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Thursday, March 31, 2022

The estate of George Orwell has approved a feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four

 The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

— Stephen Sondheim, born  in 193


Where To Turn When You’re A Breakout Movie Star Who Doesn’t Have A Ticket To The Oscars

TikTok, of course. (But honestly, how the heck did this happen?) - Variety

Why CODA Should Indeed Win The Best Picture Oscar

"There is some sniffiness out there towards Coda as best picture material: the feeling that it’s too blatant a crowdpleaser, machine tooled to leave viewers with a warm, squishy feeling. II hits familiar beats. But Coda is a landmark in deaf culture and representation." - The Guardian (UK)



 Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 20, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Report: Cybersecurity teams need nearly 100 days to develop threat defenses; Russian General Killed After Using Unsecured Phone; A sustainable look at secure device destruction; and Ukraine reportedly adopts Clearview AI to track Russian invaders.



– Hypersonic Weapons: Background and Issues for CongressUpdated March 17, 2022: “The United States has actively pursued the development of hypersonic weapons—maneuvering weapons that fly at speeds of at least Mach 5—as a part of its conventional prompt global strike program since the early 2000s. 
In recent years, the United States has focused such efforts on developing hypersonic glide vehicles, which are launched from a rocket before gliding to a target, and hypersonic cruise missiles, which are powered by high-speed, air-breathing engines during flight. As former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Commander of U.S. Strategic Command General John Hyten has stated, these weapons could enable “responsive, long-range, strike options against distant, defended, and/or time-critical threats [such as road-mobile missiles] when other forces are unavailable, denied access, or not preferred.” 
Critics, on the other hand, contend that hypersonic weapons lack defined mission requirements, contribute little to U.S. military capability, and are unnecessary for deterrence. Funding for hypersonic weapons has been relatively restrained in the past; however,both the Pentagon and Congress have shown a growing interest in pursuing the development and near-term deployment of hypersonic systems. 
This is due, in part, to the advances in these technologies in Russia and China, both of which have a number of hypersonic weapons programs and have likely fielded operational hypersonic glide vehicles—potentially armed with nuclear warheads. Most U.S. hypersonic weapons, in contrast to those in Russia and China, are not being designed for use with a nuclear warhead. As a result, U.S. hypersonic weapons will likely require greater accuracy and will be more technically challenging to develop than nuclear-armed Chinese and Russian systems…”