* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Cisco mess from 2017 becomes tool for state-sponsored infrastructure attacks and defacements

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Childcatcher

"Do not mess with our elections”

"We are big enough to them hanging chad tier crap all by ourselves"

No icon for idiocracy?

That loony guy will have to do.

Linux Beep bug joke backfires as branded fix falls short

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Windows

Re: A stand-alone program to ...

"I guess somebody thought it'd be useful. But who? And when? And more to the point, why?"

Because teleprinter Bell, you Forum Barbarians.

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

IT is full of stuff like this.

Ass-troplastic! Printing parts from p.. er... human waste

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Re: Great

Literally field times for people with scat fetishes

Googlers revolt over AI military tech contract, brainiacs boycott killer robots, and more

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Paris Hilton

Re: Killler AI

Currently a certain President is pushing the drone pilots on "kills". The latest involved him 'ranting' about the drone pilot waiting for the target to leave a house full of civilians. El Presidente just doesn't get it that killing civilians just increases the number of terrorists due to the revenge motive.

Hasn't Obama ended his two terms? What's going on?

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Terminator

In the near future, underneath the GooglePlex

Where "Do No Evil" has been replaced by "Search for Mo' Money"

Still Alive

AI can't help without your data, says Gartner, so share, share, share!

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Top Kek

Want data privacy? You’ll have to pay for that – Facebook COO

Sheryl Sandberg, second in command at Facebook, told NBC News that the social media platform runs on user data, and the only way users would be able to completely opt out of sharing any of their data would be if Facebook implemented paid subscriptions.

When asked why no opt-out button exists already, Sandberg said “that would be a paid product.” Sandberg insisted that facebook does not sell or give away users’ personal details to advertisers, but maintained that the company’s business depends on that data, and on using that data to target ads at users.

Sanders was quickly put on blast on Twitter...

"Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“"

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

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Devil

John Brunner was a genius.

Mark Steyn points out how 2018 this is

What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos… It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech – and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.

'Extreme, unnecessary, overheated': US judge slams Oracle salvo in HPE Solaris squabble

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You Novichok is in the mail

These included "blatant gamesmanship", "knowingly misrepresenting facts in an attempt to slander", "empty accusations", "supposed grievances" and "nonsense".

That must be Putin on the receiving end then. Expecting a dead cat and a couple of dead guinea pigs to turn up at Larry's house soon.

Spring is all about new beginnings, but it could already be lights out for Windows' Fluent Design

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Re: re: The Microsoft View of the world

Flat is good because I've always disliked the 'pretty' icons of WinXP compared to Win2K as I prefer plain and frugal.

Same preference here, but Win2K was NOT flat.

It started with the completely unwarranted animations and had icons everywhere leading to iconfests (not to mention iconed tabfests) that were not particulary helpful as I recall.

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Windows

Re: That's how to make Pringles

Yeah but now you can sell nonflat elements as an upgrade to flat elements previously created by hipster faddified fadfollowers faddists with fad injections, and possibly get a patent out from it on the side.

Man, I hate the flatosity, it's everywhere. KDE default icons (I want distinguishability, idiots. If I want flat, I will be using the shell!), editors, FortiGate UI.

That and that dark theming that's now prevalent. As if we were all in Afghanistan looking at tactical screens. What the hell.

2001: A Space Odyssey has haunted pop culture with anxiety about rogue AIs for half a century

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Re: Discovery-1: The Facebook Ship

Also, at http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%205.html, we read:

"Sometime in the 1990's they had released the original 70mm film in Hollywood for a short period of time and I and my girlfriend went to go see it. One thing happened in it that I wanted to share with you. At the moment the wine glass shatters near the end of the film, the film itself noticeably skipped, like the physical film reel was damaged. In the theatre I immediately laughed, because knowing Kubrick this was not a mistake. It goes beautifully with the interpretation that there are moments in the film where we are staring at nothing other than the actual monolith itself (the screen.) By having an error occur in the film on 2 levels at once, it's the film trying to step out of itself, a theme which is intimately tied in with the nature and mystery of consciousness, which I speculate that Kubrick was trying to express."

That would be very interesting to have confirmed...

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FAIL

Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...

To HAL it became an equation to be balanced in which humans were a variable. He balanced the equation by removing the crew from the equation. Thus exposing the second flaw; a lack of an instruction to value the life of the crew above all else.

Many people miss it. Where HAL repeats "Just a moment" is when he is trying to solve the equation.

Interesting but no. At that moment, no-one was interrogating HAL. Indeed, it was HAL trying to come out of the closet, nonchalantly striking up a "so...I have heard..." type of conversation. But Bowman doesn't bite -- he thinks it's just some psych evaluation again. The AE-35 nonsense is thus an embarrassement reaction "Uh... something has come up! Yeah!". Unfortunately this doesn't turn out all too well because Bowman, contrarily to Poole, is suspicious enough to have a good look at AE-35. Hence this looks like an error. Hence talk about neutering HAL (in reality, all this talk about error-free computers souns farfetched but it's a movie). Hence HAL, neurotic and panicking, trying to save himself or the mission by extreme means.

At least, that's the surface interpretation.

FAIL icon, because, both HAL and Heywood - mirrors in machinespace and meatspace - FAIL in the end. One blows the Mission. One blows the advantage for the USA.

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Thumb Up

Discovery-1: The Facebook Ship

Also, supposedly the whole ending sequence is not what it seems, it's a dream sequence, Bowman's realisation that so much in the world is not what it seems.

That was pretty fun. Like reading someone analyzing a Lynch movie. Or the end of the original Evangelion. Or Avalon.

The author decidedly goes off the rails in the last few chapters, but the hypothesis about a message of societal control embedded in the movie sounds very not impossible. Thus are good conspiracy theories made. Still, would Kubrick have been good enough to encode all the hidden elements into scripts, storyboard, props, actor behaviour, getting it past suits, people on the set, moneybags, Marvin Minsky and Arthur C. Clarke while having the latter write a solid Sci-Fi yarn as Red Herring?

It is debatable whether a human could withstand the vacuum of space, as Bowman does, even for a few seconds. So taking into account the themes of technological inhibition, Bowman overcoming the vacuum of space could be symbolizing a recovery of forgotten physical abilities. After he overcomes the vacuum we find a drastic change in cinematography. The stiff and rigid camera movements comprising almost the entire film are replaced by loose handheld shots, hinting that Bowman has freed himself from HALs psychological prison. HAL desperately spouts lies and false sincerity to save himself, but Dave is now impervious to such deceptive tactics and he wastes no time in disconnecting HALs higher brain.

This.

Also:

The scene where Bowman and Poole watch themselves broadcast in a television interview has a scripted feel to it. The true purpose of the mission is not told and so the whole broadcast smacks of propaganda. As they watch this footage the astronauts are eating processed fake food. Like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange, they are literally being fed a pack of lies, but here they are eating their own lies.

This is actually happening in the current year.

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Re: Anxiety about rogue AIs since 1872

Here is anxiety from Frank Herbert's Rather-Confusing-And-Overly-Pretentious-But-Still-Interesting "Destination: Void", 1965:

"If you solve the Artificial Consciousness problem, you can plant a human colony somewhere in space. Not at Tau Ceti, of course, but . . ."

And he was too good a divine not to penetrate the religious hokum, not to see through to the essential rightness of his role in the project.

Given the known perils, there had to be a safety fuse. There had to be someone willing and able to blow up the ship.

Flattery knew the reasons. They were reality of the most brutal kind.

The first crude attempts at mechanical reproduction of consciousness had been made on an island in Puget Sound. The island no longer existed. "Rogue consciousness!" they had screamed. True enough. Something had defied natural laws, slaughtered lab personnel, destroyed sensors, sent slashing beams of pure destruction through the- surrounding countryside.

Finally, it had taken the island -- God knew where.

Poof!

No island.

No lab personnel.

Nothing but gray water and a cold north wind whipping whitecaps across it and the fish and the seaweed invading the area where land and men and machinery had been.

Just thinking about it made Flattery shiver. He conjured up in his mind the image of the sacred graphic from his quarters, absorbed some of the peace from the field of serenity, the tranquility of the holy faces.

Even Moonbase didn't walk too close to this project now. It was all a sham to educate ship personnel, to frustrate the eager young men and women.

"Each project ship must maintain its coefficient of frustration," went the private admonition. "Frustration must come from both human and mechanical sources."

They thought of frustration as a threshold, a factor to heighten awareness.

It made a weird kind of sense.

Yep, thing's pretty demonic.

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Windows

Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."

If the engines are meant to be nuclear fission - which is what I remember from the book - then what fuel would you need, I wonder. Is it more likely to be reaction mass, than "fuel" as such?

Correct. Anything that you can pump through the reactor will do. In the book, it was ammonium, which needs pre-heating but then one does have a fission reactor nearby. Hydrogen would give best specific impulse, but it's hard to keep in the tanks.

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Windows

Re: It's not the A.I. it's WHO OWNS the A.I....

Yes. Elysium was a warning, not a manual :-)

Yes. Elysium was a warning about being an idiot in the face of Malthusian Diversity pressing up against your front door.

Merkel didn't get it.

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Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."

Most of the triangular containers along the spine between the sphere and the engines are fuel tanks, as I recall.

Reversing the polarity. They would be empty in a jiffy. It would also be might impractical to implement getting the fuel from the front tanks (which looks suppiciously not like tanks) to the rear.

Check this: The Spacecraft Designs of Arthur C. Clarke (Space.com Exclusive)

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Re: Just a moment... Just a moment...

I'm going to go out on a limb here but wasn't HAL's behaviour almost supernatural to what humans can understand?

No he was just flat-out neurotic.

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Re: "the monolith is a representation of a wideframe cinema screen rotated 90°."

The dimensions of the Monolith are explicitly given as being in the ratio 1:4:9

But evidently the cinema monolith is NOT like this.

Indeed, there are several monoliths with differring dimensions, depending on the scene. Artistry in action.

Same as the bone-shaped Discovery which makes no sense because "how am I going to decelerate in Jupiter space, I have a NERVA but I have no fuel tanks...." (made worse in 2010 because the Discovery gets out of Jupiter space with STILL no fuel tanks...)

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Aren't these also early actual design studies by NASA?

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

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Re: Extraterrestrial clouds

"for the time being this does not apply to extraterrestrial space beyond reach of U.S. missiles and rockets."

"There is only little galaxy you have missed ...."

Why a merged Apple OS is one mash-up too far

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Windows

It's just a stupid OS

This is not where the action is at.

A scheduler, a virtual memory manager, IPC primitives, interrupt dispatchers and something to plug in device drivers, networking stacks and filesystems. Oh, and security. How hard can it be? If you have a "microkernel" you can even claim to have everything in a few KByte.

Unless you have special requirements regarding extra security, hard real-time constraints and "low-power devices" you practically can't fail.

The stuff that is built on top is what's important. That's what is interesting to the end user, the application developer and the architect. That's where the action is..

Oh, and Unix is NOT "layered2 by any means. You do your syscall, you gets your results. That's it.

It's baaack – WannaCry nasty soars through Boeing's computers

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Devil

For the taxpayer.

Oh wait, everybody owes an upscale appartment to the state at the present time anyway. Never mind.

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“All hands on deck,” said Mike VanderWel,

Is it talk like a Pirate Day again, already?

Microsoft's Windows supremo Terry Myerson is now Terry BYE-rson

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Re: The king is dead, long live the King

I'm hard to convince---

No Falcon Way: NASA to stick with SLS, SpaceX more like space ex

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Windows

Re: Speed

That's a "Hohmann orbit" though.

Absent the use of a continuous thrust engine, or a ruinous waste of payload mass, the time to Mars is a fixed quantity.

Cranberry-shaped bollocks.

A Hohmann orbit is optimal for minimal delta-V. Time is unimportant. Who does that except space miners lobbing completely unimportant space rocks through the system?

Facebook to extend bug bounty to cover data leakage, sever ties to data brokers

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Windows

Can you tell Zuckerberg is an ... errr .... "globalist"?

“We know these changes are not easy,” wrote Facebook’s director of product partnerships Ime Archibong, “but we believe these updates will help mitigate any breach of trust with the broader developer ecosystem.”

Such suffering for us.

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

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Go

This is basically a moonshot program

Hubris, Greed, Prima donnas, Political interference, Undue Hasted, Crazy Tech Risks and Some Dead People.

Oh my.

NASA stalls $8bn James Webb Space Telescope again – this time to 2020

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Headmaster

Stamp it as "Necessary for the Continuing Security of Israel"

Watch congress bring in a genetically engineered money-shitting donkey if that's what it takes.

What's an RDBMS? Don't ask the UK's data protection watchdog

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Thumb Up

Modern Life: Hypereal Dilbert Cartoon Bonanza WIth a Side-Order of Crazy

As of 1 April, the salary for the role will go up to £160,000 from £140,000 – a figure it has been stuck on since it was last reviewed in 2008. There will also be an annual "uplift" of £20,000 for the duration of Denham's term.

Yes, this is going to resolve the issue regarding lack of skills.

Guccifer 2.0 outed, Kaspersky slammed, Oz radio hacker in the slammer, and more

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Mushroom

Woah these exclusive revelations are coming fast.

Said шпион forgot to turn on their VPN to disguise their public IP address and location, when visiting either Twitter or WordPress, we're told, thus revealing to American investigators their true identity – a member of GRU, Russia's military intelligence arm.

Does anyone believe this?

Oh wait, El Reg does.

Russia - always both extremely hard-hitting evilly professional and both .. so sloppy. It's like I was really watching a Jason Bourne movie.

Guccifer 2.0 claimed he was a Romanian, but showed a troubling lack of knowledge of his professed language. Now it turns out Uncle Sam's g-men know who is behind Guccifer 2.0 right down to the street of their Moscow government office, according to sources speaking to the Daily Beast.

Hahaha. Retarded.

This is going to make claims that the Russians weren't involved in American election meddling much more difficult to dodge. Sadly, for some reason or other, President Trump seems unwilling or unable to accept this.

I have no doubt that Bolton will. RELEASE NUKES!! LET'S GET THIS OVER WITH BECAUSE I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ANYMORE.

Uber's disturbing fatal self-driving car crash, a new common sense challenge for AI, and Facebook's evil algorithms

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Windows

Me important. Me warn the world.

François Chollet, author of the deep learning software library Keras, argued that the social media giant’s grip over a user’s news feed acted as a “psychological control vector”. The algorithms used to push the most important and relevant posts to the top of a user’s news feed means that it decides who we will keep in touch with and what news articles and opinions we read. It means that Facebook essentially exerts control over our political beliefs and worldview.

Pretty much like all of the western press then. Including Red-Top Webzines.

Chollet talks about how using Facebook can create a reinforcement learning loop. “A loop in which you observe the current state of your targets and keep tuning what information you feed them, until you start observing the opinions and behaviors you wanted to see,”

We have had that discussion about TV back in the 80s. The resulting idiocracy is staggering, so maybe he has a point.

he tweeted.

The irony.

Nine Iranians accused of cyber-swiping 30TB+ of blueprints from unis, biz on Tehran's orders

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Devil

Re: Evidence?

With Pompeo and Bolton, the probability of war is about 80% I would say.

But maybe the generals will revolt.

Probe: How IBM ousts older staff, replaces them with young blood

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Holmes

The case, Dr Freud, is clear.

Corporate suicide by cognitive erasure.

The MBA analogue to autoerotic asphyxiation.

Oh bucket! Unpack the suitcases. TRAPPIST-1 planets too wet to support life

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Re: Snow too cold in winter?

You will probably need access to some raw material and a surface with clay to glom onto.

Salty water all the way down until you hit salty ice may not a perfect recipe.

US mulls drafting gray-haired hackers during times of crisis

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Mushroom

Additional spartafication

"during times of crisis"

But in the US it's always "times of crisis". When they are not at war (preferably on three fronts, two of which are undeclared), they are at a disadvantage, risking loss of supremacy, garrisonning Africa and Outher Space or else calling upon ballgagged/buttplugged toys like the EU to "spend more" lest security be degraded.

Now that the idea of a winnable or just a less-than-full nuclear exchange has started to make the rounds at least in the thinktanker and powerpointing circles, are they gearing up for a big show?

FYI: AI tools can unmask anonymous coders from their binary executables

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Re: Tables, nearly Code-Free State Machines, and future Requirements Compilation

These are NOT finite state machines.

These are Turing Machines.

Which a interpreted by a lower-level Turing machine. With Polynomial slowdown.

AMD security flaw saga, browsers broken, Lamo dead at 37, and more

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Paris Hilton

Re: To be effective potential needs wisdom...

Also, uncalled-for pious platitudes.

Shows potential: Excellent work in Galois theory at age 20

Tragic end: Stupidly killed in a duel (in which he should have ripped out everyone's throat and shat down their necks but wans't trained to so)

This is not that.

We're Putin our foot down! DHS, FBI blame Russia for ongoing infrastructure hacks

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Holmes

Re: Russia hacking us?

"... whether or not [the Russians] want to be a good actor or a bad actor."

I don't think you will have to wait much. Trump has the cabling of AIPAC and the MIC/Deep State practically coming out of his braincase like in a cyberpunk movie. Liberal nation-liquefactors and neocons with a Russia problem are ready to go full in for the freedoms of Ukraine and Syria and a possible later rumble against China. The latest replacement at government top-levels indicate that we may be in a Hot War against the Bear sooner rather than later. At least Tillerson didn't look like being on ideological crack. It's a general problem too: better use these CVNs before they become completely obsolescent, eh?

OK, deep breath, relax... Let's have a sober look at these 'ere annoying AMD chip security flaws

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I see

There is a market niche for the taking out of bottom feeders that is sadly not being actively exploited.

Samba settings SNAFU lets any user change admin passwords

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Alert

Why would they want to deploy such a poorly designed amd firewall unfriendly legacy solution when they already have Powershell webaccess which has several advantages and far more security options?

Freshman point-and-clicker incoming.

Prepare for production cancer!

Trump’s immigration policies costing US tech jobs says LogMeIn CEO

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Windows

Pushing for low, low wages? Yes!

This is the company that has bought LastPass then ratched up the subscription by 200%.

Speaking to The Register in Sydney, Australia, today, Wagner said his company had hoped to bring in more workers, some on H-1B visas. He now believes that won’t be possible, that the company will instead need to establish bigger offices offshore and that the net outcome will be fewer employees in the USA.

Which is of course a complex way of saying that they want to move all jobs abroad and just keep the shares and the swimming pool in the good old USA.

Manufacturing is already not all that great. While politicians wonder-wish for the knowledge economy and go through all kind of stupid schemes to magically obtain in, what will be left is the McJobs economy.

(Prolly not that important anyway, I wonder whether there were important "muh jobs" discussions in August 1914?)

Ex-GCHQ boss: All the ways to go after Russia. Why pick cyberwar?

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Re: We should scare the s**t out of their Black Sea fleet.....

The aircraft carriers would be VERY unsafe as Russia has strong standoff capabilities in any case.

Getting a few Kalibr missiles into a carrier ain't sounding too nice.

Note the demonstrations Russia has made of the above during the "Planet Hoth" expedition in Syria.

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Re: Clever

A real motivations becomes clear...

On Wednesday, Labor MP Chris Leslie addressed May on the issue of reforming the UN Security Council in order to limit Russia’s rights within the body during a parliament session.

Leslie argued that Russia was “increasingly looking like a rogue state,” adding that “we must now begin to talk about reform” of the UNSC. “Russia can’t be allowed to simply sit pretty, thumbing its nose to the rest of the world community and feeling that it’s immune from the rule of law internationally,” Leslie said.

May responded by saying that Leslie was not the only one to stress the need for changes within the UNSC, promising that “this is something that we will look at.”

“We do talk to the United Nations about the reform of the UN in a whole variety of ways. Of course, any decision – the Catch 22 if you like – is that any decision that might be taken in the Security Council to reform it, of course, could be subject to a veto by Russia, who are sitting there,” the prime minister said.

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Re: No proof it was Putin in the first place ...

I wonder if this stuff even exists.

Remember "Red Mercury" from way back when.

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Windows

Meh

There's still a lot more LNG capacity to come on stream, and the US are also building export terminals.

Well, the UK is indeed importing LNG from Russia.

Still, if anyone thinks shipping LNG around will somehow replace a pipline, there is a bridge or two to sell.

Admittedly Germany then did a secret deal behind everyone's back to expand Nordstream, and only admitted it at the last minute. But that's another story...

The Germans are not dumb enough to suffer for the beautiful eyes of the US.

The Great China Tech Panic is just posh xenophobia

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Windows

Re: They smiled at you and and won your heart...

The fear comes from the longevity and determination of the CPC, and their Putin-like concentration only on what benefits China, powered by a soon-to-be better than US-level economy.

So it's like being afraid of the critical Higgs mass that might lead to a vacuum phase change at any time and thus cosmological demise.

Probably no need to get to excited. Europe will be rocked to death by African migration waves in any case during the next 20 years.

Getting a log cabin in Siberia sounds good.

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Re: Well they are trying hard to come up with new markets

But the home-computer revolution is long past and do we really need a new Frogger?

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Windows

Re: Economic miracle? Really?

Calling theft of the massivest scale the World has ever seen

I think Europe got one better doing the American and African colonies, but, whatever.

The build-up from a completely wrecked country after WWII to today while getting a "cultural revolution" rammed down one's throat is amazing stuff.

Now, China is VERY nationalistic, doesn't care about diversity and now has 36 million single males (b/c no women), which makes a nice army that can be raised. Better beware.

Fun fact of the day: Voice recognition tech is naturally sexist

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Windows

Diversity Victimization Bandwagon Leaving Platform 2

...while in the real world, we just have crap products.

Don't use or fix.

FFS.