29 December 2011

“We have differing views on this,” said Romney. “Some of the people, actually one of the people, running for president thinks it’s O.K. for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I don’t.”

I don't think its acceptable for Romney to own guns, or computers, or to run for pres.

26 December 2011

. It said it was able to get the credit card details in part because Stratfor didn't bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder which, if true, would be a major embarrassment for any security-related company.

Fred Burton, Stratfor's vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement officials and was working with them on the investigation.

Right, social attempt solution for a tech problem.
Morons.

23 December 2011

So you raise some ferrets. And you give one the flu.
Let it infect another. Let that one infect a third.

Continue this serial passage until a ferret in the same room, not just cage, gets sick from flu.

Now you have an airborne variant of the flu you started with.

For sci bonus points, sequence it and comment on mutations.

For Streisand effect, have the USG try to censor your work.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- The paper used to produce newspapers came under government control in Argentina on Thursday, in a long-sought victory for President Cristina Fernandez in her dispute with the country's opposition media.

Argentina's senate, which is controlled by Fernandez's allies, voted 41-26 to control newsprint's manufacture, sale and distribution to media friends and foes alike.



.....

How about Cat-5 cable? Typewriter ribbons?

21 December 2011

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/adrian-lamo-bradley-manning/

The last supper wasn't so well documented.

17 December 2011

that the US is afraid to send people to fight its battles; we're afraid to meet the enemy face to face, and that makes us cowards and dishonorable.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/12/drone-ethics-briefing-what-a-leading-robot-expert-told-the-cia/250060/
Even if we could solve these problems, there may be another one we'd then have to worry about. Let's say we were able to create a robot that targets only combatants and that leaves no collateral damage--an armed robot with a perfectly accurate targeting system. Well, oddly enough, this may violate a rule by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which bans weapons that cause more than 25% field mortality and 5% hospital mortality. ICRC is the only institution named as a controlling authority in IHL, so we comply with their rules. A robot that kills most everything it aims at could have a mortality rate approaching 100%, well over ICRC's 25% threshold. And this may be possible given the superhuman accuracy of machines, again assuming we can eventually solve the distinction problem. Such a robot would be so fearsome, inhumane, and devastating that it threatens an implicit value of a fair fight, even in war. For instance, poison is also banned for being inhumane and too effective. This notion of a fair fight comes from just-war theory, which is the basis for IHL. Further, this kind of robot would force questions about the ethics of creating machines that kill people on its own.


the relics that think that war is controlled by bans on expanding bullets, robots, chemwar, salting the earth, is evil. those relics don't understand modern war.
modern war, where 10 to 100 civilians die for each of your mercs.

and the usg only fields paid mercs, not conscripts: so their moral value is zero.
It's conceivable that there might be a target of such high value that even a 1,000:1 collateral-damage rate, or greater, would be acceptable to us.
What's an acceptable rate of innocents killed for every bad guy killed: 2:1, 10:1, 50:1?


http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/12/drone-ethics-briefing-what-a-leading-robot-expert-told-the-cia/250060/
In our Bohemian days, we were internationalist in politics and quite the opposite of patriotic. I hadn’t realized the need Christopher felt to belong to something. He was far too satirical to show it. But in the fullness of time he revealed that he really belonged in an America of his own choice.
But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. "I think, therefore I am. I think." We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot. ...
So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.

“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”


this guy gets better and better the more i read of his obit
The reactions to Hitchens's illness from his intellectual opponents –- which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers -– testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of "burning the candle of both ends" described his illness as "something so predictable and banal that it bores even me", testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of "struggle" that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to "resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice".
That was it for us. I had passed the only test that mattered to him, one in which he touchingly, anachronistically conflated intellectual honesty with a decidedly masculine, martial sense of honor.
I admire all public atheists.

This is pretty funny too
A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club.

No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

....

Christopher was never a man to back away from a confrontation on behalf of what he considered basic decency. Yet it would be wrong to remember only the confrontational side.

Christopher was also a man of exquisite sensitivity and courtesy, dispensed without regard to age or station. On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food –- lamb tagine -– to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests -– and as guests, we must have champagne.

Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair:

He was a man of insatiable appetites — for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation. That he had an output to equal what he took in was the miracle in the man. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who could match the volume of exquisitely crafted columns, essays, articles, and books he produced over the past four decades. ...

Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him. Walking with him down the street in New York or through an airplane terminal was like escorting a movie star through the throngs.

This from LA times. I never actually read CH as far as I know.

16 December 2011

http://newsone.com/entertainment/casey-gane-mccalla/tsa-leaves-cmon-son-note-for-rapper-after-finding-weed/

TSA leaves weed alone. They also saw some kief in a keyfob, heard one agent say 'it could be heroin' to another, but let it by. You can't blow up a plane with
a gram of heroin or grass.

I had flowers and cookies with me too.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-autos-oil-change-20111215,0,4554184.story

californians change oil too frequently.

its a relic of older cars ---just like my saving
files frequently is a relic of unreliable computers
of the past.

Plus you can use your used motor oil to fertilize your lawn.
Iraq occupation officially over. Hope the green zone is the next battlefield. State Dept = Covert Mil, just as legit targets as before.

Only more concentrated. Just do it.
9000 gallons of gas under an overpass... and the overpass is toast, as is traffic for a while...
Kobe Bryant gets divorced. Only a few years ago he bought off his wife and the inseminated woman he
arseraped a while back. Karma.

12 December 2011

So, who did more harm, a leaking officer or a stupid pilot / stupider engineering manager/specifier?

Got RQ-170? A lot more interesting than the hypocracy of US State / Mil communications. (PS: no diff state/mil)
(pps: enjoy your green zone)


Syria 5K dead.
Why no Sarkozy Save Us?
No oil?
Run by Israel?



08 December 2011

Another shooting in Va, yawn.
George Little citing his lack of intelligence and the pentagon's lack of belief in citizens' concerns.


Folks in glass empires ought not fly drones.

05 December 2011

Why America needs purging


"Occupy" movement declared terrorists. President signs
order to indefinately detain leaders. No judicial process
necessary.

04 December 2011

Darknet. Meshnet. SOPA.

Try this:
ipconfig /displaydns > myhosts.txt

to start caching your personal DNS entries.

You can later put them in drivers/hosts which Windows uses (besides a networked DNS resolver) to resolve names.

01 December 2011

Can Congress Steal Your Constitutional Freedoms?

by , December 01, 2011

Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate’s dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.


http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2011/11/30/can-congress-steal-your-constitutional-freedoms/

911 used cruise missiles piloted by god-fearing drones. Drones are useful. We can sit in the US and kill half a planet away. We so brave.
Steve Pinker and Geddy Lee

Canadian Jews.
Time travel.

US invaded Iraq.

That that caused 911.

Obama declared that US citizens are legit extra-legal targets of war.

This legitimizes 911.

The timing is off, but what if neutrinos carry fascism?