"“Its recliner-laden collaborative workspaces do not work well for teams carting around laptops, since workers must plug into ethernet cables *at their desks* to get consistent internet service."

I found the Top Secret stuff to be rather boring. Most such items were classified like that to avoid revealing sources or detailed specifications. Most Secret dox were boring too, though could be more interesting after massaging by analysts. I do remember seeing a couple of juicy reports, one about a current event, and another that I didn't see in open sources for twenty years.

I'm glad to hear that those responsibilities were taken seriously. When SAC was disbanded I wondered about the loss of institutional culture related to security. (Though SAC had its issues, too.)

I was in DOD police once at a munitions depot. We patrolled a large area of bunkers, checked the lock on every bunker every shift and otherwise drove our trucks around the back roads of the nature preserve surrounding the bunkers. A nice gig while it lasted. I'd rate security to be about medium.
But we had no access and little knowledge of the smaller area that contained The Weapons That Shall Not Be Named. Marines guarded those.

Nicely summarized.

"...businesses whose management class have outsourced comprehension..."

That's a nice turn of phrase.

I've played a few, but only dropped bucks on World of Tanks/Warships because they were good games and I played a lot. Good value for the occasional nickel or dime that I tossed at them. I couple of others I played free for a few months then never went back, but I did provide noobage for other players. I almost got hooked on the phone version of Star Trek Fleet Command for a couple of weeks (in the mountains with no comp). It provided casual amusement while sitting out in the woods. But I dropped it when I returned to civilization and never looked back. ATM, other than my fully paid for PC games I'm playing one where you create little musical critters. And ofc it has all the psychological hooks as other FTPs, but I learned from my first one how to recognize or avoid pitfalls. Cultivating an attitude of not giving a shit helps: I don't spend that much time with it.

As far as a business model, at first I liked it because it was basically "try before you buy". That's still the case, and people can quickly decide if a particular game interests them. And they also have a choice to support the makers with some green stuff if they really like a game. But yeah, the game industry is flooded with psych majors and making every FTP game like a casino with flashing bells and ringing graphics.

Maybe if Nikki Haley wins, Arizona will freeze over.

For some reason the guy that ignored a solemn oath to America thought that internet "friends" would keep a secret?

It's getting to be that the only Americans who can keep an oath nowadays are ones who want to tear it down.

Like most things human there are different degrees of fuck-uppery. The biggest breach that I was aware of during my time in the AF was a staff sgt. who left a secured bag of intercept tapes in the locked trunk of a courier vehicle for a short period of time. He was good at his job and very serious, and about the last person any of us would have expected to do something like that. Our crews had hushed conversations with the sentiment of "There but for the grace of God go I", but there were no immediate impacts to his rank or job, though I expect that it affected future promotions.

Both the Japanese and this lander were upright and top-heavy. I speculate that one of the reasons for this form factor is an attempt to fit within the fairings of cheaper, smaller launchers. Although it seems that they could have designed for the same form factor designed to land horizontally with wide-splayed legs.

I also note that these guys were happy getting within a kilometer of its target. The Japanese one got it within a hundred meters.

'Tiki Tour'. I like that. Saying that I'm taking the 'scenic route' whenever I get lost is so cliche`.

I got stuck with a cheap 4-cam monitor system once. I installed it and it worked adequately, but when I got to the point of setting it up to be able to monitor it remotely, there was a set of instructions that looked like a typical config for a router, with just an IP address for the target server. I looked it up...and of course it was in China. I decided that I didn't need to monitor it remotely.

That seems reasonable. It's too bad, in a way--I was looking forward to a Plasticine Epoch.

"The first crew to take part in a yearlong NASA Mars analog mission reached the 200 day mark of its mission Jan. 11.

The four person analog crew, entered the CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on June 25, 2023, and is scheduled to complete its mission on July 6, 2024."

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/...

Sounds interesting. (These ideas will have no effect on the willfully ignorant, of course.)

One of the common complaints about MSM is that "they all say the same thing." That's because they often "...send live reporters to the event, all of them have cameras and sound equipment, all of them are at the source..."

MSM mostly attempts to vet stories before publishing. That's part of what makes them MSM. So, generally, they "all say the same thing". There will be bias because humans are biased, but it tends to be story selection and/or length, etc. Bias is much easier to correct for than the unverified stories so popular with non-MSM sites. Maybe they're true, maybe they're gossip, maybe they're lies for someone's agenda. But they don't have the professional staff to vet and verify stories...else they'd be MSM.