1 Well, hypothetically, spending the body's resources producing more antigens, etc., for something you are already immune to because you already had it without symptoms might leave those resources unavailable for fighting off routine exposure to the ordinary run of freshly mutated versions of the usual strains. 

1 This was pretty interesting, although it was strangely captured by narratives at times (or tried to set them, perhaps). The one that jumped at me was when Malice was factually incorrect about Kurds and our backing of them, and then Rubin jumped in with "Trump pulled troops from Syria". Trump did no such thing -- he promised to pull the troops, but did not follow through at that. As a result, our troops are still stationed in Syria and occupy a significant amount of the territory. The exclusion zone around Tanf is all ours, and the left bank oilfields are too. When Trump was a lame duck, the topic came up, and some of the liberal generals tried to make up a version whereas they engineered U.S. presence in Syria basically by straight-up lying to the President for 4 years. That, sadly, does not remove the responsibility from Trump for not pulling the troops, nor from Rubin for not knowing any of it (or worse, knowing and lying).

2 One other great moment in narrative setting was when Malice literally admitted on camera that Epstein did nothing wrong (the "statutory rape" is called that because it's not a rape) , and yet continued to act as if it's beyond the pale.

1 I like his bee-girls better than the original Bee-man, which I have an issue of in a box somewhere...

-j

2 And, in spite of the fears, bee population is way up these days.

1 Not old or ill or anything, just suddenly taken from us. He will be greatly missed.

A unanimous decision from SCOTUS. Meaning it's not another example of our liberties hanging by a thread. Also meaning that they'll now have to go for a 19 justice court. 

More here, here, and here. 

That there was any question about this is a sign of how screwed up things are, but the decision, especially its unanimity is a most welcome surprise.  

This may well kneecap the red flag laws in addition to the now debunked idea that people can just express "concern" about a gun owner and have all their guns seized without so much as a warrant. 

1 "This may well kneecap the red flag laws"
Well, eventually.  Thomas (I think) more or less invited people to file lawsuits about them, after saying this ruling didn't address them.

2 Yeah, the situation is not as bad as it sometimes seems, and as they would have us believe it is. 

Judges and lawyers include a bunch of scammers who are only constrained by their ability to seem plausible in the eyes of other judges and lawyers.  They are largely innumerate, and will roll over for scams that a numerate person would not be fooled by.  But there are scams even lawyers and judges can see through, and some of the scammers seem to have enough shame or pragmatism that they will not use those scams.

1 It is the classic race between projectile versus armor.  So far, there has been nothing to suggest that armor can sustain anything beyond momentary periods of superiority when it comes to IT.

2 The key problem with security isn't systems, it's people.  People are dumb.

3 Yeah, what they said, but also, security inevitably ends up being added to existing systems rather than being present from the start, leaving gaps that can be exploited years later. Particularly in startups, security (and, honestly, process in general) is seen as a barrier to being "lean" and "agile", and a security team formed later won't even know about all the shortcuts that were taken  until something explodes.

When WebTV was moved onto the brand new Silicon Valley campus, it was our first experience with being on the real Microsoft corporate network, and it was riddled with malware. You could not successfully download all the patches for a brand-new Windows machine before it was compromised; you had to install updates from a CD before connecting to the network.

Why was it so bad? Because engineers all over the company had desktop machines with a second ethernet port plugged directly into the public Internet for convenient data center access, and many of them were "accidentally" configured as routers, bypassing the firewalls.

-j

4 Security issues result from more basic issues within the field of CS/programming. 

There is an aerospace engineering analogy.  This discipline is fairly young, as an engineering discipline, and only really goes back to Orville and Wilbur Wright. 

In the 1950s, there were a lot of designers with experience building sub sonic fighters during WWII.  They made some super sonic fighter designs that were 'very unforgiving aircraft', aka 'lawn darts'.  This was partly because they didn't have enough data about fluid flow at those speeds, and hence didn't really know how to design supersonic fighters. 

There is a fundamental problem within aeronautical engineering, the fluid mechanics equations suck to work with*, and you have to have experimental data to do anything new and interesting.  When you are moving into a new area of fluid behavior, like supersonics then, or maybe hypersonics now, it is not always clear which rules of thumb are no longer valid.

Whether you date the real start of CS to the 1940s or the 1960s, it is younger** than aerospace engineering, and definitely less mature as an engineering discipline.  (Basically, programmers who cannot think as engineers, and engineers who cannot think as programmers are hard to sort from the actual software programmer-engineers who understand which tools and techniques are reliable, and which ones are not.) A defective program does not collapse of its own weight the way a defective structure does.  In some cases you have to study the program, and understand software testing, to identify even catastrophically bad programs.  So the customers do not have the obvious problems that they could point to for civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and aerospace engineering, that the public was able to use as a basic for forcing those engineers to develop a certain level of discipline maturity.

As of yet, it is not certain if these basic problems are fundamental problems the way fluid mechanics challenges are for aeronautical engineering.

If we could prove that they are fundamental problems, we could then prove that we would never achieve perfect security.

There are bits of theory where researchers are working on theory that could in theory deliver defect free code when measured against a specification.  But, there would still be problems in defining the specification, and in finding experts that one could trust to properly define the specification.


We don't understand all of the problems with software designed according to best currently known principles.  Therefore, unknown security defects to be discovered in the future, if we learn more.  So security is catching up.  If you do not always have the people in place working on catching up, you will not stay current.  And software design is really complicated, so when you prepare the team on a limited budget, security people, and trying to prepare security are tempting goals to remove from the team and from the scope of the project.  Issue is, building in security afterwards is never as good.  If you want secure software, any effort spent reducing the complexity of the fundamental problem is worthwhile, because it allows designing security into the system from the beginning, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs.  The people with money do not really grok this, so everyone tends to specify absurd levels of complexity in to the basic specification for feature requirements. 

These other guys understand much better than I do, and have hit the essentials more succinctly. I expect that the wild eyed crazies promising an achievable level of assurance are best looking at those 'meeting specification' theoretical areas. It runs right through those questions of measurable, important, information loss, information delays, and organizational/people issues that make the general case of technocracy such a reliably bad idea.

*Look up the Navier-Stokes equations.  That prize for finding a general closed form solution is really significant, and has not been awarded last I heard.  And Navier-Stokes are a simplification of the more general cases of continuum fluid flow, and continuum assumptions do not hold for all cases of fluid flow of interest to Aerospace Engineers. 

**Pre-Wright CS history tends to have parallels in pre-Wright Aerospace engineering history.  At the same level of preliminary development, Aerospace is slightly older than CS.  Unless you take discrete mathematics or multi-step calculations as the earliest CS, and look back into mathematical history for stuff that may possibly predate kites. 

1 In northern Virginia, on the other hand....

Now for some music...

1 Speaking of disturbing...There is something not quite right looking at a 'realistic' Saber.

2 Akshully, in a way this is a little bit reassuring. 

You may recall that in 2012 something like 400 or 500 retired flag officers ran a advertisement in a paper endorsing Romney the day before the election. 

So, there are three slightly reassuring aspects.  a) lower number of signatories, as expected of a more fraught positions  b)  Collaborationist GOP aligned officials admitting that something was wrong, after all.  c)  Public statement means that these people aren't planning direct action.   Yeah, the naivety to think their speech will fix it may be wrong, but checking off the ticky box by trying is not wrong. 

But, it may be better to have the military sit out of things entirely.  Any retired military personal involved means that martial law tribunals have to be run under the UCMJ.  As opposed to pre-DoD standards of military law.  And pre-DoD standards of military law is the only obvious formal method of resolving disputes that hasn't been contaminated by a possible conspiracy of lawyers and judges.  If a conspiracy of lawyers and judges exists, addressing it in the current formal legal system legal system could be indefinitely subverted.

This seems theoretically intractable, so it is good that physics does not force us to solve the problem in a way tractable with theory.  Americans have solved problems before without theory, and come up with theory later. 

3 It's just a weak-sauce imitation of the recent French letters.

4 @Pete That is true to an extent, given that the French letter was signed by active military members. However, an active duty member of the U.S. military is forbidden from having a political opinion in their capacity as a service member. (Out of uniform and if they are not broadcasting their status as a S.M. it's fine). Letters such as this might ruin an enlisted's career and could get an officer sacked or sent to Leavenworth, regardless of the party in power. 

This is, in the U.S. experience, fairly unprecedented given the scope and topics tit covers. 

5 Broader situation is not one with good precedents. JFK cheated, but there were reasons to trust he wouldn't murder us for world communism. Democrats this cycle were carrying out murder and arson before taking power. And there is reason to think that the universities are sending students back out for more of the same this summer. It is actually reassuring knowing that there are retired flag officers who don't have their head in the sand, but this letter and these officers are pointless here. Might do some good if things were going to play out slowly, but regime leadership is too crazy and desperate for that.

6 I think a person can draw parallels to the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, if for no other reason then the population now has a critical mass of people -  on both sides - who are open to hitting the Big Red Button.

7 cxt217 wins the historical awareness award for this thread. 

May the Guenicas be where you aren't.

8 The pertinent question for the ever-more-likely armed internal national disagreement is....Will it be an armed argument regarding separation (A la Yugoslavia.) and acceptance, or will it be an armed argument for all the marbles (A la Spain.)?

9 Separation is not a practical model.

Game out the first ACW going the other way militarily.

Forcing recognition of a separate CSA would not have ensured peace between the USA and CSA, nor would it have prevented further separatist movements.  In particular, the Union would not have been in a position to constrain abolitionists salty about the civil war. 

Sherman was right that he was waging war to prevent the USA from becoming Mexico, and experiencing Mexico's issues with endemic Civil War.  Robert Lee deserves a lot of credit and respect for mostly delivering the Confederate side of the peace after the war.  (That I say being informed about the Confederate die hards robbing banks, etc. gathering funds in preparation for the next attempt at civil war.)

If you split a nation to resolve a civil war, you only get peace when both factions have the internal power to prevent groups from trying to profit from banditry or further civil war. 

Yugoslavia was a composite of several different ethnic nations.  The separate nations could form political factions in a position to deliver on a negotiated peace. 

US does not appear to have established separate identities strong enough and necessarily positioned to assemble political factions so capable.  (The line between small r republican and small d democrat runs right through the middle of the American heart.)

Anyway, the potential for a civil war has long been a little apparent.  Very early on, some years ago, studying the issue, it became clear that one of the key issues is assembling not only a coalition that can win, but one that can deliver peace after the fighting.  This is difficult, and constrains options. 

One of the actual positives in current circumstances is that Trumpism could possibly be a core for such a coalition. 

Anyway, to skip going too deeply into the weeds, there's a heterodox model of American history and Americans that suggests we may figure out something that works out somehow. 

1 And angry spiders on fire.

1 I've been watching it too, I probably would have plugged it even more if my blog were a hotbed of conversation. I think structurally it has something in common with shows like Durarara, where there are lots of small circles of characters that overlap, but they all overlap on Oderoki.

1 Apparently it had a total of 1,172 characters, including kana, alphabet, digits, and punctuation, so it was limited to specific kinds of correspondence. I imagine they had variants for specific industries (military and banking were prominently mentioned in several sites that turned up in a quick search).

-j

2 related:  I recall reading in a 1970s Guinness BoWR that the record for fastest typist in Chinese  (Mandarin, I assume?) was 11 words per minute. 

No, that wasn't a typo.  How did they publish newspapers?

3 How did they publish newspapers?

They got untrained monkeys to publish nonsense.  Then those monkeys acquired experience and went to work for the New York Times.

Via Pixy comes this article with a map of the affected area. Note that amongst the many affected parties are the big military fuel depots. The U.S. Navy's in Yorktown (servicing Norfolk), The Army Transportation Command at Fort Eustis, and Langley Air Force Base. 

1 Not IT or a security professional. a) What the h#ll? b) Industrial controllers are not exactly a standard high profile malware target. c) Walt Boyes is/was a journalist in controls, and had a security philosophy for industrial systems. IIRC, and if I understood it, he thought the standard IT reflexive 'shut it down' was the wrong default. d) Hearsay is that industrial controls, etc., are extremely vulnerable targets. e) This is odd for a ransom target. You might need to be smart to put together a reliable exploit for a given system. It would make sense to also pick targets that can and will pay, versus targets that won't, and will get you hunted down. f) Current situation has a lot of unpleasant and scummy things being done, including with tech. Seems to be 'social disorder' driving it.

2 Might not even have been specifically targeted, but a bored pipeline controller may have been browsing where he shouldn't have.

3 Possibly. 

Basic problem here is that you probably want at least three layers of abstraction in the software set up, and integrating everything means that the company's answer is likely unique.  Not everyone is going to have the experts/stubborn people to make sure it is done right.

At the level of the valves, you are talking about a PLC, or someone out there turning the things manually. 

You need one level of interface for technical oversight.  Unexpected pressure changes, etc.  If you have a lot of this farmed out to a bunch of hourly folks, you will sooner or later have problems because of HR cutting corners.  But automating everything means that the system doesn't have the ability to handle anything the engineers did not tell the programmers about.  You want the engineers and programmers to have worked together to reliably get the information to trained operators.  (You would also want technicians on site in various locations, for maintenance and service.)  The operators should be busy with their displays, and definitely should not have unlimited access to the internet. 

I expect that part of the problem here is the lockdown.  'Temporarily' shifting duties in a way that wouldn't cause obvious problems in the short term, but in the long term resulted in a problematic kludge.  Though, this may be excessive optimism on my part in basic organizational competence. 

Third layer is the business side.  How much product comes from which supplier, and distributed to which customer.  There needs to be a way to decide on contracts, and implement them. 

Anyway, I am only at the 'cat is C A T' level with this stuff, so I dunno.

It seems clear that an important business priority was screwed up, so we are profoundly spoiled for choice. 

Oh. 

Oh dear. 

A quick perusal of the article indicates that rainwater leaking into the sub-basements of the stricken power plant was acting as a moderator and facilitating increased nuclear reactions in the solidified mass of uranium that constitutes the now solidified melted-down fuel pile. To combat this, the powers that be erected a rain-proof shelter over the highly radioactive ruin. Unfortunately there has recently been a spike in neutron emissions from a particularly isolated room where the formerly molten mass solidified. There are concerns that the water had been acting as a moderator there as well, but in such a way as to prevent  chain reactions rather than facilitate them, and now that the water has drained/ evaporated out this area is getting all fissiony. 

Pouring water into the catacombs paved with uranium risks causing chain reactions in other areas.

This is a mess. While a runaway chain reaction would not cause an actual nuclear bomb equivalent, it could cause a steam explosion and possibly fires which would spread radioactivity. 

Or not...because these are counterintuitive neutrons and scientists are unsure of what is actually going on. 

There is more coverage of this here, here, and here at the U.K. Sun, which manages to work the word "zombie" into the headline. 

1 One of the first things that popped into my head was: imagine if Ukraine had spent the money they wasted in 2016 trying to swing the election to Hillary (Something the Ukrainians actually admitted to trying.) and used it for more constructive purposes...

One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Explodemologists has an update as of 17:37.

1 Well, for a while it meant "plausible deniability code word" like "Kill yourself in Minecraft" or "Go die in a fire... in Minecraft."

2 Mass production of explosives in Minecraft?  Absolutely.

Orbital launch vehicle design in Minecraft?  Sure.



Specific calibers of ammunition in Minecraft?  Not so much.  Unless the mod community has gotten totally out of hand, which is not impossible.

3 Yeah, I saw it happening a lot ... in minecraft.

4 They don't list calibers as such, but I'll just leave this here.

1 "And then suddenly, for no reason at all, everyone voted for Hitler." -- a volk proverb of 4chan

2 "The Lindsey Ellis excerpt at"
Was there more to this thought?

3 No . While editingI had moved the Lindsey Ellis excerpt two paragraphs up and cut and pasted the link but left the disemvoweled sentence carcass where it was. It has been removed. 

Thank you. 

According to commenter MadRocketScientist:

Your blog, and possibly all of mee.nu is now banned by T-mobiles censorship application (which I need to figure out how to disable.)

Was it downvoting communism or a picture of an empty vaccine line?

 

Hey ladies. Yeah. I'm...dangerous. 

Hahahaha! I have arrived! No doubt I've said SOMETHING too close to the truth. 

The omnipotent, ubiquitous "They" do not want people to hear me. 

So come one, come all, to read that which is FORBIDDEN. 

Now to take advantage of this public relations coup. I must think of something forbidden to write. 

1 Yeah weird. Ace is at mu.nu, not mee.nu.

2 So has this been confirmed?

3 Yes.

While one can access the blog via T-Mobile if parental filters are off,  if they are on, those filters HAVE started blocking this blog. There's no way to confirm why this is, but, as this is not a particularly lewd blog, if there is a reason other than wacky algorithms, it may well be content related. 

1 As someone who knows people who lived through the Cultural Revolution, I find it disgusting and horrifying that a good number of Americans want to repeat the entire exercise.

There are reasons why Western Communists are among the groups that I loath the most.

2 Your blog, and possibly all of mee.nu is now banned by T-mobiles censorship application (which I need to figure out how to disable.)

Was it downvoting communism or a picture of an empty vaccine line?

3 Given the timing I'd say it was the above picture of the carefully sorted bone collection at S-21.