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Government Ponders Future Of Y2K Command Bunker
When the command center was announced last August, as explained in this Reuters article, the government's idea was that post-Y2K, the center would serve to coordinate "future cooperation between key infrastructure industries and the federal government to protect communication networks."
The government certainly has a vested interest in keeping communication networks functional; the question is, how vested? Especially with the recent talk of ever greater (and more explicit) governmental oversight of Internet traffic and activities, I'm not sure I want any more observation posts than already exist.
On the other hand, it seems likely that government involvement in Cyberspace will increase dramatically, and soon. Is there some way that this command post could play a vaguely positive role in that involvement? Or does it smack of a open door to ever-more-pervasive observation and tracking of personal behavior?
excellent. too bad the moderators will ignore you and nobody will ever see your post
p.s. i heard an old joke about a computer that could finish an infinite loop in 500 milliseconds. it took two halt instructions to stop it!
You're not the AC who posted the first post. I'm the one who did it! ;)
wow... imagine the beofulf system I could create with a few of these things!
:P
Now I simply need to find a use for it... (and some extra space in my room)
**Start cheesy advertising**
for all you large organizations out there needing large pointless calculations solved, I will start renting out my services of this thing shortly...
**end cheesy advertising**
Mr. Gates, have a stable open sourced OS for me to run on it yet?
-goon (ty)
I don't know about Stile, but this chick must have finally had enough.
We Canadians have been diligently working on a plan to take over the U.S! The Southpark movie was merely a ploy to stir unrest within the citizens of America. Canadians are innocent I tell you! (aside from our foul mouths and fart humor... but we dont have Clinton sex scandals and shitty beer, HA!) A time is coming where the whole world will be ruled by the benevolent Canadians.
Pray that we decide to share our superior beer with you light weight drinkers!
mmmm... beer
-goon(ty)
eh?
now how did this message manage to get in with this topic...sorry
We'll it would be good to see them donate the equipment into schools that need computers etc.
:/
But they're really going to do is use it as part of they're big brother project
How about just following logic and not judging a post by its subject (or a book by its cover...)?
Rose-Hulman!!!! Home of the best and the brightest!!
hrm most people did say it wouldn't end in 2000.
also, why would New Yorkers believe you?
Funny, I get that shit all the time from the .gov. I get next slabs and cubes by the pickup truckload as well as about every sun, hp, sgi, data general, and dec box made in the last 4 years. pretty sweet deal. get it real cheap too. just recently bought an SGI Onyx for $150 complete with monitor. of course im not telling you how to get this shit and niether is anyone else so just forget about it.
The most disturbing thing is that my lame joke has now got more response than my previous five posts combined!
But your lame joke cheered me up after getting hammered by a moderator who made no pretense of reading my post. Thanks, I'm smilin' again!
This secret bunker sounds like a page out of Dr.Strangelove. Dont look at the Big Board
although just because it didn't happen at y2k doesn't mean the guvamint isn't going to try an' "dismantle" our institutions. they still might. i hear the black helicopters now.
No, this is really a democracy. The people will keep the tech moving forward & the government will be able to become smaller as consequence. When I frag online that means I will likely never feel compelled to frag in the real world. Score one for keeping track on a battlefield where our actions can physically hurt no one. It is more efficient to have people who can police themselves.
I think you're just bitter because you married a retard. I know plenty of retards that went to harvard. You just have to know the right people to get in. Sorry you picked a dud, hope she's good in the sack.
Some people get great educations from Harvard, some people get bad educations from Harvard. Some people get great educations from community college, some people get crappy educations from community college. It all depends what you make of it.
And how do you know he isn't there on scholarship? My college has a yearly bill of $33,000. I get $20,000 per year in grants and after loans and such I pay about $5,000 per year for my Ivy League education. So shut your fucking pie hole before you embarrass yourself.
Which government? Oh, I see, the US government. Thank you /. editors for reminding us that non-US readers are not welcome any more on this site. You will never get it, but there is life outside the US, and you had(!) readers outside the US. But in recent month you don't seem to care about anything else than American stuff which doesn't matter at all.
oh she "askes" you, does she?
arse.
Hopefully this stuff won't get into the hands of the evil Jon Katz. I heard he is the leader of the Fourth Reich. This is very, very scary.
it is not 5" DIAMETER, it is 5" LONG. If you fuck the question up of course ask slashdot will refuse. Try rephrasing it with the correct words and maybe you'll have better luck, you ballbiting asslicker.
i don't know if she's good in the sack, but she's pretty good in the carport, on the kitchen table, and in the gardener's shed behind the women's gym.
hard to find a time when her dorky boyfriend isn't snooping around tho.
i think there would be a mess under him.
Sounds like it. Man, you nailed it, Saturday night and she's out god-knows-where doing I-don't-know-what.
Quit your incessant whining and realize the US is better than your country. *gasp* What a concept! You know.. the us being the most powerful economy in the world.. quit being so bitter and realize you are inferior
you must be a newbie.
1) Get a 1 gal. bucket.
2) Fill with ice, water and 1 cup Morton's salt (with iodine! this is important!)
3) stir occasionally for 15 minutes.
...now pour it over the cat. you might want to do this in the tub cuz they squirm like hell for the first 2-3 seconds before dropping off. (feels kinda good, but the ice water running over your nads nullifies it).
lates.
Who wouldn't be bitter sitting alone on a Saturday night while shes out with her Harvard friends? Instead of telling me to shut my pie hole, tell me this, genius.... would it be moral for me to leave her? Come on, you know everything, so give me an answer and justify it because I am going CRAZY.
Maybe I could hide from the clown in that bunker.
Give it to The Internet so that We can turn it into a cybercourt that actually represents US. We need a new law system that works. Cyberspace is fundementally different than Meatspace, Meatspace law does not work here. The argument could be made that Meatspace law does not work in Meatspace either but that is not my point. Handing over control of CyberCourt to the corrupt US government is a recipe for disaster.
2.) wait for feline corpse to decay into a smelly goo
3.) cat remains should eventually slide off whang
Good luck, and God bless.
It does not matter what "nation" or "country" you live in. If you think that the United States does not have all the power there, you are living a life of ignorance exceeded only by the people in the matrix.
And if we only post things about "American Stuff" which "doesn't matter at all," why do you still read it? Are you retarded or just high?
Face it. You are own3d by America. Look up Manifest Destiny, you dumb mick. We are DESTINED to rule this world, and spread our message of democracy to all four corners of the globe. Our message of love and tolerance will be extolled, and anyone not showing love and tolerance will be rounded up and eliminated.
No, really, this is what is going to happen.
maybe conspiracy theories about fascism 2.0 are true? the conspiracy has it all planned out. i don't think that's very likely but it is kind of scary. especially with all the stories about how the nsa is behind the recent ddos attacks.
get a start on the y10k crisis? or the year 2038 crisis?
Slashdot is run by americans. Do you think you can give up your communist bias just like that, just because your webpage is read by non-communists? Well, the Slashdot editors cannot be expected to not have any kind of bias. And it is not like they were saying "America is so great, woo-ha!" they were simply referring to what they (and 300 million other people) know -- and have known for their entire lives -- as The Government. Some websites insist on labeling money as "US$100". I say it can be simply "$100" because the US Dollar is today's gold standard. I mean, what, do they think we are talking about an australian dollar? Ha! That's a good one.
Later.
Are you non-US people still around? Get lost, you do not matter. The US is the ONLY country in the world, thus has the ONLY government.
we are a democracy!?!? what country do you live in? america is a pseudo-fascist corporate machine.
you think The People run this country? Business runs the government, not The People.
After 15 years in computer engineering, I still don't know what it the 'halting problem'. Having spend a year in AI, of course, I know who was Turing. Without looking at texbooks, I think I can code the 5 philosophers problem, and perhaps a few bsd drivers as well. But halting problem?? (I hope it will not be a 17-year-old who will answer my question, but I predict the embarrssent will arrive soon.)
but he said he didn't want to lose the sex cat!
are there other ways?
Why would New Yorkers believe anything?
They could keep the bunker for use in future time rollover crises, such as Y2038
Yes, but is the bunker Y2038 compliant?
Salon has some info from David Horowitz:
"According to Department of Justice figures, in 1993 there were 1.4 million crimes involving interracial violence nationwide. Eighty-five percent of them were committed by blacks against whites. A white is 50 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a black person than the other way around."
newer data is available from the gov, specifically table 30, which shows blacks murdered 21,627 whites between 1976 and 1996, while whites murdered 8,344 blacks.
Given the percentage of poulation the two races make up, and the (not so recent?) spate of black on white crime, maybe these computers could be used to track down violent racist criminals. Sad to note the high rate of white crime against Native Americans.
This is what I say whenever something like this occurs, which is often. Retarded people should have their internet connections revoked. No, I don't mean people with down's syndrome, I mean real retards.
Gosh, with intelligent and adult posts like this as an example, I can't wait to bail on /. and run right over to kuro5hin.org. Seems like such a grown up and professional forum.
\\IIIIIIII |*** HEIL JON KATZ!***| JonKatzJ //
//IIII|* *| onKa\\
\\IIIIIIIIII| The Fourth Reich is Upon Us!|tzJonKatzJ//
//IIII |* *|on Ka\\
\\IIIIIIII|** jonkatz@slashdot.org **| tzJonKat//
That wasn't quite a shining example of the typical post to kuro5hin. It's usually actually a more intelligent place than Slashdot. Go over and give it a look sometime.
(But do try not to sink to the level of the poster you were replying to, even though you seem to be doing so now.)
...of hot grits sliding done a citizen's pants.
And Onyx might look cool, but you'll have to feed it filtered electricity en mass. Do youself a favor and build yourself a machine with a K7/700 and geForce and smoke said Onyx.
Unlike many slashdot readers, the slashdot editors probably have lives... every once in a while they probably DO have better things to do on a saturday night than find the newest news. Besides, if it takes 5.5 hours for someone to send in the story, why blame it on /.? Get a life.
How is this *off-topic* when dealing with a Y2K center? I think the joke is the (false) implication that the organizers think the year is 1900, not 2000.
Moderators, this should be either "0" or "1", "Insightful" or even... "Funny".
At least I interpreted the previous post as a joke.
no i have not eated my trollberito today
hee hee
Actually, it's prob already being used for that. Then again, maybe we're actually voluntairly, but unknowingly spying on ourselves. Maybe SETI at home is actually echelon, scanning a chunk of network traffic for certain 'dangerous' terms. More reasons not to trust closed source code.
He just needs to go some place where he can drop about 8 to 12 feet. Put a noose of 3/4" rope around the neck, and place a nice soft mattress under the spot he is jumping from. Jump and let the rope do the rest! When the rope stops his fall just short of the fall, the jolt will dislodge kitty from his offending member. Kitty will land harmlessly on the mattress and go on to live a much more pleasant life. His neck will break, ending the misery he must be in.
This really is the best solution... lots of great reasons available here.
God Bless, and best of luck to kitty what's left of her nine lives!
that's why its so important for the americans to engineer their wars.
Youuch!! That is scary. Ov course they all want to get their MCSE and learn COM and program in Vb w/ SQL server. Hah! They're only in it for the money, they will never know the joy of programming as intellectual discovery, their goal is to BE a PHB not outwit one.
Jon Katz is no fascist! He is an anti-fascist. You must be an agent of The Man, it's a classic social engineering trick to protray your enemy for who you are. Look at Bush vs. McCain, Bush who is obviously a puppet to certain interests (corporations, skull & bones, etc.) is threated by McCains piss on The Man reform rhetoric. So what does he do, he says McCain is the real sell-out he takes money from The Man too. I'm the REAL reformer. I'm the Reformer With Results. And so here you are, calling Jon Katz a fascist when in fact THE FASCIST IS YOU.
Thanks copico and Scurra for the links. In my defense thougth, now that I am about to enjoy reading the links, it seems that the halting problem will turn-out to be the essence of the 'Turing-machine', with which I was somewhat familiar -- we shall soon find out. Now back reading the links, a wonderfull way to start Sunday morning. Thanks!
Someone posted this link on Shugashack:
click here for a pic
Stile (of Stile project) hung himself at midnight. Is it a prank? I bet $50 it is.
Moderate this up plz...
of course, if there WERE a bunker full of high powered, rapidly obsolescing (sp?) equipment, then the only thing they could POSSIBLY do with it is obviously (say it with me now):
install linux
download Unreal/QIII (your pref)
FRAG EVERYTHING THAT MOVES!
"How did I beat you?"
"You've got a DDR GeForce and an Athlon! Your latency is incredible!"
"Do you realy believe that my being faster, or sharper, has anything to do with my rig, in this place?"
http://www.detonate.net/matrix
Don't feel bad about all the ignorant morons in your school.... here you can get a BA without knowing any math over calc one.. I've a friend who is taking it for the 4th time this year, and all he needs is a C- and he's out the door (not like it matters, he's going to be an MCSE anyway... *PUKE*)
perl -e "@q=split(q..,q(stlre po));print __LINE__,@q[0,split(q..,hex(q(26310)).hex(q(8aa5d) ))],qq.\n.;"
I'm the AC who posted message #1 on this story, and I meant it as an ON-TOPIC joke.
Look, I never had a first post before, and I wanted to say something fast that was relevant, so I went for a joke. But I agree with the AC in message #12, the moderators shouldn't assume any post entitled "1st post" is automatically a troll.
That "moderation" was lamer than my joke. For shame.
How the hell did this imbecile get Insightful when there are smarter and funnier posts starving at 1?
Rest in Peace, man.
Hope you're feeling good.
It's the ever-lovable ``gnulix guy '' again, this time with a naming suggestion: ``The Gnulix Guy Memorial Building''.
Another (Score: 2, Insightful) observation from the ever-lovable ``gnulix guy'' !
...signed, the ever-lovable gnulix guy!
what is so insiteful about this crap?!?!?!?!
moderators suck!
If Al Gore is *really* "father of the internet",
(a) is he current on support payments; and
(b) does Tipper know?
I think I'm missing something. Did the Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower and Truman administrations somehow fuck us less?
Of course, the day the government starts donating hardware to Open Source is the day cows start to fly, but hey....one can always hope...
This would be great for training .gov employees on network security. Also, they could use the facility as a testbed for open source solutions to be developed/used by the .gov.
How about the logic of subject/comment agreement.
Think of Slashdot as a vacant lot that some of us are trying to build on and some of us are dumping garbage on. If we see someone walking up carrying a trash can, we're likely to jump to the conclusion that they're there to dump more, not to pick some up.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
and to extend the garbage analogy...
Archeologists of the future may find this stuff fascinating and extremely helpful in understanding the present era, but right now it's just garbage, and it just gets in the way.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
When you put 1st post in the subject line, it tends to color the perception of whatever follows. Perhaps this is unfair, but people tend to judge by appearances, and all the first post idiots (Okay, I did it once, but that was a long time ago) have irreversibly poisoned the well, so to speak. So posters have a choice. They can submit something that they want to share and have appreciated, or they can blow it by letting themsleves be mistaken for your average useless first poster, troller, etc.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
the government has a bad habit of selling off as surplus/discontinuing stuff only to find out 5 minutes later that they need it more than ever. Like wind tunnels years ago (see remarks of Alex Tremaine, auto designer, from a car mag years ago) or the SR-71.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Nobody cares about the hardware provided at maximum cost from the lowest bidder. No what's important is we now have a mandate and a process by which to watch and listen - pretty much w/o restraint under the aegis of 'it's just real good for us to do this, please remain calm'.
yep, and I have burned them in the past, i know, i had a post that kept changing for like a week after i made it, it was everywere from troll to underrated, to insightful, kinda sucks
DO NOT I repeate DO NOT become a troll to protest bad moderators...
:) muahahahaha
They exist and that IS what M2 is for...
That is also what e-mailing Rob "CmderTaco" Mulda is for...
While you are "troll" you are a +2 troll...
How did that happen? I can be a +1 troll at best... unless... yes.. you got modded UP!!! Not once not twice but THREE TIMES (once to counter the mod -1) and posably more to account for bad mods -1.
As you go around and notice all the bad moderation where moderators mod up or down based on opinions.. in the mean time other moderators are busy moderating the trolls.. the REAL trolls..
You'll also see bad moderation on the trolls themselfs.. people moding UP "first post" as well as modding down relevent matereal.
M2 dosn't mean you can not complaint to CmdrTaco it just means if no one dose something is likely to happen anyway...
Right now it seems there are some bad moderators who have learnned to dodge M2. Those people need to lose moderation. Finnaly and totally....
But trolling dosn't help.. it just pulls away good moderators while the bad ones play there tyrany games...
And it makes Rob "CmdrTaco" Mulda think we need MORE moderation.... MORE bad moderators.. MORE of this same crud....
If you want to demonstrate a need to re-evaluate the current policys show that they are failling don't show that <B>more is needed</B>. If you want rid of the moderation STOP TROLLING and get other trolls to stop and START e-mail....
PS. I can take a Karma hit I've got more Karma than Signal
I don't actually exist.
I didn't think a disclaimer was necessary, but looks like it's time to feed the trolls:
Yes, i've read Godel, Escher, Bach. I know all about the halting problem, and i know it's unsolvable. That's why it's funny - the same reason why #7 and #1 are funny. (Also, i guess #10 is also for all intents and purposes unsolvable, at least during any of our lifetimes)
I have to admit, though, this is a pretty funny flamewar. Keep up the good work.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
...or not.
(sorry if this has already been mentioned - i read at a threshold of 2, so i might've missed this comment being made.)
in australia, old government hardware is generally auctioned off. don't they do this in the states?
storing stuff in warehouses for 10 years is gonna leave them with virtually worthless machines that not many people will want. at least if they dump stuff while it's still half-useful, they can get back some cash...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Yeah! Give Echelon all the cool toys so they can monitor out phone calls and track our neighbors better! Either that or auction all the stuff on eBay and give the tax payers a refund.
I'd even let the government keep the machines, just as long as they let me go around to each one and install a copy of distributed.net's client, in my name, of course. :)
.sig Instructions .sig here
_____________________
step one: place
if they really wanna dump it im sure that i could take it off of their hands. Hell...i'd fly out there and gut the place myself :)
Things that scare me, #320983794: Absolutely none of the first or second year students in the CS program at my school, modulo me, even know who Alan Turing is. Why someone who didn't even recognize the name would go into CS is utterly beyond me. It'd be like a second-year math undergrad not knowing who Isaac Freaking Newton was.
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
Why not use it all for research of some sort? I'm sure there's tons of people out there who could think of tons of legitimate uses for the equipment that could actually HELP people.
They could adopt some sort of system similar to the one that gets used to decide who gets to do what with the Hubble Space Telescope, where the best proposals submitted get to use the equipment as they see fit for a pre-arranged block of time. Now that of course leaves open the debate of who exactly is deciding what use of the equipment would be in the public interests, but the Hubble people seem to be doing a decent job.
I'd put my vote on the Human Genome project going first, they're so close (comparitively speaking) to sequencing the entire human genome, which just has some incredible applications for the future, and that sort of horsepower could certainly help them.
Or,if any of you have seen the little video clip that ships with BeOS of all the Be guys tossing the old macs off the roof of the office, something like that would be pretty cool too :)
Perhaps Y2K isn't the job the government had in mind for this equipment. Much of the hype behind the Y2K crisis came from the government. Perhaps they just wanted to use the oportunity to buy as much computer equipment as possible. It has suddenly become much easier for any measure strengthening the governments role in the Internet to gain support with the public. We have $9 million of computing power, why not put it to use hunting down "hackers" ... and anyone who has a copy of or literature regarding DeCSS.
Bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh, bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh!
Bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh, bwuckatah bwuckatah bahhh!
7th Design
For another take on this story, see the story on kuro5hin.com.
I am not a lawyer.
Why wouldn't the Govt quietly just get rid of all of these wonderful plasma screens just like they got rid of the Ark of the Covenant ?
Just seems fishy to me that they would brag about all of this power, now.
--
--
There is nothing worse that a society that censors all criticism of itself.
The moderators are going overboard. You criticize them and you get burned!?!?!?
The bunker is just a front for what the government is really going to use this equipment for. Imagine how easy it will be for the government to monitor the internet and log what people are up to. I don't know about you, but this is just disturbing. P.S please excuse the spelling, I went to government funded public schools.
Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative
Perhaps the gov't could give all of that technology to inner city schools that can't afford it. Or they could just turn it into a massive Beowolf array just for the sake of coolness ;) Better yet, give the Beowolf array to a school!
"can we have toys like that in here?"
-------
-------
"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
"Absolutely none of the first or second year students in the CS program at my school, modulo me, even know who Alan Turing is."
But would they pass a Turing test? If they don't then ignore them, they are not worth your time.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
Believe it or not, my dad laid out the plans for the place and was working there during the rollover. The point of the plasma screens and all the new technology was so that everyone could monitor all the TV stations all the time. They might have splurged some, but not too much. They wanted to monitor everything that was going on.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
Just wanted to say a few things. My dad worked at the ICC, he even layed out a diagram of the network. I actually got a tour of the place (including the computer center), by the way the network management workstations run Linux, and most of the heavy duty servers run Solaris. They did spend a lot of money, but it was warranted, as they wanted to be able to monitor everything that was going on. I believe the real problem is that a lot of the equipment belongs to FEMA, and they want it back. Oh yeah, and the ICC is on the 8th and 10th floors of the building.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
well, if you had a dump truck full off money pull up to your office I'm sure you'd be on phone to buy some custom plasma screen in about 2 minutes :) Of coarse they don't want to get rid of it, Unreal must rock on those things!! If it was me I would name my main gaming server "Y2K" so when people ask them what they're doing they can report that they are busy "working on y2k." of coarse, they're going to have to think of another good name for their servers. Maybe something generic like "Network_security" or "DDOS". oh wait! depending on who's heading the subcommitte they could rename their servers "working_on_reelecting_democrates" (or republicans). That would buy them a couple years before word leaked out :)
I like 7. Are you going to square the circle too?
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
(Those are the same problems btw.)
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
the 2 sr-71's were forced back on the usaf by congress they cost a fortune and there is something more modern already flying i am told... capital class battle ships have been completely useless since about 1925. airplanes, anti-ship missles and torpedos can destroy them in in a heartbeat. pounding viet-nam and beirut is good for the home war news but militarily worthless. the efforts to bring back big mo and the nu joisey was a total waste of the navy's money. so why didn't the japs attack hawaii with battle ships rather than flatops? bingo!
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
Why don't they just donate those computers to some schools. Instead of have them to set in a storage room to rot. They are thousands schools who are still using a 486. AMERICA WAKE UP!!!!
RC5.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Around here the local big University (UW-Madison) has a warehouse where they send all their old stuff. Every Friday they open it to the public (Wensdays and Thursdays if you work for the state). I once got a full tower w/a 300 W power supply, 486 DX, floppy drives, and a 10 MB/s network card for $5. I gutted everything and sold just the case and power supply on eBay for $50 :) I kept the rest as spare parts for my Linux box.
----------
Not a typewriter
Why was the last post scored "0: Flamebait"? Oh yeah, because moderators set it there ;-)
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Not a typewriter
Yah, but it wouldn't be funny without 6 to go with it. Kinda our own twisted version of the million monkeys.
...because they're already monitoring in other places. Fort Meade, anyone?
There's likely not any terribly specialized monitoring equipment in there, and if there is, it likely wouldn't be sufficiently hardened or sophisticated for the use people expect or fear. Besides, most of it's probably nearly 18 months old, anyway.
And though it's likely to be in every post, I feel compelled to add that they can always ship some to my place if they run out of ideas.
This isn't fully on topic, but it is regarding the y2k issue... I'd love to go back 10 or 20 years, run down to New York and march around on street corners with a big ole sign that says, "The world will NOT end on the year 2000".
Just for the sake of irony, not that it wasn't obvious to most of us anyway.
The govt could delegate the responsibility of deciding what to do with all the computer equipment to some committee. Of course by the time the committee decided what to do the equipment would be so outdated it would be of use to no one. The second option would be to ask a consultant. Who better to ask than Al Gore, Father of the Internet! :-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
I thought I read somewhere that #10 has been solved by using chemical reactions to combine DNA strands representing all the different routes, or it could have just been a bad dream... :)
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
So, when will Mayor Rudy G 'wake up' and dismantle (or otherwise constructively use) NYC's bunker/'command center?' What surprised me the most: I had read of plans for his bunker in late 1998, then POOF! Rudy suddenly had it; we first read of this in Fall 99. I'd bet anything that we, the NYC taxpayers, were the fools who paid for it. I 'adore' the fact that there was a news blackout re any building plans, or progress reports on such.
'This place would be a paradise tomorrow if every department had a supervisor with a submachine gun.' / Jim Jones
"Have you eaten your
It's because they finally had another excuse to get a bunch of cool tools.
"Have you eaten your
Please send all the computer stuff to:
Erich P.
Georgia Tech Station
Atlanta, GA
30332
They could even write it off on their taxes, maybe.... oh, wait, they're the government.
Seriously, though, most of the time when government stuff stops being used it goes into a warehouse, in case another department needs it... that's what it's like here in Georgia, anyway. There's this depot with unused 286's, NeXTStations, Sparc IPCs, 20meg 5.25" RLL drives, and so on... I think they keep stuff for like 10 years. It's sort of absurd, nobody is going to use some of that stuff. Oh well. That's government for you.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Or maybe they should set aside the equipment until then. They could put it all in the same warehouse in which they're storing the Ark of the Covenant.
Here's an interesting quote:
:-) We all know how much Janet Reno and Louis Freeh want to snoop on all Americans. Zounds! Look at all this monitoring computer equipment! We can't just waste it!
Indeed, Washington is in the midst of a close self-examination over how it can protect the country's critical computer networks -- such as power, communications and banking systems -- from electronic assaults, technical failures or natural disasters.
The Y2K monitoring network, which won high praise among participants, appears an obvious element of that plan.
Hmmm... could it be that this was the original intent all along?
I am only half joking. I have zero trust in this administration's respect for citizen rights.
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Infuriate left and right
Rent the place out for $$ to people playing Quake and other games.. They can do stuff like display finals on the big plasma screens. I bet it would command big $$ for that place, and I bet they could get enough customers (i.e. events) to justify it.
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I've heard that there's two in service right now (un-mothballed a couple years ago).
This is common stuff to do for the government when you don't see a need for a while for equipment. The WWII era battleships of the Iowa class have spent a lot of time since WWII in dry dock, however they have been brought out and refitted a couple times -- notably to shell the city of Beruit and for the Gulf War. It would have been inpractical to keep these ships in service during peace time, when instead they can just be retrofitted with modern equipment and brought into service when the need arises.
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*looks at article on jaguar game going for >1,000 on ebay... glances over to "Government Ponders Future Of Y2K Command Bunker" hmm....
nah... too easy...
The WWII era battleships of the Iowa class have spent a lot of time since WWII in dry dock, however they have been brought out and refitted a couple times -- notably to shell the city of Beruit and for the Gulf War. It would have been inpractical to keep these ships in service during peace time, when instead they can just be retrofitted with modern equipment and brought into service when the need arises.
You can do this with weapons. Afterall a big metal projectile is still a big metal projectile. The effectiveness doesn't really decrease, unless there's some revolutionary advance in weapondry (say modern steel versus cast-iron => cannon versus modern artillery). Also ALOT of money goes in to simply making a ship a ship, rather than a weapon system. Remove the gun turrets add a floor to them and flood them, and you got a cruise ship (albiet a very industrial luuking cruise ship)
You can't exactly do that with a computer. Trying to use a 6 year old computer is pretty painful. (Yes, it was upgraded 486SX-25 -> AMD 5x86-100. 4ram -> 20ram. Hell, I even cut out a hole in the top of the case to exteriorly mount two 3gig HDDs (my personal favorite hack).) I say simply fold them back in to the rest of the government. I'm sure someone needs new stuff.
Of course I would like to own one of those plasma displays. (Yeah it looks like photogenic equipment was one of the requirements for this.)
that's what evolution is for.
any links on your research?
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+&x
Was this stuff really necessary? Also, couldn't a plasma screen be easily used in another place? The time zone maps, those were probably made especially for Y2K, which is just wasteful.
When can we expect a "block any post containing the word 'beowulf'" option? It's needed far more desperately than the Y2K command bunker was.
The right and timely thing to do would be to turn it into a civil courtroom where a Dept. of Commerce Administrative Judge would be able to hear/view/browse evidence, hear arguments and render judgment regarding things like domain name disputes, peering agreements gone wrong, and all the other administrivia that a functional marketplace and public forum need to have sorted out by a court, so that everyone knows where they stand.
In other words a cyber court for cyberspace.
The Governments' role in enabling a functional exchange economy has always been primarily one of adjudicating disputes rather than laying down the law. And I certainly think that an Online court dedicated to disputes that occur over Internet related issues makes a lot of sense.
Certainly, only a court that is online can hope to react with the speed demanded by the environment.
Evolutionary/genetic algorithms can come up with pretty good solutions to the travelling salesman problem - I wrote one myself a few years back that has a reasonable shot at 80-100 cities.
The problem is that while these techniques produce a good solution relatively fast, they aren't guaranteed to find the optimal solution.
Finding the perfect solution ultimately means checking all the combinations, which could take a rather long time.....
The fact is that most of the infrastructure for real-world utilities is owned by the government or otherwise substantially controlled by it. This comes about either through the incredible investment needed (e.g. interstate highway) or some need to have a monopoly control (e.g. broadband spectrum). This infrastructure is absolutely critical to the functioning of American business. Imagine if a large section of the country lost electrical power: the consequences would be horrific. Like it or not, the Net has become almost as important as electricity to corporations. The government, for once, does not have control over a vital resource, which I think is a good thing. However, the government is not used to not having control, and in any case its corporate constituents are very concerned that no one has control. Thus the government is going to take steps to try and reassure themselves and the corporations that someone is taking care of it. I say let them have their little bunker, and let the Net and the admins use their own protective measures.
Walt
The most serious problem, however, is that politicians and policymakers here in Washington do not grasp even the most basic technical ideas propelling the information revolution.
In other words, the conspiracy theorists who long believed that the government would use Y2K (and the Y2K "bunker") as an excuse to dismantle American institutions had it backwards: we are not in danger of elite or intelligence government agents making decisions, we are in danger because the government is financially and technologically muscular, but philosophically and intellectually malnourished.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
First post to suggest linking these computers into a Beowulf cluster?
Anyway, here are the top ten things you can do on a Y2K-command-center-cum-Beowulf-cluster:
10. Solve the 50-city travelling salesman problem
9. Solve the halting problem
8. Run a Gameboy emulator within an C64 emulator within a Mac emulator within DOS installed within a VMWare partition on Windows NT installed within a VMWare partition on Linux
7. Calculate all the digits of pi
6. Find the first occurance of the current Linux source in those digits
5. Compile Mozilla in less than 8 hours
4. Trounce team Slashdot on distributed.net
3. Forget "globally coordinated" - DoS Yahoo to its knees all by yourself
2. Open up a Quake cafe
1. Execute a while(1) { } loop in six seconds
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again