How about the reality: spelling?

Re: to separate network

Bandwidth hogs are still fairly common, though it's less "important people" then it is idiots sending gigantic emails around. Most network abuse is due to people not understanding the concept of limited bandwidth, rather then general conceit as you seem to imply. Bandwidth has improved dramatically over the last few years, thankfully.

Your implication that networks are used as status trophies is just being angry. SIPRnet and JWICS are just very large intranets, and as such, are used for web publishing and email, much like any other intranet. SIPRnet has many many many users and JWICS, though operating at a high classification, has a large userbase as well. Believe me, as the near polar opposite of "senior management" I experience no mission-ending delay on the network, either here or CONUS. Your attempt to make this an emotional appeal against those Evil, Dark Overlords is sad, really.

Re: Drug Testing

Yes, of *course* people use drugs in the military. And those idiots rarely last long. My whole point was that drug testing is frequent, unpredictable and nearly irrefutable. Dishonorable discharges or a dismissal of a commission is a permanent scar on one's life, and it's a huge risk to take. Your assertion that people in the DoD take drugs to comply with the unreasonable demands of the same Dark Overlords that take all our bandwidth in video chat is, again, a needless emotional appeal.

Re: Cyber Warfare

Again, emotional appeal. You say much about the evil, nefarious schemes of massively powerful corporations or individuals...great fun, I must admit, but ignorance is a better explanation. In government, things rarely start from a point of malice. They generally start because of fear and ignorance. In this case, Cyber attack entered vogue a number of years ago as an emerging threat against systems in the gov't. Remember, old warfighters (generals and admirals) aren't as tech-savvy as us, and so will naturally relate the concept to warfighting methods they *do* understand, and the result is that they think of cyber warfare as similar to network warfare.

Network warfare, for those unaware, is the idea that complex enemies fight in systems, which can be abstracted into nodes which affect the status of a system. In network warfare, the idea is to destroy or neutralize the points in an abstract network that will best disable the enemy's ability to fight. Taking out a bridge on a major highway (thus interrupting an enemy's transportation system) or destroying an early warning RADAR (thus blinding the enemy's intelligence network) is a perfect example of this.

The problem with this approach from cyber warfare's standpoint is that it leads people to think of cyberspace as a traditional battlespace, and to draw metaphors appropriately. This, combined with the deep arcana of modern information systems leads to, well, what we have now.

Re: Sony protected CD

Cute.

Re: intelligence community

You sound genuinely embittered here. On the one hand, it's not surprising considering how secretive such a business is. On the other hand, it's kinda sad. Intelligence is, by its very nature, educated guesswork. Many times they get it right. Sometimes, they fail spectacularly. That is to be expected. And this is something you probably realize, but choose to ignore; when has logic and rationality stopped a good strong hate? After all, the truthiness behind Big Evil DoD is the intellectually easier route to take. The idea that it is simply a massive, unwieldy organization whose nature and mission make weirdness like this inevitable isn't very sexy, after all. Better to go with aliens and oppression.

I would also recommend running a post through a spell checker before you post.