When you’ve got over half a trillion dollars at stake, people will do or say pretty much anything. So it gets hard to figure out what’s going on when you read headlines in the form of “X is an ongoing disaster” alongside of “great cost-savings achieved via X” for any given X. It’s hard to be both a tremendous success and an ongoing disaster. I am, naturally, referring to the latest news about the F-35 program.
As Dan Geer once said, “We all have limited time; thank you for yours.”
… I’m going to a small conference up in Chicago the next couple days. So I’ll be driving (to avoid the homeland security fol-de-rol) and otherwise may be too occupied to say much. If I seem uncharacteristically quiet, that’s what’s what. It doesn’t mean I hate you, or you’re the last commenter standing. Whether I post or not is going to depend on my activity level at the event.
Back in December, 2016, the US Government officially punished Russia by closing down their beautiful love-shack on the Chesapeake Bay. [stderr] [Read more…]
I periodically post this in comments on other blogs when the topic comes up. A lot of Americans are ignorant of the law regarding torture, and are kept that way, deliberately. Let me clear that up a bit for us all.
There are many agencies that have some degree of charter for computer security – but “defense” has been a bit of a hot potato. Meanwhile, the NSA (and now we know CIA, and probably every other Three Letter Agency) used to go to security conferences like DEFCON and advertise that they were hiring hackers. Of course they were.
The idea that you can tell things about a person from their appearance underlies the entire point of dressing up, wearing make-up, and being concerned with our appearance. There are probably some things you might be able to assume from a person’s looks, but it’s still going to be pretty unreliable: you can’t tell someone’s a terrorist because they “look muslim” because “looking muslim” is a vague concept to begin with.
What about people who look like criminals?
You’ve probably already heard about this: United Airlines oversold a seat and threw a passenger off the flight – literally, with security guards dragging him kicking and screaming off the plane as other passengers, horrified, recorded it with their phone cameras.