My personal experience of live government surveillance

Some months ago I was walking from memorial to memorial around the tidal basin in DC with my family. The Occupy movement was still active in DC at the time.

When we got to the Washington Monument I found a discarded ziptie handcuff; I took a photo with my cellphone, with the monument in the background. I shared it to Facebook with the caption "Occupy this". Funny right?

We proceeded on to the Jefferson Memorial. I was out front walking through an empty parking lot area. A massive - like 6'5" tall - African-american motorcycle cop had parked his bike by the sidewalk in the direction I was heading, and was on his radio. As I approached to his left, he got off the radio and walked DIRECTLY into my path. I continued my straight line walk until I found myself blocked by him, and I stopped about two inches away from him. I said something like "oh hello there", and then went around him.

My wife witnessed this strange behaviour from the cop. There was absolutely no apparent reason for him to walk on an intercept course so that I would be forced to either evade him or run into him.

This is how I know that not only was the government monitoring what I posted on Facebook, it was able to follow up by tracking me with my cellphone; and was making sure I was not the beginning of an Occupy presence at any of the memorials.

The ultimate irony should be obvious; I believe strongly in what the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial represent.

Ben

the dream of two layers

[9:33:30 PM] Ben Lindquist: I have a dream of two layers
[9:34:06 PM] Ben Lindquist: layer 1 a standardized set of machines up to and including os, secure, managed + networking
[9:34:39 PM] Ben Lindquist: layer 2 a standard way to run a process, with cpu and memory upper bounds, upon layer 1
[9:35:20 PM] Ben Lindquist: give me a way to create processes... rather than vm's. :)

generation x

Somewhere along the way we became convinced that the world is essentially fucked. My logical brain thinks that if God doesn't exist, we really are lost. As a gen x'er, I have no optimism that the government can create a better world. It is ridiculous. But I look around and I am surrounded by false gods.

The "user story" and ALL preiteration artifacts should express the mission NOT the solution.

If some kind of documentation of an algorithm/formula/workflow is needed, it is a deliverable of the story and there is an acceptance criterion saying hey however you end up doing this it has to be documented.

People like the VP, the data scientist, the CEO, the helpdesk tech, the account manager... can have non-code deliverables as part of the story. So the "scrum master" is marshalling resources from throughout the company in order to accomplish the iteration.

The dev team is no longer some set of resources being managed by the PM in order to accomplish business goals. The dev team instead brings capabilities that they have developed during their own internal iterations and projects and time... to the table to help get the job done in concert with team members from all of the departments.

Full circle: this is not a dev pipeline into which is fed what the customer wants and the business needs. The PM/design team doesn't determine "what is to be done" and feed it to the devs. The business faces challenges and the customers want things... and teams are formed to solve problems during iterations. So the articulation of the problem properly, and the discovery of the solution, the trying of multiple possible solutions, the first working, releasable implementation of the solution: these are all done with full visibility of the whole team, during the iteration. Not before.

Arkowitz

All must be accepted. Ben

Check out my friend Bing's site bingtohelp.yolasite.com. She is looking for suggestions on how to help with world hunger. You can read about why in her "about-me" page; her contact is on the site.

circumnavigating the tidal pool

The Jefferson Memorial brought me to tears. The clarity of the statement against tyranny over the mind resonated with me powerfully.

Moving on to the FDR Memorial... and there it was. The glaring perversion of Jefferson's vision. "Free from want"

(The first memorial I visited yesterday was Lincoln, ultimate symbol of the rise of the Federal Govt.; I will leave a discussion of what Jefferson would have thought of him for later... hint: we are all now equally enslaved by a bigger system.)

What? Free from want? Is this a freedom?

The freedoms which were on the table before were freedoms of choice and of opportunity, freedom being the LACK OF EXTERNAL CONTROL OVER THE INDIVIDUAL.

Is there any way to provide a freedom from want without imposing CONTROL OVER THE INDIVIDUAL? Can someone explain this to me?