Why do you need to spread life to land? There were probably a billion years or more of life on earth that was nothing but archaea, and it's still life and if things hadn't changed they would have kept on living as happily as archaea can be.

You're awfully confident in the uniqueness of life on earth, given that we really haven't even made much effort to determine its presence or absence in other potentially habitable places in our own solar system (and there are at least a few, and they aren't all planets in their own right), and that we've only had confirmation of the existence of extrasolar planets for less than 20 years. The statistics on extrasolar planets are still skewed by selection effects of the methods we use to look for them, despite the large numbers that we've discovered. When people did start discovering real extrasolar planetary systems, the existing models for planetary system formation did a terrible job of predicting the systems that were discovered. The jury is still very much out on how common life is in the universe, and even whether life could exist elsewhere in our own solar system.

NSA doesn't need to do any of that. Their budget is made up of money laundered through programs with boring names so nobody can tell what they get anyway.

And if they want the data all they have to do is ask OPM. Or offer to store backups for them. The privacy act protections are almost nonexistent and completely worthless.

I talked to someone recently who lost a day of science data from a UAV because the Windows system driving the instrument decided to auto update while in the air with something like a 56kbps data rate.

I recently built a field instrument and made it Linux based specifically to prevent things like that, as well as to keep power and latency down by being able to kill unnecessary background tasks.

Ford did a pretty good job of this in the Cmax hybrids. The things you need to know to drive the car don't change location, and are the way they've been on cars forever. The speedometer is a big analog rotating needle, so you just have to glance at the needle position-- you don't have to evaluate numbers. The hybrid details are also displayed as analog dial information (using the LCD) to minimize mental processing. They're also in an unobtrusive side display of the driver's side triptych and you can choose from several default sets of details that all are consistent with showing the same information in the same way, but add new information if you pick the more detailed ones. The center console is for phone, entertainment system, climate, and nav, and can be controlled via the touchscreen, traditional controls that would be familiar if all you ever drove before is a car out of the 60s, or voice controls interchangeably. The more common things to adjust also have steering wheel controls, but it's all set up so the learning curve is easy and you can operate everything just fine with all the traditional controls.

that's what bugs me whenever I drive a prius- they decided to get creative and put things in non-standard positions, used digital displays where analog is faster to evaluate, put a whole bunch of distractive stuff in the driver's field of view, and made the front window small with huge pillars so it's hard to see out. It's a car that encourages people to drive badly.

No, at least parts of the government require full disk encryption of all laptops, as well as fully encrypted, two-factor auth remote access. NASA implemented full disk encryption in a rush after a similar personnel data set was stolen from an unencrypted laptop in a car in DC.

Other parts of the government already use more appropriate forms of two-factor authentication, generally smartcard badge+password, pin+rolling RSA key, or in some cases pin+password+rolling RSA key (not really more secure, and easier to forget pin+password). The badges and RSA keys have to be issued by the agency (and sometimes department) and synchronized-- I have a bag full of them from various agencies and aerospace companies and they're hard to keep track of. The badges are issued as a result of the whole background check process that was compromised and contain a hash of your fingerprints as well (some, though very few, computers have fingerprint readers). If they had implemented any of those, it's likely that the breach wouldn't have occurred. If, as you suggest, they had included access limits or almost any kind of access log checking, they could likely have detected and stopped a breach that was traceable to a forged/stolen credential as well.

If you're going through OPM you fill out the SF86 online on a system called eQIP-- you get a pdf at the end that you can print and keep, but they collect all the data electronically. No OCR involved.

eQIP has its own problems-- the default passwords for entry are based on data that anybody can look up about you. You're supposed to change them so that when you submit your stuff for reinvestigation you use passwords that you made up, but given that they have specific password requirements (3 passwords) and reinvestigation is every 5+ years, you might as well just bang on they keyboard and then ask for a password reset when it's time to do it again.

As perpenso already noted-- you can move some of the data temporarily across the gap. Even whole files for people whose investigations are currently in progress. But given that reinvestigations are only every 5+ years, data that isn't immediately required can be isolated from the internet. In that case, if you suffer a data breach you still let out a bunch of confidential information on people, but you don't let *all* of it out on *everybody*. And some inputs to the database (e.g. invesitgation results that aren't needed for other investigators) can be swept to the isolated side on a regular basis.

The FBI doesn't do most of the investigations-- there are various investigating agencies and contractors depending on who you're going to do the cleared work for, but they do indeed do detailed investigations. I've been interviewed a few times for people's investigations, and mostly they ask benign things that you'd be willing to tell anyone (do you know about spouses/partners/dating habits, ever seen the person drink, ever seen them drunk, are they quiet vs. outgoing, do they overshare), but there are probably cases where they get into a lot of personal details if you give them something that might lead down a juicy path.

So that the gov't can use it to blackmail you into compliance? At least that's how it probably started. I don't get the impression that they do a lot of that since Hoover went away, but they kept all the systems because that's how they always did it. Now it may come back to bite...

A curious thing about the disclosures, is that your boss *doesn't* get the information that goes into the SF86 (at least if you're a contractor, may be different if you're a civil servant), only the government does. I never had a clearance, but know a lot of people who do, and it's not clear that you're required to disclose all the blackmailable things to the people you might be blackmailed with respect to (e.g. spouses), or just to the government. From what I can tell, I think it's just to the gov't. It seems very traceable to Hoover's FBI, where his personal goal seemed to be that he would get blackmail material for absolutely everyone he could so that he would have the ability to coerce people, rather than as the claimed prevention of blackmail by other parties.

I tend to agree that if you look at the process it does appear to be more of an ideological filter than real trust/security system.

Things like that always seemed like they should depend a lot on where/when you are-- I think in parts of the country and for people of certain ages if you *don't* do that you should probably be a little suspect.

If you don't admit to a past drug problem and they find out about it, you don't get a clearance, or you lose it if you had it. If you tell the truth about it and it's in the past you probably will get a clearance. They ask about it on the SF85 (the form for non-sensitive positions) and people have been denied employment or fired for lying about it.

That era never existed for most artists, even large, well known ones. The money has always been in live shows, merch, and more recently licensing.