If you work only with computers lenses are probably a better idea.
If you also work with chemicals or anything that can splash into your eye (even trivial cleaner fluid) never ever even think of a contact lens. Once you get something nasty in your eye the body will refuse to keep it open for you to take the lens out. Washing, eye rinse, etc will not help because whatever got in your eye will get under the lens. Best case - eye damage. Worst case loss of an eye.
I saw this only once and I still cannot forget the person's screams more than 15 years on. As a result I wear glasses and will recommend glasses to any geek that sometimes has to deal with mechanical tools or chemicals and not just computers.
95%+ of the SPAM reduction on Yahoo is due to the use of greylisting. Essentially the mail server simulates that it is unavailable to anyone it does not know as a well behaved relay. A well designed MTA will come back and deliver the mail later and the server will accept it. A SPAM zombie will skip to the next target.
A probe will be judged a zombie until proven opposite. A probe that does not try to deliver mail or do anything usefull will cause the SPAM ranking of the originating IP to go up until firewall shielding rules are deployed. From there on you cannot even reach the servers in question until the entry expires. In addition to that well behaved MTAs go to MXes in a predictable order. Anything hitting MXes in a different order is immediately considered a SPAMBOT and will cause the greylisting code to either set a "refuse" with a high timeout on it or (if the code is there) to raise firewall shields outright to tarpit any connections from the BOT. This also essentially disallows you to test any specific host for MX connectivity without testing the entire MX pool in correct order. If you do, you guarantee yourself a blacklist entry which will be generated automatically on the fly.
By the look of it this pretty much summarises what has happened here. Quite funny actually. It is indicative of the current crop of "security companies" and professionals. They claim understanding of security without knowing how things are done.
Yahoo is a heavy user of greylisting. I would expect any of their servers to break connections, refuse connections and even deploy firewall rules including tarpitting to anything their greylisting algorithm finds annoying. In fact I am pretty sure about the first two, dunno about the last item. I am planning on doing it on the servers I run, I would be surprised if they do not have it already. After all they have a huge department that does nothing else but mail for themselves and their resale customers.
Move along people, simply the dot.bomb times are back. Yet another metric company making big noises about the fact that someone BIG looks bad on their metric. Reason is most likely that the metric is badly designed and does not take current large scale mail handling practices into account. We have all been there a few years ago when everybody and his dog was pushing metrics around just before the bubble collapsed. Move along, nothing new here.
If you are doing it yourself the choice is between OpenVPN and OpenVPN.
Advantages:
Ease of setup. Once you have an SSL CA setup the OpenVPN part is a piece of cake
Possibility to use multiple links, load balance, failover, hang yourself by any means necessary. See Caveats though...
Possibility to use QoS and run VOIP on top with no worries. While IPSEC security is considerably better studied than OpenVPN (this does not mean it is better, it is just a devil we know), IPSEC has a major failing. In its most common VPN use which is tunnel mode it is utter piece of horrid shite as far as QoS is concerned. Shameless plug: you can lift off QoS setup for OpenVPN off my website
Possibility to get hardware acceleration on the cheap. It is trivial to get OpenVPN to work with an SSL library which has via padlock support. A padlock capable motherboard is around 120$. This theoretically gives you 50Mbit hardware accelerated AES. Practically - see caveats
Ease of debug and understanding. It provides you with the notion of interface. You can tcpdump it, collect stats, check its status, you name it. You do not get any of that with IPSEC.
What you need to keep in mind are a list of
Caveats:
OpenVPN will copy from userland to kernel and back to perform its task. As a result it has a speed limit per client which cannot be worked around. It is a fundamental limitation and is around 5MBit per client (multiple clients bandwidth grows as a log of the number to a total of around 15-20MBit). For a distributed installation or road warriors this may prove to your advantage, because no single client can eat all the resources. There is always some resource to go around. If you want higher speeds on a single encrypted point to point link you are better off with IPSEC transport mode overlay of IP-in-IP or IPSEC overlay of PPTP.
OpenVPN route mechanism has minimal error checks and will bugger up your routing table majestically of you decide to do something really fancy. If you want to run a large distributed infrastructure you have to run quagga and use OSPF or RIP for routing. Either works fine provided that you can do them and you use peer-to-peer mode of OpenVPN. This also allows you to interoperate nicely with any failover within your network and this is something you never get out of IPSEC.
You cannot use the Server mode of OpenVPN along with routing protocols. Actually I think that there are some fixes in the Quagga CVS head that will allow this but I will advise against this. This is a mode for road warriors. If you want infrastructure you better set your tunnels properly as peer mode ones.
If you are doing it vs someone else, especially someone with an overgrown IT department full of certification waving droids you have to use IPSEC. I have had some bad experience with SWAN varieties and personally I would suggest using Racoon and the KAME stack. Anything else aside they have some good debugging and so far I have managed to make them interop versus every implementation I have tried.
The army will probably try to stop this by mandating it not be done.
Once upon a time it could force that it is not done. This is what levels of security above C and OSes like Trusted Solaris were all about. Not about being unhackable, but about it being impossible to copy data from a higher security container to a lower. Granted, someone with high enough security clearance and rights to declare his USB drive "secure" could have gotten past that as well, but the average PHB wannabie corporate ladder climber could not do anything about it. He could not "take work home".
This is also coming back. The slashdot crowd keeps bitching about Vista DRM being Digital Wrongs Management and being mostly promoted by pigopolists. Once again wrong. Along with AD it will allow any corporation to force a mandatory encryption policy on all the data on all media in the house at the click of a mouse. Throw in this the usage of TPM chips on all Vista ready PCs and this will make any data that a corporation wants to make unrecoverable without proper access credential on a PC really unrecoverable. All of this centrally controlled. This will also result in much faster adoption of Vista in the enterprise than people can even think off, especially for mobile devices.
This also means that if Linux is to compete for the desktop it will have to have the same features regardless of Stallmans desires. This is one thing on which Linus is absolutely right. The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise. Having this will be essential to the success of any OS out there in 2-3 years. Also, there is no problem with DRM being opensource. Essentially DRM is nothing but a crypto application. Same as with every good crypto - having the source should not allow one to break it.
Agree. It is also old news as far as less developed countries are concerned. This shit is standard armament on Russian T90 http://www.shipunov.com/eng/bron/drozd.htm and Chinese T98. I am surprised yanks do not have it (I though they did) and I am even more surprised that they have to get it from Israel.
I would not be so sure. We are just about coming to the time where advertisement and placement revenue can recoup costs of mobile data (or SMS). Similarly, VOIP has been driving costs of voice into the ground. They are nearly there where you would like a transport for search to be.
It is quite possible that we will hear more about this one.
Fair points on all accounts. Still, it is time we look for better transmissions. The current are all rehashes from the old good BT7 transmission. Initially american design, russianized in 1930-es and reimported back by the Americans (yep, history repeats itself again and again and again).
We have reached the limit of what it can do. If we want to go further we have to look at something cardinally different. The ball grid idea which Poles (IIRC) came up with was great. There were others.
Do you have an operational manned space vehicle at the moment. Oooooooops not... Let's ship some americans in space on a russian rocket.
That about says it. But I will continue.
Been to Venus? Mars is a walk in the woods by comparison. Ooooooooops not...
Had a working space station for 20+ years? Oooooooops not...
By the way at that level of foaming you may choke on your own foam at some point.
And by the way - if NASA designed the rover for their lifetime so far it would have designed them with a CLUTCH. Now, I strongly suspect that they did not do this for a reason. If they planned a mission that long they would have had the project smacked silly at budget time in the Senate. So they sneaked it through the back door. American design forced by American realities. Senate to be more exact (I did not say NASA anywhere in my original post). Imagine yourself in the shoes of the person in NASA trying to explain a budget subcommitee in the Senate that "the rover needs a clutch and this is why it will be heavier by X pounds". What a laugh. Unless you are the person explaining this.
Clutches allow full mechanical wheel disengage. That increases survivability.
You are right for the short predicted lifespan of the rovers.
For their actual lifespan so far - dunno. If there will be one more wheel failure the rover is dead. If it had a mechanical wheel disengage it could have survived with only one functional motor remaining on either side.
As far as the designs are concerned it is still a rehash of old and actually bad designs. There are much more interesting all terrain transmission designs out there nowdays. Forgot who did it (it was neither the Russian, nor the yanks) but someone in the mid-80es came up with a 4xQuad (or Hex) Ball transmission. The balls roll at angles of 90 or 60 and the holding cart simultaneously rotates. Looks extremely weird, but gives much better performance on sand or muck than the good old wheels. There were a few other designs as well.
First of all I did. The clutch in question is actually different from the clutch on a car. It is a complete mechanical disengage. Freewheel. So that the wheel does not drag. It should be a one-way operation as well. As such implementing it takes replacing several normal bolts with explosive ones. Not that much more weight, but considerably improved survivability.
Its a pity Slashdot does not have moderation "+1 Good FlameBait".
You define sabotage the american way - blowing things up for god, the president and the country. Sabotage can be considerably more supple.
Chaining yourself to a ship or blocking the exit of a harbour is a form of sabotage. It is usually completely illegal but as a result the ship does not leave port. Dumping a dead whale onto an Embassy driveway is also a form of sabotage. Deliberately entering a prohibited nuclear testing range with a fleet of ships is also a form of sabotage.
Granted - nothing is blown up, but some things still happen none the less.
There are different kinds of trash we dump on the third world:
Dumping toxic trash that does not generate technology jobs and does not promote education. Essentially this is using cheap labour to perform "guaranteed death" jobs. The two asbestos ladden french ships which India and Bangladesh refused entry to recently are good examples.
Dumping trash that is not toxic, which does not generate any jobs, promotes black market, feeds the local mafia in the process and kills jobs in the native industry in the country in question. A good example are all charities that collect clothing and ship it to the third world. Every item of clothing shipped this way means one less item produced by the local factories. On top of that at least in some countries the distribution channel is throughly controlled by the local organised crime so it can bypass any sanitary controls by bribing.
Dumping toxic trash that generates some technology jobs and promotes at least some education without killing the directly involved. It may still kill years later leaking from landfill but there is no direct problem with it just yet. An example are computers as in the article.
I definitely agree with you as far as waste processing/ship breaking and killing local industry is concerned. Case 1 and 2 are crimes and the more is done to deal with them the better. GreenPeace keeps a list of the asbestos death ships and does an extremely good job raising public awareness and outright sabotaging the attempts to send them to third world breaker yards. Want no more ships to reach India and kill people there - give them some money (disclaimer - I do).
Few people do anything as far as the clothing dumping. The BBC did a decent documentary on it but it has not sunk in at least here (UK). People still donate to various charities especially religious which dump it to the third world.
As far as the article subject is concerned. Well... As someone who has processed "donations" in an ex-behind-iron-curtain country I can tell you that they make a difference compared to ship breaking or clothing dumping because they:
create local qualified jobs
go mostly into education, science and charities
The state of an average donation is so bad that it takes several man hours per computer to get it to be anywhere near useable. After that it is put to good use sometimes as long as 7+ years. By the time it goes to landfill the recipient country may as well have reasonable laws. I do not like the idea very much, but I have to admit that there may be some benefit from it.
I know that I will get modded down by some "dixie gung-ho we are the best of the world" fanboy, but the only reason for it to drag the wheel instead of freerolling it is that it is an American design.
If you compare the Spirit design with the Russian Moon rover series (aka Lunokhod) you will immediately notice one striking difference. The american design has something missing. It is called a CLUTCH. Yeah, I know, an extremely foreign concept for 95%+ of the American population.
If the wheels were individually clutched the way they were on the old Russian moon exploration vehicles it would have been happily cruising at slightly reduced power instead of dragging its wheel.
Even if you are suicidally intent you still have to have a delivery system unless you want use suicide infectors. Otherwise the chance that you have infected a big enough population sample to cause a pandemic is rather slim.
The SARS debacle showed how quick can developed (and less developed) countries act when necessary to isolate a disease spread. Most importantly all the IR scan equipment procured for the Airports during SARS is still there and operational. Try to pass through Heathrow with a 38C flu. It will be an entertaining experience (had that one myself long before SARS). There is an on duty doctor and an X-ray as well as some rapid test equipment. They let me go that time (this was long before 9/11), but I do not believe that they will let anyone go today.
Everyone and his dog has access to bioweapon design and production capabilities. Once you have got your hands on a sample of virulent bacteria like Antrax producing them is a piece of cake. Viruses are considerably more tricky but it is still feasible to produce the less fussy ones with student lab level equipment. Actually with viruses your biggest problem would be isolation, not production.
So far so good, here everyone would ask why all the dictator wannabies and terrorists are not slugging each other with biowarfare?
Well the answer is simple, while producing bioweapons can be done in a garage, producing a viable delivery system is something much more difficult. Testing it is even more difficult. This is clearly beyond the capabilities of most terrorists and dictatorships out there. And thanks $DEITY, otherwise we all would have been walking around wearing filter masks and wearing biowarfare suits on public transport.
If it had an PCMCIA it would have been built in. As it does not have one, I have to use a serial to a 5 year old Benefon (write off with a dead battery and broken screen).
From there on it of course depends on the cellular working, but after all so does BB. It does not depend on the firewall, it does not depend on a separate BES server, it does not depend on the internet working and it does not depend on RIM being alive and not swamped by a fat DDOS. Exactly as I said.
It took me 40 minutes to write the actual delivery agent and around 20 more minutes to get it interfaced into exim. It has required exactly 0 man minutes of maintenance since for a fourth year running. Compare that to an average BES install and judge for yourself.
While what you say is true in principle the reality does not get even close.
In order to prioritise on BB you need to have perfect or nearly perfect mail delivery filters that are guaranteed to be applied prior to the mail being picked up by BES. Not a single one of the corporate email systems officially supported by BES is even close to fitting this description. Exchange has always been a piece of sh** as far as filtering is concerned (regexps in an exchange filter on a custom field anyone?), Lotus is not much better and Group(un)wise is not far off from either one of these.
So in reality you get all of your emails, get distracted, interrupted, your concentration broken and after that you can prioritise.
Err.. No... Thanks... I like to be disturbed only when there is a real emergency. This is best done with an email-to-SMS interface.
First - it is 20+ times cheaper to run per user.
Second - it can be made to rely on a single box to run - the mail server. For comparison, BB in order to operate requires your email infrastructure to run properly, your firewall infrastructure to run properly, the Internet connectivity to run properly, BES to run properly, RIM itself to run properly and the GSM operator internet connectivity to run properly. That is a fat and long bill of materials for an emergency warning system. Definitely too long to my liking.
By the way, out of all obvious targets RIM is the only one yet to be hit with a good oldfashioned DDOS. It will be entertaining to watch the congresscritters jump up and down when it finally happens (provided that you are not the person responsible for running BES in your company).
The shuttle has no breaks, neither does SpaceShip 1. Extra weight which has no or little use. The former uses parachutes to break and the latter uses a slide instead of a front wheel which doubles up as a friction break. Dunno about Buran, but I would not be surprised if it has no breaks either.
There are people who are using specialised software for this and it is a well developed industry.
For example:
Most UK Nildram customers with a static IP have a hostname in the form username.gotadsl.co.uk. Nildram has minimal restrictions on services which you can run (only SMTP is subject to relay check, everything else is fare game). It is also an old business ISP so most people on static IPs are actually running something on these addresses.
So as a result some enterprising individual is running a dedicated typosquatting service. In fact it has been running it for quite a while.
If you query any address in the domain goatadsl.co.uk you will always get the following answer:
$dig arivanov.goatadsl.co.uk arivanov.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
Similarly, $dig aivanov.goatadsl.co.uk aivanov.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
And $dig utterbollocks.goatadsl.co.uk utterbollocks.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
I have not tried what is on that IP, but it is a classic typosquatting on an industrial scale. It has been there for at least a year now, possibly longer.
This is just an example off the top of my head. I bet that there are plenty others out there.
The bloated rolling non-sporty geek is an American phenomenon.
In all my years of working in EU I have never had more than 2-3% of these in the company. In fact the IT industry in most EU countries is generally more healthy than the remaining population.
I am one of the least sporty individuals in my company (which is a typical UK telecoms/IT shop) and I always walk for at least 20 minutes at lunch, cycle for 3 miles a day with a 4 year old on a tag-along whenever the weather allows (picking him up from the nursery is a perfect excuse for some exercise). On top of that I try to do at least 1 hour basketball or 1 hour swimming per week.
That does not prevent me from doing design work, coding and a bit of sysadmin here and there.
To summarize - geek lifestyle is whatever you make it. Being a rolling ball of fat does not make you a geek. Being a athelete does not exclude you from being a geek. At least outside US.
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If you work only with computers lenses are probably a better idea.
If you also work with chemicals or anything that can splash into your eye (even trivial cleaner fluid) never ever even think of a contact lens. Once you get something nasty in your eye the body will refuse to keep it open for you to take the lens out. Washing, eye rinse, etc will not help because whatever got in your eye will get under the lens. Best case - eye damage. Worst case loss of an eye.
I saw this only once and I still cannot forget the person's screams more than 15 years on. As a result I wear glasses and will recommend glasses to any geek that sometimes has to deal with mechanical tools or chemicals and not just computers.
You are amazingly pretty much on target.
95%+ of the SPAM reduction on Yahoo is due to the use of greylisting. Essentially the mail server simulates that it is unavailable to anyone it does not know as a well behaved relay. A well designed MTA will come back and deliver the mail later and the server will accept it. A SPAM zombie will skip to the next target.
A probe will be judged a zombie until proven opposite. A probe that does not try to deliver mail or do anything usefull will cause the SPAM ranking of the originating IP to go up until firewall shielding rules are deployed. From there on you cannot even reach the servers in question until the entry expires. In addition to that well behaved MTAs go to MXes in a predictable order. Anything hitting MXes in a different order is immediately considered a SPAMBOT and will cause the greylisting code to either set a "refuse" with a high timeout on it or (if the code is there) to raise firewall shields outright to tarpit any connections from the BOT. This also essentially disallows you to test any specific host for MX connectivity without testing the entire MX pool in correct order. If you do, you guarantee yourself a blacklist entry which will be generated automatically on the fly.
By the look of it this pretty much summarises what has happened here. Quite funny actually. It is indicative of the current crop of "security companies" and professionals. They claim understanding of security without knowing how things are done.
Yahoo is a heavy user of greylisting. I would expect any of their servers to break connections, refuse connections and even deploy firewall rules including tarpitting to anything their greylisting algorithm finds annoying. In fact I am pretty sure about the first two, dunno about the last item. I am planning on doing it on the servers I run, I would be surprised if they do not have it already. After all they have a huge department that does nothing else but mail for themselves and their resale customers.
Move along people, simply the dot.bomb times are back. Yet another metric company making big noises about the fact that someone BIG looks bad on their metric. Reason is most likely that the metric is badly designed and does not take current large scale mail handling practices into account. We have all been there a few years ago when everybody and his dog was pushing metrics around just before the bubble collapsed. Move along, nothing new here.
Advantages:
- Ease of setup. Once you have an SSL CA setup the OpenVPN part is a piece of cake
- Possibility to use multiple links, load balance, failover, hang yourself by any means necessary. See Caveats though...
- Possibility to use QoS and run VOIP on top with no worries. While IPSEC security is considerably better studied than OpenVPN (this does not mean it is better, it is just a devil we know), IPSEC has a major failing. In its most common VPN use which is tunnel mode it is utter piece of horrid shite as far as QoS is concerned. Shameless plug: you can lift off QoS setup for OpenVPN off my website
- Possibility to get hardware acceleration on the cheap. It is trivial to get OpenVPN to work with an SSL library which has via padlock support. A padlock capable motherboard is around 120$. This theoretically gives you 50Mbit hardware accelerated AES. Practically - see caveats
- Ease of debug and understanding. It provides you with the notion of interface. You can tcpdump it, collect stats, check its status, you name it. You do not get any of that with IPSEC.
What you need to keep in mind are a list ofCaveats:
- OpenVPN will copy from userland to kernel and back to perform its task. As a result it has a speed limit per client which cannot be worked around. It is a fundamental limitation and is around 5MBit per client (multiple clients bandwidth grows as a log of the number to a total of around 15-20MBit). For a distributed installation or road warriors this may prove to your advantage, because no single client can eat all the resources. There is always some resource to go around. If you want higher speeds on a single encrypted point to point link you are better off with IPSEC transport mode overlay of IP-in-IP or IPSEC overlay of PPTP.
-
OpenVPN route mechanism has minimal error checks and will bugger up your routing table majestically of you decide to do something really fancy. If you want to run a large distributed infrastructure you have to run quagga and use OSPF or RIP for routing. Either works fine provided that you can do them and you use peer-to-peer mode of OpenVPN. This also allows you to interoperate nicely with any failover within your network and this is something you never get out of IPSEC.
-
You cannot use the Server mode of OpenVPN along with routing protocols. Actually I think that there are some fixes in the Quagga CVS head that will allow this but I will advise against this. This is a mode for road warriors. If you want infrastructure you better set your tunnels properly as peer mode ones.
If you are doing it vs someone else, especially someone with an overgrown IT department full of certification waving droids you have to use IPSEC. I have had some bad experience with SWAN varieties and personally I would suggest using Racoon and the KAME stack. Anything else aside they have some good debugging and so far I have managed to make them interop versus every implementation I have tried.Once upon a time it could force that it is not done. This is what levels of security above C and OSes like Trusted Solaris were all about. Not about being unhackable, but about it being impossible to copy data from a higher security container to a lower. Granted, someone with high enough security clearance and rights to declare his USB drive "secure" could have gotten past that as well, but the average PHB wannabie corporate ladder climber could not do anything about it. He could not "take work home".
This is also coming back. The slashdot crowd keeps bitching about Vista DRM being Digital Wrongs Management and being mostly promoted by pigopolists. Once again wrong. Along with AD it will allow any corporation to force a mandatory encryption policy on all the data on all media in the house at the click of a mouse. Throw in this the usage of TPM chips on all Vista ready PCs and this will make any data that a corporation wants to make unrecoverable without proper access credential on a PC really unrecoverable. All of this centrally controlled. This will also result in much faster adoption of Vista in the enterprise than people can even think off, especially for mobile devices.
This also means that if Linux is to compete for the desktop it will have to have the same features regardless of Stallmans desires. This is one thing on which Linus is absolutely right. The usage of DRM by pigopolists is a current fad which is only a minor fraction of its actual use. The real use of DRM is to enforce a security policy on data across an enterprise. Having this will be essential to the success of any OS out there in 2-3 years. Also, there is no problem with DRM being opensource. Essentially DRM is nothing but a crypto application. Same as with every good crypto - having the source should not allow one to break it.
Agree. It is also old news as far as less developed countries are concerned. This shit is standard armament on Russian T90 http://www.shipunov.com/eng/bron/drozd.htm and Chinese T98. I am surprised yanks do not have it (I though they did) and I am even more surprised that they have to get it from Israel.
I would not be so sure. We are just about coming to the time where advertisement and placement revenue can recoup costs of mobile data (or SMS). Similarly, VOIP has been driving costs of voice into the ground. They are nearly there where you would like a transport for search to be.
It is quite possible that we will hear more about this one.
Fair points on all accounts. Still, it is time we look for better transmissions. The current are all rehashes from the old good BT7 transmission. Initially american design, russianized in 1930-es and reimported back by the Americans (yep, history repeats itself again and again and again).
We have reached the limit of what it can do. If we want to go further we have to look at something cardinally different. The ball grid idea which Poles (IIRC) came up with was great. There were others.
Err...
Do you have an operational manned space vehicle at the moment. Oooooooops not... Let's ship some americans in space on a russian rocket.
That about says it. But I will continue.
Been to Venus? Mars is a walk in the woods by comparison. Ooooooooops not...
Had a working space station for 20+ years? Oooooooops not...
By the way at that level of foaming you may choke on your own foam at some point.
And by the way - if NASA designed the rover for their lifetime so far it would have designed them with a CLUTCH. Now, I strongly suspect that they did not do this for a reason. If they planned a mission that long they would have had the project smacked silly at budget time in the Senate. So they sneaked it through the back door. American design forced by American realities. Senate to be more exact (I did not say NASA anywhere in my original post). Imagine yourself in the shoes of the person in NASA trying to explain a budget subcommitee in the Senate that "the rover needs a clutch and this is why it will be heavier by X pounds". What a laugh. Unless you are the person explaining this.
Clutches allow full mechanical wheel disengage. That increases survivability.
You are right for the short predicted lifespan of the rovers.
For their actual lifespan so far - dunno. If there will be one more wheel failure the rover is dead. If it had a mechanical wheel disengage it could have survived with only one functional motor remaining on either side.
As far as the designs are concerned it is still a rehash of old and actually bad designs. There are much more interesting all terrain transmission designs out there nowdays. Forgot who did it (it was neither the Russian, nor the yanks) but someone in the mid-80es came up with a 4xQuad (or Hex) Ball transmission. The balls roll at angles of 90 or 60 and the holding cart simultaneously rotates. Looks extremely weird, but gives much better performance on sand or muck than the good old wheels. There were a few other designs as well.
First of all I did. The clutch in question is actually different from the clutch on a car. It is a complete mechanical disengage. Freewheel. So that the wheel does not drag. It should be a one-way operation as well. As such implementing it takes replacing several normal bolts with explosive ones. Not that much more weight, but considerably improved survivability.
Second, I was joking (at least to some extent).
Its a pity Slashdot does not have moderation "+1 Good FlameBait".
You define sabotage the american way - blowing things up for god, the president and the country. Sabotage can be considerably more supple.
Chaining yourself to a ship or blocking the exit of a harbour is a form of sabotage. It is usually completely illegal but as a result the ship does not leave port. Dumping a dead whale onto an Embassy driveway is also a form of sabotage. Deliberately entering a prohibited nuclear testing range with a fleet of ships is also a form of sabotage.
Granted - nothing is blown up, but some things still happen none the less.
Bugger, misspelled the URL http://www.greenpeace.org/.
Damn...
There are different kinds of trash we dump on the third world:
I definitely agree with you as far as waste processing/ship breaking and killing local industry is concerned. Case 1 and 2 are crimes and the more is done to deal with them the better. GreenPeace keeps a list of the asbestos death ships and does an extremely good job raising public awareness and outright sabotaging the attempts to send them to third world breaker yards. Want no more ships to reach India and kill people there - give them some money (disclaimer - I do).
Few people do anything as far as the clothing dumping. The BBC did a decent documentary on it but it has not sunk in at least here (UK). People still donate to various charities especially religious which dump it to the third world.
As far as the article subject is concerned. Well... As someone who has processed "donations" in an ex-behind-iron-curtain country I can tell you that they make a difference compared to ship breaking or clothing dumping because they:
- create local qualified jobs
- go mostly into education, science and charities
The state of an average donation is so bad that it takes several man hours per computer to get it to be anywhere near useable. After that it is put to good use sometimes as long as 7+ years. By the time it goes to landfill the recipient country may as well have reasonable laws. I do not like the idea very much, but I have to admit that there may be some benefit from it.dragging a broken wheel around
I know that I will get modded down by some "dixie gung-ho we are the best of the world" fanboy, but the only reason for it to drag the wheel instead of freerolling it is that it is an American design.
If you compare the Spirit design with the Russian Moon rover series (aka Lunokhod) you will immediately notice one striking difference. The american design has something missing. It is called a CLUTCH. Yeah, I know, an extremely foreign concept for 95%+ of the American population.
If the wheels were individually clutched the way they were on the old Russian moon exploration vehicles it would have been happily cruising at slightly reduced power instead of dragging its wheel.
Even if you are suicidally intent you still have to have a delivery system unless you want use suicide infectors. Otherwise the chance that you have infected a big enough population sample to cause a pandemic is rather slim.
The SARS debacle showed how quick can developed (and less developed) countries act when necessary to isolate a disease spread. Most importantly all the IR scan equipment procured for the Airports during SARS is still there and operational. Try to pass through Heathrow with a 38C flu. It will be an entertaining experience (had that one myself long before SARS). There is an on duty doctor and an X-ray as well as some rapid test equipment. They let me go that time (this was long before 9/11), but I do not believe that they will let anyone go today.
You should not.
Everyone and his dog has access to bioweapon design and production capabilities. Once you have got your hands on a sample of virulent bacteria like Antrax producing them is a piece of cake. Viruses are considerably more tricky but it is still feasible to produce the less fussy ones with student lab level equipment. Actually with viruses your biggest problem would be isolation, not production.
So far so good, here everyone would ask why all the dictator wannabies and terrorists are not slugging each other with biowarfare?
Well the answer is simple, while producing bioweapons can be done in a garage, producing a viable delivery system is something much more difficult. Testing it is even more difficult. This is clearly beyond the capabilities of most terrorists and dictatorships out there. And thanks $DEITY, otherwise we all would have been walking around wearing filter masks and wearing biowarfare suits on public transport.
I will second that.
I have observed that on multiple occasions.
When I roll out an improvement to the antispam systems the BB users complain to the BB admin that the system is broken.
If it had an PCMCIA it would have been built in. As it does not have one, I have to use a serial to a 5 year old Benefon (write off with a dead battery and broken screen).
From there on it of course depends on the cellular working, but after all so does BB. It does not depend on the firewall, it does not depend on a separate BES server, it does not depend on the internet working and it does not depend on RIM being alive and not swamped by a fat DDOS. Exactly as I said.
It took me 40 minutes to write the actual delivery agent and around 20 more minutes to get it interfaced into exim. It has required exactly 0 man minutes of maintenance since for a fourth year running. Compare that to an average BES install and judge for yourself.
While what you say is true in principle the reality does not get even close.
In order to prioritise on BB you need to have perfect or nearly perfect mail delivery filters that are guaranteed to be applied prior to the mail being picked up by BES. Not a single one of the corporate email systems officially supported by BES is even close to fitting this description. Exchange has always been a piece of sh** as far as filtering is concerned (regexps in an exchange filter on a custom field anyone?), Lotus is not much better and Group(un)wise is not far off from either one of these.
So in reality you get all of your emails, get distracted, interrupted, your concentration broken and after that you can prioritise.
Err.. No... Thanks... I like to be disturbed only when there is a real emergency. This is best done with an email-to-SMS interface.
First - it is 20+ times cheaper to run per user.
Second - it can be made to rely on a single box to run - the mail server. For comparison, BB in order to operate requires your email infrastructure to run properly, your firewall infrastructure to run properly, the Internet connectivity to run properly, BES to run properly, RIM itself to run properly and the GSM operator internet connectivity to run properly. That is a fat and long bill of materials for an emergency warning system. Definitely too long to my liking.
By the way, out of all obvious targets RIM is the only one yet to be hit with a good oldfashioned DDOS. It will be entertaining to watch the congresscritters jump up and down when it finally happens (provided that you are not the person responsible for running BES in your company).
You are right. It is a star record.
It is still typosquatting none the less. Just squatting on a different thing (user websites).
Yes. You are damn right actually.
The shuttle has no breaks, neither does SpaceShip 1. Extra weight which has no or little use. The former uses parachutes to break and the latter uses a slide instead of a front wheel which doubles up as a friction break. Dunno about Buran, but I would not be surprised if it has no breaks either.
There are people who are using specialised software for this and it is a well developed industry.
For example:
Most UK Nildram customers with a static IP have a hostname in the form username.gotadsl.co.uk. Nildram has minimal restrictions on services which you can run (only SMTP is subject to relay check, everything else is fare game). It is also an old business ISP so most people on static IPs are actually running something on these addresses.
So as a result some enterprising individual is running a dedicated typosquatting service. In fact it has been running it for quite a while.
If you query any address in the domain goatadsl.co.uk you will always get the following answer:
$dig arivanov.goatadsl.co.uk
arivanov.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
Similarly,
$dig aivanov.goatadsl.co.uk
aivanov.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
And
$dig utterbollocks.goatadsl.co.uk
utterbollocks.goatadsl.co.uk. 86400 IN A 217.160.182.197
I have not tried what is on that IP, but it is a classic typosquatting on an industrial scale. It has been there for at least a year now, possibly longer.
This is just an example off the top of my head. I bet that there are plenty others out there.
To add to this.
The bloated rolling non-sporty geek is an American phenomenon.
In all my years of working in EU I have never had more than 2-3% of these in the company. In fact the IT industry in most EU countries is generally more healthy than the remaining population.
I am one of the least sporty individuals in my company (which is a typical UK telecoms/IT shop) and I always walk for at least 20 minutes at lunch, cycle for 3 miles a day with a 4 year old on a tag-along whenever the weather allows (picking him up from the nursery is a perfect excuse for some exercise). On top of that I try to do at least 1 hour basketball or 1 hour swimming per week.
That does not prevent me from doing design work, coding and a bit of sysadmin here and there.
To summarize - geek lifestyle is whatever you make it. Being a rolling ball of fat does not make you a geek. Being a athelete does not exclude you from being a geek. At least outside US.
I would not be so sure. At least until the country is governed by a government lead by Antonio Bliar.