One thing to note is that Media Mail is an explicit exception for everything. This is because it is by definition only to be used for "media" (books etc) and not for any other purpose. The post office lists very explicitly that there is no expectation of privacy and that they can inspect these packages to make sure that they aren't being used for anything other than media.
Your making the trade off of being able to ship heavy and otherwise very expensive items at a far cheaper rate by declaring that you are only shipping media and not private communications.
There is absolutely nothing you can do because the government has root for any given phone (if nothing else through a warrant). Own the network and you own anything going through it. Your encryption means jack when their are appliances that do nothing but decrypt and re-encrypt traffic at very high rates of speed. You could get a separate phone just for having private conversations (ala drug dealer). You would quickly find out that they can determine that number (doesn't matter how you got that phone). Once they know that number they can just tap that through the same phone system.
Want some level of privacy and to ensure that the government at least has to get a warrant to read your supposed to be private conversations? Go old school, visit this antique shop called a Post Office and buy a roll of stamps and envelopes. There is well established legal doctrine that says snooping on your mail can only be done with a warrant.
Don't like my answer? Call your congress critter and demand change.
You can't afford to get complacent, resist the temptation. Your 25 years into your career, which could easily mean your in your 40's and have another 20+ years to go. Your far from done with your career and need to prepare for the next job. Your in IT, that means you have one of the few fields that demands more education after you graduate than before. Look at industry trends and start training for your next thing.
There's a five year difference between someone on the bleeding edge and a dinosaur. Experience makes it easier to give into the temptation of complacency and complacency is how you can far too easily become one of the countless numbers of IT people that can't get a job because their skills are out of date. Age discrimination in IT is entirely too real and you have to stay as hungry for career success now as you were fresh out of school.
You have put this quite well. Amusingly enough this could be used as an analogy to explain to people why it's more important to increase average economy of a car from 18 mpg to 24 mpg than a car from 30 mpg to 36 mpg.
You have a receipt printer attached to a computer that is assumedly used as a cash register. Now it is quite possible that said cash register is cash only (perhaps you work at a towing company?).
That being said the overwhelming majority of cash registers are used with credit cards. Credit cards are subject to PCI audits and if your processor performed an audit you would find your contract rate jacked sky high or your contract terminated. This would remain the case until you were brought into compliance, which would not happen with significant changes to your system.
What utter nonsense spoken by someone that obviously doesn't have any level of enterprise experience. The fact that support is ending is critical, and to be frank the only reason for the overwhelming majority of businesses to take on the significant cost burden of migrating systems. The fact of the matter is that XP is well known, deployed and just plain works. It has just plain worked for so many years that at this point many XP machines have been deployed for so many years that they are out of warranty. The net result is that you replace the hardware at the same time you migrate the computer to the new OS for cost reasons. When Microsoft ends support for an OS many vendors likewise end their support for their applications.
The fact that Win 8 is crap means jack as the enterprise will simply buy Windows 8 and use downgrade rights to deploy Windows 7. The crap your spewing will only hold sway for some small businesses and the proverbial Grandma Nellie that only uses her computer to look at pictures of her Grand-kids.
Some good points, something to add to this is that Red Hat support typically costs more than Microsoft support. I like Linux for many things, but the idea that it is automatically cheaper for any given production use is a fallacy. An operating system is and should be a tool and never a religion.
Considering I've managed quite a few thousand thin clients over the years I think I'm on pretty firm ground. Thin clients booting over PXE have been around for a very long time. There is absolutely nothing about thin clients that changes any of my points.
Patch Tuesday? Patch Management is an issue that affects all platforms and requires professional support regardless of your operating system. It also involves all of your applications and that easily requires as much work as the OS itself. There is nothing special about Microsoft in this regard. Half my fleet is OS X and I've implemented Patch Management to support Unix and Linux over the years.
Your either talking out of your ass or simply incompetent by thinking you don't need to patch your environment.
Wake on LAN for maintenance is something that sounds great in practice. Wake your computers up at 2 AM, perform all of your maintenance and put them back to sleep. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well in production and reliability is a huge issue. If you can get it to work you can use it to reduce some load by scheduling maintenance overnight. However in practice it tends to fail and your back to your problem with everything happening first thing in the morning.
Daytime maintenance windows avoid these issues entirely and don't impact the user in a perceivable way. I've implemented this on hundreds of thousands of systems over the years and the only times I have ever had a user complaint is when a package was misconfigured and didn't run silently as it was supposed to. It's the difference between something that should work with no theoretical impact and something that does work with no perceivable impact.
When I first started deploying full disk encryption in the late 90's it was a significant burden on the computer. It could easily take over a day to encrypt the drive and performance was castrated on any computer. That was an eternity in technology though and today you can typically run full disk encryption with about a 2% load.
I've worked with environments where anything that could be was encrypted, from the disk to routine traffic (email etc). With today's computers you should never have more than a 5% impact on performance with even the most strenuous security measures. I'm inclined to think that their scanners have been misconfigured if they are having that kind of impact.
I've been an infrastructure architect for environments that include heavy government regulation at multiple large enterprises. I've dealt with everything from HIPAA, DOD, SOX, PCI, FERPA, FDA and so on. I've also worked a fair bit Euro and Asian regulatory environments at multinationals. I've done these things at environments from large health insurance companies to financial companies at stock exchanges to working with DOD contractors to large multinational pharmaceuticals.
There is no reason for their support costs to be anywhere this high, even when you include everything you mention. This is why you utilize enterprise management tools to manage your computers. This is why you pay for a professional lab, use change management, standardize the desktop, use HII, use packages, and have strong policies. Even with the costs to professionally manage everything you should be at well less than a fourth of the support costs that they mention.
IL certification costs money, but there is no reason for it to cost anywhere that much money. All that being said the "just buy iPads" bit is enough for me to consider her incompetent and whole heartedly agree with your statement "she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation"
They could start by making some changes that cost nothing and would reduce their boot times. Most critical of all is the need to use an enterprise management tool (Altiris etc.) to run the fleet and automate maintenance. This alone combined with a competent staff and policies that allow them to use best practices should drop maintenance costs by 75% within a year.
For an immediate free impact you can start by stopping the scheduling everything to run overnight! This doesn't work when combined with shutting down PC's. The net result is that as soon as you turn the computer on it immediately starts processing 'overdue' jobs. Your now combining boot up, establishing connections, software distribution, patching, antivirus scans, inventory scans with the time of day the user most pays attention to their computer - first thing in the morning.
This problem is readily fixed at no cost by using maintenance windows during the day hours for anything that doesn't require a reboot. Anything that runs in the day can be throttled and set to run silently. Run your virus scan at 10, patch at 12, distribute software at 2 and so on. By distributing the load during day hours, after the computer is up and running your cup of coffee boot ups. By scheduling things you avoid the user impact and perception issue and insure the computer is powered on when you need it.
Were living in what could well be a future dark age for archeologists / historians. Hardly anything is put into a nice hard format (stone is incredibly rare and metal gets stolen) for someone to find. What's left suffers from incompatible file formats, acid based paper that decomposes, bit rot, cryptography, incompatible technology for data storage and worst of all DRM. With DRM you have active measures that try to prevent something from being usable.
In the old days people stopped use with armed guards, obfuscation and primitive crypto. Today we have servers that are required for operational functionality for many products. With the advent of the cloud you have reasons for storing things where you have a dependency on a third party. How many services that are cloud / server based have come about and gone tits up?
Even having a large well known brand name doesn't protect you from having a server shut down. Just think of Microsoft's play4sure service that lasted less than a decade. Having a license and a physical disk isn't that helpful when the DRM requires an authentication server that doesn't exist. With the movement to put more and more DRM into the cloud or with SSL certificates (again dependent upon servers and naturally time bombed) this is going to be a problem that will only grow worse.
Learning to break DRM is far more critical than file formats which require nothing more than a conversion tool.
Microsoft has both gaming and workplace computers to lose. Present market dominance isn't a guarantee of future succes(e.g. IBM). There are really three viable ways that Microsoft can lose ownership of workplace PC's.
1. Apple finally gets their head out of their ass and adopts enterprise best practices (PXE, virtualization support etc). 2. Google starts extending Android (not Chrome) to desktops as users have accepted this and it would be easy for them adapt from their phone to their desktop. 3. Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot.
Frankly the most viable of these is for Microsoft to continue to shoot themselves in the foot. 8.1 will restore boot to desktop, however they completely missed the mark on the Start Menu. The workplace market is still stuck with users being dumped into the modern interface by the Start button. Microsoft is forcing people to use Modern despite overwhelming user rejection of the interface as unusable. They are doing this as Modern applications all have to go through the market where Microsoft takes a cut of every sale.
I'm not going to have tens of thousands of people dumped into Modern every time they want to launch an application. It's a no brain decision to stick with Windows 7. The other aspect is by Microsoft forcing a vastly different user interface on people they have now opened / forced people into accepting that their interface is going to be significantly different. Frankly without this foot in the door it wouldn't be possible for any meaningful market share loss.
Why should your non-profit survive when compared to any of the others? The overwhelming majority are staffed with good people with good intentions who work for very little money. The problem is one over-saturation for the market and a donation fatigue from a public that is burned out. There are hundreds of thousands of non-profits in the US alone and every single one of them thinks that/they/ are the most important.
When a business starts to think that they 'deserve' our money we accuse them of entitlement (e.g. Circuit City) and vilify them. A non-profit really isn't any different in that they serve a function that costs money and in order to survive need to take in money. Like a business they can merge, be bought or go bankrupt.
Frankly if more non-profits started to merge it would enable greater economies of scale and efficiencies, just like a business. It would also enable them to spend more money on their mission and less money on overhead. Services from secretarial to bandwidth to phone banks could be shared at greater efficiency across more organizations.
Perhaps my answer seems callous, but the bottom line is that no organization is entitled to survive. Non-profits need to embrace what the business world has done and go through a series of mergers for the greater good. Are your clients better served by your merging with another organization because you are stretched so thin that you are no longer effective?
People typically start and run non-profits because their ego tells them that they can do better than the person already running a like kind service. Society as a whole would benefit enormously if non-profits put their missions before their egos. These warm hearted organizations need some cold blooded business acumen.
The locale where it would hit is probably not feasible to evacuate. Pick a spot on earth that would be affected, middle of Africa, major city, farmland, doesn't matter. Now, propose a plan on how to evacuate that area that will work in the real world. Start by looking at examples of 'mandatory' evacuations in recent history for hurricanes, volcanoes, wild fires and the like. Point being that evacuations only work in the movies and even then they rarely work as they should. Evacuation also doesn't do anything for atmospheric affects, and those are what are said to kill most of the dinosaurs.
You have to either destroy it or deflect it, those are the only realistic choices. If you destroy it you have many small pieces that impact in a series of impacts instead of all at once. Most of the smaller pieces will simply burn up in the atmosphere. The larger pieces may or may not hit the earth (some will maintain trajectory, many will be deflected out of the way). Those pieces that do hit will still cause damage, however they have far less mass.
To put in perspective the earth gets hit by small amounts of material every day and most people never notice. To quote NASA "Every day, the Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-size particles." If those same 100 tons of debris hit as a single asteroid the damage would be quite devastating. By spreading out the impact into a series of smaller impacts you reduce the damage that would occur.
Sorry, just because the message is one that some might like I can't get past the messenger. The BSA has spent decades lying to the public and politicians and using math that would never pass muster in any college in the developed world. They have lost any and all possible credibility they could ever possibly have, especially when it comes to on of their 'reports'.
I'm sure this will offend a lot of people here that are open source fans who would love to cite this. However I'm not about to become a hypocrite and give them credibility now just because they are saying something more palatable.
The fact that your using VM's is largely moot and goes back to the line of thought that VM's are somehow not 'real' computers. VM's run the same operating systems, software, have the same bugs, vulnerabilities and everything else as a physical computer. You need to patch them just like any other computer and you need to license them just like a regular computer. The fact that they are VM's really only makes two differences practical differences that matter, fist is that is easy to roll them back and second is that your aren't running on bare metal.
In other words you have a core issue that needs addressed of giving students root access to a computer. In an isolated environment this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Understand that they exploit root and see what they can do with it, however they are there to learn and if you can do so safely and without disruption of what your trying to teach then let them. Your focus needs to be on making it safe for those around them and that means making sure your VLAN and any related Internet access are properly setup. The lab is a lab and as long as you can make sure they aren't getting access to anyone persons computer than let them have at it.
A good rule of thumb is to roll your sessions back prior to the start of every single class. This always gives a fresh machine and the students will quickly learn how to set their VM just the way they want it.
Misleading headline is misleading, he was check into the mental health ward for an evaluation after acting like a nut. The fact that he has views that are generally only held by nutcases didn't help his case.
Guy is one of those conspiracy theory whack jobs that thinks societies refusal to consider his conspiracy theories makes him a political target. Sometimes when society thinks your ideas are crazy you just might be crazy.
Retailers have been doing this kind of thing for many, many years. The first indoor big box shopping mall every built (Southdale) was built just to have a place to attach a Dayton's store too. I got my start in IT in operations for a large retailer, working with the real estate team in setting up and closing down store properties was part of my job. Many retailers have as much business in real estate as they do in retail and this has been the case for years.
By way of point Home Depots are often located near Target or Walmart since they buy large tracts of land for their stores and as a defensive measure to keep the other companies store from being put up nearby. They then use the best space for their own and develop strip malls around their property. When they have a lot just the right size for a big box retailer they will lease it to someone like Home Depot just to keep the land from being used by the competitors as many cities have will build taxes for unused property.
McDonalds has been known to buy a large tract of land and build a strip mall just to ensure that they get a restaurant in a prime location. When stores closed down the realtors then find other uses for the store. This is something that the retailers have been doing for decades with professionally run and managed real estate companies that they own. There are even special tax exemptions to allow these operations with special discounts.
When Icahn wanted to do a hostile takeover on Target a year or two back his highest priority to get in - sell their property off for great profit - and get out. The only thing that is new about this case is that Sears wants to get into the data center hosting business. If they bring in professionals (which the article says is exactly what they are doing) to run it there is no reason that you couldn't see Sears do very well in a very short time doing this.
Gawker is spending $200,000 to get a rise out of embarrassing a politician. It would be far to use it for something such as donating to the EFF, fighting the next SOPA or some other similar cause. Donating personal money for this cause is something only a tool would do.
Unless your sick you should not take antibiotics as it raises your resistance to them. Save them for when you need them and they will work much better.
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One thing to note is that Media Mail is an explicit exception for everything. This is because it is by definition only to be used for "media" (books etc) and not for any other purpose. The post office lists very explicitly that there is no expectation of privacy and that they can inspect these packages to make sure that they aren't being used for anything other than media.
Your making the trade off of being able to ship heavy and otherwise very expensive items at a far cheaper rate by declaring that you are only shipping media and not private communications.
There is absolutely nothing you can do because the government has root for any given phone (if nothing else through a warrant). Own the network and you own anything going through it. Your encryption means jack when their are appliances that do nothing but decrypt and re-encrypt traffic at very high rates of speed. You could get a separate phone just for having private conversations (ala drug dealer). You would quickly find out that they can determine that number (doesn't matter how you got that phone). Once they know that number they can just tap that through the same phone system.
Want some level of privacy and to ensure that the government at least has to get a warrant to read your supposed to be private conversations? Go old school, visit this antique shop called a Post Office and buy a roll of stamps and envelopes. There is well established legal doctrine that says snooping on your mail can only be done with a warrant.
Don't like my answer? Call your congress critter and demand change.
You can't afford to get complacent, resist the temptation. Your 25 years into your career, which could easily mean your in your 40's and have another 20+ years to go. Your far from done with your career and need to prepare for the next job. Your in IT, that means you have one of the few fields that demands more education after you graduate than before. Look at industry trends and start training for your next thing.
There's a five year difference between someone on the bleeding edge and a dinosaur. Experience makes it easier to give into the temptation of complacency and complacency is how you can far too easily become one of the countless numbers of IT people that can't get a job because their skills are out of date. Age discrimination in IT is entirely too real and you have to stay as hungry for career success now as you were fresh out of school.
You have put this quite well. Amusingly enough this could be used as an analogy to explain to people why it's more important to increase average economy of a car from 18 mpg to 24 mpg than a car from 30 mpg to 36 mpg.
You have a receipt printer attached to a computer that is assumedly used as a cash register. Now it is quite possible that said cash register is cash only (perhaps you work at a towing company?).
That being said the overwhelming majority of cash registers are used with credit cards. Credit cards are subject to PCI audits and if your processor performed an audit you would find your contract rate jacked sky high or your contract terminated. This would remain the case until you were brought into compliance, which would not happen with significant changes to your system.
What utter nonsense spoken by someone that obviously doesn't have any level of enterprise experience. The fact that support is ending is critical, and to be frank the only reason for the overwhelming majority of businesses to take on the significant cost burden of migrating systems. The fact of the matter is that XP is well known, deployed and just plain works. It has just plain worked for so many years that at this point many XP machines have been deployed for so many years that they are out of warranty. The net result is that you replace the hardware at the same time you migrate the computer to the new OS for cost reasons. When Microsoft ends support for an OS many vendors likewise end their support for their applications.
The fact that Win 8 is crap means jack as the enterprise will simply buy Windows 8 and use downgrade rights to deploy Windows 7. The crap your spewing will only hold sway for some small businesses and the proverbial Grandma Nellie that only uses her computer to look at pictures of her Grand-kids.
Some good points, something to add to this is that Red Hat support typically costs more than Microsoft support. I like Linux for many things, but the idea that it is automatically cheaper for any given production use is a fallacy. An operating system is and should be a tool and never a religion.
Considering I've managed quite a few thousand thin clients over the years I think I'm on pretty firm ground. Thin clients booting over PXE have been around for a very long time. There is absolutely nothing about thin clients that changes any of my points.
Patch Tuesday? Patch Management is an issue that affects all platforms and requires professional support regardless of your operating system. It also involves all of your applications and that easily requires as much work as the OS itself. There is nothing special about Microsoft in this regard. Half my fleet is OS X and I've implemented Patch Management to support Unix and Linux over the years.
Your either talking out of your ass or simply incompetent by thinking you don't need to patch your environment.
Wake on LAN for maintenance is something that sounds great in practice. Wake your computers up at 2 AM, perform all of your maintenance and put them back to sleep. Unfortunately it doesn't work very well in production and reliability is a huge issue. If you can get it to work you can use it to reduce some load by scheduling maintenance overnight. However in practice it tends to fail and your back to your problem with everything happening first thing in the morning.
Daytime maintenance windows avoid these issues entirely and don't impact the user in a perceivable way. I've implemented this on hundreds of thousands of systems over the years and the only times I have ever had a user complaint is when a package was misconfigured and didn't run silently as it was supposed to. It's the difference between something that should work with no theoretical impact and something that does work with no perceivable impact.
When I first started deploying full disk encryption in the late 90's it was a significant burden on the computer. It could easily take over a day to encrypt the drive and performance was castrated on any computer. That was an eternity in technology though and today you can typically run full disk encryption with about a 2% load.
I've worked with environments where anything that could be was encrypted, from the disk to routine traffic (email etc). With today's computers you should never have more than a 5% impact on performance with even the most strenuous security measures. I'm inclined to think that their scanners have been misconfigured if they are having that kind of impact.
I've been an infrastructure architect for environments that include heavy government regulation at multiple large enterprises. I've dealt with everything from HIPAA, DOD, SOX, PCI, FERPA, FDA and so on. I've also worked a fair bit Euro and Asian regulatory environments at multinationals. I've done these things at environments from large health insurance companies to financial companies at stock exchanges to working with DOD contractors to large multinational pharmaceuticals.
There is no reason for their support costs to be anywhere this high, even when you include everything you mention. This is why you utilize enterprise management tools to manage your computers. This is why you pay for a professional lab, use change management, standardize the desktop, use HII, use packages, and have strong policies. Even with the costs to professionally manage everything you should be at well less than a fourth of the support costs that they mention.
IL certification costs money, but there is no reason for it to cost anywhere that much money. All that being said the "just buy iPads" bit is enough for me to consider her incompetent and whole heartedly agree with your statement "she really does know nothing about large infrastructure design, planning and implementation"
They could start by making some changes that cost nothing and would reduce their boot times. Most critical of all is the need to use an enterprise management tool (Altiris etc.) to run the fleet and automate maintenance. This alone combined with a competent staff and policies that allow them to use best practices should drop maintenance costs by 75% within a year.
For an immediate free impact you can start by stopping the scheduling everything to run overnight! This doesn't work when combined with shutting down PC's. The net result is that as soon as you turn the computer on it immediately starts processing 'overdue' jobs. Your now combining boot up, establishing connections, software distribution, patching, antivirus scans, inventory scans with the time of day the user most pays attention to their computer - first thing in the morning.
This problem is readily fixed at no cost by using maintenance windows during the day hours for anything that doesn't require a reboot. Anything that runs in the day can be throttled and set to run silently. Run your virus scan at 10, patch at 12, distribute software at 2 and so on. By distributing the load during day hours, after the computer is up and running your cup of coffee boot ups. By scheduling things you avoid the user impact and perception issue and insure the computer is powered on when you need it.
Were living in what could well be a future dark age for archeologists / historians. Hardly anything is put into a nice hard format (stone is incredibly rare and metal gets stolen) for someone to find. What's left suffers from incompatible file formats, acid based paper that decomposes, bit rot, cryptography, incompatible technology for data storage and worst of all DRM. With DRM you have active measures that try to prevent something from being usable.
In the old days people stopped use with armed guards, obfuscation and primitive crypto. Today we have servers that are required for operational functionality for many products. With the advent of the cloud you have reasons for storing things where you have a dependency on a third party. How many services that are cloud / server based have come about and gone tits up?
Even having a large well known brand name doesn't protect you from having a server shut down. Just think of Microsoft's play4sure service that lasted less than a decade. Having a license and a physical disk isn't that helpful when the DRM requires an authentication server that doesn't exist. With the movement to put more and more DRM into the cloud or with SSL certificates (again dependent upon servers and naturally time bombed) this is going to be a problem that will only grow worse.
Learning to break DRM is far more critical than file formats which require nothing more than a conversion tool.
Microsoft has both gaming and workplace computers to lose. Present market dominance isn't a guarantee of future succes(e.g. IBM). There are really three viable ways that Microsoft can lose ownership of workplace PC's.
1. Apple finally gets their head out of their ass and adopts enterprise best practices (PXE, virtualization support etc).
2. Google starts extending Android (not Chrome) to desktops as users have accepted this and it would be easy for them adapt from their phone to their desktop.
3. Microsoft continues to shoot themselves in the foot.
Frankly the most viable of these is for Microsoft to continue to shoot themselves in the foot. 8.1 will restore boot to desktop, however they completely missed the mark on the Start Menu. The workplace market is still stuck with users being dumped into the modern interface by the Start button. Microsoft is forcing people to use Modern despite overwhelming user rejection of the interface as unusable. They are doing this as Modern applications all have to go through the market where Microsoft takes a cut of every sale.
I'm not going to have tens of thousands of people dumped into Modern every time they want to launch an application. It's a no brain decision to stick with Windows 7. The other aspect is by Microsoft forcing a vastly different user interface on people they have now opened / forced people into accepting that their interface is going to be significantly different. Frankly without this foot in the door it wouldn't be possible for any meaningful market share loss.
Why should your non-profit survive when compared to any of the others? The overwhelming majority are staffed with good people with good intentions who work for very little money. The problem is one over-saturation for the market and a donation fatigue from a public that is burned out. There are hundreds of thousands of non-profits in the US alone and every single one of them thinks that /they/ are the most important.
When a business starts to think that they 'deserve' our money we accuse them of entitlement (e.g. Circuit City) and vilify them. A non-profit really isn't any different in that they serve a function that costs money and in order to survive need to take in money. Like a business they can merge, be bought or go bankrupt.
Frankly if more non-profits started to merge it would enable greater economies of scale and efficiencies, just like a business. It would also enable them to spend more money on their mission and less money on overhead. Services from secretarial to bandwidth to phone banks could be shared at greater efficiency across more organizations.
Perhaps my answer seems callous, but the bottom line is that no organization is entitled to survive. Non-profits need to embrace what the business world has done and go through a series of mergers for the greater good. Are your clients better served by your merging with another organization because you are stretched so thin that you are no longer effective?
People typically start and run non-profits because their ego tells them that they can do better than the person already running a like kind service. Society as a whole would benefit enormously if non-profits put their missions before their egos. These warm hearted organizations need some cold blooded business acumen.
I do believe that was my point, that VM's should be treated as "real" and not to get hung up on the fact that they are virtual.
The locale where it would hit is probably not feasible to evacuate. Pick a spot on earth that would be affected, middle of Africa, major city, farmland, doesn't matter. Now, propose a plan on how to evacuate that area that will work in the real world. Start by looking at examples of 'mandatory' evacuations in recent history for hurricanes, volcanoes, wild fires and the like. Point being that evacuations only work in the movies and even then they rarely work as they should. Evacuation also doesn't do anything for atmospheric affects, and those are what are said to kill most of the dinosaurs.
You have to either destroy it or deflect it, those are the only realistic choices. If you destroy it you have many small pieces that impact in a series of impacts instead of all at once. Most of the smaller pieces will simply burn up in the atmosphere. The larger pieces may or may not hit the earth (some will maintain trajectory, many will be deflected out of the way). Those pieces that do hit will still cause damage, however they have far less mass.
To put in perspective the earth gets hit by small amounts of material every day and most people never notice. To quote NASA "Every day, the Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-size particles." If those same 100 tons of debris hit as a single asteroid the damage would be quite devastating. By spreading out the impact into a series of smaller impacts you reduce the damage that would occur.
Sorry, just because the message is one that some might like I can't get past the messenger. The BSA has spent decades lying to the public and politicians and using math that would never pass muster in any college in the developed world. They have lost any and all possible credibility they could ever possibly have, especially when it comes to on of their 'reports'.
I'm sure this will offend a lot of people here that are open source fans who would love to cite this. However I'm not about to become a hypocrite and give them credibility now just because they are saying something more palatable.
Agreed, that contributes to the need for a properly set up VLAN. You can't rely on the fact that the machines are virtual to handle your security.
The fact that your using VM's is largely moot and goes back to the line of thought that VM's are somehow not 'real' computers. VM's run the same operating systems, software, have the same bugs, vulnerabilities and everything else as a physical computer. You need to patch them just like any other computer and you need to license them just like a regular computer. The fact that they are VM's really only makes two differences practical differences that matter, fist is that is easy to roll them back and second is that your aren't running on bare metal.
In other words you have a core issue that needs addressed of giving students root access to a computer. In an isolated environment this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Understand that they exploit root and see what they can do with it, however they are there to learn and if you can do so safely and without disruption of what your trying to teach then let them. Your focus needs to be on making it safe for those around them and that means making sure your VLAN and any related Internet access are properly setup. The lab is a lab and as long as you can make sure they aren't getting access to anyone persons computer than let them have at it.
A good rule of thumb is to roll your sessions back prior to the start of every single class. This always gives a fresh machine and the students will quickly learn how to set their VM just the way they want it.
Misleading headline is misleading, he was check into the mental health ward for an evaluation after acting like a nut. The fact that he has views that are generally only held by nutcases didn't help his case.
Guy is one of those conspiracy theory whack jobs that thinks societies refusal to consider his conspiracy theories makes him a political target. Sometimes when society thinks your ideas are crazy you just might be crazy.
Retailers have been doing this kind of thing for many, many years. The first indoor big box shopping mall every built (Southdale) was built just to have a place to attach a Dayton's store too. I got my start in IT in operations for a large retailer, working with the real estate team in setting up and closing down store properties was part of my job. Many retailers have as much business in real estate as they do in retail and this has been the case for years.
By way of point Home Depots are often located near Target or Walmart since they buy large tracts of land for their stores and as a defensive measure to keep the other companies store from being put up nearby. They then use the best space for their own and develop strip malls around their property. When they have a lot just the right size for a big box retailer they will lease it to someone like Home Depot just to keep the land from being used by the competitors as many cities have will build taxes for unused property.
McDonalds has been known to buy a large tract of land and build a strip mall just to ensure that they get a restaurant in a prime location. When stores closed down the realtors then find other uses for the store. This is something that the retailers have been doing for decades with professionally run and managed real estate companies that they own. There are even special tax exemptions to allow these operations with special discounts.
When Icahn wanted to do a hostile takeover on Target a year or two back his highest priority to get in - sell their property off for great profit - and get out. The only thing that is new about this case is that Sears wants to get into the data center hosting business. If they bring in professionals (which the article says is exactly what they are doing) to run it there is no reason that you couldn't see Sears do very well in a very short time doing this.
Gawker is spending $200,000 to get a rise out of embarrassing a politician. It would be far to use it for something such as donating to the EFF, fighting the next SOPA or some other similar cause. Donating personal money for this cause is something only a tool would do.
Unless your sick you should not take antibiotics as it raises your resistance to them. Save them for when you need them and they will work much better.