> To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
The gist of it is in August of 1991, hardline Soviet leaders, opposed to political reform, attempted a coup. As part of this coup, the elimination of Yeltsin was planned. Yeltsin was inside the Russian White House, which was surrounded by a very large crowd of civilians who opposed the coup. KGB chairman and leader of the coup, Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered the KGB's spetzna (Alfa) to fight their way through the crowd of civilians into the Russian White House to eliminate Yeltsin. Alfa showed up to do the job, but upon seeing and mingling with the crowd of civilians, decided against slaughter.
Incidentally, Alfa is also the group that in 1979 stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated Hafizullah Amin, starting the Soviet-Afghan War.
von Braun and his team specifically sought out Americans to surrender to. Characterizing a surrender as "theft" (as though people are property?!) is truly bizarre.
What is this whitewashing? The Soviet Union never stopped assassinating people, and the practice clearly continued into present day Russia. Boris Yeltsin was one whim away from being assassinated in 1991 on orders from the KGB; the only reason it didn't happen is because the Alfa group commanders decided not to be bloodthirsty that day.
> Shouldn’t they have a paper-based/offline downtime procedure for this?
If they did, I would expect their employees to be out of practice with such methods since they weren't working that way day-to-day. Unless they're running regular "all computers are down"-drills to keep their employees sharp, downtime was probably inevitable.
Does it really make a difference, with respect to whether they should be kicked off HackerOne? Incompetence and disorganization is no excuse for what is essentially (if not literally) wage theft.
Depleted uranium has indeed been used in airplanes. Some models of 747 have a ton or so of depleted uranium, though I believe this practice was phased out in later models.
It's not just planes though. Some sailboats have been made with DU keels. Usually lead is used, but DU would presumably allow for a smaller (thinner?) keel.
> Also, slightly unrelated but Cloudflare protected websites are almost impossible to access via tor, the captcha never succeeds.
Yes, I've never understood why it's seemingly so important to CAPTCHA me before serving me less than 100kb of read only plain jane HTML. What sort of "attack" is this stopping? I'm pretty sure the CAPTCHA itself is bigger than half the sites it blocks me from reading.
Perhaps Elbakyan should promptly convert to Islam so she can claim she's being persecuted by Islamophobic investigators. I'm only half joking. As dumb as that may be, I think it does actually have some purchase in America.
Yeah, that's a bizarre headline. I'm not sure it's wrong, but it's quite strange.
Edit: I'm not sure actually right either. It was not the act of eating that transported the bodies; rather the bodies were brought there so they could be eaten.
"Hyenas dragged 9 Neanderthals to a cave to eat them."
If the mugger isn't bluffing, then he'll get your money one way or the other. This makes it different from paying ransoms.
Furthermore, a corporation's bottom line is not truly comparable to a human life. However it is my understanding that paying ransoms to save human lives is technically illegal to. If paying a ransom to save your family member's life is illegal, then corporations paying ransoms to protect their finances should certainly be illegal.
> How does anyone justify these obscure tokens and coins being worth billions.
The Greater Fool Theory. This stops working when you run out of fools, but the notion of "there's another sucker born every minute" probably keeps the ball rolling for a while.
I don't think it has anything to do with energy or the environment. I think Elon Musk distancing himself from Bitcoin is a consequence of the recent spat of highly publicized ransomware attacks using bitcoin. Elon Musk is connected to the military-industrial complex; it is plausible the federal government has given him forewarning of an impending war on crypto currencies, to make sure their asset, the guy who launches lots of their satellites, doesn't get caught in the crossfire.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.