Oh, I dunno, lets do some maths... We don't know how much it will weigh, but lets just assume that loaded with passangers it weighs about as much as your average locomotive without any train cars attached... so 150 tons. Traveling at 4000 miles per hour at peak speed... and that comes out to about 57 tons of TNT going off if it impacts something.
On the bright side, if anything went wrong, you'd never know. I believe your nervous system has been calculated at under 600mph.
One of my neighbors is kinda of a minor league "prepper" he's got water and ramen noodles and... some other stuff... who knows. Anyways, he was over one day and I was cleaning my pistol... he doesn't like guns much and was telling me it would never do me much good. I asked "what about the disaster you're always getting ready for?" He went on to tell me a gun wouldn't do me any good, I'd need food water, etc... what good were bullets when I was starving. I asked "Couldn't I just use my gun to shoot you and take your food since you're unarmed?" He just frowned and left. Now his food stores are top secret, he doesn't brag about them anymore. Which is awesome really.
So I work for a telco, and I used to work in the NOC. I got all the alarms for all the equipment all over the country and would call out techs to fix it or fix it myself when there was a problem. After a particularly bad day a few years back I read that there had been some elevated solar activity that day. We always knew that solar activity effected our equipment, after all our giant nationwide network was basically a huge copper net for all those stray electrons. But I realized that now I had a large dataset to play with.
To my surprise there was actually a NASA space weather website with large datasets you could download that would show solar output over time. So I dumped all this into a database along with logs of our alarms. Without getting into all the details of it, I found that we indeed did have spikes when solar activity went up but there were other spikes as well. Realizing our #1 cause of equipment alarm or failure was electrical storms, I then filtered out all alarms that were resolved as "Storm related" by the repair tech and re-ran my report. There, clear as day were 2 graph lines that were very similar in their trajectory. Solar activity and our alarm activity. It wasn't perfect but I'm no research scientist but it was compelling enough that I took this to my boss, very excited. He was impressed "That's really cool!" I was giddy... then he looked up and said "well?" and I was like "Huh" and which point he made the obvious point that I had missed in my excitement "there is absolutely nothing we can do about this. You just wasted several hours of your time... it's still really cool though!"
Ah well... but it is a fact, solar activity has a direct impact on copper networking equipment. Even our fiber optic networks had an increase in alarms, I suspect because the routers and such are metal and plugged into the electrical grid.
You see, right there is your problem. You're arguing it wrong. Don't argue that it leads to better trials, better convictions, yada yada, then they can argue back against you about it. They can disagree. This isn't something that should be a debatable issue.
Argue: "Torture is evil. If we administer it, WE are evil people. It is all about hate, revenge and there is no excuse, no justification for it, ever. If a man were guarding the knowledge that would cure all mortal illness and the only way to get the cure from him were torture, it would STILL be wrong to commit it. We cannot give up our very souls for security because all we'll truely be secure in is our own shame."
In my opinion: Oracle is easier to hire for. A lot of "reporting people" know Oracle. If they had half a brain in their head they could write SQL for any DB... but if they had half a brain in their head you'd have to pay them more.
Oracles support is... worse than anything. We just stopped calling. It's better to live with the bugs than waste man hours on that cunt licking whore Oracle calls support. I'd rather traverse the 7 layers of hell in a thong than ever talk to Oracle support about anything ever again.
Oracle is Satan. They will fuck you in the most evil way imaginable. Whatever alternative you think will get you away from them, half way through the migration project oracle will buy the alternative company out. If torturing puppies were profitable, Oracle would have a puppy torturing product as a SASS. In fact, if torturing puppies just made the product slight less helpful to you, they'd probably do it as well... because their favorite pastime is making their product of less value to you.
Seriously, did Bose EVER make a good speaker? I've heard Pristine ones from all the way back in the 70s and even those were crap. Their car stereos are boomy over sound processed crap. Usually with proprietary connectors, amplifiers, even line levels so if you removed any part of the system you had to scrap the entire thing. I remember replacing a bose system in one car, and when I tested the door speakers they were running at 1ohm in series down each side of the car. WTF is that? If you look at the only picture they have of a speaker in that slideshow, it's just a garbage line array. Not only that the drivers are pointing in every direction possible. That thing would sound horrible and all the problems you'd have with phase would make it extremely inefficient. I know everyone is saying he was a great engineer and that may be, but he didn't know shit about designing speakers.
I doubt many of them will. But you can rest assured that we'll be hearing rare stories of these containers washing up in remote locations all over the world for the next 10 years.
I doubt it. We've got some software like this, and while we were having trouble one day and I was on the phone with their support (who was about as skilled as your local broadband support tech) proceeded to log into our equipment, duplicated my administrator account, log in as me, and start making changes. The log even reported the changes as being done by me. When I realized what was going on I started yelling into the phone "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Holy fucking shit?!?!" The tech on the other end was rather surprised I was upset "Excuse me?" he asked... "How did you just do all that?!?! This is on OUR servers, behind OUR firewall!!! You're under contract with us, none of this should be possible! physically, or legally!" all he said was "Well they don't let me see the contracts. I just click this "Clone account" button and there we go..."
I reported the whole thing to our security director. It ended up in the lawyers lap. Their software basically just tunneled its way out of our network. There were other reasons their software needed to connect to them so they just used the same port to allow their support techs to have basically more access than I, the senior administrator had. Now, instead of having a secure product, we have an unsecured product and the only thing protecting us from them is a "more specific" contract that, again, their techs have no access to read. Also, given the regulations we're under, that tech was violating federal law without even knowing it.
Don't trust your vendors. My management has, after this and several other incidents, come to the conclusion that these sorts of products are more trouble than they're worth. In the near future we'll be building it all in-house and dropping vendors like this. Some stuff, like oracle and microsoft, will be hard to dump. But I bet that given enough time even they will be gone and we'll be on something open source.
“He got a lot,” the official continued, but it was not even close to the lion’s share of what the NSA is engaged in. Still, the official said, harm to the efforts “is a concern.”
Let me re-quote that for you: "Moreover, the verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified view of the nation's political establishment."
They don't care... They are going to pretend like we agree with them and just continue on. They're invent some fake issue that the country is evenly divided on and argue about that to distract us. Abortion, Gun Control, The Zimmerman trial. We'll argue about that, and they'll quietly install more cameras.
Since everyone like that one, here's another for you:
New evidence released by the Washington Post confirms that the NSA is tapping major fiberoptic cables as well as has direct access to the internal servers of Google, Apple, etc... despite their claim to the contrary. It seems that room 641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A is not just a conspiracy theory after all...
A Helicopter costs at least $5 million, and that's before the fancy spotlights and night vision. A drone costs $2000 and will probably come down to under a few hundred in the very near future. That's the difference. A major metropolitan police force may have 1 or 2 helicopters tops. In 20 years drones will likely outnumber police in departments. Imagine squadrons of them with face recondition software combing the skies over your town. That's exactly what will be going on in short order if laws aren't passed. Oh yea, and all those drone feeds will assuredly be recorded and kept by the NSA. Nationwide, real-time, camera surveillance nearly everywhere. With cameras that can move on command to any point at anytime. Cameras that can run autonomously, find an individual, track them, follow their car, and that's before we get to the scary stuff.
Since slashdot refuses to accept my submission on this, or anything else relating to this guy, I'll just leave this here: The American Public: Edward Snowden is not a traitor
A new poll released Wednesday by Qunnipiac University finds that the vast majority of Americans thing that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, not a traitor. A mere 34% think he is a traitor 45% percent think the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 10, 2010, survey.
"The fact that there is little difference now along party lines about the overall anti- terrorism effort and civil liberties and about Snowden is in itself unusual in a country sharply divided along political lines about almost everything. Moreover, the verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified view of the nation's political establishment." — Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Maybe so, and you're allowed to argue that point with them. But The citizens of this country decided a very long time ago this was something they wanted to invest in. Rural communities should have phone service. So that's how it's been and how it works. But pretending like there's a bunch of people living out in the middle of nowhere getting fat and happy off their cheap phone lines is complete load of crap.
A Man standing next to you has a gun in his right hand, his finger on the trigger, in his left hand he holds a note that says "Only pull the trigger if you are 51% sure this person is a criminal" Do you feel safe? When your kid turns 18 he's going to point that gun at him as well... are you ok with this situation?
I work for a telco. We're required by law to provide phone service to everyone... period. In some counties we're required by law to keep 911 service working regardless of if they residents even want a phone, or even if the building is abandoned! We've got houses on top of mountains, we've got houses at the bottom of the grand canyon on Indian reservations that require microwave dishes to link the bottom of the canyon with the top. Or techs have to hitch rides on helicopters to service some of these people. The vast majority of whom are not rich at all. Rich people like to live in the countryside around cities or small towns, not in the Appalachians where these subsidies have the greatest affect.
Not that all the government subsidies are perfect. The most recent, the Rural Broadband initiative, is total pork. But the standard tax on lines that allows rural customers to get basic phone service? No, that's probably one of the most important programs in US history. If hadn't been enacted most of the country (geographically) would still be without service. If they were to drop it all together, rural customers would get cutoff almost immediately. We're talking entire towns. And before you start talking about cellphones, how do you think all the cellphone providers get their data links for those towers? The phone companies.
Actually yes... I get very good bug reports from users. Luckily I did tech support for about 15 years before I got into development. So I had a lot of experience dealing with people that basically had no idea what they were doing. Keep in mind, I work in a corporate environment where what I create is consumed by a limited set of about 5k people.
1. Relationships: Where possible I get to know, personally, the people that will use my software. I can't know them all because there's thousands. But I can find key people, Managers, Seniors, etc... take them out to lunch, make them feel comfortable talking to me, and explaining the need for tickets rather than random emails etc... 2. When a strange problem arrives or I suspect such a problem may exist in some new software, I give them tools. Specifically a button that says "REPORT BUG!" that takes screenshots, dumps the contents of variables and datasets. If available, previous steps taken. Also the log files... and sends it all directly to me. Usually adding such a thing is pretty simple depending on what you're working in. C# and VB have all kinds of pre-built stuff that make this sort of thing super easy. 3. I write documentation on how to properly submit a bug. I make it very clear to people that are not computer savvy what to do. Down to "How to save the file" and "How to take a screenshot" I make it so even my mom could follow the instructions. Generic instructions like this may take you a day or so to write, but then you can just shoot them out to anyone having trouble. 4. Restate the issue. This is the classic "My computer doesn't work! *Is it plugged in?* "I can't see back there, the power is out" You have to know exactly what the customers real issue is. Listen to the client, write down what you hear as the problem, then restate that problem back to them using entirely different language. "My computer doesn't work! *So if I understand you correctly, you're calling me because you've hooked up your computer correctly, you've tried to turn it on, but it just hangs there?* "No! I want to pay my electric bill!" 5. Once you've fixed the problem, confirm with the user that it is in fact fixed. There's nothing worse than fixing something, closing the ticket then having the user come back 3 weeks later asking when you're going to get around to finishing. *You contacted me because your report was giving you incorrect data. We've found that in the original requirements there was a typo and this app should have included an average next to the new sale button. We've added that and now it appears the way you expect it to?* "Yes! It looks great thanks! Want to go get some lunch?" *Sure thing Tammy*
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Oh, I dunno, lets do some maths...
We don't know how much it will weigh, but lets just assume that loaded with passangers it weighs about as much as your average locomotive without any train cars attached... so 150 tons.
Traveling at 4000 miles per hour at peak speed...
and that comes out to about 57 tons of TNT going off if it impacts something.
On the bright side, if anything went wrong, you'd never know. I believe your nervous system has been calculated at under 600mph.
One of my neighbors is kinda of a minor league "prepper" he's got water and ramen noodles and... some other stuff... who knows. Anyways, he was over one day and I was cleaning my pistol... he doesn't like guns much and was telling me it would never do me much good. I asked "what about the disaster you're always getting ready for?" He went on to tell me a gun wouldn't do me any good, I'd need food water, etc... what good were bullets when I was starving. I asked "Couldn't I just use my gun to shoot you and take your food since you're unarmed?" He just frowned and left. Now his food stores are top secret, he doesn't brag about them anymore. Which is awesome really.
So I work for a telco, and I used to work in the NOC. I got all the alarms for all the equipment all over the country and would call out techs to fix it or fix it myself when there was a problem. After a particularly bad day a few years back I read that there had been some elevated solar activity that day. We always knew that solar activity effected our equipment, after all our giant nationwide network was basically a huge copper net for all those stray electrons. But I realized that now I had a large dataset to play with.
To my surprise there was actually a NASA space weather website with large datasets you could download that would show solar output over time. So I dumped all this into a database along with logs of our alarms. Without getting into all the details of it, I found that we indeed did have spikes when solar activity went up but there were other spikes as well. Realizing our #1 cause of equipment alarm or failure was electrical storms, I then filtered out all alarms that were resolved as "Storm related" by the repair tech and re-ran my report. There, clear as day were 2 graph lines that were very similar in their trajectory. Solar activity and our alarm activity. It wasn't perfect but I'm no research scientist but it was compelling enough that I took this to my boss, very excited. He was impressed "That's really cool!" I was giddy... then he looked up and said "well?" and I was like "Huh" and which point he made the obvious point that I had missed in my excitement "there is absolutely nothing we can do about this. You just wasted several hours of your time... it's still really cool though!"
Ah well... but it is a fact, solar activity has a direct impact on copper networking equipment. Even our fiber optic networks had an increase in alarms, I suspect because the routers and such are metal and plugged into the electrical grid.
You see, right there is your problem. You're arguing it wrong. Don't argue that it leads to better trials, better convictions, yada yada, then they can argue back against you about it. They can disagree. This isn't something that should be a debatable issue.
Argue: "Torture is evil. If we administer it, WE are evil people. It is all about hate, revenge and there is no excuse, no justification for it, ever. If a man were guarding the knowledge that would cure all mortal illness and the only way to get the cure from him were torture, it would STILL be wrong to commit it. We cannot give up our very souls for security because all we'll truely be secure in is our own shame."
In my opinion:
Oracle is easier to hire for. A lot of "reporting people" know Oracle. If they had half a brain in their head they could write SQL for any DB... but if they had half a brain in their head you'd have to pay them more.
Oracles support is... worse than anything. We just stopped calling. It's better to live with the bugs than waste man hours on that cunt licking whore Oracle calls support. I'd rather traverse the 7 layers of hell in a thong than ever talk to Oracle support about anything ever again.
Oracle is Satan. They will fuck you in the most evil way imaginable. Whatever alternative you think will get you away from them, half way through the migration project oracle will buy the alternative company out. If torturing puppies were profitable, Oracle would have a puppy torturing product as a SASS. In fact, if torturing puppies just made the product slight less helpful to you, they'd probably do it as well... because their favorite pastime is making their product of less value to you.
Seriously, did Bose EVER make a good speaker? I've heard Pristine ones from all the way back in the 70s and even those were crap. Their car stereos are boomy over sound processed crap. Usually with proprietary connectors, amplifiers, even line levels so if you removed any part of the system you had to scrap the entire thing. I remember replacing a bose system in one car, and when I tested the door speakers they were running at 1ohm in series down each side of the car. WTF is that? If you look at the only picture they have of a speaker in that slideshow, it's just a garbage line array. Not only that the drivers are pointing in every direction possible. That thing would sound horrible and all the problems you'd have with phase would make it extremely inefficient. I know everyone is saying he was a great engineer and that may be, but he didn't know shit about designing speakers.
I doubt many of them will. But you can rest assured that we'll be hearing rare stories of these containers washing up in remote locations all over the world for the next 10 years.
So... they can make a disease now that re-sequences our DNA? Anyone else find that terrifying?
I doubt it. We've got some software like this, and while we were having trouble one day and I was on the phone with their support (who was about as skilled as your local broadband support tech) proceeded to log into our equipment, duplicated my administrator account, log in as me, and start making changes. The log even reported the changes as being done by me. When I realized what was going on I started yelling into the phone "What the fuck do you think you're doing? Holy fucking shit?!?!" The tech on the other end was rather surprised I was upset "Excuse me?" he asked... "How did you just do all that?!?! This is on OUR servers, behind OUR firewall!!! You're under contract with us, none of this should be possible! physically, or legally!" all he said was "Well they don't let me see the contracts. I just click this "Clone account" button and there we go..."
I reported the whole thing to our security director. It ended up in the lawyers lap. Their software basically just tunneled its way out of our network. There were other reasons their software needed to connect to them so they just used the same port to allow their support techs to have basically more access than I, the senior administrator had. Now, instead of having a secure product, we have an unsecured product and the only thing protecting us from them is a "more specific" contract that, again, their techs have no access to read. Also, given the regulations we're under, that tech was violating federal law without even knowing it.
Don't trust your vendors. My management has, after this and several other incidents, come to the conclusion that these sorts of products are more trouble than they're worth. In the near future we'll be building it all in-house and dropping vendors like this. Some stuff, like oracle and microsoft, will be hard to dump. But I bet that given enough time even they will be gone and we'll be on something open source.
An article about a windows phone? Why is this on here? What's Microsoft market share in phones? Doesn't Nintendo sell more phones than them?
(while I'm kidding about Nintendo there is this image: http://cdn.pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/6a00d8341c5c9353ef01156f2acdc3970c-800wi.jpg )
I claim the first "Spot the fed" siting. i.e. Kevin Johnson
Enjoy your security contracts. Your grandchildren will thank you for the police state you helped create.
And then there's this:
“He got a lot,” the official continued, but it was not even close to the lion’s share of what the NSA is engaged in. Still, the official said, harm to the efforts “is a concern.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-snowden-case-review-focuses-on-possible-access-to-china-espionage-files-officials-say/2013/07/11/9ba0f004-e9a1-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html ...not even close to to the lion's share... and this from an NSA official.
Uh... I'm fairly certain google is doing the exact same thing as Microsoft.
Wow, everyone I work with must have read this. That's crazy.
Let me re-quote that for you:
"Moreover, the verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified view of the nation's political establishment."
They don't care... They are going to pretend like we agree with them and just continue on. They're invent some fake issue that the country is evenly divided on and argue about that to distract us. Abortion, Gun Control, The Zimmerman trial. We'll argue about that, and they'll quietly install more cameras.
Since everyone like that one, here's another for you:
New evidence released by the Washington Post confirms that the NSA is tapping major fiberoptic cables as well as has direct access to the internal servers of Google, Apple, etc... despite their claim to the contrary. It seems that room 641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A is not just a conspiracy theory after all...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide-you-havent-seen/2013/07/10/32801426-e8e6-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html
A Helicopter costs at least $5 million, and that's before the fancy spotlights and night vision. A drone costs $2000 and will probably come down to under a few hundred in the very near future. That's the difference. A major metropolitan police force may have 1 or 2 helicopters tops. In 20 years drones will likely outnumber police in departments. Imagine squadrons of them with face recondition software combing the skies over your town. That's exactly what will be going on in short order if laws aren't passed. Oh yea, and all those drone feeds will assuredly be recorded and kept by the NSA. Nationwide, real-time, camera surveillance nearly everywhere. With cameras that can move on command to any point at anytime. Cameras that can run autonomously, find an individual, track them, follow their car, and that's before we get to the scary stuff.
Since slashdot refuses to accept my submission on this, or anything else relating to this guy, I'll just leave this here:
The American Public: Edward Snowden is not a traitor
A new poll released Wednesday by Qunnipiac University finds that the vast majority of Americans thing that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, not a traitor. A mere 34% think he is a traitor 45% percent think the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 10, 2010, survey.
"The fact that there is little difference now along party lines about the overall anti- terrorism effort and civil liberties and about Snowden is in itself unusual in a country sharply divided along political lines about almost everything. Moreover, the verdict that Snowden is not a traitor goes against almost the unified view of the nation's political establishment." — Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-institute/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=1919
Maybe so, and you're allowed to argue that point with them. But The citizens of this country decided a very long time ago this was something they wanted to invest in. Rural communities should have phone service. So that's how it's been and how it works. But pretending like there's a bunch of people living out in the middle of nowhere getting fat and happy off their cheap phone lines is complete load of crap.
A Man standing next to you has a gun in his right hand, his finger on the trigger, in his left hand he holds a note that says "Only pull the trigger if you are 51% sure this person is a criminal" Do you feel safe? When your kid turns 18 he's going to point that gun at him as well... are you ok with this situation?
I work for a telco. We're required by law to provide phone service to everyone... period. In some counties we're required by law to keep 911 service working regardless of if they residents even want a phone, or even if the building is abandoned! We've got houses on top of mountains, we've got houses at the bottom of the grand canyon on Indian reservations that require microwave dishes to link the bottom of the canyon with the top. Or techs have to hitch rides on helicopters to service some of these people. The vast majority of whom are not rich at all. Rich people like to live in the countryside around cities or small towns, not in the Appalachians where these subsidies have the greatest affect.
Not that all the government subsidies are perfect. The most recent, the Rural Broadband initiative, is total pork. But the standard tax on lines that allows rural customers to get basic phone service? No, that's probably one of the most important programs in US history. If hadn't been enacted most of the country (geographically) would still be without service. If they were to drop it all together, rural customers would get cutoff almost immediately. We're talking entire towns. And before you start talking about cellphones, how do you think all the cellphone providers get their data links for those towers? The phone companies.
So your argument is they are just following orders? That's pretty funny.
Actually yes... I get very good bug reports from users. Luckily I did tech support for about 15 years before I got into development. So I had a lot of experience dealing with people that basically had no idea what they were doing. Keep in mind, I work in a corporate environment where what I create is consumed by a limited set of about 5k people.
1. Relationships: Where possible I get to know, personally, the people that will use my software. I can't know them all because there's thousands. But I can find key people, Managers, Seniors, etc... take them out to lunch, make them feel comfortable talking to me, and explaining the need for tickets rather than random emails etc...
2. When a strange problem arrives or I suspect such a problem may exist in some new software, I give them tools. Specifically a button that says "REPORT BUG!" that takes screenshots, dumps the contents of variables and datasets. If available, previous steps taken. Also the log files... and sends it all directly to me. Usually adding such a thing is pretty simple depending on what you're working in. C# and VB have all kinds of pre-built stuff that make this sort of thing super easy.
3. I write documentation on how to properly submit a bug. I make it very clear to people that are not computer savvy what to do. Down to "How to save the file" and "How to take a screenshot" I make it so even my mom could follow the instructions. Generic instructions like this may take you a day or so to write, but then you can just shoot them out to anyone having trouble.
4. Restate the issue. This is the classic "My computer doesn't work! *Is it plugged in?* "I can't see back there, the power is out" You have to know exactly what the customers real issue is. Listen to the client, write down what you hear as the problem, then restate that problem back to them using entirely different language. "My computer doesn't work! *So if I understand you correctly, you're calling me because you've hooked up your computer correctly, you've tried to turn it on, but it just hangs there?* "No! I want to pay my electric bill!"
5. Once you've fixed the problem, confirm with the user that it is in fact fixed. There's nothing worse than fixing something, closing the ticket then having the user come back 3 weeks later asking when you're going to get around to finishing. *You contacted me because your report was giving you incorrect data. We've found that in the original requirements there was a typo and this app should have included an average next to the new sale button. We've added that and now it appears the way you expect it to?* "Yes! It looks great thanks! Want to go get some lunch?" *Sure thing Tammy*
Good luck.
Dear Drew Houston,
The NSA has killed your business model.
Yours truly,
The Government
Cocaine's a hell of a drug.