Getting Back At It
Today was my first day back from the long Macalicious weekend where I got the two MacBooks for my oldest kids. My son (13) loves the games and is saving up for some game he saw in the Apple store. He's playing DVDs and surfing and loving it. My daughter (11) is having a blast with iLife (iWeb, iMovie, iTunes, and iDVD) and ready to publish a new web site with movies and pictures any day now.
Work is a little tough getting back into it. Lots of emails to catch up on... needed to spend an hour or so with a new guy to bring him up to speed on the components of the system I've been working on for the last 6 years - he's a new second-shift Ops, and will be needing this information as soon as he can get it. Then there was a bug to file with the vendor of our reporting framework, and a few other things to play catch-up on.
But probably the most interesting thing that happened today was the Slashdot article about the Google Maps image of the prototype Chinese nuclear sub. This is incredible, and at the same time shows once again that the cost of destruction of weapon is far far less than the cost of it's construction.
I think the first real point of this was the Falklands Islands War where a missile took out a large British warship. The British won, but the cost of the loss of the warship far outstripped the cost of the missile it took to take it out. This lopsided equation is now even more clear with the Google Maps realization. There have always been spy satellites, and yet the problem with having them is that you can't really tell people what you see as then they know the capabilities you have. But with this, Google plays a somewhat disinterested third-party and "outs" the Chinese sub without the western powers having to leak that the sub exists. Amazing. Just like that, the western governments can bring up the boat as a "problem" without having to expend any of their intelligence in the bargain.
The web and companies like Google are going to change the way people look, act, respond, and are governed. Wild.