Too much work to keep up with this much, but of note:
Sixty per cent of those who slept discovered the secret rule, compared to 22 per cent among those who stayed awake.
The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!
—Plautus, 200 BCE. Haven't found a confirming source, other than repetition itself. But still.
In theory, Samba can function as a domain controller, and a Windows XP Professional is able to join as a client, with some adjustments:
These steps are to alleviate Windows XP's expectations that it will join a Windows 2000 domain, which permits signing and sealing of netlogon packets throughout the network, unlike a Windows NT 4 domain, which Samba emulates.
That's not the end of the story. Some Windows XP machine lose their ability to join a Samba domain sometime down the road, a day, a week later, but unexpectedly. Which happened to one of my XP boxes. After trolling the lists, I found fellow travellers lost in this misty domain, and some elusive tips.
Computers are but tools, and like any other tool, their usefulness depends on the application to which they are put. They cannot as yet perform the miracle of changing data into intelligence, let alone salient intelligence, although computers are immensely helpful to humans in that transformation. Or as Bruce Schneier explains in his column Homeland insecurity, computers with large quantities of data are not by themselves going to make us safer.
Relying on computers to sift through enormous amounts of data, and investigators to act on every alarm the computers sound, is a bad security tradeoff. It's going to cause an endless stream of false alarms, cost millions of dollars, unduly scare people, trample on individual rights and inure people to the real threats. Good intelligence involves finding meaning among enormous reams of irrelevant data, then organizing all those disparate pieces of information into coherent predictions about what will happen next. It requires smart people who can see connections, and access to information from many different branches of government. It can't be seen by the various individual pieces of bureaucracy; the whole picture is larger than any of them.
These airline disruptions highlight a serious problem with U.S. intelligence. There's too much bureaucracy and not enough coordination. There's too much reliance on computers and automation. There's plenty of raw material, but not enough thoughtfulness. These problems are not new; they're historically what's been wrong with U.S. intelligence. These airline disruptions make us look like a bunch of incompetents who cry wolf at the slightest provocation.
might work better for deciding elections in Broward County, Florida. Evidently, touch screen voting is not an improvement over butterfly ballots. According to the article, about 134 (1.3 percent) of the votes didn't register, perhaps because voters didn't confirm their vote by pressing a “vote” button. But the article is silent on the truly interesting questions: So what did the next voter see on the screen? The previous voter's unsent vote? Which vote was submitted? How were lost votes determined?
Work lost its internet connection due, as it turns out to general area outages by our provider. Also the router is troubled. But, we are back on the internet.
I have arrived stateside (on the scheduled flight), and must say it was a lovely touch really to listen to the O'Reilly Factor interview with Michael Savage raging about illegal immigration while waiting for passport control. British Airways crew was fantastic and solicitous, especially during the 2 hour wait for US security agencies to clear the passenger manifesto. The only drawback were the two little sots kicking my row of seats impudently. That is until I employed the ancient parental technique of withering stare and stern admonition.
Turns out the two British Airway flights were cancelled because BA pilots simply implemented a prior agreement to cancel if the US insisted on placing US air marshals on a flight.
[Addendum: I inadvertently left off some salient information. The agreement is premised on the belief that the security of a flight should be established on the ground. If the US considers the flight risky enough to warrant an air marshal, the pilots' union prefers to cancel the flight as a better guarantee of safety. Best guess is the extensive checking of the passenger manifest by all interested UK and US security agencies is a compromise position.]
Apparently British Airways flight 223 between London and Dulles may be targeted because it shares the number of UN resolution 223. So which flight do I have return tickets on? Yep. 223. At least I hope to miss the fighter escort home. CNN reports today's flight took off, after 2 cancellations, albeit with additional security measures in place.
You didn’t ask, but here is the news:
Plus side: Imperial War Museum had a nice exhibit on Women and War; pictures and letters were the most interesting. While focusing on British women in the world wars, the exhibit included the fascination of earlier generations with women who'd passed themselves off as men to fight in the American Civil War and Revolution. My favorite was a Brit, Dr. James Barry, became a doctor, served in the British Navy? and her sex was uncovered only upon death.
Other pluses: Anything Goes, but then I adore musicals, and although an oldie, this was an enjoyable rendition of Cole Porter's music, PG Wodehouse's writing (the original also was written to feature Guy Bolton and Ethel Merman).
Tragedy: Mourning Becomes Electra opens with Helen Mirren just as my flight leaves the UK. Damn. The double-damn goes to missing both The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed twice. It played in DC at year's end and opens shortly in London.
Comedy: The Reduced Shakespeare Company's does 37 plays in 97 minutes.
London Bridge (version x) still stands, the people are polite, the food comestible, and no one has attempted to run me down.
I'm off to Londontown for some R&R, and maybe some palak paneer. Play nicely. (As I hope my computers do).