81–90 of 113 posts
File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...
I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
Even Reddit opened just a couple years ago their own server @ irc.snoonet.org.
Coding chatbots for IRC is still a really fun way to practice NLP concepts.
Archived SomethingAwful thread from 9/11/2001: http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/ http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html > WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR
Fascinating. I was in Dominica at the time. They threw a national street party for the day to celebrate "the big house falling down". I guess there's something of a grudge to be borne there, from hundreds of years of slavery. Re: the thread, it's saddening quite how many were immediately desperate to go to war - with bin laden, nonetheless. This is generally a bit odd, given that OBL was only really known in the west…
File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits: Is there anybody there? I am fine. Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears". IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...
Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them. 39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched. The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remai…
And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
Fun thing is: It's 512 bytes for everything, not just the part you typed. So this includes the command and channel, the trailing CRLF and I think when routing through different servers the server name gets stuck in there somewhere, too. Which means that a client has no idea how long the actual message is that it's going to be able to send.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
A lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops. A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth. But as the community b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC protocol spec limits message length to 512 bytes, I know only of a single implementation that lets you go above that and many clients crash or otherwise break if you go above it.
Fun thing is: It's 512 bytes for everything, not just the part you typed. So this includes the command and channel, the trailing CRLF and I think when routing through different servers the server name gets stuck in there somewhere, too. Which means that a client has no idea how long the actual message is that it's going to be able to send.
Most clients that do attempt to split long texts into multiple messages get one of these wrong:
- They miscalculate the number of bytes available for payload, because they don't check with the server's idea of their hostmask (which can change during the session e.g. due to authentication) to calculate the length of the preamble as seen on the receiving end.
- They count characters and ignore the number of bytes they actually encode to (either in the message or the preamble, or both: there are some networks like the Korean Ozinger that allow Utf-8 nicknames).
KDE's Konversation does both correctly (it also has some other nice visualizations of server/protocol-imposed limits, e.g. when you try to change the channel topic it'll color text past the server limit in red, again taking into account character and formatting code encoding).
Most clients don't even try at all though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them. 39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched. The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remai…
The Patriot was so overhyped and yet so bad in practice that Israel went and developed its own missile interceptor system (Iron Dome), because they realized that from the claimed 80+ % success rate, Patriots really intercepted less than 10%. And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.
Iron Dome isn't comparable. Iron Dome is made to shoot down short-range rockets and shells. It makes intercepts against slow moving targets at low altitudes. It would not likely have much success against a mach 5 Scud that would spend only a few seconds within Iron Dome's engagement range before impact.
Iron Dome is vastly superior to Patriot in one key area, namely cost. Shooting down cheap Palestinian rockets and mortars at $2 million/missile for Patriot would not be feasible, but at $30-50,000/missile for Iron Dome is completely doable. I don't know what Patriot's success rate would be against these targets, but given its cost, it doesn't matter if it was 100%, it still wouldn't be workable.
I remember very clearly sitting in my first math class in my first term of college, talking about the Gulf War when it started. I was 18 at the time. The big concern we had was another Vietnam, dragging on for years with a new draft. There was a lot of talk on campus about that, until it became clear the war was not going to last long.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Page 13, Kramer says: > Not to belittle the signifigance of these events, but you do realize that this means a whole slew of "anti terrorist" and probably "anti violence" laws will be passed through congress. > Any "anti terrorist" laws will be given almost a blank check to do what is necessary. I'd be surprised if in 6 months you'll be able to make a domestic call without it being monitored. > That's the way terrori…
Yeah, this comment was massively insightful.
If you want insightful, this notorious article from The Onion, of all places, really takes the cake:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh...
That was months before 9/11 when just about everyone thought Bush was a harmless goof. I remember reading it (on paper!) when it came out and thinking it was amusing and way over the top.