Can you show that "bored indians" are significant contributors to forest fires any more than "bored white men", "bored black men", "bored Hispanics", etc.??

That should save lots of money.

Be sure to wipe the drives, burn the backup tapes, sell the old hardware and fire all former employees (in that order). We wouldn't want the NSA to slip back into the mess it's currently in.

of this which is shorter. Unfortunately this comment field is too small to contain it.

See On The Origin of Circuits:

"As predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked."

"Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest-- with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output-- yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type."

"It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip's operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method-- most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors' absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white.'"

Dr. Thompson's publications seem to be difficult to find in free viewing form on the Internet, but the daminteresting article gives the gist of it: evolution will eventually make use of whatever characteristics are available to solve a problem.

let me know. I'll be on the next flight out.

One bright cloudless summer's day I climbed over our back fence to visit my friend Billy. The day was beautiful: I looked up into the blue clear sky and saw...what? To this day I don't know but I know what it looked like: A solid metallic body with two elongated pods at it's extremes, slowly and silently rotating in a plane about it's longitudinal center parallel to the ground and moving slowly across the sky. No rotors, no blades, no extensions on the pods, no sound, no lights.

It appeared to be very high, above the height of a commercial jetliner. I ran in to get Billy (who did see it), then to to get a camera but he could not locate one before the craft passed over the forest's horizon.

One of my greatest regrets in life is not getting a picture of this: the optical conditions were absolutely perfect.

I have searched all my life and never found a picture of a craft like the one I saw. I believed it had to be a spacecraft of some sort in an orbit but this was in circa 1957 and at that time only small probes were being launched according to the history books.

Anyway, build a craft like that: it's within our technology and it could create an artificial gravitational field that would suffice. And it's a tested design!8-))

Do you suppose that the NSA's injection system is a derivative of Microsoft's or vice-versa?

Microsoft can remotely remove programs from people's computers.

I suppose if I were interested enough, I'd be able to "inject" code too. I always thought of security as a waste of time, since there are so many much more productive things to be done with software. It is hard to build something, easy to tear it down.

But it seems that the IT world now views "injecting code" as a primary mission. It's a sad, sad world we live in.

will stop at nothing to find "domestic terrorists". Indeed, watch as they now _create_ domestic terrorism out of thin air.

Own a firearm? Belong to the Tea Party? Got food rations for six months? Have more than a box of ammo? Your own water well? Got gold hidden somewhere? Support Israel against Iran?

If the answer is "Yes" then you must be a "domestic terrorist".

Where's our protection from Russian financial terrorists? Were the NSA employees in charge distracted by their Starbucks carmel macchiatos at the time this was coming down?

A clear instance of international crime/terrorism and NSA was asleep at the wheel.

I was president of a condo association for 5 years. I made the costly mistake of replacing all outside incandescent lights with CFLs:

- all CFLs, regardless of brand, failed within two years. Outdoors CFLs don't last as long as the cheapest incandescents, despite all caterwauling to the contrary. Please don't tell me about your special brand: I've tried it and it failed prematurely.Please don't tell me to return them to the store under the 3-year guarantee: if I did that all my time/gas would be spent driving to/from Home Depot/Lowe's/Light Store and changing bulbs.

- CFLs were frequently stolen. This was an unanticipated cost.

LEDs are even worse: thieves can spot an LED from 100 yards away and will stop at nothing to steal them (since they're so damn expensive). Great to spend $300 replacing a weatherproof floodlight receptacle and the electrical tubing because a thief tore it off an outside wall to get a $50 LED floodlight.

CFLs break frequently when used in an outdoor environment. This was especially true in the carport area, where taller delivery/postal/visitor SUVs and trucks would back into a spot and break the bulb, scattering fragments over the vehicle roof and an area larger than the parking space. Cleanup consists of sweeping a strip of driveway and searching for the SUV that has the broken bulb fragments atop it. This is not nearly so worrisome for an incandescent as for the mercury-laden CFL. When one considers that most SUVs belong to parents with children, who are the most likely to be adversely affected by mercury, this is even more troublesome.

After 3 years I gave up and went back to incandescents, which we will use forever. Savings due to CFLs low electrical usage are not recovered when you include failure and theft in the equation. In fact, incandescents are cheaper even when you include the cost of the rugged models.

There are good reasons why incandescents have been used for so long. And, as others note, you can heat the chicken coop, keep pipes warm, and do other useful tasks with incandescents. CFLs were a political solution to a non-problem.

There's a market for such a straightforward expert system. Where's my ObamaBest iPhone app?

"We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don't supply that data to anyone"

"Try to exploit a buffer overflow on my home VAX cluster. If you can, then you deserve a prize because you've learned VAX machine code."

I learned it decades ago. There must be near hundreds of thousands of others that also know it. That's can be a problem with a once-popular architecture like VAX.

SNAFU = " "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up".

Anyone who expects to gain pleasure or be appreciated for serving in our political system is making a big mistake.