peter-erwin

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• Commented on (Flash fiction) A message from the Laundry public relations office
  keep a close eye on your colleagues for unusual behaviour — swiveling eye turrets, snatching insects out of the air with a quick flick of the tongue Know your enemy: True Facts About the Chameleon (which happens to have some...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: 419/Rule 34
  In some parts of criminology, at least, a "true mafia" is defined by the fact that it functions as a kind of government for the criminal underworld. More exactly, it provides (in exchange for generous fees!) quasi-governmental services, such as...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  In the case of Frank Corder: I don't think that starting off from an airport inside the country itself really counts as "[taking] on a properly-worked-up first world air defence network". (Matthias Rust did start off from Finland, so that...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The Nazi nuclear research program was hampered by the perception that it was a Jewish idea, which meant they had to reverse-engineer everything Einstein and co. had publicly published in a way that would be politically acceptable. Not really. The...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  ... the US-based Allied research programme at Los Alamos and elsewhere was headed by an engineer Both programs were headed by scientists: the American one by Oppenheimer, the German one by Heisenberg. The problem was that Heisenberg had erroneously calculated...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  AIUI it was the White SA that got rid of their nukes ... Yes; the dismantling of the weapons took place in 1990 (though the existence of the program and its ending wasn't made public until 1993, I think); the...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Considering that we'd sold Saddam most of his weapons ... You've gotten your pronouns confused; with the exception of France, the "we" who fought against Iraq in the Gulf War were not the countries which sold Saddam "most of his...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I think the Anglosphere would have more to do with cultural and legal traditions than language, though language is clearly a prerequisite for it. That would rule out India, Pakistan ... As royal.canadian.bandit noted previously, this would most definitely rule...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  ... a healthcare law which in any other free country in the world would be understood to be a matter for the legislature alone with no element of constitutionality in its passage into law... Just because you haven't heard of...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  ... displacement and extermination of the local indigenes and finally the American Civil War. Really we in the EU don't want to screw up royally like your Founding Slaveowners^WPropertied White Men^W^W^WFathers did, so we'll pass thank you very much. That's...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Why stop there? You could categorize languages based on the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which might include the following: Languages that belong to a corporation Dead languages; Insane languages; Imaginary languages; Languages included in this category; Languages that, at...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  The USA is well on the way to being a Spanish-speaking nation by 2100 As realzompist said, this is a right-wing... well, not pipe dream, exactly -- more of a paranoid crack-pipe hallucination, which you seem to have accidentally gotten...
• Commented on The Anthropic Stupidity Hypothesis
  And “Al-jibra” (the calculation) was not really an arab invention – almost all of “arab” mathematics came from India, originally. I thought this was well-documented? No, because it's not really true. What is true is that Islamic (chiefly Arab and...