Odd Things

[chookmustard]

Jun 23, 2013 10:28:19 GMT 10 angra said:

I'm sure some good person here can help me with this.

What's the best way to grow Cannas?

A neighbour is digging up a large bed and has offered us the bulbs.

Just stick 'em in the ground, or what? Sun?

Being the resident horticulturalist, I'll take this one.
Just bung the bulbs into a prepared area, with decent drainage of course. If they sit in boggyiness while not growing some may rot away.

Springtime will do the rest.

I've grown them before when I worked in production. They grew easily, and if they needed tidying up before sale etc etc , We cut them low (in pots) and applied slow release fert prills, added some water occasionally and left them alone.

Bloody things are hard to kill actually.

Ever grown zantedeschias?

[angra]

Thanks chookmustard. Will do.

And zantedeschias? My dad managed to grow some.

I managed to kill some Dendrobrium Habbemense painfully brought from the highlands of PNG but not suitable for coastal climates like Sydney - they only survive at over 5,000 foot altitude. Customs were a bit non-plussed.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

My golly, that's BRILLIANT!

www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-security-washingtonbre95m08u-20130623,0,2374212.story

"[House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike] Rogers urged the Obama administration to exhaust all legal options to get Snowden back to the United States. "If he really believes he did something good, he should get on a plane, come back and face the consequences of his actions," he said."

Yes. That's totally what snowden's going to be thinking. How could anyone resist such a compelling argument? Yes! The Truth Will Out! That's totally how a military tribunal system works.

I'm of two minds about snowden and the wikileaks thing. Yes, they are relying on betrayals of professional trust to do their work, and I do have a problem with that. I actually don't think that bradley manning should get a free ride, and if snowden does get caught I won't be arguing for his release. Those guys did the wrong thing, and it's not actually "brave" if there are no consequences.

However ...

Both of those cases have highlighted some serious problems in the US, not only with the things they do, but with the way they manage classified information. In the embassy comms leaks they had clearly over-classified way too much stuff, which meant that way too many people then had to be cleared to an unnecessarily high level to do their jobs, which THEN meant that way too many people had access to the real stuff. That's just a result of not thinking it through. And in an effort to overcome the institutional rivalries between agencies, they apparently implemented a bit too much unjustifiable pooling of information (why was a military private in iraq even READING embassy communications?!?!? What possible need did that answer?). So rather than doing proper systems analysis and coming up with the RIGHT solutions, they apparently skipped all that and just implemented the wrong ones. Their security classification apparatus is evidently AFU.

So I think they've had a bunch of embarrassment headed their way for a while. It's probably for the best that the impact has been relatively low-level stuff that doesn't really put the defence of the west at stake, and just embarrassed congress. If could be worse - it could be something like the F22's and F35's engine and radar designs.

Apparently congress is being briefed on 50 terrorist plots that have been foiled by this prism thing. I hope they haven't invited the most gormless congresspeople to that meeting, coz I reckon there's probably going some padding there.

[angra]

We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Yankees seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven? — Is he in hell?
That damned, elusive Edward Snowden.

[angra]

MoC - Snowden and Assange for that matter may have broken US laws, but what gives the US the right to eavesdrop on the whole world's communication? They have increasingly acted as a law unto themselves. How do we know what checks and balances are in place when it is illegal to even report that such surveillance occurs? How can we know that such data will not be misused to frame critics, discredit 'enemies', blackmail public figures? Cook the books?

[chookmustard]

Intones 'the greater good'.

Hot Fuzz reference, greatest movie ever outside of Ghostbusters 1 and 2

[angra]

Fashionable business words to hate.

The latest?

Agile.

It's so f***ing stupid.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

Er ... I'm sorry, but wasn't this already obvious? Anyone who bothered to properly pay attention already realised that the problem wasn't political interference, but the mechanisms used by an overworked and underfunded IRS workgroup. So ... will there now be a bunch of apologies? Will The Right continue to be a whining bunch of dummy-spitting moist towelettes?

"IRS targeting political was even more widespread than thought and included terms 'Israel,' 'occupy' and 'medical marijuana'"

Another made-to-measure bullshit rightwing conspiracy theory. Add it to the rapidly-growing pile. Used to be that conspiracy theories were a "leftist" thing. These days if a "conservative" encounters a red light it's because they're a victim.

And I'm totally convinced that andrew bolt will write a post decrying this attack on leftists tomorrow. Because he is totally NOT a far-right zealot.

[angra]

What's happened to the Internets?

I can't send emails with embedded images - even thumbnails. This has only happened in the last few days.

Can I blame Conroy? Or is it Microsoft?

[Matthew Of Canberra]

"I can't send emails with embedded images - even thumbnails. This has only happened in the last few days"

What's your email client? Outlook? Thunderbird? Elm?

A couple of possibilities:

(1) You've switched your default email-writing format from HTML to plain text (there should be a way to switch it back on an individual message, which would be a giveaway)

(2) If it's outlook, I seem to recall that it happened at work back when we were still running 2003. It's a bug, and the clever folks on the service desk had a fix for it that involved deleting a temporary files from the local part of the profile directory. I'll check today.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

"Can I blame Conroy? Or is it Microsoft?"

It's obviously due to the carbon tax. Or asbestos.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

Ok, this has to be the bizarrest use of language in international relations in a while:

www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-26/putin-confirms-nsa-whistleblower-snowden-still-at-moscow-airport/4780468

"I myself would prefer not to deal with these issues. It's like giving a baby pig a haircut – there's a lot of squealing but there's little wool," he said.

Your move, Washington.

EDIT: And I will just add that I'm very aware of the irony of a whistleblower relying on favors from two of the most totalitarian of advanced modern states for his protection. Neither russia nor china have anything to teach the US about openness or privacy.

[angra]

MoC - it's happening with Yahoo, Gmail (both web only) and the Livemail client. I can send one image, maybe two, but the rest just won't load, even though only thumbnails.

[Matthew Of Canberra]

Google it. See if somebody's mentioned it somewhere.

Have you checked that the images you're using (are they uploads) are valid? Is it something about the format?

[chookmustard]

So Bernard Tomic beats his Wimbledon opponent in 5sets after taking a break mid game because he was dizzy, tired and ill.

The reason? He didn't have enough brekky in the morning and he ran out of energy.

Not sure that's in the spirit of the game, to not prep correctly and then recharge mid game to put your opponent off.

How odd