Why are astronauts made out to be heroes? They are at best test pilots, and I betchya more test pilots have died in the line of duty than astronauts.
Why does it have to be either/or? Test pilots are heroes too. Most would also volunteer to strap themselves atop two million pounds of fuel. Much better than today's heroes who play with balls or grimace and shake in front of cameras.
Privatized profit, socialized sickness.
"so-called "misinformation" (of which much of it certainly was not)."
And its corollary, "much of it certainly was". As always, we argue about where to draw the line.
...found it disconcerting how the magnetic vortices tend to appear like pairs of eyes, faces staining out of the void, animalistic bodies, etc.
That's your pareidolia kicking in.
I took a look at the picture. Interesting but "messy" and it didn't really impress me. When I clicked on the hi-res pic in the article and zoomed in, I saw a galaxy of field lines that would have done Van Gogh proud.
Since we're doing analogies here, I've never seen a rollout of an extremely large system that didn't immediately need a slew of patches. Sometimes they include actual exceptions to a ruleset.
It is magnitudes cheaper than the Cold War, where it was Russia draining the US treasury by supporting proxies around the world, and is cheaper than a full-blown Cold War II.
The US, despite its cycles of isolationism and failures to live up to its own ideals, is not going to quit promoting the rule of law and democracy, and Russia is not going to stop bullying its neighbors and own people. It's one reason it is the largest nation in the world and growing.
Well, when the goal is power at any cost, the ends justify the means.
I wonder if he committed suicide by shooting himself in the top of his head 5 times like Vince Foster... (who knows what Wikipedia says about his death now)
Wikipedia says five investigations, including Kenneth Starr's circus, support suicide by gunshot through the mouth and out the back of the head.
Great explanation, thanks.
Well said.
"“Its recliner-laden collaborative workspaces do not work well for teams carting around laptops, since workers must plug into ethernet cables *at their desks* to get consistent internet service."
I found the Top Secret stuff to be rather boring. Most such items were classified like that to avoid revealing sources or detailed specifications. Most Secret dox were boring too, though could be more interesting after massaging by analysts. I do remember seeing a couple of juicy reports, one about a current event, and another that I didn't see in open sources for twenty years.
I can't answer for what was going on when you were a kid. I was doing this stuff roughly 10 years ago dealing with WMD and they were fucking tight. No excuses, no bullshit, no errors, no nothing.
I'm glad to hear that those responsibilities were taken seriously. When SAC was disbanded I wondered about the loss of institutional culture related to security. (Though SAC had its issues, too.)
I was in DOD police once at a munitions depot. We patrolled a large area of bunkers, checked the lock on every bunker every shift and otherwise drove our trucks around the back roads of the nature preserve surrounding the bunkers. A nice gig while it lasted. I'd rate security to be about medium.
But we had no access and little knowledge of the smaller area that contained The Weapons That Shall Not Be Named. Marines guarded those.
Nicely summarized.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
