I am going to ramble a bit today.\u00a0 I could not come up with a single thing to focus on for a topic today.\u00a0 I didn’t feel like writing another programming thing, so…I’ll ramble a bit.<\/p>\n
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I’ll start with a little addition to yesterday’s rant.\u00a0 Which is to say, I’ll rant a bit more about Osama bin Laden’s death, but on a different aspect.<\/p>\n
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Let’s suppose you live in a small, urban area.\u00a0 No skyscrapers, just average housing and small businesses.\u00a0 Somebody comes along and erects a building with concrete walls, something very different from surrounding buildings.\u00a0 Expensive vehicles go in and out and there’s lots of obvious security.\u00a0 Wouldn’t that make you curious to know who lived there?\u00a0 Isn’t it likely the local authorities would know, even if they wouldn’t tell anyone?\u00a0 And yet, this is the crap the Pakistani government is trying to feed us.\u00a0 They’re saying they didn’t know Osama lived in the lavish, fortified compound American troops found and killed him in.\u00a0 I call bullshit on that.<\/p>\n
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Beyond that, they’re also upset we came in and killed him.\u00a0 Not so much because we killed him, but because we didn’t let them we were going to do it.\u00a0 By my understanding, President Obama told Pakistan and other countries that if we learned where Osama was and he was in their land, we weren’t going to ask for permission.\u00a0 In short, they were warned this would happen.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I applaud the effort on another front:\u00a0 No civilian casualties, as far as I have heard.\u00a0 A bombing was apparently discussed but rejected in order to avoid civilian casualties.\u00a0 Navy Seals were sent in specifically to avoid this, to make sure only Osama and those with him were hurt or killed.\u00a0 The operation, as near as I can tell, went smoothly, and the Seals hit their target and nothing else.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Speaking of large scale responsibility, I want to give some kudos to Sony.\u00a0 If you’ve not heard, their game networks were hacked, exposing as many as twenty-three million accounts, including twelve-thousand non-U.S. credit card numbers.\u00a0 This is bad, and Sony has owned up to it.\u00a0 First they shut down their Playstation network and then they shut down their PC games.\u00a0 They made no bones about what was happening.\u00a0 In fact, I received an email this morning from them about it.\u00a0 They haven’t tried to hide or cover up any part of this as far as I can tell.\u00a0 Shutting down the games’ networks has got to be costing them a lot<\/em> of money, but they have done it anyway.\u00a0 I haven’t been able to play EQ much lately anyway, but even if I were I am glad they are taking difficult steps to deal with an embarrassing intrusion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Making another segue, I wish the TSA would be embarrassed by the video which has gone viral from a former Miss USA about her experience of being groped by TSA security people while traveling.\u00a0 They’re not the least bit troubled, of course.\u00a0 The TSA released a statement about how the experience Miss USA went through followed proper procedures and how it was necessary to combat terrorism.\u00a0 Seriously?\u00a0 To my knowledge, they haven’t caught a single terrorist.\u00a0 They have, however, upset a large number of law-abiding legitimate travelers, including a U.S. senator and now a beauty pageant winner among others.\u00a0 They aren’t protecting anybody.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think the TSA simply needs to cut their procedures way the hell back.\u00a0 Sure, have the metal detectors; they’ve been there for a long time and while they’re not terribly effective, either, at least they’re not as offensive as some of the other procedures being used to try and give travelers a false sense of security.\u00a0 Focus on watching people and their behavior.\u00a0 Put more security on the planes, where the trouble will ultimately occur.\u00a0 In my opinion, there should be one uniformed and one plainclothes (hidden) security person on every flight.\u00a0 One or both should be capable of flying the plane.\u00a0 If trouble happens, the uniformed guy deals with it.\u00a0 If he fails, the hidden agent takes care of it.\u00a0 Both have panic buttons so ground control knows immediately there’s a problem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Okay, so I ranted a bit.\u00a0 I’ll stop now.\u00a0 Not much more to say, anyway.\u00a0 See you tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am going to ramble a bit today.\u00a0 I could not come up with a single thing to focus on for a topic today.\u00a0 I didn’t feel like writing another programming thing, so…I’ll ramble a bit. I’ll start with a little addition to yesterday’s rant.\u00a0 Which is to say, I’ll rant a bit more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions\/478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}