Hold the Car!

Looks like a news shutdown on the Italian-Secret-Service-Commie-journalist-ransomer killing. So here are a few data points to fill the void.

1. Looks like a classic cock-up. Secret Service folks the world over hate giving telling anyone anything – it makes them feel sooo important to have Secrets. An Italian with his mandatory Bella Figura would be even worse. Think about it – all he had to do was to tell the Coalition Force Protection authorities what he was doing, when he was doing it, and to look out for his car on the road to the airport. Then everybody would have been fine. But it would not have been cool. Hence a classic Identification friendly fire incident.

2. The Italian driver says he was driving at 25 MPH, whereas a US official said he was driving at over 100 MPH. Anyone who has ever driven it Italy will credit the US version. Plus, the car is a modern Nissan & will have engine management software with memory – so a quick diagnostic will prove who is right. One source said that there was plan to ship the car to Italy. Bad Idea. Get a technician over from Japan ASAP!

3. The only useful witness statements are a) the soldiers on the roadblock and b) the driver. Forget the reporter, the kindest thing one can say is that she’s in shock. Less charitably, she’s on the side of the head hackers.

4. It looks to me that 5.56mm M-16 rounds were fired at the vehicle. In automatic mode the M-16 fires 3 rounds per trigger pull, and if the vehicle was moving very fast, the US soldiers would only have time for a couple of bursts. Anything with a bigger caliber would produce a Marvin-in-Pulp-Fiction effect, which would have visibly messed up the car and its passengers.

Gardening

Gardening is tweaking working code to make it spiffier than called for by the spec – it never terminates & is why software is always late.

Back in WW2, week-for-a-week slippage of the V2 rocket development was stopped by a nasty SS manager who sat outside the drawing office & shot anyone trying to make a change. Not that I applaud the V2 – it left a few gaps in the neighborhood where I grew up. Still, it did divert Nazi resources from useful things like computerized gyro gunsights.

Anyway, I have just spent 4 hours gardening around an IE limitation (hysterical laughter off). And nobody will notice it because who uses IE?! And I could have done a proper post on the Commie Journalist.

Better get that Luger out…