venturi IIRC - look it up. That way you can run the hot parts as hot as you like. I think they call that a static ram jet.

There's a general rule: a great power going downhill will have a special friend that it shares a lot of its goodies with. In order to get in good with the up-and-coming great power set to replace the old one, the special friend will share the goodies with the up-and-comer. What the up-and-comer does with those goodies is anyone's guess.

The current great power is the US, the special friend is Israel, the up-and-comer is China. It's a fair bet that the Israelis already have passed this on to the Chinese; it's a fair bet that the Chinese have already passed it on to the Iranians - because, after all, one of the flow-on effects of the 2003 Iraqi War debacle was to anoint Iran as the resident power of the Persian Gulf, and in order to maintain an uninterrupted steady flow of energy products from the Persian Gulf while everything gets retooled for renewables, the Iranians need strong defenses.

So at a guess, I'd say the Iranians are indeed taking note. I'd also guess they'll soon show up in Iranian hands in the fight against the "Islamic State".

Dunno how it happened but I read the second title line as "Evoking the spirit of Malcom X" and wondered how a sixties Black American radical civil rights campaigner inspired Jaguar ... alas, it is not so!!!

Nice car, but I'm still deeply in love with the Jaguar E-Type ...

space plane

I got to thinking, why the (censored) don't they design the apace plane that lands the sub, to float on the water, put on some (relatively) minor sensors, build in a humungous aerial, and use it as the sub-to-Earth relay station? That way you get to collect more info, get an extra sensor set, and get an aerial that's got the range to pass serious detail back to Earth.

" "I don't think it's realistic" for private companies "to deal with [cyberattacks] totally by themselves," he said."

Hey, where did all the hype about deregulation go? During the hyper-hype on deregulation during the eighties and since then, the claim has been made that business should be allowed to regulate itself. The corolary of that is, let the buggers sink or swim. Don't hold them up.

So much for that theory. No athiests in foxholes, as the saying goes, and they'll be around to kneecap you the instance you don't cough up ....

" Rogers added that the NSA would be around to help with similar investigations in the future. "

Sony deserves it bigtime. I would say they deserve all the help they can get; as we expect to be titllated by further leaks, floods, and tsunamis of data in the future.

I won't be completely happy with Microsoft until Microsoft opens its (obsolete) OS trees under the GPL 3 or something very similar, with similar patent provisions, that effectively put to death its long-standing "software patent" threats against Linux. (and gets IBM to do the same for OS/2 and HP with the VAX VMS source trees) thus putting to rest one long and unproductive waste of time ...

But in the meantime, I'm pleased I can play with C# without worrying about some nebulous lawsuit to punish me for succeeding with it and thus competing with Microsoft.

Countermeasures

anything that can deflect the beam

anything that can diffuse the beam

anything that can overwhelm the targeting

anything that can make the laser overheat

location - on the sea

targets - other ships, boats, aircraft

sending a flood of small drones at it, loaded with marbles and smoke bombs should work a treat. then, once the air inbetween has been "tainted" with airborne glass globules and smoke, you send in even more, and if everything goes to plan, the laser overheats trying to penetrate the airborne mist it has itself created.

Son of Stuxnet?

First thought of mine. Stuxnet's out there, source code for it's available if you've got the cash, and there's a company out there's painted a target on its back ... rootkit's just the icing on the cake, the cream on the strawberries (or manure, if that's what you like) ...

Werewolves are a lot of fun on their loansome ownsome:

How Fluffy Ruined My Reputation

http://www.antisf.com/the-stories/how-fluffy-ruined-my-reputation

being another example of how Kiwis are not renowned for taking too much too seriously ... can't blame 'em

Sounds like the Kadinka-Donka machine

There was a rich and not altogether intelligent young man getting bored with his life of excessive privilege. One day while driving at random through the Peruvian Andes, he noticed a sign by the side of the road. It said "Kadinka-Donka Machines Our Speciality".

So he went along the little side road the sign pointed down, until he came to a small factory with "Kadinka-Donka Machine Manufacturer" on the roof.

"I've seen the sign," he explained to the proprietor, "but I've never heard of Kadinka-Donka Machines before, and I don't have one. I'd like to order one."

"Fine. If you could make a down payment of about three million, we'll get to work. Come and see us in a couple of years time."

In a couple of years he was back. The proprietor had a tale of woe. "Our costs had risen, and money has suffered inflation, we need an extra ten million. Come back in another couple of years."

In another couple of years he was back. Again, it was explained that components had vanished, availability of certain things, etc, etc, etc. So he put down another twenty million, and went away.

http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.science/2005-11/msg00176.html