Nobody is listening to your telephone calls...Follow

That was before he saw the cook hocking loogies into them.

No we aren't. You imagined it. We don't exist, we're just weather balloons.

New Black Sabbath? Lol, them guys r way older'n me.

I'm not sure why anyone cares that the government has our stuff. Well, I could see the concern with home **** videos, but other than that, I don't see the issue.

The biggest thing that I took away from this situation is how ignorant people are on security clearances. I don't mean that in a negative way, just an observation. There are people asking how a young person has access to such information when age is not a factor. I may or may not have the same clearance as him as well as 18 year olds.

I'm pretty sure my dad had a relatively high security clearance when he was in the Navy. But he didn't have actual access to much of anything beyond the targeting system on the nuclear submarine he was stationed on.

I'm fully aware of the "Need to know" concept. That's how clearances work. Whether or not Snowden's claims are true is irrelevant to the fact that he's full of BS.

That's.... um.... deep man. Yeah. Deep.

Right. It's way shallower than your earlier analysis of "sounds like ******** to me. I mean I know nothing about government service or how security clearances work, and I'm almost constantly wrong, but we'll assume I'd a good judge of character on this one, right?"

Their train wreck with Lou Reed permanently flipped the I don't give a **** about these guys anymore switch for me.

That they thought that **************************************************** that sounds like a metal band by the mentally handicapped with a ranting hobo for a vocalist[/url] was worth releasing and that nobody went "waitasecond guys, this ******* SUCKS" baffles me.

That was beautiful. awesome.

As far as my earlier analysis, it's because in any technical field you will run into people who have no clue how things really work or are used, but love to impress other people by making wild claims based on their half understanding off such things. His statements practically scream this. Long on speculation, but short on detail. I run into the same exact type of personality at various security seminars/conferences (or the hacker versions of such) all the time. The guy who is constantly boasting about all the stuff he knows or can do, but when you engage him about even basic stuff, it becomes obvious he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

Yes, this happens to everyone on the planet, all the time. Most people shrug it off and realize that people like to embellish to feel part of a group. For instance, everyone on this board just chuckles silently to themselves when you pretend to understand business issues. It's obvious you're a guy who does ad hoc support for end users for basically the one company you've ever worked for, but we let you ramble on about labor costs or whatever and semi seriously engage you in discussion. Because your credentials don't matter, no one cares, really. You frequently post laughable stuff about data or math, so it's clear to everyone that you aren't an engineer or a developer, but, again, we play along most of the time.

The problem for you is that YOU CANNOT TELL when someone is full of **** and when they aren't. You're bad at it. It's established. You engage in the very worst kind of selection bias where you only recall making correct guesses about things (no matter how vague, and you're almost always EXCEPTIONALLY vague) and ignore when you're wrong. This leads to a feedback loop of overconfidence and the tendency for you to assume everyone is full of **** all the time, as if there's a constant streaming subtext of "gotcha" missing information from every topic. There isn't. Being skeptical is a good starting position for most things, and that's fine. Claiming that said skepticism is the result of your skill at judging other people's communications is idiotic.

I've spent the better part of my professional life judging the confidence of reported information, and a good part of my academic life studying how well people can predict outcomes. I'll let you in on a dirty little secret of my former profession. People are fucking terrible at predictive analysis. I mean BAD. Human instincts in this regard are almost unerringly wrong. It's a significant problem in the intelligence community, and always has been. Current best practice is to aggregate opinions of highly skilled (well educated predictors you constantly require to be retrained in the most effective techniques) predictors. You know what? It still sucks. They're working on it, though. (Spoiler, I contribute in a minor way to ACE, the results aren't promising so far).

The reality of modern intel analysis is that almost all of it isn't "we carried out a complicated deep analysis of a lot of information and determined that the raised level of keyword chatter indicates a large event possibly occurring on Wednesday"...it's almost always "Bob called Jim and said 'hey we're still going to bomb that things on Wednesday, right." So, that's why I laugh when you claim to "know" someone's "full of it". Because you can't tell. I can't tell. No one can tell unless there's an obvious intentional false statement made. Perhaps old Eddie is under a wee bit of stress, what with facing the almost certain wrath of people with whom fucking is fairly regularly rewarded by death. Perhaps he's full of ****. We can't tell yet. Not enough information. We might never know. I will you grant you that he's an IT know it all without a significant education, and those sorts of people are frequently full of shit, and have hugely outsized notions of their own self importance, so we might want to lean towards him not having any idea what he's talking about. You know, based on our past experience with that personality type....

It was like rain on your wedding day.

A future devoid of Bees? Not on my watch!