Musings, Commentaries, Photos and Reviews

It's true, 107,207 folks have petitioned the Obama Adminstration to: Pardon Edward Snowden This is petition text: "Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs." How embarrassing for the petition signers. They  side with a guy who ran away first to China (a place that doesn't spy on it's citizens ) then ran away to Russia (another place that doesn't spy on it's citizens). I suppose he will eventually show up in North Korea like Dennis Rodman . Am I the only one that sees the irony?

"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...