Random Nuclear Strikes

When overconfident engineers chat

“I admire your faith in your product.”

Ry Jones

Check this out

Fictional, but as the man says, each element’s already occurred — just not all together.

h/t: BoingBoing

Jerry the Geek’s beloved Sandie passed away this past weekend.

I grew up in his town; though I moved away long ago, and I’ve never met him, or the late She Who Must Be Obeyed, I’ve corresponded with him on occasion in the past and read his fine blog posts from time to time; he and she seemed like the kind of good folks you’d want to know. And they obviously cared for each other very much.

So sorry for your loss, Jerry.

Has me rather… eh. Mostly because our government has a habit of making secret so much information that is instead pedestrian or politically damaging, rather than damaging to National Security.

If you make everything secret, then you damage the value of that classification.

As some of you know, among other things, my job involves writing my employers’ contracts with consumers who use our services.  One of the best weapons has been the arbitration provision — keeps disputes private, keeps them out of court, and most importantly, prevent class actions and attorneys’ fee awards if they’re written correctly. California and a few other states have tried to gut that tool of its usefulness, and a case I’ve been watching for years just was heard at the US Supreme Court. Transcript of oral argument here.

Bear in mind, in most cases if you complain about something as a consumer of our services, my company and others like it will simply refund your money, 100%, no questions, just to shut you up and avoid inquiry by a state agency/bad BBB rating/etc.  We make those contracts you agree to so brutal only to fend off class-action consumer attorneys who bring utterly frivolous suits to collect big settlement checks from us.