Nice. What's different or unfamiliar is incorrect.

'cause on the first day God wrote a specification document, on the third day he coded madly, on the sixth day God ticked off the last box on the acceptance test plan, and then he sat back and cracked open a can of Galactic Suds.

It comes in galaxies? You bet.

That wasn't the case here. The ringing tone (and all the other tones, dial tone, engaged, number unobtainable, all circuits busy) was generated by a machine called a Ringer 2A, which was a big motor driven thing with relays that interrupted the audio output to give the various cadences of the various tones.

We still had Strowger exchanges into the 1990s. I remember the line noise they used to put into your calls when using a modem. Before the whole network went digital, different telephone exchanges had slightly different cadences and pitches to their tones. It gave the phone network character.

s/heal/heel

Second time this morning. Bad fingers, bad.

That view is no longer tenable

I've attentively followed every stray tidbit to cross my radar about the shadow sector since the publication of The Puzzle Palace, about the peripheral ghosts of which my algebra professor had direct experience.

The gold box agencies can do traffic analysis at scale. They can model metadata at scale. They can't break every damn cipher at scale—neither can they employ the rubber hose password-getter at large scale (the Soviets managed to cover about 10% of their population with blue welts over a thirty year period, but ultimately this did no favours to their economy).

The best approach to scaling crackers is to leak key bits in the purportedly pseudo-random number nonce stream. This is the hardest tampering to identify from the outside of a black box. Even when the black box is reverse engineered and one discovers that random is far from uniformly random (with no stray key-space correlates), some idiot applies Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

How about we agree to make a small exception for the industrial-scale tainting of purportedly random numbers, where discerning the difference between malice and stupidity achieves an elite level of algebraic epsilon? Oh, look, one digit in the source code for the random number generator has a wrong digit. Must have been a careless mistake—as if careless mistakes are a dime a dozen in the land where a poor man's nonce is a persistent agency's key-space collapsing back-channel.

The NSA does not randomly shoot holes in the protection of the American public. Worse than having no back door is having a back-door that somehow becomes shared with the wrong people. What they want is to inject a weakness that only they can exploit, even when their adversaries discover their handiwork.

Just off the top of my head, one way to achieve this is to require that exploiting the leak requires having the intercept history of the channel in hand since day one. The unfortunate flip side is that the specificity of these methods of single-party Achilles-heal exploitation becomes a smoking gun to the presence of a far-from-blind watch master. No ruse is totally perfect.

But you can always keep 90% of the population busy debating whether metadata has any value, such that any debate that makes any progress at all contains only those people who were already sophisticated cranks (recruitment/rubber-hose scale, to mention the carrot and stick). It all works out.

If scale matters, assigning a scant value to metadata can not be so much as trivially entertained by a thinking person. Pity we have so few.

s/basis rule/basic rule

That's a natural error, where my brain had the right word, and my speedy fingers went "close enough" as they often do when there's a hot, fresh, unfinished coffee on my desk they're trying to rush off and levitate.

Semantic interference often contributes. I think my brain went square dancing for a brief moment with the Peano postulates.

He huge amount of time he spent trying to get things done made much of his time at ORI 'the very worst job I have ever had'.

Have people stopped reading the last sentence of the typically summary altogether with the part of the brain that doesn't type?

On a not-so-tangential side note, it would be nice in the eagerly awaited Beta Redux to be able to click preview prior to furnishing the subject line, and actually get the preview to go along with the lecture. Just about every time this happens to me I want to paste "cat got your tongue" into the subject line until I've actually seen the damn preview I requested, at which point I'm far less than entirely motivated to go back and remove the shim.

It's like childhood. You ask a question. Someone corrects how you presented the question. The question itself never gets answered. If the question can't be properly understood, it needs to be addressed before diving off into an answer. If it's just a matter of persnicketty dress code, probably the answer needs to come first if you're raising a young scientist rather than a young bureauocrat.

However, one must make an exception to this basis rule in extreme cases of shifting the burden: when someone publishes something for thousands to read, and every damn reader has to read the final sentence three times because you've changed "The" into "He"—a hundred times worse than the natural error "he"—which is enough to turn us all into syntactic Cylons.

FFS whoever submitted that, get your mental back-light fixed.

Right, because who needs to pass a law requiring a gun registry when we can just ask the NSA for a list on demand?

Oh, wait, maybe this is a BAD thing.

You gun nutjobs would probably be a lot more successful at making your case if you could string together at least 140 characters that make sense. Right now, people like you are actively keeping the phrase "gun nutjob" alive, and you're turning off people like me who actually support your position. I know it's asking a lot of someone with a room temperature IQ, but could you at least try to think before you click "post"?

It seems like every liberal idea is missing about 10 steps that they forgot to consider in their overly-simplified view of the earth.

Better to forget ten steps than crassly define them as unworthy of notice.

Even the adherents of the basic principles themselves seem to stop short of explaining why they work. "Here, this is duplicate code. You should follow the DRY principle and get rid of it." "Why?" "Because it's a principle."

They should let the new kid do some sink-or-swim maintenance on code that doesn't follow the principles. You want to learn about DRY, try changing one branch of duplicated code without realizing there was a cut-and-paste copy elsewhere in the code base. Now you've gone from a solid bug to an intermittent bug, and your clients are still yelling at you. Thus beginneth the lesson.

They're certainly not "worth nothing." They're worth whatever a vulture capitalist is willing to fund, or whatever an IPO will bring in. Those people still have the ability to turn punching purple monkeys into a pile of quick cash. The few technologists who time their insider stock-option trades correctly will get rich, but almost everyone else will get pink slips and a hard slap of reality.

Everybody out there imagines they'll be the one who lucks into a lucrative stock market trade, just as every gold miner imagines he'll be the one to strike the motherlode. I wish them all luck, but that's all I'll give them. I'm still not dropping $0.99 on a fart app.

Tell that the the families of passengers on Flight MH370.

That's the best way to proceed. Ask the person who has recently suffered an extreme loss, who won't be paying for the decision with his own money. What could go wrong?

GPS tracking of the flight? Unlikely. Flight arrival information was likely taken off an ATC feed from secondary surveillance radar.

When they are Welsh. It's a common idiom amongst the Welsh to say things like "And there it was! Gone!"

You're not going to fit it to a C172, though. Small GA planes don't have a requirement for a flight data recorder and many other things a large airliner must carry.

Only once ever have I been to a dealer for parts (and never again). Common service items such as oil filters, gaskets and various other bits and pieces can come from any generic parts store. Anything else can be found via some shop on the internet (and for older cars, the scrap yard will usually yield a spare in good condition - when I owned an older car, my parts needs were nearly always fulfilled by the local scrappy)