cstross

37 ms·

331.
by cstross 8y ago
The Saudis are positioned as our allies in the war on terror. More accurately, they're regional enemies of Iran, and the western powers tend to run on the rubric "the enemy of my enemy is my ally" (even when a closer look at
332.
by cstross 8y ago
I'm pretty sure they didn't need it. My read on BHO is that as a non-white guy super-achieving in a quietly racist political climate (we've subsequently had a refresher course in American racial politics: it never went away)
333.
by cstross 8y ago
UKUSA treaty: goes back to 1945, GCHQ is used by the NSA as a convenient work-around for restrictions on domestic surveillance. This was all documented by James Bamford in his histories of the NSA, "Inside the Puzzle Palace" and &
334.
by cstross 8y ago
Nuh-huh. What happens is something approximately like this: Saudi military intelligence puts through a request via appropriate channels to the Five Eyes for a tap on some low-profile woman's phone, claiming it's necessary in pursu
335.
QuadrigaCX Chain Analysis: Was It a Ponzi Scheme?(medium.com)
3 points by cstross 8y ago|0 comments
336.
by cstross 8y ago
British Rail was privatized between 1994 and 1997. Let's just say that for those of us who ride the rails in the UK, it didn't necessarily make things better. (State subsidies rose, punctuality fell, and ticket prices rose faster
337.
by cstross 8y ago
In 1996-2003: running a payment service provider for dot-coms who wanted to actually do B2C sales on the internet. Rewind to 1996 and Paypal and similar didn't exist, getting permission to do cardholder-not-present transactions was a b
338.
The Last Psion: Resurrecting Psion's SIBO/EPOC16 Platform for the 21st Century(hackaday.io)
3 points by cstross 8y ago|0 comments
339.
by cstross 8y ago
Per other news reports, kinetic kills were ruled out because of unacceptable risk of bullets/shells hitting something they shouldn't — the whole of South-East England is populated at a density that Americans would call suburbia. (
340.
by cstross 8y ago
Here in the UK, the way I heard it from a friend who was doing their pre-med, is that there was a built-in cost incentive: hospitals paid doctors who were on-call at one third of their regular hourly rate for out-of-hours on-call coverage
341.
by cstross 8y ago
You were dealing with doctors and nurses, right? One group runs a gauntlet of fire by sleep deprivation during pre-med training: with on-call work hours up to 120 hours a week. And the other group are typically on shift rotas so their sleep
342.
by cstross 8y ago
This won't fly in the EU — inherently discriminatory against the disabled. (Consider the plight of a wheelchair user, or an amputee, or a paraplegic …) (I can see a US health insurance co offering lower premiums for this crap, but aga
343.
by cstross 8y ago
> Unix licensing costs maybe? Unix licensing costs almost definitely . A/UX was forked from UNIX System V Release 2.2, with "additional features from System V Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3". It also had a
344.
by cstross 8y ago
Something the tech industry fails to notice is that cars are not the only road users—-let alone the only ones that use traffic lights. As a pedestrian (or, when I was younger, a cyclist), I relied on traffic lights as much as (if not more t
345.
by cstross 8y ago
Two points of clarification (for other readers): 1. Combat 18 is a neo-Nazi terrorist organization associated with several murders, not a left-wing political campaigning group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_18 2
346.
by cstross 8y ago
OP is a useful overview of the relevant regulations. And in case anyone disputes the need for regulations, it's worth remembering that any rocket that can put a payload into orbit — any size of payload — is de facto an ICBM: not a
347.
by cstross 8y ago
Sewage was widely believed to be deadly due to its association with "night airs", which the (now disproven) miasma theory of disease held was responsible for many infections. While John Snow demonstrated the epidemiological evid
348.
by cstross 8y ago
This isn't the first such experiment (with tethers in space) but previous ones (such as the Shuttle tether experiments from 1996 onwards: https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html ) discovered some una
349.
by cstross 8y ago
Startup time is a non-issue for both Vim and GNU Emacs on modern hardware. (It was not ever so: I remember first meeting Emacs under DOS on a 20MHz 386. It was not speedy.) Perhaps another underrated issue affecting relative uptake is key
350.
by cstross 8y ago
Well, it was designed to be executed using dice, pencil, and paper rather than a computer ...! (IIRC the 1st edn AD&D DM's guide dates to roughly 1982. (Can't find my copy to verify: that's going from memory of when I g
351.
by cstross 8y ago
Not to minimize the awe and mad brainfuck skillz, but ... esolangs can be used productively, FSVO productivity; for example, the CLC-INTERCAL compiler is self-hosting (it was originally implemented in Perl but rewritten in its own dialect
352.
by cstross 8y ago
For technical reasons deep space missions usually run on Plutonium 238 RTGs. Pu-238 is scarce: "In 1992, the US arranged to buy 30 kg of Pu-238 from Russia for US$6M ($200K/kg). Even counting the effects of inflation, this was a r
353.
by cstross 8y ago
If stuck to posters or wallpaper it also leaks oil/plasticizer over time (months to years) which is absorbed by the paper and causes staining. I discovered this the hard way in my late teens/early 20s. Solution is to apply some Se
354.
by cstross 8y ago
Not the BBC report. Nor the quoted excerpt from the airprox board on HN.
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by cstross 8y ago
Who was operating the F-15E? USAF? (The RAF doesn't have any F-15s, but routinely hosts visiting aircraft from other NATO air forces. One wonders if differing operational standards played a role in this airprox -- or if politics played
356.
by cstross 8y ago
Hint: can you tell me where to find the command key on your iPad? (User is specifically asking about reading HN on mobile devices , not a desktop OS.)
357.
by cstross 8y ago
Barely mentioned in the article: Alfie Evans had an incurable neurodegenerative condition that had already destroyed approximately 75% of his grey matter. He was, in clinical terms, brain dead, with no prospect of recovery.
358.
by cstross 8y ago
Funnily enough, this works just fine here in the UK (where the NHS supports a profitable pharmaceutical private sector).
359.
by cstross 8y ago
Yes but ... Big pharma currently doesn't want to cure medical conditions, it wants to sell drugs continuously. (See also: lack of development of new antibiotics, huge over-investment in anti-depressants, etc.) New medicines are very
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by cstross 8y ago
2 degrees over 200 years might be manageable. Alas, that's now at the very low end of what we're likely to see -- more probably, 2-4 degrees over 100 years. One problem with a single headline number is that this is an average

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