very

I'll write a sample using contracts so you can flame if you have time

But not now, driving 750 km starting soon

Ah, a Sverige-rundresa.

@JohanLarsson sounds like a fun time...

hopefully gf feels like driving

@RegDwigнt That seems like a dodge of another sort. If I give a crazy person a gun, and he shoots someone, am I blameless?

There is confusion as to whether it was the rebels or the Ukranian government troops. The rebels say they don't have access to anything that could shoot that high

What does the government say?

The government says it was the rebels

What do the rebels say?

Apparently the rebels have access to a stolen missile-launcher, and there was a suspicious Tweet this morning.

my source of information

@skullpatrol that it was the Ukranian air force

a different tweet

not that I can read it

@Robusto no you are not, but the "you" in this case is the Ukrainian army, not Putin. Also, they didn't give it to the crazy person, they let him steal it.

But it's not like they invaded Russian territory and penetrated a secure facility to steal the weapon.

Exactly. So why are the Russians to blame, again?

I said it's not like that.

But you also said this:

I'm just trying to put things in perspective here.

@MattЭллен Google Translate: 'Self-propelled anti-aircraft missile systems "Buk" in the territory of anti-missile defense regiment A1402 take control of the DNI'

@RegDwigнt That was an attempt to inject humor.

Oh.

K then.

@AndrewLeach ah. thanks!

Neither will humor.

I suspect that Google have mixed up indirect objects and the like though.

Well, then there's nothing to be done but discuss balrogs again.

@AndrewLeach the folk republic of Donezk takes control of Buk, pictured.

That fucker can shoot 18km high.

So 30000 feet is no biggie.

@cc I don't know what to say. I'm at a loss. I got nothing.

@AndrewLeach Also it says Anti-aircraft warfare regiment A1402, not "anti-missile defense".

In short, the self-proclaimed republic stole from the Ukrainian army.

Thanks. They were saying on the radio this morning that Robusto's humorous comment was actually quite likely EXCEPT that it was the rebels, not the Russians. That, and that it was deliberate and they didn't actually know what they were shooting at, and they didn't know how to use the radar to identify the plane.

They were shooting at a Ukrainian Antonov that was flying the same route.

And now all the rebels feel pretty bad.

@RegDwigнt Who funds these rebels? (moscow billionaires)

Probably at a different time and at a different altitude, though.

@skullpatrol trust me, the last thing Moscow billionaires care about funding is those rebels.

billionaires love to fund wars

both sides

You can say "Putin dunit", and there's certainly no shortage of people doing just that as we speak, but in no way shape or form is any Russian Bill Gates remotely interested in any of this shit.

There are no billionaires in the Russian military. They all made their billions with oil and shit. There's no Russian Halliburton, no Russian Dick Cheney.

not even a howard hughes?

Why bother with cossacs if you can make a fortune selling mobile phones to Muscovites.

Criminy.

@AndrewLeach they bragged about shooting down a military AN-16 on the Russian Facebook-knockoff, complete with videos of it coming down, ten minutes before anyone else in the world even noticed the Malaysia plane had disappeared from the radar.

Oops.

The Ukrainian intelligence agency has since leaked alleged radio communication between rebels, where they go to the site and slowly realize their mistake. It's on YouTube.

Why would billionaires love to fund wars? They seem bloody inconvenient to me.

@RegDwigнt I hope they had the decency to be horrified.

I have no sound here, so couldn't check.

I only read about it on Spiegel Online.

They said there were like six different subtitles to choose from, including in English.

Lemme see.

sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/publish/…

"Freight 200" is military jargon for dead body.

@KitFox kicks dirt aw shucks.

@KitFox They love to fund both sides, that way their businesses keep running and growing larger...

The bit at 2:10 is particularly saddening and madenning.

Especially the reaction. "Obviously if it was a civil aircraft, then they were bringing spies."

But the question is actually quite relevant. "What the fuck was this thing doing here, there's war going on."

@RegDwigнt wouldn't a commercial jet be flying at 30K-40K...a little out of reach?

Get with the programme!

And yes, that was my very first question when I heard where the plane came from and where it was heading.

So they were shooting at whatever blip was on their radar?

But we have since learned that they were not exactly shooting with air rifles.

@RegDwigнt I agree.

@Mitch Pretty much so.

@RegDwigнt Well the airline probably thought they were 'above all that'.

I feel bad for the guy explaining that there weren't any weapons, they were all just civilians. He sounded really shocked.

@Mitch Not everyone reads the bragging of some Cossacks on the Russian Facebook knockoff.

I have an account there but didn't know about it until yesterday.

So it's understandable Malaysian airlines wouldn't be among their followers.

That said, I've heard quite a few airlines had been flying detours for weeks.

Is this the second one in that area?

The second one what? Plane shot down?

yep

They brought down a military plane a couple weeks ago.

43 air troopers died. Everyone on board.

:(

But it was different. The craft was landing, so they basically did bring that one down with a rifle.

It fell from like a hundred feet or something.

Also, a military airport.

And that was a military plane, so them's the breaks.

Yup. Occupational risk.

excuse me?

people are people

they have families too

Yes, but people deliberately standing in kitchen heat are deliberately standing in kitchen heat. They could have become programmers instead.

A la guerre comme à la guerre.

They knew full well they were flying through a war zone.

The two occasions could really not be any more different.

death is the end result of both

Yes, and if you do not smoke, you will die, too.

and nothing will bring me back

Which is why you should take it seriously.

Despite the unbearable lightness of being.

yes, all death is sad

All the leaves are brown.

And the skies are grey.

Here's a Spiegel article with technical details on how Buk works, Google-Translated.

@RegDwigнt I didn't mean to say that the actual main Russian army had shot them down.

@Cerberus that article actually suggests that the Russian army has been training those morons.

But Putin created that mess by sending his troops and weapens, materiel to the rebels.

Yes, exactly, something like that.

It says 20 people are needed to operate the missile.

I wonder how many were actually around.

By the way, of course I am not saying the Russians are any worse than the Americans or the English.

The higher the number, the higher the chances that you can get one to blow whistle on the others.

Or the Dutch, perhaps, if they had more power.

So the chances of finding the responsible are actually not that slim.

At least not as slim as when you just have a single idiot with a Kalashnikov firing in the middle of some pampa.

I saw the suppose conversation between the rebels yesterday, but it was hard to follow with Youtube's translation...you think it's genuine?

I've only read about it on Spiegel earlier today, and I don't even have sound here.

And of course anyone can forge anything, and has in the past. Can't tell.

The thing is, not even the people at the top can.

Neither Putin nor Steinmeier nor Obama have a remotely reliable overview of what the fuck is actually going on.

I imagine to you it will either be "possibly real" or "probably not real".

Yeah I'll listen to it as soon as I get home.

@RegDwigнt Of course.

OK.

At any rate the translation was remarkably family-friendly.

But wouldn't mind if Putin got the blame for this.

I'd expect a rebel in that situation to use expletives every other word. Or in any situation, really.

Right.

I mean, a Russian can't even buy a bus ticket without calling five people's mothers stinking cunts.

:-O

For Cossacks I'd expect it to be more like seven.

Because before they even get to the buying part, what the fuck is a fucking ticket in the fucking first place.

@RegDwigнt I thought the same thing.

And the people speaking don't sound like they are swearing.

Well everything in Russian sounds alike.

So it doesn't sound like a cleaned up version of something.

Plus I don't even know if they were even speaking Russian. As I said, no sound.

But it also doesn't have background noise.

Which is weird.

Hm.

Maybe, they are going to make a Disney movie out of it; like they do with everything. Still waiting for Disney's version of 911.

@RegDwigнt That's not what I mean. There's no intonation that would suggest swearing.

@KitFox but that's precisely what I mean.

Of course, I don't think I would know what Russian swearing sounds like. I see.

Some languages are just like that.

"I ate a pancake just now" sounds equally smooth as "Go take a flying fuck".

Have you heard a Greek saying "I love you"? It is exaclty like a Greek saying "fuck off moron".

Will you people please stop talking? I'm trying to work.

No emotional emphasis?

All emotional emphasis.

All the time.

Oh. That must be why I love Russians.

@KitFox nah talking Greek here. Where asking "what time it is" sounds like "I will tear your head off".

In Russian, it is sort of the opposite.

"Fuck you cunt" is just as gentle as "please buy some milk".

That's sweet.

I really need to learn Russian. If only it were not written in Cyrillic and also that it would not kill me.

Cyrillic is the least of the issues confronting one who would learn Russian, I am quite certain.

@RegDwigнt why is the intonation so conservative

@tchrist /nod

@RegDwigнt Doesn’t the timing rule out a carefully crafted hoax?

@tchrist not sure which part specifically you have in mind.

Trying to catch up on logs.

I am talking about this radio transmission allegedly intercepted by the Ukrainian intelligence agency.

That could very well be a carefully crafted hoax.

made for TV

I mean, I've not even heard of a Ukrainian intelligence agency up until today.

If they are so good at intercepting shit, how about intercepting something of value for a change, like oh I dunno, a missile.

Or not letting Dutch tourists fly over war zones in the first place.

Just a suggestion.

hello

Would really put the "intelligence" into "intelligence agency", you know.

can someone help me suggest or remind of word / phrase that is to call or refer something along the lines to hunt for food etc

scavengers do?

@tchrist Then I should have no trouble with it at all.

do they hunt

@RegDwigнt I think I may have been confusing two different postings. Was there something posted somewhere within the first 10 minutes that was gloating but then deleted, and then a second supposedly-leaked Ukrainian intelligence intercept?

@Saladin Forage?

@tchrist yeah two different things entirely.

thanks @KitFox :)

nods

That's one.

@Saladin Scavengers scavenge.

That's two.

Right.

Should be AN-26 there.

Forage doesn’t sound like looking for dead critters the way scavenge does. It sounds more plant-based.

But as that Spiegel article says, anyone with a brain would know that 30k feet cannot be military aircraft. Too high for most things, too low for AVACS and shit.

And even after firing by accident you still have a full 30 seconds to self-destruct it.

Then again, a coyote who goes a-scavenging may be eating from whatever the restaurant threw out into its dumpster.

@RegDwigнt Do you think that somebody who made such a bad decision as to launch it in the first place would have realized his error within 30 seconds and then also had the nerve to issue the self-destruct order without losing more face?

Maybe they couldn't tell how high it was.

Maybe they hadn't ever shot down a plane before.

@tchrist I am saying that apparently 20 trained people are needed to operate that thing, and that if I grab 20 untrained people off the street at random there's likely to be one among them who knows that 30000 is too damn high.

They must have specifically been on the lookout for morons.

And the training must have been specifically "push this button, upload video to YouTube, is all".

At least one of them should have been able to read "Malaysian Airlines" on the plane when they looked at it through field glasses to confirm the target.

I don’t know. Never underestimate the stupidity of the stupid.

And barring that, thought "I'm pretty sure military aircraft don't having writing on the side."

@KitFox of course they had been specifically trained to hold the field glasses the wrong way around.

Not that field glasses reach that far in the first place, but just to be completely on the safe side.

@KitFox Field glasses might not have been enough. I’m thinking that you’d need a spotting scope with vibration reduction.

jinx

blah blah. You know what I mean.

Point is, you don't fire a missile blindly.

Yeah, you mean the IFF.

Someone looked at the fucking plane.

I’m saying that they might not have had optics needed for visual confirmation.

@KitFox Well, someone does.

@tchrist Yeah they did. Comes with the missile.

Again as Spiegel says, their radar likely sent a "Friend of Foe" request, and the craft likely replied with a "Friend here" code, but nobody was around to know what the fuck that all meant, or to even notice these things were happening.

is anyone from here who doesn't use shampoo to wash their hair?

I use baking soda with some frequency.

I used to soap my hair. For like fifteen years.

And then there's people who only ever use water and nothing else.

hm what is preferred cleaners versus shampoo?

baking-soda if not used with vinegar coarse up your hair

cleansers hair*

@KitFox Too bad it didn’t include brains then.

I don't have that problem with baking soda.

it depends how oily and long your hair is

Much oily, such long.

so the quality of your hair improved using baking soda over shampoo?

Natural leavening agents.

I don't use it exclusively. I still shampoo relatively frequently. Also, I oil my hair sometimes too.

Baking soda makes it look good.

that's where cleanser are for most are made of natural stuff

but i guess your hair has to reborn as most of us grow up using commerical shampoo

I imagine with a name like Saladin, you have gorgeous long black hair.

@KitFox lol

OK, I take that back.

I don't think anti-Semitic statements are warranted.

nothing is more natural than plain water

@KitFox sorry

but whats happening down-there is really awful :(

Depends on the quality of the water, I would guess.

@skullpatrol it means dandruff problems just water alone...

some celsb prefer mineral water esp the ones from ALPS

remember the name anyone?