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Comment by patrickk | Hacker News Reader

Spot on. It always struck me as an elaborate joke just to spook the authorities and see what kind of a reaction they would get.

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Ahem. "I am ruling out nuclear propulsion because I assume The Pirate Bay do not have access to a supply of fissionable materials. Otherwise, it's Game Over for the MPAA."

No smileys here: No sir.

I was referring to the original Pirate Bay post describing their plan for the LOSS proposal, not this particular article. Plenty of people here seem to be treating it as a serious project, judging by the comments here at least....

Building underground pizza-eating rat robots (with or without smilies) sound as serious as the original proposal, that didn't include smilies either.

I am shocked, SHOCKED sir, that you could possibly suspect anyone would write a humorous piece without smilies!

I am sure Jonathan Swift is spinning in his grave.

Perhaps we could attach his corpse to a generator and put an induction charging mat in the roof of his coffin (or shallower if it's really 6 feet down and the surrounding soil is found to have high iron content, thereby effectively blocking the inductive charging) so that the rat bots can use /that/ to charge. We'd need some type of authentication system for the rat bots so the police ferret bots don't tap the same power. I'd suggest a pressure-sensitive switch linked to an arduino-powered RFID reader. Perhaps it would also require a key revocation system in the event that one or more rat bots ate recovered and the ferret bots attempt to spoof the RFID tags. We could accomplish this with some type of coffin-to-coffin mesh network (an "Under[ground]Net[work]", if you will.)

I'll start the project on Github and propose my idea for budgetary consideration at Noisebridge. We can get a Google Docs group going and I'll run the Dokuwiki off my linode vm.

Cheers!

Poe's Law makes satire difficult these days. With the huge amount of tech sites that post stories like this with a straight face, I actually wasn't sure it was satire, and I follow your blog pretty regularly. I thought it was out of character based on earlier posts (your analysis on space travel), but I've seen worse serious posts pop up on reddit and even here.

My rule of thumb: if I LOL, it's satire. If I don't, it doesn't matter. I remember a couple of times it was embarrasing, though.

One was at the movies. Pulp Fiction. Christopher Walken is telling the story of the watch. When it reaches certain level, I am the only laughing person around. The more I feel everybody throwing me vicious looks in the dark, the less I can't stop.

Edit: BTW, I enjoyed the story a lot, thanks cstross!

Glad to see people noticing how absurd this whole idea really is. Every time I read something about this 'proposal' it conjures up a mental image of a smoke-filled room full of geeks on a sci-fi/spy film bender who haven't left their parents basement for two months.

It really is absurd, I can't believe anyone would take it seriously for a second.

I mean go to http://thepiratebay.se/legal and read some of the stuff they send back to companies/lobby groups who threaten them with legal action. Hilarious, but you wouldn't exactly take what they are saying as gospel.

When I think of unmanned UAVs, I think of advanced DARPA research, or the UAV from the GRAW videogames[1]. This isn't something remotely feasible for TPB.

This is what I'd imagine happened:

- The pirate bay guys, with their naughty sense of humour, sat around a table and said "hmm, wonder what we could possibly do right now to make the MPAA and their Congressional lapdogs really choke on their caviar and burbon..."

- Mikael* in the corner pipes up, "I know! Let's announce some outlandish, yet semi-technically feasible idea which geeks will know is bullshit but will make those crazy, out-of-control American lawmakers propose some more insane laws. Then in a couple of weeks, we can release another announcement, saying what idiots they are and why do they insist on wasting taxpayers dollars on locking down their own airspace and generally turning themselves into North Korea..."

- Then the chairman goes "Great idea! Meeting adjourned. Mikael, you are promoted to senior-shit stirrer!"

(Needless to say, this is all conjecture and quite possibly bullshit, but far more plausible to me than TPB actually launching sci-fi UAVs in the near future.)

*I'm making up a Nordic-sounding name here, what can I say, I'm reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the moment.

[1] http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/765/765249...

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