Turkish prosecutor indicts six jihadists for alleged attempts to acquire chemicals with intent to produce sarin
Does the truth really set you free? Do I care?
The Turkish Republican Prosecutor in Adana has issued a 132-page indictment, alleging that six members of the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra Front and Ahrar ash-Sham – one Syrian and five Turks – tried to acquire chemicals with the intent to produce the chemical weapon sarin.
The Turkish newspaper Radikal reports that the suspects were under surveillance by Turkish police after they received information that the al-Nusra members tried to acquire two government-regulated military-grade chemical substances.
11 people were arrested in their safe house in the city of Adana in southeastern Turkey on May 23, 2013, after they had acquired some of the chemicals.
The news that Twitter has taken the first steps towards a stock marketflotation has triggered a predictable storm of speculation about the valuation of the company. How much is a corporation with 200 million monthly users actually worth? How does it compare with Facebook, with its billion users?
The answer is: nobody knows. But that doesn't matter because it's not the important question. Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese. And, of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.
Phi Beta Iota: Not so fast, Cantinflas! Twitter is stupid….Kum Ba Ya on steroids, which is to say, lots and lots of people holding each others hands digitally, but all largely unintelligent in the decision-support sense of the word. Yes, Twitter has the ability to harness collective intelligence, but when that collective intelligence is drugged up, dumbed down, clueless on true cost economics, and largely devoid of ethical holistic understanding of systems dynamics, cause and effect, and so forth, Twitter has to be considered the equivalent of a billion drunk teen-agers all trying to drive the same car via a shared joy-stick. Without an honest Wikipedia and an honest Google (just to be explicit, both corrupt to the bone), Twitter is noise.
Sometimes an initiative comes along that causes me to perk up and declare, “wait, you mean they weren’t doing that already?” That is my response to Slashdot‘s article, “Navy Version of ‘Expedia’ to Save DOD Millions.” I know, I should no longer be surprised by the gross inefficiency of large bureaucracies.
The set of bureaucracies that makes up our military, though, is taking a welcome step toward efficiency with this project being tested by the Office of Naval Research. The system would use “an Expedia-like” search to correlate freight and personnel travel needs with open slots worldwide. Writer Kevin Fogarty reports:
“The Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time.”
Though it has taken our government seventeen years to take advantage of this technology, I suppose the fact that they finally are is worth celebrating. The TET system is part of the Logistics Information Technology(LogIT) project, which aims to combine information “from separate systems for travel planning, asset tagging, tracking, location, monitoring and analysis of travel options into a single interface.” Logic is a beautiful thing!
The article includes a few details about how the system will work, as well as expectations for the project’s impact. See the article for more information about this belated but important initiative.
New revelations about National Security Agency abuses, which now include everything from industrial espionage to reports that the agency can access most data on our smartphones, seem to put everything we know about how business is done on the Internet in danger.
Now don’t get the addled goose wrong. The goslings and I use Google and a number of other online services each day. The reason is that online indexing remains a hit-and-miss proposition. Today’s search gurus ignore the problem of content which is unindexable, servers which are too slow and time out, or latency issues which consign data to the big bit bucket in the back of the building. In addition, few talk about content which is intentionally deleted or moved to a storage device beyond the reach of an content acquisition system. Then there are all-too-frequent human errors which blast content into oblivion because back up devices cannot restore data. Clever programmers change a file format. The filters and connectors designed to index the content do not recognize the file type and put the document in the “look at this, dear human” folder or just skip the file type. And there are other issuers. These range from bandwidth constraints, time out settings, and software that does not work.
Kerry Was Wrong
