The PP mentioned "GPO" in his/her post. If it's the conventional TLA, it means "[US] Government Printing Office."
If so, it would definitely explain a lot. I did miss that little TLA. Those guys can throw the book at you, if necessary. Smaller private businesses can't. Large and super-large private businesses can. This is determined primarily by things like this:
How replaceable a specific person is?
What are the relevant laws in your state?
How many lawyers you have on permanent staff, ready and willing to pursue a case?
How much money are you willing to spend on a case, and what will you gain?
Larger companies - and the government as an ultimate extension of that - are better positioned to go after little people. Smaller businesses don't have cash to burn, and they value individual employees far more because they have fewer of them, and often businesses depend on several key employees. Also, smaller businesses don't have legal departments, and the probability of losing the case may be uncomfortably high.
But in any case, even as you acknowledge a possibility of getting fired, you do not believe your employer may have you whipped, or fined, or otherwise punished. I think only military can do that. Businesses, and the government, can only refuse you a promotion, or salary increase. But in many cases bad workers are very comfortable doing nothing for their current salary, and they don't want any extra money if that means they have to work better.
At least, that's how I see the situation - just my opinion, nothing more.
Well, you must be either working for the US government, or in a different country alltogether. I did read that when people get security clearances they part with a good deal of their rights. If that is involved, then indeed they can be in trouble. But in many places (the rest of the world?) an employee is very much untouchable, and even commonplace noncompete clauses are deemed invalid. There is no employee responsibility because there is no way to enforce compliance by social means (like, asking politely and repeatedly, in writing.) The only enforcement tool is firing an employee, but that's quite a radical tool, like a dental treatment by extraction of the tooth.
The contract that employees sign does not allow for any penalties against employees if they underperform or otherwise fail in their duties. For example, if an engineer works for a month on something and then, upon review, it is a pile of junk and has to be thrown out and redone, the engineer is not liable for any sort of loss. It's his manager's fault (and a good deal of it is indeed the manager's fault.) But things like locking doors... if a laptop is stolen from someone's office do you think it's possible to subtract the cost from the paycheck of the guy who walked out for lunch without bothering to lock the door? Not in this state. You are more likely to end up being countersued for mental anguish suffered, and besides the employee's job description did not mention being a guard.
Corporate IT managers will never beg users to do this or that. This is simply because the users can not be depended upon. Some will do as they are told; some will never do as they are told, and some will forget occasionally. This is just psychology. If an IT manager wants something done, s|he needs to enforce a policy, thus making non-compliance impossible. People who follow instructions will see no difference; people who make a mistake will get a gentle reminder; and people who like to be difficult will be denied the pleasure.
The only possible answers to that question are that you don't really trust your users at all
This is the correct answer.
in which case you're a moron for giving them any access before giving them training
A sysadmin in a company is not permitted to decide who gets access and who doesn't. HR hires people, and department manager tells you to create an account, that's all. And you don't do any "training" (whatever that means) just because there is no funding for that, and your job duties do not include training of anyone. Even if you did train someone, this would have no legal relevance, and how do you know that a 50-yr old Mary Smith, a new PCB assembly technician, fully understands that her workstation is only for reading emails and accessing Intranet, and not for installation of spyware by firing up IE and going to random sites? Do you think that a mature person will meekly accept instructions from a teenager, even if that teenager knows computers inside out?
You don't even get to see the new employee; all you get is an email saying "Create an account for John Doe, assign him to groups 'Technicians' and 'Librarians'". You have no reason to trust this guy. And even if you know someone and trust that person to not do stupid things, people are fallible and can make mistakes. When they do, you are responsible because you permitted them to fail.
I am unsure how it could possibly work. If an engineer loses 8 weeks of work, he reports to his manager that "his computer crashed and the IT was unable to recover the data." Then he proceeds to repeat his work, and takes another 8 weeks to do so. The engineer was not punished, the company was.
The 'regular user' is what i was talking about in this case
Mary: Hey, Nurb, could I ask you to help me with something? I have this project in this folder that our department worked on for last 6 months, and we can't seem to be able to open it any more... Nurb: Ok, I see that it is password protected, what is the password? Mary: What password? Nurb: This password! Mary: I know nothing about any password...
The point is that you can't do anything to any [l]user, short of having him/her/hir fired. And that is something you don't do lightly, especially if you can be sued for wrongful dismissal. There is no proof who set the password, even assuming that a unassailable log exists that says "Mary" did that. She can always say that she didn't, and anyone could have done that when she was not at her desk. You'd need to catch her on a video camera, entering the password, to have any legal basis for an accusation.
Now if you thrust in towards the mass your orbiting, well im actually not quite sure what would happen but intuitively i dont think you would lower your orbit.
This will lower your orbit and increase your orbital speed at the same time. The trick here is that you have a lot of kinetic energy that you obtained through the launch, and that energy is not going anywhere, as far as your pushes are concerned. Human power (a few hundred Watts) is not enough to affect any change during the astronaut's lifetime.
And if you follow through the links, you will find precomputed numbers for this very case:
The International Space Station has an orbital period of 91.74 minutes, hence the semi-major axis is 6738 km [1].
The energy is 29.6 MJ/kg [2]: the potential energy is 59.2 MJ/kg, and the kinetic energy 29.6 MJ/kg. Compare with the potential energy at the surface, which is 62.6 MJ/kg. The extra potential energy is 3.4 MJ/kg, the total extra energy is 33.0 MJ/kg.
This roughly means that if you weigh 100 kg you need to negate about 3.3 GJ to fall to the ground, and if your mechanical power is 1000W (a trained athlete, unencumbered with a spacesuit and provided with all the food and oxygen you need) you still need about 1000 hours of pushing, assuming that there is always something to push against. For example, you can carry a spring-driven pellet gun; however the weight of the pellets that you have to carry will slow your descent drastically. This does not take the atmosphere into account, but you definitely will find it there, briefly.
You are at the point where your inputs (eyes, ears etc.) are, and where your mechanical actuators (arms, legs etc.) are. It can be, probably, possible for such a cyborg to comfortably "move" his viewpoint along the surface of the Moon, while petting a cat in a house somewhere. This is not any different from looking through binoculars, for example. People associate their "being somewhere" with the place they see because that's usually a very good starting point. An FPS gamer may tell you that during the game he is "in" the map, not in his chair.
Just because the GUI layer can't handle multiple interactive users, doesn't mean the OS itself isn't multiuser.
It can, that's what the Terminal Server does. WinXP and any Win2003 Server also do it in single user mode, not because they can't support more than one but because MS wants some cash for the access. Once you pay up, the GUI attaches to a virtual desktop and runs through the RDP just fine, for any number of clients (limited by your licenses, RAM, CPU etc.)
That is, they click whatever default button happens to spring forward, regardless of whether it says "Delete this File? OK/Cancel" or "Format the Disk?" They've been trained by Microsoft to push buttons in order to accomplish tasks.
This is *so* true! Many times someone asks for my help: "This thing does not work! It gives me an error!" And then proceeds to demonstrate, clicking through the error messages so fast that I have to almost scream "Stop, for ${DEITY'S} sake, let me read them!" [L]users do not understand that these messages carry information.
The directory is writable, however, the contents are not. Interesting, no? You can create new entries, but you cannot alter/delete existing entries. Seems like a satisfactory security model to me.
Are you saying that a virus can invisibly install itself into Applications/ but an antivirus can't delete it without your explicit permission and the password? A typosquatting virus would be very interested in this option...
Most people don't think about upgrading their CARS do they
I take it that *you* don't upgrade your car, but believe me, there are plenty of people who do just that. There are all kinds of reasons to do that - mostly because enterprising people offer goodies for your car that the OEM was too lazy to think about. A simplest example - people buy trunk organizers and cargo nets because they don't want their groceries spilled on the very first turn from the store. Most people upgrade the battery when the old one dies, since every new generation of batteries is a little better than before. Many people upgrade the tires because the OEM installs the cheapest, lousiest piece of rubber they can get away with, and if you want traction on water/snow/ice you buy what is good. Our secretary upgraded her VW with Sirius radio because she likes it. And so on.
Gamers, and those who "need" MS Office (and don't realize it's available for Mac) probably cover 95% of this segment.
You are also forgetting about professional software applications, stuff that businesses depend upon daily. A handful of them exists as native executables for Mac (Adobe primarily.) What about tons of Autodesk stuff, CATIA, ProEngineer, SolidWorks, PADS, Xilinx ISE and PlanAhead, ISP Lever, Keil compilers, IAR compilers, Synplicity products, Modelsim, Electronic Workbench, Microwave Office, CST or Ansoft, SINDA/FLUINT, Ansys... hardly any of these have Mac ports, and they depend on native execution because they require tremendous CPU power to do their job.
Any one of these apps will easily cost 10x more than a box to run it on. The app defines the computer, not the other way around. And when you are forced to have 20 Wintel boxes, and have no particular reason to buy a Mac, which will you standardize on?
[The Dock is] totally intuitive to everyone but computer geeks. It is simply a place you put things that you need easy access to.
Sounds useful. However, how is it different from the desktop, or from any number of folders where you might want to keep shortcuts to apps and documents? Or how is it different from a toolbar? You know that Windows (and KDE, and probably GNOME) allow you to have any number of them? I know people who excel in this skill:-) And it only takes drag-and-drop to put something there, or to remove. And you can have as many of those as you want, and the toolbars don't take half of the screen away.
All the other analogies that you provide can be reduced to this one. And this functionality exists on all modern desktop/workstation OSes.
Given the inherent busy-ness of the college schedule, I think many students would easily choose to pay $450 more for the mac solution.
It does look like these students are busier than a CEO of a Fortune 100 company; no surprise they just throw money at every problem!
On my planet, however, majority of students have plenty of time, and very little money; most of the software they need is either free (MSN/Yahoo/Meebo/* Messenger, Picasa, Google Talk, etc.) or inexpensive. Windows XP comes with MovieMaker, FWIW, and a GarageBand app is really an {over|under}kill for practically anyone: "You've just finished editing your latest iMovie masterpiece. Now it's time to think about the musical score."
The Saturn V flew 13 times including tests and Skylab. 2 were put on display
You are apparently correct, and this Web site is in error, since it says "In all, 32 Saturns were launched". I double-checked with Wikipedia, and it confirms your count. Probably www.nasm.si.edu counted all Saturns they could find, not just Saturn V. Saturn I was flown 10 times. I do not know where they took the rest of the missions from...
Come on, if every country is to judge others on such minor details, we'd all be radioactive gas by now. How do you think Russia treats:
Aggression and embargo against Cuba?
Meddling in Nicaragua against Sandinistas?
Support of every evil dictator who declared the USA to be his Master
Meddling in Afghanistan, arranging for a coup against a liberal president
Financing in every way Afghan fighters (who ended up being bad guys, surprise!)
Helping KLA and bombing Yugoslavia after the war ended?
Murder at Ruby Ridge, mass murders at Waco?
Meddling in Georgia, Ukraine? Attempted, foiled plot in Belarus?
Killing of several Russian agents in Iraq a week ago?
Military bases in Asian -stan republics?
Expansion of NATO closer to the borders of Russia?
Invasion of Iraq where Russia has interests?
Development of new nuclear weapons?
Pulling out of strategic arms control treaties?
... and many more.
Using your own metric, "The USA is being very naughty indeed." But so what? Russia sees USA as a country with interests to defend, and though none of the above is pleasing it is a predicted behavior. So is Russia's behavior, and French, and German, and Iranian... everyone protects his interests as he knows, even North Korea (though most concede that this time NK made a mistake.)
When you start a long trip through a difficult terrain, is it wise to hit your companion in the teeth, for no reason, just when you started? Mind you, if you do that then if you break your leg one day the companion will gladly leave you in the dust, to die.
Stop making enemies, make friends instead, and you will be happier and live longer (as a person and as a country.) Nobody wants the USA blown up, except a few terrorists in caves; why do you want a far more powerful enemy? Your decision to deploy SDI already resulted in a warhead that can penetrate the US defenses; isn't it a good enough illustration of futility of the militarist approach to everything?
don't think even the ruskies stuff can rival the saturn 5
The Energiya booster is configurable to 400,000 lbs, and that exceeds the 285,000 lbs orbital lift capacity of Saturn V. This is not surprising, given that Energiya was designed decades later and was using the latest technologies.
There were only two flights of Energiya, compared to 32 of Saturn V, and it is not manufactured any more. However its technology is not only up to date, it is being actively used in other boosters. So if anyone wants to lift 175 tons to the orbit, it can be done. It only costs money. See here for available configurations.
If you really need to launch anything that heavy, it would be cheaper and smarter to pay for manufacturing of Energiya rather than for redesign and manufacturing of Saturn V, and you get more bang for the buck at the same time. Engines of that power that are time-tested and proven to be OK are invaluable.
It's an old thread now, but why not to add a few comments? Not that any of us are very familiar with the criminal world, but everyone is a top specialist in things that he does not understand:-)
Now aside from the interesting question of why would you only take that, and not the CD-ROMs with even more VA data, that were laying nearby.
Because the lowly thief had no clue who the laptop belongs to, and the idea that CDs may be far more valuable than the computer probably never visited his mind (I admit that most CDs aren't very valuable.)
why would a petty, common thief not take more stuff?
How much of easily locatable, portable and easily disposable stuff a government employee of VA department could possibly have? He is probably lucky that he got approved for a mortgage to buy his house. His salary is likely to be lower than in the private sector. Do you really expect him to have the original French Impressionists' paintings on the walls, or piles of jewelry just laying around, or travellers' checks? The thief grabbed what was visible, such as the computer and all the cash that he could find in usual places (pockets of a suit, a briefcase, a wallet.) There could have been more, but a thief likely preferred to get away within minutes. Besides, the thief probably only knew how to sell common stuff; if you just happened to have a time machine in the corner, a thief would shy away from that - he can't sell that to anyone he knows.
I'm glad the forensics guys know the laptop was not taken apart, but how hard is it to dump the external harddrive data?
Probably it's far easier to just leave the laptop alone - don't touch it, don't power it up; just connect the external HDD to another computer, mount as read-only, and copy all you want.
And why not destroy the disks after you make a copy?
You mean the external HDD? Because it's better to return it and create an impression that the data was not accessed; same applies to the laptop. A smart ID thief could clean both items, then drive to another location, like a city park, where homeless people may be present, and leave both on a bench. The items would be gone within minutes, and tracelessly sold through many hands who don't know anyone else.
If it was idiot thieves that didn't know what they had, odds are they did boot it up and mess around.
You are talking from a geek's POV - you would be curious what s/w is loaded, what data files are present, what cookies with what passwords exist in the browser store... But "an idiot thief" would be barely able to power the box up, and he would have no inclination to rummage around. The laptop would be to him just an item that can be sold.
There is another possible factor. Government-owned laptops are super-likely to be logging into the domain; they would be mighty useless otherwise. This kicks out the "friendly" XP login, and you are given the usual login dialog after the Alt-Ctrl-Del. A common thief would be totally defeated by this primitive security feature, and he would not even be able to log in. However a data thief would boot from a CD that bypasses all that; it would be the first and the last thing that he does with the laptop.
Heck they probably traced it's MAC address to find it.
MAC addresses are local to an Ethernet subnet. The thief would need to physically go to VA building to plug it in and get caught:-)
Can you prove no one copied the external harddrive?
No, not in this case. It is possible if you had the drive in your posession, captured all the SMART data that you can have, recorded all the snapshots of everything, and then walked away. When you are back a month later you can repeat the capture and compare the results and *maybe* say something definite. But in this case nobody knows anything about the original state of the hardware.
Or if they did immediately pawn it, how did both the
A LinuxCertified LC2440N laptop is sold for $1199. Either they gave you 50% discount, or you paid the most for the least.
Dell will sell you a similar notebook (an Inspiron, for example) for $600. Or you can give Dell your $1200 and happily own a Dell XPS, with dual core CPU and everything else. If you don't want Windows, you can always blow it away and install your Linux of choice, not that it costs any.
It is very hard now, impossible probably, for small notebook vendors to compete on price with the big companies. Dell just gives them away, and Compaq is right there too, with $450 price tag on Presario V2000 and V5000 series, and Lenovo trails them all at $600.
But consider that if the DRM allows you to increase the font until it becomes readable then you can just put the thing down on the scanner, press a button and go get some dinner. By the time you are back, the scanner will have OCRed the whole book, easier than with paper even!
The DRM book can be only safe from you if its font is as legible as those twisted, crooked, scratched letters that you need to recognize and enter for subscription to Web services.
Slashdot Mirror
If so, it would definitely explain a lot. I did miss that little TLA. Those guys can throw the book at you, if necessary. Smaller private businesses can't. Large and super-large private businesses can. This is determined primarily by things like this:
Larger companies - and the government as an ultimate extension of that - are better positioned to go after little people. Smaller businesses don't have cash to burn, and they value individual employees far more because they have fewer of them, and often businesses depend on several key employees. Also, smaller businesses don't have legal departments, and the probability of losing the case may be uncomfortably high.
But in any case, even as you acknowledge a possibility of getting fired, you do not believe your employer may have you whipped, or fined, or otherwise punished. I think only military can do that. Businesses, and the government, can only refuse you a promotion, or salary increase. But in many cases bad workers are very comfortable doing nothing for their current salary, and they don't want any extra money if that means they have to work better.
At least, that's how I see the situation - just my opinion, nothing more.
The contract that employees sign does not allow for any penalties against employees if they underperform or otherwise fail in their duties. For example, if an engineer works for a month on something and then, upon review, it is a pile of junk and has to be thrown out and redone, the engineer is not liable for any sort of loss. It's his manager's fault (and a good deal of it is indeed the manager's fault.) But things like locking doors... if a laptop is stolen from someone's office do you think it's possible to subtract the cost from the paycheck of the guy who walked out for lunch without bothering to lock the door? Not in this state. You are more likely to end up being countersued for mental anguish suffered, and besides the employee's job description did not mention being a guard.
If a user forgets his password you change it on the AD server. It's a 10-second procedure.
Corporate IT managers will never beg users to do this or that. This is simply because the users can not be depended upon. Some will do as they are told; some will never do as they are told, and some will forget occasionally. This is just psychology. If an IT manager wants something done, s|he needs to enforce a policy, thus making non-compliance impossible. People who follow instructions will see no difference; people who make a mistake will get a gentle reminder; and people who like to be difficult will be denied the pleasure.
This is the correct answer.
in which case you're a moron for giving them any access before giving them training
A sysadmin in a company is not permitted to decide who gets access and who doesn't. HR hires people, and department manager tells you to create an account, that's all. And you don't do any "training" (whatever that means) just because there is no funding for that, and your job duties do not include training of anyone. Even if you did train someone, this would have no legal relevance, and how do you know that a 50-yr old Mary Smith, a new PCB assembly technician, fully understands that her workstation is only for reading emails and accessing Intranet, and not for installation of spyware by firing up IE and going to random sites? Do you think that a mature person will meekly accept instructions from a teenager, even if that teenager knows computers inside out?
You don't even get to see the new employee; all you get is an email saying "Create an account for John Doe, assign him to groups 'Technicians' and 'Librarians'". You have no reason to trust this guy. And even if you know someone and trust that person to not do stupid things, people are fallible and can make mistakes. When they do, you are responsible because you permitted them to fail.
I am unsure how it could possibly work. If an engineer loses 8 weeks of work, he reports to his manager that "his computer crashed and the IT was unable to recover the data." Then he proceeds to repeat his work, and takes another 8 weeks to do so. The engineer was not punished, the company was.
Mary: Hey, Nurb, could I ask you to help me with something? I have this project in this folder that our department worked on for last 6 months, and we can't seem to be able to open it any more...
Nurb: Ok, I see that it is password protected, what is the password?
Mary: What password?
Nurb: This password!
Mary: I know nothing about any password...
The point is that you can't do anything to any [l]user, short of having him/her/hir fired. And that is something you don't do lightly, especially if you can be sued for wrongful dismissal. There is no proof who set the password, even assuming that a unassailable log exists that says "Mary" did that. She can always say that she didn't, and anyone could have done that when she was not at her desk. You'd need to catch her on a video camera, entering the password, to have any legal basis for an accusation.
This will lower your orbit and increase your orbital speed at the same time. The trick here is that you have a lot of kinetic energy that you obtained through the launch, and that energy is not going anywhere, as far as your pushes are concerned. Human power (a few hundred Watts) is not enough to affect any change during the astronaut's lifetime.
See Equation of motion.
And if you follow through the links, you will find precomputed numbers for this very case:
This roughly means that if you weigh 100 kg you need to negate about 3.3 GJ to fall to the ground, and if your mechanical power is 1000W (a trained athlete, unencumbered with a spacesuit and provided with all the food and oxygen you need) you still need about 1000 hours of pushing, assuming that there is always something to push against. For example, you can carry a spring-driven pellet gun; however the weight of the pellets that you have to carry will slow your descent drastically. This does not take the atmosphere into account, but you definitely will find it there, briefly.
You are at the point where your inputs (eyes, ears etc.) are, and where your mechanical actuators (arms, legs etc.) are. It can be, probably, possible for such a cyborg to comfortably "move" his viewpoint along the surface of the Moon, while petting a cat in a house somewhere. This is not any different from looking through binoculars, for example. People associate their "being somewhere" with the place they see because that's usually a very good starting point. An FPS gamer may tell you that during the game he is "in" the map, not in his chair.
Isn't it possible to write a virus in Perl, for example, or in any of that "dozen of [scripting] programming languages" that someone else mentioned?
It can, that's what the Terminal Server does. WinXP and any Win2003 Server also do it in single user mode, not because they can't support more than one but because MS wants some cash for the access. Once you pay up, the GUI attaches to a virtual desktop and runs through the RDP just fine, for any number of clients (limited by your licenses, RAM, CPU etc.)
This is *so* true! Many times someone asks for my help: "This thing does not work! It gives me an error!" And then proceeds to demonstrate, clicking through the error messages so fast that I have to almost scream "Stop, for ${DEITY'S} sake, let me read them!" [L]users do not understand that these messages carry information.
Are you saying that a virus can invisibly install itself into Applications/ but an antivirus can't delete it without your explicit permission and the password? A typosquatting virus would be very interested in this option...
I take it that *you* don't upgrade your car, but believe me, there are plenty of people who do just that. There are all kinds of reasons to do that - mostly because enterprising people offer goodies for your car that the OEM was too lazy to think about. A simplest example - people buy trunk organizers and cargo nets because they don't want their groceries spilled on the very first turn from the store. Most people upgrade the battery when the old one dies, since every new generation of batteries is a little better than before. Many people upgrade the tires because the OEM installs the cheapest, lousiest piece of rubber they can get away with, and if you want traction on water/snow/ice you buy what is good. Our secretary upgraded her VW with Sirius radio because she likes it. And so on.
You are also forgetting about professional software applications, stuff that businesses depend upon daily. A handful of them exists as native executables for Mac (Adobe primarily.) What about tons of Autodesk stuff, CATIA, ProEngineer, SolidWorks, PADS, Xilinx ISE and PlanAhead, ISP Lever, Keil compilers, IAR compilers, Synplicity products, Modelsim, Electronic Workbench, Microwave Office, CST or Ansoft, SINDA/FLUINT, Ansys ... hardly any of these have Mac ports, and they depend on native execution because they require tremendous CPU power to do their job.
Any one of these apps will easily cost 10x more than a box to run it on. The app defines the computer, not the other way around. And when you are forced to have 20 Wintel boxes, and have no particular reason to buy a Mac, which will you standardize on?
Sounds useful. However, how is it different from the desktop, or from any number of folders where you might want to keep shortcuts to apps and documents? Or how is it different from a toolbar? You know that Windows (and KDE, and probably GNOME) allow you to have any number of them? I know people who excel in this skill :-) And it only takes drag-and-drop to put something there, or to remove. And you can have as many of those as you want, and the toolbars don't take half of the screen away.
All the other analogies that you provide can be reduced to this one. And this functionality exists on all modern desktop/workstation OSes.
Your math is wrong. You get a PC that costs x2 as much plus cost of Windows XP (another $100, as a bad non-OEM deal), and that PC is less powerful.
It does look like these students are busier than a CEO of a Fortune 100 company; no surprise they just throw money at every problem!
On my planet, however, majority of students have plenty of time, and very little money; most of the software they need is either free (MSN/Yahoo/Meebo/* Messenger, Picasa, Google Talk, etc.) or inexpensive. Windows XP comes with MovieMaker, FWIW, and a GarageBand app is really an {over|under}kill for practically anyone: "You've just finished editing your latest iMovie masterpiece. Now it's time to think about the musical score."
You are apparently correct, and this Web site is in error, since it says "In all, 32 Saturns were launched". I double-checked with Wikipedia, and it confirms your count. Probably www.nasm.si.edu counted all Saturns they could find, not just Saturn V. Saturn I was flown 10 times. I do not know where they took the rest of the missions from...
Come on, if every country is to judge others on such minor details, we'd all be radioactive gas by now. How do you think Russia treats:
Using your own metric, "The USA is being very naughty indeed." But so what? Russia sees USA as a country with interests to defend, and though none of the above is pleasing it is a predicted behavior. So is Russia's behavior, and French, and German, and Iranian... everyone protects his interests as he knows, even North Korea (though most concede that this time NK made a mistake.)
When you start a long trip through a difficult terrain, is it wise to hit your companion in the teeth, for no reason, just when you started? Mind you, if you do that then if you break your leg one day the companion will gladly leave you in the dust, to die.
Stop making enemies, make friends instead, and you will be happier and live longer (as a person and as a country.) Nobody wants the USA blown up, except a few terrorists in caves; why do you want a far more powerful enemy? Your decision to deploy SDI already resulted in a warhead that can penetrate the US defenses; isn't it a good enough illustration of futility of the militarist approach to everything?
An enemy??? What have Russia ever done to you?
The Energiya booster is configurable to 400,000 lbs, and that exceeds the 285,000 lbs orbital lift capacity of Saturn V. This is not surprising, given that Energiya was designed decades later and was using the latest technologies.
There were only two flights of Energiya, compared to 32 of Saturn V, and it is not manufactured any more. However its technology is not only up to date, it is being actively used in other boosters. So if anyone wants to lift 175 tons to the orbit, it can be done. It only costs money. See here for available configurations.
If you really need to launch anything that heavy, it would be cheaper and smarter to pay for manufacturing of Energiya rather than for redesign and manufacturing of Saturn V, and you get more bang for the buck at the same time. Engines of that power that are time-tested and proven to be OK are invaluable.
Now aside from the interesting question of why would you only take that, and not the CD-ROMs with even more VA data, that were laying nearby.
Because the lowly thief had no clue who the laptop belongs to, and the idea that CDs may be far more valuable than the computer probably never visited his mind (I admit that most CDs aren't very valuable.)
why would a petty, common thief not take more stuff?
How much of easily locatable, portable and easily disposable stuff a government employee of VA department could possibly have? He is probably lucky that he got approved for a mortgage to buy his house. His salary is likely to be lower than in the private sector. Do you really expect him to have the original French Impressionists' paintings on the walls, or piles of jewelry just laying around, or travellers' checks? The thief grabbed what was visible, such as the computer and all the cash that he could find in usual places (pockets of a suit, a briefcase, a wallet.) There could have been more, but a thief likely preferred to get away within minutes. Besides, the thief probably only knew how to sell common stuff; if you just happened to have a time machine in the corner, a thief would shy away from that - he can't sell that to anyone he knows.
I'm glad the forensics guys know the laptop was not taken apart, but how hard is it to dump the external harddrive data?
Probably it's far easier to just leave the laptop alone - don't touch it, don't power it up; just connect the external HDD to another computer, mount as read-only, and copy all you want.
And why not destroy the disks after you make a copy?
You mean the external HDD? Because it's better to return it and create an impression that the data was not accessed; same applies to the laptop. A smart ID thief could clean both items, then drive to another location, like a city park, where homeless people may be present, and leave both on a bench. The items would be gone within minutes, and tracelessly sold through many hands who don't know anyone else.
If it was idiot thieves that didn't know what they had, odds are they did boot it up and mess around.
You are talking from a geek's POV - you would be curious what s/w is loaded, what data files are present, what cookies with what passwords exist in the browser store... But "an idiot thief" would be barely able to power the box up, and he would have no inclination to rummage around. The laptop would be to him just an item that can be sold.
There is another possible factor. Government-owned laptops are super-likely to be logging into the domain; they would be mighty useless otherwise. This kicks out the "friendly" XP login, and you are given the usual login dialog after the Alt-Ctrl-Del. A common thief would be totally defeated by this primitive security feature, and he would not even be able to log in. However a data thief would boot from a CD that bypasses all that; it would be the first and the last thing that he does with the laptop.
Heck they probably traced it's MAC address to find it.
MAC addresses are local to an Ethernet subnet. The thief would need to physically go to VA building to plug it in and get caught :-)
Can you prove no one copied the external harddrive?
No, not in this case. It is possible if you had the drive in your posession, captured all the SMART data that you can have, recorded all the snapshots of everything, and then walked away. When you are back a month later you can repeat the capture and compare the results and *maybe* say something definite. But in this case nobody knows anything about the original state of the hardware.
Or if they did immediately pawn it, how did both the
Dell will sell you a similar notebook (an Inspiron, for example) for $600. Or you can give Dell your $1200 and happily own a Dell XPS, with dual core CPU and everything else. If you don't want Windows, you can always blow it away and install your Linux of choice, not that it costs any.
It is very hard now, impossible probably, for small notebook vendors to compete on price with the big companies. Dell just gives them away, and Compaq is right there too, with $450 price tag on Presario V2000 and V5000 series, and Lenovo trails them all at $600.
The DRM book can be only safe from you if its font is as legible as those twisted, crooked, scratched letters that you need to recognize and enter for subscription to Web services.