More oddities spotted in the news

[robkelk]

Really cold brew.

Ojibway coffee company brews sweet new partnership with ice cream brand

Marsolais-Nahwegahb said this coffee ice cream is the first of its kind because it's made with cold brew rather than freeze-dried instant coffee crystals which are typically used to make coffee-flavoured ice cream.

[Dartz]

Capital Murder in Irish law is a strange thing. It's a murder that the law believes is worthy of the Death Sentence. Now, there's no Death penalty available on the books. Can't have that in modern civilised EU.... so what's a state to do with Capital crime and no Capital punishment

The minimum sentence in prison for Capital Murder is 40 years. There is, of course, no maximum. The net result - of course - being a death sentence via the slow route. Time does what the state cannot.

So what does it take to get the slowest of Death Sentences?

Shooting a cop eleven times with his own pistol will do it

[Dartz]

Leo Varadkar proves how with the modern times he is.

With a Monica Lewinky joke in Washington DC


A man so Out of Touch, he's Hall and Oates.

[robkelk]

Nordstrom is closing its Ottawa store. (It looks to me like they made the same mistake that Target made: they thought Canadians were the same as Americans.)

Uniqlo is opening a store in the same mall. (Not their first store in Canada, so they already know Canadians and Americans are different.)

I think we're coming out ahead. I can afford to shop at Uniqlo.

[Dartz]

Man caught with Child-abuse images, tortune-porn, livestreams of that new zealand mosque shooting, hardcore Nazi flags police badges and armalite parts. Caught after trying to import more gun parts from the US. Breivik wannabee, it seems - caught in the early stages.

10 years in prison.

It got a one page note in the back of the newspaper. It didn't even make the radio or telly today

Judge Nolan

You can tell it was serious. Judge Nolan gave him a custodial sentence. Nolan's a fucking cabbage.

[hazard]

Ehm, Dartz?

I do not speak colloquial Irish dialect of English.

[Jinx999]

Neither do I, but the meaning is perfectly understandable from the context.

[Dartz]

Cabbage. A vegetable. As in with all the intelligence of a cabbage.

Nolan's known for giving some bizarrely lenient sentences. Or bizarrely strict ones. This sentence is longer than the average period of custody that man gives. The guys a walking fucking meme for a judiciary so out of touch they're Hall and Oates.

[robkelk]

Which one's the more important space news?

The first woman, the first non-white, and the first non-American selected to go beyond Low Earth Orbit aboard Artemis II. (Mind you, it's a white male American who's in charge of the mission.)

Virgin Orbit files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection

[classicdrogn]

Probably the bankruptcy filing, TBH. Doing science is good and so is more diversity in STEM jobs, but if they can't find ways to make a profit at it space travel will never be a thing for a statistically significant number of people.

[robkelk]

In-house-written Twitter code released into open source found to allow DoS against Twitter accounts. The time between code release and creation of a National Vulnerability Database record was less than one week.

Because this bug is in Twitter's recommendation algorithm, it means that accounts that have been subject to mass blocking are essentially "shadow-banned," and won't show up in recommendations despite the user being unaware they've been penalized. There seems to be no way to correct that kind of action, and it ideally shouldn't be possible to game the system in this way, but it is.

if your tweets aren't showing up in recommendations, this might be why. Maybe. Assuming you've annoyed somebody enough that they'd do this to your account.

[Dartz]

Six months or so ago, there wasn't a mass shooting in Ireland.
There were no funerals for the dead.
No condolences from the US Embassy
No Judicial Inquiries into how the fuck he managed it.
No accountability, but we never have that anyway.
No Thoughts and fucking Prayers.

Only an arrest, a trial and a long fucking sentence.

Whatever this creature was planning will remain known only to himself, and we are far better off for it. Something truly dreadful was prevented.

The law acted as a tripwire. The guards and customs did their jobs. Even Judge Nolan.

But you can't sit back and believe he was the only one, either. He was just the one that got caught. A warning that we're not immune by any special quirk of national character or geography.

They're going to ban 3D Printers or something, aren't they?

-----

We've a sentence for the murder from earlier at least.

In Texas they give you the death penalty.

In Ireland, we have the slow death penalty. 40 years in Prison. By 86 most people in Ireland are dead.

Killing a gard is capital murder.

[Dartz]

Homeless Soldier with child denied accomodation by Dept' of Defence

Department of Defence says ‘provision of residential accommodation not provided to members of Defence Forces. This is everything - the contempt for people who actually work for a living, the housing crisis and the utter disintegration of the military.

Tainiste uses Dail privelege to attack website

Martin said that Bowes was “a political opponent of the government” and he also referenced that Bowes was “quoted on Russia Today”.

Seller of Android TV's given community service

Lol. Idiot advertised it as a real business. Most of them are sold through facebook and telegram groups. It still took 6 years for this to get in front of Judge Cabbage


Afghan asylum seeker sues state after it's unable to find accomodation for him. Some EU law or something.

Of course another government failure is going to lead to hundreds of compensation payouts. And fucking leeches in wigs getting their beaks wet.

Everyone's going fucking homeless. Our own fucking soldiers are going homeless. Everything's fucked.

[robkelk]

Okay, when did they change the definition of "Rock and Roll"?

(Over the last decade, and slowly, apparently.)

NPR: 2023 Rock Hall inductees include Kate Bush, Willie Nelson and Missy Elliott

[robkelk]

HuffPost: Nearly 500 Pounds Of Pasta Mysteriously Dumped In New Jersey Woods

There are conflicting reports over whether the pasta was cooked.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, that was all over the local news. Old Bridge isn't far from us.

[Bob Schroeck]

And the mystery is solved: Neighbors Solve Mysterious NJ Pasta Dump Case. Summary: It was part of a stockpile of old food stored by the mother of a man who was clearing out her house after her death. It was not cooked, but soaked up moisture from recent rains.

[robkelk]

Looking for a place to live in LA? Got $5.5 million? The Brady Bunch's house is for sale.

And, unlike when the show was made, the house interior now matches the stage sets.

[Bob Schroeck]

And, unlike when the show was made, the house interior now matches the stage sets.

Sort of. IIRC, Greg's "attic bachelor pad" had to be recreated in a basement room, or something like that, for instance. As is often the case, the interior as shown on the show couldn't fit the exterior, and they had to make some compromises when it came to fitting in various rooms. But they did a remarkable job of recreating everything down to all the decor.

[robkelk]

They called it what?

UK launches SKYNET – not a doomsday plot, just shopping for improved satellite comms

After a week when the media sphere has been alive with the wildest claims about AI and its supposed power to wipe out humanity, it may not have been the best time for the UK's Ministry of Defence to launch a £1.5 billion procurement for SKYNET. Still, maybe they didn't get the memo.

Closer examination reveals that the Whitehall department is not about to set us on a path to our doom at the hands of nefarious robots, but is instead looking to buy a new satellite communications network.

[Bob Schroeck]

Why do I think there are a bunch of guys in a backroom at the MOD somewhere laughing their heads off?

[robkelk]

Age is just a number.

12-year-old graduates from the University of Ottawa

Her B.Sc. is in biomedical sciences.

Her honour’s research project used open-source fMRI data to examine differences in how right-handed, left-handed and ambidextrous individuals formed functional connections in their cerebellums, the part of the brain controlling motor functions.

[Dartz]

Tourist submersible goes missing near Titanic

The thing looks sketchy as fuck to begin with.


If they're lucky, it was sayonara in two microseconds when the hull imploded.

If they're unlucky, a window seal cracked and a hypersonic jet of water cut through the skull of the poor sod peering through it - and then showered the person behind in brains before slicing them in half too - with a few seconds to sit and scream before the window finally fails and the pressure of the rushing water diesels the air the submersible.

If they're incredibly unlucky, they've joined the other passengers remaining on the Titanic - never to leave. But with plenty of time to contemplate their fate.

----

[Dartz]

Looks likey got crumped. The phrase 'Reported Overdue' in association with 'Submarine' rarely has a positive outcome, but this story is proving to be a tale of Hubris and Nemisis to pleasure the Greek Gods.

A CEO who:
-Refused to hire experts
-Fired an engineer who complained about things not being tested - or a porthole only being certified to half the depth it needed
-Insisted a single wireless controller would be sufficient to control the sub.
-Insisted a completely unique carbon-fibre hull would be perfectly safe and didn't need to be inspected because they had a real time hull-crack monitoring system. (It likely gave a millisecond of warning)
-Didn't want voice comms because they didn't want to be bothered.
-Used a comm system so unreliable that everyone assumed it had just borked until the sub didn't come back up
-Didn't have a proper navigation system - they brought a guide who knew by sight where around Titanic they were
-Convinced paying passengers it was perfectly safe
-Charged them 250,000 dollars for a trip in a 5-man suicide booth.
-Ignored every warning from the industry afraid his death would be a Hindenburg moment for DSV's
-Took a safety and regulation last approach.
-Imploded along with the submarine.

These are people used to using money to make the problems of life vanish, insulated from the consequences of their actions by their wealth, and certain in their technological mastery.

Unfortunately, the laws of physics and engineering and 350 atmospheres of solid water do not give a shit about your personal fortune, or faith in your own technology.

[classicdrogn]

Well... at least he was indeed putting his own ass on the line with them? I don't trust a wireless controller to play Brickout let alone bet my life on one, personally, but we can be pretty sure that this guy wasn't intentionally running a scam to endanger people's lives, at least any more than, say, the early days of Mt. Everest or polar expeditions. The big difference of course is that the world in general has been made safer for most of us, and communication technology improved to the point that everyone knew about it within hours instead of, at best, a short newspaper article months later, if there wasn't enough interesting more locally that day so they needed to fill some column inches.

Reading what El Reg had to say about it, the porthole window thing could even have been a feet-to-meters conversion that got missed in the design phase, since being certified to 4300m when you only intended to dive where the sea floor is at 4000m would be fine, but 4300ft is a definite problem. That's not to absolve the error, there should have been far more than enough double- and triple-checking by multiple sets of eyes to catch that kind of thing, but it's happened many times before, especially when someone is putting together off-the-shelf components as they specifically were.

In the end, I'd have to say better to never know what happened than to have been stuck in a little can on the bottom of the ocean with three days worth of air when it took four for even an RPV to find the site. I like small spaces to the point of being uncomfortable if I don't have a hat to provide the impression of a ceiling outdoors even on my good days, but that's still an idea that gives even me the willies.