We miss Justice Scalia

And God help the United States if Obama nominates his successor. 

Maggie Hassan on the Sunday Pundits show

Maggie Hassan, incumbent NH governor, and candidate for US Senate.  WMUR's "Closeup" show with Josh McElvane gave her 15 minutes of pretty much un interrupted air time.  This is fairly important coverage in NH, WMUR being the only real New Hampshire TV channel. 
   And, in fifteen minutes of happy talk, Maggie managed to say exactly nothing.  Pols must go to school somewhere to learn all the happy talk words that mean nothing, don't commit them to anything, but sound good.  Maggie used them all, and gave no hint as to what she might do in the future, what she wants to accomplish either as out going governor or newly elected senator. 

Where is George Orwell when we need him?

Actually Orwell has been dead since 1950, but we need him back.  In Orwell's time Communism was a virulent ideology spreading world wide and fast.  Communism was so compelling as to cause people to risk their lives spying for the Soviet Union.  The Rosenbergs were caught passing secrets of the Manhattan project to the Soviets and were executed for it. 
   Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 did more to kill off Communism as any other event during the Cold War.  The two novels spelled out the evil at the heart of communism in simple terms clear to the average reader.  Anyone who read either book could never be a true believer in Communism ever again.
   Today we are afflicted with two dangerous ideologies.  Communism, which I had thought really dead since 1989, is making a come back in the US.  The Bern is preaching communism.  He calls it "democratic socialism" but it's Communism.  And ISIS and company is preaching a horrible fanaticism that leads people to massacre  innocent bystanders, Christians, Kurds, Yazidi's, anyone not a Shia Muslim.
  We need another Orwell to point out the evil at the heart of both these dangerous and horrible ideologies.  

Who should vote in the NH Primary?

Howzabout limiting participation to real New Hampshire citizens?  Let's not allow busloads of out of staters showing up on election day to vote.  Out of state college students should not get to vote in New Hampshire, they can jolly well vote by absentee ballot in their home states. 
  And for that matter, the primary is how the parties choose who the party will support with money, publicity, and workers.  Primary voters should be party members.  If a voter cannot bring him/her self to simply declare their party affiliation when they register to vote, then they should not get to vote in party primaries.  It's not like the parties ask members to do anything, like contribute money, attend party meetings, post yard signs.  They just ask the voter to express an interest in the party, verbally.  I'm thinking that voters who cannot say "I am a Republican" or " I am a Democrat" are so turned off by American party politics that they should mot be allowed to mess up candidate selection by voting in the primary. 
   Speaking of which, NH voters should be required to register, in person, at town hall BEFORE election day.  Voters so unmotivated as to not get down to town hall and register at least a week before election day, are too lackadaisical to cast intelligent votes.  And requiring registration in advance will make it harder for out of state shills to vote, they will have to come up twice, once to register and once to vote.  To register the voter needs to show a NH driver's license, out of state licenses make him an out of stater.  And they need to show a real NH address, an apartment or a house, college dorms are temporary and don't count.  

The Bern and Hillary debate

I turned it on at 9 PM.  First question was to The Bern.  "The Federal government takes up 21% of GNP right now.  How much will it take under a Sanders administration?"  Not a bad question.  The Bern refused to answer it, instead he went off on has rant about income inequality and a rigged economy.  I went to bed.

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

We got two inches of snow this morning.  Better than nothing, but still pretty measly.  It's cold, 20 F.

Cyber Security for ordinary businesses

In this day and age, every thing your company does is on the company computers somewhere.  Email is forever.  First off, you need to identify the things that you need to keep secret from hackers and competitors.  Start with personnel records.  Those must be secret to keep competitors from pirating your best people.  Pay and salary is particularly sensitive because when that gets out, everyone in your company gets bad feelings about everyone who make more than they do.  And it points headhunters toward your less well paid people.  Production information; mechanical drawings, electrical schematics, parts lists, software source code, test procedures, recipes and formulas.  With this stuff someone can set up to make your product and compete with you.  That's legal in places like China.  At the very least they can make a good guess at your cost of production.  Sales and marketing; your customer lists and customer contact information.  If the competition gets to your customers and wins them over, you are hurting.  Email; there is bound to be damaging information in someone's email.
    To keep the hackers out, first consider keeping stuff OFF the hard drives.  Back it up to CD-ROM and keep the CD's in a locked room.  There is a lot of old stuff on hard drive that you don't use today, but could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.  If the stuff is really valuable, now is the time to establish an off site backup location.
    Set up a secure network.  This is a small number of computers, kept in locked rooms,  and NOT connected to the general company network or the public internet, or the public phone network.  By not connected we means NO wires or wireless connections to anywhere.  Don't rely on "firewalls", some of them have caught fire in the past.  Snip off the wires going to the USB sockets to prevent Flash drive virus invasion.  Remove all floppy drives to prevent invasion by merely inserting a boot floppy in the "A:" drive. Keep all your sensitive stuff on the secure network.  When you do Engineering Change Orders, pull the master drawing off the secure network, give it to the engineer, and have him return the updated version to the secure network.
   Now we come to training your personnel.  Start with email.  Make sure everyone understands that email lasts forever, and will be used against you in court, and by hackers.  Tell them to never put anything in email that they would not post on the bulletin board at the local super market.  If the matter is sensitive, handle it face to face or over the phone.  And delete old emails after 30 days.
   You want to run an anti virus scan once a week on every computer in the company.  Virii can do the damnedest things, just ask the Iranians about Stuxnet.  Commercial virus scan programs are pretty good, and they get better every week.  Keep your anti virus updated.  Even if you have a deal that permits IT to run the virus scans remotely, you still want everyone to understand how important they are.
   All your creative people want to keep their stuff on their machines, just in case.  Encourage them to encrypt it, and/or back it up to CD and keep it  in a locked drawer.  And make sure the latest version is stored on the secure network as well as on their private hard drives. 
   Consider getting rid of Windows company wide.  It can be done.  Linux works, and isn't too difficult for your people to learn.  Windows is totally, but totally, insecure.  Anything stored on a Windows computer is vulnerable to small children, let alone adult hackers.