I've just finished putting together a rough reproduction of the French Foreign Legion "combat suspenders" and pistol holster (I do leather working and enjoy trying to reproduce and then embellish on historical pieces). I find that a leather harness is uncomfortable on bare skin, though, so you might try something like that out of breathable materials. I'm sure the pistol holster could be replaced with something for a tablet or maybe extra batteries which might have some weight to them. :-)

Not many pictures online, but this is a good example of the type: http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/french-foreign-legion-belt-holster-combat-harness. US Military PALS light tactical webbing is also practical and extremely versatile but it would seem silly to wear a vest on top and nothing on bottom.

We have been steadily whittling down our consumption for years, but we use very little for the whole farm. We are slowly switching over to solar and wind, rewiring the house. We can cover our needs here (in Missouri) with 165 watts of solar panels and an 800 watt wind turbine. We have a battery bank which will cover almost a week in the rare event of no sun and no wind for an extended period (which is almost never the case) or a problem with the system. We also have a backup gas generator but don't expect to use it much.

We air condition one room which keeps the soap from turning to goo (we make handmade lye soap which does not deal well with both high temperature and high humidity). That also gives my wife somewhere to retreat when it is real hot as she does not deal with it as well as I do. I am fine with 90-105 which is what it gets out here in the summer.

Heat is mostly wood supplemented with propane for cooking part of the year and for hot water. Electric is a backup supplemental heat. We cook on the wood stove when it is going and are finishing a wood-fired mass oven for summer baking (outdoor). We have enough wood lot that wood heat is easily sustainable. We have to burn the accumulated deadfall periodically one way or another--- might as well make use of the energy--- and we get a lot out of each cord: heat, cooking, bark mulch, ash leach as input to the soap making and spent ash for soil treatment. The chickens also love picking through the chopping/splitting area for bugs.

The system we are putting together will end up consuming some additional electricity because of the diversion load off the wind turbine. If we aren't using electricity quickly enough and the batteries are charged, the power has to go somewhere (or the turbine will be damaged). The diversion load will preheat our hot water to save propane and will provide resistive heat when it is cold and windy (which is when the house is hardest to heat anyway). We get 30-50 mph winds across here commonly in the winter. That will actually put us in the position of having to use the electricity quickly enough.

The fridge was our biggest power consumer but we swapped it for a DC chest fridge (SunDanzer) which runs right off the battery bank with minimal power use except when it is exceptionally hot. It takes a bit of getting used to, figuring out how to organize a chest fridge conveniently and so forth, but it has its good points, too. An efficient front-loading washer doesn't use much. Nor does the propane dryer (or the clothesline in warm months). Computers and electronics usually with an eye to efficiency and direct-DC capability. Are starting to work with a Panasonic Toughbook which puts up with the kind of abuse we dole out on the farm better than other things we've tried.

Anyway, it is quite possible to use very little and still do quite a lot. Power-outages don't effect us too much.

You could run around naked. Or at least with just a webbing harness to hold your portable electronics.

Well, I just went through and reread the linked text and have read of some of his essays before. I am not entirely unsure that it might not be what he is trying to say; I just think he is saying it very poorly. A lot of people of that mindset couch their explanations in such pseudo-intellectual twaddle that it is hard to actually see the central point.

I admit I have not read his stuff in sufficient depth yet. I am just guessing that if I boil it long enough I'll end up with something like my summary plus some gooey and mostly uninteresting residue. But in any case, I think that what Wikileaks is doing could be justified by that logic, whether Assange is precisely doing it for that reason or not and even if a good bit of it actually comes down to self-aggrandizement.

At one point I was responsible for transferring four classified laptops (they were fully loaded Sun Solaris laptops (by Tadpole, I think) and therefore rather expensive), external hard drives, and a pile of DAT tapes out of the Pentagon to a new secure facility elsewhere. All of the laptops and all of the (4-8GB) tapes were Top Secret. I had all of the paperwork, it was a legitimate transfer, and I followed all of the rules. When I got down to the Metro Station entrance (there is a DC Metro terminal connected directly to the first sub-floor of the Pentagon), I waited in line for the guard to check my paperwork and the file cart with all of the equipment. Unfortunately the guy in front of me had NOT filled out his paperwork correctly and got in a protracted argument with the guard (and yes, the guard was armed). This went on long enough that the exasperated guard waved me through. No one looked at my paperwork. No one looked at the cart or what was on it.

We were told in one of the first security briefings that bad guys will often use the buddy system to work the guards. The first guy causes a minor but hard-to-resolve problem; the second guy walks out with all of the data. I am sure the guards were briefed on this too, but guards are human and have human weaknesses. They get bored, they get frustrated, and their job becomes routine. Often enough they don't want to give people like me trouble who were not causing any trouble for them. The fact that I was standing there politely probably had a lot to do with him waving me through. But a professional would have been calm and courteous and would have acted just like I did... and might have walked out with the whole kit and kaboodle. The equipment I was carrying alone was probably worth $100 grand at the time. Any extra equipment on the cart would have had no paper trail. Luckily I was a good guy; not everybody is.

That is why you need security in depth and you need to use the buddy-system to make sure that one distracted guard doesn't let something by that he should not. But that is expensive and budgets are always under pressure. You also need to have a system where people believe they are on the right side and want to help protect the secrets because they know good people's lives depend on them. Corruption gets people killed as much as loose lips.

I think Assange's point is more that it is much easier to keep a small number of secrets than a large number and that this is incompatible with a manifestly unjust system. If that is his point, I would have to basically agree: you cannot use classification to cover up blatant crimes and violations of your own rules in a leaky intelligence environment. You cannot effectively control a global oppression network without secure communication. At some point the system needs to balance the costs of the two extremes and that is easier to do in a system which has some amount of integrity.

You also run into the problem that a system without integrity, which constantly violates its own rules, cannot use people's conscience as a means to keep secrecy. It is simply not terribly effective to tell someone that they really have to follow procedure because leaking will get a "good guy" killed when the good guys are blowing up children, targeting citizen responders, and trafficking in human slaves. Even if it is only a small percentage of "good guys" doing it, asking someone to cover it up immediately suggests that officials condone the crimes.

Now, if you keep your intelligence apparatus as trim as possible, work hard to weed out the immoral from rising to that level, follow your own rules consistently, don't classify your dinner receipts from the night before to hide them from the taxpayer, and visibly punish people who cross the line, it is a lot more effective when you say to someone "loose lips sink ships." They WANT to protect your secrets.

Is there a cost? You betcha, but there always is. That's just life. But on the balance, I would rather do right and be dead than do wrong and have to live with it.

Actually, in some of the secure facilities I've worked in, the solution was simpler: use PS/2 keyboards and superglue the USB ports. Sometimes the low-tech solutions can be the most reliable. By the same token, make sure the only removable media are read-only optical drives (except for specific stations assigned for controlled copying of data). In quite a few places, MP3/minidisk players were simply not allowed. You could use portable CD-players or put music files on a CD and play them through a classified system. That depended on the facility, though.

The rapid growth of portable electronic devices people now carry is hell on security, unless you strip search workers going in and out. Even calculators and phones can copy enough sensitive stuff to get people killed. Now that Bluetooth has become popular, the devices don't even need to be physically attached to anything, unless that is also physically disabled on every workstation and laptop that gets deployed. As a contractor, I've had to check-in my own equipment at a lot of places, have it inspected and tagged on the way in and out. That included DoD work, obviously, but also, say, IBM and GSK worksites. Annoying as hell, but understandable from their side.

The other problem is that this was already policy in the '90s when I worked in AFSAA in the Pentagon. You were not allowed to copy data to non-classified system without the approval of specific officers who were tasked to examine the data. The data was copied onto a zeroed disk in a clean system, examined directly and in a hex editor. Then, if approved, it was copied for you onto a disk marked unclassified. There were also strict rules about the use of pads of paper (remove the top sheet, put it on a hard surface, write your note; that way you did not leave stray impressions on the pad which might be distributed. In the vaults, they often had pads stamped "SECRET" or "TOP SECRET" to make this less likely.) And there were quite a few applications we used where cut and paste was disabled or limited.

This obviously slowed things down, but that was the whole point. There had been several incidents where people had bypassed the rules and classified data were nearly leaked (the affected unclassified systems had to be scrubbed). Even if you just know that a document contains no classified information, it is quite possible that a file does. Problems were specifically discovered with MS Word files where random data from the system could end up in non-visible portions of the file. Once on an Unclassified system, the classified data might end up in swap space or otherwise be copied to where it should not be and remain after the offending file was wiped. Therefore the entire contaminated system would usually be wiped and reinstalled from a clean image. And, often the offending person would have their career shortened considerably. We dealt with nuclear deployment data and WINTEL (data which could reveal the identity of intelligence sources), so courts martial was always a possibility even, perhaps especially, for inadvertent release.

Personally, I consider release of classified data through idiocy to be a higher offense than doing so on purpose through act-of-conscience. The procedures exist for a reason, and often it is not to make things convenient. Carelessness gets people killed.

About when I stopped doing work there (1997-98) was when they were really going gung ho on the "classified Internet" where classified networks were tunneled over the DoD Unclassified Internet. That made for a lot more mixing of systems and cables which, I think, made it much harder to enforce strict separation. It used to be that there had to be 6' between the Top Secret network cables and the Unclassified network cables (and the cables were color coded). Ostensibly that was to prevent electronic feedback from leaking signals, but I think the real reason was to make absolutely sure the wrong network cable never went to the wrong hub and that someone lost their job if it did. It was absolutely forbidden to patch a classified cable outside of the designated rooms and areas. Classified printers, copiers, and CD burners were usually in designated areas as well. (You were allowed to make Unclassified copies on a Classified copier as long as you ran three blank pages through first to clear any residual images on the drum; you were never allowed to copy Classified data on an Unclassified copier outside the designated areas). Trash, of course, was separated by classification level and classified electronic waste (e.g. bad hard drives) were destroyed. Some manufacturers insisted that we return bad drives for warranty replacement, which was fine, as long as they understood that the platters would be physically destroyed first.

In any case, I am not surprised at this rule as much as surprised that it was allowed to lapse. You cannot 100% prevent leaks of data, but you at least want to make sure it is deliberate, that people are aware of what they are doing and of what the consequences will be.

I wasn't aware that Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin were the only two choices on the 2008 ballot.

Thank you!

And if third parties don't "have a realistic chance" then what does it matter? If both "mainstream" candidates are absolute bozos and will plow the country into the ground (with possible variation in speed and technique), what does it matter whether or not the alternative can win or not? What do you gain even if the evil of two lessers you choose wins?

Voting third party in that case (if there is a third party candidate who is not, themselves, a bozo) at worst will net them an easier time getting ballot access next time. At best, if enough other people have a sudden fit of sense at the same time, it may score an upset, but there is no downside and at least you can remove blame for the situation from your own conscience.

So, for instance, I voted for Chuck Baldwin in 2008. No, I did not expect him to win, but I could not conscience voting for either of the two mainstream candidates, especially after witnessing what the McCain team did to people in his own party (yes, I am Republican, or, at the very least, republican). Also, I would rather have a bad Democrat in office than a bad Republican as a bad Republican (which is unfortunately a lot of them right now) tarnishes the ideals and hurts good candidates. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I voted for Roy Blunt against Robin Carnahan in the recent MO senate election because I saw no credible 3rd party attempt and, unfortunately, Blunt and Carnahan swept their primaries, ensuring that there was no divided loyalty for a 3rd party run (I voted against him in the primary (Chuck Purgason) and in his 2008 run (CP Travis Maddox). I am still not certain I did the right thing there, so, it takes some thought, but often, there is simply nothing to lose. And, as far as "party loyalty" goes, I think that strong 3rd party options increase the health of the mainstream parties.

The real problem we have is with the primaries not generating decent options to choose from in November. We had some 8 or so candidates in the primary for the MO Senate race and any of the other 7 would have been vastly preferable to Blunt. Somehow we end up selecting the most corrupt and unreformable to represent us and this seems to be the case for both Democrats and Republicans (and often enough, even for Libertarians). That is what I strongly believe we need to fix and that takes serious work withing the party structure(s). Many of us have stepped up to the plate in that respect to gain positions on the Central Committees for the purpose of making primary elections and conventions more honest and more honestly representative of supposed party principles. Many of the people on this site may well disagree with the core Republican ideals, but I think we would all be better off to at least have them honestly represented in elections and be able to seriously debate application of those principles rather than extended sessions of "My opponent is even more corrupt than I am."

It is interesting how any government solution to their own screw-up always involves giving them more power. The obvious solution to an "asymmetrical" cyber-security threat to our national infrastructure, from their point-of-view, is more centralization of authority and a big "cybersecurity command" that gets more budget dollars.

%0

I feel your pain. I have been in countless arguments on this subject in the last month and for some logic-defying reason, people who would violently protest the removal of the Ten Commandments from a courthouse on the basis of "freedom of religious expression" are frothing at the mouth about denying others that same right. I am a Christian, a Conservative, and a Republican, and I find myself defending Muslims daily from my own countrymen and [alleged] adherents of my own religion.

The whole argument of "hollowed" [sic] ground is utterly, fantastically specious. By the "landing gear" argument, my Missouri farm is "hallowed ground" because dust from 9/11 probably landed here. I know my farm has been impacted by the political fallout from the explosion of anti-American bills Congress has used 9/11 to justify. We rail about this project in the name of "common decency" and serve pork during Ramadan in the "Green Zone" of Bagdhad on the graves of Muslim children killed by Americans in the name of "Iraqi freedom" right next to the burned out shells of Iraq's few (now non-existent) churches. But we remember from the Crusades that killing Muslims is not a sin, and if a Christian gets in the way now and then... well, at least they were Saved.

We have used racist, anti-Muslim, venom-spewing hate to justify so much violence in defense of our "love of peace and freedom" that we may as well just build a prison on "Ground Zero" since they are the only things we are still building in this country and it is emblematic of what 9/11 has come to mean to us as a nation. Incarcerate a few potheads, torture a raghead or two, solicit donations to spring souls from purgatory, and serve pork sacrificed to American Idols at the visitor center. "Executions in the courtyard daily." Tourists can take home rolls of toilet paper with the flag and Constitution emblazoned on them along with tacky, patriotic tee-shirts manufactured by Asian child labor.

Either we mean what we say, or we don't. Either we accept the command to "love your enemies" with the rest or we walk away. Either we stand up to what dedication to freedom and equality requires or we are yet another collection of fascist, hypocritical, self-righteous bastards: another two-bit "People's Republic." From one of the comments on the page you link to:

The First Amendment is at the foundation of the American Experiment which rest on the belief that when exposed to all the arguments on each side the people can be trusted to determine which ideas are better. The people need not be 'protected' against bad ideas because in the course of debate they will come to reject those ideas. (ALJ)

Exactly. Though I like to put it a bit more strongly:

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. --- Sam Adams

I consider myself a follower of Yehoshuah Netzarim, the Messiah, who some call "Christ", and I believe Muslims to be in error, but I am so sick of this issue that I almost want to go and help build the mosque myself just to show that not all of His followers are disgusting cretins. I don't care one way or another whether the mosque is built, but if we prevent it from being built, it will be "no little impeachment of all our honors", the honor of our nation, and, in the end, a smear on the name of Christ Himself.

Very true. But the corporate reflex is always to CYA, not to come clean. A lot of time they get in more trouble for the cover-up than they would have for the offense.

Exactly, the fact that they will not tell anyone, including the actual rights-owner who issued the request is automatically fishy. I see two basic possibilities:

1. As you suggest, it was someone at Yahoo acting without authorization.
2. Someone "put pressure" on Yahoo to do it and made the consequences clear if the revealed who.
3. Yahoo received a completely bogus DMCA request and is too embarrassed to admit that they were taken (and maybe afraid of legal action over the issue).

[You will note that I said there were two possibilities and listed three. Since there is some overlap between them, I took the average number of unique possibilities. It is not because I am too lazy to go back and edit the word "two" after coming up with a third bullet point. That would be ridiculous.]

"And domestically, so he flushed money down the bankster hole... okay, that might have been smart or dumb, not sure yet. But healthcare reform? Seriously, THAT'S what you'd fight to STOP? We here in NZ look at American-style healthcare as a Very Very Bad Idea which we flirted with in the 1980s-90s, and thank goodness we didn't completely go that route. It looks like hell, and we're so glad we don't have the mess you now have to fix."

He flushed an amount fairly close to our yearly GNP down the bankster hole and specifically banksters he had connections with. If we count the type of fraud these Prankster people did as criminal, then what Obama has done (following what Bush started, building on the foundation laid by Clinton...) has to count fairly high on the felony scale.

But the biggest thing is that you misunderstand something critical about American politics and why many of us strongly resist "reform". Reform here means changing the rules so that your cronies will profit instead of someone else's cronies. It has been that way since at least the '60s, probably longer and is largely true of both major parties. Health care "reform" means booting the folks who currently have control of healthcare out and putting your people in all the while leaving the actual *citizens* with less power. Each change of regime results in the pendulum swinging further into insanity with each administration trying to top the criminal aspirations of the previous. That is how they now get away with the House passing a 1000+ page bill that no one had read because it hadn't even been completed at the time of the vote ("Cap and Trade"). The memos and briefs coming out of the Obama Justice Department read word for word similar to those from Bush's with statements about how indefinite detention without charge (or even cause) is fine, the accused have no rights because of the severity of the accusation, and we don't really need to tell anyone, even a judge, who we are wiretapping or having followed. Obama's defense budget still has more money in cost overruns and blatant pay-offs (to mostly the same people as usual) than the GDPs of many countries. So it is not really a matter of what the subject of the bill is these days but rather that it is prudent to not let ANYTHING pass right now [at the Federal level] because we cannot control the time bombs they are writing into them until we get firmer legislation at the State level to protect ourselves from Federal overreach, stupidity, and corruption. I would rather have Ghengis Khan in control of my health options at the moment than a Congressional-appointed committee.

It is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing. I believe Democrats to be wrong about the best way to run the country, but I believe most of them are on the level. I, myself, am a Republican because I look back to ideals the party was actually founded to promote... like personal responsibility, personal charity, and freedom. But the core ideals are not promoted by the top levels of *either* party and grass roots efforts to actually change something are quickly co-opted by monied interests, pork, riders, and 'oversights' in the legislation until they do much more damage than if the problems had been left alone. There is a deep racket here where the 'leadership' treats the citizens exactly like those Pranksters, as if they are useless sheep who can be paid off in bright baubles and trinkets to look the other way... and cheating them isn't really immoral. That attitude infects the citizenry just the same, who try to emulate their 'betters' by making their own racket and trying to get a piece of the pie... and cheating The System isn't really immoral... so in a way, the attitude of the leadership ends up being accurate. That's how we end up with people in charge of liberal policies and promote using our tax money to "help others" who have not paid their own taxes in many years and people do not really find it odd.

Health care 'reform,' if it passes will do no better than utility 'reform' or the many Defense-Industrial budget 'reforms' or 'campaign finance reform', etc., it will just provide new ways for insiders to profit at everyone else's expense. We need to have a fundamental shift here where character is valued over personality and people are not focused solely on whether we can screw our neighbor over before they screw us. Until then, reform of any kind is not useful. People have to realize that the laws we have CREATED the health care crisis, the economic crisis, the wars overseas, etc. Replacing them with different laws won't make a difference when the people writing, carrying out, and adjudicating the laws are all largely corrupt. It is like trying to fix your software when your RAM is faulty. When the people are trying to screw the government (and other people) and the government is trying to screw the people, you cannot have a foundation for a stable system.

Don't get me wrong, the bare fact that we have elected a non-white president is a good thing, even if I think blacks would have been better represented by someone else... I don't know, off the top of my head, Allen Keyes... but I think Mother Theresa elected in this climate would quickly succumb to corruption, resign, or be assassinated.

I do not know where we are going precisely, and I will continue to try to change things in my own corner of the mess, but there really are not many good options from here. [For the record, I voted for 'neither'. It is a little known fact that we do have more than two people on the ballot for president in this country, even if they never win.] Personally, I think it is *my* job to help my neighbor, not to take someone else's money to do it. So I do what I can and try to show people that meaningful community and inter-reliance is still possible.

"Even if you never go to a public school or library, you benefit from the fact that others do, and therefore, the taxes you pay to support these institutions are entirely fair."

Actually, I thought that was what "charity" was for. For well over a century in this country, "public" libraries were actually private organizations and the norm for school funding was to seek private scholarships. The idea of the public funding these things through taxes at gunpoint is relatively recent--- and I do not see that it has gotten anywhere.

For example, the fact that libraries are public institutions has pushed them to embrace the least common denominator. As many in this discussion point out, technical information is impossible to find in most libraries, even information in fields moving much more slowly than IT. In fact, a group of us here have tried to encourage our libraries to support homesteading information (botany, agriculture, animal husbandry, cottage industry crafts, machinery plans and designs, alternative energy systems, etc.), and we cannot get them to do so even though there is quite a demand for the subject--- even if we provide the books. We were told point blank that if we donate the books to the library they will likely be sold at the next book sale rather than shelved.

Many of us in this community tend to have some of the same critical books on our shelves and the rest it is to our advantage to share. New people starting small farms or heading into the homesteading adventure have no idea where to find this information or which books they should start with and quite a few of them do not have regular access to the Internet or it may be unreliable and expensive (ours is both). We are looking at having to start a private specialty library to support this information despite paying taxes for an existing library system.

Current legal information is also essentially non-existent at our public institutions, including the contents of the revised statutes, recent case law, etc., but there is no lack of donated legal books being sold at book sales. Fewer and fewer libraries even have good selection of periodical or newspaper archives. You can request them from other institutions--- if you already know what you are looking for.

Libraries are great if you want entertainment, to find the latest romance or western, even an audio book or movie or two, but for education--- the reason it is allegedly fair for everyone to pick up the tab--- they are very sadly lacking. You do better clustering around the households of patrons who have painstakingly collected the books themselves. The MSU library here is an exception, but that is not open to the general public even though it is paid for by them.

And do not even get me started on the quality of our "public education".

So, no, capitalism does not deal with externalities well, but neither does government. That is what the gift economy is for, to shore up the places where the free market simply falls short.