"One [airman] never takes his eyes off the monitor, calling out possible threats to his partners, who immediately pass alerts to the field via computer chat rooms and snap screenshots of the most valuable images.
"'It's mostly through the chat rooms--that's how we're fighting these days,' said Col. Daniel R. Johnson, who runs the intelligence centers" ("Military Is Awash in Data from Drones")
From: DroneStud82:
Dudes! U are totally close to Taliban!
From: DesertPUNK998:
No way!
DroneStud82: Way!
DesertPUNK998: OMG!
DroneStud82: OMG, Dudes! IED ahed!
DesertPUNK998: IED! WTF!
DroneStud82: LMFAO! :-)
Etc., etc.
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In other news, Richard Heene, the father of "Balloon Boy," turned himself in today to begin serving a 30-day jail sentence. You will recall (much as you might wish to forget) that Heene and his wife, Mayumi, falsely reported that their 6-year-old son had floated off in a balloon that Heene had cobbled together in the family's backyard. After panicked rescuers found the empty balloon, we learned that it was all a publicity stunt: The Heenes were hoping to get people interested in a reality television show about this wacky family of misfits.
30 days? Give him the chair!
No, but, semi-seriously, let's think about this. In an earlier post (which we can't locate at the moment), we rambled on about the purposes of incarceration. One can assume that jailing an individual serves one or more of the following purposes: punishment, rehabilitation, and/or public safety.
Now, we can assume that public safety was not the primary motivation for jailing Richard Heene: Considering the potential danger caused by his jailing--namely that an important news story will slip between the cracks while this non-event continues to take up space in the public consciousness--one could argue that public safety would be better served by letting him go.
Similarly, we think it unlikely that Heene is in serious need of rehabilitation. We assume he is sufficiently chastened by this experience to refrain from ever again claiming that his son is trapped in a runaway balloon. Indeed, it's a well-known fact that the national recidivism rate for phony-balloon-crisismongering is under 1.2%.
So, we are left to conclude that the sole purpose of jailing Heene is punishment: Presumably, he will serve as an example to any other would-be hoaxers--especially if we get really lucky and he gets raped, beaten, and/or killed in jail!
All right, we assume he's in a minimum security prison, and he'll probably be fine. But at what cost? Look, according to ask.com, a "rule-of-thumb" estimate is that it costs about $25,000 a year to keep someone in jail. This means that, in addition to wasting people's time and money by perpetrating the hoax in the first place, Heene will now cost Colorado taxpayers approximately $2,000-$2,200 more.
Wouldn't a simple $5,000 fine better serve everybody's purposes? (We'll take a 10% commission for this suggestion.)
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