My guess is there isn't one -- whatever we do that increases safety today is never enough, and we're always demanding the next level of safety, chasing ever-more elusive risks and trying to eliminate them while failing to consider the costs of doing it.

Most corporations have no problem creating phantom business units to hide profits and losses, inflate executive salaries, etc, etc.

How do we know they aren't doing the same thing with an eye towards creating "disposable" and nearly unconnected entities they can use/abandon/reuse to launch counter-attacks or reconnaissance missions against targets they think are attacking them?

Buy a handful of servers, hire some contractors to install and do basic setup on them in some leased colo space, lather, rinse, repeat a few times and you have a distributed nationwide network, for all intents and purposes disconnected from the parent company and available to launcher counter-attacks, problems, etc.

Screw up, get fingered, have problems? Walk away. Send in different contractors to strike the equipment, box it and ship it off....to another data center, where different contractors can set it up again.

For a Fortune 500 business they could do this with the rounding error in their budget.

It'd be nice to pin this on some shitheel executive with the morals of Don Draper, the personality of Steve Ballmer and the naked greed of Gordon Gecko, but my guess this is something broader than that involving the economics of the entire product and less about one guy saying "Let's fuck everyone and get rich!!!11"

I'm sure there was a whole lot of people from finance, to marketing, to sales, etc. who threw in their two cents and probably a gigantic finance model they tweaked endlessly trying to maximize the economics of the entire project, from hardware, to marketing, packaging, etc.

I drink maybe a bottle of wine per year (a glass here, a glass there) plus maybe the equivalent of 2-3 bottles of sparkling wine (champagne, prosecco, or asti). Wine gives me awful hangovers, worse than overdrinking whisky or beer, and generally it doesn't appeal to me -- kind of bitter and unsatisfying.

Until about 2 years ago if you had asked me about wine, my instincts would have been that it's 95% bullshit and 5% reality (the difference between jug table wine and a $20 bottle of wine).

And then I got dragged to a fairly serious wine tasting (the wines being sold were $75-100 bottle) and I had to change my opinion. All of these wines were really good -- I really enjoyed drinking them and it took self control to not pick up a case of one of the reds.

I still don't drink wine, but I have changed my opinion. I think there is a qualitative difference between wines, but I don't know how you navigate this. I don't think price is a reliable indicator (snob appeal) nor do I think that recommendations are necessarily good either (herd appeal, snob appeal). Brand identity might help, but listening to the wine guy at the tasting it was clear that many of these bottles are vinted with grape blends from several orchards, diluting the value of brand unless the brand is really just the vintner.

...and all it's really saying is that IT will have to pay more attention to actual business needs.

This gripe has been made about IT since the mainframe age. System outages, deleted files, disk quotas, delayed reports, no card decks, not loading my tape -- just switch the technology to whatever is current, and the same complaints will be made about IT.

The reverse complaints are made both about the business "leaders" and the end users.

End user complaints are usually just that -- complaints. Some are quality of service gripes that may or not be legitimate, but some of it is just people who want to do their own thing because its most expedient for them and moves their ball ahead.

IT gripes about the business leadership is more legitimate -- if business leadership actually worked with IT to develop solutions instead of simply demanding resources or outcomes without engagement over goals and processes they would find IT paying more attention to what the business needs are.

Encryption would be nice so would a "panic" sequence that would allow you to wipe the flash (or wipe the keys for the encrypted store).

Since dash cams are uncommon in the US on civilian vehicles, I wonder if a stealth system would be a better idea. I know it's security through obscurity, but they won't ask for data they don't think you have.

I'm thinking some kind of camera mounted either externally or unobtrusively with remote electronics/storage.

What's wrong with propane or butane stoves? Are we supposed to eat cold food or forage for berries? Or are we only supposed to eat over a campfire?

Most of the hard-core backpackers I know carry a butane stove (they're remarkably light) for heating water to rehydrate and heat food or make coffee.

And I'm pretty sure that its considered a lot more environmentally friendly than gathering firewood (illegal or at least prohibited in most State and National parks).

And then there's times where the fire danger is high where all wood fires are prohibited.

Volvos were always designed for safety first.

Only in the last 15 years have they really tried to compete in the near-luxury-semi-performance categpry.

The V8 is pretty quick, but it is a large car. I find I can take clover leafs at a steady 60 MPH without a lot of issues (the model with the adjustable suspension does even better, but I avoided that for long-term reliability issues).

They used the same Aisin transmission for the V6 and V8 models which led to the V8 being detuned -- it only shows 315 HP in the specs, and a normally aspirated 4.4L V8 should be cable of 350 or more HP. I'd think 400 HP with supercharging would be not unrealistic and make it a very quick car.

It has AWD, stability and traction control which help a lot. It's a great car in the snow, almost impossible to spin out.

Anyone who's read "Puzzle Palace" knows that NSA has been doing SIGINT on telephone calls for a long time.

When calls were undersea, they had lucrative real estate between the cable termination and the rest of the network so they could snoop the microwave link.

At one point, they had SIGINT on all overseas phone calls.

They actually had a lot of lucrative real estate that happened to be between microwave repeaters, allowing more than international call intercepts.

My Volvo's "keyless" lock and start system has adjustable behavior for what doors will get unlocked when you open a door. It's able to tell what side of the car you are on and change its behavior.

I think maybe whatever they're doing involves exploiting location sensing somehow, or maybe even finding a back door that involves opening a passenger door, with the idea being that most people wouldn't find the back door because it involved the passenger door instead of the driver's door.

Perhaps they are able to trick the system into thinking the key is *inside* the car and the locks or computer make some kind of assumption based on where the key is, releasing the locks if the key is inside the car as some kind of emergency/safety feature when the car isn't moving.

My 2007 Volvo S80 does this.

If you walk up to the locked car without the keyfob and pull on the handle nothing happens, the door will not open. If I have the keyfob the door just appears to be unlocked.

The only opening on one side thing is curious -- the car settings menu has a door unlock choice -- you can choose how many doors to unlock when you open the driver's side door -- driver's only, all driver's side, or all doors.

The keyfob works on all the doors (ie, you can open any of them), but I wonder if whatever is exploited doesn't involve the car's idea of where the keyfob is relative to the car.

Or maybe there's some kind of back door code that only works on the passenger side, the idea being that exploits would target the driver's side first or only.

You haven't driven an S80 V8, have you?

The tape would probably consist of me laughing about the accusation, then politely asking the officer what the result from the rape kit were.

I think that laughing at the police because you're smarter than them thing works well in certain novels and the first 20 minutes of "Law and Order" but in real life seldom works out the way people want.

At a minimum it gets you put in too-tight handcuffs in the too-small back of a squad car in a position that would bedevil a yoga instructor for a half an hour or longer while the cop and his partner debate who will win the next major sporting championship.

At worst you get the shit beat out of you and spend a couple of days in jail on resisting charges. And when you're getting revved up to sue, remember the people who hit people professionally know how to do it without leaving the kinds of marks that would impress a jury, especially one trying to explain that his situation occurred when he was being questioned as a rape suspect (a claim that the city attorney will make over and over and over).

It's all well and good to push back against the cops, but when the rubber hits the road they hold ALL the cards and you want to be all YES SIR, NO SIR respectful or you will wish you had been.

...by secret email addresses is the notion that maybe the Labor Department was mostly being honest.

It's scary because it paints the reality of a large government bureaucracy essentially unaccountable even to the people internal to it theoretically with their hands on the levers of control, like a big bus being driven on a huge sheet of ice where you can brake, accelerate and steer but the actual responses to your inputs may have completely different outcomes than what you expect.

It seems unfathomable that the Federal Labor Department can't easily tell you who has what email addresses, yet it's not hard to imagine an agency like the Labor Department with 20,000 employees may have dozens of email servers spread over various bureaus and locations managed by different teams with different reporting structures.

I think there's a pretty wide gulf between a marriage that grows familiar and perhaps unexciting ("a business relationship") and "putting up with...an abusive bitch." I think most marriages in modern society lose their luster to some extent just as anything working and familiar loses its luster after a while.

I got a 70" LCD TV last year and it was awesome for a while and now it's just TV. Occasionally I marvel at the picture quality or the size and I wouldn't trade it for a different TV, at least not without careful situation.

I think what people expect isn't really very normal -- that their marriage is going to be a constant source of excitement and stimulation and their spouse is going to be the only person in their life to supply this. That's as abnormal as me basing my entire life around my TV.

I think people do get into ruts where they find their spouse less fulfilling but I think you have to work at those issues with your spouse and yourself to make sure you're not expecting them to fix something wrong in your own life.