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Los Alamos Missing Disks Never Existed
Hal9000_sn3 writes "Turns out that the investigations carried out at Los Angeles National Laboratory over a matter of stolen research were flawed...because the missing disks never existed. Kind of hard to defend against having lost something you allegedly had access to, if the thing never existed." From the article: "Eventually, four were fired for security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands."
Thus again it it is proven that in an investigation like this the most important step is to find scrapecoats, even when the investigation itself is groundless.
i'd say the same ...
...we knew this months back. This isn't new news.
No, nevermind they never existed in the first place.
Think of it as paranoia in action.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This article doesn't go into too much detail, and doesn't clarify why the people were really fired.
For example, if they didn't properly sign out the data and disks that they were borrowing, then they would be responsible for a mistake like this even if they didn't lose anything.
There should never have been a question about who had the disks in a properly run lab.
I'm glad to hear that the disks were not missing and in fact apparently never existed, but that only clears up one mystery.
Were the missing notebooks that were reported, alleged Chinese hack-attacks, accusations against Wen Ho Lee and all the other reported security lapses phantoms as well?
I'm a big tall mofo.
The XXX never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!
"The WMD never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!"
"The disks never existed, but the draconion measures we took were justified!"
Just fill in the blanks...
... numerous nuke experts convinced of having been disenfranchised in politically motivated "purges" and "sacked as scapegoats" ?!
Maybe they can't find them disks but I heard they found some of them WMDs they been lookin' fer.
Silicone Valley? I never would have thought...
--
ECFA.
same way CIA actions help the safety http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/Fig htSmart18-11-2001.htm
four were fired for security breaches, one chose to resign under the threat of termination and seven others received various formal reprimands
All too often these matters are concluded by way of "well mistakes were made, lets just leave it at that and forget about it".
As a US taxpayer (which I'm not) I'd want an investigation into the basis for the allegations and who made them. If someone is wrongly accused then the accusators have to be held responsible for their errors.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
A very funny Monty Python skit. Except the Spanish Inquisition wasn't funny and like any witch hunt you will find witches even when there are none to be found. The equivilent of the Spanish Inquisition swooped down on these people and heads were going to roll. It doesn't matter that there were no disks to go missing in the first place. It only matters that it's perceived that something is being done to correct the problem - even if that particular problem doesn't exist. There is bound to be some problem if we look hard enough. The vengeful, righteous persecutors who went and gleefully destroyed people can sleep happily in their beds because they are under the misguided belief that they found and burned their nonexistent witches with the full backing of god and country. It's a shame they don't make children watch The Oxbow Incident (old black and white movie about hanging cattle rustlers who were not guilty - a study in mob justice)
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
The best way to cover your butt when there is a problem is to make everyone believe the problem never existed, then divert attention to the other "more serious" problems in the organization.
How hard would it have been to make duplicate copies of the bar codes (or remove the original ones if you were actively stealing the disks) and place them where they could be found during an investigation.
The fact that they write off the un-used bar-codes without mentioning that good procedure would log bar-codes when they are used (not just when they are printed), makes this result suspicious.
More like
The disk never existed.
The disks were missing.
The security breaches were solved.
The disk were found back because the security was not that bad.
and last but not least.. the data was not that sensitieve.
Like a suspect pleaing to judge:
-I never did it.
- never was there.
-I left before it took place.
-The xxx forced me to do it. (not my fault.)
- I am sorry about it.
(b.t.w. perfect logic for a lawyer)
Okay, this isn't the BIG missing disk story of the Clinton era, this is a set of missing disks from last year. Kerry was trying to make political hay out of this for the election year so the Bush Administration did what it usually does. Shoot first, ask questions later so Kerry couldn't accuse the Bush camp of being lax on security.
So now the article screams false alarm and everyone appears to be lamenting the loss of money to UC and the loss of careers.
Valid points to be sure but... What's the bigger mystery? That top secret disks disappear from a research facility? Or that non-existent top secret disks get reported as disappearing from a research facility?
(Or in other words, did Karl Rove falsely report missing disks to make the Bush team look tough on security? Or did UC students falsely report missing disks to make the Bush team look weak on security?)
When I was a gov.contractor with a high level clearance, we had to go through all kinds of security steps in the handling of classified docs... One day I had thought my PHB had lost his mind..... I was wrong, it never exsisted to begin with. We did not have to report it though, because it did not have anything to do with "intelligence".
If they ever get around to "the missing uranium actually never existed," then I think I shall disbelieve.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
...US govt.... ...never existed...
Just how do those two connect?
I hate to sound like this, but what does this have to do with my rights online?
Is it "Your Rights Online" or "Your Rights.... Online"?
Either way, it doesn't justify this article being submitted here.
Interesting story though...
If you can't mod them join them.
It's just a matter of statistics.
If you minimize the probability of not identifiying a real harm you will maximize the false positives which mean alarm on nothing.
But we all know that security is the highest goal we must archieve no matter what the price will be.
---
The equation becomes more sense if you tag a price to each false positive and unidentified real harm.
He said "I may have destroyed many innocent lives but at least I never claimed to have caught anyone. These guys are going to give witchhunting a bad name."
Maybe those Los Alamos disks are Saddams weapons of mass destruction?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Oh, it could be a coverup. But inventory tracking in a secure environment would be a compelx system, a minor failure of which would look exactly like what we've seen.
The confusion, it turns out, was created by inventory bar codes produced for computer disks that have never been written, a department official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell, this mistake, if it was that, is the best thing that ever happened to the place - there were multiple, serious problems with security and safety on the site that were addressed as a result of the hunt.
"Although multiple investigations have confirmed that the 'missing' disks never existed, the major weaknesses in controlling classified material revealed by this incident are absolutely unacceptable, and the University of California must be held accountable for them," Brooks said in a statement.
"Of even greater concern are significant safety weaknesses which came to light at approximately the same time," he added.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
This happened in the UK.
20 kilos of Uranium "vanished". We were later told that it was an accounting error.
We still don't know what really happened.
I don't know this really sounds like a cover up to me.
has also never existed.
"No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
A few things about Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
They're under the direction of the Department of Energy and are managed by the University of California.
Across the street from both one finds Sandia National Laboratories, managed by Martin-Marietta.
Election-year antics with these two labs have become rampant of late: usually, the republicans go for security lapses and the democrats for environmental issues. This is in spite of the fact that the laboratories have a negligable environmental impact (the measuring devices at LLNL to detect toxic releases in the air from the research facility had to be brilliantly engineered to filter out the noise from the freeway 1 mile away, noise which is 1000 times larger than the "damaging environmental releases" they're supposed to detect and help prevent), and have an excellent security record (the "security incidents" are in fact created by failures in the security bureaucracy. If, for example, you have a policy to destroy secret documents after 20 years, and someone slaps a secret-document tracking program on top, suddenly the news reports "tens of thousands of secrets lost").
In effect, these have beome largely political attacks on the Secretary of Energy, a cabinet-level appointment, and through that person, to the president and party in power.
So why the "lax security" during a Republican administration? Those two labs employ something on the order of 15,000 people. THey're managed by the University of California. The University of California has one of the most solvent pension funds in the country. Martin Marietta(or Lockheed Martin, I forget. same company) has long expressed an interest in stretching their management across the street from Sandia to LANL and LLNL; in addition to the money they can make directly from government spending, they'll be free to raid that sweet pension fund.
Of course, I'm just ranting. The Bush administration has set a steadfast policy of protecting the country's resources against corporate raiders.
We run stories about:
/. keep a "copy" of those previously rejected articles that are still news, and would be more interesting reading? I'm sure thousands of better articles have been rejected before.
-Flawed browser rendering speeds (not that it really matters anyways, it's all about security/features)
-Microsoft job offers (patent related, nothing special really)
-Open Source journalism (wtf?)
-Microsoft: smell of rot (nothing to see here, please move along)
-Machine grown housing (huh?)
-Tankcam (every 8yo boy's dream!)
and to top it off - missing disks! (and a screwup)
The only "for nerds, stuff that matters" news I've seen today was "Anatomy of the Linux Boot Process" (good article and a LOT of good links).
Doesn't
I don't know about you, but I don't bother submitting articles, seeing how everybody says "mine was rejected" all the time, and that we end up with these stories instead (a lot of slashvertizements lately too, including the worst ever - that asbestos blog. mind you the guy can retire now...).
Using WMD that were destroyed in response to sanctions and inspections as a justification for saying that the sanctions and inspections were ineffective is just silly.
Who said that? What are you talking aout?
No, no... it's scrapegoatse. Think goatse with a paint scraper involved.
Both need to cover their butts...
I think that this is actually the best that could have happened. First, the disks weren't stolen because they never existed. This means the disks weren't stolen. Disks not being stolen is a good thing. Secondly, alleged flaws in the security of the labs were found and fixed -- hopefully preventing anything from really being stolen in the future. Flaws being fixed is a good thing. We're up two and down zero. Cigars for everyone.
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82
Some of the ranting on here about "scapegoats" seems to ignore that some of the people were guilty of security violations (an obvious cause for dismissal), but the violations were only found after an investigation was triggered on misinformation. It doesn't make those people any less guilty of their security violations.
The last two lines of the article should have made that clear, but I suppose most of the loud mouths never got that far.
Big difference. :)
sight unseen?
Does this mean that if I get into Berkeley or UCLA, it's gonna cost even more? I'm not a CA resident either...
I believe
Imagine investigating a story, reporting on an event before anyone else, even getting articles placed in other papers! It could be a dream job with people lining up to fund it. PLEASE consider what
Caveat, this coming from someone who just got a post rejected last week, but still there are a hundred geeks out there wanking on about two week old news and it's kinda dumb. Why not actually contact some congressional staffers and find out what's happening BEFORE the news breaks elsewhere? Like, news? You know?
This is the weak point of slashdot's dependence on user submissions. There aren't any journalist users who are going to submit first to slashdot. Solve for x.
I have to say that this sounds even worse than having lost two disks.
If the inventory of classified resources included completely imaginary items then how can it be trusted at all? If people assume that the inventory is wrong, then how will they know if something actually goes missing?
Sorry, but I agree with the government - if these guys managed classified data so poorly they deserve to be fired and fined.
Clear, Dark Skies
This is NOT news. This story is at least 2-4 weeks old.
WHY does old news keep reappearing here?
The WMD used to justify the second Gulf war indeed *NEVER* existed.
You guys are talking about the wrong non-existent disks. The submitter clearly says the Los Angeles national laboratory. That's that new one, right?
{Jedi hand wave}
These are not the disks you're looking for.
Chip H.
I have no personal knowledge of the situation at Los Alamos, but the report doesn't surprise me. Security is only taken seriously when there are regular inspections and audits. Too many people will become complacent and let things slide if there is no mechanism to detect and correct problems. Good security slows things down and costs money, which makes it easy to rationalize cutting corners. Management often views it as a waste of their budget dollars.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
There are a dozen scenarios that could involved non-existant, classified disks for which people should be fired.
-Person A creates a record of a disk, intending to classify a piece of media. Then doesn't. They forget to record the disk as destroyed.
-Person B repeatedly writes inspection reports stating that the non-existant disk in fact exists. This indicates that they are not actually doing their job of inspecting.
-Person C repeatedly signs off on the inspection reports that Person B writes, thus affirming the existance of a non-existant disk.
Regardless of the fact that the disk never existed, all three people should be fired. First, they were not doing their jobs. Second, and more importantly, they facilitate the work of people like Aldrich Ames. By not immediately reporting the disk missing (or non-existant) any could have stolen the disk, sold its contents and come back for more without anyone noticing.
the one who "had to resign" was an extremely resepected scientst and a member of the national academy of science. He was essentially a vice president at the lab and the only member of the NAS who was at that level of management.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Surely, the University of Texas wanting to take control of Los Alamos has nothing to do with it, wink. And of cause, the ex-governor of Texas was a completely uninterested party.
"Should the contract go to bid, the University of Texas might have an edge because it is in President George W. Bush's home state, said Pete Stockton, a senior investigator with the watchdog organization Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C., a loud critic of UC. And Bush doesn't have close ties with California, which he lost in the 2000 election."
www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/5034980.htm
This article is the result of trult execrable reporting. The missing disks were the least of the problems at the lab. The investigations began after an administration change and BEFORE the missing disks story. There was a theft ring operating out of the lab that even included one person charging a Ford Mustang on her office credit card.
For references, read the local newspapers
www.abqjournal.com and thealibi.com
The main guy fired was a Chinese guy. The media ran rampant conjuring all manner of implications about his link to the People's Republic of China.
It's unclear whether this is because of a real screw-up, or it's a cover-up for some seriously bad leaked information, and they want to say that it "never existed" like how UFO's "never existed"...
stuff |
I thought they had been found? Who ever took them stashed them back under a copier of some other piece of office equipment so that someone would discover them?
No, it proves that security investigations that turn up security holes are very important, even when no damage has yet been done. Those people were fired because of actual unacceptable risks they created, discovered in the course of the investigation. If you want to talk about scapegoating, talk about the administration which jumped at the allegations, but never revealed that the actual damage was never done, because it would have been harder to spin that. Even though it would have reduced the fear among Americans that our nuclear programs are being compromised by active enemies. Who benefits from the increased fear?
--
make install -not war
Scapegoating... well this looks very possible but you have to remember that someone, somewhere actually did believe in all honesty that there did exist the drives.
Next, we have to ask ourselves (start by putting away the pr0n and thinking we are the smartest people in universe) if the phantasmal hard disks were in fact the result of, not the cause of the problem. See there is a larger problem. Proactive people (smart people) learn from mistakes. They use what works. They do not jump to conclusions. They do learn and grow. (as an aside, it is the stupid people... the average slashbot, that would claim he knows about development because he once made a hello world program and writes some simple scripts periodically. They would actually be proud of not ever using reference books or online material. They would say things like "I thought you knew [X] to someone with a reference book or site they were using" because they do not have even the most rudimentary real life experience of usage of a general domain issue (programming with a real 3 or 4 level language) or specific issue (programming RDBMS tools for validating (or just any sort of r/w access) data and completely go against the whole idea of relational database storage. Ignorance? Nope, it is chosen stupidity since the combination of refusal to research what works, ask questions, and admit that their lack of expertese is a conscious decision.
The situation is exactly the same here. The slashbot refuses to do real research and apply critical thinking for themselves as it is easier to be a parrot.
Now, keep in mind that if scapegoating did happen based on the belief of missing harddisks then by carefully (it takes great concentration for slashbots) stripping away the theory and getting down to any proven facts we will not only justify most punitive actions but be able to clear the way for those performing the scapegoating to be punished as well.
Think about it (concentrate hard little slashbot). If negligent behavior of the sort that would enable the loss critical pieces of infrastructure and date is proven then what is the cause for alarm when those who were negligent are punished? In other words, if vigilance was replaced by complacence, apathy and willful refusal to follow critical policies and procedures then that is perfectly acceptable grounds for punitive action.
However, (isn't there always a 'however'?) we must also ensure that in any situation there is justice. There is a sort of matrix of values with one axis measuring degree of potential harm (probably using risk assessment techniques) in a horizontal fasion and the other axis measuring position. Position can of course greatly increase the impact of the negligent behavior as well as it sets bad precident.
So, are we thinking a little better now? Is the slashbot demon slowly being defeated by sound reasoning and self reliant thinking? Is the voice of groupthink somehow a little more quiet? Great!
Anybody else see the irony of a story about typo sites being directly above this story given the obvious "Los Angeles National Laboratory" mistake (vs. Los Alamos National Laboratory)?
Even if you don't, it looks ironic to me.
I repeatedly submitted this story to /. back in July and even posted it in a comment:
1 6107
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=9827294&sid=1
Idiots.
The teaser says: Hal9000_sn3 writes "Turns out that the investigations carried out at Los Angeles National Laboratory over a matter of stolen research were flawed...because the missing disks never existed. Somebody should let Hal9000_sn3 know that the "Los Angeles National Laboratory" should read Los Alamos...if you are going to gloat get it right ;-)
I repeatedly submitted this story to /. back in July and even posted it in a comment:
1 6107
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=9827294&sid=1
Idiots.
Los Angeles National Laboratory doesn't exist. If you mean, Los Alamos National Laboratory on the other hand...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The power of this piece isn't in the incident itself. It's in the political manipulations of such... But then this is on Slashdot under the heading "Your rights online"
Rights?
I wish I could provide names, so obviously this is nothing for you folks but unsupported rumor. Oh, well. An acquaintance of mine who works at Los Alamos claims that she was told by co-workers that some congressperson wanted the lab to be run by the university in their state, and rigged the whole thing to bolster the case for it. The gain was millions of pork dollars for that university.
Even if it was the worst coffee in the world. As long as it was within the norms of BOILING WATER I think it's safe to say it's expected to be hot.
... is 100C by definition [well average at the normal ground pressure for most places on earth...] ...
I'm sorry I don't care why they kept it hot, provided the water wasn't like >110C or so I don't see the claims.
Boiling water
That's like saying ice cream was too cold for being below zero C... I DEMAND MY ICE CREAM BE 23C like outdoors!!!
BBRRRRR cold!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
/. bro... that's not how things work.
I believe there are actual conspiracies, but I believe they are so complicated and likely to fail in an embarrassing way that they are rare. Either side could have made gains here, but actually setting something like this up would have been incredibly risky - even an apathetic populace might take notice of propaganda games being played with nuclear weapons security.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
anybody else remember these notable 80's events:
terrorists steal plutonioum
Doc Brown cons terrorists with a "shoddy casing full of used pinball machine parts"
news reports that the missing plutonium is really just a clerical error
terrorists go looking for Doc Brown
Marty ends up kissing his mom
oh wait...
Sometimes counterintelligence sets up big ruses to catch people without giving away the fact that they had a mole on the other side.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same was the case here. The FBI was looking for information on a known spy or source of leaks here (possibly one of the persons let go), but created the "lost disk" ruse not to give their hand away that they have penetrated the upper layers of the Chinese spy agency.
If you want to talk about scapegoating, talk about the administration which jumped at the allegations, but never revealed that the actual damage was never done, because it would have been harder to spin that. Even though it would have reduced the fear among Americans that our nuclear programs are being compromised by active enemies. Who benefits from the increased fear?
What you said is even more applicable to the case of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, which happened during the Clinton administration.
The government needs to clean up its act. But it's not really a Republican/Democratic party issue. It's more the fault of the Department of Energy, and the University of California (which manages Los Alamos for the DOE).
We don't have the whole story here. There is no actual explanation in the article as to why the persons who lost their jobs did, and there is no detailing of whatever actual security breaches may or may not have been discovered as a result of the clampdown initiated as a result of the not-missing missing disks.
But even if we never find out what happened, I don't mind. The frickin' Soviets would up with the Bomb because of security breaches at Los Alamos (remember the Rosenburgs?). Sure, the USSR would probably have figured it out by themselves eventually, but it was a screwup of the highest order to give them our nuclear secrets for free.
So, if these employees feel they were treated unfairly, too bad. It's cheaper for the government to pay out a few bucks on the occasional wrongful termination claim than to deal with the dissemination of some of our secrets.
I supposed I should state that I spent a summer at the lab as a college intern, working on something I cannot disclose.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Actually, the disks has an equal chance of existing or not existing before the investigation was opened.
But the official said the episode had helped discover and fix serious security breaches at Los Alamos, and therefore the department had no regrets.
I guess this gives a green light to government-backed fishing expeditions. Funny how heads rolled for a problem that didn't exist, but nobody is held accountable for the false information that started the whole mess. The Bush camp seems to thrive on imaginary monsters. I'm willing to bet that Los Alamos and WMD either are, or will be only the tip of the iceberg.
Read the details of the case. It wasn't just hot coffee that persuaded the jury to rule in favor of the injured individual. There were circumstances for which McDonalds was responsible. Also, the ultimate award was no where near where the media has led us all to believe. There are reasons to dislike the justice system, but the McDonalds-Coffee case is not one of them. (It is a reason to dislike the media which fails to inform.)
That scandal was during the Clinton administration. Apparently this was a new security review.
Clear, Dark Skies
Did that guy find behind the copy machine?
Informatus Technologicus
Yea, but hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns, require skin graffs, and require 8 days hosipitalization is not too hot because there is another 30F until I get to boiling. It's a hazard to serve any drink above 140F. The coffee was at 185F, McDonald's knew it. At 185F the coffee is not consumable and the product (drinkable coffee) was defective. It's not like she was the first person to get burned, she was the 700th person McDonalds had known about with the same types of burns. All McDonalds had to do was lower thier coffee maker's temprature to be the same as the rest of the industry. She sued for to get help with her medical coverage, but the jury was so angry that McDonalds knew about the danger and let person after person get injured.
I love the typo story just above this one and the fact that 'Los Angeles National Labs' hasn't been corrected for nearly four hours! Nice work reading what you type before you post it!
Different disks, different investigation. You'd think Los Alamos would have learned after that previous investigation, but apparently not.
Clear, Dark Skies
That explains why UC said this about the investigation:
"Unfortunately, we deserve this," UC spokesman Chris Harrington said. "But what we have done is correct the problems and put the right system in place so that we don't have to take this type of hit again."
I doubt UC would be admitting guilt if the evidence wasn't pretty damning.
Clear, Dark Skies
He's right, check out his previous post! Too bad no one noticed at the time...
He hates the chinese. He's said several times that he wants to see every single one of them dead. He just couldn't stand the thought of a chinese person having a good job even though they're much better educated and much smarter than the average gool-ole' white boy.' Check-out http://democraticunderground.org/ for the best place to get the real truth about smirk.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I think you should understand why they didn't take your story right away.
Sources... don't have reliable sources. Can't do nothing you know?
It's the only reason and a very good one.
Still mod parent up, I repeat. Mod him up.
It's funny how I make sense to others and not myself...
...if you think drives exist that don't, in a classified environment, someone is too incompetent for the job and should be fired.
Remember the line in The Usual Suspects? The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
First they say the files are lost. They can't find them, so then they conveniently say the files never existed. Nice work, really.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
This non-incident is another example of Bush Administration lies. The affected people should sue the Administration for false defamation of character.
"In other news, officials at the pacific nuclear research facility have denied the rumor that a case of missing plutonium was in fact stolen from their vault two weeks ago. A lybian terrorist group had claimed responsiblilty for the alleged theft. Now, however, officials attribute the discrepancy to a simple clerical error."
Of course, anyone who's seen the movie knows that the "officials" were wrong about that "clerical error."
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
Occams Razor...
In related news, Osama bin Laden, Monica Lewinski, and the Watergate Hotel never existed, either.
Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq existed, though.
It should be good for a laugh, since they weren't fired for losing the disks.
Clear, Dark Skies
There are some people who brown nose their way to power. When achieved, these same people back stab and crap all over their underlings. I suppose it's a way to climb the ladder. You get money, power. Sure people curse you, hate you, take out the shotgun and point it at you, but so long as they don't fire, you get to abuse your power freely. In this case, someone cooked up a story that people weren't dilligent enough about security. The security people got to yell at everyone at length about their incompetent, sloppy practices. New abusive measures to put 'those silly science people in line'. In the end: oops, we made a mistake, BUT DON"T YOU PEOPLE LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!" We're watching you.
It's a good thing this happened at Los Angeles National Laboratory. Since the lab doesn't exist, this means that there was never any problem. The disks don't exist, and there aren't any security flaws that exist, so literally nothing can be stolen in the future. Things are looking good. I'd say we're up three and down zero. Oh, I don't smoke.
I believe there are actual conspiracies, but I believe they are so complicated and likely to fail in an embarrassing way that they are rare.
You appear to be confusing cause and effect here. Whilst complex conspiracies, especially those involving many conspirators, are likely to be detected. Simple conspiracies, involving few conspirators, are less likely to be detected.
Could be the pluto "New HOrizons" mission - Los Alamos was supposed to be making Plutonium 238 for the RTGs. The delay could mean they are not ready for the Jan 2006 launch window..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Director Nanos single-handedly dealt an enormous blow to the American and world science by shutting down the operations at Los Alamos for MONTHS - all for nothing more than dominance games. If the Cold War were still on, I would suspect him of being a Russian mole.
Let me state that the knowledge of the total absurdity of the lleged "security breach" in Los Alamos is nothing new. Larry Barker of KRQE News reported that the scandal was fake in August 2004. Read the August 11, 2004 artile from Santa Fe New Mexican.
To conclude, I am much saddened by the mindless regurgitation of the official lies in this thread.
Whats all this I hear about missing risks? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If you want to find risks you could take up parachuting or hang gliding but I think most of us would prefer to miss risks. I think missing risks is a good thing.
Excuse me, but thats missing Disks, not missing Risks.
Ohhh... Never mind.
It's not "Los ANGELES"! It's LOS ALAMOS. Located in (surprise!) LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico! Damn slashdot submitters and "editors"!
The leak of the story of the "missing" disks to the press was a politically motivated attack intended to harm the administration during the election season. It was coordinated with the Kerry campaign.
The seditious perpetrators should feel lucky they just lost their jobs. They should be in jail or a shallow grave somewhere, instead.
That's like saying ice cream was too cold for being below zero C... I DEMAND MY ICE CREAM BE 23C like outdoors!!!
You can serve alcohol too cold. Pure ethyl freezes at about -117c. I'm not sure about spirits in the 60 to 80 proof range but they do not freeze in the freezer but if served directly from the freezer they can freeze you.
Agreed, but political conspiracies are seldom small and simple - the conspiracy theories that are commonly tossed about would have to be massive byzantine things run by precognitive geniuses.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I've been looking for something like that for years! The web is just too full of republicans who hate the world and want to kill every single non-white or poor person. Too many idiots just don't understand Mr. Bush's (I refuse to call him Mr. President after he stole the job) hatred. It runs deep and strong. The world hasn't seen a man like him since Hitler. If he isn't stopped, millions will die.
Actually, I think Arthur Miller denied any intentional connection to the McCarthy hearings with his play. That is, it wasn't an allusion, but rather an inference by some who interpreted the play.
This may seem improbable but I've actually read transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials, and the events depicted in the play (and even snippets of dialogue) are right out of the trials.
So, in that sense, it's way scarier than an allusion. It's history repeating itself.
I work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is a sister lab to Los Alamos National Laboratory. I can tell you that our system for tracking classified removable electronic media (or CREM in our PHB vernacular) is atrocious! We are FORCED to use a EXTREMELY POORLY designed and implemented database for tracking CREM. This database was designed to track PAPER DOCUMENTS, as are most of our procedures. There is no enforcement of unique records or entries. i.e. we don't track media (and media serial numbers or other unique identifier), we track labels printed on Dymo thermal printers that can be made by ANYONE.
Our group of system administrators have been pointing out the flaws in the handling and tracking of CREM, and proposing solutions for over five years. Middle management doesn't have the will or desire to expend the effort it would take to overcome the inertia of our bureaucracy. When the shit hit the fan (and press) last summer we thought management would finally listen to us and implement some of the changes. Not. Our culture does not include the idea of management being responsible for the actions of those they manage. Period. Nor do they have any worries of being fired for the actions of those they are nominally responsible for. There was a bunch of meetings, etc., but NO REAL CHANGE. They finally listened to our proposal of moving to diskless desktops. This pleased the users: they didn't have to put up with the hassle of dealing with CREM and being responsible for it. Of course, the data has to go somewhere, which meant that now single system administrators were responsible for hundreds of more pieces of CREM than before, and are primed for becoming the scapegoat when some secretary screws up an entry in our nominal database and DOE goes looking for some non-existant piece of CREM (similarly to what happened at Los Alamos).
Argh, I could go on, and on, and probably get myself into trouble. I am just so damn frustrated with Lab culture, and how this shit has landed on those who warned of this YEARS ago and were ignored.....
You can serve alcohol too cold. Pure ethyl freezes at about -117c.
If you are actually drinking pure ethyl alcohol, somewhat bad things will happen to you anyway. Basically, the alcohol would like to combine with water if at all possible, so it will pull water out of your tongue, throat, etc. by osmosis, causing surface damage similar to a burn.
I'm not sure about spirits in the 60 to 80 proof range but they do not freeze in the freezer but if served directly from the freezer they can freeze you.
They will not be any colder than the ice or anything else that's been in the freezer for a while. Liquid water typically cannot go below 0 C. Frozen water can.
There's a little thing called due process which McCarthy ignored, which made absolutely everything he turned up questionable and worthless - it is very hard even with hindsight to work out what was real and what was supposition and invention. It was only after McCarthy went after General Marshall, who was overseeing two theatres of war while McCarthy was hiding behind the couch - that it was shown how much of a fool McCarthy was.
McCarthyism is gnerally held up as an example of ignoring due process, the constitution and generally being an idiot. A "kill them all and let God sort them out" attitude may catch one or two guilty people, but generally a more targeted response is warranted. Looking back at post-war history, how can any sane person suggest that Stalin had a revolution planned out for the USA - he may have killed more of his own people in a brutal reigime than were killed during WWII, but world domination is the stuff of Bond films.
McCarthy took a percieved problem used it as an excuse to gain incredible amounts of personal power - any real threats were secondary. The bigger the scare the greater the justification McCarthy could use for going around the professionals and taking his own amataur approach. What is a democracy without justice?
Which has proved a goldmine of information - records have been well kept, even to the extent that there are records of orders as to which records have been destroyed (eg. records of massacres) and helpfully summarise them - just to show that there was an attempted cover up by a paticular official and this is the information they were trying to hide. Until very recently we called the main interrogation techniques of the NKVD - sleep deprivation and breaking fingers - by the name of torture. In my opinion we should go back to calling it torture and not practice it as a state.I'm sorry I don't care why they kept it hot, provided the water wasn't like >110C or so I don't see the claims.
You can't superheat coffee like that, it'd vaporize. The problem was, they handed an older lady a cup of near boiling temperature coffee into her moving vehicle. The lawsuit wasn't because the coffee "was hot" -- it's because it "was too hot to be safe for a drive-through". Cars and old ladies are proned to spilling stuff (they both shake). Everyone likes their coffee hot, but not scalding hot.
That's like saying ice cream was too cold for being below zero C... I DEMAND MY ICE CREAM BE 23C like outdoors!
Well, if the ice cream left your mouth/lips covered with scars for being -200C you might have a similar case.
There are plenty of cases where people harm themselves and sue for it. This isn't one of them.
Submit it again - now that it will be a dupe, it's sure to posted!
Someone please do something!
Well .. I realize that this could just be me failing to see through the misinformation. But.
Why should I now believe that the disks never really existed? What makes this later finding any more competent than the earlier finding that disks were missing? In either case the cause is that the recordkeeping was sloppy and/or human mistakes were made.
If this later finding is accurate, it surely sucks for those who lost their jobs over the earlier mistake. But in any case, the mistakes -- whoever is making them, and whatever they are -- need to stop.
This space intentionally left blank.
...thinking that they'd simply rigged the voting machines more effectively after a few years in power. No dubious court cases needed now that the process is streamlined.
Personally, my wish is not so much that any particular Heckle or Jekyll gets into power, but that there was a party or leader which/who didn't suck.
Bush's crew mostly have their heads so far up their ass in search of religious rightness that they need air pumped in through their navels. Kerry's crew would happily rip up and trample over an emormous number of "traditions" without stopping to notice how well they've worked for centuries, nor stop to ask themselves why this might be. Neither side has a handle on what separation of church and state actually means.
No other party is going to get a look in any time soon (not that the alternatives are exactly confidence-inspiring) and there's no way to elect people even on a case-by-case basis, let alone on practical merit or anything other than "team politics".
Conclusion: the USA is screwed and is going down big time over the next decade or few. Which is not going to be a happy event no matter how yankophobic one is since they're also the world's most potent industrial and military force.
It would take a series of major miracles for the USA to recover its original purpose, character and vitality again.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ironic? It precipitates airborne particles while you watch. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Dave: The door won't open HAL, let me in! HAL 9000: I don't know what you're talking about Dave
"It's a hazard to serve any drink above 140F. The coffee was at 185F, McDonald's knew it. At 185F the coffee is not consumable and the product (drinkable coffee) was defective."
Well, then coffee has to be considered an inherently hazardous product. I guess we should ban it completely. It's funny, after about 30 seconds of searching I found some interesting information about coffee from a manufacturer of brewing equipment. Ideal holding temps of 175 to 185 degrees F. Ideal serving temps of ~155 to 175 degrees F. Just because a court found certain "facts" to be true doesn't mean the court isn't full of blithering idiots....
A few points. You are wrong. Many people are stupid. And bad things happen to good people all the time. That's why you should always carry health insurance in the US.
Someone like Karl Rove?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
You're not the only one - I sent it in when the sanctions against the University of California were announced. Rejected in under two minutes ...
I think you're confusing mass with massive.
One of the keys to determining which weapons are supposed to be legal for use in warfare is discretion. i.e. A gun is strictly under a person's control and may be fired at the wrong target but is always fired at a target, though this is often abused, of course.
Firebombs, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, etc. are inherantly designed to kill people in an area rather than take out a particular target. The US's prohibited use of cluster bombs, and our use of DU, for example, should be considered use of weapons of mass destruction given the degree of civilian damage that they cause.
Frankly, the notion of 'illegal weapons' seems to have been used more as grounds for prosecuting defeated leaders as opposed to actually improving the 'morality' of warfare. As I think Sherman said "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it."
While it i
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
But the response by the "leaders" at the University of California was breathtaking: they railed against the evil spy hunters who wanted to destroy national security by interfering with academic collegiality. Sheer insanity.
Um...last time I checked people liked McD's coffee because...wait for it...it was hot. And when you went through the drive through the coffee would still be hot enough to be hot on your tounge when you got to your desination, or a few miles down the road, or after you've eaten your food...
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
So /. rejected a story which was based on some guy claiming to have heard it from an unknown source. I'm somewhat surprised that /. seems to have some integrity, but it's still nice to see editors throwing out stories that clearly shouldn't have been posted.