* Posts by Crazy Operations Guy

2513 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2009

Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'

Crazy Operations Guy

Easy to get rid of the lawyers

Just release the Linux Kernel under the BSD license. Its near impossible to violate the BSD license, so you won't need the lawyers anymore.

Apple is making life terrible in its factories – labor rights warriors

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: New President!

Keep the shit jobs overseas. Fund STEM programs and build up the next generation to design everything, invent new technologies and become an intellectual mecca. Let the other countries squabble over the pennies they'll earn making our stuff while we enjoy $100k+ salaries while sitting in a nice cushy office working 20 hours a week.

Uber lost $7m a DAY in the first half of this year

Crazy Operations Guy

Facebook is much worse for that. THey have yet to make a profit and no way of actually doing so, yet they throw $16 Billion dollars for WhatsApp and another $1 billion on Instagram, neither of which seem to help the whole "make a profit" problem, since they can't even keep themselves afloat.

We are nearing a second Dot-com crash and its things like this that are going to cause it.

Linux turns 25, with corporate contributors now key to its future

Crazy Operations Guy

"It would be interesting to hear from the El Reg staff what proportion of their..."

I would wager that El Reg is:

99% Linux on webservers

75% Linux on business servers with 20% running Windows for random applications and Active Directory and 5% or so Running FreeBSD on file servers (well FreeNAS). Maybe some OS-X boxes for "time machine"

95% OS X on the user machines with 3-4% Windows (Mostly to test software or reporting on the Windows world) and 1-2% Linux.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: World without Linux

Even if you were to ignore the existence of Apple, MS and Intel would still still quite a lot of competition coming from the *BSD camps and several of the pure-Unix OSes, such as Solaris.

Linux is not, and was not, the only free OS out there. It just happened to have the right mix of resources at the beginning to build a proper community and attract as much attention and support as it did. It could have happened with any OpenSource OS; NetBSD might be king if a few things happened a little differently.

Although at this point, I believe Linux itself needs more competition in the Open-source world. Its getting to the point where you have a small number of software projects that weld ridiculous amounts of control over the eco-system that are breaking everything because they can't be bothered to fix the lumbering beasts that their projects have become (Looking at you Gnome, OpenOffice, systemd...).

Robot babies fail in role as teenage sex deterrents

Crazy Operations Guy

A better simulation

For several months before the simu-baby arrived, they should have required the students to work 60+ hours a week on school work to simulate the extra jobs they'd need to cover expenses; randomly require them to somehow get across town to make the appointment with the only OB/GYN with an available time-slot; pump both male and female students with random hormones to cause erratic mood swings and physiological changes; have the father stand-in randomly flip between saying they'll always be there to support the child and disappearing for days on end with no indication that they'll ever come back; have most the community stare at them and judge them at every opportunity and random yell out 'slut', 'whore', and other insults; if in the US, have a group of religious idiots scream at her when just going to evaluate their options to try and make them feel like a murderer (Bonus points if they are going to a clinic that offers free / cheap pre-natal care in addition to abortion services); have simulated job interviews where employees refuse to hire them because the mother may have to take time off to care for their child.

The worst part about being a young parent is not the child itself, but all the other crap associated with the process. Being required to stay up all night for a week or two because of a loud noise isn't a punishment for a teenager, its how they stay up to study for finals and midterm tests. Being forced to endure terrible smelling liquids; Have you ever been around a teenager? They exude grotesque smells all the time. In many cases, the other teachers and families will give quite a bit of lee-way for students taking care of simulated children rather than the more real-life situation where no one gives them a break and even adds more burden citing "You should have thought about that before having a child"

I've learned a lot about such situations working as an InfoSec expert for a large network of Women's Health Clinics and listening to the Family Planning Counselors during lunch (Nurses that are trained in Obstetric care and social work)

Baltimore cops: We flew high-res camera planes to film your every move

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Big surprise

Seconded.

For a while, I lived in a neighborhood where they decided to disband the police department and replaced it with "Community Counselors". They played a role very similar to what the Police are supposed to e, but they were trained to approach situations from a point of view of "You shouldn't drive through a red light because you might hurt someone you didn't see" rather than "You broke the law, here is a ticket". The end result was the same (A fine was issued) but the reaction from the ticketed person was completely different. It also helped that when someone paid a fine, they'd receive a receipt that details where the money went (most red-light tickets went to replacing intersections with round-a-bouts).

They'd also do 'good-will' patrols where they'd go through a neighborhood and ask if anyone needed help with anything and would help with everything form helping the elderly with groceries, to talking with a neighbor to find a compromise for an unsightly hedge. It also helped that they were hired from the neighborhoods they'd patrol so the department would be representative of the area's citizens.

Complaints dropped significantly (somewhere between 90-95%) and the crime-rate plummeted as well. Something that the old police department went bankrupt trying to fix by building out CCTV networks, install speed / red light cameras, increase staffing, and buy more powerful equipment.

Crazy Operations Guy
Joke

They didn't hide their actions...

...the notice was on public display, in the bottom drawer of locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading "Beware of Leopard". The lavatory, of course being in the basement where all the lights had gone out, in the local City Council office.

Larry Page snuffs out ‘too expensive’ Google Fiber project

Crazy Operations Guy

Comcast may be evil

But at least they aren't going to up and stop being an ISP just because they can't sell enough of their customer's information to be profitable.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... er, Graphene bubbles – 200 times stronger than Superman

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Underrr.... PRESSURE!

Lucky, I also got Vanilla Ice when Queen popped in there...

Just a little FYI: Small town ISPs want out of FCC privacy rules

Crazy Operations Guy

IP addresses *are* personal information

On their own, not so much, but the point of the rule is to stop ISPs from giving advertisers a list of IP addresses in addition to other pieces of information. It is completely possible to identify someone using nothing but data that isn't legally defined as "Personally Identifiable Information", and that is what the FCC is trying to put an end to. There have been some ISPs that sell lists of IP address and most-common domains visited, neither bit of data is legally classified as PII, but it presents some pretty severe privacy issues.

NASA tried turning lost spacecraft STEREO-B off and on again... but it didn't work. True story

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: "... and the months and years tick by"

"I'm not a rocket scientist but I'm fairly sure without any orbital speed it'll just fall into the sun,"

Perhaps, but I'm thinking that the vast difference in mass would produce a minimal amount of force given that the Earth's mass ratio of 1 : 330,000 with the mass of the Sun versus a space station (going by the mass of the ISS) would have a mass ratio of 1 : 4.75 x 10^24. Given that the distances are equal, I figure that the gravitation force exerted on the station would be 1/14.4 x 10^18 of that of the force exerted upon the earth.

I am going off of knowledge gained from my physics 101 class, I am by no means an expert on astrophysics, so my math may be off...

Crazy Operations Guy

"... and the months and years tick by"

It'd only take a year at most, the worst case would be to maintain your station and wait for earth to come back to you.

That's an experiment I've always wanted to do: Build a space station just outside of earth's gravity well with enough supplies and fuel to maintain position (relative to the sun) and wait for earth to come back around. It'd make for a pretty good experiment to test endurance for a Mars-shot and to test the psychological effects of actually being cut off from communication with Earth for some time (rather than just "don't call us for a while or the experiment will be failure").

Blizzard blighted by another DDoS storm

Crazy Operations Guy

Probably not a DDoS

Its likely that their infrastructure just fell over and they don't want to 'fess up. I've seen their infrastructure, its barely held together by shoe laces and chewing gum.

Cisco's upsell plan: tell you your old kit is not as secure as its new kit

Crazy Operations Guy

It'll take them quite some time to get me to let go of my current kit.

It'll be a cold day in hell before they'll get me to part with my pile of 2514's with their two AUI ports. They are capable of IPv6 and multi-path routing, not much else is really needed, even now.

Microsoft's maps lost Melbourne because it used bad Wikipedia data

Crazy Operations Guy

"No negative sign... It was marked "South"."

A common problem on Wikipedia. There was a massive war between "editors" on Wikipedia about the convention of GPS coordinates around the time of the change (EG, should it be labelled as 'west' vs negative longitude / is it 'south' or negative latitude). Its one of those pointless squabbles that Wikipedia throws more effort into than was spent to put a man on the moon. For equal levels of insanity / pointlessness, look at the edit wars for the proper spelling of a character from a fuckin' video game (FF7 and Aerith / Aeris)... But then again, this is the same website where the article on the movie "Juno" is almost 4 times as long as the article on the god Juno.

Californian gets 50 months in prison for Chinese 'technology spy' work

Crazy Operations Guy

Why get the info from companies?

All that data could be gathered from Aviation Machinist's Mate fresh off one of the carriers making port. The fact that they are paid less than minimum wage and have been cooped up on a big gray hulk for months on end make them an easy target for bribery / honey pot. Offer a couple thousand dollars or sex for a couple of photos of the blades or broken pieces of the engine and come out way ahead of anyone attempting to steal them from the companies making them. I personally know a couple aviation mechanics with extensive collections of engine fragments in their homes.

'Neural network' spotted deep inside Samsung's Galaxy S7 silicon brain

Crazy Operations Guy

Why not just write better code?

An 8-core chip at 2+ GHz seems a bit overkill for a damn phone... I would think that focusing on reducing the requirements of the software would be a far better investment (at the very least, you can significantly increase battery life).

I grew up in the *Nix world where a full-featured OS with a basic offices suite would ship on a couple of floppies. Now you have projects that are trying to do that with a CD-ROM and are considered 'over-ambitious'. In the past 10 years Linux has gone from a single CD with dozens of useful packages (Including a useful browser and OpenOffice) to requiring a full DVD just for the OS.

Its no surprise that there are security holes in Mobile OSes and phones barely last a day per charge when they strain under the 8 GB of OS code lumbering along.

Das ist empörend: Microsoft slams umlaut for email depth charge

Crazy Operations Guy

Contracting at Microsoft

I was a contractor for Microsoft some years ago (local employer, figured it'd be good for my resume). Local law [1] requires a 100-day break after each 1-year long stint [2] so as to avoid having to give employees the same benefits as a full-time employee.

What has resulted is that contractors will work for 1 year at one local company, then 1-year at another company, then back to the first company the following year, ad nauseum. This has lead to issues where contractors stagnating because they end up under the same manager they had a year ago and their re-hiring process is just a formality. It gets to the point where there are no new ideas coming in, just the same bland one getting spread between two companies. This process has spread from Microsoft and is now affecting Amazon, Boeing, Expedia, F5 Networks, Nintendo of America, Starbucks, T-Mobile, Valve, and Zulilly. Every once in a while you get something like AWS, but then they contractors working on it go over to Microsoft and you end up with Azure where they will start to homogenize and become indistinguishable (AWS sinking and Azure slightly improving until they meet in a mediocre middle).

This isn't just a localized problem, its become deeply embedded into the Silicon Valley region, and its taking a stronger hold as there are a lot more companies to cross-pollinate between and many people in niches where they can only get hired at a single company and its competitor.

[1] Not so much a law as a legal precedent set by a lawsuit that the local companies are trying to avoid falling afoul of

[2] There are specific types of contracts that can get around that, but that's a discussion for another day

How many zero-day vulns is Uncle Sam sitting on? Not as many as you think, apparently

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Except that the NSA is supposed to be in charge of America's cyberdefense too

"So how do you handle a DOMESTIC"

Which is why I mentioned releasing the firewall code as part of a on-premise piece of security software. PLus, at that point, the FBI could actually arrest the person responsible rather than issue a warrant for some unnamed guy in the Baltics and never catch them.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Except that the NSA is supposed to be in charge of America's cyberdefense too

This is why I've always thought that the NSA needs to be split into two organizations:

An offensive group that works with the military and CIA to do what they currently do, but acknowledge that they are a military organization and subject to the rules of combat.

And a purely defensive group that is as transparent as possible. They'd help with US companies making secure software, provide security auditing to US-based organizations and government agencies, maybe even produce an Open Source security suite for US entities (Citizens, companies, NGOs, etc). They could leverage the fact that we already have equipment intercepting all packets going in and out of the country and stick some layer 3-7 firewalls in place (especially if they release the code as part of the OSS security suite). They'd save the country billions in just blocking fraud and malware by doing such a thing. A banking trojan making the rounds? Block it at the edge of the country and prevent it from getting into the country, or stop it from spreading once its in by distributing the signature / definition to the machine-level security suite. Hell, such an organization might actually end up being a net-positive benefit to the people from just blocking ransom-ware alone.

How the HTTPS-snooping, email addy and SSN-raiding HEIST JavaScript code works

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: "HEIST requires ... the victim to have enabled ... third-party cookies."

3rd party cookies are required by some websites in order to work. This is more true now that in the past, mostly due to CDNs and the like where user data might be stored on both the primary domain (company.com) as well as (compCDN.com or company.CDNprovider.com). My bank does this for their online banking portal where the main website and unencrypted content comes from cloudflare, but the secure data comes from the bank's domain.

Three times as bad as malware: Google shines light on pay-per-install

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: OEM manufacturers

And that would be why whenever I buy a new machine, I buy a fresh hard disk (since the OEM is going to over-charge you for it anyway) and a fresh boxed copy of Windows. I'll pop the old HDD from the machine, pop the new one in along with the Windows install disk. I keep the old disk around in case I need to send the machine back to manufacturer for repairs or if there are drivers I need to siphon off the original image.

Android's latest patches once again remind us: It's Nexus or bust if you want decent security

Crazy Operations Guy

Too bad the cell networks are irrevocably broken

I still get near-daily spam calls from numbers that cannot exist (like yesterday, I got a phone call from the telephone number "1", or sometimes I'll receive calls from my own number) and the carriers are powerless to do anything about it since the protocols themselves are crap when it comes to security and allow impersonation by allowing a adevice to inject whatever phone number and EMEI / MSISDN / IMSI ID it wants into the packet header without the tower even checking.

For a while, I was able to use an inexpensive SDR to authenticate against the tower using the phone number (555) 867-5309 and make and receive phone calls with that number.

Crazy Operations Guy

Manufacturers make variants of each phone to be specific to a carrier, so something like and Galaxy S7 on AT&T and an S7 on T-Mobile are different devices. The biggest difference between the variants is typically that they are locked to a much narrower set of carrier-specific frequencies to make them a little more sensitive and use less energy versus the carrier-agnostic unlock phones that the manufacturers sell.

Normally the changes between variants isn't an issue, but many times they changed more than just the radio block, which can cause updates to completely break between carrier-specific variants.

The reason that Nexus devices aren't affected is that Google requires the devices use specific hardware without any deviation at all. This allows a patch that works on an LG-made Nexus-5X running on Verizon completely compatible with a Huawei-made Nexus 5X running on T-Mobile.

Crazy Operations Guy

@Anon Coward RE: "Untrue"

[citation needed]

Boffins shrink light-twister to silicon scale, multiply bandwidth 10x

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Light is the exact same thing as radio waves (just shorter)

I've always wondered why no one has done the reverse and started implementing various radio technologies to optical communications. Implementing a modulation technique like QAM seems like it'd be a fairly trivial way to greatly increase the bandwidth of an optical fiber rather than the current technique of 'turn the laser on and off really fast'.

'The box' Bones uses to fix any ailment on the Enterprise? Yup, it's real

Crazy Operations Guy

Anthrax is indeed a bacteria, and difficult one to breed at that. But, yeah, governments will freak the hell out over anything that sounds just the slightest bit scary. I hope they never learn how easy it is to breed bacteria and some of the hardier viruses, or else they'll try and confiscate everyone's toaster ovens...

FireEye admits filtering out legitimate emails in sniffer snafu

Crazy Operations Guy

I prefer a different methodology for spam / malware detection

I prefer to let the software mark the message as "potentially dangerous" followed by a score so that I can id the message rather than letting software dispose of it for me. Of course I have a set of always-block rules on my mail gateway, but even then it just gets pushed to another account (checked using the 'mail' command built into OpenBSD or a command line version of Lynx for HTML mail).

Going! going! pwned? 200! million! Yahoo! logins! leaked! allegedly!

Crazy Operations Guy

For passwords at my old job, I'd grab lines from the employee handbook. It'd take a machine eternity to guess that my password was

"ITP-34.922 - password policies. All passwords must contain"

60 characters, numbers, and symbols. Yet there is no need to try and remember which ones were converted to uppercase or leet-speak bullshit.

ON my person systems, my passwords were the file names to songs I like. "Rolling Stones - 03 - (I can't get no) Satisfaction.mp3" or "AC/DC - 07 - Ain't no fun (waitin' round to be a millionaire)" would take a machine quite a long time to figure out, but I can type it out pretty quickly and remember it fully.

I've also used commonly typed system commands as well, especially ones I would use fairly often, like "ping6 mailer03.mycompany.com". The benefit being that its immune to key stroke sniffers.

Domain name bods NetNames netted by CSC Global

Crazy Operations Guy

Demand for gTLDs

Nobody really wants the gTLDs, they seem to only exist for brand protection and nothing more. No one trusts them and they go unused and will probably just end up being ignored or actively avoided like ".biz" or ".info". The whole concept was flawed from the beginning, especially since ICANN tried this crap before with ".areo" and ".museum" which failed horribly...

Seagate scoops a revenue boost off back of its 8TB drives

Crazy Operations Guy

What would certainly help would be to start offering hard disks with a physical WORM setting and better hot-swap capability to compete properly in the D2D backup space. I'd throw so much money at Seagate if they could build a hard-disk based replacement for my aging tape robot-library system. Building out a box for the disks to be completely tray-less would be trivial (I have a couple such bays on my desktop), especially if they added some kind of twist-lock notch to the physical casing to aid a robotic arm to grab it (The corners of the drive are already hollow most of the time anyway).

Maybe add in some kind of RAID-like redundancy into a backup set and you'll get something even better than tape. I can't count the number of times I've had a backup set ruined by a tape having failed for one reason or another (Broken gears and dried-out / structurally defective tape being the two biggest issues).

I figure a proper system would write the backup data across a 12 or 14 disk RAID-6 (or preferably something that provides the same level of redundancy but in a more backup-friendly format) backup set loaded into a tray-less box. Each disk would have a pair of notches on the end so that a robot arm can easily grab and pull the disk. The disks would be equipped with a physical switch or a set of fuses to electrically disconnect the write heads. Perhaps add in some logic so that backup device knows how much data it will back up and can use smaller, or larger, hard disks to avoid waste.

Kaspersky so very sorry after suggesting its antivirus will get you laid

Crazy Operations Guy

I fucking hate the over-sensitive MRA asses out there

All I hear is "Waah, you're oppressing me!" whenever someone tells you how offensive you are being. Women have, and continue to be, harassed based on their gender and continually receive threats of sexual and physical violence on daily basis.

We live in a world where in 34 states of the US (Australia, New Zealand, and most countries in Europe), a woman can be charged with assault for fighting back against her rapist just because she is married to him. We live in a world were "She was asking for it" is a valid statement used to defend a rapist, a world were "She isn't acting like a victim so is making it up" has worked many, many times in court. We live in a world were a man seems to have the right to say lurid and disgusting things to a woman because she just happens to walk by. Fuck, we live in a world where a man can claim that the only people that are complaining about a sexist ad are whiny babies and be met with nothing but upvotes.

I hate that I need to keep saying this but:

WOMEN ARE NOT TRYING TO OPPRESS YOU. Women only want to be treated fairly, to be able to live without constant harassment, to have the same opportunity as anyone else.

WOMEN ARE NOT OBJECTS. Women are not there for you to leer at, to make sexual statements to, or there for your sexual amusement. They do not owe you sex, or dates, or anything because you are a "nice guy" (Hint: real 'nice guys' don't demand anything of anybody because they did something, they do things to be nice)

I am not saying any of this to impress a woman, or because I'm gay, or anything of the like. Its because I have achieved my dream life, a nice home that I own where my loving family is waiting for me when I come home after a day of work that I enjoy, and I want everyone to have that opportunity.

Don't use a VPN in United Arab Emirates – unless you wanna risk jail and a $545,000 fine

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: DOn't get raped in the UAE

Not just in the Middle East, women are treated horribly around the world, not just the Middle East... In over half the US, it is perfectly legal to rape your wife, same story in large chunks of Europe and all of the remaining continents.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Internet dongle

That connection would be going through the STATE-OWNED cellular network. Given the complete lack of proper security / authentication on the 3G/4G network and how trivial it is to MitM on it, I would consider it far less secure than just using a regular connection.

Maybe if the dongle was connected to a secure satellite via a tight-beam antenna, but even then the response coming back down would be known by the state...

BBC will ‘retain your viewing history’

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: It's for marketing...

You also have to consider that while -they- aren't trying to sell you something, they have advertisers that pay a pretty penny to get their hands on it (in fact, television stations were among the first to get on the "sell our customers' data to advertisers" business model). TV viewing habits are quite valuable to advertisers, especially when they can be combined with the mountains of data they are gathering from all their other sources.

Nintendo to investors: Pokémon Go won't make money come

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Toys?

Have you been living under a rock since 1990? The mid-90s were littered with so much Pokemon crap that it was nigh-impossible to not trip over a stuffed Pikachu doll on the way to the bathroom, even if lived alone and a child was never seen anywhere near the place...

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Not the only thing over-inflated.

"Any sign of Nintendos new console yet?"

Why would they build a new console? They're more likely to just take their IP and start developing for the mobile market anyway. Consoles are a significant cost to develop and they were losing money on each sale anyway. Mobile phones are more than powerful enough to run most of their games anyway. And more than powerful to run re-releases of their old catalog, which they might focus on after seeing how much money Square/Enix is raking in by re-selling the old Final Fantasy games for $20 a pop to mobile customers.

Crashed and alone in a remote location: When paid help is no help

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Hmmm

"Who on earth wants to 'lighten the load' on lawyers!"

I worked for a law firm: a smaller load on the lawyers means that they in the office less; being in the office less means that they don't have quite as long to break their systems in new and exciting ways.

Tinder porn scam: Swipe right for NOOOOOO I paid for what?

Crazy Operations Guy

"rely on a hosted payment page to minimise PCI exposure."

Not sure if PayPal supports it, but I've seen payment processors that will host a payment page for any website on their servers. It appears as a subdomain of the webshop, but is on secure PCI-compliant machines. All it takes is for a simple record to be added to the webshop's DNS and for the payment processor to cut a certificate for that subdomain (In my case, the payment processor was recognized as a trusted root CA by the big-name browsers, so it was free for them).

Glassdoor spaffs users' email addresses in bcc fail

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Questions

Don't even need complicated software, I wrote a script that ran on our SMTP relay; you feed it a file containing the message you want to send and a csv with the email addresses and the variables in the message you want to replace. Took me less than a week worth of slack time to write and now there is no possibility of accidentally leaking recipients.

Oops: Bounty-hunter found Vine's source code in plain sight

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: Wait a minute.

" Even if they weren't in the image they would have to be available to the image, and in this case you'd have full control over it. "

I suppose that could be fixed by putting the keys and secrets into a shared DB table so that you'd at least need access to the their private network, maybe authenticate using a certificate for additional security. Plus would make it easier to update the keys if they got leaked, or just changing them routinely as procedure.

Nitwit has fit over twit hit: Troll takes timeless termination terribly

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: It's all for the best

I'm sure there is a huge overlap between this group of reprobates and those that said that they were going to move to Canada if the candidate they didn't like was elected president.

What keeps former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani awake at night?

Crazy Operations Guy

Point-to-point cell communications

Its too bad that law enforcement doesn't have access to some kind of van full that can operate as a cell phone tower to forward calls onto another network or another cell phone in the area. Maybe they could name the device after some kind of sea creature, like a "Sting Ray" or something... Of course such a device would be in clear violation of civil liberties and the 6th amendment to the constitution, but its not like anyone would care, right?

Crazy Operations Guy

"reads the same papers as the rest of us the next morning."

I tend to doubt that, politicians have no time to read something when they have golf games and $1000 a plate meals to attend to. They tend to leave such tasks to sycophants that filter current events so that their lord only hears things that agree with what they are saying.

Politicians like Rudy rarely do anything like a normal person, yet regulate their lives. They wake up in the morning next to their trophy wives while an assistant picks their outfit for the day and dresses them, they go to their dining room where a chef has already prepared them a meal. Then its off to the roof to catch a helicopter or down to their private parking area where a limo is waiting for them; either way, they never see what the city actually looks like to a normal person. At work, they almost never interact with a normal citizen, its always some assistant or one-level-lower politician. When they do meet with a normal person, its because they did something extraordinary where meeting with them either re-affirms their beliefs or is politically advantageous to be associated with them. All they hear about the real world is what they ass-kissing aides tell them. And then when they travel, they have their limo drive right up next to their private plane.

What I want a politician to tell me, rather than, or in addition to, their tax returns, is the last time they've had to manage breakfast in one hand, and a suitcase in the other so they have enough time to get to the airport in enough time to get through a fondling by the TSA and get to their gate and on their flight in time. It seems just wrong that all a senator knows about how people actually fly is the bogus reports that the TSA / DHS feed them, yet they are allowed to legislate how the average person gets around.

Crazy Operations Guy

Re: I wouldn't say that Giuliani is evil...

I would fear a Giuliani presidency over Drumpf any day of the week. Giuliani has enough political know-how to get something done, whereas Drumpf would just be slamming his head against the wall trying to get congress to listen to his insanity rather than just filibustering until he goes away. The president only has power so long as congress allows them to, and congress thinks he is a loud, hateful idiot, and will kill any budget he ever tries to propose. He would have a small amount of power, but anything long-term requires congressional approval.

What frightens me is that a healthy percentage of congress is up for re-election this year and there might be enough crazy people swept in that some of the Don's rhetoric might get through or at least tie up congress too long so the big kids can't get any real work done.

If I've learned anything about the US government, is that the vast majority of power is held by local elected politicians who nobody cares about or even know who they are. The water crisis in Flint was the fault of the local city councilors and utilities commissioners (not to say that the state and federal governments weren't blameless, just that they didn't have direct control over what happened and it really isn't their responsibility to monitor the local authorities)

US govt is in, EFF told to take a hike in post-Safe Harbor wrangling over privacy and EULAs

Crazy Operations Guy

The NSA doesn't use keywords anymore, its purely just skin color and religious affiliation now

A friend of mine's grandparents immigrated to the US from Pakistan several decades ago (Funny enough, to get as far away from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as possible), but he has never been to the middle east and rarely posts anything about his religion or even issue going on in the Middle East.

I, on the other hand, regularly travel to the middle east, associate with people that have ties to terror organizations, and I've read every single issue of 'Inspire Magazine' as well as seen all of IS's propaganda. I volunteer for an organization that helps out in Muslim communities to help people that might otherwise turn to terror networks for support and a feeling of belonging.

I'm so white that I have to be careful around 60 W bulbs or else risk getting a bad sun burn. My friend, on the other hand, wears the traditional clothing and is most definitely descended from a long line of Pakistanis. I'll give you exactly one guess as to who of us is on the government's watch-lists and is constantly being stopped at the airport for questioning.

Use Brexit to save smokers' lives and plug vaping, say peers

Crazy Operations Guy

Ah, e-cigarettes

The most effective birth control ever invented.

Blighty will have a whopping 24 F-35B jets by 2023 – MoD minister

Crazy Operations Guy

Also, the Gerald Ford-class carriers are not only cheaper ($4.5 billion USD / £2.9bn vs. $4.78 billion USD / £3.1bn GBP), but they can operate for 25-50 years between refuelings (so even more savings in fuel), come equipped with electromagnetic catapults and more advanced arrestor cables, and several other improvements to ship-board systems. The Ford also comes with a much larger hangar (90 aircraft vs. a theoretical max of 50), much larger magazines for the aircraft's weapons, and much larger tanks for aviation fuel; all of which mean that the carrier can run 4-5 times as many missions without replenishment.

Crazy Operations Guy

"Personally I think we should have made the carriers nuclear"

Also not building them as straight-deck carriers would have also helped. Although it probably would have been so much cheaper and easier just to get the US to build a pair of Nimitz-class boats or purchase and refurbish the Enterprise, now that the Ford has replaced her, and/or the Nimitz since she is getting replaced by the Kennedy in the next few years (so weird how we name ships after men, yet refer to them with feminine pronouns...).