You make it seem like the FAA cares. I was at a shopping center just yesterday, less than a mile from a major airport and less than 1000 feet directly under the flightpath. It's a very busy airport. Yet there I was, in this shopping center featuring an adhoc carnival and there's a drone zipping around taking video or whatever.

The drone was being flown by the county recreation authority running the carnival because they wanted good publicity photos. Just for photos, Not public safety. Not operated by law enforcement. When I pointed out there's an airport RIGHT THERE! They dismissed it with "Oh it's ok. We're the county. We can do what we want."

The FAA may care. And people who don't want to see accidents may care. But everybody else just wants to do whatever they want.

The major airport near me considers a single chain link fence to be enough security. And there are gates in that fence, secured with just some chain and a padlock. Beyond the gates and fence are things like parked aircraft just feet away, and huge fuel tanks not much farther. Beyond that are the taxiways and runways clogged with planes waiting to takeoff, and eventually the terminal buildings. It's a pretty standard airport. I've seen several with the same lack of security.

I have NO idea why terrorists haven't already rammed a truck through fence like that one, blown up the fuel tanks, and proceeded to the taxiways where they only have to disable the first plane in the line. Once they do that, the rest are sitting ducks. Sure, the attackers would eventually fall. But the casualty rates would be astronomical and a physical attack like that would wreck the entire air system by revealing how easy the attacks can be, and wipe out billions upon billions of dollars on the stock markets.

And all they have to do is ram a truck through the gate. If a truck won't do it, rent a dozer. Or steal one. Big deal. The only hard part would be obtaining RPGs or grenades or something to blow up the fuel tanks and planes.

And if a mere civilian with an interest in and appreciation of physical security can see this scenario, well, I could just have a good imagination and seen too many bad movies. But if I can see how it could work, so can people with ill intent. And is that cheap fence really supposed to stop them? Really? Well pardon me for doubting.

Given that Netflix cancelled the Jonah Ray version, maybe it's time for a new NEW guy.

I've been Team Joel forever. Mike Nelson can kiss my script for Hamlet. Never saw the Netflix version.

It's not just the poor and most vulnerable and the agencies that assist them. My 'personal' domain is a .ORG and only five letters long, so 1) I've had it forever; short URLs are like low slashdot numbers, and 2) It's not going to be something I can simply move to the same thing at .COM or whatever. And 3), I refuse to move it to some stupid subsdomain like
vvvvvvv.geocities.com/somecity/somerandomthing/someotherrandomthing/~notmydomainname -Not a real nightmare URL but it could be!

I don't have business cards big enough to haul that URL around. I'd need, posterboard, probably.

Anyway, besides not having a big card, I also don't have a big budget. $100 a year is a problem. I've got an optional bill right now for $100 I have opted to not pay because that's a lot of money by my standards. If my domain name moved to that kind of pricing model, it would be a problem without a doubt.

Costco has that great and legendary policy about refunding everything. Yeah right. I tried to return a GPS unit, legitimately, with the box and receipt, and they flat out told me no. Because people had abused it. The item was not on the excluded electronics list at the time, ~2013. It wasn't abused or old.

As far as I can remember, this was the only time in years of pricey Executive membership that I ever tried to return anything to Costco. I don't DO returns. I plan ahead, do my research, and usually only buy what I know I will want to keep. Not like some people. Anyway, the Costco manager on duty refused. The store head manager refused. And corporate customer care refused. And I ended up stuck with this thing.

Because people had abused the generous policy. Thanks, PEOPLE. You all suck.

The little heater next to me on the floor came from Costco. One of those "dish heaters" they like to put near the entrance. I got one. It has worked great. But the other day I noticed it no longer turns off all the way. It's defective. I'd love to waltz into Costco and ask them to replace it or even give me credit toward a new one. But I laugh at the idea of Costco returns now. My membership was first against the wall when renewal came up and I'll probably never go back.

Apparently just once.

Lastpass was originally privately held until Logmein bought it.

And now Logmein is being acquired.

Oracle bought the company I used to work for. My group was immediately spun out and sold to another company. Those who ended up at Oracle did little better as the new owner striped away all the patents and customers and did the usual Oracle push to migrate those customers to existing Oracle products. The retained employees were fired as soon as the product they supported was deemed to have no future. The rest ended up as mindless drones doing whatever Oracle wanted.

The customers, meanwhile, mosty fled, because they never wanted to deal with Oracle anyway.

The group that was spun off, the people who had freaking coded and invented the products ended up working for another company having to pay Oracle a license fee to use the software they wrote and tested and developed. But Oracle decided they didn't want to let us do that and made the license fee impossible to pay. The end result was office closures and layoffs as that branch just ceased to exist.

So my point is that being acquired by private equity is bad, but it's not necessarily better when the buyer is somebody like Oracle. Either way, all these guys want is value. They want patents, products, clients and their contracts, and lots of recurring revenue. The people are disposable. The commitment made to clients or to ethics or to privacy are only alive as long as it takes to craft a memo declaring that those commitments are dead.

My city was announced for Google Fiber some years ago. Everybody was excited. I redid my home LAN with gigabit everywhere to ensure nothing inside my network would slow down this miraculous Google Fiber connection.

There were Bechtel crews trenching major roads. Fiber huts got built and the surrounded by fierce-looking fences. These Google people weren't playing.

Oh wait. Yes they were. About four years have passed now since the huts went in and essentially nothing else has happened. A handful of apartment buildings apparently have service. Nobody really knows.

Meanwhile my $40 a month cell service regularly exceeds 50mbit and my Comcast cable modem exceeds 200mbit for $80 a month, and both of those are fast enough for anything I can dream up. Fiber would be nice but Google's given up. It's never happening. A real shame, because if Google, with deepest of pockets could not install it and make it work, then probably nobody else ever will either. The future is wireless. But there are scenarios where a symmetrical fiber line would be better. Like moving my home NAS to the cloud. This will never happen under Comcast data caps.

I've paid for ESET Mobile Security for years and use it on my one remaining Windows PC. Used to be many more of them but everything else is running linux now.

Anyway, it works well. It doesn't seem to degrade performance and it has occasionally detected bad stuff. So it seems to work.

Used to use Lookout but it wasn't doing anything obvious that ESET wasn't doing.

The Twitch stream is playing the same trippy new-age music my local Burger King uses for ambiance in the dining area. It confuses the HELL out of patrons and workers alike especially since hip hop or rap would be the music in that neighborhood. Nobody would listen to this trippy stuff. They'd use a different S word; not stuff.

I've tried to describe the weird BK music before. Now I can just point people at the Fortnite Twitch stream. Done.

BTW, their black hole looks wrong. I'm sure they care about accuracy and all. Kip Thorne could probably help them get it right. Shrug.

The other possibility is that these things are merely designed to fool our enemies into thinking we HAVE invented these devices, and leading them to spend major money trying to equal the inventions and spend a major effort trying to steal whatever they can about the US results.

The first scenario, getting them to spend money, works. We did just that during the cold war and forced the Soviets to spend like crazy to keep up, until it wrecked their economy. Spending to keep up plays on the fears your enemy has something you don't, and generals and presidents tend to fall for it quite easily.

The second scenario, military and industrial espionage, is a weapon of choice these days. What better honey pot is there than nearly magical inventions we went and patented because we love taking credit for things, and boasting, and flaunting. We surely would not do these things unless we HAD the inventions, right? So the enemy forces have no choice but to invest significant resources trying to steal anything they can about these things. People, money, techniques and resources, will all be spent and burned to obtain the information. We just sit back and watch and take notes about what and how they do it.

And if it's fake, you just tricked your enemy into wasting a lot of time and money. You have won the match.

If it's the real deal and you really DO have these things, then you have won THE game. Your old enemies are no longer even your peers, much less relevant enemies.

I'm hoping for the latter. It sure would be nice to have the biggest breakthrough since the discovery of fire. But it is much more likely this is just a disinformation campaign.

KIK was always the choice for perverts on Whisper. Whisper? Oh it was this sort of blogging app thing where you post a picture and add some text, and then some guy sends you dick picks and ask if you have Kik.

And then if you watch carefully long enough, you see the different message areas get repeat posts from the same people, every day, for months on end. And then you realize, the whole app is like 90% bots reposting the same crap just to make it look busy.

My goddamn $20 Walmart toaster oven did the same thing. Turned itself on to full power and ran that way for a while before I happened to wander back into my kitchen and find it red hot and burning. A fucking $20 oven with no smarts.

I did the smart thing, though: I took that $20 oven and threw it in the trash. Who cares, 20 bucks is not work risking using it again when it is clearly defective in some manner. These smart oven people spent a lot more on their ovens, no doubt. But they face the same problem I did: keep it and risk it, or toss it. Which one of us is going to feel the wallet hurt more? Which oven should they get next time? Well, I guarantee you a $20 piece of crap oven won't make your food quite as good as an expensive oven but if both ovens are at risk of breaking, buy the cheap one and toss the damn thing if it betrays you. Don't be stupid and buy the expensive one and act all surprised when it breaks.

There's an old parable about good old Newt. One of his office staffers relayed this story.

Newt has lots of ideas, all the time. He wrote them on 3x5 cards and had his office staff look them over and file them in boxes. So they had a closet full of showboxes. Nearly all of them labeled "Newt's Ideas" and down in the corner, all alone, one box by itself labeled "Newt's GOOD ideas"

So basically, 99% of what he says is horseshit.

The same three-foot rule exists where I live, but the cyclists are under no obligation to give back the three feet at all. In fact, if you are operating a car and a cyclist on their own closes the distance to less than three feet, the car operator has to yield. The cyclist can keep closing that distance until the car can't yield any more space in which case it is forced to stop where it is until the cyclist moves away. We are absolutely not allowed to cross a double yellow to go around even if there is no oncoming traffic.

It's a bit dangerous to engage in what amounts to a game of chicken with a car but it does happen.