Undersecretary Elbridge Colby summoned the Papal Nuncio to the Pentagon, said the pope better get in line with Trump, and referenced the “Avignon Papacy”, a historical event where France kidnapped and killed the pope then set up a puppet Papacy.

Edit: Looking into it, the original story came from “anonymous Vatican sources”, and has since been officially denied by both sides.

I mean, the DoD literally threatened exactly that

What I don’t get is where does all the money they win come from? Somebody has to take the bets and lose right? Seems like an awful lot of money to just be fleecing random rubes.

Don’t fuck with Jesus… ask The Beatles.

It looks more like Jon Stewart to me

You know, I’m starting to think that maybe the “drive bay full of thermite” guy way back in the day WASN’T crazy…

Not just bipolar, but rapid cycling too!

Holy shit, I hadn’t thought about Pathfinder since it first came out on DVD… I remember it being great, gonna have to go hunting now!

True, what I was getting at is that AIS alone doesn’t prove that there is even any ship at all.

I’ve got a huge soft spot for OpenRC, my first experience with Linux was installing Gentoo on a junker PC i’d patched together from scavenged parts in like 2007. I actually worked from a printed out version of the handbook >.<

This is mostly a nothing burger. AIS has basically zero validation built in. I’m not sure where the article is sourcing its data from, but it’s probably an open source ship tracking site.

AIS datagrams aren’t encrypted, so you can make one with any ship ID and location data you want, then create a station account on one of the open trackers and inject it.

Alternatively, you could get a cheap SDR dongle and broadcast your spoofed messages to a nearby station and let them upload it. It’s been a while since played around with SDR, but you could probably get everything you need for around $200. You’d almost certainly be breaking licensing laws doing this, for what that’s worth.

Edited to add: Looks like this article is using kpler.com, where you can sign up to be a receiver station and feed them data.

That’s one the most insanely stupid things I’ve ever heard. Tokens are a tool used to do your job, a business expense, not fucking compensation.

Are the kWh that you use to light and air condition an office part of your compensation? How about toner and paper in the office printer?

If those tokens are a bonus, they’re yours, right? So you can burn half your annual salary worth of tokens translating Microsoft Encarta 95 into Klingon, and they will foot the bill?

I mean, you haven’t NOT been in missile range since the 60s, that’s when the Soviets really got their ICBMs online. Don’t need to put missiles in Cuba if they got the range to launch the from home.

We just stopped CAREING about being in range once it got to the point that we couldn’t actually do anything about it

ooh! ooh! Can we restart the systemd wars??

Scattered smothered covered chunked and topped!

https://archive.is/CV0Jt

Also, fun fact! We decommissioned our minesweeper fleet in the Gulf, the last of them were shipped out from Bahrain in January. You know, just weeks before we started a damn naval war. All we got now is some equipment bolted onto repurposed LCS…

The problem with the ‘declare victory and leave’ is that the enemy gets a vote. Even if shitler pulled forces back, Iran ain’t got no reason to stop shooting tankers now.

Also… Do we just have two carrier groups trapped in the Gulf now? Guess our navy is just gonna have to ‘man up’ like he told the tankers to? That could get real spicy REAL quick.

Except US politics is gonna burn the world down, we all in this shitshow together…