There’s a building in Utah that holds exabytes of data at a cost of $1.5B.
Yet the NSA seems to be befuddled by ISIS.
Possible explanations:
In any case, the solution is the same. Burn it down. Salt the earth. Ostracize anyone who has ever worked there.
It turns out that the US tried to rescue James Foley, but failed because their intelligence was bad.
Huh. Maybe the NSA should spend less time on spying on citizens, and more doing its actual job. At which it fails almost every time.
Or we could just burn it to the foundations, salt the earth at Langley, and cast into exile everyone who has ever worked there.
It used to be if, for whatever reason, I was short of poop bags for the dogs (brought N, needed N+1 for whatever number, including 0, meaning I forgot), I could walk one house in either direction and “borrow” one from a neighbor. Meaning, I’d take their newspaper out of the bag, put the newspaper on their porch, and “recycle” their plastic bag.
About a week ago, I was out of bags (actually I spaced out and didn’t bring any, a rare occurrence but it happens), and I walked almost all the way home, a couple of miles, past dozens of houses, without seeing a newspaper.
Which is a anecdotal observation of this:
Yeah, that corresponds about to my observation of when I stopped being able to rely on finding a plastic bag to recycle.
Must read interview with Snowden by Bamford.
Addendum: Another reason why NPR will never get a dime from me. Dina Temple-Raston continues her Judith Miller-esque swallowing of the Deep State line. DTR presents talking points about Snowden from a completely CIA- and NSA-funded front company as though they were independent viewpoints, with no acknowledgement, or alternative source.
It had to happen. Now we send people to jail, not for what they’ve done, but for what they might do in the future.
Unless of course you’re C-level at a too-big-too-fail bank. Then you can money-launder drug money, sell worthless mortgages, commit fraud, and not only get off scot-free to, utterly predictably (and not just because you live in the wrong zip code) do it again, but get a huge bonus as a result. Probably have politicians come to your house to seek your approval.
Saturday, I sent my most recent project. I’m not bragging, just setting this up. It’s easy for most of the people I climb around, and hard for some. Including me. Everyone sends something sometime or we’d all hang it up and go surfing.
Last weekend I tried it six times, and it was hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, and hard. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make the last clip, couldn’t make myself climb above the last clip, couldn’t pull the crux move at the last clip, couldn’t make myself skip the last clip, no one else’s beta worked for me at the last clip [1], got pumped at the last clip. Et cetera. The crux is at the top, could you tell?
Then all of a sudden, it was easy. I warmed up and did it, and I knew I was going to do it when I pulled my shoes on. I could have botched it and fallen, but I didn’t have that feeling. I don’t know why, because the last time I was on it, I was trying really hard (ask the witnesses!), and still… couldn’t do it.
I’m not any stronger than I was last weekend. Maybe a bit lighter (I didn’t step on a scale). The conditions were slightly better – perfect to be exact, but last weekend wasn’t bad. I didn’t train specifically. Didn’t obsess. Didn’t visualize. Just ran and biked and spent about three hours on the climbing wall, along with a couple of PT sessions in the gym.
And six days farther into the decline.
Yet it went from hard to easy. From screaming at the top of my lungs and falling off [2], taking big whips, to utterly casual. Maybe a grunt or two, but it felt easy.
What changed? It had to be mental. Something in the mind, something mental, just clicked over, and what was hard was now not. Like understanding a mathematical concept, or one of those color-blindness tests; once the neurons click, you can’t unsee it.
The real trick is, how do you go immediately to that state? There must be a way. Ondra, Sharma, Megos (and similar experts in other fields – music, science spring to mind), immediately see the flow and the consequence. How do you train yourself to get there immediately without the intermediate frustration state?
10000 hours, I suppose… but there must be a mental switch that’s accessible, because in 25 years of climbing, I must have the hours in at this point. A mystery.
[1] Thanks, Vincent, for the key beta in the bottom crux. Even though he, and no one else, does it the way I do it, Vincent saw the flaw in my sequence and pointed out an improvement, taking it from 50% success to 100%. The top crux sequence is all mine, and probably nowhere near 100%, but you only have to do it once for the send.
[2] Taking a big whip while falling off trying is A Good Thing.
For all the billions we dump into intelligence gathering on friend, enemy, and citizen, and basically anyone with email or a phone, for all the pissing done on the 4th Amendment, the whole ISIL/ISIS crisis in Iraq seems to have been a complete surprise to our political masters.
Perhaps they’re too busy spying on Congress to actually gather intelligence about real threats.
Of course, Congress is no real threat. They know that the TLAs know where the bodies are buried, and they better keep their traps shut, and oversight committees a farce, unless they want the real stuff coming out from an unnamed source.
Much like in Gulf War I, when we were looking for WMDs that we sold to Iraq during their war with Iran; in Gulf War III, we’re destroying weapons we gave to Iraq after Mission Accomplished in Gulf War II.
It’s just the circle of life — if you’re a defense contractor. After all, someone is going to have to sell the new Syrian/Iraq ISIS caliphate the replacements for the weapons being destroyed now. Those F-35s don’t move themselves. Actually they don’t move at all and I’m sure we’ll be looking for suckers^Wclients to offload them on.
I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you, that the person responsible for black prisons, enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, and the destruction of evidence would stoop so low as to spy on Congress.
He is, after all, a person of moral rectitude.
Three guesses whether anyone will lose their job or be prosecuted for this, much less go to jail.
The real reason behind the increasing pressure for laws mandating cell phone kill switches? It's not stemming a wave of crime. The real thing it's killing is burners. If you have to have the ability to shut down a phone remotely, then you have to be able to identify who can shut it down. So no more anonymity will be possible on cell phones.
That's why prosecutors and LEOs are behind it. Not because they give a shit about your stolen phone. Try turning in a police report about that, and you'll get laughed out of the station. I've been rear-ended, witnessed hit-and-runs, been the victim of a bike/car hit-and-run, and reported break-ins, with zero police response – they couldn't even be bothered to show up. You think they care about your iPhone? They do care that you might be able to communicate anonymously. These laws will be the end of that.
Someone is developing an algorithm that finds not the shortest, or quickest, or cheapest route, but the most scenic. But what I want, having been burned twice in the last month by LA traffic construction, is one that lets you rule out routes. “Siri. The 5 North is closed. Find a way to get me back on it north of the 22. That doesn’t involve driving on the 5.”
Yes, the maps algorithms let you choose alternate routes, but the alternates are very limited, and there are lots of places where there is one freeway, and Google or Apple or Waze or Mapquest or whoever is going to route you on that, no matter what you do. And if it’s closed, well, too bad for you. As you drive around, pulling out your two-decade old copy of the Thomas Guide, Siri will just be telling you to make a series of u-turns to get onto entrances that are blocked.
Invisible hand
For years, airlines have been shrinking seats, and the space between seats, to the point where even reasonable people can't stand it anymore. Flights are being diverted because people are arguing over leaning the seats back. Three times in a week.
This is just the free market at work. Airlines try to maximize profit by squeezing more people into smaller spaces, and now they'll have to eat the costs of diverting flights because they've gone too far.
It sucks to be the people who are going to get fined $$$, but hopefully that money won't go to the airlines, and some accountant somewhere will do the math and conclude that x diverted flights are more expensive than n more passengers, and ease back on the ridiculous cabin crowding.