I'm home fighting a nasty head cold, so between lack of sleep and drugs, I might not be coming across very nicely myself. I'll have to see how I feel in the morning before deciding if I'll take another day off. I have to teach a programming class tomorrow night. If I feel then the way I feel now, well, it's going to be a short night.

I rag a lot on the movie "Enemy of the State" because of the huge inaccuracies in it. While the movie itself is fairly entertaining, it portrays a wildly exaggerated view of our intelligence capabilities. With that view in mind, it's easy to see how some people think black helicopters are lurking behind every bush and that we should've been able to tract those 19 hijackers anywhere on Earth (out of a population of over 6 billion people). Things always look obvious in hindsight but one of the problems with current intelligence capabilities is data overload. The sheer volume of intel data coming in defies analysis unless you know what you're looking for, so there's little chance they'd add to the overload by spying on us when there are so many of "them" to keep an eye on.