Musings of a minor megalomaniac
I suppose it was inevitable. But the first spacewalk selfie done in orbit at the ISS makes it interesting to me. Of course a girl had to be the one to do it, but the whole idea pretty much puts the gender inequality debate to rest as far as I am concerned.
I went twice, the 2nd time around being just a short followup. But that first week in Albania with Mr. O’Rourke was quite an eye opener. The Wing at Mildenhall got a State Department tasking to do some sort of sponsored military assistance mission for a systems install in the Tirana MOD. MSgt Cheek said they weren’t really sure what anybody wanted, just do a tech solution and they’ll sort it out after I get back. So off we went. Not sure who I pissed off to pull that one, but it ended up being fun anyway. The one bad part was an enduring view into the world’s most poverty-stricken country.
I’m not going into the bad part(s) except to say seeing a young woman with an infant sitting begging next to a frozen sidewalk mud puddle on your morning walk to work is a thing, to me at least. I (stupidly) took hikes around the city in the evening a couple times, and it just got worse from there. But at least we were able to get their Defense Ministry headed in the digital direction.
After meeting and greeting everyone on the team including our Albanian counterparts, next formality was seeing the Big Guy – their Minister of Defense. They were after all, giving me free reign to roam the premises. The length and breadth of this big technological step soon seemed literally profound to me, from a purely technical perspective. Once again, I was in waaaay over my head.
O’Rourke (RAF Mildenhall comm Chief), our handler and me waited in an outer office for a few minutes until a gaggle came out, then we went inside a much larger room where some more people gathered around the front talking Albanian while we continued waiting in the back. There was a long table along the back wall about the size of two 8′ party folders end-to-end with around thirty telephones of somewhat varying makes and models neatly arranged clear across it. I asked Colonel ForgotAndNeverCouldPronounceHisName why so many phones? He replied “In case the Minister needs to make a call at least one might work.”
Everything went pretty smooth while I spent most of the week crawling around a 3-story medieval castle-like compound about the size of a small baseball stadium taking measurements of things like 3-foot-thick stone walls thinking things like “it’s gonna be fun cabling this shyt.” I could almost envision the firing squads that must’ve taken place in that central courtyard. We got it done and went back for a visit a year later to check on progress. They ended up going with something different than what we recommended. Maybe that was the part MSgt Cheek was talking about. It looked good though, so I guess Albanian tech contracting is what it is.
One computer problem trumps all others, because when the network is down, the rest of it don’t matter. It’s also the reason for computer crime’s irrational fear basis: Bad things happened over the net and we don’t know exactly what or why.
“Within hours of Bezos’ receipt of the video, the analysis found, “a massive and unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos’ phone began, continuing and escalating for months,”
If it looks like a duck… I imagine the call with Saudi Prince Salman went something like this: “Yes Mohammed, the Aramco deal is going to be amazing! But I need you to do us a favor…”
I knew it right away – just like when Malaysian flight 17 was shot down over the same AOR 6 years ago. It doesn’t take a veteran space cadet to know it was bad actors any time an airliner goes down in flames. The good thing out of this mess is SBIRS early warning keeps our troops safer. I was working in the Block 10 control room when the Malaysian plane went down. The big difference this time is the government was quick to say how we knew those missiles were coming. Six years ago it was hush-hush for months. SBIRS is the real deal. Our adversaries have no corresponding capability and no answer for it.
Working with the Russians is tricky, huh Donnie? We’ll expect to hear about upcoming negotiations on a new Russian missile warning treaty.
It’s not just your money given to these fuckers. And remember – your smartphone is reading you faster than you read it.
Not sure if it was that Saturn-V rocket model I got for xmas when I was 10 years old or what, but by the time I left my 1st assignment with the newly formed USAF Space Command at Buckley ANGB in 1984, I was hooked. Interest really ramped up for me during my time in Bosnia, where I helped establish Navy SATCOM assets bringing the HUMINT mission closer to real-time for our folks there on the ground.
This past decade was the 1st of the past five in which I was not recently directly involved with U.S. military space ops. But I haven’t stopped following it, and probably never will.
…no longer purport to sell just products and services. They leverage the explosion in “screen time” to successfully manipulate the way in which you think and act. Then along came social networks and “advertising” took on a whole new paradigm.
“Though Facebook exempts politicians’ ads from fact-checking, the company said politicians would not be allowed to run ads or post content that conflicts with its census policies.”
Apparently Facebook’s stock in trade is dishonesty and lies. Some (politicians) are OK with that, other topics (census) are not. Has corporate America become the truth arbiter in this country? Of course. It just didn’t become widely apparent until the Internet and mass media exposed the cocksucker’s scheme: money- grubbing bastards parlaying personal information to grab their paydays by any means necessary – not to mention the live-stream, electioneering, hate, racist, privacy and other endearing issues Fuckbook’s recently raised in our collective consciousness.
This time we are competing with ourselves. Ballistic, warhead-bearing spacecraft are about the only space-faring news coming from the other side of the planet these days. Boeing and SpaceX are presently engaged in crew capsule ops, as candidates vying for NASA contracts to ferry ISS-bound astronauts. SpaceX’ Dragon capsule should be ready for humans next year, and Boeing has the new Starliner almost ready for a first test flight tomorrow.
(Late Update) “We have since experienced an off-nominal insertion and the spacecraft is in a stable position…” Both the Dragon and Starliner have experienced significant anomalies in development.
I hope the Intel and Cyber agencies not already sufficiently neutered by Trumpomania have a handle on this. At least we’re throwing some money at it. The propaganda campaign will be significantly more difficult to detect and thwart this time around. eMail bots I’m seeing appear to be in some cases, actively managed, with shades of reality attached. It’s not going to be a full frontal assault like last time. It will be low, slow, under the radar.
Let’s hope there’s not any good AI behind the FB and Twitter accounts.
If there’s any powerful people in the high tech industry I respect these days, it’s gotta include these guys. They did it right for the most part IMHO, and acted quickly to correct things that went wrong. By “right,” I mean being honest, at least as honest as a corporation can be, in terms of their policies and user treatment. Google was the single biggest driver of the Internet for quite awhile. They did it with good products, fair service, prices and a customer-oriented attitude. I need to think real hard to come up with other companies I might have similar opinions on.
Now can we please get started on this side of the pond by taking Fuckerberg’s company and breaking it over his head? Just to start? Maybe just the Russian propaganda?
“26,000 items, which included videos, publications, social media accounts and communication channels, were flagged by authorities as being terrorist propaganda.”
People need to start connecting the dots. Fiona, from the Hill, today:
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country, and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” Hill said in her opening statement. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” she said.
Terrorism, electioneering, fraud. It’s a WONDERFUL Internet.
Some of my favorite technological and scientific advances are in the realm of forensics – all kinds. There’s the crime type everyone seems familiar with. Digital was part of the job in several assignments with both the Air Force and Lockheed. It’s pretty amazing how you can break down the physical world to it’s most fundamental parts and get a first-hand reality peek into the past. And there’s no argument. Given a “thing,” the arrangement of molecules “is what it is” now. Based on an unbroken chain of scientifically-proven causes and events, where it came from and how it got to be here this way, can be factually determined, beyond a reasonable doubt. Not being a doctor or medical examiner myself, I can’t be too technical about this, but here goes:
Take my lumbar spine, for example. An L4-5 annular tear reflects a traumatic force applied in some direction. Z axis spinal flex is minimal, because the spine is held together by the annulus portion between each disc and vertebrae. It’s basically the glue holding everything together, propping you up while standing. OTOH, we have great spinal flexibility in the X-Y axes due to nature’s mechanical engineering of the vertebrae and discs – ask any hoola hoop or gymnastics buff. So unless you are being drawn and quartered, a traumatic force causing an annular tear may potentially source from any 360-degree radius direction.
Thanks to the miracle of modern medical imaging techniques, we just happen to know exactly where my annular tear is located. Looking down with north facing front it’s at about East/Southeast on the compass dial. So by definition, the direction traumatic force sourced from was West/Northwest. Hold a small stick by the ends in your hands, arms outstretched straight in front, and bend in a plane parallel to the ground until it starts to break (tear). Now imagine you are facing East/South east, and the stick is my spine.
Anybody see a fresh hip replacement back there somewhere? I’m gonna say we got a bit overzealous seating the cup. I’m no orthopedic surgeon, so what the fuck do I know. We’ll find out, sooner or later, one way or the other – hopefully not in the course of a wrongful death lawsuit.
For decades, the enthusiast electronics industry has catered to an insatiable demand for faster processors, higher-res displays and burgeoning bandwidth to support what? Medical research? Spaceflight? Artificial Intelligence? No, I’m afraid it’s computer games. I understand the markets represented by multitudes of people with more money than sense is tempting, but seriously? This is just ridiculous.
We’d been back from Germany less than a year when early one afternoon, our Sq CC stopped by the section and instructed Captain Mears to send me downstairs to talk with the SA’s and find out what was going on. eMail had been spotty and slow all morning, people were getting pissed, and 21Net administration was seeking outside help.
After poking around for a few minutes, I told the boss down there they needed to shut it down. He said “we can’t do that without the base commander’s permission!” I replied “OK, you can either do it and start the clean-up now, or wait and try to find out how long it takes to clean the entire 14 terbaytes in the NAS eMail store – your call.”
