> The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them.[19] The "windows" evidently worked, as the first western reports of the aircraft were wildly inaccurate, to the point of some analysts even concluding its primary mission was as an air superiority aircraft for hunting and killing NATO attack helicopters.

Not Google but they were gaming ufo people. Thee was a good documentary about this called "Mirage Men"

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/men-in-black-ufo...

http://sputniknews.com/military/20150928/1027670037/kgb-cia-...

Probably followed by liquidation of the parties responsible.

Communist Russia was coming apart at the seams, and it took the US many years to realize it. There's a lot of complexity.

Also: _The Structures of Everyday Life_ and _Simplicius Simplicissimus_ both touch on Russia, in ways that suggest that the country (post-Mongol-conquest) always did have a certain amount of proto-Sovietness to it -- alcohol sales as a state monopoly, for example, or arms always coming from royal treasuries.

The USSR was not much of a superpower in the technology side. They got ALL of their technology from western corporations in technology transfers and sales from 1917 to today. They constantly got "last years model" of weapons and tech. This is documented in a three volume scholarly work called "Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development 1917 - 1930, 1930-1945, 1945-1965". Also I find it funny this is released the same week the X-Files returns to Fox. Talk about the CIA / Entertainment nexus.

I thought cheque books were a relic of the past until moving to the UK.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFTPOS

First thing I got when I moved to France (admittedly 12 years ago) was a checkbook. Hadn't heard of them since the 80s in Sweden.

I used to pay my milkman with a cheque, but he's online now.

Most major retailers (e.g. WalMart) have electronic check acceptance, where they scan the check, print all the details on it, then hand it back to you. It's faster than a debit card, if a bit awkward at first.

My mother still routinely pays for nearly everything (groceries, pizza, hardware, etc.) using personal checks. She lives in a small town though.

What you are likely confusing is "Seal Team 6", which is now properly listed as "United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group" or DEVGRU.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/delta-fo...

I called them "CAG" in 2008. I'm willing to guess they're not even "ACE" anymore.

> At the Soviet Aviation Day demonstrations at the Tushino Airfield, ten Bison bombers were flown past the reviewing stand, then flew out of sight, quickly turned around, and flew past the stands again with eight more, presenting the illusion that there were 28 aircraft in the flyby. Western analysts extrapolated from the illusionary 28 aircraft, judging that by 1960 the Soviets would have 800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap

Just imagine if you were playing chess against an opponent and as soon as you made your carefully planned movement the other player immediately made his move and it was your turn again right away. It feels pretty aggressive, doesn't it?

So I gave players the impression of the computer taking time to think by instituting a random delay (within a given range which I tested until it felt right) before it acted, and I think it felt a lot more natural and less aggressive because of that.

If people are curious about the game, it's easy to find and you can play it online.

I even turned down a request from the Puzzle Pirates guys to include it as a minigame in their game (that was a mistake), and OmgPop almost paid me to make a version for their website (shortly before they made Draw Something and got bought by Zynga), but I was too busy trying to finish my degree at the time.

I've been tempted to start an open source version to get some help developing it, but I started getting more into board game design lately and I've been programming less and less in my spare time. Kinda hoping I get a reputation in the board game world and then get a board game version of Proximity published (it's an abstract, so it's a harder sell to publishers).

Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the game. Hopefully someday I'll put out a newer version of it.

I've also done this in some programs I wrote as a teenager to solve math / physics homework to make it seem like it was doing more than it was.

DigitalOcean's Create Droplet flow comes to mind. You get a progress bar indicating your droplet is being created, but in just a few seconds you can click "My Droplets" and go use it immediately.

On HN there was this about Well Fargo "Establishing Secure Connection".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5305925

It was pretty hilarious.

I got a bug-fix from the form developer that his button wasn't working, and I kept trying to explain to him that it couldn't possibly work, it didn't do anything.

Finally he explained that if the user had clicked the fake button already, and then changed their search to a search that reported the same results, it wasn't pretending to search again, and this was causing a lot of bug reports from his client.

I helped him rewrite the fake button to make a bigger deal about (fake) searching again, and apparently the bug reports went away.

We would number hotfixes sequentially. Customers would be notified when hotfixes were to be deployed to their sites. One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence and worked out both that we had a lot of hotfixes (tens per week) and that they didn't get them all right away (if you don't ask for it, it comes to you in the next quarterly trunk release.) Many awkward discussions ensued.

Solution: new policy to number hotfixes randomly instead of sequentially. Whoops, now sometimes hotfixes that had dependencies would get deployed in the wrong order.

Solution: also name hotfixes by date. Whoops, now the client can figure out that two weeks elapsed before they got the hotfix. (For all your usual enterprisey red-tapey risk-aversey reasons.)

Just because there private hotfixes that deliver custom tweaks to specific customers. in fact, that's exactly how Microsoft has had it set up for years.

Then you might create another hotfix while that decision making process is going on, and both you and the client need to evaluate whether it's possible and desirable to apply the first one, second one, or both.

It's why versioning, source control, build process automation, and client communication are so important to get right from the outset.

employee #63, invoice #51775. press 1 for sales, 2 for support. sure.

I originally wrote "versioning convention" but realized I had to drop convention.

The OXCART program (SR-71 predecessor) was a CIA program. This is probably one of the best pieces of journalism I've ever read on the topic:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-mag-april052009-back...

While the entire article is good, paragraphs 5-8 are by far the best. The CIA literally drugged their own test pilot during debriefing.

>I'm pretty sure this is the result of a deliberate strategy: create a bunch of fake information, so that real information about US military capabilities will be harder to find. A few hints and a few taunts, and voila, every discussion about unidentified aircraft is guaranteed to have a schizophrenic walk in and start rambling about aliens!

I was actually just writing about this, except in context of aviation industry insiders perhaps misleading a respected industry journalist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971548

Entire thread for context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957365

Page 3, point 4:

"Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomenon or known types of aerial vehicles."

Also note the National Security Council directive on the last page.

You're referring to project OXCART which preceded the Blackbird program. The documentary you're referring to was called "Area 51 Declassified" which was on National Geographic channel:

https://youtu.be/fE8xqTO6hXk

It's a fascinating documentary

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/05/110520-area-...

There are only so many military aircraft and drones. They are relatively distinct. Add to those a handful of properly-black projects and there are perhaps a hundred types in service. Compare that to the thousands of civilian models out there, many of them very odd looking. Things like Rutan's VariEze get rather close to the flying-triangles. And some very unique objects, including random light patterns, also fly in the civilian world. So given the far greater number of civilian aircraft, outside of restricted airspace I'd say that most sightings are probably of strange but non-military flying vehicles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutan_VariEze

http://www.hugeskyadvertising.com/Scrolling-LED-Flying-SIGN....

You might have more luck if you google "Groom Lake Air Force Base".

All that really circles back to the first part of my comment, the CIA and military had people dedicated to management of the story and the people involved. Legends and myths can be created, you just have to plan it out and act on the plan correctly

It's funny how today many people call them "flying saucers" due to a misunderstanding of Kenneth Arnold's description of the objects that he claims to have seen in 1947 because more than 800 years ago, someone reported seeing what he described as a "flying earthenware vessel" in the sky over Edo(Tokyo) Japan.

People have been seeing things in the sky for a very long time. We simply don't know all of them are. Anyone who claims to know with absolute certainty what they are is just speculating. Chances are, that person just wants to sell you their book.

Most of them are eventually identified as mundane.

I'm Canadian but that reminded of some relatives who sent a video of a birthday party. They were outside and a big booming noise could be heard and they all looked to see what it was.

I didn't think much of it since it was hard to hear other than a sort of jet sound but they lived there and seemed to think it was different or unusual in some way.

They lived in Apple Valley in the "high desert" (I didn't know what that meant) years later I found out Area 51 is pretty close.

I don't beleive in aliens but it was interesting to know the video had a mysterious aircraft and Area 51 in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwards_Air_Force_Base

Many interesting things like the B-2 and the space shuttle were also produced in Palmdale (to the west of Apple Valley). You often see interesting things flying around that area.

EDIT: Virgin Galactic has nothing directly to do with Edwards, but they test in that airspace.

While this is true, it isn't incorrect to call them "unidentified flying objects". All top-secret aircraft projects are by definition unidentified flying objects. It's up to the crackpot bullshit artists to interpret "unidentified" as "confirmed alien".

This is one of my favorite twists on conspiracy theories - that they themselves are often a product of conspiracies. Or that they get discreetly, erm what would be the right word, native speakers? Kinda "fed" (by controlled information leaks, for instance) if it serves some purpose.

This one?

It was the second match when I used the search query: area 51 cold spots russia satellite -alien