Except for the Cult of Cyberwar and selected computer security companies sending out press releases.
I’ve tried to stay away from this one but the media has insisted on waging it.
The greatest denial of service attack in history — until next month or the month after — was aimed at America’s monster banks. And the worst the enemy could do?
In the past two weeks, customers of top U.S. banks including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co, U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services have reported having trouble accessing their websites, as unusually high traffic volumes appeared to crash or slow down the systems.
No thefts have been tied to hacked sites, but an untold number of customers were not able to pay bills or transfer money from their computers, leaving banks with remediation expenses and customer irritation as the biggest costs.
When customer irritation and trouble accessing websites are the worst things happening, it spoils the soup of previous stories which predict dire consequences for the country when the financial infrastructure is attacked in cyberspace.
Raise your hand if customer irritation accurately describes how you often feel when dealing with your giant bank.
I’m a customer of one of the banks that were targeted.
As I’ve maintained, if you polled ordinary citizens, in depth, on how they really felt about their financial institutions, you would find little regard for them.
We don’t want our financial servants protected from denial of service attacks as much as we want to be protected from the business practices of the banks.
Cyberwar against banks is a two-edged sword, one that doesn’t cut very finely or deeply. While it may be hard on the websites of financial institutions, it’s not optimum for alleged Middle East hackers because banks aren’t sympathetic entities in this country. There is no horrification at the news, perhaps a vague feeling of annoyance. At worst, for those who believe every bit of cant on cyberwar, some unease.
Big banks in this country do not inspire confidence and love in their customers. Many people hate them.
In overlooking this the attackers have probably also put a little too much in the claims from our cyberwar salesmen, specifically the assertion that America could be gravely damaged, or easily brought down by attacking its banks.
So what is resented more?
Middle East hacktivists, or Iran, making your bank’s website run slower, which you may or may not have noticed? An inconvenience?
The candidate has thoroughly incorporated the modern instantaneous connectivity of his iPad into his now-frenetic life, but he downloads only free applications, friends say. He is so rigid about this that he continued to revise his speeches through a cumbersome process of text changes in e-mails, complaining all the while — but refusing to buy Apple’s Pages word-processing program because it costs $9.99. Finally, a senior staffer told an aide to buy it and download it onto Romney’s iPad when he wasn’t around.
Some might applaud Romney’s insistence on freeware as a harbinger of a president who would rein in spending and cut waste.
But he has a car elevator.
The beatings will continue until morale improves. They won’t stop until Mitt Romney is gone in November, his only record being that of a lampoon of excessive wealth who was real, someone you never want to see anything of again.
“Mitt Romney always seems to have kept score with dollar signs,” it reads.
For example, I know of a fellow who, despite winning the birth lottery, had the gumption and smarts to create a highly successful business. After a period of becoming wealthy in his own right, he then decided to rest on his bounteous laurels and run for president.
Trouble is, he can’t relate to anyone now. He is so desperate to be liked by ordinary people that he will say any old conservative thing just to show he is one of the boys.
It is a sad spectacle because it’s such a waste of obvious talent. Instead of investing money in a Swiss bank or the Cayman Islands, he could start another business right here in America, maybe producing special harnesses that could keep dogs safe on the roof of the family car.
No one can survive it on a daily basis. Mitt Romney has won an unusual prize. He’s locked up the allegiance of Heevahava, USA.
A candidate who’s seeking to represent Nashville in Congress posted a photo of his gun and a pointed message for President Barack Obama on his campaign Facebook page …
Brad Staats, the Republican nominee challenging U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper in the 5th Congressional District election, posted the picture of the silver and black Colt 1911 semi-automatic pistol on Friday. Under it he wrote:
“Many people in Tennessee keep asking me about my opinion on Second Amendment rights. Apparently Tennesseans are part of that crazy crowd that Obama says ‘cling to (their) religion and guns.’ Well, then I must be part of that crazy crowd. Here is something that I usually have with me. Welcome to Tennessee Mr. Obama.???
The newspaper contacted the US Secret Service, which normally doesn’t have much to say about its activities protecting the President because, uh, it’s secret:
Max Milien, a spokesman for the United States Secret Service, which is responsible for the president’s security, had little to say about the post.
“We’re aware of it, and we will conduct any appropriate follow-up if necessary,??? Milien said.
After Tennessean.com wrote a story about the post Monday afternoon, Staats linked to the story from his campaign page and wrote: “So the Tennessean took one of my posts and called it a threat to Barack Obama, which was completely taken out of context. My post from Friday was regarding the fact that the UN Small Arms Treaty, passed last week will undermine our Second Amendment Rights.???
Staats’ “original Facebook post made no mention of the treaty,” reads The Tennesseean.
The current public educational system in Kansas and the United States is preparing its students to be liars, crooks, thieves, murderers, and perverts.
My mission, in running for the Kansas State Board of Education, is to throw out the crap that teachers are feeding their students and replace it with healthy good for the soul knowledge from the holy scriptures.
Let’s be specific. Evolution should never be taught in public schools as science. Evolution is false science! God made the heaven and the earth and created humans from the dust of the earth! The very bad teachers that teach that men descended from apes via evolution need to have their teaching licenses revoked … Eliminate funding for evolution textbooks and pseudo-education … .
The lies of men and of the devil need to be expelled from the classrooms of Kansas, and of the United States, and of the world. Make room for the truth of God!
“Jack Wu grew up in Hayward, California,” it reads. “Jack fell victim to the lies of his evil teachers and thought evolution was real science for a time.”
The paper notes that although it is unlikely that Wu will win election, other politicians are concerned enough to go to the media so that voters, read straight ticket choosers, will know about wu’s views when they enter the booth.
The Guardian spoke to some of the women, all volunteers, to find out why they decided to come out in support of a conservative whom the mainstream Republican party and many women in the US consider a pariah …
Asked what she thought about the science behind Akin’s comments over a rape victim shutting down a potential pregnancy, [Missouri Baptist student Kelly Burrell said: “I’m not a scientist, but there are a lot of contradictions. There was a time in the world when scientist thought the world was flat. I don’t buy into science.”
Coincidentally, Todd Akin is on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
Missouri Women Standing with Todd Akin
“Akin, who enjoys gospel music, brought his guitar and played,” reads the Guardian piece.
Every week YouTube/Google editors find some dogshit to highlight, always by celebrity musicians or someone who really doesn’t need any more fame or publicity.
Today, it’s “Pyschedelic Music!”
From YouTube:
The ’60s might be long gone, but a new crop of musicians is embracing the era’s experimental, anything-goes aesthetic. Whether it’s through mind-expanding visuals or adventurous songs, psychedelic music is alive and well. Even Neil Young’s doing it!
Neil Young, a ‘new crop-type of musician,’ whose ‘new’ shtick is low-res videos cobbled together from other old pieces of film downloaded from YouTube. Only when you and I do it, no bonus points.
People who don’t know anything about science, including journalists, often labor under the assumption that the US military is whiz-bang at it.
Not so. Most of the great achievements in American science do not, and did not, come from the US military. The Manhattan Project, for example, while conducted by the military in World War II, was the product of the finest minds in high-energy physics, chemistry and other related fields.
Today, a doofus editor at an NBC News blog called “Futuretech,” allowed someone to go forward with a story on how the US Navy wants to make jet fuel from sea water.
It takes one small torpedo to send this story to the bottom.
The only way to make fuel from water is by electrolysis, which yields burnable hydrogen gas. And the reason our fuel problems are not over is because splitting it is not trivial, energy wise.
Which is a very good thing for the planet since good ol’ H20 is the solvent in which the chemistry of all life on Earth occurs. (I kinda like that sentence.)
But leave it to stupid journalists to mess this up with incomprehension for an equally benighted audience.
The U.S. Navy may need to look no further than the water around its ships to produce jet fuel, according to a program underway at its research laboratory …
The technology involves extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater and then using catalysts to convert them into a class of jet fuel called J-5 that meets Navy safety specifications.
The journalist, John Roach, never really gets around to explaining the bit about cracking water, instead relying on some double-talk from the Navy boffins pushing their quack schemes:
This can all be done for between $3 to $6 per gallon, according to a feasibility study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
“This cost includes capital costs, operation and maintenance, and electrical generation cost for synthesizing the fuel,??? Heather Willauer, the study’s lead author at the Naval Research Laboratory, told NBC News in an email …
The team elaborates in the paper that the “though the energy balance is unfavorable, electricity cannot and never will be able to fuel jet turbines.???
The electricity to produce the fuel would come from either ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology or onboard nuclear power technologies.
Took a giant step toward solving the world’s energy problems in one e-mail, a press release, some vague jargon (OTEC) and an article in an obscure journal, did ya?
There might be an Ig Nobel Prize in it.
From Barry Commoner’s obit at the Times, today:
Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
Basic science helps one understand why the Navy’s fuel from seawater project is a waste of time. And is intelligence-insulting.
Reality tv for the Psychopath Vote. Or to paraphrase Paul Fussell, catering to the audience of shallow pocket that gets erections dreaming about shooting or shoving a bayonet into someone foreign or liberal, preferably smaller and not white.
The more indecent and infamous Nugent gets, the more atrocious television he makes. Like a perpetual motion machine of BAD — that which is puerile, odious or both, publicized as if it is the opposite, a defiantly burning example of freedom and liberty.
A show devoted to showing how tricked up semi-automatic long range assault rifles and machine guns to shoot antelope, pop mannequin heads and blow up vehicles. In case you’re attacked by zombies or, uh, real people. What a pitch that must have been.
As said previously, I grew up in a community of hunters. But there came a point where excess became celebrated simply because it was excessive. And now all the straining white flab in too-small camouflage clothes, all the paramilitary gear, the creepy obsession with private ownership of heavy weapons by men who rant about tyrannical government, just shows the rest of the world how psychotic much of this country has turned.
60 Minutes did Afghanistan last night. Fifteen minutes of total cock-up from the war that will never end until we have a President who will do it. And Barack Obama is probably not that guy.
General John Allen: “I am completely devoted to these magnificent troops …”
60 Minutes showed we’ve managed to make Afghanistan into a shit magnet for the remains of al Qaeda. Like insignificant iron filings, they’re all drawn to the lodestone of American soldiers.
Did Pete Seeger’s old song achieve any result during the Vietnam War?
He reflects on the linked page: “No one can prove a damned thing. It took tens of millions of people speaking out, before the Vietnam War was over. A defeat for the Pentagon, but a victory for the American people.”
They all cluster around computer science, engineering and hard science degrees.
Lehigh, my alma mater, is number six in the list.
As far as LU went, the benefits of the school reputation, when it came to immediate hiring, went exclusively to the civil, mech and chemical engineers. Those were the only students corporate America deigned to send recruiting scouts to the school for.
During this time the student body and athletes were “the Engineers.”
Today, the school is the home of the much less inspiring “Mountain Hawks,” changed because it now has more non-engineers enrolled than the real thing.
Also in the list, the obvious — CalTech, here in Pasadena, MIT, the Ivy League schools … (Harvard’s there, where you must go and learn to be a lawyer to have any chance of being among America’s nobility, or at least one of its immediate shoeshiners.)
Surprisingly, the service academies at Annapolis and West Point are included, again for their undergraduate engineering degrees. (The inclusion of Stevens Tech in Hoboken, and a couple other old but small relative unknowns made me laugh, names that show the editors were pooching their list to add a few surprises.)
So if the only measuring stick is bucks on hiring and at mid-career, perhaps all the schools are a good bet, if you’ve the right degree and can survive the four years with a reasonable record.
Otherwise, I’m jaundiced. Monetarily, Lehigh has never been of even the slightest value. And of the majority of the peers I recall in my classes, not so much, initially, for them, either.
However, I was able to make a difference at the school. Unlike the vast majority of engineers who there at the same time.
Missouri Women Standing with Todd Akin