Before the pathological evil of what we know as the industrial war machine, with broadcast technologies and deployment tactics that could harness fear and loathing to politics everywhere at once--- and the tireless drudges who worship them came to the fore---
We were becoming increasingly cyclical, distracted by moment, swaying in tighter rhythms while not dancing -- a bad sign. Hypnotized by the leafspring, the mainspring, the ratchet, the pendulum and most obnoxious of all, an hour-bell that means something besides nothing.
Between brutal wars -- merely pathological, in a cute sort of way. The animals kept us sane.
Despite ages of civilized existence -- it has scarcely been one hundred years since our clocks and calendars, biological and practical, were last paced by animals. And what a time it has been.
Rome built the roads; but it was always horses and oxen that set the pace. Oxen and people, measured seasons of growing in the fields. Even on the ocean do we find animal companions, for in the days when sails took us to places unknown, animals were aboard to ensure survival. But the wind itself is like an ox, with moods that paced the journey.
History has always moved in waves legions of soldiers traveling light and fast as wind, settlers burdened with goods at a snail's or oxen-pace. On a smart strong horse riders could doze and daydream, the beast's eyes as fixed on the horizon as the rider. In the far north dogs, rivers and caribou set the pace; in Summer mosquitoes kept everyone on the run.
Was a time we'd foretell the seasons by the birds as they got ready to travel, there were places for them to roost. Migrating birds and the moon and the stars to guide them were featured in theaters of sky and morning and evening and darkest night.
People cast tiny flickering shadows on land that went out with sleep -- not the lidless throbbing glimmer of busy continents today.
And news flowed like the tides -- news from over the ocean, of country and world gathering in eddies of pulp presented, like sermons, in their own time and place of reading. Local news and affairs churned with comfortable babbling regularity: ripples of gossip, stories heard in tavern and meeting-house and church. Rumor from afar came through with strangers and gathered rapt attention for telling and re-telling. Church it was that harnessed the calendar at first -- but it took a whole week for the tides of morality to flow round again -- plenty of time left for fun.
Where days full of task might stretch a bit here and there played themselves out, church bells gave us the first hint of regimentation to time. A manageable affair, for even old rural school-house days could hold more leisure within the hours, and there was more mixing between the ages during the process of learning. Apprenticeships. Though even in the age-segregated electric-bell'd warrens of today a good teacher can still open vistas; but like all modern animals even teachers are challenged by pace and environment. They're only human.
Even our busiest cities were townish -- wide avenues for horses, slow moving newspapers and the ever-present lure to market-place, wharf and concert hall tugged at us, kept us moving between meetings.
Those on long journeys tended to be out in the open. They set sights on destination more so than the calendar; getting there was the thing even if the journey was not. And long many-people journeys were actually moving cities -- where one or two people drift into dream-time, whole families and groups illuminated the trail with their own culture and hobby. We sang along the rivers, played music in time with horses' hooves. Children sought adventure on the fringes of camp.
Weather was the ocean we lived in, not the comforting or annoying visitor it is today. If you spot people-dots in a model of society you'll find us traveling more distance but moving around less than ever before. Everything is piped in, even things that shouldn't have been.
Lower-level violations are those considered to pose very low risk, such as improper upkeep of an electrical transformer or failure to analyze a problem with no impact on a system's operation, such as the effect of a pipe break. Higher-level violations range from low to high safety significance, such as an improperly maintained electrical system that caused a fire and affected a plant's ability to shut down safely.
I can grok exactly where this stream of 98% low-level 'potential' violations is coming from, and I will tell you even though it will not be Politically Correct for me to do so.
There are a great many Useless Eaters (my bad) invading industrial plants these days whose direct expertise does not include knowledge of the Thing being manufactured or produced. They are graduates of a quasi-liberal arts educational process that has emitted them from university and sent them out into the world to manage or assist in the management of people. The Human Resources Type. Ask any career machinist to (politely and quietly) point one out to you, they're sure to nod their head as someone passes by within two minutes or so.
And why are these Human Resources people cruising the halls like nervous night watchmen? Because they are young and have just joined a fraternity whose senior members have established themselves as people who you come to if there is a problem. The seniors count on you to tell them when there is a problem but otherwise they stay out of your hair. It is an excellent arrangement because with a small Safety Culture in place when a machinist or other employee brings something up, you'd better listen.
But there are too many of these young Human Resources people, too soon. They were trained to 'lead' but in the glare of reality they are realizing that they will not be leading anything for years to come, because their seniors are comfortable in their positions, years away from forced retirement, made indispensable by their high degree of experience. Many of them are graduated from among the ranks of those they manage.
And quite frankly, the seniors want the juniors to stay out of their hair. But also they want the juniors to cruise the plant and perhaps gain by osmosis some of the know-how that their education has denied therm. So go forth young man and learn our trade.
But what is there for these young barely skilled people to do?? There is only one Task for which they seem suited, in a place where the actual process has been tweaked and streamlined to perfection for decades now. It is a vital task but as we see first hand, even the noblest endeavor may become absurd if undue emphasis is placed on it.
It's Safety. It has become a Zero Tolerance game that is a distant social relation to the indictment of small children who draw pictures of guns. It begins with an almost religious affirmation that everybody knows is a dumb myth, "All Accidents Can Be Avoided." It's true, but only with complete hindsight and a level of plodding procedure that would have everyone strapped securely along the walls of the room (safely) unable to reach their tools.
But we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and put ourselves into a mental Total Safety Zone (in meetings with videos and small talk and with group hugs) where we believe it is possible.
The problem is that for every small but reasonable step such as brighter yellow pained lines or enforcement of speed limits in the yard or filling that little gas can outside, there is a TON of well-meant but trite suggestions that merely clog the system.
Malfeasance takes root within a Total Safety Culture too. I was told that Halliburton had once, with great fanfare, introduced a program where anonymous tips of safety violations would net a cash bonus. Sounds like it would be great for everyone. It became apparent that only a few people were using the system and that the targets of this activity tended to be those with whom there was a strictly personal animo
> I predict the way you're using two digits to count the errors is going to turn into a scalability limit.
Not if the error sequence number follows the convention used in IBM RPG/400 1.1.4.4. "Sequence Numbering of the Listing after a Compile"... "The high order 2 digits of the sequence number are made up of the characters A through Z and 0 through 9 in the following order: A, B, C,..., Z, 1, 2,..., 9, A0, AA, AB,..., AZ, A1, A2,..., A9, B0, BA,..., ZZ,..., Z9, 10,..., 99. This structure allows for up to 1295 different increments of the high order sequence number. "... it is worth noting that this counting sequence does not sort properly in ASCII or even native EBCDIC [A9,B0,BA] which leads Real Programmers away from the messy realms of real-world problems into the comfortable zone of devising elaborate workarounds for problems they had created.
Sometimes delving into the structure of ancient computer architectures and programming languages yields new and clever insights into old problems. This is not one of those times.
I had a severe adverse reaction to Sherlock Holmes as a child. Still do.
It was soon obvious that the feats of deduction based on observation described in the books were explained to the reader post-seeum, that is, explained by Holmes himself and the reader was not even invited to participate. Or Doyle was too simply lazy to describe the surroundings, opting instead for some sort of empty exercise in hero-worship. If Tolkien or Auel had described a crime scene you'd be able to spot that broken twig.
There is a certain realm way beyond the possible and the ridiculous, beyond any suspension of disbelief, a place where you cannot even enjoy a bad movie because a part of your brain is asking, "Are there people out there who actually enjoy this stuff?" and you are distracted because it leads to "Are any here right now... and should I be worried about these people?"
I decided early on that the feats described were impossible because the human eye and brain cannot resolve and store high definition images and process them completely in real-time, excessive signal to noise ratio and quantum flux in all motion that cloaks everything in Gaussian noise. For every Holmsian 'clue' you could spot in the real world you are also presented with countless equally possible 'faux clues', or even real clues that relate to some other crime. I just knew this, though I could not describe it that way until I was much older.
I was used to comic book characters performing the impossible. They do it with style and sometimes a wink of humor. But Holmes did not fit anywhere. Not even Jesus had the privilege of having a whole Universe (obviously) constructed for the sake of massaging his ego-intellect, where a gentleman could glop around in galoshes for a whole afternoon --- ever so carefully --- so as not to disturb the tiny scrape marks in their inner heel that Holmes was supposed to divine. It seemed so scripted, somehow.
Sherlock Holmesees are just 'Just So Stories' told without the flair and nonsensical humor of Kipling. They are entirely at your expense. No will ever spot a "monograph I have written on the subject" because he had never written any. He was also a compulsive liar.
The genre has spawned a load of modern shite like some CSI and all of Numbers and what have you, that try to present as possible and grainy-real to gullible people, situations that should be setting off loud clanging false-flag and deception alarms in our heads. It would have a detrimental effect, short-circuiting the part of the mind that is supposed to step up and say "This just isn't right."
And when Hero-Holmes made inquiries into police matters, he was always of course privy to information that should not have been obtained without a warrant. The Sherlock Holmes genre prepares you to accept NSA surveillance. Implicitly trust authority when steeped in hero-worship, unbelievable coincidences do happen (when we say they do). Training wheels for Sheeple.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be [STRIKEOUT: the truth] [INSERT] a clear sign that you may not have thought of everything."
Here we have a classic who'da-thunk-it situation. It is difficult to craft a poll question that has even a third of Americans voicing any 'support' for intrusive surveillance
Now we know that Senator Feinstein is some sort of gelatinous alien rodeo clown from outer space... but what of the others? This is bigger and badder than the transgressions that triggered the Church Committee. Where is the bandwagon? Where is the passion?
Gag me with a spooooon (I am Slashdot's favorite score:{-1,0,1} commenter) but y'all are some of the smartest critters around but all I see here is more of the same lounge lizard comfort zone hate I see elsewhere. They're attacking the Constitution, we hates them Precious, we hates them!
What about the WTF factor? Should this be sounding alarms in our heads? Could some of these elected representatives be under duress? And isn't it our collective 'job' to find out?
We seem to be hung up on ego as a species (it's mostly a male thing), find it difficult to create cultural 'duress codes', subtle signals that could be used to indicate that beneath the surface of our unexpected or unpopular behavior, there is a motivator that could explain our actions. One that, should it come to light, would not just absolve us but might eliminate a conspiracy of true evil.
But we don't have duress in the vocabulary, so the game is handed over directly to blackmailers, extortionists and for wont of a better term, bullies.
So here I give you the score. We have delivered on a platter the scenario that a government agency is certainly in possession of material (read and unread), goods on people, that if disclosed would ruin their lives.
WHAT IF there was some way to secretly poll Congress, put them to a simple question to which they could respond in an anonymous but accountable way. The question is,
Are you now, or have you ever been directly threatened to support intrusive government surveillance as a result of materials collected under that surveillance?
The victim of blackmail feels alone and isolated in the world. Our society is so hung up on Puritan holier than thou ethos that effective blackmail can be devised from the dumbest of things.
As computer professionals we understand that serious software vulnerabilities do arise through human error and oversight. It seems so easy to discuss their impact and work hand in hand with the 'guilty' engineers to close the holes.
What if glaringly obvious, dangerous vulnerabilities arise in our political process? Will we have the human decency to acknowledge a 'duress signal' and work with the affected parties (politicians under blackmail) to rrectify this dumb situation in a way that leaves their dignity and valuable career contributions intact?
We need to hack our culture to add a 'duress code' feature.
It could be a matter of survival. Otherwise the most ruthless assholes will run the show. Even within NSA there are lots of folks who do not wish to be a party to this. It's time for them to speak up too.
to warn you that we've been down this road before. In 1982 IBM was incredibly convinced that their new Personal Computer was destined to be used for simple word processing and as a dumb terminal to dial in and access their Really Smart Computers to do the Real Work. You wouldn't even need to purchase an expensive high speed printer, you'd just key in your time card data, run some reports and drive down to the nearest Service Bureau to pick up a little package containing the week's dot matrix bursty-form payroll checks.
DISCLAIMER: I admit that I have not read all of The Reg Whitepapers that describe how while we were asleep we have passed beyond the virtualization era into the even sexier post-meta-virtualization era of metametametadata , where one IT worker can do the work of thousands, millions --- after of course Complete Migration is Achieved and the simple 'GO' button is installed by a licensed technician at your business. There's just no time to read all that stuff.
I'm here stuck in traffic, on my way to pick up the payroll checks.
There is only one proper response to erudite claims that robotic space exploration should supplant human.
It starts with flared nostrils, increased heart rate. The eyes widen and adrenalin surges, releasing a flood of desperate emotions focused into rage. Direct eye contact and beating with fists on the chest to signify readiness for aggression, then a single step forward to firmly establish to the other that 'fight' is more likely than 'flight'.
Next, a primal scream of rage that serves to demonstrate that the time for sorry-ass debate on philosophical topics that serve to delay human space exploration and space colonization has ended. Someone has crossed the line and they're going to get their ass kicked.
If the proposal to 'abandon' human space exploration in favor of some pansy-ass robotic push-button solution was the result of a funded research grant, the next logical step is to rip the grant out of the wall and beat the responsible organization into a bloody pulp. And piss on the remains.
In fact, ANY organized group that gets in the way of continued human space exploration should be completely surrounded by an angry mob of stick waving concerned persons, in the hope that they will see that they are treading on shaky ground, because this is an existential threat.
The threat arises when we let ourselves be diverted from a proven and direct course of action towards a goal, to some other another that makes only promises. Let down your insistence for human space exploration for the greater good, they'll say. Maybe next year we will find the money in the budget. Then next year comes along and it's the year after.
The Club of Rome was pushing this tripe as early as the 70s. Let us not waste resources looking outward UNTIL we have solved all our problems down here. Then they try to place themselves as the authors of the new agenda. It involves wealth re-distribution and negative population growth and some form of ruthless 'governance' that (for wont of better ideas) would come down to force feeding people suicide pills.
To put it kindly,, an evolutionary dead end.
Because once you come into awareness that the human race exists within a delicate window of time between slate-wiping asteroid impacts, and our time is 'up' soon... the one planet of origin is like unto a theater aflame, and long term survival of the species depends on our ability to race out of the burning building.
It's about power consumption. These new Power8 chips may be clever but due to a shortfall of imagination and planning by Silicon Valley investors (and American corporations in general) in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st... these things are pretty 'steampunk'.
Of every 100 chips coming off the assembly line, roughly 37 will be powered by coal, 30 from natural gas. There is no real future in this.
Only 7 chips will get their power from Hydroelectricity, a percent point we would never want or be able to increase since it disrupts ecosystems and watersheds way beyond anything renewable utopians would admit to.
Only 3 chips will be wind powered, at a federally subsidized cost usually double that of other sources, the actual power supplied by wind turbine equipment amortized over 40 years that actually lasts less than 10.
19 chips will be nuclear powered, the method that most befits their advanced nature and hefty real-world consumption needs. Unfortunately the number is declining as the light water reactor plants are retiring after 30 years of (practically) perfect service.
Not ONE of these hundred chips will be completely solar powered despite an obscene amount of research and development that completely ignores the fact that no practical land based solar solution will ever scale, or exist without natural gas plant hidden just over the ridge.
Long before these 100 Power8 chips reach the end of their practical lifespan, the cost of non-renewable energy sources will start to climb as the natural gas 'glut' tapers off and cost of extraction increases exponentially.
Only if IBM and other corporations come together for the purpose of creating a true revolution in Power, such as ensuring development of molten salt reactor designs within a reasonable time frame for grid electricity and industrial heat generation... might these $ billions help the human race in ways that can save us,
Otherwise these 100 Power8 chips might become interesting trinkets found in the silicon rich dust of a failed civilization, taken by nomadic peoples for use as jewelry and adornment.
For a practical phaser you'd have to add an incredibly larger amount of energy to the budget to power a force field that surrounds the victim to prevent wall splattering by surface tissue that manages to escape during the 'conversion process' from thermodynamic expansion and propulsion at the edge of the field.
And since you've already allocated the budget for a force field, why not skip vaporizing the victim, just have the force field close in and compress them into a dense little cube? Then once that is done, expand the cube until it flash freezes.
Cleanup is still a breeze. And after a major battle you can make Stew.
Years ago my Dad oddly started referring to cordless phones as "headless phones" causing waves of shock and horror within our family. It is my hope that the ripples extend outward until they break across all cultures and languages, culminating in a universal oddity that science cannot explain.
Energy is life and civilization. Balancing an industrial society on the razor edge of a single point of failure is itself a 'fail'. Whether the failure would occur technically or politically is of little consequence.
The catch-22 is impossible to avoid. If orbital solar doesn't scale then it is a waste of resource, if it does then it's a single point of (catastrophic) failure.
Terrestrial power plants can be replicated easily, hardened from sabotage, operated and maintained within many sovereign countries at once, can easily swap out parts. That is what you would wish to ensure the future.
The day would arrive when some one will be unable to establish or maintain a dial 911 to save lives --- merely because they are surrounded by a Virtual Tuned Faraday Cage of these parasitic signal sucking devices.
This is an idea that is so bad in principle that it is embarrassing that it has not been laughed out of the room.
It is an example of what I call predatory engineering, the phenomenon where someone's "bright idea" trumps common sense and consideration for others. Yes, there are moral threads that weave through everything.
The imperative that power for communication not be drawn off of other peoples' communication is a moral imperative. This means even drawing power off of broadcast bands is a bad idea.
Inducing some 50/60 cycle hum is OK, though the coils would have to be large. Proponents of this idea choose small wavelengths it is most practical for small devices, although those bands contain our most fragile and imporant communication.
Politician: Turns out that Parkes is the biggest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.
Prime Minister: What's it doing in the middle of a sheep paddock?
Rudi: This is Sector 8. Is that you, Mr. Armstrong?
Rudi: Who goes there? [sheep heard bleating]
Reporter: No offense, but NASA spends fifteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars so that we can watch man walk on the moon and in the end it falls to you blokes! I mean, how do you feel about that?
Ross "Mitch" Mitchell: A lot better before you opened your trap!
Isn't using it to compress air in confined spaces or pump liquids uphill to recover some single-digit percentage of energy input, an bigger loser? Or is this one of those, we lose a little on each transaction but we make up for it in volume, er, things?
How about setting aside some tiny corner of one of the cave systems to store an itty bitty bit of nuclear waste, for as long as it takes to develop the technology to use the rest of the energy stored within it? For this privilege I am sure the nuclear power plant would give the data center all the electricity it needs. And light Las Vegas.
High Frequency Trades are abiotically generated by artificial node-gysms that infest the innermost belly-mantle. They execute on a timescale that is so distantly small from our own thought process they manage to knit cause directly to effect.
We operate within a lovely gylophagous gygantsm of our own devising. But there has always been human delay between cause and effect. Any system that has managed to knit cause and effect together and has evolved beyond thought-time becomes a paroxysmal gygantsm.
Gygantsae are set in motion as a single primordial gysm effects itself, or triggers causes in other gysms as they are introduced. As the expanding wave of possibility and permutation becomes practically unbounded a rolling glysm forms. It is convenient to think of glysms as expanding spheres whose behavior along the surface may be theoretically predictable, but its interior is comprised of behavior that may be possible to define but is always impossible to divine.
If a glysm coalesces from others and still others find stable orbits of context within them --- they form 'bellies'. Because Buddha has a big one and he is smiling. These are the belly-mantles, nested like so many Russian Dolls. It is convenient to think of bellies as constructs of geography-time within which transactional behavior occurs.
In the macro-belly-mantle we have index trends over time, predictable lifetime notions of people and corporations behaving in ways one would expect. This outermost foundation-belly is the one demonstrated and taught. These things are taught as if there is a rational basis to every decision. In the slowly rolling glysm of the macro-belly both history and textbook are written as the great-circle paths along its surface.
At this level economists work and play. They attempt to geographically map and narrate the macro-belly with glimpses below the surface to the glysms beneath; at this scale subterranean features are visible The do-belly is the most prominent structure effecting the macro-belly and its protrusions effect the surface, much as plate tectonics effects a planet.
Then we come to the do-belly-mantle which is layer of discrete events caused and effected by people, politics and careers. It is a do-belly because if you've ever done something or had something done to you by someone and it cost someone something, it happened in the do-belly.
It is the do-belly which economists feel comfortable modelling as a simple series of 'zero-sum games', mainly because they are too sociopathic to realize that when bad things happen to individual people, those people effect those around them, polarizing a range of empathy (opposition to indifference to altruism) which spawns a thick chaos of cause. If something happens to you and you understand why, your chain of reasoning is a great-circle path along the do-belly but no zero-sum model could predict what happens next unless you are completely alone. Fables and parables serve as culture's medieval maps to the great do-belly.
That 'liberty and the pursuit of happiness', that is a do-belly thing.
From the renaissance into modern time the poker-belly-mantle has evolved. It has become a seething glsym of mostly-beneficial wonder and miasma. This belly lives within the do-belly and its horizon is defined not as a scale of time or even behavior but perception. It is the multitude of decisions that are caused by or intended to effect the disembodied "market" itself. The best way to describe it is by example.
If you buy stock in a company to hold as an investment you are a do-belly even if your primary motive is to make money --- because your decision has thought-symbols for you and the company. If your purpose is to ride financials or short techs it's poker. But it crosses the boundary.
Warren Buffet lives in the do-belly. He has mystified folks all his life by doing this. He operates exclusively from a state of conscious transactional awareness. Win or
1. 218 (50%+1) of the 435 representative members of congress vote to imeach. 2. 67 (2/3) of the 100 Senators vote to convict. 3. 1 President is removed from office and is now subject to criminal prosecution. 4. 23 members of a grand jury indict him to stand trial for treason (Benghazi certainly qualifies: ordering troops to stand down when Americans are under attack?). 5. 12 members of a jury convict and sentence him for treason. 6. One disgraced, former president.
7. President Biden
I am not afraid, of criticism, of torture, or of death.
PRISM (what part of it is eventually determined to be real), just like the old over-hyped PROMIS, are just analysis and coordination tools. A user interface.
It's the COLLECTION that matters. We must slap a collar and bell on the NSA... and introduce strong criminal penalties for corporations who knowingly participate in these taps, OR even fail to exercise due diligence in policing their infrastructure for the presence of 'unauthorized' taps.
Shut it all down and send 'em home. Let the folks at NSA do something worthwhile and productive like filling potholes.
Even straight real-time voice intercept is a well known capability, geezers among us will recall there was a time when taps required alligator clips and assistance of telephone company personnel. Popularity of telephone ESS and CALEA guidelines (thank you Bill Clinton, you dumb outlaw-all-encryption Clipper Chip dawg) began to streamline the process to put back doors in telephone switches.
Such backdoor tactics were necessary because even then the digital component of our voice backbone consisted of an incredible number of multiplexed constant bitrate channels that criss-crossed the country as a mesh. They were far too distributed and numerous to present the possibility of 'complete intercept'.
On a clear day you actually could hear a pin drop too. Bell Standard Practices. Bless 'em, may they rest in peace.
Then codecs happened, packetization happened and IP routing happened. Fiber happened. Gigabit switching happened. Those constant bitrate links, both terrestrial and microwave, went the way of the horse and buggy.
Welcome to the Brave New World, where your voice is compressed to the point where speaker recognition is iffy, turkey garble when packets are delayed or lost.
And most importantly for the NSA who wants to slurp in domestic communications, it all passes through very few terrestrial interconnection points and the compression allows them to spool and store (via 'dark fiber' that has mysteriously come to life) in centralized locations. For-fuckin'-ever.
Since they listen afterwards and have captured every packet --- even the ones that did not arrive on time --- the NSA probably gets better voice quality than you do. How twisted is that??
Amazingly, the Associated Press is starting to get it,
AP: Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure: But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
The only silly fallacy tripping them up now is the prevailing theme that these taps are "only" placed at points of ingress and egress. A border thang, they's listenin' to foreigners, move along now.
Since the days not so long ago when as much traffic passed through satellite earth stations as did undersea cables, NSA's collection and interception has brought them well into the geographical confines of the country. With a extremely high ratio of illegal domestic intercepts versus 'sanctioned' border-crossing communication.
This is an existential threat.
1. LYNCHPIN of warrantless spying: Hepting v. AT&T
Hepting v. AT&T is the smoking gun of wholesale warrantless surveillance.
Government flacks will (and are) attempting to divert the issue thus: Snowden is a traitor; this is specifically about FISA warrants issued for foreign nationals; any Americans caught in the dragnet amounts to small collateral damage; or, this is specifically about access of telephone metadata (aka "pen registers") not content without warrants, which is permitted by law.
Anything to keep you from thinking about split fiber optic taps at interchange points, wholesale copying and (blind) storage of intercepts which comprise ~99.99% domestic (illegal) traffic.
Our rule of law recognizes that 'wholesale possession' of certain materials, either obtained in an illegal manner or explicitly construed to be of use in the commission of a crime (such as 'presumed intent to...'), is a crime. Another element is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) where individuals can be held accountable for the actions of syndicates.
Could one argue that the only conceivable motive of gathering domestic communications and storing them wholesale (read or unread), would be to subject parties to blackmail for 'future' crimes? Could one argue that AT&T personnel who did authorize and oversee the splitting of the fiber optic cable (on their premises), were in full knowledge that Constitutional rule of law was being violated?
Hepting v. AT&T seeks to answer these questions. And the Supreme Court has 'declined' to hear the case without explanation or elaboration.
If there is a moment of history where the Supreme body of any branch of government is in dereliction of duty and in violation of its own sworn oath, this is it.
The Supreme Court needs to be pressed on this matter. Congress needs to investigate this particular issue because the PRISM slides are very possibly FAKE, and FISA courts issue but a few transactional warrants, most of which involve foreign nationals and are thus defendable. PRISM and FISA make the perfect distraction and diversion. The mass warrantless wiretapping and data mining that is explicitly uncovered and pursued in Hepting v. AT&T is the furor we need to see.
Time to bring in the big guns. Please 'like' Hepting v. AT&T on Facebook.
Data is abiotically generated by natural entropic processes in the mantle of novel pragma. As yet we have only skirted the edges of the Mandelbrot Set because we are fond of semantic connectitude. But research into anomalous fusion has hinted that some day we may find a way to plumb the depths of the Lake to find the answers to life's Big Questions, and a joke whose punchline would make the cosmos shudder, then contract.
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Greetz to my buds at Juniper's Special NSA Piggyback Slurp Packet Sniffle Fiber Fruitcake Utah Datacenter Cluster Zap Lightning Products Division.
Glad to see someone is living the American dream.
Just joking. I know full well that routers do not listen to people, people listen to people.
Before the pathological evil of what we know as the industrial war machine, with broadcast technologies and deployment tactics that could harness fear and loathing to politics everywhere at once--- and the tireless drudges who worship them came to the fore---
We were becoming increasingly cyclical, distracted by moment, swaying in tighter rhythms while not dancing -- a bad sign. Hypnotized by the leafspring, the mainspring, the ratchet, the pendulum and most obnoxious of all, an hour-bell that means something besides nothing.
Between brutal wars -- merely pathological, in a cute sort of way. The animals kept us sane.
Despite ages of civilized existence -- it has scarcely been one hundred years since our clocks and calendars, biological and practical, were last paced by animals. And what a time it has been.
Rome built the roads; but it was always horses and oxen that set the pace. Oxen and people, measured seasons of growing in the fields. Even on the ocean do we find animal companions, for in the days when sails took us to places unknown, animals were aboard to ensure survival. But the wind itself is like an ox, with moods that paced the journey.
History has always moved in waves legions of soldiers traveling light and fast as wind, settlers burdened with goods at a snail's or oxen-pace. On a smart strong horse riders could doze and daydream, the beast's eyes as fixed on the horizon as the rider. In the far north dogs, rivers and caribou set the pace; in Summer mosquitoes kept everyone on the run.
Was a time we'd foretell the seasons by the birds as they got ready to travel, there were places for them to roost. Migrating birds and the moon and the stars to guide them were featured in theaters of sky and morning and evening and darkest night.
People cast tiny flickering shadows on land that went out with sleep -- not the lidless throbbing glimmer of busy continents today.
And news flowed like the tides -- news from over the ocean, of country and world gathering in eddies of pulp presented, like sermons, in their own time and place of reading. Local news and affairs churned with comfortable babbling regularity: ripples of gossip, stories heard in tavern and meeting-house and church. Rumor from afar came through with strangers and gathered rapt attention for telling and re-telling. Church it was that harnessed the calendar at first -- but it took a whole week for the tides of morality to flow round again -- plenty of time left for fun.
Where days full of task might stretch a bit here and there played themselves out, church bells gave us the first hint of regimentation to time. A manageable affair, for even old rural school-house days could hold more leisure within the hours, and there was more mixing between the ages during the process of learning. Apprenticeships. Though even in the age-segregated electric-bell'd warrens of today a good teacher can still open vistas; but like all modern animals even teachers are challenged by pace and environment. They're only human.
Even our busiest cities were townish -- wide avenues for horses, slow moving newspapers and the ever-present lure to market-place, wharf and concert hall tugged at us, kept us moving between meetings.
Those on long journeys tended to be out in the open. They set sights on destination more so than the calendar; getting there was the thing even if the journey was not. And long many-people journeys were actually moving cities -- where one or two people drift into dream-time, whole families and groups illuminated the trail with their own culture and hobby. We sang along the rivers, played music in time with horses' hooves. Children sought adventure on the fringes of camp.
Weather was the ocean we lived in, not the comforting or annoying visitor it is today. If you spot people-dots in a model of society you'll find us traveling more distance but moving around less than ever before. Everything is piped in, even things that shouldn't have been.
Farms have be
Here is the ggggggist of it,
Lower-level violations are those considered to pose very low risk, such as improper upkeep of an electrical transformer or failure to analyze a problem with no impact on a system's operation, such as the effect of a pipe break. Higher-level violations range from low to high safety significance, such as an improperly maintained electrical system that caused a fire and affected a plant's ability to shut down safely.
I can grok exactly where this stream of 98% low-level 'potential' violations is coming from, and I will tell you even though it will not be Politically Correct for me to do so.
There are a great many Useless Eaters (my bad) invading industrial plants these days whose direct expertise does not include knowledge of the Thing being manufactured or produced. They are graduates of a quasi-liberal arts educational process that has emitted them from university and sent them out into the world to manage or assist in the management of people. The Human Resources Type. Ask any career machinist to (politely and quietly) point one out to you, they're sure to nod their head as someone passes by within two minutes or so.
And why are these Human Resources people cruising the halls like nervous night watchmen? Because they are young and have just joined a fraternity whose senior members have established themselves as people who you come to if there is a problem. The seniors count on you to tell them when there is a problem but otherwise they stay out of your hair. It is an excellent arrangement because with a small Safety Culture in place when a machinist or other employee brings something up, you'd better listen.
But there are too many of these young Human Resources people, too soon. They were trained to 'lead' but in the glare of reality they are realizing that they will not be leading anything for years to come, because their seniors are comfortable in their positions, years away from forced retirement, made indispensable by their high degree of experience. Many of them are graduated from among the ranks of those they manage.
And quite frankly, the seniors want the juniors to stay out of their hair. But also they want the juniors to cruise the plant and perhaps gain by osmosis some of the know-how that their education has denied therm. So go forth young man and learn our trade.
But what is there for these young barely skilled people to do?? There is only one Task for which they seem suited, in a place where the actual process has been tweaked and streamlined to perfection for decades now. It is a vital task but as we see first hand, even the noblest endeavor may become absurd if undue emphasis is placed on it.
It's Safety. It has become a Zero Tolerance game that is a distant social relation to the indictment of small children who draw pictures of guns. It begins with an almost religious affirmation that everybody knows is a dumb myth, "All Accidents Can Be Avoided." It's true, but only with complete hindsight and a level of plodding procedure that would have everyone strapped securely along the walls of the room (safely) unable to reach their tools.
But we are supposed to suspend our disbelief and put ourselves into a mental Total Safety Zone (in meetings with videos and small talk and with group hugs) where we believe it is possible.
The problem is that for every small but reasonable step such as brighter yellow pained lines or enforcement of speed limits in the yard or filling that little gas can outside, there is a TON of well-meant but trite suggestions that merely clog the system.
Malfeasance takes root within a Total Safety Culture too. I was told that Halliburton had once, with great fanfare, introduced a program where anonymous tips of safety violations would net a cash bonus. Sounds like it would be great for everyone. It became apparent that only a few people were using the system and that the targets of this activity tended to be those with whom there was a strictly personal animo
> I predict the way you're using two digits to count the errors is going to turn into a scalability limit.
Not if the error sequence number follows the convention used in IBM RPG/400 1.1.4.4. "Sequence Numbering of the Listing after a Compile" ... "The high order 2 digits of the sequence number are made up of the characters A through Z and 0 through 9 in the following order: A, B, C, ..., Z, 1, 2, ..., 9, A0, AA, AB, ..., AZ, A1, A2, ..., A9, B0, BA, ..., ZZ, ..., Z9, 10, ..., 99. This structure allows for up to 1295 different increments of the high order sequence number. " ... it is worth noting that this counting sequence does not sort properly in ASCII or even native EBCDIC [A9,B0,BA] which leads Real Programmers away from the messy realms of real-world problems into the comfortable zone of devising elaborate workarounds for problems they had created.
Sometimes delving into the structure of ancient computer architectures and programming languages yields new and clever insights into old problems. This is not one of those times.
Clearly there are some puzzle pieces missing.
I had a severe adverse reaction to Sherlock Holmes as a child. Still do.
It was soon obvious that the feats of deduction based on observation described in the books were explained to the reader post-seeum, that is, explained by Holmes himself and the reader was not even invited to participate. Or Doyle was too simply lazy to describe the surroundings, opting instead for some sort of empty exercise in hero-worship. If Tolkien or Auel had described a crime scene you'd be able to spot that broken twig.
There is a certain realm way beyond the possible and the ridiculous, beyond any suspension of disbelief, a place where you cannot even enjoy a bad movie because a part of your brain is asking, "Are there people out there who actually enjoy this stuff?" and you are distracted because it leads to "Are any here right now ... and should I be worried about these people?"
I decided early on that the feats described were impossible because the human eye and brain cannot resolve and store high definition images and process them completely in real-time, excessive signal to noise ratio and quantum flux in all motion that cloaks everything in Gaussian noise. For every Holmsian 'clue' you could spot in the real world you are also presented with countless equally possible 'faux clues', or even real clues that relate to some other crime. I just knew this, though I could not describe it that way until I was much older.
I was used to comic book characters performing the impossible. They do it with style and sometimes a wink of humor. But Holmes did not fit anywhere. Not even Jesus had the privilege of having a whole Universe (obviously) constructed for the sake of massaging his ego-intellect, where a gentleman could glop around in galoshes for a whole afternoon --- ever so carefully --- so as not to disturb the tiny scrape marks in their inner heel that Holmes was supposed to divine. It seemed so scripted, somehow.
Sherlock Holmesees are just 'Just So Stories' told without the flair and nonsensical humor of Kipling. They are entirely at your expense. No will ever spot a "monograph I have written on the subject" because he had never written any. He was also a compulsive liar.
The genre has spawned a load of modern shite like some CSI and all of Numbers and what have you, that try to present as possible and grainy-real to gullible people, situations that should be setting off loud clanging false-flag and deception alarms in our heads. It would have a detrimental effect, short-circuiting the part of the mind that is supposed to step up and say "This just isn't right."
And when Hero-Holmes made inquiries into police matters, he was always of course privy to information that should not have been obtained without a warrant. The Sherlock Holmes genre prepares you to accept NSA surveillance. Implicitly trust authority when steeped in hero-worship, unbelievable coincidences do happen (when we say they do). Training wheels for Sheeple.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be [STRIKEOUT: the truth] [INSERT] a clear sign that you may not have thought of everything."
Here we have a classic who'da-thunk-it situation. It is difficult to craft a poll question that has even a third of Americans voicing any 'support' for intrusive surveillance
Now we know that Senator Feinstein is some sort of gelatinous alien rodeo clown from outer space ... but what of the others? This is bigger and badder than the transgressions that triggered the Church Committee. Where is the bandwagon? Where is the passion?
Gag me with a spooooon (I am Slashdot's favorite score:{-1,0,1} commenter) but y'all are some of the smartest critters around but all I see here is more of the same lounge lizard comfort zone hate I see elsewhere. They're attacking the Constitution, we hates them Precious, we hates them!
What about the WTF factor? Should this be sounding alarms in our heads? Could some of these elected representatives be under duress? And isn't it our collective 'job' to find out?
We seem to be hung up on ego as a species (it's mostly a male thing), find it difficult to create cultural 'duress codes', subtle signals that could be used to indicate that beneath the surface of our unexpected or unpopular behavior, there is a motivator that could explain our actions. One that, should it come to light, would not just absolve us but might eliminate a conspiracy of true evil.
But we don't have duress in the vocabulary, so the game is handed over directly to blackmailers, extortionists and for wont of a better term, bullies.
So here I give you the score. We have delivered on a platter the scenario that a government agency is certainly in possession of material (read and unread), goods on people, that if disclosed would ruin their lives.
WHAT IF there was some way to secretly poll Congress, put them to a simple question to which they could respond in an anonymous but accountable way. The question is,
Are you now, or have you ever been directly threatened to support intrusive government surveillance as a result of materials collected under that surveillance?
The victim of blackmail feels alone and isolated in the world. Our society is so hung up on Puritan holier than thou ethos that effective blackmail can be devised from the dumbest of things.
As computer professionals we understand that serious software vulnerabilities do arise through human error and oversight. It seems so easy to discuss their impact and work hand in hand with the 'guilty' engineers to close the holes.
What if glaringly obvious, dangerous vulnerabilities arise in our political process? Will we have the human decency to acknowledge a 'duress signal' and work with the affected parties (politicians under blackmail) to rrectify this dumb situation in a way that leaves their dignity and valuable career contributions intact?
We need to hack our culture to add a 'duress code' feature.
It could be a matter of survival. Otherwise the most ruthless assholes will run the show. Even within NSA there are lots of folks who do not wish to be a party to this. It's time for them to speak up too.
I've been chosen
to warn you that we've been down this road before. In 1982 IBM was incredibly convinced that their new Personal Computer was destined to be used for simple word processing and as a dumb terminal to dial in and access their Really Smart Computers to do the Real Work. You wouldn't even need to purchase an expensive high speed printer, you'd just key in your time card data, run some reports and drive down to the nearest Service Bureau to pick up a little package containing the week's dot matrix bursty-form payroll checks.
All twelve of them.
The concept of your business cranking to a silent standstill because someone with a backhoe cut a cable somewhere or someone cannot be swallowed by Amazon or Zaxxon in time is not new.
DISCLAIMER: I admit that I have not read all of The Reg Whitepapers that describe how while we were asleep we have passed beyond the virtualization era into the even sexier post-meta-virtualization era of metametametadata , where one IT worker can do the work of thousands, millions --- after of course Complete Migration is Achieved and the simple 'GO' button is installed by a licensed technician at your business. There's just no time to read all that stuff.
I'm here stuck in traffic, on my way to pick up the payroll checks.
There is only one proper response to erudite claims that robotic space exploration should supplant human.
It starts with flared nostrils, increased heart rate. The eyes widen and adrenalin surges, releasing a flood of desperate emotions focused into rage. Direct eye contact and beating with fists on the chest to signify readiness for aggression, then a single step forward to firmly establish to the other that 'fight' is more likely than 'flight'.
Next, a primal scream of rage that serves to demonstrate that the time for sorry-ass debate on philosophical topics that serve to delay human space exploration and space colonization has ended. Someone has crossed the line and they're going to get their ass kicked.
If the proposal to 'abandon' human space exploration in favor of some pansy-ass robotic push-button solution was the result of a funded research grant, the next logical step is to rip the grant out of the wall and beat the responsible organization into a bloody pulp. And piss on the remains.
In fact, ANY organized group that gets in the way of continued human space exploration should be completely surrounded by an angry mob of stick waving concerned persons, in the hope that they will see that they are treading on shaky ground, because this is an existential threat.
The threat arises when we let ourselves be diverted from a proven and direct course of action towards a goal, to some other another that makes only promises. Let down your insistence for human space exploration for the greater good, they'll say. Maybe next year we will find the money in the budget. Then next year comes along and it's the year after.
The Club of Rome was pushing this tripe as early as the 70s. Let us not waste resources looking outward UNTIL we have solved all our problems down here. Then they try to place themselves as the authors of the new agenda. It involves wealth re-distribution and negative population growth and some form of ruthless 'governance' that (for wont of better ideas) would come down to force feeding people suicide pills.
To put it kindly,, an evolutionary dead end.
Because once you come into awareness that the human race exists within a delicate window of time between slate-wiping asteroid impacts, and our time is 'up' soon... the one planet of origin is like unto a theater aflame, and long term survival of the species depends on our ability to race out of the burning building.
And these people are blocking the exits.
proud to be a cave man
It's about power consumption. These new Power8 chips may be clever but due to a shortfall of imagination and planning by Silicon Valley investors (and American corporations in general) in the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st... these things are pretty 'steampunk'.
Of every 100 chips coming off the assembly line, roughly 37 will be powered by coal, 30 from natural gas. There is no real future in this.
Only 7 chips will get their power from Hydroelectricity, a percent point we would never want or be able to increase since it disrupts ecosystems and watersheds way beyond anything renewable utopians would admit to.
Only 3 chips will be wind powered, at a federally subsidized cost usually double that of other sources, the actual power supplied by wind turbine equipment amortized over 40 years that actually lasts less than 10.
19 chips will be nuclear powered, the method that most befits their advanced nature and hefty real-world consumption needs. Unfortunately the number is declining as the light water reactor plants are retiring after 30 years of (practically) perfect service.
Not ONE of these hundred chips will be completely solar powered despite an obscene amount of research and development that completely ignores the fact that no practical land based solar solution will ever scale, or exist without natural gas plant hidden just over the ridge.
Long before these 100 Power8 chips reach the end of their practical lifespan, the cost of non-renewable energy sources will start to climb as the natural gas 'glut' tapers off and cost of extraction increases exponentially.
Only if IBM and other corporations come together for the purpose of creating a true revolution in Power, such as ensuring development of molten salt reactor designs within a reasonable time frame for grid electricity and industrial heat generation... might these $ billions help the human race in ways that can save us,
Otherwise these 100 Power8 chips might become interesting trinkets found in the silicon rich dust of a failed civilization, taken by nomadic peoples for use as jewelry and adornment.
Energy from Thorium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
> "Citation?"
CITATION: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4216793&cid=44858311
A recursive definition means never having to say you're sorry.
For a practical phaser you'd have to add an incredibly larger amount of energy to the budget to power a force field that surrounds the victim to prevent wall splattering by surface tissue that manages to escape during the 'conversion process' from thermodynamic expansion and propulsion at the edge of the field.
And since you've already allocated the budget for a force field, why not skip vaporizing the victim, just have the force field close in and compress them into a dense little cube? Then once that is done, expand the cube until it flash freezes.
Cleanup is still a breeze. And after a major battle you can make Stew.
Years ago my Dad oddly started referring to cordless phones as "headless phones" causing waves of shock and horror within our family. It is my hope that the ripples extend outward until they break across all cultures and languages, culminating in a universal oddity that science cannot explain.
Energy is life and civilization. Balancing an industrial society on the razor edge of a single point of failure is itself a 'fail'. Whether the failure would occur technically or politically is of little consequence.
The catch-22 is impossible to avoid. If orbital solar doesn't scale then it is a waste of resource, if it does then it's a single point of (catastrophic) failure.
Terrestrial power plants can be replicated easily, hardened from sabotage, operated and maintained within many sovereign countries at once, can easily swap out parts. That is what you would wish to ensure the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1YjDdI_c8
The day would arrive when some one will be unable to establish or maintain a dial 911 to save lives --- merely because they are surrounded by a Virtual Tuned Faraday Cage of these parasitic signal sucking devices.
This is an idea that is so bad in principle that it is embarrassing that it has not been laughed out of the room.
It is an example of what I call predatory engineering, the phenomenon where someone's "bright idea" trumps common sense and consideration for others. Yes, there are moral threads that weave through everything.
The imperative that power for communication not be drawn off of other peoples' communication is a moral imperative. This means even drawing power off of broadcast bands is a bad idea.
Inducing some 50/60 cycle hum is OK, though the coils would have to be large. Proponents of this idea choose small wavelengths it is most practical for small devices, although those bands contain our most fragile and imporant communication.
Two thumbs down.
Politician: Turns out that Parkes is the biggest radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere.
Prime Minister: What's it doing in the middle of a sheep paddock?
Rudi: This is Sector 8. Is that you, Mr. Armstrong?
Rudi: Who goes there?
[sheep heard bleating]
Reporter: No offense, but NASA spends fifteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars so that we can watch man walk on the moon and in the end it falls to you blokes! I mean, how do you feel about that?
Ross "Mitch" Mitchell: A lot better before you opened your trap!
See this... and you will understand.
The Dish
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0205873/
Isn't using it to compress air in confined spaces or pump liquids uphill to recover some single-digit percentage of energy input, an bigger loser? Or is this one of those, we lose a little on each transaction but we make up for it in volume, er, things?
How about setting aside some tiny corner of one of the cave systems to store an itty bitty bit of nuclear waste, for as long as it takes to develop the technology to use the rest of the energy stored within it? For this privilege I am sure the nuclear power plant would give the data center all the electricity it needs. And light Las Vegas.
Hrrrmph.
High Frequency Trades are abiotically generated by artificial node-gysms that infest the innermost belly-mantle. They execute on a timescale that is so distantly small from our own thought process they manage to knit cause directly to effect.
We operate within a lovely gylophagous gygantsm of our own devising. But there has always been human delay between cause and effect. Any system that has managed to knit cause and effect together and has evolved beyond thought-time becomes a paroxysmal gygantsm.
Gygantsae are set in motion as a single primordial gysm effects itself, or triggers causes in other gysms as they are introduced. As the expanding wave of possibility and permutation becomes practically unbounded a rolling glysm forms. It is convenient to think of glysms as expanding spheres whose behavior along the surface may be theoretically predictable, but its interior is comprised of behavior that may be possible to define but is always impossible to divine.
If a glysm coalesces from others and still others find stable orbits of context within them --- they form 'bellies'. Because Buddha has a big one and he is smiling. These are the belly-mantles, nested like so many Russian Dolls. It is convenient to think of bellies as constructs of geography-time within which transactional behavior occurs.
In the macro-belly-mantle we have index trends over time, predictable lifetime notions of people and corporations behaving in ways one would expect. This outermost foundation-belly is the one demonstrated and taught. These things are taught as if there is a rational basis to every decision. In the slowly rolling glysm of the macro-belly both history and textbook are written as the great-circle paths along its surface.
At this level economists work and play. They attempt to geographically map and narrate the macro-belly with glimpses below the surface to the glysms beneath; at this scale subterranean features are visible The do-belly is the most prominent structure effecting the macro-belly and its protrusions effect the surface, much as plate tectonics effects a planet.
Then we come to the do-belly-mantle which is layer of discrete events caused and effected by people, politics and careers. It is a do-belly because if you've ever done something or had something done to you by someone and it cost someone something, it happened in the do-belly.
It is the do-belly which economists feel comfortable modelling as a simple series of 'zero-sum games', mainly because they are too sociopathic to realize that when bad things happen to individual people, those people effect those around them, polarizing a range of empathy (opposition to indifference to altruism) which spawns a thick chaos of cause. If something happens to you and you understand why, your chain of reasoning is a great-circle path along the do-belly but no zero-sum model could predict what happens next unless you are completely alone. Fables and parables serve as culture's medieval maps to the great do-belly.
That 'liberty and the pursuit of happiness', that is a do-belly thing.
From the renaissance into modern time the poker-belly-mantle has evolved. It has become a seething glsym of mostly-beneficial wonder and miasma. This belly lives within the do-belly and its horizon is defined not as a scale of time or even behavior but perception. It is the multitude of decisions that are caused by or intended to effect the disembodied "market" itself. The best way to describe it is by example.
If you buy stock in a company to hold as an investment you are a do-belly even if your primary motive is to make money --- because your decision has thought-symbols for you and the company. If your purpose is to ride financials or short techs it's poker. But it crosses the boundary.
Warren Buffet lives in the do-belly. He has mystified folks all his life by doing this. He operates exclusively from a state of conscious transactional awareness. Win or
cue the white gorillas
with stone paddles
that smash yer head
and squrt yer brains
and make yer eyeballs fly out
unless yer skull is made of Crichton
1. 218 (50%+1) of the 435 representative members of congress vote to imeach.
2. 67 (2/3) of the 100 Senators vote to convict.
3. 1 President is removed from office and is now subject to criminal prosecution.
4. 23 members of a grand jury indict him to stand trial for treason (Benghazi certainly qualifies: ordering troops to stand down when Americans are under attack?).
5. 12 members of a jury convict and sentence him for treason.
6. One disgraced, former president.
7. President Biden
I am not afraid, of criticism, of torture, or of death.
A fate worse than death.
PRISM (what part of it is eventually determined to be real), just like the old over-hyped PROMIS, are just analysis and coordination tools. A user interface.
It's the COLLECTION that matters. We must slap a collar and bell on the NSA... and introduce strong criminal penalties for corporations who knowingly participate in these taps, OR even fail to exercise due diligence in policing their infrastructure for the presence of 'unauthorized' taps.
Shut it all down and send 'em home. Let the folks at NSA do something worthwhile and productive like filling potholes.
Even straight real-time voice intercept is a well known capability, geezers among us will recall there was a time when taps required alligator clips and assistance of telephone company personnel. Popularity of telephone ESS and CALEA guidelines (thank you Bill Clinton, you dumb outlaw-all-encryption Clipper Chip dawg) began to streamline the process to put back doors in telephone switches.
Such backdoor tactics were necessary because even then the digital component of our voice backbone consisted of an incredible number of multiplexed constant bitrate channels that criss-crossed the country as a mesh. They were far too distributed and numerous to present the possibility of 'complete intercept'.
On a clear day you actually could hear a pin drop too. Bell Standard Practices. Bless 'em, may they rest in peace.
Then codecs happened, packetization happened and IP routing happened. Fiber happened. Gigabit switching happened. Those constant bitrate links, both terrestrial and microwave, went the way of the horse and buggy.
Welcome to the Brave New World, where your voice is compressed to the point where speaker recognition is iffy, turkey garble when packets are delayed or lost.
And most importantly for the NSA who wants to slurp in domestic communications, it all passes through very few terrestrial interconnection points and the compression allows them to spool and store (via 'dark fiber' that has mysteriously come to life) in centralized locations. For-fuckin'-ever.
Since they listen afterwards and have captured every packet --- even the ones that did not arrive on time --- the NSA probably gets better voice quality than you do. How twisted is that??
Amazingly, the Associated Press is starting to get it,
AP: Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure: But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
The only silly fallacy tripping them up now is the prevailing theme that these taps are "only" placed at points of ingress and egress. A border thang, they's listenin' to foreigners, move along now.
Since the days not so long ago when as much traffic passed through satellite earth stations as did undersea cables, NSA's collection and interception has brought them well into the geographical confines of the country. With a extremely high ratio of illegal domestic intercepts versus 'sanctioned' border-crossing communication.
This is an existential threat.
1. LYNCHPIN of warrantless spying: Hepting v. AT&T
That the title of the article has flopped the whole topic from strength and durability to carbon emissions.
The authors fail to point out that large scale mining of tuff by Corporations will only encourage volcanism.
Hepting v. AT&T is the smoking gun of wholesale warrantless surveillance.
Government flacks will (and are) attempting to divert the issue thus: Snowden is a traitor; this is specifically about FISA warrants issued for foreign nationals; any Americans caught in the dragnet amounts to small collateral damage; or, this is specifically about access of telephone metadata (aka "pen registers") not content without warrants, which is permitted by law.
Anything to keep you from thinking about split fiber optic taps at interchange points, wholesale copying and (blind) storage of intercepts which comprise ~99.99% domestic (illegal) traffic.
Our rule of law recognizes that 'wholesale possession' of certain materials, either obtained in an illegal manner or explicitly construed to be of use in the commission of a crime (such as 'presumed intent to...'), is a crime. Another element is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) where individuals can be held accountable for the actions of syndicates.
Could one argue that the only conceivable motive of gathering domestic communications and storing them wholesale (read or unread), would be to subject parties to blackmail for 'future' crimes? Could one argue that AT&T personnel who did authorize and oversee the splitting of the fiber optic cable (on their premises), were in full knowledge that Constitutional rule of law was being violated?
Hepting v. AT&T seeks to answer these questions. And the Supreme Court has 'declined' to hear the case without explanation or elaboration.
If there is a moment of history where the Supreme body of any branch of government is in dereliction of duty and in violation of its own sworn oath, this is it.
The Supreme Court needs to be pressed on this matter. Congress needs to investigate this particular issue because the PRISM slides are very possibly FAKE, and FISA courts issue but a few transactional warrants, most of which involve foreign nationals and are thus defendable. PRISM and FISA make the perfect distraction and diversion. The mass warrantless wiretapping and data mining that is explicitly uncovered and pursued in Hepting v. AT&T is the furor we need to see.
Time to bring in the big guns. Please 'like' Hepting v. AT&T on Facebook.
Data is abiotically generated by natural entropic processes in the mantle of novel pragma. As yet we have only skirted the edges of the Mandelbrot Set because we are fond of semantic connectitude. But research into anomalous fusion has hinted that some day we may find a way to plumb the depths of the Lake to find the answers to life's Big Questions, and a joke whose punchline would make the cosmos shudder, then contract.
I'm already there.