Netizen

I saw Zero Dark Thirty last night at a movie theater near Times Square. The inside CIA work was intriguing to watch, although I had already read about it. The actual operation I had sucked the details out of in the 2-3 days right after it happened. That is the power of Open Intel. It is a technical term. Publicly available information counts for a lot these days. I predicted this movie. They are going to make a movie out of this, I said. They did. And a good one too.

So I did not come out having learned details about the operation I did not know. I came out feeling the movie was a statement on gender. Islamists are the most rabidly sexist people on earth today, perhaps. It is poetic justice then that Osama Bin Laden, the ultimate Islamist, was felled by a woman. The CIA can go on and on about teamwork, but this work was out of the box thinking, and the woman does get immense credit. She found the needle in a haystack.

The CIA is a man's world. DC is a man's world. Still. The movie shows.

That is not to discount the role of the guys who actually carried out the operation. Job well done. The action beats action movies. Actually the guys who carried out the job came across as the least sexist of all guys in the movie. Excellent analyst meet excellent operatives. Good match.

I am on record at this blog - in 2007, also earlier - saying Bin Laden is not in a cave, he is in some big city. I was thinking Karachi. I was wrong. But he was not in a cave.

You also come out really admiring the people who run the US government. And by that I mean bureaucrats, faceless bureaucrats who run the machinery, people who get demonized by small government ideologues. There are a lot of very qualified professionals doing very good work in there.

But it has been wrong of the CIA to refuse this woman her well deserved promotion. Some day she should be CIA Director.

The Bin Laden Operation
Bin Laden: Dead
Bin Laden Was In A Huge House
Did Pakistan Know Where Bin Laden Was?
Where Is Bin Laden?
Barack Said In 2007 He Would Do This
What Obama Said On Pakistan

Acting C.I.A. Director Criticizes ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is utterly gripping
Review: 'Zero Dark Thirty' is massive, meticulous
'Zero Dark Thirty' review: Jessica Chastain shines in nail-biting thriller

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The Email Quagmire

What would a perfect email program be like? Right now that is anyone's guess. A good program would allow you to ignore all emails you don't mind ignoring.

Just like Craig's List is not one service, it is many services, email is the same way. Facebook is an email offshoot. You don't need to share photos over email anymore.

Asana doing task management takes a lot of load off email. Calendaring is another key function.

Character Limits In Email
Outlook.com: Microsoft's New Attempt At Email
Asana's Inbox: Work Email
Email Solutions

Startups Aim to Bring E-Mail Back to the Future

There hasn’t been a big shakeup since the release of Gmail in 2004, which brought threaded messages and a gigabyte of free message storage (an eye-popping amount at the time). By now, many of us are encountering so-called e-mail overload on PCs, smartphones, and tablets. And e-mail shows no sign of disappearing. ...... unlikely that we’ll see another large, independent e-mail service emerge anytime soon ... toting our Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail addresses around with us like cell-phone numbers. .... we’re trying to use it in ways that were never intended—as an organizer, for example, or to facilitate collaboration on group projects. .... Mailbox is trying to reimagine the in-box as a workflow tool ..... E-mail is based on two protocols, IMAP and POP, which are decades old and have never changed much. .... his service aims to bring context to communication—telling you what’s happening around you, who’s e-mailing you, how you’re connected, why they’re important. ..... small in-boxes, poor search, and a preponderance of spam. ...... Flow control: e-mail is always coming in, and we’re expected to be checking and responding to it at all times. ...... “Unfortunately, that’s not something you can fix with technology”