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Friday links

Entering the home stretch on deadlines and having lunch at my place for friends today. Getting more sane by the minute … but will it last?

9 Comments

  1. BusyPoorDad
    BusyPoorDad April 27, 2012 4:40 am

    The article reads like basic humanity. A vet gets out, has issues adjusting to a life that dose not involved being shot at, gets into trouble. having a system set up to deal with the special needs faced by vets is a great idea.

    However, the real question is: how does it really work? Is it a way to hide problems with vets? or a way to pretend they are doing something so everyone can see “they care”?

    Do they throw every vet arrested in that wing? or just those with minor violations? (pretty big difference between assault and battery and criminal trespass while intoxicated.)

    I would hope it is used to help those who have had problems so they can get help with out being ruined for life. Maybe even expand it to all people.

  2. Pat
    Pat April 27, 2012 5:09 am

    That CCC Hidden Advantage vest, along with a pair of cargo pants (and possibly a dirk sheath in a pair of boots), can take a woman as far as she wants to go!

  3. Kent McManigal
    Kent McManigal April 27, 2012 9:12 am

    I just think how poetic the justice would be if one of the military’s drones malfunctioned and targeted the very puppeticians who think they call the shots. Someone will figure out how to hack these things to turn them on their senders, but an honest malfunction would be even nicer.

  4. Ellendra
    Ellendra April 27, 2012 11:10 am

    Re: CC vests:

    My mom looked at that website, and says that now she knows why one of her coworkers always wears the same vest every day!

    I still think I could make prettier ones.

  5. clark
    clark April 27, 2012 3:53 pm

    BusyPoorDad asked, “the real question is: how does it really work?”

    I’d say it’s All about perceptions and nothing else.

    Seems like part of it is to create further distinction between all People.

    On one side are vets, on another side helots.

    Right now too many vets are being treated as mere mundanes, a.k.a. helots. Our rulers probably want to widen the gap for their own gain.

    As long as everything is a part of the prison industrial complex, it will never be “used to help those who have had problems so they can get help with out being ruined for life.”

    The prison industrial complex needs to be abolished and replaced by private justice alongside charities.

  6. clark
    clark April 27, 2012 3:55 pm

    Ellendra wrote, “I still think I could make prettier ones.”

    Sounds like a million Dollar idea.
    Start small.
    Think big.

  7. jed
    jed April 27, 2012 4:39 pm

    “Intellligence signatures”. Too bad we can’t apply the same criteria for serving in Congress, or for that matter in any office, or public service capacity. If your mental capacity is such that you think the Navy could capsize an island, you don’t have any business being involved in policy matters. (Yes, I know, we’d be better of not having any of them — I mean, in the context of having government, which seems an inevitability of the human condition, despite that episode of anarchism in Iceland (?))

    Anybody else here read Prickly City? I think Winslow looks like Joe Biden. (Well, at least some of the time) The latest story arc involves a drone strike intended to kill an invasive species — a coconut rhinoceros beetle who came back from Guam with Kevin, the Lost Bunny of the Apocalypse. Kevin is a US Senator, running for President.

    Those CC vests look nice, but I’d be quite leary of using the internal pockets for either a gun or spare mags. You want those 2 items to be staying put, I think, and the one-size-fits-many sizing of the pockets doesn’t give me a happy feeling about retention. Given, that, will they be better than using a fishing vest or photographer’s vest, or a big Hawaiian shirt?

  8. Jim B.
    Jim B. April 29, 2012 10:01 am

    “Is there anybody left that Obama, the Pentagon, and the CIA don’t claim the right to kill at random?”

    Yeah, themselves.

  9. David
    David May 1, 2012 10:20 am

    Hi Claire-

    I posted a version of this at Oliver’s site too, though with less commentary (’cause I like you better). The thing is, there’s cloud & then there’s cloud. I use SpiderOak for cloud storage–I was thinking of building an application for this myself, but discovered they’d built it already. The main point: in return for some performance hits in some situations, they are not able to view your data. At all. Lose your password, and it’s all gone. So: not the same as Google, Dropbox, etc. They can tell you how much space you’re using, but that’s about it. Assuming you’re careful with your password, anyway.

    I’m not affiliated with SpiderOak in any way.

    On the other hand, if you have a business website and would like it to be backed up, Scarecrow can do that. In the cloud. Using Amazon’s S3, but with data encrypted so Amazon employees can’t read it. And yes, I built that one.

    Now…could I read your files, if you used my service? Yep. Scarecrow does both backups and restores, so it has to be able to decrypt data. I haven’t built a tool to do it, but in principle I could. I won’t, but how do people know that?

    I could take the next step and build a tool that does automated website backups in such a way that I can’t read the files…but users would have to run the restore/download piece on their own computer. If I tried to do it as a web application, I’d have the password/decryption key, wouldn’t I?

    On the other hand, Scarecrow stores data MUCH more securely than the web servers it backs up can manage. So…absolute trust is a bad idea, yes. But managing trust & risk? Not so horrible.

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