Via Ry. Meet MOP, Boeing's new bunker-busting super-bomb:

The 20-foot-long bomb that weighs 30,000 pounds — much heavier than the 21,000-pound MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Burst bomb, unveiled in the prelude to the Iraq war.

...

MOP will go a lot deeper — 200 feet of 5,000 psi concrete. MOP pulls it off by not being all that explosive — less than 20% by weight, compared to almost 90% for the MOAB. That's because bunker-busting bombs need very thick casings to survive the effects of impact.

...

Potential targets for MOP or other deep penetrators would include the Iranian underground centrifuge cascade at Natanz and the heavy-water reactor complex under construction at Arak.

Ry told me about it yesterday. I thought about for a few seconds and announced, "I'll bet I could defeat it with 100 feet or less of concrete." I explained and Ry countered with a solution to my defense. I modified my defense and defeated that as well. About midnight last night I woke up with a solution to my modified defense--use more than one bomb per target. I thought about that solution for a few seconds and came up a defense against that attack plan too.

I incredibly impressed someone has designed a non-nuclear bomb that will penetrate 200 feet of high end concrete. But with a smartly designed bunker that may not enough. But my thought process over the course of just a few hours should be a lesson to Iran, don't count on your bunkers being safe should you continue on your current path. You designs could be made obsolete in a matter of days. Can you redesign and rebuild as fast was we can come up with new attack plans? And you won't know our plans until after the bombs start dropping.

The 10 Real Reasons Why Geeks Make Better Lovers

This includes such things as:

Geeks don't shock easily

Geeks have seen all the porn you can imagine and then some, priming them to be open to your sexual peccadilloes. They are not only less likely to be shocked by your exotic requests -- they might not even realize that other people think your turn-ons are exotic.

Conversely, your geek lover might be relieved that your wildest fantasy involves only two other people, five utensils and a trapeze.

Geeks know kinky people

Geeks haven't just seen a variety of positions, kinks and fetishes in blue movies. They know (or are) people who enjoy those things, so they don't dismiss entire categories of sexual interests as the sole province of a bunch of weirdos in San Francisco.

It's hard to sustain prejudice and bias against an abstract group when you develop relationships with individuals and discover they're just like you. It doesn't matter if they dress up like ponies, or refuse to conform to a societal idea of gender norms, or eat pancakes for dinner. Geek lovers know better than to try to impose their sexual preferences or standards on others -- including your friends -- and are more likely to love and let love.

A leftist idea can be recognized by three earmarks, It will be:

1) Founded in ignorance,
2) Focused on irrelevance,
3) Engaged in wishful thinking.

Mark Philip Alger
http://www.babytrollblog.com/
[Also found in the sidebar with the above:

4) "And threaten use of the coercive power of the state to extract compliance."
--Arnold's Corollary (ed.)

Yup, and the political right has it's own set of faulty hypotheses (gay cooties for example) and follows up with the same number 4). This is why, in part, the U.S. Constitution only granted the government an enumerated set of powers. To protect the people against things the government has no business getting involved in. But virtually no one pays attention to the Constitution anymore.--Joe]

It’s not a build break until you have people baying for your blood in the morning.

Suresh Parameshwar
April 3, 2007
[From a technical perspective a "build break" occurs when computer source code will not compile (the automated process of converting human readable code into machine code). In almost every medium or larger sized project people check-in their code to a common computer which does the compile once per day/week/whatever. The resultant code is then installed on test machines and the testers go to work on it to see if they can find bugs. The developers also "sync up" with the common computer to get everyone else's changes to use in their development for the next day. If the build breaks nearly all the testers and many of the developers are idle until the build is fixed. Hence, it's a big deal if the build is broken.

I had checked in some code in the middle of the afternoon with a stupid mistake that broke things. Mike noticed it something like 40 minutes later and I fixed it within a few minutes--long before the morning build. Suresh was reassuring me it wasn't a big deal, even though I was quite embarrassed.

Today Suresh was slightly embarrassed when I during a code review I pointed out one of his mistakes. But we're not going to talk about that here.--Joe]

From Albany New York:

Under the proposed law, gun owners would have to register with the city, even if they already have a valid gun permit. And dealers would be required to file a report every day with the chief of police, listing sales.

The measure would also outlaw the sale of higher caliber ammunition.

So what is it this is supposed to accomplish? Can they answer Just One Question before going forward with this? Of course not.

And can you imagine stink that would raised if a similar laws were proposed for some minority group other than gun owners?

Bigots. Nothing but bigotry can explain their beliefs and actions.

Currently I'm not at liberty to go into great detail on what is happening with the return of the DVDs constituting 99+% of the information we obtained in discovery. That will soon be fought in court and I can probably talk more about it then. What I can say is that PNNL claimed the information on those DVDs was "extremely sensitive" information and hence my lawyer and I were required to return it. The judge agreed without giving us an opportunity to refute that claim. This is acceptable in certain extraordinary circumstances which PNNL/Battelle claimed were present.

I thought people would be interested in knowing what PNNL defines as "sensitive". This is from their public website (IIRC PNWD stands for Pacific NorthWest Division):

sensitive information

At PNWD, information is considered sensitive if any of the following criteria are met: information is protected under the Privacy Act information for which Battelle would be liable if released to unauthorized individuals information for which Battelle is legally responsible information of which corruption or loss would substantially delay a project or impact the completion of a mission or goal information that cannot be reproduced or that would be unreasonably expensive to reproduce information that could profit an employee or outsider through unauthorized use, modification, or disclosure; or information that could be harmful to DOE, Battelle, or cause unfavorable publicity (e.g., financial, technical, or supply data) data identified by DOE as unclassified controlled nuclear information (UCNI) or data identified as export controlled information.

Bold emphasis added by me.

Needless to say we are challenging the validity of this as being sufficient reason to withhold discovery data. These guys are slime-balls and know that public disclosure is not good for their future.

I can understand their motives. Being rented out to their fellow inmate bidding the most cigarettes is something to be postponed as long as possible.

It was a day when men, recognizing the reality of evil, carried weapons that enabled them to stand in the gap for those being unjustly tormented and threatened. Virtually any man on the street could come to the aid of a victim like Clara.

That was then; this is now.

Bob Allen
April 4, 2007
How gun control trades life for death
[Clara is the woman killed in the CNN building yesterday.--Joe]

And you choose to be unarmed? To me, that just doesn't make sense.

Nicki Stallard
Pink Pistols: The Gay Group That's Getting Armed
Posted April 3, 2007
[Jeff Soyer, gay gun blogger at Alphecca, is quoted in this article as well.--Joe]

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu Wu
From The Art of War
[PNNL will love seeing this one today.--Joe]

Boomershoot 2007 stuff. There are even mugs, posters, bibs, thongs, and boxer shorts. All with this awesome image (edited by Xenia Joy):

A flight attendant accidentally carried a gun on board an airplane. She apparently went right through security with it. If they can't defend against people accidentally carrying weapons on board then they sure as heck can't defend against people that deliberately attempt to get them past security. They should investigate the alternatives and just give up this tremendous waste of money.

Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: Can’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get ’em, and then no one will use them. And if Iran’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device that’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

Mark Steyn
Facing Down Iran
[It is my belief we will "wake up" when Israel or an major U.S. city gets hit with a surprise nuclear attack. And although the "progressives" will whine about "it must have been our fault" we will finally take appropriate action. The question is how many 100's of millions, on both sides, will die due us waiting so long? Thanks to my brother Doug for sending me the quote and the link.--Joe]

Can you imagine what would have happened if some wide spot in the road had kidnapped a boat full of 'Er Majesty's tars back in the days of Pax Britannia?

HMS Thunderer would have dropped anchor in the harbor of whatever pathetic hamlet they were being held captive. Royal Marines would have been disembarked. Crowds of Wogs would have been mowed down by Gatlings and run through with Martini bayonets. The local rajah would have forked over his prisoners, or he would have found his house burned to the ground and Tommy Atkins pissing on the ashes.

Tamara K.
March 30, 2007
England, ma'am. It's where Great Britain used to be.

In a way I'm relieved they took back the DVDs with all the data I was going through. It had been a gold mine of useful information but this weekend I can let the caffiene circulatory system revert back to blood and get some sleep. It was wonderful to refresh my memory on so many things and be much better prepared to ask questions but I really needed some rest. The battle over the DVDs will be fought by the lawyers and either way Battelle comes out looking like a bunch of clowns and/or jerks.

The depositions and even the close of discovery may be delayed because of this. It's hard to imagine the fight over the DVDs will be over in time to keep on schedule. We'll see...

Yesterday I was talking about the current state of things with one of my primary financial backers. He congratulated me on hiding my true intentions on this blog. He said early on he was concerned about me being able to do that but that he was completely sucked in by my disinformation campaign. Cool! But what was so hard about it?

The Personal Protection Act has succeeded in destroying the myth that legally-armed citizens are somehow a threat to the general public. We knew they were wrong, and now everybody else knows it, too.

Joe Waldron
March 30, 2007
Executive Director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
ANTI-GUNNERS WRONG (AGAIN) ABOUT MINNESOTA CARRY

This case just gets more and more interesting.

Matthew Bean
March 29, 2007
[Bean is my lawyer in the PNNL case. Today the bad guys got a court order to demand we return 17 DVD's (and destroy all the copies) we had obtained as part of discovery. A lot of the information they gave us last week were printouts of my blog, nothing new for me to find there. Subtract that and the portions of the personnel file I already had and they took back more than 99% of the information they supplied to us. I had to leave work and get them to the lawyers office as quickly as I could. They sent someone to pick them up. Like I said before, I was shocked they hadn't destroyed some of the stuff they gave me. They might now. Fortunately for me the more data of theirs they suppress or destroy the more of the total evidence consists of my log files. Yes, they are backed up in numerous safe places and I'm adding another location tomorrow. I was right to go into full overdrive mode to get through as much data as quickly as I could. As I told Barb today, they can't legally delete my mind.--Joe]