Bumblehive - More than George Orwell could have every imagined

"Defending our Nation. Securing The Citizens"

The Good Old Days

The NSA is constructing a massive data center in Utah code-named Bumblehive. The amount of computing power and storage of this facility is staggering. When I started working in the computer industry in the early 1970s disk capacity was measured in kilobytes. We had magnetic core memory boards which looked like fine tapestry. As I remember they were capable of holding a few thousand bits of data.

It was long before Kilobytes became Megabytes, Megabytes became Terabytes, Terabytes became Gigabytes, Gigabytes became Terabytes. My current PC has 1.35 Terabyte of storage with 612 Gigabyte of free space. It holds thousands of photos, programs, documents and  music files.

Technology advanced,  Terabytes became Petabytes, Petabytes became Exabytes. This data center will have storage measured in Zettabytes. That is a decimal number 10 to the 24th power. Of course tied to this storage will be a massive super computer. I can only imagine it becoming self aware at some point in my lifetime, just like HAL or Colossus: The Forbin Project.

I'm okay with this to some degree. After all I'm publishing this on Google's Blogger platform. Google already knows everything about me and has my photos, home address and credit card information. I like Google, they promised to do no evil. I hope my government will do the same.

Thanks for reading to this point, your browser information, operating system, location and time on this page have been recorded in our database. Here is a brief summary:


Location: Salt Lake, UT, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sandy Hook Mother's Day Card

Image
I cannot fathom the anguish these grieving families are experiencing since the Sandy Hook massacre.  On this Mother's Day the Sandy Hook Promise foundation has posted an online Mother's Day Card for the mothers of the slain children.
Read more

Scott Brown Victory in Massachusetts

Email is not the proper forum for discussion so I created a place-holder topic on this PUBLIC site to discuss the recent historic election of Scott Brown, a republican in the very blue state of Massachusetts. Keep it civil folks! I am the moderator of this blog and I can block comments that are off topic or nasty. The Democrats are already in a circular firing squad looking for someone to blame but this victory did not surprise me, even though I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I was upset with the special treatment that some of the senators got for supporting health care, or maybe jealous because our senator Jeanne Shaheen wasn't clever enough to hold out for more. I still have hope for Obama's presidency, but I did detect a bit of back room Chicago style politicking. I didn't care for the secret meetings when I was "hoping" for the transparency and the online postings of legislation. So weigh in with your opinions here instead of sending "reply to all&qu
Read more

I'm Joe the Plumber

On a recent morning walk, my friend John Poltrack suggested that maybe I would have been a better icon to represent the proverbial small business man than the now world famous Joe the Plumber . John the Software Engineer owns his own business, employs people, and pays a good chunk of his business income in taxes. I think I pay too much in taxes, but of course everybody thinks that. I made the mistake one time of sitting down and calculating how much of Big Time Software’s income actually goes out in taxes of way form or another and the answer is a very discouraging 50%. That qualifies as too much in my opinion…and I still consider myself a patriot despite what Joe Biden might think. My business makes more money than Senator Obama seems to think I deserve to keep, so I can look forward to being in his crosshairs to pay even more should he be elected President. I certainly don’t want to attract the scrutiny of the crack investigative media teams that have unearthed every skeleton in p
Read more