"I Am an Incurable Romantic." -- Leonard Nimoy

This is what he had to say at the end of his talk to Phoenix ComicCon in 2011.

You can rewind it to the beginning and you should. It's well worth your time.

Caturday

Jake indulges in one of his favorite pastimes:

If You Want to Buy a Drone

Don't buy one from DJI, makers of the Phantom series. They've adopted "geofencing", so anywhere that DJI thinks you shouldn't be flying your drone, it simply won't fly.

(H/T)

Torture Nation, Chicago Edition

More allegations about the Chicago P.D.'s black-site prison.

Don't expect ol' Rahm to do anything about it anytime soon. He's too busy fighting for his political life.

Round Up the Usual Suspects, Москва Издание

Prominent Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov has been shot dead in Moscow. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and a sharp critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was reportedly shot four times in the chest by a killer in a passing car. ... Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the president would take the investigation into Nemtsov’s death under “personal control”...

A good place to start looking for the killer would be here:

Either this case will disappear into the unsolved file faster than you can say Anna Politkovskaya, or they'll pin it on some thug who will conveniently die whilst resisting arrest.

Mr. Spock Has Gone West

Leonard Nimoy has died.

Because It's Friday

"Steam train a-comin'!"

True Fact About Class

From here.

Or Cops.

More O'Reilly Lies

Having concrete rain down on him during the Rodney King riots-- lie.

Being present when a man linked to Lee Harvey Oswald killed himself-- lie.

Seeing nuns get shot in the back of their heads in El Salvador-- lie

Disturbing Giuseppe Zangara's aim, well, as far as I know, O'Reilly hasn't claimed that. Yet.

But don't worry. Fox News is standing by their man because they are a propaganda organ, not a news outlet.

NSA Hates the Term "Backdoors;" Still Searching For Nicer Ephemism

That's what I took away from this little exchange.

As BadTux has noted, we've been here two decades ago. The fact that a backdoor exists is going to be catnip to hackers and you can bet your goddamned house that the Chinese and the Russians will be throwing large amounts of cash at cracking the key for the codes.

And then what happens when a foreign government passes a law saying that they get the keys to the backdoors of any encryption products sold there? Because they'll know that the keys exist. It was an open secret for a long time that if a foreign business executive sent or received a fax at a Japanese hotel, the Japanese government would route a copy of the fax to whatever Japanese company with which the foreigner had business. The same thing will happen with any encrypted communications, if the NSA and the FBI have their way.