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The US military is currently in the process of ensuring that they won't have to do this again in the next war. There's a whole alphabet soup of DoD programs to expand their communications capabilities: Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (FCW article), Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite system (Fed of Amer Scientists site), Joint Tactical Radio System (Army site) and more.

I don't know. Let's ask the U.S. Army what they think of Microsoft after the latest server hacking.

"What's good for America, is good for General Motors, and vice versa."

- GM President Charlie Wilson, 1953

Although I've always felt that "cyberwar" scenarios were rather overblown attempts at giving backroom geeks frontline roles, the military certainly takes it seriously; one well-received military paper a few years ago warned that America's IT defenses were on a par with the ability of Task Force Smith (whose ignominious retreat from Korean forces showed how woefully unprepared America was for the Korean conflict).

As we know, China has been touted as the first great cyberwar enemy; allegedly, China does have a "hacker brigade" tasked with disrupting American networks and computer systems in times of war, to rectify the strategic imbalance between the two nations. Now, Microsoft plans to open to a strategic rival of the U.S. the internal code that will power the Navy's upcoming CVN-77 aircraft carrier, plus other "smart ships."

This raises an interesting question for the Administration: although, as Vann H. Van Diepen (Director of the Office of Chemical, Biological, and Missile Nonproliferation) told Congress, export controls to China are not enforced in "areas where the technology is widely available as commodity items ... such as low-level computers," the source code to a mission-critical operating system used by military C4 systems is certainly not a "commodity item," nor is it "widely available." Will the White House put national security over Microsoft's profits? Les Kinsolving, call your office!

If these companies can't provide access at reasonable rates (note that the libraries ARE offering to pay for the companies' work), isn't there a case for the government to (threaten to) provide a similar free service, for the public good? That would incidentally put the companies out of business, but that's too bad. They're basing their services on documents that the state provides.

Of course, the government would never do this in a country where commercial publishers can shut down government sites just by asking nicely.

Arizona (USA) made this claim almost three years ago.

Texas does NOT require fingerprinting for a either a Driver's License or a State-Issued ID card for those who do not drive.

I could show ya a million links to the contrary (like here) but it also helps that I've been involved with an organization, based in Texas, which is devoted to changing Texas law and prohibiting driver's license fingerprinting.

Kroger usually uses its home base of Ohio as it's testing market for new things.

.... when they haven't even been able to secure their existing physical infrastructure? I mean, our military can't account for 25% of their expenditures (some $2.3 trillion). And even in a single case of domestic terrorism such as the Oklahoma City bombing, where the FBI lost 3000+ documents pertaining to the McVeigh case due to antiquated technology.

No, what I think we need are leaner bureaucracies that make better use of their existing resources. Improve what we got, then build upon it........ as the whole Linux-vs-Microsoft row has proven, you can't add just security to a shitty foundation -- you have to do it from the ground up. I'm of the mind that the same holds true for efficiency, where bureaucracies are concerned.

More specifically, if you're into RSS (and if you're a geek, you are) - check out the Homeland Security Feed.

He does have an aircraft carrier!

Huh, let's see. Could it be NASA !

The better question is...who uses Oracle? MySQL out performs Oracle. PL/SQL should be renamed to POS/SQL. Oracle is the worst database system money can buy.

Even MS SQL Server is better than Oracle. It sounds like your dad was a pretty smart man. To bad it doesn't run in the family.

I know it's a Troll but I had to respond anyway.

Remember way back some two years ago when Sun CEO Scott McNealy said "You have no privacy, get over it." To think, how far we've all come since then.

Hello I am Bill Gate's lapdog and I look like a goof

Long before September 11 and last year's virus-like attacks over the Internet, the United States government announced plans to train an elite corps of computer security experts [...]
Oh come on, do you really beleive that?

..they would set up this service in Virginia Beach, VA , seeing that the local government approved the use of facial recognition software at the oceanfront, making it the second city in the whole US to use it...

Databases are for storing data. End of Story.
Oracle is taking some BIGTIME performance hits for stacking all that OO crap in there, and MS SQL Server is seeing the same thing now that they've got the XML in theirs. Don't believe me?
Why is NASA switching to MySQL from Oracle and noticing speed increases?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of XML.. as a data interchange format.. but when i want tight storage and quick retrieval, give me a normalized RDBMS any day of the week. Because that's what it's for.

Aparently, one of the amendments on the US$40 billion emergency funding bill slipped in by Rep. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was to ease restrictions on installing and using Carnivore. Read about it in Federal Computer Week.

Takes a licking and keeps on ticking:

Timex uses that phrase for its watches, but the one computer I remember ( The Timex Sinclair) was no where near durable enough to use that phrase on it. But today that are portable pc's that can withstand a lot of abuse. Back in March an article "Rugged Requirements"was written about an Air Force testing of three rugged laptops and a gateway in a Samsonite Case. These were tested for Heat, Drops, usability and other stress testing. In the heat test the Gateway actually fared better than two of the rugged models, although it was beaten by the Itronix XC6250 Pro. And to add to their usability ratings they are now offering THE added functionality to compute in low-light environments by illuminating their keyboard according to a recent review. When the author compares the IBM Thinkpad to the Itronix XC6250 Pro, the author states " A clever idea, but it doesn't come close to Itronix' solution." Even Robert Blincoe of the register mentioned in his article comments concerning the IBM Thinkpad stating " the added glare to the LCD screen making it a little harder to read, and the keys are not lit evenly."

I can not wait to get one of these!!!

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0129/web-supe r-01-29-01.asp

Not directed at you in particular, but let me just say this:

"God, sometimes I wish analogies could be lameness-filtered."

There. Nothing personal. However, I have determined that analogies get it wrong in this forum, more often than not.

Here is the point that your analogy misses, and a very important point at that, to quote:

The relevant protection for copyrighted material becomes as the technology says, not as copyright law requires.

What Lessig is saying is that lawmakers have allowed the industry to write law... with regular books the copyright is the sole protection, but with e-books the industry is entitled to protection beyond what an ordinary "copyright 1994 Random Books, Inc, All Rights Reserved yadayadayada" provides; it is entitled to provide an electronic adjunct that becomes protected under the law in a way unprecedented in American legal history.

What Congress has done is given legislative authority away to big corps* and relegated themselves to irrelevance, i.e., the original copyright laws are no longer needed. Not only that, but they have delegated to law enforcement a basically insurmountable task: to prosecute each and every electronic transgression, no matter how small, in a way never intended by the original copyright law! The courts should/would be awash in a great and diverse array of cases, each with its own unique conundrum, if the DMCA holds. In fact, Metallica did point out the absurdity of trying to enforce such laws when they essentially sued all Napster users. The other side of that coin is that computers make such prosecution easier: a simple summons in your email in-box should suffice. Maybe someday, like the whole photo radar brand of violation of our Bill of Rights, such emails Will constitute proper law enforcement procedure.

So tell me, what has happened in the past when unenforceable and unjust laws went on the books? Is it then not our civic duty to take a stand against it, however we must sacrifice?

I understand that analogies can sometimes help, but they often warp the main thrust of the issue, and definitely have a tendency to understate the finer points. I agree with your stance and support your opinion (as all good ./ers will), but an education about the DMCA until we all understand it as well as we understand the GPL (I love explaining that to cowworkers!) necessitates a proper approach. Sorry, the lock analogy just don't get it here, and it is my contention that there is NO analogy that will fit, as there are no analogies in many of these issues that we discuss because of the high-tech and highly complex nature of these issues.

*- ya know, it doesn't Have to be read as "big bad powerful corps with senators in their pockets", but tell me, who else but them will be able to sic the FBI hounds on guys like Skly? The DMCA is for corps only, not for regular folks, but you knew that already, don't you?

As far as I can figure, the display he's talking about is IBM's Big Bertha. It was custom-built for Laurence Livermore national lab, and it runs at a native resolution of 3840x2400.

I saw a prototype of this display at Supercomputing 2000 in Dallas last year. It was running off of an IBM-brand Wintel system-- can't recall which one, an Intellistation, I guess-- with four 1920x1200 graphics cards. The monitor was stitching the four images together seamlessly.

According to rumor they hooked it up to their bigger iron from time to time, but when I saw it, it was running NT.

So I don't know *where* the author got his "it takes 16 CPUs and costs $200,000" stuff. Hell, LLNL only paid $80,000 for the prototype-- see this Federal Computing Week article. According to the IBM guy I talked to at SC2000-- although I can't seem to find a confirmation of this in writing anywhere-- when the monitor is commercialized sometime this year, they're expecting to sell it initially for about $20,000. One too many zeros, Doug. ;-)

And the obligatory remark: yeah, it's an incredible display. Like reading a newspaper-- effectively about 200 ppi. But for any traditional computer application, it's not really practical. Once you get past the "wow" factor, this thing really lives up to its nickname: the IBM Squintron 2000.

the article

Summary from ACM TECHNews:

The federal government is starting to harness the power of peer-to-peer computing. FedStats.gov and FedStats.net are excellent examples of the resources that P2P technology opens up. Users logging onto the FedStats.gov site can search a database of published government data in XML format from over 70 federal agencies on such topics as demographics, foreign trade, agricultural trends, and health care information. The new FedStats.net initiative allows federal employees to mark documents on their connected computers for file sharing. Eventually, officials at the FedStats Interagency Task Force expect to gather enough data and develop the technology to allow government workers to compile personalized data sets and searches that can be re-accessed on the network. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been working on P2P for the battlefield longer than the popularization of Napster and instant messaging, says Small Unit Operations manager Paul Kolodzy. The agency is developing a P2P wireless network that would transmit both voice and data, enabling soldiers in combat to access updated geographical and organizational information instantly. Additionally, the P2P model would have the benefit of having a lower vulnerability to eavesdropping because the wireless devices would only have to power a signal to reach the nearest user whereas traditional radio signals must be strong enough to reach the edge of the network.

On Nov. 6, a team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center finished the transition of the NASA Acquisition Internet Service to mySQL with barely a hitch, said Dwight Clark, computer systems analyst and project leader for NAIS. ... "We noticed an increase in [speed of] performance" since the change and have not experienced any problems with the product, Clark said. "We kept waiting for the other shoe to fall from the time we started investigating mySQL, but it never did." ... The President's IT Advisory Committee recommended in September that the federal government encourage open-source software as an alternative for software development for high-end computing and allow open-source development efforts to compete on a "level playing field" with proprietary solutions in government procurements.

Not being James Bond or a gun-toting Gary Busey type means jack. I have a friend who works for the USDA (Agriculture) and he has a department issued service piece. He works behind a desk analyzing data on welfare cheats. The gun sits in a lockbox in his bedroom closet.

If there's one thing that us geeks should be able to understand, it's that today INFORMATION is the name of the game. If the NSA is so innocent, why won't they discuss Echelon with Congress? Monitoring private citizens is not in the best interests of National Security.

Has anyone ever heard of a major user or someone in a business setting abandoning Windows mainly over security/virus fears?

Yes. The US Army. In a FCW article (that was referenced by a slashdot article), they talk about how the US Army picked Solaris with Lotus Notes for secure communications over WinNT and Exchange due to security concerns with the OS.

The contract was for the Army Battle Command System (ABCS) which apparently deals with secure communications in the battlefield. I'm sure it was a hefty contract. But there's more to it.

An interesting sidenote to all this (and the REAL meat of the article) is that Microsoft is scrambling to make a Unix Exchange client to support the Defense Department's secure Defense Message System (DMS) program. The fear is that if the US Army starts to go this direction with messaging on Unix, they're just as likely to scrap Exchange servers back at home to make everything cross compatible.