[News] strange happenings of 2015

[Rosenakahara]

Because both NK's and other country's military advisers know that if they actually attacked SK in full force then they would lose and i don't just mean lose i mean they would get DESTROYED, china wouldn't actually back them, they would be idiots to and so NK just pretends like it has balls, it doesn't.

[r1cepurin]

Because both NK's and other country's military advisers know that if they actually attacked SK in full force then they would lose and i don't just mean lose i mean they would get DESTROYED, china wouldn't actually back them, they would be idiots to and so NK just pretends like it has balls, it doesn't.

My sister is a teacher in South Korea, and literally none of her students take the DPRK seriously. Both her students and the teachers don't even refer to Kim as his name, they just call him "The fat man"

[drinian]

Because both NK's and other country's military advisers know that if they actually attacked SK in full force then they would lose and i don't just mean lose i mean they would get DESTROYED, china wouldn't actually back them, they would be idiots to and so NK just pretends like it has balls, it doesn't.

Such a conflict would cause an incredible loss of human life. Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. The fact that this is possible is enough.

That being said, you are right that these threats are mostly empty -- it's all about internal politics in North Korea. This happens every few years. In fact, it happened while I was in North Korea in 2009.

[Gob Hobblin]

The North Korean military would wipe Seoul off the face of the earth, and most likely steamroll the DMZ (very much like they did in the Korean war). The problem they would run into that is the fact that they have a massive military with extremely out of date equipment, crap logistics (which would not extend easily the further the NK military got away from the DPRK), and the fact that all of the real heavy firepower isn't on the DMZ, it's deeper in South Korea and in the Sea of Japan.

The follow-up strikes, combined with a massive air campaign, would crush the NK military offensive and roll it in on itself.

[Nuclear Lunchbox]

Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea.

This is one of the biggest reasons why nobody's taken the time to stop all over the DPRK yet-- even if North Korea goes, Seoul's going away along with it.

[Rosenakahara]

I know this is politics but:
[url]http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/north-korea-warns-will-attack-6290303?ICID=FB_mirror_main[/url]
SPOILER ALERT: they didn't attack, like everyone expected honestly SK just continued as normal through the whole thing, everybody knows for a fact they wont.

[PanzerEVA]

A vintage Hawker Hunter jet fighter has crashed at Shoreham Airshow in West Sussex, UK, today... i would know: I was there

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/22/hawker-hunter-plane-crash-shoreham-air-show-reports

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvHplYmh2f8

[MAGI_01]

Staying indoors today as the entire region is covered by smoke from all the wildfires on the east side of the state as well as eastern Oregon and Idaho. http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/northwestern-fires-by-night

Things have gotten so bad that Obama declared a state of emergency for our state and we have firefighters from Australia and New Zealand on the way to help.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/as-winds-ease-crews-in-northwest-hope-to-contain-blazes/2015/08/22/b2d68c82-48f1-11e5-8ab4-c73967a143d3_story.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/western-wildfires/western-wildfires-experts-australia-will-help-u-s-firefighters-n413582

[Gob Hobblin]

This is one of the biggest reasons why nobody's taken the time to stop all over the DPRK yet-- even if North Korea goes, Seoul's going away along with it.

Not really; the artillery wasn't an issue when we had the desire to militarily invade North Korea. It was built up over the past five decades.

The biggest reason then was because of China; they showed their willingness to get involved in issues that happened too close to home. Now? It's less the artillery and more the aftermath. Any invasion of North Korea, combined with the toppling of the Kim regime, would result in a massive humanitarian flight into both China and South Korea, and that's without North Korea being absorbed by either the South or China. Either of those countries would then face economic ruin inheriting the disaster that's North Korea.

[Bagheera]

Man, that's depressing. That means the people of North Korea have been hung out to dry, and the Kim dynasty allowed to do as it pleases, not because of an effort to protect others but rather because it's too much goddamn trouble to deal with the aftermath of a fucking dictator's whims. That truly is shameful.

[Ray]

In today's world, the only way for dictators to fall is for the people suffering under said dictators to rise against them.

[Gob Hobblin]

It's not the only way; just one way among many.

As you can see from Ukraine and Egypt, simply pushing the dictator out on their own has its own slew of problems!

[soul.assassin]

http://bpdnews.com/news/2015/8/23/keeping-boston-safe-officers-arrest-two-suspects-recover-two-firearms-after-bpd-notified-of-online-threats-to-pokemon-world-championship?rq=pokemon
http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/23/9194747/pokemon-world-championships-2015-terror-threat

This is beyond madness by taking a kid's game too far, but fortunately the duo were stopped before they could do another copycat of Columbine.

[Rosenakahara]

yay censorship! -_-
[url]http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9196969/twitter-shuts-down-politwoops-diplotwoops[/url]

[Bagheera]

yay censorship! -_-
[url]http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9196969/twitter-shuts-down-politwoops-diplotwoops[/url]

I can't imagine why such things would be stored on Twitter rather than in a separate location (something like Storify, perhaps?). Why leave such things to the control of Twitter to begin with?

[drinian]

I can't imagine why such things would be stored on Twitter rather than in a separate location (something like Storify, perhaps?). Why leave such things to the control of Twitter to begin with?

They're not stored on Twitter.

Those sites used Twitter's API (a means for software to read Twitter in an automated fashion) to harvest tweets and detect which ones got deleted. Their API access has been revoked. Twitter's pretty good at controlling access to their site -- I suspect that if they tried to bulk-harvest tweets by pretending to be a human in a Web browser they might get blocked as well.

Twitter's terms of service say that you cannot reproduce deleted tweets.

I have my own personal opinions on this, but it's another sign of how the Internet is no longer the engineer's world it was in the 1990s and before.

[Nuclear Lunchbox]

I take screencaps of this kind of thing and store them on the external drive I use for other important things. Twitter can delete whatever they like-- my copies are safe. (I do the same thing when EGF posters are doing stupid things.)

[Ornette]

That's different than an API that allows you to pull anything that's posted by thousands of people the moment it happens, completely automated, that you can then save and sift through. Twitter has the right to do what they want with API access, it's part of the agreement when you ask for an API key. Of course, these sites can still go and browse twitter and save the content that way, but here you have a threat of a 3rd party monetizing twitter's content, so of course they considered that an issue. And it looks like this is the regular API (free) and not the firehose (which requires a business relationship with twitter directly).

[Bagheera]

They're not stored on Twitter.

Those sites used Twitter's API (a means for software to read Twitter in an automated fashion) to harvest tweets and detect which ones got deleted. Their API access has been revoked. Twitter's pretty good at controlling access to their site -- I suspect that if they tried to bulk-harvest tweets by pretending to be a human in a Web browser they might get blocked as well.

Twitter's terms of service say that you cannot reproduce deleted tweets.

Ah, I see. That makes sense, then, and as you and Ornette say that's entirely Twitter's call. It seems the entire premise of these sites is a violation of Twitter's ToS to begin with.

[Ornette]

Well, it's still a little fishy that they decided to do this, who knows what all the motivations really were. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to have an archive of public figure's tweets, I don't personally find the majority of that all that interesting. I wouldn't call is censorship though.