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For example,Biowulf, 100th fastest supercomputer on the planet, at the NIH, mostly runs Linux. And many peopel use R, rather than paying the licensing for Matlab.

Now, whether management wants to support Linux and OSS, or repeats in their sleep "THE WORLD BELONGS TO M$" is another story... but it's heavily used.

Just for fun, slashdotters, look up https://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose... - a lightweight secure distro of Linux, can run from a flash drive.

Put out by the US Air Force.

The Air Force does have it's own Linux Distribution but it's not for standard installations. https://spi.dod.mil/LPS-Public...

I'll just leave this and this here.

This may enable potentially important solutions like: http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose....
Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) creates a secure end node from trusted media on
almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots a thin Linux operating system
from a CD or USB flash stick without mounting a local hard drive.

The LPS may be less than ideal but it is a good step forward and makes it clear
that a like solution has a valid place in government and corporate America.
Some think this is a baby step. I think it is a step in the correct direction.

Lightweight Portable Security, http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.... perhaps? Might be a good place to start, but I don't know if you're aware of this one already.

Nothing is ever 100%. 99.99999 is achievable but not really much fun for daily web surfing and such. The trick is to keep an OS on an Optical disk. I use a linux distro the USAF provides called LPS for banking and such. I boot my laptop from it, do my business and pull the disk and reboot for surfing the Web.

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose....

Next time you get the call, you could try this approach:

You: Wait, you know I have a computer? Are you my parole officer? I've been banned from using electronic devices due to my recent conviction. If you're accessing my computer, that makes you an accomplice. Per the plea agreement, we both going get 20 years in a federal prison. The NSA is probably now tracking us both.

I haven't had the opportunity yet, but if I were to get such a call I think I would boot up the computer using LSP. When they finally get in and see the background is the USAF emblem I would then nonchalantly say something like "Oh, by the way, this is a DoD administered computer. All traffic on this computer is logged and monitored. That's not a problem for you, is it?"

If the DoD can do this:

DoD Linux OS: Lightweight Portable Security

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lps
http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
http://www.spi.dod.mil/docs/lpsmanual.pdf

OS Type: Linux | Based on: Thinstation | Origin: USA | Architecture: i386
Desktop: IceWM | Category: Live Medium, Privacy, Security | Status: Active

"Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) is a Linux-based live CD with a goal of allowing users to work on a computer without the risk of exposing their credentials and private data to malware, key loggers and other Internet-era ills. It includes a minimal set of applications and utilities, such as the Firefox web browser or an encryption wizard for encrypting and decrypting personal files. The live CD is a product produced by the United States of America's Department of Defence and is part of that organization's Software Protection Initiative."

They could do without anything Microsoft.

If the DoD can do this:

DoD Linux OS: Lightweight Portable Security

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lps
http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
http://www.spi.dod.mil/docs/lpsmanual.pdf

OS Type: Linux | Based on: Thinstation | Origin: USA | Architecture: i386
Desktop: IceWM | Category: Live Medium, Privacy, Security | Status: Active

"Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) is a Linux-based live CD with a goal of allowing users to work on a computer without the risk of exposing their credentials and private data to malware, key loggers and other Internet-era ills. It includes a minimal set of applications and utilities, such as the Firefox web browser or an encryption wizard for encrypting and decrypting personal files. The live CD is a product produced by the United States of America's Department of Defence and is part of that organization's Software Protection Initiative."

They could do without anything Microsoft.

>use an entirely separate computer.

No. You don't have to. If you can boot from a USB port or CD/DVD, use a live read-only OS and boot from it.

An example of it is here: http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

You can do the same thing with other live distributions like Knoppix, Trinity, Ubuntu, etc.

--
BMO

I'd leave a "bait" hard disk so nothing looks amiss. It won't affect the live DVD or CD.

Your idea is a good one.

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

Thank you for the pointer to LPS. This has many user-cases including creating a secure tamper-proof forensic analysis system.

I'd leave a "bait" hard disk so nothing looks amiss. It won't affect the live DVD or CD.

Your idea is a good one.

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

> Which is why this will never happen in the US.

SELinux (developed by the NSA)
GRASS GIS (developed by the US Army Core of Engineers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRASS_GIS#History
VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture developed by the VA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA
You can even try out the DOD's flavor of Linux - http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

We can of course do even better.. and we should.

See http://www.spi.dod.mil/approach.htm and present your situation. The need for secure and non-secure environments to exist, and function, separately in the same macro-environment, without cross-contamination, is something they should understand, and have interest in developing. I suspect a controlled micro-macro-environment, such as exists on a ship at sea, might be a good development and experimenting environment, for which they might have specific interest.
The SPI people are Air Force, instead of Navy, but what are airplanes except submarines that deploy in a lighter medium? That return to the bottom instead of to the surface...

Yes, it matters.

Even the US military "gets" that Windows machines at home aren't at all secure and offers this nifty distro. Free download, and if you are USian your taxes were actually spent well for a change:

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm Quote: Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) creates a secure end node from trusted media on almost any Intel-based computer (PC or Mac). LPS boots a thin Linux operating system from a CD or USB flash stick without mounting a local hard drive. Administrator privileges are not required; nothing is installed. The LPS family was created to address particular use cases: LPS-Public is a safer, general-purpose solution for using web-based applications. The accredited LPS-Remote Access is only for accessing your organization's private network."

it's remote exploits of one of the services that are installed, by default, to be accessible from the Internet.

Why worry about defaults?

If you're choosing Linux for security, you can already choose one of the security-enhanced distros like SELinux (if you trust the NSA) or Ubuntu Privacy Remix https://www.privacy-cd.org/, or LPS http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm, or Fortress Linux http://www.fortresslinux.org/ etc etc etc. Or just roll your own with your favorite distro and GRSec installed http://grsecurity.net/.

All of these are a (free) download away. It's not like it's difficult to secure Linux if you choose to.

That's why all this bullshit about Linux being as insecure as Windows, but less popular is just FUD. If Linux IS ever threatened the same way, the FOSS community is ready and has the tools to respond. Linux users won't have to wait for a vendor to reluctantly spend the money to ramp up a security team. They'll just benefit when it's needed.

DoD Taps Commercial Internet Providers to Help Protect Defense Industry Networks

-http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=7c996cd7-cbb4-4018-baf8-8825eada7aa2&ID=787
----- http://dibnet.dod.mil/
----- http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=15266

"Weapons manufacturers and thousands of other Pentagon contractors are responsible for protecting much of the militaryâ(TM)s most sensitive data.

But the Defense Department of late has lost confidence in industryâ(TM)s ability to secure its intellectual property from cyber theft. It also has recognized that the government has limited technological tools to protect industry-held data.

So the Pentagon is now asking companies to voluntarily sign up for data-security programs offered by Internet service providers such as Verizon and AT&T.

This new approach to protecting defense industry data is the latest twist in a cybersecurity pilot program that began four years ago when the Pentagon asked companies to voluntarily share information about network intrusions and malware attacks.

In exchange for volunteering details about cyber intrusions, the government would analyze the malware and send back to industry valuable intelligence on the source and scope of the hacking.

Over the past four years, 36 companies have signed up for the exchange program.

But that is hardly enough, considering that there is an estimated pool of 8,000 companies that are believed to be eligible for this program.

The number was calculated based on how many companies have employees and facilities cleared for classified work, said the Pentagonâ(TM)s Deputy Chief Information Officer for Cybersecurity Richard Hale.

The Pentagon would like to see at least 1,000 companies join the so-called âoeDefense Industrial Base Cyber Security/ Information Assuranceâ program, Hale said in a May 14 conference call with defense journalists and bloggers.

In an extraordinary move, the Pentagon last week announced it is expanding the program to allow commercial Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, to offer cybersecurity services to participating defense contractors. The expanded information-assurance program is called Defense Industrial Base Enhanced Cyber security Services.

The Defense Department agreed to provide classified and unclassified âoethreat signaturesâ to three commercial ISPs so they could develop security tools that they could sell to defense contractors in a fee-for-service arrangement.

Hale said he could not discuss the cost of the ISP services, and stressed that it was entirely up to each defense firm to decide whether to sign up for the services.

Since the May 11 announcement that the program is being expanded, more than 250 companies have expressed interest, Hale said.

âoeWe are starting to see responses,â he said. âoeWe think thereâ(TM)s pent-up demand for participation. But itâ(TM)s too early to tell how many companies are going to join.â

The Pentagon concluded that it made sense to use ISPs â" which have access to advanced cybersecurity tools â" to provide network protection services to defense contractors. The alternative would be to have to share classified information with the contractors and expect them to use that data to build their own cybersecurity systems, said Hale.

Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said the three ISPs that so far were approved for the program had to meet stringent security requirements and had to invest their own money in building the highly classified infrastructure and technology that is needed to protect defense industry networks.

âoeThe defense industrial base faces unrelenting attacks from sophisticated actors who are trying to steal intellectual property and sensitive defense information

It's cool that this is public information. This of course is shocking but there are clearance reviews that are just boring paperwork with nothing exciting. The more open they are about it the better. I do however thing Shep should have had to do some hard time for failure to disclose. When I had a clearance if you screwed up you could lose your clearance but if you disclosed a mistake like this upfront it was much easier on you. With that information they can target the whore and feed her misinformation.

http://www.dod.mil/dodgc/doha/industrial/11-05079.h1.pdf

DoD has a live distro for telecommuting. They should make its use mandatory for that, and get rid of their Windows desktops. That's as easy as giving the order, just like when we transitioned TO Windows in ancient times.

It's free to download, grab a copy:

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

Your taxes paid for it and it's a free download. Grab a copy and check it out. Saves buckets of money in license fees compared to a PE-ish live CD, and won't run Windows malware.

Hand out a custom (or even standard) version of this for emergencies with an instruction sheet tucked into the CD cover.

Your taxes paid for it:

http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

If you can't secure your software. You should be running software that is securable. You should talk to the Air Force I understand they have some.

For some of you that do not want to chase that link, It's a Linux Boot CD that uses only local volatile memory so that no untrusted software can exist, after a reboot. The disk has an optional copy of open office and networking software for connecting to secured servers.

I'm surprised you didn't hear about JIEDO... they were around during that timeframe, but I guess they weren't as aggressive about getting the word out.

https://jknife.jieddo.dod.mil/

I know that a bulkhead can be removed between the 1st two bays to make a longer internal bay which may be able to carry the MOP, but according to this, it appears that it is not allowed under the START I treaty since it would also make the aircraft capable of carrying nuclear armed cruise missiles.

You're insane. Current temp (US zip 75501) is 100.8 with dew point at 73.4. This means sweating will only get you down to 99.8. You need active cooling in some areas, it's a necessity of life.

HAHA. I grew up in Florida which gets as warm and while I like air conditioning I didn't need it. Nor did I need it when I was in Panama. Then again I didn't need much heating when I spent part of winter in Alaska. And yes I was in both places, for three weeks. I was stationed at Fort Greely Alaska for Winter Warfare training and at Fort Sherman, Panama for Jungle Operations training.

The courts had ordered the Pentagon to release additional prison torture pics and vids, stuff Congress had viewed in private and turned a lot of stomachs. Currently the Pentagon is illegally sitting on these pics. Can we get all the ugly in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?

You can find the DoD's FOIA request information here. I'm not entirely sure which sub department that would fall under but you could try with the military first.

They should help you:

Please note that this office is not a repository for documents maintained or released by the Department of the Army. Requests received in this office will be forwarded to the activity that has the responsibility for the subject matter requested. For a more timely response, please refer to the POC listing to ensure your request is submitted to the proper office.

After reviewing the POC listing, if you are still unsure which agency to contact, you may submit a request to the Department of the Army Freedom of Information Office, 7701 Telegraph Road, Suite 144, Alexandria, VA 22315-3905 and we will attempt to assist you. Requests to this office can also be sent electronically by emailing: DAFOIA@conus.army.mil, or Facsimile (703) 428-6522.

Address: Department of the Army Freedom of Information Act Office 7701 Telegraph Road, Suite 144 Alexandria, VA 22315-3905

E-mail: DAFOIA@conus.army.mil Telephone: COMM (703) 428-6504 or DSN 328-6504 Facsimile: COMM (703) 428-6522 or DSN 328-6522

FOIA requesters who have any questions concerning the processing of their requests at the US Army Freedom of Information Act Office, should contact this center at (703) 428-6504. If you are not satisfied with the response from the center, you may contact the FOIA Public Liaisons, Mr. Robert Dickerson or Mr. Steven A. Raho, at (703)428-6504, Army_FOIA_Liaison@conus.army.mil.

There's a handbook online if you have questions. If you want something from the State department or FCC, they have pretty easy request forms online. I'm thinking you'll just get a big fat rejection but who knows?

The courts had ordered the Pentagon to release additional prison torture pics and vids, stuff Congress had viewed in private and turned a lot of stomachs. Currently the Pentagon is illegally sitting on these pics. Can we get all the ugly in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?

You can find the DoD's FOIA request information here. I'm not entirely sure which sub department that would fall under but you could try with the military first.

They should help you:

Please note that this office is not a repository for documents maintained or released by the Department of the Army. Requests received in this office will be forwarded to the activity that has the responsibility for the subject matter requested. For a more timely response, please refer to the POC listing to ensure your request is submitted to the proper office.

After reviewing the POC listing, if you are still unsure which agency to contact, you may submit a request to the Department of the Army Freedom of Information Office, 7701 Telegraph Road, Suite 144, Alexandria, VA 22315-3905 and we will attempt to assist you. Requests to this office can also be sent electronically by emailing: DAFOIA@conus.army.mil, or Facsimile (703) 428-6522.

Address: Department of the Army Freedom of Information Act Office 7701 Telegraph Road, Suite 144 Alexandria, VA 22315-3905

E-mail: DAFOIA@conus.army.mil Telephone: COMM (703) 428-6504 or DSN 328-6504 Facsimile: COMM (703) 428-6522 or DSN 328-6522

FOIA requesters who have any questions concerning the processing of their requests at the US Army Freedom of Information Act Office, should contact this center at (703) 428-6504. If you are not satisfied with the response from the center, you may contact the FOIA Public Liaisons, Mr. Robert Dickerson or Mr. Steven A. Raho, at (703)428-6504, Army_FOIA_Liaison@conus.army.mil.

There's a handbook online if you have questions. If you want something from the State department or FCC, they have pretty easy request forms online. I'm thinking you'll just get a big fat rejection but who knows?

Which commentators, pundits and so on? Left wing, right wing, balanced?

Right wing, mostly. See the links below.

If you actually had evidence of this, it would be a huge story.

Indeed, it has been big news when evidence came to light concerning the programs under which the Bush Administration, including the DoD, was paying pundits and news analysts to promote administration programs, or otherwise buying the news.

But you don't.

If GP didn't (which I suspect is not the case), the web certainly does, including evidence directly from the horse's mouth at the DoD link above.

So you're nothing but a mindless droning troll.

I would be careful throwing around insults like that, especially when you clearly don't know much about the subject and are just assuming that the person to whom you are responding to is wrong because of your own ignorance.

In the two years since then I have read all the CSR Tribunal transcripts.

I can assure all of you that they absolutely do not support the Bush Presidency claims that the captives were all terrorists -- or even that they were all combatants.

The "Summary of Evidence" memos prepared for the 558 captives who had a CSR Tribunal convenened on their behalf absolutely do not support the claim that more than a few dozen captives were "captured on the battlefield" -- for any meaningful definition of "battlefield". And, for those who were captured on a battlefield, my take is that at least half of them were merely the innocent civilian bystanders who lived near an attack, and were left behind when the actual combatants had gotten away scot free.

The CSR Tribunal process was very seriously flawed in several important ways.

There was no mechanism to refute or confirm the captive's alibis. One captive, Abdul Matin, faced the allegation that he had been the Taliban's intelligence chief in the large Northern city of Mazari Sharif. He testified that he had been a refugee in Pakistan during the entire period the Taliban was in power. Further, he testified that he had been a high school science teacher in Pakistan, at a real high school, not a Madrassa. He had to sign in every day. And his time sheets for the seven years he worked there would document that he was in Pakistan, not Mazari Sharif.

His Tribunal told him this alibi was irrelevant because -- wait for it -- he could have traveled to Afghanistan to serve as an intelligence chief during his summer vacation.

His story was not exceptional. It was typical.

Does this make you feel safer?

Another extremely disturbing flaw was that almost all the captives faced more allegations, and more serious allegations, during their first and second annual Administrative Review Board hearings. Those allegations were withheld from the captives during their CSR Tribunal -- thus giving them no opportunity to refute them. ARB hearings weren't authorized to overturn a CSR Tribunal determination that a captive was an "enemy combatant"

Some poor captives were able to offer completely satisfactory rebuttals during their ARB hearings of the allegations that had been withheld from them during their CSR Tribunal. The officers must have agreed with my assessment that their rebuttals were completely credible, since they didn't ask any questions related to the allegations. Instead the transcripts record truly Kafkaesque conversations where the officers said (paraphrasing):

Okay, you convinced us, you weren't an enemy, and you didn't hate us -- when you were captured. But now you have to convince us that, after years of unjust detention, you haven't started to hate us. Bear in mind, we know, for a certain fact, that you have spent the last four years in close proximity to some really dangerous men, who do hate us.

Another deeply inadequate aspect of the CSR Tribunals concerned the definition of a combatant.

According to the Geneva Conventions a veteran is not a combatant. A veteran is a civilian. Period. Unless he takes his varmint rifle down from above his mantelpiece, and takes some pot-shots at you.

But CSR Tribunals considered some captives "combatants" if they had fought against that Soviets during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Some foreign captives were classified as combatants because they had been conscripted back in their home countries.

Afghanistan

...But the government is in a position to know more about certain things...

Only if you assume that they are halfways competent, intellectually honest, and not blinded by preconceptions.

The DoD fought tooth and nail to keep these documents arising from the captive's administrative proceedings secret. But they failed. There are about 2300 documents released under the freedom of information Act where you can read the actual "Summary of Evidence" memos, and the captives' testimony.

Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) and Administrative Review Board (ARB) Documents

Try reading them and I suspect you might find some of the stories surprisingly compelling. Try reading them and I guarantee your charming faith in your government shaken.

Here is a package of documents released around Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari's Combatant Status Review Tribunal. It is not the most shocking. But is the first one I read that really shocked me.

Note the three allegations on page 20. One of the allegations was that he was found wearing a Casio F91W digital watch. When I read that allegation in September 2005 I did what any of you would do. I spent thirty seconds doing a google image search, so I could see what a Casio F91W looks like. I recognized this watch. I used to own one. It is one of the most widely produced digital watches ever made.

I found it kind of shocking that this very weak allegation was being used to justify his continued detention.

But, it got worse. In his testimony, (pages 12-18) he expresses his distress at learning that the watch was one of the triggers for his detention. As part of this distress he gave a detailed description of his watch. Guess what?

His watch wasn't a Casio F91W. The F91W is an accurate, reliable, water resistant watch, with a stop-watch, a little light, a little beeper, and a daily alarm. It has no other features.

The watch he described was much more featureful. It was a watch specifically designed for observant Muslims. Observant Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day. This watch called out a call to prayers at the required times. Observant Muslims are supposed to bow down facing Mecca when they pray. This watch pointed to Mecca. It had a little magnetic compass. If the wearer was a world traveler, when they landed in a new city, they told the watch where they were, and the watch had enough computing power to do the spherical trigonometry to calculate the direction of Mecca. When the compass was pointing North an LCD arrow on the compass would point at Mecca. The wearer entered their current location either by picking a nearby city from a list of 200 cities, or by entering their latitude and longitude.

That is technically cool.

Well, thirty seconds to find the image of the F91W. About five minutes to figure out that Al Kandari's watch was the "Casio Prayer Watch". It looks NOTHING like an F91W. The Casio logo doesn't even look the same. And it costs about six times as much.

How competent can the JTF-GTMO staff be, how interested can they have been in determining who was an actual threat if any competent computer user can blow away one of the allegations in just a few minutes?

In March 2006 the DoD was forced, by court order, to release about a thousand documents. They showed that well over a dozen captives faced the allegation that owned a Casio F91W watch. In September 2007 the DoD released the second thousand documents. Almost two dozen captives faced this very flimsy allegation. The record shows only one courageous officer challenging the credibility of this allegation.

One of the other two allegations was that his "known alias" was found on a suspicious list on a suspected al Qaeda member's computer. This alias wasn't listed for him to challenge. But

Another captive who stands accused of having a role in an attack where an American soldier was injured was also a teenager when the alleged incident occurred. He was only charged recently.

One stands accused of playing a role in an attack where a Red Cross worker was killed. One of the allegations that JTF-GTMO analysts suggests his denials of involvement in, or knowledge of this attack? Interrogators pounced on how, in his initial replies to this allegation he referred to the Red Cross worker as a "he" -- when his interrogator said they never mentioned the Red Cross worker's gender. Need I point out how flimsy this allegation is? It is hardly surprising that someone from a patriarchal society, where women are covered from head to foot, and aren't allowed out of their home unless they are in the company of a male relative, would refer to every stranger they hear about as male.

One of the seven other captives who were charged under the military commissions President Bush initially authorized, and which were over-ruled as unconstitutional by Supreme Court faced extremely flimsy allegations that he played a role in a third incident where a grenade was tossed into a van with Canadian journalists, seriously wounding Canadian journalist Kathleen Keena. His transcript is on pages 108 of this .pdf.

Do any of the allegations against other captives support the allegation they were captured near an incident where uniformed Pakistanis or uniformed Afghans were killed or injured?

What you have to understand about how the captives came into US custody is that Omar Khadr's capture was the exception. Most captives were turned over by bounty hunters, who merely told the Americans the captive was an enemy. And the Americans did absolutely zero sanity checking before they paid the bounties. Of the remainder, who were captured by Americans, it wasn't following a skirmish, but was based on a denunciation, for which the denunciator got a big bounty.

IMO, none of the claims of these bounty hunters should be given any trust whatsoever.

first the TFA is wrong. the goal is to cut the weight by only a factor of 2.
http://www.dod.mil/ddre/prize/rules_doc.html

from the DOD site:
"Demonstrate a wearable electric power system providing 96 hours of equipment operation at less than half the current weight. The power system should attach to a garment (vest) and provide 20W average electric power for 96 hours with peak power requirements of up to 200W for short periods. All components, including the generation, storage, electronics, and connections must weigh 4kg or less, including the attachment system. The total minimum energy required is 1920 W-hr (20W * 96hr)."

The call is incredibly poorly worded but it appears the current weight is 9Kg (about 20 pound, not the 40 pounds states in the article linked to)

1920 W-hr is about 6 MJoules and if we assume that means 4.5 KG then that's 1.5MJ/Kg.

currently Mg-hydride (with Li) gets over 8Mj/Kg. So you could win this contest right now using those, assuming the pulse-power requirments are achievable.
http://www.energyadvocate.com/fw64.htm

  to put this in perspective, as to what is ultimately possible to achieve in a quasi theoretical limit: Gasoline holds about 44 Mjoules / Kg. So a perfect electrical conversion from gasoline would be only 5 fold more than what is available now.

As a follow up:

Section 6.0 on this page: http://www.dod.mil/ddre/prize/rules_doc.html

6.0 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The government claims no rights to the intellectual property of competitor's systems. Any proprietary information disclosed to the government will be protected in accordance with government regulations.

Future development of the candidate systems will be under separate contracts and subject to government rights clauses agreed to under those contracts.

Systems will be visible to competitors and media during the bench test and field trial. Competitors concerned about proprietary information should ensure no proprietary information can be ascertained from a casual viewing of the system.

$30k a year gross :
-7.5% FICA (-2250)
-5% 401(k) (-1500)
-15% IRS (-4500)
-$300 a month for student loans (using your example) (-3600)
=$18k a year take home = $1,500 a month to live on.

Rent on a 700sf apartment, 1br/1ba, in just about anywhere that has tech jobs nearby (California, Boston area, etc) will run you $800 a month easy. $700 a month for a complete dive in a crack infested neighborhood.
Electricity / heat / water - $100 / month (being conservative).
Cable (internet / maybe also tv) - $60 / month.
Phone (cell or land-line) - $40 a month
Car insurance for a young single man - $100 / month
I'm going to assume a car that runs but is older (no payment). Maintenance ($50/mo), gas ($100/mo) : $150 / month

That leaves $350 a month.
Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner on $10 a day is not unreasonable, for a healthy diet including eggs, bread, milk, coffee, meat, cheese - all the things a software engineer eats.
That leaves $50 a month for :
clothing (for working in an office setting)
laundry (once a month, whether it needs it or not)
ethanol (beer / liquor)
music
hardware upgrades (have to keep current)
WoW subscription
furnishing your home
going on dates
chocolate
and emergencies.

I'm not saying it can't be done - I've lived on less (was only making $25k a year right out of college) - I'm just saying it isn't the kind of life that you might expect for a degreed professional software engineer.

For comparison, assuming instead had you gone into the military as a boot-camp recruit (E1) and did five years (four years instead of college, plus you would be in your fifth year) and made E5 (not difficult, it is like a second class or something, still a nobody with no authority or responsibility) according to the pay charts found here in San Diego you would be making the equiv of about $50.5k a year, including housing and subsistance pay (but not including combat pay, no matter how rough things get in San Diego.) And no student loans, which is another $3,600 a year difference, bringing it up to an effective $54k a year. And no medical costs. And after less than 30 years you can retire at 100% of your base salary (that would mean retiring at 45 with a lifetime income of about $55k a year, plus or minus depending on how far up the food chain you made it.) As someone going on 40, the thought of being able to retire in five years at 100% of my base salary sounds really, really good right about now. A LOT better than waiting until I'm 65 or 68 or whatever they cranked it up to recently for the regular world.

And we keep hearing how 'under paid' the military enlisted are ... so there's the comparison. Software engineering after five years = way below the curve set by the Military. Possibly behind the curve for life, and that's before we consider going in as an officer (requires college, etc.) After only a single promotion with 3 years in the service, an O2 in the Navy stationed in San Diego makes the equiv of $73.5k a year. Makes what they are offering software engineers with three years experience look like chicken-feed, and again - we keep hearing how we 'under-pay' the military.

With out knowing the exact details of the case but doesn't this sound like an April Fools joke?

Is this still America?

With apologies to our benighted brethern in other countries who have yet to see the light of American democracy. We have this message for you: We know where you live, and we will get to you in short order. Please consult Who's Next For a Democratic Make Over to find out when we will get to you.

Personnel still get most of the money.
"The nearly $440 billion defense budget contains $110.8 billion for military personnel, including a modest 2.2 percent pay increase, as well as $84.2 billion for weapons systems and $73.2 billion for research and development."

Considering how little soldiers get paid (starting at $1,204 per month), and how much engineers get paid (~$3,500 per month starting), you start wondering who the Defense Department's priorities are...

Just the facts...
NASA "Science, Aeronautics, and Exploration"
$10 Billion

DoD (Department of Defense)
$420 Billion

So about 42x more for DoDO (Department of "Defense" operations) than for NASA in fiscal year 2006 (completed).

Unfortunately i don't have time to properly research this at the moment, so i'm going to be irresponsible and simply quote the first thing i have come across that looks definitive:

What is a record?
A record is the product(s) of data compilation, such as all books, papers, maps, and photographs, machine readable materials, inclusive of those in electronic form or format, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteris- tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law in connection with the transaction of public business and in Department of Defense possession and control at the time the FOIA request is made.

That's pulled from the DoD's Freedom of information Act Handbook, available through the DoD's FOIA office (down at the bottom of the page).

From the passage above, it would seem that citizens can request any existing data output or document from a federal agency (including the DoD). Given that fact, i would not assume that the programs that produced that data output would be subject to the same output. I am curious whether you could request software manuals however (which would be true for open or closed source software).

Unfortunately i don't have time to properly research this at the moment, so i'm going to be irresponsible and simply quote the first thing i have come across that looks definitive:

What is a record?
A record is the product(s) of data compilation, such as all books, papers, maps, and photographs, machine readable materials, inclusive of those in electronic form or format, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteris- tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law in connection with the transaction of public business and in Department of Defense possession and control at the time the FOIA request is made.

That's pulled from the DoD's Freedom of information Act Handbook, available through the DoD's FOIA office (down at the bottom of the page).

From the passage above, it would seem that citizens can request any existing data output or document from a federal agency (including the DoD). Given that fact, i would not assume that the programs that produced that data output would be subject to the same output. I am curious whether you could request software manuals however (which would be true for open or closed source software).

Unfortunately i don't have time to properly research this at the moment, so i'm going to be irresponsible and simply quote the first thing i have come across that looks definitive:

What is a record?
A record is the product(s) of data compilation, such as all books, papers, maps, and photographs, machine readable materials, inclusive of those in electronic form or format, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteris- tics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law in connection with the transaction of public business and in Department of Defense possession and control at the time the FOIA request is made.

That's pulled from the DoD's Freedom of information Act Handbook, available through the DoD's FOIA office (down at the bottom of the page).

From the passage above, it would seem that citizens can request any existing data output or document from a federal agency (including the DoD). Given that fact, i would not assume that the programs that produced that data output would be subject to the same output. I am curious whether you could request software manuals however (which would be true for open or closed source software).

It's not really "free," it's just being rolled into the opportunity cost of the job: it's like a benefit, one of the few benefits of being in the military. A civilian would have to pay for the surgery, sure, but they would probably so make significantly more money. Same with the health plan and free housing (barracks). Go read the military pay rates if you want. I'm not saying they're not a bad deal if you want to be in the military, but if you have half a brain you don't do it for the money, that's for sure.

So saying the surgery is 'free' is right up there with Verizon wireless telling me I can get a 'free phone,' if only I agree to pay them $50 a month for three years. Only fools and people who work in advertising would call that 'free.'

TANSTAAFL.

As I understand cost effectivelly, the Raptor is about $187 million (per jet) (BTW: I got the info by searching Google with "f 22 raptor cost" and the .mil site only, so the return I pulled this quote off of was the dod.mil site = http://www.dod.mil/news/Jul1999/n07301999_9907302. html)

BTW: the info for the Russian jets I would have gotten directly from the sukhoi.ru site, but my Firefox Google translater extension doesn't support Russian/Cyrillic.

Compared even to the experimental MiG 1.42/1.44 "MFI" which is supposedly $70 million per unit, and that is the more expensive experimental MFI. A direct quote from http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws001/janes008.htm which cites their source as Janes Defense - "With a projected unit cost of $70 million, the MFI (mnogo-funktsonalnyy frontovoy-istrebityel) is now described as a 'flying laboratory', as it is unlikely to be ordered in any quantity. "It is not a commercial programme", says Korzhuyev, "it will be the basis for a new fighter that will be smaller and cheaper, but not worse, than the MFI"."

And that's just the MiG MFI, not including Sukhoi's experimental Su-47 "Berkut" which is supposed to lead to the slightly dumbed down "PAK (something or other I think)" (they are leaving out the forward swept wings, which as I understand Russia discovered just as America did that "marginal manuervablility gained by the foreward swept wings was outweighed by the cost of the automatic computer stability controls"). The experimental Berkut is based on the Su-37, which in-turn is based on the Su-27 Flanker series.

Yes, that's the reason the Intelligence Oversight legislation was passed, making it illegal for the DoD (and CIA) to collect intelligence on U.S. persons (citizens, resident aliens, etc). However, that's still the backyard of law enforcement, and the FBI. All I see this meaning is while the CIA can't store fingerprints in a database due to intelligence oversight laws, the FBI still can, and does. See http://www.dod.mil/atsdio/ for information on intelligence oversight.

Slashdot personality: If you can possibly find something remotely wrong with something someone said, focus on that. Ignore the central meaning and how what was said could be correct.

If you want the same answer above from the U.S. government's Department of Defense, look at this PDF file, located on a U.S. military web site: National Defense Budget Estimates for the FY 2005 Budget.

What's 100 Billion one way or the other? The 450.586 Billion U.S. dollars listed there as the 2005 U.S. government money for war-making capability is enough to justify my argument.

If part of it doesn't go for spying on other countries, where does it go? The think they don't have to tell you, and if they did say something, they don't think they don't have to tell the truth.

This is the military equivalent of saying "Here's a $200 billion program to Make The World A Better Place". As with so many other military programs, it throws insane quantities of money at a real problem, with a timeline so long that the solutions will be obsolete before they hit the field, without paying attention to recent successes.

The most successful information sources to the troops in the field in Operation Iraqi Freedom were from agencies who left the alphabet soup of military interoperability acronyms behind, and built effective web interfaces (almost on the fly) which were ideal for their customers on the ground in Iraq.

Army logistics tracking system allowed troops to request and track their re-supply orders via satellite phone as if it was FedEx. The smarter intel systems are looking to amazon.com style customer relationship management systems as the appropriate model.

This was all taking place in an environment where laptop computers in the field were still considered "unauthorized" by the military (fortunately, an edict ignored by commanders). Some of the best Command and Control information systems used were improvised in the months before the war by a few smart techies at the Corp level out of necessity using COTS equipment, since none of the divisions in the initial action had been upgraded to trailers-full of "ruggedized" computer systems of the last multi-multi-billion dollar information system program, Force XXI.

The military has to learn to embrace technological FLEXIBLITY and allow a Bazaar-style of advancement among it's agencies. _READ_ some of this GIG proposal... http://ges.dod.mil/articles/netcentric.htm
if you were constrained to those "Common Operating Environment" mandates, and what will be thousands of pages of specifications and acronyms, you'd never want to develop a line of code again. And noone will, except for the half dozen programmers at over-priced defense contractors who will be well paid to live and breath these standards for the next 20 years.

-bcg

Wikipedia article on SIPRNET

The government's page on it

http://ges.dod.mil

True, but Republicans also like to spend other peoples money. Mostly on "defense", much of it being wasteful or just plain pork*. I respect the Libertarian position, but the Republican position is pretty nasty in my eyes - they are happy to spend our money on killing people and pork projects but refuse to help people in need. That's just amoral in my eyes.
Not that I'm really defending the Democrats per say - when it came down to it, they chose to end social welfare as we know it but didn't cut back their own cronyism.

*references here and here and here and here and here

By the way, here is the SECDEF's own response on the draft question.

For starters, he trumpets the oft-stated mistake that there is no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda

Check your sources, to say that that memo is misleading is to be fawningly polite. The truth is its bullshit.
Bush has yet to give a coherent argument about why we needed to invade Iraq, but not invade Syria or Saudi Arabia or Iran or Jordan or etc, because all those other countries have had minor or low level connections with terroists organizations too, but we aren't attacking them. This is the problem: even if it was true in a technical sense (low level connections may have existed), it wasn't true in a fundamental or practical sense because:

• Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
• Hussein was extremely suspicious of the radical Islamists, he himself was a secular nationalist, not a religious nut. Within Iraq he actively suppresed Islamic fundamentalism.
• Removing Hussein did *not* hurt Al Queada in any way. Al Queda was in Afghanistan, but they had no known presence in Iraq (for the reason given above) until we removed Hussein and the Iraqi army which allowed the terrorists to infiltrate into Iraq.
• Americans are now more threatened by Al Queda than ever before, because AQ has about 300,000+ convenient US targets in Iraq now to go after, a substantial population to hide within, and a real, *genuine* resistance movement (anti-West Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq) to complicate attempts at stopping AQ. Had we kept our presence to just Afghanistan, we would be now in a much better situation.

Next, he brings out the ridiculous draft claim. First, re-enlistment rates are at record highs.

No, they aren't. The military, for the most part, for most units, is meeting its own targets for retention, but that doesn't make them records. Second, the big exception is the National Guard, which is dramatically failing to meet its retention goals nationwide, and because half the troops in Iraq are reservists, this is a serious problem. (If Bush plans more of these wars, the Army may be forced to abandon the concept of integrating the Guard into the full-time military units). Third, we don't know yet what the full effect of multiple, back-to-back, year-long deployments are going to do in the long run to the Army. If the Army can end those long deployments soon, it may have no effect, but if they can't stop it because of a chronic lack of combat troops, it could start to have a bad effect. Fourth, the longer the Army uses "stop loss" orders (Bush's stealth draft) to keep people from going home after serving their time, that will have a negative impact on people too (particularly the Guard). Finally, it depends on who you ask, many units aren't having major problems with retention, but some definitely are.

Second, there will not be a draft. Bush has stated that he doesn't want a draft

I believe the whole issue in dispute here is whether we can trust Shrubby anymore. I believe this about as much as I believed his father's "no new taxes" pledge.

Of course we will first dismantle the army and reassemble it -- the first one wanted to kill us (baathists) and the second one is our ally!

You need to get in touch with the troops. Its high ranking officers in the military that are the ones admitting we should have kept the Iraqi military force structure intact (this doesn't mean keeping the politically appointed officers, nor does it mean keeping units like the Republican Guard). I'm pretty sure even Rummy has conceded this. This was