The "Hearts and Minds" people are out in force today.

Most of us don't have a problem with checking the wanted list against passport photos. The problem is they won't stop there. TFS says this was a test of the system. Obviously, there are bigger plans.

Our government doesn't yet have enough political power to safely brutalize its general population (though it's doing an increasingly good job on minorities), but it can control most of us never-the-less. Their current interest is in ensuring we don't upset the current balance of power. Thorough surveillance is critical to knowing who, when and in which direction to nudge or blast opposition leaders to the sidelines. Subtle manipulation of current and potential opposition leadership is likely far more successful to entrenched interests' goals than more direct, physical options.

As someone towards the beginning of the comments said, sometimes stuff happens. Maybe there was and maybe there wasn't corner cutting and/or poor engineering in this tragic situation. The take-away here for me is that we simply should not put these big mines in ecologically sensitive areas. Stuff will happen without regard to the best laid plans and intentions of mine developers. The Fraser river salmon may take a terrible hit from this pond breach. The proposed Pebble Mine is threatening the Bristol Bay area of Alaska, home to the worlds largest red salmon run, with a 700+ foot tall earthen dam upstream from major rivers, holding back a 4 mile long tailings and leach pond.

This! Most of our voices are lost in the noise of state-wide and federal elections. Local elected representatives are likely to listen to and act upon your input regarding fire, police, sewer, water, garbage collection, schools, zoning and platting, property assessing and taxation, sales tax, libraries, swimming pools, parks, street lamps, road maintenance and a host of other items that directly affect you and your daily life. Added bonus: they can amplify your message to elected/appointed/employed people in "higher" levels of government.

The only challenge on that road, from either the north or the south, is the rented Mustang convertibles plugging it.

It's not a bad thing until they find _you_ interesting.

Pu-leeze ... this bad boy's gonna be on the endangered species list for the rest of our lives.

No, you won't get those messages. As an former iPhone user who recently switched to Android I will attest to the fact messages from your friends who use iOS go into a black iMessage hole. The messages are not forwarded out of iMessage to a traditional text message. The iPhone must be reconfigured to opt out of iMessage before text messages will be delivered to a non-iOS phone.

iMessage fails over to text ONLY if you're using an iOS device. It doesn't fail over, as you might expect, if your mobile number moves to a non-iOS platform. It's a total pain in the ass. I can only believe it's designed this way to promote vendor lock-in.

The draft ended. The requirement for 18 year old men to register for a draft that might exist in the future did not end.

Um, HAARP has been shut down. It may open again. Maybe. Someday.

There is a huge amount of information to collect based on subjects' reactions to these requests for DNA. At the very least, the cops must be compiling a naughty/nice list indexed to license plate based on who accepts a cheek swab. Making the link from license plate to individual is pretty easy, especially if they're also taking video of their proceedings. People are forced to play the game and there's no way to win.

The answer to that seems fairly apparent: To prevent or stifle a popular uprising against those in charge. Our government no longer works for us. In many ways, it works against us.

Oh, it's a whirlwind alright. The big organizers, promoters and builders whirl in, scoop up all the money and whirl back out of town. Leaving the locals within some hundreds of kilometer radius holding out empty bags if not outright saddled with debt.

If I recall, the system configs hadn't been saved to non-volatile memory. Reloading the routers as part of a standard Cisco password recovery/reset would have resulted in empty configs. As much as SF city government hated Terry Childs, they apparently loved his network equipment configs.