George alerted me to this over-the-top, off-the-grid, most secure home ever. Here's an excerpt from the website for the Ultimate Secure Home:"Strategically located in the awesome San Juan mountains of Southwest Colorado, this patented steel-reinforced concrete earth home was built to withstand almost any natural or man-made disaster you can name. It is more secure, safe, and functional than any conventional house could ever be, yet still has a level of comfort that one might not expect to find in an underground home."
It is completely off the grid, relying on solar power for all the electrical needs. It has a safe room (i.e., "bomb shelter"), and is hardended against almost anything.In an apocalyptic mood? Get it now for just $495,000.
The Department of Homeland Security homepage leads with a story about 1,700 new Border Agents being deployed along the southwest border with Mexico.
This photo accompanies the story, and it made me wonder: Couldn't they cover more of the border by spreading out a bit?
Bruce Schneier, the author of several books on cryptography, the founder of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., and the creator of the Solitaire encryption algorithm presented in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, has launched his own web log!Bruce has been publishing a newsletter known as Crypto-Gram (which will still be available as a monthly e-mail newsletter) whose contents will now be available as he creates it on his new web log, Schneier on Security.George and I read Cryptonomicon, and became interested in cryptographic methods (we actually carried around a deck of cards each for encoding/decoding messages for a while). I even presented a contest on this site where the readers had to decrypt a message using Solitaire to win a copy of Cryptonomicon, but it turns out I botched the encryption...Check out Schneier on Security.
