…yadda yadda.
Now:
Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.
In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.
Then:
War Department, Washington, Feb. 9, 1899.
In accordance with the instructions of the President of Feb. 3, 1899, a court of inquiry, to consist of the following-named officers, is hereby appointed to meet in this city on Feb. 15, 1899[.]
[...]
The court is hereby directed to investigate certain allegations of the Major General Commanding the Army in respect to the unfitness for issue of certain articles of food furnished by the Subsistence Departmet to the troops inthe field during the recent operations in Cuba and Puerto Rico. In addition to its findings of fact the court will submiy an opinion upon the merits of the case together with such recommendations as to further proceedings as may seem to be warranted by the facts developed in the course of the inquiry.
Regardless of the era, war attracts vultures of all kinds…
(As a side note – how cool is it that you can search the NY Times’ archives from 1851 onward?)
[updated to change the tag from 'random' to 'politics']
Posted by protected static as politics at 11:24 PM UTC
4 Comments »
Subject line in the spam folder today: “Put Fire and Ice in your Pants”
Who could possibly think that sounds enticing?
So… I’ll bring the oxy-acteylene torch, y’all bring the dry ice – if it’s such a good idea, I think we should have the spammer try it out for us. Who’s with me?
[edited shortly after posting to correct spam subject line]
Posted by protected static as asshattery, spam at 3:39 PM UTC
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I wondered about the timing of Arthur C. Clarke’s death and the gamma-ray burst; now I know:
Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which occurred 7.5 billion years ago, be named the Clarke Event. The outburst, which produced enough visible light to render it a naked-eye object across half the universe, is officially designated GRB 080319B. What more fitting tribute to Clarke than to associate his name with the greatest bang since the big one?
The Clarke Event. I like it.
Posted by protected static as cultcha, geek, space at 10:40 PM UTC
2 Comments »
Adobe has an extensive online collection of Acrobat (PDF) documents for testing purposes.
It makes sense, no? I needed to test a problem with upload times and speeds, so I was looking for large PDFs online. Just as I was getting frustrated that Google’s file-type search doesn’t let you search by file size as an advanced option, I stumbled across a reference to Adobe’s testing suite.
And lo! there they were: http://acroeng.adobe.com/Test_Files/filesize/Large_Files/
(What a sensible URL, too…)
Posted by protected static as geek at 7:49 PM UTC
No Comments »
I was reading /. this morning and came across this comment about Windows 7 (Vista’s successor):
Vista is a failure and Windows 7 will be an even bigger failure. At a minimum, the next three years belong to GNU/Linux. Users and hardware makers alike know better than to buy into Vista now and people looking for new hardware and software are going to go Linux. By 2010, Microsoft’s base will be erroded. The Microsoft game, at long last, is over.
While our company’s livelihood depends largely upon Microsoft’s largesse (indeed, perhaps because of it), we bitch about their products as much, if not more, than your typical Linux fanboy. And yet, I’ve been reading and hearing stuff like this for the last 10 years. Swap out the dates, and the OS names, and this could come from any Linux-friendly site of the last decade. Do I think Microsoft has fscked up with Vista? No question – they managed the development process poorly, changed Vista management around like deck chairs on the Titanic, and botched communication with their OEMs. Does this portend Microsoft’s doom? I doubt it. They’ve got a ton of cash on hand, and will probably weather this.
So, back to the point at hand… Given Atrios’ neologism, the Friedman Unit, I’m proposing the Tux Unit (TU): a one-year period during which Micro$loth will collapse and Linux will Rule The World (Or At Least The Desktop). Usage: Over the last two Tux Units, the number of household users running a Linux distro has increased 2500% to 5% of all household users. Redmond is doomed! Doomed!
[edited shortly after initial publication to add Wikipedia link to Tux, though if you don't know who Tux is already, you probably won't have read this far...]
Posted by protected static as geek at 9:22 AM UTC
4 Comments »
An exploding star, visible to the naked eye…
…from halfway across the Universe.
Damn, that’s bright.
Posted by protected static as space at 8:10 PM UTC
No Comments »
I don’t remember how I found this, but BRIO (those Scandinavian makers of oh-so-wholesome, non-commercial wooden trains) is now making a line of toys called…
BRIO Network:
BRIO Network is not your classic toy train set. It.s [sic] an original world of Rail Play featuring the imaginary creatures who live inside your computer. They drive super-cool vehicles around wooden train tracks. They can listen to their messages and interact in fun, new ways. Though the networkers are inspired by the computer world, you do not need a computer to play with them.
Suitable for ages 3 and up; get those junior sysadmins started early, eh?
Posted by protected static as geek at 7:49 PM UTC
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Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died at age 90. Clarke, probably more than any other ‘Golden Age’ writer, fired my imagination as a futurist. While not without controversy, he will be missed.
Posted by protected static as cultcha, geek, space at 8:40 PM UTC
4 Comments »
John Derbyshire wouldn’t know a socialist if one rammed a red flag up his ass while bellowing “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” at the top of their lungs…
(His summation of Obama’s speech? “Blame whitey, and raise high the red flag of socialism.” Whatever.)
Posted by protected static as politics at 4:27 PM UTC
4 Comments »
…who (should be? will be?) at least mildly amused that this past Friday was Kill Jack Haringa Day.
To the rest of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, you have my most sincere apologies…
Posted by protected static as random at 9:17 PM UTC
9 Comments »
The Boy has been invited to a birthday party tomorrow.
A girl’s birthday party. A gift-related brainstorming session ensues:
So – what does she like to do?
“I really couldn’t tell you.”
What kinds of books does she like to read?
“I have no idea.”
What sorts of games does she play on the playground?
“I can’t say that I’ve really noticed.”
Whoops.
There are some additional bits and pieces of information that make this funnier (for lack of a better term): she was one of the only girls to give him a Valentine (and a handmade one at that), and The Boy had remarked at one point at how surprised he was by how nicely she had complimented him as part of a class exercise. It’ll be interesting to see how many kids have been invited to this party, and how many of them are boys.
And he barely notices that she has a pulse… Ah, 2nd grade.
[update: it looked like an 'invite everyone' party, even if the gender ratio was heavily skewed towards girls... *whew* ]
[update the second: I misjudged it entirely... There was only one other boy invited. Damn.]
Posted by protected static as random at 11:03 AM UTC
12 Comments »
…(upon looking at a co-worker’s code) that a class named DiskBurn would, well, burn DVDs or CDs. Setting aside the fact that it should be named something more along the lines of DiskBurner, it doesn’t actually burn anything. As it turns out, it never actually will – it’s going to create ISO images instead.
But that wasn’t what bugged me – for a variety of reasons, the specs were awfully hand-wavy for this part of the application, and I knew when I started working on DiskBurn that it didn’t do what we wanted. Because of the state of the spec, I was given a fair amount of leeway in determining the final form this feature would take, so most of the actual ‘burn’ code was left until I was finished with a different part of this project (and got back from vacation, which should be the subject of another post Real Soon Now).
Basically, the application is a web-based content management system consisting of a public search interface and an administrative back end. The administrative component allows a small group of archivists to add new documents to the system, tag them with searchable metadata, edit existing metadata, and tokenize and index the document so that the body of the document can be searched through the public interface. In addition, these archivists occasionally get requests for custom data sets that they ultimately deliver on CD or DVD. Their existing manual process takes weeks to complete; DiskBurn should create a downloadable disk image in under an hour, depending upon the size of the requested data set. If everything goes according to Hoyle’s, the longest part of this process for the archivists should be downloading the image (they’re located overseas, with cranky connectivity; we’re hosting the website) and subsequently burning it to disk.
No, what bugged me was finding code in DiskBurn that searches the data set (because you need to create the custom subset, of course) – in an application that already has classes dedicated to search.
Shoot. Me. Now.
Posted by protected static as programming at 7:58 PM UTC
8 Comments »
