woodman

> In fact when I went looking just now I found a bunch of listicles about retail startups that failed.

Their contribution to losses in the dotcom bubble were measured in the millions. Telecom, last mile service providers and B2B losses were measured in the billions. [0] You obviously know those lists are infotainment.

> The telecom bubble and crash was almost a side-effect.

I'd characterize it as more of a feedback loop. They weren't simply increasing capacity with the expectation of a customer demand that didn't materialize, they were pushing through an evolutionary hump in search of a global minimum. The world would look very different today if they hadn't, at great cost, setup the network the way it is today - pushing way beyond the original design of NAPs (Network Access Points) to IXPs (Internet Exchange Points). I guess you could attribute the change to capacity, but I'd say it is more accurate to describe it as a recognition of inevitable scalability problems and as a result - a change in philosophy. That change, the official government handoff, occurred in '95. There was also an amazing amount of very interesting R&D work going on, from strange new operating systems to packet switching on fiber optics without copper interruption. Even Enron was getting in the game by trying to setup a commodity market for bandwidth. The entire situation reminds me of the evolutionary problem, where you've got massive metabolic costs in brain size growth.

So no, it wasn't an overestimation of traffic growth. Everybody was trying to figure out the way the new world would work, a lot of people got it wrong.

Also... 401k participation spiked in '95 - I don't think that is a coincidence.

[0] https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/

> But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way.

For that to be true, you'd have to be unaware of the fact that people can process data and reason through complex problems differently.

> I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good.

That is a poor assumption that requires the redefinition of the word "thought". Our mind reading devices are pretty good: "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work."

> How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"?

By clearly demonstrating an applicant's competing priorities by way of solution selection? It sounds like you've never worked on a team that had that one guy who would regularly shoot down seemingly sensible textbook solutions, and instead offer a solution that either sounded like more work or just plain insanity. Have you never heard the story of Mel [0]? I can tell you from my own experience, as a former full stack developer who had to do a lot of interdepartmental work at a non-software company, diversity of thought is very useful.

[0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...

First: the dotcom bubble burst five years after it began, and the technological advancements didn't see "mass adoption" - because they were not consumer facing. I get the feeling that you're thinking that pets.com was the dotcom bubble... the bubble was centered around telecom technology - not retail websites. The bubble is fairly disconnected from what one would describe as the success of the internet today - web 2.0, the rise of APIs.

Second: The region of experience that blockchain tech is best suited to revolutionize, finance, is also the one that is most sensitive to rapid change and most heavily regulated. The US government is still grappling with the idea, hell - the NIST draft that was supposed to provide some clarity of what cryptocurrencies actually are got totally nuked by every interested party. I'm still waiting for the IRS to issue a clarifying statement on the tax handling of a hardfork so that I can amend last year's filing. It has led to a very strange situation where a hands-off approach has allowed for development, but also prevented integration.

> As the years have passed, I'm a bit less sure about the motivations however.

If you've got evidence, or even a coherent rationale, that would cast doubt on his motives - I'd love to hear it. No, fleeing to the only country that would be out of the reach of a president who prosecuted more whistleblowers (and reporters) than every prior administration combined... that isn't evidence of Snowden being a Russian spy. That would be like insisting that a prisoner who accepts food from his captor is also expressing approval for his captivity.

BTW, looking back at all the articles about Obama's legacy in regard to whistleblowers, written after the election - darkly predicting that Trump will start jailing reporters because Obama had established the precedent... lol.

> Isn't he residing in Russia now?

The only country that has demonstrated the ability to resist pressure to extradite people wanted by the US? Yes.

> ...could his knowledge of our systems and processes somehow have helped Russians do the hacking prior to 2016 US elections?

bwahaha, so now he is involved in muh Russian collusion? The answer is yes, which is what makes your insinuation really funny - they did all the things he would have advised them not to do. So you could interpret that as evidence that he didn't provide them that information, and is therefore not a Russian spy.

Ha, I haven't thought about Binney in a while. Well he certainly focused on the issue of the surveillance apparatus failing to perform a useful function to US citizens, unfortunately Binney's narrative had relatively few datapoints (which some would dismiss as an aberration) - the government therefor had a wide selection of acceptable responses. So I draw mainly from Snowden, due to the government's chosen method of damage mitigation. When you consider their potential alternatives, and the likely reasons for their rejection, it provides a peek into the black box:

Given the fact that their sources and methods had just been burned, and they had no hope of discrediting the leaks, the most logical path would have been to declassify operation success - this was actually the only time that they'd have realistically been able to do something like that. This would have immediately villainized Snowden, preemptively defused all future leaks, shielded politicians, and changed the narrative. They didn't do this, and the list of potential reasons why is very short - at the top of the list: they had no operation successes (or a comically small quantity) that the US public would recognize as such.

I've also worked as an analyst in Corporate America (specifically related fraud and low probability/high cost events), so I'm intimately familiar with the utility of an untargeted survey of massive and rapidly expanding datasets (in both datapoints and dimensionality).

> What our IC was doing is nothing compared...

The whataboutism isn't a long term winning strategy. Even if one were to reduce all geopolitical activity to the concept of amoral power struggle, that does not factor in how we are engaged not in a singular contest - but a series of games on an unknown timescale.

> I find Snowden and Greenwald leaking such a document to be hugely offensive and anti-American.

Obviously I disagree. Here is the moral of the story, and what many of us felt vindicated in its undeniable revelation: given the capability and disposition - the US Government will do whatever it wants. The larger body of leaks demonstrated capability, the link you just read demonstrated a single example of disposition... interestingly enough, the Department of state uses a similar metric for the designation of terrorist organizations.

> I believe in the American way and disagree that we should not have an offensive cyber strategy as well...

I'm fine with that, but it should be reduced by an order of magnitude or two. It isn't presently doing us any good, and it represents a very realistic potential threat for abuse.

> Offensive biological strategy is something different, not seeing the parallel.

Both programs have the same asymmetry for offense and defense. They also share the same risk that your own advancement in offense will be used against your own interests by a much less capable adversary. Had the CIA paid attention to this, they'd not have lost control of their 0-day rootkits that got used by criminals (and potentially by adversarial states) against US interests.

> As for your insights about Iraq I’ll ask around.

Ask about the NRO and the FBI, they're the only ones I can think of that actually provided a benefit. The CIA was a net negative. The NSA did nothing, any capability they could have brought was already organic to the deployed element (and has been since WWII).

Most of the people I served with share my conviction. It likely has less to do with geography and more to do with experience and culture. I fought in Fallujah as a Marine infantry machinegunner, and did a bunch of S2 work as well. You know what good the NSA and CIA did us? None. I can't tell you the number of times we were sent of wild goose chases for Zarqawi by an intel echelon above battalion... So nothing Snowden leaked would have touched operations in the al-Anbar province. Manning on the other hand... he leaked fresh company level operation logs - which I certainly disagree with. It is a very strange experience to be able to go through wikileaks and find mission debriefs that I submitted over a decade ago.

> ...obtain maximum impact in embarrassing United States.

That only worked because the government repeatedly lied in an attempt to minimize the last leak, only to be proven a liar with the next leak. That wasn't the ultimate goal though, just a hilarious side effect. The ultimate goal was to dominate as many news cycles as possible, because the public has a limited attention span.

> Maybe I’m missing something.

You are. The NSA is so incredibly tilted toward offensive operations that it is ridiculous. They've so inundated themselves with surveillance data that they've got analysis paralysis and can't effectively use the data for its stated objective. It makes no sense for the US to dominate in offensive cyber operations, because we have no technological peer... unless the NSA is cool with industrial espionage. [0]

That effort should instead be redirected to defense, which is supposedly a mission of the NSA, because of the asymmetrical relationship between the difficulties in exploitation and hardening. Any banana republic can gather a team of hackers and electrical engineers, but it takes some serious resources to harden code and infrastructure. This is the reason why we stopped pursuing biological weapon development and shifted to an unmatched defensive posture.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...

> ...and the service members of our military also fight for your right to do so as well, while keeping classified info private.

Combat vet reporting in: you have my permission to view the rest of the Snowden documents. While secrecy does have a role in operational security - taken too far it does much more harm than good. I'll never forget the news rolling in about the leak, and how vindicated many security folks (including myself) felt in regard to how insane the surveillance apparatus had become. It was hilarious watching them drip feed the leak, see the predictable government lie, then see the next leak proving that the government just lied.

> ...they thought it untraceable back when it first came out

I'm guessing you haven't read the white paper where this was directly addressed - by the creator. Page 6 of a 9 page document: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Ground stations and aerostats.

> I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then.

Yup, long stare SAR hooked up to a DVR was a thing over 10 years ago - it could cover a lot of ground (like a large Iraqi city) with a resolution that would easily detect this drone.

It really doesn't matter, because the rationale you provided was essentially: it is wrong because I don't like it. To keep with your utilitarian line of thinking, a position against cannibalism based on disease transmission would make more sense. Personally, I prefer the classic argument of it being the ultimate violation of personal space - but that is likely because I favor Locke's theory of property and the mixing of labor.

If IQ measured the depth of emotional understanding, then yes. You don't have to like it, just find another reason to argue against eating people - there are plenty.

Such a move would instantly make bitcoin worthless - it would be more profitable for the attackers to put the computing power to mining. The only kind of party that would pose such a risk would not be interested in direct profitability: states.

To mend hairs, literacy isn't the point - it is the fact that those who can't read (or name a policy) are ruled by those who can... they are disenfranchised. So let us shortcut all the bolt on solutions for ensuring a 100% informed voting body while avoiding disenfranchisement: you can't, it would be an attempt to maximize individual freedom within a collectivist system. If you aren't thrilled with the idea of idiots voting and having a negative influence on your life - get upset with the concept underlying voting, not the actual implementation details.

Lol, this is so incredible. You've essentially suggested the reintroduction of a voter literacy test... now consider the context of that suggestion.

> Nitpick: The children would have to move very quickly to get there during the time of flight of the shell (a few seconds).

Double nitpick: 155mm artillery rarely has a time of flight of a "few seconds" - as they usually call "splash" 5 seconds before the anticipated impact in order to give the forward observer a heads up. A TOF of a minute isn't unusual - in that time a lot can happen.

Having been in the military when DADT was the rule of the day, I can tell you that it was applied a little differently than your characterization. Yes, locker room talk happened among the junior enlisted (E1-E3), yes the straight guys could get away with it while the gays missed out. That was the extent of it, after you hit NCO there was pretty much no more sex talk - and I never once saw a photo of another dude's wife. We knew everybody's orientation and didn't care so long as we didn't have to hear about it.

As far as the hotel story. Yes, I've experienced a much lower budget version of that - I had a gay VP setup a meeting at an empty satellite office. He made his pass and I stared blankly for a couple of seconds before continuing my work on the white board. On another occasion I had a female coworker show up at my hotel room asking for some help with the presentation she was working on, I handled that the way you should: "I'll meet you in the lobby in 10 minutes."

Her complaints about the office politics make up the bulk of the text - I experienced much the same as a man. Her complaints about woman specific issues, like accidentally having an affair or being upset about not being able to take off 4 months in an insanely competitive industry... I'm not terribly impressed.

The sex talk complaint is interesting though - consider whatever emotional response you've arrived at, but with a slight twist: a straight man having to listen to gay men talk about gay porn stars. So what are we talking about here, 'don't ask don't tell'? Because I'm totally fine with that - I don't enjoying hearing the sexual fantasies of my coworkers (regardless of orientation), anybody know why that didn't work for the military?

> ...diversify your political isn't silly at all.

It is, as most political differences are rooted in mutually exclusive ideas. If you are advocating for simply being open to considering alternative positions and measuring them against your own present position - then I agree with you, that is nice. But I would describe that as "diversify your politics", I'd describe that as being intellectually honest.

> ... initially drawn to btc as a speculative vehicle? Or is it a matter of principle to hold forever?

I got involved with btc when it was in the single digits, the crowd was very different then - cryptoanarchists. So your call to "diversify your investments" sounds to me much more like "diversify your politics", which is obviously a silly thing to tell somebody - especially somebody whose politics is any anarcho flavor. While I can only speak for myself, I do think this is true for many others: I was already living pretty comfortably and a few million isn't enough of appreciably change one's quality of life as a software developer.

> Which Snowden leak showed that the NSA was being used to aid piracy investigations?

I'm not aware of any assistance rendered to piracy investigations, but there is ample evidence of them sharing intel for the purpose of domestic law enforcement - which is way worse. So the call for direct evidence is nice (and silly considering the nature of the evidence), but the logic of "our boys would never" is pretty soundly blown out of the water. They have every reason to - and no reason not to, as there is no punitive action even after being caught.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...

That sounds like a solution looking for a problem. Anybody who was sprayed, even after they washed the orange crap off their face, is given away by the bloodshot eyes/red face/running nose and pungent smell. Also, I wonder how effective that would be if they put on sunblock[0] before the blacklight test.

[0] http://samanthagouldson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/uv_an...

I've never seen a leaded telescoping baton, but you might want to reconsider the fixation on weight - because strike damage depends a lot more on the angle and targeted zone. If the cops are getting anything like the military in training on these things - they spend a lot of time learning where and how you can hit somebody without risking permanent damage. I'm pretty much the last person to stick up for cops, but beating somebody with a baton is hard work - so I'd be more inclined to think the cop dealing out the blows is trying harder than his fellow officers to not shoot a person to death.

When is the last time you saw something like that carried around that wasn't a rerun of "Cops" recorded in '89? Today you see telescoping steel tubes that certainly couldn't break down a door and could only break bones intentionally and with effort. You rarely see them deployed, which is unfortunate in my opinion, because it is an escalation of force step designed to counter physical but non-life-threatening aggression. So essentially you're abandoning a spectrum of force and adopting a model of only two modes - subjugated or dead.

No kidding, this is exactly what pepperspray was invented for. Before I was even allowed to touch the stuff in the military I had to read a short history of it and a load of technical facts, oh and then get sprayed in the face before running an obstacle course...

I really don't see how cops are able to have their cake and eat it too, with the whole "gotta do whatever to get home at the end of the day" and "we bravely risk our lives to hold the thin blue line".

You've misunderstood my point, which is that distant iris data collection from non-cooperative subjects is so easy now that vendors are selling solutions pretty cheaply. So using it for security, without additional checks in place, is like walking around with your pin written on your forehead.

> ...if someone takes an IR high resolution, close photo of your iris they can defeat your security...

There are commercial security products that regularly perform "IR high resolution" iris scans from several meters away and require no cooperation from the target. Stanley CSS sold one that sat on top of a doorway over five years ago, their product literature says that you need to look at it - but having demoed it myself, I can say that is not true.

Source? By all accounts, at the time, he didn't have the data at that point.

I hope you can do better than "He is a liar!", because given what he did and why he did it - the benefit of the doubt is deserved.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/world/snowden-says-he-took...

Isn't there a lot of work that goes into post processing the data? It wouldn't matter if you just want an awesome background image, but using the data for some kind of actual work... there is a lot of calibration to be done. I was working with some ESA Sentinel data several months ago - not fun.

Edit: For those who don't normally work with this stuff, I'm talking about not only correcting geospacial data - but also bringing the sensor data in line with a bunch of other sensors and past datasets. It quickly goes from "Oh, pretty pictures!" to "Do I really want to do this anymore? Can I ever trust data again?" That said, doing your own ground segment is cool - just know that there is a whole lot more work to do beyond actually receiving the radio transmissions.

https://earth.esa.int/web/sentinel/level-1-post-processing-a...