Want to sit in Picard's chair while spying on THE WORLD? We can make it so – ex-NSA man National Security Agency director Keith Alexander apparently sold the concept of surveillance to members of Congress using an operations centre styled on the bridge of the starship Enterprise from much-loved sci-fi series Star Trek. According to "a former administration official" who spoke to Foreign Policy magazine, General …
The protection screen could be referring to shields or the deflector array. Two different things on a Federation Starship. One (shields) are a passive defense mechanism, the other is an active system used to deflect things out of the ships path and/or open rifts in subspace.
I guess it could have been worse - he could have asked to borrow Cheyenne Mountain or somewhere similar and installed a white fluffy cat, a pool with a few sharks (laser beams under R&D) and an overlarge plot device (spaceship, missile/rocket, weapon of mass destruction of your choice etc).
But then again I guess that's too 20th century perhaps for the modern cyber-era.
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From dystopian works about government micromanagement of its citizens through lies, deceit and misinformation to a futuristic journey of exploration managed centrally from a quasi-military Federation controlled by an English speaking council of elite rulers; man the NSA has all the sci-fi bases covered.
Where are my teleporters you cocksuckers? Your priorities are all wrong!
There's always Tony Alleyne's flat...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U67CJqLUjA0
Looks like he won't be needing it anymore since he's been put away for bolding downloading images he shouldn't have.
Is that what you pay taxes for? So some overpaid prick can pretend he's Picard? If this was someone's private project then fair play, but this is the biggest bunch of privacy invading dickheads there are abusing tax payers money to play star ships. Excuse me if I don't see the funny side.....
You're correct. This is simply a waste of money; possibly an effective moral booster though... Maybe that's how they justified it?
Anyway. I think there was some confusion about the intended target of your original comment. I know I couldn't tell if it was for the NSA or for us Commentards. Precision man, precision! Lack of target discrimination is what led to all this NSA mess to begin with you know :)
What, nobody remembers the big screen at the front of the bridge with the blinky lights underneath it? The one that alternated between views of stars, space ships, and video conferencing with allies and aliens? *That* big projection screen from Star Trek? The one that gets spoofed with the crew playing PacMan and Pong on it, etc?
I always wondered why they didn't cover the whole front of the bridge with a big screen.
You need to download then unzip 'NSA Unidirectional Permissions Manager' in order to establish a trusted connection to the site. Once you've unzipped it run 'Hoover.exe' and follow the on screen prompts. Installing the Yahoo! toolbar is optional and I recommend declining. It is simply too intrusive.
" https://www.belvoir.army.mil
Fort Belvoir's web page gives a"This Connection is Untrusted." warning when you connect..."
hee hee. "This certificate isn't from a trusted authority. Issued by organisation: US Government"
Peruse the bridge and control centre in all of its vain glory here ..... http://cryptome.org/2013/09/info-dominance.pdf
* Or is that just the just remit of a few who be more than just just and a few?
That's right up there with the GCHQ's "Mastering the Internet". I guess the NSA and other alphabet agencies really do by their nature attract people with fascistic tendencies. And these nimrods hold our freedom in their hands and get to pull their crap behind a legal veil of secrecy.
And thanks for spending my tax money bringing in a Hollywood set designer to turn otherwise perfectly useful conference space into a half-assed version of the Enterprise's bridge. It's not like the government doesn't have millions of other places that money could have been spent to actually improve some lives. But as long as a bunch of self-important fuckwits got to say "Make it so!" to their daydreams of galactic conquest, I guess it's OK!!
(Sorry for the playground language, but this kind of
That's one of the worst, most dangerous, ideas I've ever heard. You might as just declare jihad on yourself and detonate an "Anti-Freedom" bomb in your own house. Paying teachers more would only incentivize proficient subject matter experts to enter the education field.
Capable professionals teaching young people with impressionable minds how to think critically and assess and manage risk is the path to a non-ideological, non-dogmatic nation of racially tolerant citizens who support and participate in sustainable agriculture and effective conservation of nonrenewable resources. Who wants that?
Nobody ever sees him/herself as an evil bad guy.
It's always "I'm the Good Guy, everyone that opposes me is Evil!"
Ah hell, This explains it better than I can:
http://mrmagundi.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/on-goodness-and-niceness/
"‘It’s more important to be good than to be nice’ neatly summarizes the beliefs of Pol Pot, of Robespierre, of nearly every terrorist there ever was; and I’m sure that, translated into Latin, it was the official motto of the Spanish Inquisition. All the misery in the world is caused by people hell-bent on being good at all costs.”
C. S. Lewis might have had something to say about that. People can be nice on the surface and still have bad intentions. It depends how you define 'nice' and 'good', really: as long as you file respecting the rights of others under 'good', then putting good first won't get you in that kind of trouble.
Well, traditionally functional command centers have been fairly awful. My internship was with a company that serviced shipboard systems and as such we regularly ended up in harbor control centers, which are really complicated places. Since those days I've been in many control centers for several different industries and they're all about the same.
They are universally spartan, densely packed with bulky, massively shielded equipment with lots of dials, knobs and buttons no one in the room knows the purpose of and are either overwhelmingly beige or that sickly green that was globally fashionable in official facilities in the 60's and 70's.
There seems to be a direct correlation between the effectivnesss of the business being done and the quantity of comforts and amenities. So I suppose it does make perfect sense that the NSA has a fancy control center: They really suck at their job.
And that office was designed to convince his (nominal) superiors that they were in "control" of the internet.
Complete BS but you can believe it was exactly what they needed to hear to give him the big $$
He played those ass clowns like a f**king Stradivarius.
Hasn't stopped the shoot-em-up at the Washington Naval Yard, did it?
I suspect that the phrase that so many associate with Captain Picard, "Make it so", doesn't actually originate with Star Trek TNG.
The author Patrick O'Brian (1914~2000) puts it into the mouth of his Napoleonic era character, Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey. The historical detail in the books of this series appears to be well researched, so I'm going to suggest the the writers of Star Trek adopted this from RN tradition, rather than inventing it.
"Mr Bryant's intelligence and maturity....." Ah, poor ickle Henri is still sulking from his last debunking. I see it so scarred him he has stopped even trying to post an opinion (no great loss). Maybe it will cheer him to note that the Fwench have been fingered as supplying software to ze nasty NSA (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/17/nsa_vupen/) - who knew the Fwenchies could write useful code! Then again, maybe not, as he probably wants to baaaah-lieve that only Ze Man does that nasty eavesdropping, not those cultured Fwenchies, n'est pas?
Seriously, Enterprise D had way better ergonomics than this monkey imitation. What a sad reproduction this is. The most interesting thing is the set for STNG probably cost a lot less. Besides where are the touch interfaces that inspired all our lovely tablets and surface? Of course, for all of you complaining about what would be the point of the chair and screen. At least the boss wouldn't be sitting in his office playing on an iPad while everybody else is scrambling in Red Alert. I'd take that anyday over where I'm at!
Ahh, Section 31 strikes again, hahha. Maybe they should invoke Reed Alert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHyWYA1Nvq8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
However, I think the Voyager Astrometrics Lab or 1701-D Stellar Cartography room would be better, even moreso if the perch overlooking planets or Intertubes nodes and pipes below could be built.
Maybe even better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQC7U7i-KdY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Crewman Daniels' temporal commission holo-encyclopedia
Project Cybersyn was a British-Chilean project and had nothing to do with the CIA. It was designed to help the failing economy under the democratically elected Allende government.
The CIA were doing everything they could to topple Allende. Part of the reason the Chilean economy was failing was that the USA were deliberately calling in all their debts. They also covertly supported opposition groups.
The CIA succeeded, Allende shot himself before being captured during the coup, and Chile was subsequently ruled by a ruthless dictator while thousands were killed, tortured or went 'missing'.
So much for the 'special relationship'.
The CIA played both sides of everything in their South American adventures in dictatorship development. One hand undermined the current administrations, one hand propped them up, and both hands got together on the weekends to create, manage and exploit 3rd parties which picked up any scraps their work during the week dropped.
There's a bunch of reasons, based on past abuse by the CIA, why the South Americans don't trust the gringos. We've fucked them so hard and mercilessly in the past it will be hard to ever truly fix the situation. But hey! At least they figured it out before they were all slaughtered. US dealings with Native North Americans had given them somewhat of a blueprint for what to expect...
"There's a bunch of reasons, based on past abuse by the CIA, why the South Americans don't trust the gringos. We've fucked them so hard and mercilessly in the past it will be hard to ever truly fix the situation."
True. This "position paper" from 1983 outlines the situation.
Of course a lot has changed in 30 years.
You can't smoke in a US govt building.
I think you've hit on a grand idea! All future government policy should be set to music video. That way even younger people who might not want, or be able, to trawl through pages of bureaucratic gibberish can still understand what's happening.
There could even be interactive public shows where the losing video (and policy) gets voted off. Democracy in the 21st century :)
"I think you've hit on a grand idea! All future government policy should be set to music video. That way even younger people who might not want, or be able, to trawl through pages of bureaucratic gibberish can still understand what's happening."
Exactly. Of course at the time I guess they figured it was just the annoyed comments of someone whose bloodstream was very familiar with the products of the international drugs trade.
Thirty years and $Terra of taxpayers money has changed what?
In 2031 I wonder what the bill for The War Against Terror will be, and what actual benefits it will have shown?*
Unless of course you mfg bulk data storage products or network DPI equipment of course.
Meanwhile, we put up with the Boston bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, the attempted bombing of an airliner in Detroit, so on and so forth while being groped at the airport by the TSA. The next president should initiate criminal investigations regarding fraud, waste, and abuse.
The Death Star worked as designed.
The Enterprise(s) was always prone to internal systems failures, underutilized/incorrectly utilized as a result of being a pawn in expansionist Earth-centric politics and commanded by a succession of delusional madmen who claimed to hold certain principals as sacred, but were regularly 'forced' to ignore those principals to meet the needs of the moment.
I think the Enterprise was a good choice to copy.
*I'm a big Star Trek fan. But neutral analysis of the Federation and its policies show many heavy biases glossed over with fancy technology and busty, tightly attired female crewmen :)
Holy shit! Here's the pitch:
Starfleet: Trek Support - Follow the adventures of the unsung hero's that keep Starfleet's cutting edge starships boldly going where no one has gone before. Watch as highly skilled techs answer late night subspace emergency transmissions to solve mission critical problems onboard starships throughout the galaxy. Replicator not working? Sonic showers peeling the skin of the helmsman? Holodeck vaginas sandy? Unknown virus causing pop-ups on the main screen? Watch the action as malformed system patches are rolled back while still keeping life support, propulsion, shield and weapons systems online and ready for action!
Starfleet: Trek Support Always there. Always ready.
Of course many people dream of a work environment like that. It is simply good management to make your staff feel special.
There are certainly scads of other moral boosting things going on there. It sure does help explain why ~20,000 US Citizens were comfortable with spying on and betraying their countrymen and the founding principals of the country they are supposed to be protecting. They were made to feel very important; nobody wants to lose that feeling.
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