I understand that we’re getting alll the way into the 40s today, before plunging back into the frozen winter. Sounds like a good time for my annual solicitation for employment near the Equator. I mix an excellent martini.
~
Matt Cooper thinks that if we really want to change government, we should get serious about improving defense procurement. I think that the public appetite for this is fairly thin, but if it were done right, it could bring massive returns.
~
Getty Images goes looking for content at Flickr. Interesting.  There are loads and loads of phenomenally skilled photographers on Flickr, but I can’t help but feel like this is just one more step in the direction of making it harder to make a living as a professional photographer.
~
Apple, making sure your kids sell candy instead of dope. Or something like that. (DopeWars has been on every handheld I’ve had since 1998).
~
Thomas Fuchs and Felix Sockwell ofter some branding help to the GOP. Some of them are actually quite thoughtful.
~
I’d really like to see some follow-up on, and independent confirmation of, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice’s claims aired on Wednesday night:
TICE: Well, I don’t know what our former president knew or didn’t know. I’m sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn’t — it didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication — foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications. (emphasis supplied)
He goes on to explain how the NSA, under the guise of trying to ensure that they weren’t reaching into communications they shouldn’t, were doing exactly that.  Now, I do tend to believe that the NSA has done that (see, e.g., statements that some NSA employees were listening in on intimate conversations between deployed soldiers and their wives). A systematic wholesale monitoring on the scale of what Tice is talking about, however, goes well beyond my original suspicions. But not beyond possibility. I’d like to see his claims taken seriously and investigated.