Working in tech as long as I have, I tend to take pre-announcements of “great new thing coming soon” as suspicious. But prerelease teasers are a way of telling what research is being done, and/or is ready to come to market eventually. And a lot of research is being targeted at the police state, because that’s where the money is…
This time when I renewed my vehicle registration for one of my trucks, I didn’t get the registration sticker.
We’re all familiar with the “notpology” – “I am sorry you were offended.” Or perhaps, “I am sorry you feel that way.” The essence of a good apology is that:
This is something KA9Q posted back in the early 00s, I’m not sure where he got it.
tl;dr: make sure you have a good supply of popcorn.
I grew up with revolutions; my father is a historian and his specialty was the evolution of absolutism under Louis XIV and the lead-up French Revolutions that culminated in the big one and the terror.
A recent article in The Guardian describes brutal put-down of protests in Kashmir; the Indian government is “using pellet guns” on civilians and has blinded several. (Trigger warning: guns, violence, political repression)
In my recent post “Nationalism Is A Lie” there was so much horror behind what I wrote, that I was either going to have to write a textbook-length incoherent screed,* or leave a lot on the table. So I thought that rather than diverticulating into asides, I’d post this piece separately.
Trigger warning: really horrible people doing really horrible things, with a walk-on by the Roman Catholic Church
About a decade ago, I did a series of talks at various conferences entitled “cyberwar is bullshit” – the problem, I felt, was that the US was talking about being deeply afraid of cyberattack from Eurasia (or was it Eastasia?) but there was considerable irresponsible talk about “weapons of mass destruction-like capability.” Industry insiders like myself wound up divided as to whether it was likely/practical, or good marketing/a chance to make a fast buck. There were a lot of fast bucks made.
In 1987 or so, I was working for Welch Medical Library at the early stages of the human gene-mapping project. We had funding from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Library of Medicine, and had a small lab of programmers and researchers thinking hard about medical informatics and retrieval systems.
I was struck speechless to read that the Iraqi army has brought its handful of TOS-1 “Buratino” thermobaric rocket launchers into the field at Mosul.