Reading Microsoft’s press release on their earnings, you’d think everything is fantastic in the division. “Online Services Division revenue grew 17% for the fourth quarter and 15% for the full year, primarily driven by increases in search revenue.” Big growth! Awesome!
Wait a minute…
What Microsoft once again conveniently left out is any talk of how profitable the division is. That’s because it’s not profitable. Oh boy is it ever not profitable. The division lost $728 million for quarter. Remarkably, that’s the second-worst loss they’ve ever reported — only $4 million shy of the record $732 million loss in Q4 2009.
Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world's ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.
Click on Image to Enlarge
“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
Koko the Reflexive: Balance is a huge part of integrity. This research is encouraging only if humanity survives for several more centuries. What is being done to our water here on Earth is a crime against all species.
Farm thefts in California. From copper to iron to avocados to bees to solar panels. Combo of economic depression/financial collapse (a loss of legitimacy) that continues to ravage CA and legal decay (budgets to protect against this are down by 50% in three years
EXTRACT
Like many lawmen in vast agricultural areas, Sheriff Anderson said a major challenge was the remoteness of farms and the lack of witnesses. “It’s not like breaking into the neighbor’s house and the dog barking,” he said. “These things are just sitting out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Phi Beta Iota: This one quote is gripping, because it describes the insanity of what the US Government is trying to do with Homeland Security: “It’s difficult to lock up 1,400-plus acres,” he said. “The value of the fences would be worth more than I’m worth.”
Phi Beta Iota: Anyone educated in the 1960's and 1970's will remember Pervcival and Paul Goodman's Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. The strategy devised by the Earth Intelligence Network celebrates this concept.
The plethora and pace of the development of these one-off “solutions”
is killing me ….the collective defense and intelligence community
apparently can't keep up with themselves in order to prove who is more
irrelevant…. we continue to throw good money after bad.
The Pentagon’s top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as “Nexus 7,” and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.
The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission.
But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.
“There are no models and there are no algorithms,” says one person familiar with the program, echoing numerous others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the program publicly. Just “200 lines of buggy Python code to do what imagery analysts do every day.”
Phi Beta Iota: The mind boggles at the idiocy of “reality mining” where the only reality that can be “computed” is digital, and actual reality is a 15th century pre-analog illiterate society. The comments at the end of the article are earthy and on target. The US Government in the aggregate has lost both its intelligence and its integrity.
“The enterprise has proved to be a model of how not to go about such things, breaking all the rules of grand strategy: getting in without having any idea of how to get out; almost wilful misdiagnosis of the challenges; changing objectives, and no coherent or consistent plan; mission creep on an heroic scale; disunity of political and military command, also on an heroic scale; diversion of attention and resources [to Iraq] at a critical stage in the adventure; poor choice of local allies, who rapidly became more of a problem than a solution; unwillingness to co-opt the neighbours into the project, and thus address the mission-critical problem of external sanctuary and support; military advice, long on institutional self-interest, but woefully short on serious objective analysis of the problems of pacifying a broken country with largely non-existent institutions of government and security; weak political leadership, notably in subjecting to proper scrutiny militarily heavy approaches, and in explaining to the increasingly, and now decisively, sceptical domestic press and public the benefits of expending so much treasure and blood.”
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles
British ambassador in Kabul and as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan
Phi Beta Iota: A full reading of “The Afghan misadventure” by Lionel Barber is highly recommended. The ends with several lessons not understood in Washington, and a marvelous description of NATO as a “tethered goat.” He also recommends these three books:
