Did we kill a bunch of russian mercenaries? If we killed a hundred, how many russian mercenaries are there in Syria?? WTF are we playing at here? Why are we dancing on a powder keg with a road flare dripping fire?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-13/us-strikes-kill-100-russian-soldiers-syria
Why are we there at all if it is ” a conflict that started as a domestic crackdown only to morph into a proxy war involving Islamic extremists, stateless Kurds and regional powers Iran, Turkey and now Israel.”
Russian mercenaries???
n
45F and overcast. Supposed to be raining later….
It was 10 and frigid when I left for work this morning. Frost on the windshield & all the slush still frozen.
It will be 34º at lunchtime, so slush will be thawing. Should make for interesting footing. I slipped yesterday & 3/4 fell. I didn’t break anything as I managed to catch myself just before falling into it. But it sure scared the crap out of me.
Plenty of beautiful sunshine today, and projected to be clear tonight so we can get out that reflector I got the kinder for Christmas.
It’s all thanks to our #1 mooslem B. H. Obama, but we can just call him Barry.
Oh, come on, Barry isn’t a Muslim. To be a Muslim would require that he believe in something other than Himself.
@Dave, please note that I called Barry a mooslem, this is not a good person.
Muslims are different than Muslems (this denotes the bad ones) and I reserve the word mooslem for the worst of the worst.
I have worked with, and consider friends, several what I will call Reformed Muslims. They realize that they are no longer in the 7th Century and have learned to live a truly peaceful life.
I also realize that our problems today are not just Barry’s fault, it goes back hundreds of years and will not be resolved until those religions that believe that all non-believers should be killed are removed from the face of the earth.
This is where OFD could really impart some words of history and wisdom.
Added: This morning we are hearing a lot of helicopters. Temperatures are in the high teens this morning and the fruit trees and grapes budded this past week due to unseasonably warm temperatures. The helicopters are used to keep the air moving in the orchards and vineyards which actually lessens the chance of the buds freezing. They also use fuel oil heaters and propellers mounted on tall poles.
@Dad
OFD and I have more in common than you might think. Think Jesuit all-boys boarding school. Best friends, dorm-mates, then roomies were Muslim. I owe a lot from what I’ve learned from them. One is now quite the scholar.
Of course, I owe a lot to the Jews, too.
And here’s one for you, which JEP and Greg Cockman never got: Tamil Brahmins. They wipe the pants off any IQ score any Ashkenazi Jew ever got.
EDIT: and Louis R Andrews, RIP.
5 men in a boat: a gedankenexperiment:
A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Hindoo — and you.
Only you and one other can successfully row across the rising tide of adversity.
Whom do you throw off first? Who remains?
Speaking of OFD, I pinged his wife by email today, never heard back from her the last time.
LIZ!! if you are checking in, please check your/Dave’s gmail…..
The forecast rain has arrived. It’s been p!ssing down steadily for at least an hour. Currently 45F so while we won’t be getting slushy, it’s no fun out there.
Been doing ebay this am. Sent out 5 items yesterday. I’ve got a backlog of listing to do. I am not the only one who has noticed that if you list, you will get sales. I listed a few items yesterday, and this AM an item that has been languishing for a year finally sold. I believe ebay takes your recent activity into account when ranking search results in the Best Match order. If you want to sell on ebay, you need to be consistently listing new items to get good results selling your old stuff.
n
Did we kill a bunch of russian mercenaries? If we killed a hundred, how many russian mercenaries are there in Syria?? WTF are we playing at here? Why are we dancing on a powder keg with a road flare dripping fire?
Don’t turn on your battle radar with a USA fighter jet in the region.
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-us-jet-destroyed-a-russian-t-72-battle-tank-in-self-defense-in-syria-2018-2?r=UK&IR=T
Especially when an Israeli F-16 just got shot down.
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Report-Israeli-F-16-crashes-pilots-safe-542192
Since I am using Comcast for my internet service I decided to go with Xfinity Mobile for my cell service. You do not pay for phone calls or text, only data. That is billed at $12.00 per gigabyte per month. I rarely use more than 1 gig for data so my bill will drop to about $15.00 a month for two phones from $90.00 a month.
Runs on the Verizon network which is where I was currently getting my service. Thus I should see no change in the service. Only thing I cannot get to work is WIFI calling as their system says my address is invalid for E-911. You cannot finish setting up WIFI calling without a valid address. I need WIFI calling for Europe and Xfinity is supposed to support WIFI calling.
So when some of the most connected guys in Silicon Valley talk about how we’re all doomed if AI becomes a real thing, why does everyone automatically pooh pooh the idea?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5383753/Boston-Dynamics-SpotMini-able-hold-open-doors.html
Robodog is unsettling enough, but scroll down to the freakin’ T2!
n
So when some of the most connected guys in Silicon Valley talk about how we’re all doomed if AI becomes a real thing, why does everyone automatically pooh pooh the idea?
A lot of the “most connected” guys in Silicon Valley are heavy into recreational pharmaceuticals, especially the Boomers who made their piles in the 80s and first Internet bubble, as the Valley transitioned from actual silicon to … well, whatever it is about today.
High or not, they talk to all kinds of smart people, many working in the field. It’s a bit like when the FB founder talks about designing it to cause addiction ON PURPOSE, and everyone seems to go “Ehhh, so what?”
“Killer robots with AI are coming!” “Ehhh, so what?”
It’s been 4 years since google saw signs that should be disquieting at least.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/google_living_omega_cloud/
“It’s very strange – it behaves like biological systems from time to time,” he says.”
Sure, we probably don’t have to worry about tomorrow, or next week, but I don’t think it’s a zero risk.
Building robots that have the sort of creep factor that dog does just doesn’t seem to be in our best, long term interest…
n
Nah, I will get impressed by Robodog when it can pee on a fire hydrant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CVYOCMpJRY
One of my favorite sites to visit now is Seth Godin. He quite frequently posts things which make me think. I don’t know (or care) what his views are. I care that he writes short posts that make me think so much that I dare not read one of his many books cover to cover because my brain would explode.
A few days ago he wrote a post with Alinksky’s 13 Rules For Radicals reversed.
Channeling OFD, I will bring up Pat Buchanan, “Patrick J. Buchanan: Is US Being Sucked Into Syria’s War?”:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/patrick-j-buchanan-is-us-being-sucked-into-syrias-war
“Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed.”
“Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran’s hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights, and was shot down by an Apache helicopter.”
“Israel seized upon this to send F-16s to strike the airfield whence the drone originated. Returning home, an F-16 was hit and crashed, unleashing the most devastating Israeli attack in decades on Syria. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu says a dozen Syrian and Iranian bases and antiaircraft positions were struck.”
It is spring in the middle east and the wars are heating up. Time for the USA to leave.
“Trump claims the U.S. has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. It hasn’t.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/12/trump-claims-the-u-s-has-spent-7-trillion-in-the-middle-east-it-hasnt/
Uh, can I go with Trump on this one ? When one counts in future costs of caring for combat veterans in the USA, the dollars may be simply amazing. We have somewhere around two million combat veterans since 9/11 (SWAG) ? I know several of them, all young and middle aged men. They are in mostly good health except for their hearing and creaky joints from carrying so much armor and weaponry.
Any thing President tRump says, the Washington Compost will say is a lie.
Currently in San Bernardino for meetings. For a “sanctuary” State, they sure don’t want people in the rest rooms. Every where we go, the crapper is locked with code locks. If you have to take an emergency dump, just go in your pants.
“It is spring in the middle east and the wars are heating up. Time for the USA to leave.”
Didn’t Bush say we were only there briefly to force regime change, we were not there indefinitely to institutionalize democracy.
WOW ! The SpaceX Falcon Heavy side boosters landing simultaneously at Kennedy Space Center:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0-pfzKbh2k
Hat tip to:
http://www.woodpilereport.com/html/index-516.htm
FIFY
Also, a billion dollars fifteen years ago is worth more now.
Also, we started pouring money down that rat hole well before 2001.
Didn’t Bush say we were only there briefly to force regime change, we were not there indefinitely to institutionalize democracy.
Uh – you might be thinking of Bush 41. We went into Kuwait, kicked the Iraqis out, and came home. Most of us thought we’d be there until Saddam fell, and were surprised to come home as early as we did. In that case, we did EXACTLY as we said we would and stopped when we said we would stop. Achievable goals.
Would that the current mess was handled the same way.
With hindsight, I’d prefer that the 1990 Gulf War was handled by deposing, killing, or deporting the entire Kuwaiti ruling class and jailing everyone employed by CNN in the US or elsewhere. If you ignore extralegal issues like the Saudi payments to the Bush family, the reason the US got involved was the alleged atrocities committed by the invading Iraqis. American lives and money were spent because of lies, and some repayment is warranted.
WOW ! The SpaceX Falcon Heavy side boosters landing simultaneously at Kennedy Space Center
The middle booster would have landed too, but it ran out of the fuel used to restart the engines.
I’m amazed that we’re letting NASA build out more than one high bay at the VAB for stacking SLS. At least that was the story we were told when we went to Kennedy last year.
I’m amazed that we’re letting NASA build out more than one high bay at the VAB for stacking SLS. At least that was the story we were told when we went to Kennedy last year.
Control the high ground, control the …
@SteveF – you may be right. (I won’t judge you.) I’m a simple man. The war itself was handled “right” from beginning to end. We told them to get out. They didn’t. We went there & told him to get out. He didn’t. We kicked him out. We came home.
IF we are to be involved in conflicts, we must have clearly defined goals and clear metrics for success. “Iraqis out of Kuwait & unable to wage war.” Pretty clear to me that we had done what we were there for.
The “War on Terror” can never be finished. There are no metrics for success. We should be beheading anyone that commits an act of terror on our soil & be done with it. Is his head removed from his shoulders? Good. Success.
Agreed.
Aye, there’s the rub. If we’re going to get involved, it should be only because it’s in our national interest.
Agreed. The only thing since I’ve been old enough to vote that I think we were right in was Afghanistan after 9/11. That should have been a smash & spank & get out affair. Let the world know that effing with us is a good way to get dead & leave it at that.
Currently in San Bernardino for meetings. For a “sanctuary” State, they sure don’t want people in the rest rooms. Every where we go, the crapper is locked with code locks. If you have to take an emergency dump, just go in your pants.
You are so lucky !
I am guessing that the building still has copper pipes. If you leave the bathrooms unlocked, the vagrants will come in and jerk the pipes out the walls. The amount of destruction that they can do in ten minutes is amazing.
10-4, and what I don’t understand is we he pledged to get out of Iraq so quickly, but we remain in Afghanistan for the next four score years?
Oh yeah, we can spray dope fields in Colombia but not Afghanistan? What fraud they all are……and tRump seems no better in getting our boys out of there.
I am guessing that the building still has copper pipes. If you leave the bathrooms unlocked, the vagrants will come in and jerk the pipes out the walls. The amount of destruction that they can do in ten minutes is amazing.
More likely, in CA, the homeless will bathe in the stalls using the toilet water.
I start work downtown on 2/26. I’m hoping that the parking isn’t too far from the office. Like the rest of the world, homeless people are moving to Austin in droves.
The middle booster would have landed too, but it ran out of the fuel used to restart the engines.
I have heard that “Two out of Three ain’t bad”.
Obama portrait really does look like the artist played perverse games
http://dailycaller.com/2018/02/13/obamas-painter-has-long-predatory-peverse-history-of-sneaking-sperm-into-paintings/
HAHAHA!
The only thing that would make it more perverse is if he mixed it with the paint.
Considering the caligula like excesses the ‘ruling class’ routinely engages in, should we expect anything else from their art?
n
I have heard that “Two out of Three ain’t bad”.
Publicly, SpaceX placed the chances of a launch pad explosion at somewhere between 1 in 3 and 50/50. My guess is that their engineers were sure the rocket would clear the pad if not survive to booster separation, but Musk wanted a worldwide audience to watch live.
Without high bay access in the VAB, SpaceX stacks their rockets horizontally in a building at the base of the ramp up to Pad 39A. The facility is built to withstand a Cat. 5 hurricane, but I doubt that it was built to handle the fuel equivalent of three Falcon 9 rockets exploding simultaneously.
The thing to do is, build a blast wall of wallyhogs between the launch pad and the shed. It’s not like wallyhogs serve any higher purpose.
No, wait, that’s a terrible idea. Fat burns, and the burning, wobbling wallyhogs would make the problem worse than if the Falcon just exploded and knocked the shed down. I’ll get back to you when I come up with another genius idea.
“Government websites have quietly been running cryptocoin mining scripts”
https://thenextweb.com/security/2018/02/12/government-websites-quietly-running-cryptocoin-mining-scripts/
Cryptojacking.
I thought that I would never see anything new under the sun but this one certainly fits that bill.
I’ve been lurking, wanted to join in for some time but have been stopped to due to Health issues for my wife followed by a Kidney Stone for me that took twenty-five days to clear up.
My DirecTV bill was $162 monthly for two TVs. I wanted to drop it but since it was in my wife’s name they wouldn’t talk to me. (I have power of attorney and she has Alzheimer’s and she was institutionalized on January 12th.)
DirecTV sent us a updated Service agreement that gave us two weeks to drop out if we didn’t accept the new agreement. I called the associated 800 number and told them I want to cancel service as I didn’t like the new service agreement. The person I talked to accepted my verbal statement that my wife was not available and reluctantly allowed me to cancel the service. I even got a $51 dollar refund for the unused but paid for service.
I bought an Amazon Fire stick. Couldn’t get a thing on the TV. Got an antenna and now get a twenty or so local channels. Tried Hulu but was unable to get anything with it either and canceled within the 7 day trial window.
I’m not sure what value the Amazon Firestick provides other than a connection to Wifi. I haven’t watched a movie since Grand Torino was released.
I tried Sling next and am able to get a few channels. NBCSports, ESPN but nothing much else after two weeks of working with my granddaughter over the phone.
I hate the fact the if I’m watching a local (Raleigh, NC) basketball game (I love ACC basketball) and want to check out a game on ESPN I have to change the TV input option from antenna to HDMI4, select the input option as Sling, search for and select the channel, and then maybe get ESPN (sometimes I get a list of movies instead). I always get the response of: “Alexa doesn’t support your request on this device” so voice commands don’t work.
So watching two games is almost out of the question. I’m going to hate “trying” to watch the NCAA basketball tournament. I sure hope I can get TNT and TrueTV located and working by March. Hopefully I can figure out how to get Sling to be truly useful.
My wife didn’t know how to response to telemarketers and I couldn’t always get the phone before she did. No one else ever called us on that number. So I dropped the landline last Fall but kept the ISP part of Windstream. Cut my bill from $105 to $45 and got an upgrade in Data to from 5 GB to 25 GB also.
I’m a retired MIS manager that learned to program in machine code when I moved from Computer technician to Computer Programmer and one of my first major projects was rewriting the mainframe compiler.
I thought that I would never see anything new under the sun but this one certainly fits that bill.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. The latest Firefox has WebAssembly IIRC. Dunno about Chrome.
If you want to build your own mining rig, I have an Intel Core2 Duo board that needs a new home. 1 16x PCI-e, 3 1x PCI-e, four cards total. I’ll even include one card, a GT 730 with 2 GB RAM which hasn’t worked well for me under Windows 7 since Intel and Microsoft started trying to “fix” the Meltdown and Spectre bugs.
Given the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, I’m tempted to set up a Raspberry Pi Model 3 for anything secure I want to do online.
Given the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, I’m tempted to set up a Raspberry Pi Model 3 for anything secure I want to do online.
IIRC, the SeaMonkey browser uses the old school Javascript engine, free of any special performance tricks. Just remove the Java and Flash plugins.
If you want to build your own mining rig
Not me. I need to decomplicate my life. Between the geriatric dog, the 30 year disabled daughter, the oil and gas software business, the commercial property with three tenants, and worrying that the Brazos River is coming to visit my house someday, life is too complicated. Way too complicated.
The thing to do is, build a blast wall of
wallyhogspoliticians between the launch pad and the shed.FIFY
@alan, but I like space exploration/exploitation and if there was a ring of politicians, I’d have to root for an explosive failure…..
@bob Sprowl, welcome, thanks for de-lurking… cord cutting is why I’m looking at the pre-configured Kodi boxes or running Kodi on my own little box. They SAY they’re not about piracy, but they’ve got hundreds of content plug ins for all kinds of copyrighted stuff, and their single youtube plugin doesn’t even really work. I’ll leave their real focus as an exercise for the reader. If you decide to look at Kodi, watch a bunch of youtube vids first, concentrating on NEWER vids aimed at newbies getting started. (oh and my wife finally put me on the cable account as an authorized user, so I can sit on hold for hours with them instead of her.)
FWIW, the men’s snowboard half pipe was just astonishing.
Now I can go to bed…
n
[snip] The thing to do is, build a blast wall of wallyhogs politicians between the launch pad and the shed. [snip]
Too many of us would find ourselves in the distasteful position of rooting for a launch pad explosion. The average commenter here grew up in a time in which “NASA” was a synonym for hero, whether it was the astronaut corp or the engineers.
@nick and ech, I am reminded tonight of the old unofficial Houston motto:
Onward through the fog !
Seems like we have a lot of fog this winter, more so than normal.
You just reminded me that there are two phones on our Verizon account. One in my wife’s maiden name and one in her married name. Because when we went to tell them she changed her name and add me to the account and buy a Motorola Droid for me, they just added the Droid in her married name. At least I finally managed to get my third phone upgrade since then. I’ve had a Samsung Galaxy Note8 for a month and seem to like it so far.
Dodged a bullet. Returning to work part time at my old job is off the table. I really did not want to go back to work at any price.
Apparently there was some confusion in the communication paths that got morphed into something different at each step. Why there was no direct communication between my replacement and the office is unclear. Something odd is still taking place.
@Bob – I prefer the Roku stick / device to the Amazon offerings. It just seems the channel apps are “better”.
I agree about Sling’s apps. Even on Roku they’re not great. It’s good enough, and I can find the content I want with a little work. I’m about to drop Sling, though, as Sportsball season is over, and there’s not enough there for me to spend the money.
When I discuss cord cutting, the Roku device is invariably the device I recommend.
Dodged a bullet. Returning to work part time at my old job is off the table. I really did not want to go back to work at any price.
I was once offered an Apple employee badge to return to Death Star Telephone and dig my weed head former partner out of trouble with a Mac version of our product. I passed on that “opportunity”, but, damn, did they apply the hard sell — my last interview of the day took place in the conference room in Bandley 3 where the first Macintosh powered up in the early 80s. I don’t know if it was the same table.
Honestly, I think I would have settled for an apology from the Death Star management (and a lot of cash), but we all know that is waaaay too high a price to pay.
Sadly, I’ve never been enticed to come back to a former job, so I was unable to tell them to shove it.
A number of times I was fired or chosen to be among those “downsized” because I was relentlessly negative, insulting to managers or coworkers, an energy vampire (that one amused me), and so on. Well, pardon me for being a competent professional and pointing out why some dreamy-eyed idea wouldn’t work. And, in fact, they didn’t work. I stayed in contact with people on some jobs and was informed that, yep, that architecture worked great for the demo but completely failed in production. And of course the pre-release testing didn’t consist of any heavy load testing because there wasn’t time. Anyway, the bosses didn’t want me back because
I wasn’t a cheerleader for their stupid ideas and wasn’t willing to work free overtime to try to make them workI didn’t add anything to the team.Oh, and “We were wrong” and “My idea wasn’t a good one” are words that never pass a manager’s lips, in my experience. I suspect that’s because hardly any managers in IT, or maybe in general, are competent and they (justifiably) suffer from severe imposter syndrome and they’re terrified of leaving any opening for anyone to criticize them. -shrug- Or maybe I’m just cynical.
(But, in the words of a wise man*, cynical is just another word for experienced.)
* That would be I.
Anyway, the bosses didn’t want me back because I wasn’t a cheerleader for their stupid ideas and wasn’t willing to work free overtime to try to make them work I didn’t add anything to the team.
Basically the same thing happened to me when I worked for the credit union as the IT manager. We were changing systems. EDS was the current vendor and three others produced proposals. I liked EDS’ new proposal as it was all server based, others a mainframe. I voted for EDS but was overruled by clueless management. Account manager for Summit Information Systems that got the contract was a shapely thing who waved her mammeries in the CEO’s face and thus got the contract.
Conversion went badly. CU printed their own statements, about 130,000 pieces of paper for quarterly. Summit proposed a dot matrix printer running in NLQ mode to produce the statements. Everyone except me signed off. I did some calculations and found that it would take three weeks, printing 24 hours a day, to produce the statements. Summit did not listen.
I went behind Summit’s back and ordered an impact printer to produce the statements. Needed impact as the statement paper was pin feed. Summit said they could make it work. They couldn’t. So I bought a conversion box to make the printer work with the system.
After conversion Summit ran a script that set all the mortgage rates to zero, accidentally of course. This triggered notices to all the mortgage holders. Caused us to lose three days of interest on those accounts.
There were many other fiascoes. I bitched at Summit, the account manager persuaded the CEO with more tit waving that I should be let go, and he did. Best thing he ever did for me. Six months later he was let go by the board.
Maybe it’s just crappy people…
Linkfrom the latest Woodpile report http://www.woodpilereport.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/27/oliver-burkeman-mediocrity
They SAY they’re not about piracy, but they’ve got hundreds of content plug ins for all kinds of copyrighted stuff
I’ve tried a bunch of plug-ins. It can be hit and miss for what you want, and, they change weekly.
I torrent just about everything. I have a sort of automated system on my Mac Mini running a VPN. It processes movies and shows with meta and loads it into iTunes. Then it streams to Apple TV boxes.
I bought a R-Pi and am going to try to load Kodi on it (instructions on web). You can run Kodi on Apple TV with a hack, but it only lasts a week (year if you get a developer ID). You can pay for a special Kodi install that is permanent, but I don’t want to add another monthly bill.
I haven’t done anything with Kodi yet, but I tinker with Raspberry Pi’s so if you have any questions feel free to ask here. Of course, there are probably a bunch of other Raspberry Pi tinkerers here as well.
@Dave Thank you, Sir. I’ll keep that in mind.
They accused me of it, but the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
I torrent just about everything. I have a sort of automated system on my Mac Mini running a VPN. It processes movies and shows with meta and loads it into iTunes. Then it streams to Apple TV boxes.
I recently figured out that my BluRay player will handle x264 MKVs loaded from a flash drive inserted into the USB slot. Sneakernet works really well.
Before that, I used ffmpeg to generate DVDs from torrented files, burning to DVD-RWs for the living room player. Sometimes, my DVDs looked better than the legal copies.
Here are some of the R-Pi and Kodi sites I’m looking at:
https://kodi.tv/product/pi-case
https://mediaexperience.com/raspberry-pi-xbmc-with-raspbmc/
https://flixed.io/install-vpn-raspberry-pi/