hedonist

“I was going to buy an outfit, but it was so hot.”

TL;DR Talk about First World Problems.

"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

A vastly under-rated and under-appreciated art form, indeed.

High performance LIBOR fixing is more like it.

Of course, by the DoD's book invading sovereign nations for no particular reason, causing between 109,032 and 1,033,000 civilian and combatant deaths (depending on how you count[1]) wasn't an "ethical failure." It was just "bad policy", based on poor intelligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

That's the genius of it, you see.

Yeah but by the time we've taken care of injection issues (and handled all the other gotchas that haven't been articulated yet), we've written about as much boilerplate as we would for just about any other scripting language / framework, wouldn't we?

Don't get me wrong -- it's still a pretty neat idea. It's just there's that "other 90%" (i.e. the necessary work to create anything seriously production grade) that always comes to mind when evaluating a new interface.

Admit it, everyone: you're all just a little bit jealous.

Hmm -- all I'm seeing is a white screen of death on my (admittedly overloaded) chrome instance.

I wouldn't say it felt like dying, but yes, I once had a very strong panic attack with symptoms like this.

It was actually helpful (in retrospect) to consider the experience in terms of a temporary glandular over-reaction of some sort. As in, not "aww look how broken and pathetic I am to be all curled up in a ball like this", but rather, "look at what a complex feat of engineering I am, and look how helpful it is of my body to warn me and signal me when I'm exposing it to stresses it doesn't like very much."

So you might want to look up the terms "cortisol surge" and "adrenal fatigue". And also look into that magical chemical known as serotonin, and how it works as a cross-regulator among various cognitive and strictly physical subsystems in your body. Mind you, I've had no formal medical training, I'm just saying a bit of self-study and serious research might be helpful here.

As to how to prevent them: that's a touch one, because everyone has different trigger thresholds, and (despite what big pharma would dearly like for you to believe) there are no magic bullets.

But personally I've found a sustained, low-key meditation practice to have surprisingly positive long-term benefits. When you strip away the paranormal- and pseudoscientific baggage around it (which are really just that), what it comes down to is (1) basic common sense awareness of how mental and emotional stress works in the body, and in particular, how it correlates with physical stress; (2) how easily we fall into "monkey-mind" patterns of reacting to stressful situations, rather than simply detaching from and (mentally) walking away from them, as it were; and (3) how the same natural tendency of our minds/bodies to learn counterproductive reactive behaviors, can, over time, be used to "unlearn" them, and with surprising efficacy.

But in general -- increased awareness of how our minds and bodies aren't really separate things, but different manifestations / aspects of the same, unified (and beautiful) thing; couple with a realization of how much potential we really have (despite all of our past mistakes, and all the crummy things other people do to us, or say about us), can really help quite a lot.

A good point at which to stop taking Hayden seriously is where he says:

Snowden fled to China with several computers' worth of data from NSANET, ..

As in, he's trying to plant the idea (and fear) in our minds that Snowden has collaborated with the PRC government in some way. There's no evidence that this is the case, and a lot of evidence (based on how he conducted himself while in HK) that no contact of any such kind occurred.

Yet Hayden is trying to plant the idea in our minds that the main purpose of Snowden's trip was to make contact with the Chinese, in the same way that Benedict Arnold collaborated with the British, or Hanssen or the Rosenbergs did with the Soviets, Ames with the Israelis, etc.

How does this case differ from Snowden's situation?

One way in which it differs:

Robert Seldon Lady is far more likely to get a fair trial in Italy (and far less likely to be subject to solitary confinement, or other forms of torture during a prolonged delay before his trial) than Snowden is in the U.S.

Whatever the answer is, it probably has nothing to do with PHP.

All questions about Kelly's policies and track record in NYC aside, what's interesting about this move on Obama's part is the utter vapidness of it. There's no reason to presume that the skills of leading a large (even one of the world's largest) police forces is in any way transferable to the task of running a sprawling federal agency like the DHS (if in fact it can be "run.") It's a completely alien environment, in fact.

But Kelly is being pumped for this job solely on the basis of stature -- and nothing else. If anything it's just another sign of how useless and zombie-like the DHS has become in the short time since it was created. Which pretty much everyone -- including, it would seem, Obama himself -- already knows on some level, though very few are willing to state openly.

Brings to mind that Leonard Cohen song:

  Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
  Everybody knows that the captain lied...

Well, "an analog to" rather than "the equivalent of" might be a better qualifier in the above.

Fair enough: your daughter will be tear gassed[1] under the tethered, direct control of a human operator then.

[1] tased, pepper sprayed, heatblasted, subject to concussion blasts and/or other non-lethal crowd control measures as deemed necessary and appropriate by the exigent circumstances of the moment.

Cost of training per role is probably a pretty good metric.

Or could be used to "humanely" incapacitate your daughter if she gets mixed up in the wrong kind of campus protest, not too far down the road from now.

"Real" military applications, perhaps not.

"Pseudo-military" operations, i.e. in our rapidly militarizing civilian police forces, perhaps not so far off.

God this is awful. Just a matter of time before these beasts are used to serve search warrants, deal with "difficult" protests, etc.

Yeah. The Legacy and Opinions in Poland sections are particularly interesting.

Can you USE MORE CAPITAL LETTERS, please? That would MAKE YOUR POINT MUCH MORE CREDIBLE, you know.

Guess what? Employers do weird shit during interviews, too. Cuts both ways.

To be fair to the 1962 NASA, they did say "women", not "girls." It's still blatant sexism, but there's need to hyperbolize.

Unless of course all you care about is generating linkbait.

Umm, no. You're both changing the subject, and baiting me with words / opinions that aren't mine.

Apparently Morales didn't have any fuel so he put on a little show play to get some attention.

Apparently you need to do some basic research into the circumstances regarding the harassment of the Bolivian presidential flight.

Snowden is running away from having to take responsibility for his actions.

Umm, "intelligently sidestepping a justice system known for its egregious disregard for due process in cases similar to his, as amply demonstrated by the Manning precedent" would be a better overall characterization of his actions.

NSA does not object to any lawful, peaceful protest.

Especially when it gives us an opportunity to build a geo-associational database of potential troublemakers cross-referenced with surveillance cam data, social media breadcrumbs and other applicable metadata sources.

You know, for the day when things get serious.

But when we visit certain websites, we get extra special attention.

"Legal" in the sense that it's constitutionally protected. In theory.

"Illegal" in the sense that doing so no doubt exposes you to tracking and other forms of extrajudicial government abuse.