Posts by Wzrd1

Re: At first I thought he was a crackpot

That facility was closed and the operation placed on the downgraded installation 33 1/3.

Damned sequester!

Re: well both are "national"

If that is the case, they missed the mark by a lot.

Most US citizens don't visit NASA sites. They'd far rather go to Twitter or Facebook than anything scientific, especially as they don't understand most of what NASA does.

As for our attitude with our government, you're partially correct. But, we also despise our government and distrust it.

Largely due to the fact that when we correspond with our congresscritters, we typically get a barely polite sod off letter. Regardless of how many voters write in.

Besides, this describes governments at their best:

http://www.despair.com/meetings.html

Re: Come to think of it....

Well, the script kiddies aren't going to get into the NSA website, so they picked the low hanging fruit.

Actually, considering NASA's history, that fruit is always on the ground.

As for geography, most US citizens couldn't even find the US on a map. I won't even go into how many can't find Afghanistan, far too many think it's next door to Saudi Arabia.

I'm ashamed to say of my countrymen that the United States of America is a large village.

Full of village idiots.

Apparently, Brazil is trying to close the idiot gap.

Re: Mais attendez!

A little. I already have enough frog legs in my freezer, thank you.

Seriously, I do. :)

Re: We'd all jump that high

"Suicidal frog, trying to find the IT angle. Poor bastard."

Animal trying to find the IT angle. See Dilbert.

Oh, wait...

Re: But I want to know.. Did he croak?

"it was Green, but not a Martian I saw on that rocket....."

Hulk exile.

Re: Poikilothermic not cold-blooded

Doubt that it was hot blooded.

It was in a classic falling frog stance.

Seriously.

That is how frogs spread out when falling.

Re: Maybe he made it to the moon

Nah. It as a tea party frog, who was overheard to exclaim, "They ain't interferin with *my* liberties with those BS warnings! I have a *right* to be where my tax dollars are wasted!"

It also rambled on about second amendment rights and remedies, waved around a cheap AR-15 for a bit.

Reports are that the AR vaporized when struck by sunlight.

Or maybe it was superheated water from the main engine.

Re: Communicating with the rocket via Kermit?

Wow! You are ancient!

I thought that *I*, one of the last ancients was the only one to remember kermit, how to initiate a transfer, etc. ;)

Footnote (bootnote):

Yes, I really *am* older than dirt. I was with the Celestial Engineer Corps on the first Great Earth Dirt Delivery Project.

At least it feels that way in the morning.

Re: One happened to die so many could live

I happen to know of areas that are even more heavily secured with the listed weapons and more that have schools on them.

They're called military installations.

They also have heavy restrictions on who can carry what weapon where.

Such as only the military police can rove about carrying firearms. Training military are only armed in the training areas, far from the habitation and administrative areas of the installation.

Re: One happened to die so many could live

As I recall, they also have secondary fences in place to keep the larger wildlife away from the operational areas, such as the assembly building, roadway to the launch pads, the launch pads, etc.

But, fences only work against larger wildlife, birds fly over and frogs swim and jump through or under.

Still, with those large eardrums, it *had* to have heard the warnings, then the countdown... ;)

Re: Wait..

I'm retired US Army, but know plenty of reformed Marines and plenty of still serving Marines.

The *only* dumb Marines I ever met were commissioned officers. Two of them out of hundreds I personally know/knew.

The US studied IQ and military capability ages ago. They learned, one cannot get a moron to charge a machinegun nest, one can trivially get a genius to do so and most of those who are of above average intelligence. They further quantified the particular measures and those are reflected in the ASVAB test.

My scores qualified me for every position, save crypto.

Ended up implementing a lot of crypto, having to understand it to make it work after I retired.

There is idiocy and there is stupidity. An idiot won't perform in a military environment involving combat, the stupid person will happily make a suicide charge "for the cause".

Though, it takes a special kind of stupid to go through hell week, all the other hell, then serve through hell and damnation and survive. Those are selected for an inability to quit, regardless of how lousy things are and will become.

Amazingly, many of us survive.

Some become BOFH MKII. ;)

Re: The problem is...

It's a choice right now of shit or excrement.

What really matters in the end is who manages to retain control after all of the murder and destruction is over.

Pity, I rather liked Syrians. Overall, they were rather laid back folks that had really cool ladies bedroom attire.

At the end of this, it's likely the ladies will be wearing sackcloth from birth to grave, even when showering.

Maybe I should start the lot of them off on me and distract them from killing each other. I'll just pick on them for how small their olives are compared to Lebanese olives, let alone Egyptian olives. ;)

(Yes, I spent enough time in the region to know what each exported food tasted like. It makes me want to strip the warhead off of a cruise missile, shove the missile body up Assad's ass, then launch him out to sea.)

Re: Wow such a tough "army"

Script kiddies at their, erm, worst.

What is disgusting is that El Reg calls figuring out an insecure password hacking.

They'd quite likely shit themselves if they saw a real hack done by a CEH, let alone a black hat.

Re: Get your glasses on.

"but it doesn't show on google maps, maybe they have only just opened"

Nope, it's because the Starbucks is on a sub-surface US military installation, so Google leaves it blank. ;)

Re: Tourist Trap

"But seriously, this is just another reason why science is so exciting - you never know what is about to be discovered."

Too true. One never knows what is truly there unless one looks.

Just think of what will be discovered by this time next year!

Why, they may even discover a trace of intelligence in politicians.

Beats what a US military officer called his consultants, "ninety pound brains".

Really gives one great respect for the intellectual integrity of the US military commissioned officer corps.

Re: Participation

Pretty much the hat. Magnetic fields lose strength to the inverse square of the distance. In short, the strength of signal drops dramatically the farther away one is from the electromagnet.

In theory, one could build a unit to send a precise signal across the room to do the same thing, but every compass in the country would point to the facility. ;)

Not to mention rattling rebar in concrete walls...

Don't know about that. It may well actually have an atmosphere. Of vaporized rock.

I imagine that some astronomers will be seeking a tail from that planet.

Re: I smell America's hand

Uh huh, so it's not popular, but the US government doesn't flood the Bitcoin network with tons of rubbish, break the lousy entropy code and flood it with counterfeit bitcoins or anything else.

No, they tell Australia to have one bank close all accounts.

Yep, because shitcoin is suuuuch a threat or even noticed.

Re: But would anyone

"The problem that occurred in this case is one that you might easily have missed if you relied on testing patches yourself on a test server,..."

Except when the patch works on the test server, but fails for obscure reasons when it hits the production environment.

Had that a few times in the past.

Annoying as hell.

Re: Oracle and Microsoft..

You forgot Adobe.

They're right up with the pack.

Re: Microsoft slipping?

"I think Vista could be argued to be the beginning of the end as the first major product that went Pete Tong."

Erm, Microsoft Bob. Windows ME both come to mind.

But, they're still in business churning out shitty patches.

Remember NT4 SP6? The lawyers were howling over their broken Lotus Notes.

You'd have thought the Microsoft would've learned from that debacle!

Re: Not the only dodgy patch this Tuesday

Shades of NT4 SP6. Remember *that* debacle? When the service pack broke some obscure software that Redmond's lawyers used extensively, something called Lotus Notes. ;)

Also due to shitty testing.

Apparently, Microsoft still hasn't learned.

Re: Sounds like you have a hammer

"Not in this case. Since qualities like security, reliability and performance are what you might call system attributes, you need to consider those properties quite early in the system's life (like during the concept and design phases)."

Then, one has to wonder if a government demands a backdoor be installed into the system, at a system level, by the software vendor.

One recalls Windows source code with "NSA hooks" from some years back...

Re: Sounds like you have a hammer

GNUnet, a new version of Freenet? ;)

Seriously though, one could always own one's own encrypted server, with keyserver for public keys. With an encrypted filesystem out of one's own domicile.

First, they'd have to get your key to unlock the filesystem. Then, have to get assorted other keys from you.

Which is where you typically are at anyway, as if you know your key, they can attempt to force that key out of you.

Indeed, as I recall TrueCrypt offered a duress key and a real key just go avoid such unpleasantness. Briefly.

Still, just to twig their nose, I've taken to sending encrypted e-mails to my wife when she's upstairs on her computer.

Re: What is needed...

"The problem is that they did have the keys"

That is one thing that El Reg's article gave me heartburn over, their need to pull things out of their asses, rather than consider that metadata and plaintext would be available, as Snowden did leave computers home when he fled the US. Knowing him, he left his private keys on some or all of those machines.

(Yes, I met him. He was and is a prima dona and barely competent as an administrator, but sucked at securing systems quite badly.)

"This is all complete guesswork on our part and all we know for sure is that Lavabit shut itself down to avoid complying with something it found intolerable while it takes its case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals."