Senate LOL at Big Gummint

Yeah, I got this from Fox News, but the GAO report itself is delightful:

tl;dr highlights: http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677435.pdf
full report: http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677436.pdf

Absolute gold:

but there are plans for an update by the end of fiscal 2017. whew!

 

Yet another reason to just get rid of most of our nukes.

 

Trident:

 

This is not necessarily a bad thing--the older systems are so unsophisticated, they're probably less vulnerable to hackers.

 

I sympathize completely with maintaining legacy systems to perform unique tasks.

For example, I kept my old LCII color Mac until 2009 so that I could occasionally fire it up and play the After Dark Lunatic Fringe screensaver game.

 

Don't forget these:





Still the coolest looking missile. Not an ICBM but a tactical nuke.

I like the slogan for the Nike Hercules: If it flies, it dies. One of these nukes could take out an entire wing of Soviet bombers.

 

Tactical nukes are such an amusing idea.

While we're on the subject of nukes, I need to post this tribute to my favorite passage from Snow Crash, which I've been rereading for the past 3 days:

I'm imagining Obama's "nuclear football" containing nothing but an 8 inch floppy disk, and I'm thinking to myself, yep, president Obama is the baddest mother****** in the world.

 

Did you just compare Obama to Raven? The guy who gets knocked out cold by YT's dentata?

Jabba#1pls

 

Good to know that the IRS runs on a 1960s mainframe using assembly code. Hackproof!

 

Those nuke systems also are not enabled with any kind of data sharing setup like the Internet/ARPANET/etc., so reprogramming them requires bringing a properly coded and formatted 8-inch floppy to the physical computer, and having the time to upload it. That makes the systems very secure. Much more so than the UKs bike locks anyhow. Gentleman's agreement is not something that should be applied to nukes.