Or, it could be that DIA is learning its lesson and trusting a source that's proved to be credible in the past... you decide which you think is the more likely explanation.

That would be true if you were dealing with a straightforward external cost-benefit analysis scenario. When speaking of Iran, that's not the case. Iran has enormous internal pressure to keep up the appearance of being a threat to Israel. In order to make that cost-benefit scenario work from a political standpoint, you'd have to make the expense and danger greater than the existing implied threat of being nuked by Israel.

You're absolutely right about the other part, however. If our intel suggests that they've already constructed tunnels of depth X, it may cause their development process to slow down while they re-engineer existing infrastructure, and it will certainly cause them to import more concrete and other building supplies. Various governmental and past-governmental monied interests are well invested in the "international" firms that don't have to abide by the embargoes, and can therefore supply these contracting services and make substantial money from it

Cheney, I'm looking at you.

Due to the varying level of sarcasm in your post, my detector's MoE is +/-50% so this remark may be completely irrelevant. When you're discussing compiled languages it's not customary to remove your comments, for two primary reasons.

1. Comments help a maintainer other than the original author more quickly locate and troubleshoot problem code. This also applies to prolific coders who can't be bothered to remember what they were doing on somerandomlibrary.c three months ago.
2. Comments are generally removed in the compilation process, and therefore do not add to executable or library overhead.

That said, comments are typically also retained for reason #1 in interpreted and compile-on-run languages. If comments inflate your interpreted script code by 20% or more, you're probably using them ineffectively and they won't serve as much of a guide for a subsequent maintainer anyway. Even at a rather unnecessary 20% level, the average perl or python app is unlikely to exceed a meg in code size, so you'd only be adding in the neighborhood of 200k to your final product, and again for reason #2 this won't negatively impact the runtime footprint.

For things like html, css, and javascript, this is why minifiers exist. However, it does seem like an inordinate number of "professionals" fail to regularly avail themselves of these tools.

finally...

Sure didn't seem to stop you!

Figure that at least a few and probably dozens of IT staff were called in for OT on a holiday to clean up this mess. Figure also that there were probably some outside consultants called in. Add to this out-of-cycle communications and (non-tech) administrative costs and you're easily in low six figures.

So, if you don't think we should focus on vandalism damages in the $100k range, I'd like your bank account numbers and home address, please. However if that is really your attitude, odds are you don't have anywhere near that in assets.

Add to the above costs that those people called in didn't get to spend a holiday with their families, and that attacks like this amount to private censorship, since its retribution for Frontline reporting things the attackers didn't like, and I think there's plenty of non-monetary reasons to investigate and prosecute this kind of pathetic attempt at manipulation. It's kind of like bribery... sure maybe nobody gets hurt but if it gets out of control, we're in a serious mess (ask china or mexico)

That *would* be the first step, wouldn't it?

Please for god's sake tell me you are kidding.

If a threat was part of an intimidation campaign designed to affect public policy, that would be one thing. But a threat against a citizen is a threat against a citizen, regardless of how many popularity contests that citizen wins.

I never said that it did. I was merely correcting the statement that Ted Kennedy somehow birthed it.

I honestly don't care if it's constitutional. It's bad policy. Individual mandates don't work: ask the 25% of California drivers that don't carry auto insurance. Also increasing the demand for something only brings down the cost when you keep the supply fixed or decrease it relative to the demand. Since insurance industry re-regulation is long overdue, there are not substantial requirements in place that the "supply" of insurance policies won't effectively remain infinite. So it wouldn't achieve its objective even if it was realistic.

Just curious, who is the bigger jackass: the guy who takes out the loan he can't pay, or the guy who loans out hundreds of millions of dollars to people he know can't pay him back... because it's not his money!

We bailed out banks that should have been allowed to fail, and as a result millions of poor people are going to be made homeless and hungry. I'm guessing you haven't seen the latest republican budget proposal. There's a punishment coming but it's hitting the wrong people.

Hardly. In California, drivers are required to have insurance. Yet about 25% of them remain uninsured. The individual mandate doesn't work because it's unenforceable.

No sane intelligent person would ever want to be president. It costs a small fortune to even think about running, about a billion to put in a serious run, which is a physical endurance test that makes a marathon look like a leisurely stroll in the park. Your history, your family, your personal life, the kind of breakfast cereal you eat all get put under a microscope.

You can make some minor policy changes but you do anything major and 2/3rds of the country freaks out. You're pretty much guaranteed to be less popular by a large amount when you leave the office than you were before you won it. You suddenly realize that since you're only 1/3rd of the government and that the other two thirds have manpower on their side, you can't really accomplish anything you promised in your campaign without sucking a bunch of congressional dick. Nevertheless about 70% of the decisions you make are life-and-death for someone. You'll age about 10 years per four year term.

Afterwards you get a secret service detail following you around for the rest of your life and you get paid a couple million a year to go around and make speeches and promote your book. If you're lucky, you'll be able to leave the country without facing war crimes charges at the ICC. The 16.2% of the country that voted for you will remember you fondly, while the 16.1% of the country that voted for the other guy will continually blame you for everything wrong from the crabgrass in their lawns to the tax laws passed before you were born. 67.7% of the country will have no fucking clue who you are.

The guy you dormed with at Harvard is a CEO making $200 million a year.

civil service is for schmucks.