Month: April 2016

Cleveland protests

the city didn’t put the bid for this equipment out until March. Even if the equipment does turn up in time for the convention (unlikely), there won’t be any time to train with it. This degree of organizational incompetence is more than sufficient to guarantee a bad outcome for a convention city in a good year. However, this year’s convention won’t be a normal protest. It will be something altogether different.

Encryption Backdoors

They’ve been threatening this for months now, but Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have finally released a “discussion draft” of their legislation to require backdoors in any encryption… and it’s even more ridiculous than originally expected. Yesterday, we noted that the White House had decided to neither endorse nor oppose the bill, raising at least some questions about whether or not it would actually be released. Previously, Feinstein was waiting for the White House’s approval — but apparently she and Burr decided that a lack of opposition was enough.

This is what happens when your government is run by elderly, luddite lawyers instead of engineers.

100B Galaxies

Just by taking this observation and applying some high school math, we have discovered that the Universe has something like a 100B galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has billions of stars. There are something like a sextillion stars in the Universe. And it’s reasonable to think that most of those stars have planets, perhaps multiple planets. How many are Earth-like? How many have life?

Not Going Dark

All 15 identified attackers were on terror warning lists or “Islamist instigator” lists in at least 1 European country. In addition, most were on other lists, such as no-fly lists. All 15 had been classified as violence-prone. 14 had known contacts with other radical Islamists (one of them was apparently radicalized only via the Internet). 12 had taken trips to the “Islamic State” in Syria, or to al-Qaida in Iraq or Yemen. 10 had criminal records, most of them for violent crimes.