What I'm Reading | 2016-08-07 - 2016-08-13

August 7, 2016

we’ve spent hundreds of billions since 9/11. The question is how much of that was wasted and how much should have been used on other programs to address other security gaps.
one law-enforcement website offered “a how-to guide, Tapping Into Federal Funds, advising public safety officials to amplify the frightening ‘what ifs’ in their request for funds by pointing out ‘the worst case scenario’
“People ask, ‘How many terrorist attacks has TSA thwarted?,’ ” Jeh Johnson said. “We’re never going to know the true answer to that question. I do know that last year TSA seized in carry-on luggage 2,500 guns—83 percent of which were loaded.”
Americans have come to accept mass killings carried out by those who are mentally unstable as horrifying but not apocalyptic, why do they perceive an attack linked—even if just rhetorically by the perpetrator—to Islamist terrorism differently?
Sooner or later we have to realize that “never again” is a fantasy, and that it is not an excuse to make everything a priority. A democracy must make rational decisions, even when that’s not easy, and especially when security is involved.

The object database is literally just a content-addressable collection of objects. All objects are named by their content, which is approximated by the SHA1 hash of the object itself.
all objects can be validated by verifying that (a) their hashes match the content of the file and (b) the object successfully inflates to a stream of bytes that forms a sequence of + + + <byte\0> + .
since a “tree” object is a sorted list of “filename+content”, you can create a diff between two trees without actually having to unpack two trees. Just ignore all common parts, and your diff will look right. In other words, you can effectively (and efficiently) tell the difference between any two random trees by O(n) where “n” is the size of the difference, rather than the size of the tree.

The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete. Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports.
“Tax deductions are subsidies that are paid for by all taxpayers,” Ms. Fleischer said. “And the reason the subsidy is provided is that the charitable organization is supposed to be doing something for the public good, not that specifically benefits the private individual or corporation in the form of providing them goods or services.”

Roots and fungi combine to form what is called a mycorrhiza: itself a growing-together of the Greek words for fungus (mykós) and root (riza). In this way, individual plants are joined to one another by an underground hyphal network: a dazzlingly complex and collaborative structure that has become known as the Wood Wide Web.
A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of airborne hormones. But such warnings are more precise in terms of source and recipient when sent by means of the myco-net.
“These little green-less plants plug into the network, and somehow derive everything from it without paying anything back, at least in the usual coin,” Sheldrake said. “They don’t play by the normal rules of symbiosis, but we can’t prove they’re parasites.”

I took a risk with Haskell, and it’s paid off. I’m not yet sure exactly how I feel about it, or when I would chose it relative to other tools, but it is currently very high on my list of favorite technologies.

I developed the USE Method to teach others how to solve common performance issues quickly, without overlooking important areas.
For every resource, check utilization, saturation, and errors.

Experts have warned about voting machine vulnerability for years, but nothing has changed.
As Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in cryptography and cybersecurity, said, “There is only one way to protect the voting system from a nation-state funded cyberattack: Use paper.”
States like Georgia that need to replace their creaky machines should use this opportunity to switch to optical-scan ballots — and, when necessary, jurisdictions should receive federal aid to upgrade to systems that include a verifiable paper trail.