Actually, social security is not part of the federal budget. That is a misleading figure from combining the Federal funds, and Federal Trust funds. Note on your paycheck stub that you pay 2 or 3 different fed accounts. Federal Income tax, which pays for military, and most other gov't stuff, is one item, usually, Social Security and medicare/medicaid come from other line items. These are paid for with trusts, not taxes. The Social Security TRUST is huge, amounting to trillions of dollars kept safe for social security, and used only to pay for social security. It does not take money from the federal taxes. NONE. However, congress keeps "borrowing" money from this trust for federal budget stuff, and promise to repay it in the indefinable "Future". So if you pull the x% that these huge budget items consume from the published "Budget" you will find that that 100Million is a heck of alot more percentage wise than it looks.
My town of 40k just spent something like 60,000 on deep diving equipment for the dive rescue team from a homeland security grant. We have 1 lake in the entire county that is deep enough to need this equipment. The counties view is "hey, its free federal money" Its not free, we are all paying for it.. Mulitply this by x number of stupid grants for stupid things, and you get a very, very large amount wasted.
There was an interesting piece in this months "Maxim" magazine.. Not an article, but a little sidebar. Showed that if your taxable income was $32k this year, you paid X amount for the war in Iraq. I forget the number, but it was around $125, and was something like 2/3 of a box of Ammo for an M16. (a couple of clips) Was kinda scary to read.
The Process of writing a flight control system, FAA control system, or even brake controller for a car goes through extensive, extensive review.. Often times, it is the government stepping in and reviewing it, and other times, it is the fact that if you devide by zero and your brakes stop working, someone will DIE, and you will get your pants sued off. (and the repercussion of people not buying your cars anymore because they are unsafe).
The flight control and FAA systems have a rigorus backup system, and redundancies. They have certification levels for the software developers, and even the install too! (like, good luck plugging your airport radar controller into a ordinary wall outlet, let alone one without a battery backup and generator, and you do test your generator monthly, right?). And all hardware is tested like crazy, and certified.. (you buy this system, with this power supply, this exact model of nic, etc) Their are paper trails, backups, redundant systems, etc..
If serious questions were raised about the accuracy of these systems (like has happened to diebold) the project would be put on hold, and all questions would be answered.. Often times, the source code has to go into "escrow" in case your company goes out of business too..
the Internet Security Center at sans.org had an interesting article about getting ready for defcon.. (in order to protect your privacy) While it does not go into very detailed how-to's, it does give a hell of a parnoid BOFH type mindset for defcon. There are some basic guidlines for secure connections using tunneling over SSL in that discussion..
So the question that LEAPS out at me, is how can they block groups.gooogle.com as being a "bad" site, and still allow access to slashdot? WTF??
Seriously, one of the problems has a relatively simple solution. Antivirus is running, and blocking SMTP. I am assuming that you run an "enterprise" edition of some anti-virus software. They probably have one group policy set for all machines, since everyone uses outlook or something.. This is not taking into account your groups machines, that need it to get work done. Usually,, you can create another "group" in the software, and give them slightly different configs.. (like letting SMTP through) and only putting your machines that NEED it in that group..
The other possiblity (wasn't explained well) is that they block port 25 on the network. This is a little more difficult. I personally have my routers set to deny any outbound port 25 connection that is not from a list of mail servers.. It gets logged, I get an email, and I have a pretty good idea what machine is infected with a virus... (also handy for other ports, 110, 443, 135, etc)
Egress filtering! its good to be a nice Net-Neighbor!
I am a government employee. (work at a small college). Had a broken Digital Projector. Called them up, described the problem, was told that $PART was broken, and it would be $2400 to fix. I kind of went silent for a few minutes, and pointed out that their new projectors of the same Lumens cost $1500. Do customers really do this? His response was that sometimes, especially with government accounts, there is no budget for new equipment, but money in the repair budget. I remember saying, "So instead of spending $1500 on a new projector with a warranty, they spend $2400 on repairing a 3 year old projector? Don't you feel good about where your tax dollars are going?" I have seen this far too many times in government. Rules are so strict and rigid (often because of abuses) that it is easier to spend twice as much money than to get approval to move the amount from one budget account to another..
I think the key to this working is looking at the recent partnerships between video.google.com and CBS, ABC, and the NBA. They can target you if your downloading or streaming the video's from their systems. They can profile your location, what other shows you watched, what ads you clicked on, etc. Seems to me that the combination of Cable boxes that use the Internet for updates (vs the phone lines the old ones used) and Digital broadcast TV, and a new wave of "tivo" type set top boxes might just start a revolution in broadcasting.. Imagine a "googleTV" broadcasting in the Digital TV range. Or just using a broadband box in your living room to stream your content directly from video.google.com.. (or itunes, or whatever). Why pay for Cable TV, when you can get it streamed into your home, just the shows you want, when you want them, and advertisers love it because the ads are targeted at the audience that it is geared to.
Is to let the RIAA have their way with tiered pricing.. Obviously, if new songs aren't being bought at $.99, they will be purchased in droves at $2.99 for that hit new single...
Am I incorrect, or didn't they sue Palm a few years ago over the "thumb keyboards" on the new treo's infringing on RIM's patents? Man, funny how Karma works..
Ditto to this.. We love ours.. You did not mention how many POTS lines you have, and how many desk phones. Shoretel has some hardware that comes in 3 flavors, the shoregear 8/12/24. These are sweet. Set aside the first 4 lines for your POTS to the central office, the 5th one for a fax machine, and the real cool thing is, for every analog port you disable on the device, it allows 5 IP phones to be used. We use the Shoregear PRI (for a 23-24 line telco t1 for phones, ) and a shoregear 24. This allows us faxes, alarm systems, credit card machines, a few old analog phones we didn't want to run ethernet to in other buildings, and 75 voip phones. I had the whole system up and running in 2 days, and really, 1.5 days of that was deploying the phones and showing people how they work. The voicemail stuff is absolutely sweet, runs on your own win2k3 server. Seriously, if you want more info, give me an email (up above) and i'll answer more questions.. No, i don't sell these, i'm just a very, very happy small school network admin..
I hate to respond to my own post, but if you look at Hamster Havoc you will find that cmdTaco made a silly video in the summer of 96. I know that a hamster is different from a mouse, but their genetic structure is very, very similar.
Amen, I am also at a college, and this has saved my tired little soul... Too many college textbooks contain CD's that have old versions of Authorware, and require Admin rights.. (newsflash to publishers!!! not many schools use Windows 95 and 98 anymore!). So, I setup everyone with admin rights, and freeze them.. Well worth the price any way you look at it. I have gone from spending huge amounts of time and bandwith reghosting machines that had crap installed to only ghosting once a term to make sure they have the newest software.. Total lifesaver.. I actually got a huge SHHH in the library the first time I tested deepfreeze, installed Kazaa, AIM, any other spyware I could think of, and rebooted.. I laughed with glee so loud I disturbed 40 students!
No where have I seen the dns address to query.. I would like to check my Named Logs, and see if there are any infected machines on my office network. (about 200pc's, most in student labs). Does anyone have any idea what the domain is that it searches for?
Is if Sony practices what they preach?? If I start sharing $SYS$Daredevil.AVI and $SYS$AllMetalicaSongs.mp3.zip, will their network monitoring tools not notice it? Seeing what they have done with their little rootkit, that seems only logical for them..
There is a large market for using embedded and custom hardware running a non-proprietary control program (like linux). There are a ton of embedded projects that use proprietary technology and put an Open OS on it. Think Linux running on motorola based embedded microcontrollers, or Intel or AMD microcontrollers..
There is a corallary saying to yours, that I personally believe.. "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a hell of a lot of fun!"
Really, I think you misunderstand Rural. We are not talking about BFE, where your neighbor is the driveway 10 miles down the dirt road. Rural in the US seems to be pretty much any town less than 100,000. (At least out here in the west). My rural town (Klamath Falls, OR) is 40k people, living in one basin, but with lots of sprawl. Lots are huge here, 1 acre lots in the middle of town are not uncommon at all. This is an old town, with very old infrastructure. (its actually very similar to Hermiston,OR in population density.) To wire up the town, it would take an insane amount of fiber, and then the last mile stuff. When the cable company wired up the town, it took dozens of teams to pull all the fiber. Figure those guys were making something like $30 an hour (prevailing wage). Figure on the sheer amount of equipment needed, trucks, fiber converters, tearing up streets, etc. Now, look at putting up 3 towers around town with wireless. Even if you have to pay $50k or more per tower, it is damn cheap. YOu can then turn around and sell your service for much less than a fixed infrastructure, because you have much less invested in installation and maintenance. And with cheaper service, especiallly in a "rural" town where the mean wage is much less then the bigger cities, your going to get a hell of a lot more customers. (lots of people can't afford $45/month for internet)
So, i guess my point, since i got sidetracked, is that smaller communities can be quickly setup, with it being very easy to "blanket" a smaller rural town, and start building up revenue streams. Especially when you consider that rural areas don't have as much competition. I could spend $150k, and get 5000 customers paying $15 a month all within a few months.. whereas in a bigger city, you could get more revenue per tower, but not nearly as quickly, as you need more towers to cover the city (higher infrastructure costs), and lots more competetion.
Yes, they enforce draconian "standards of decency" that are not documented. They used to have the "7 dirty words", and all broadcasters knew to avoid them. Now, anything goes. They assign frequencies, and enforce a undefined moral standard on the people. (for the children, of course!)
What on earth are you talking about? I've been to the bay area doesn't of times.. if there is one thing I have definately noticed, its that you can live under a bridge, but you sure as hell better have a Mercedes! Californian's without cars? Thats like Oregonians without rainjackets! (yeah, we rust, not tan)
Actually, while not directly connected to the internet, a College I work with has started to move all of their classroom flouresent lights to IP addressable dimmable balasts. This enables them to adjust the light, depending on the ambient light coming in from the windows, having certain lights dim when the network gets a broadcast saying the networked projector is turning on, alert maintenance when a light burns out, alert someone to the fact that the lights have turned on at 3 am and maybe security should head over and check it out, and other fun stuff.. Also, all their sound is now over IP. I know, this is not "over the internet" and does use private IP address space, but still, there are more IP devices coming out than you would think..
You forgot one little detail about the freedom of speech, that I think is rather important. You should have the right to protest when you want to. that is speaking.. You should not be sent to a "free speech zone" in a razor wire cage a mile from the event you are protesting.. National Security my ass!
Oh, and the other key part of the freedom of speach, the corallary I guess, (maybe the inverse).. I should have a right to not listen....
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, social security is not part of the federal budget. That is a misleading figure from combining the Federal funds, and Federal Trust funds. Note on your paycheck stub that you pay 2 or 3 different fed accounts. Federal Income tax, which pays for military, and most other gov't stuff, is one item, usually, Social Security and medicare/medicaid come from other line items. These are paid for with trusts, not taxes. The Social Security TRUST is huge, amounting to trillions of dollars kept safe for social security, and used only to pay for social security. It does not take money from the federal taxes. NONE. However, congress keeps "borrowing" money from this trust for federal budget stuff, and promise to repay it in the indefinable "Future". So if you pull the x% that these huge budget items consume from the published "Budget" you will find that that 100Million is a heck of alot more percentage wise than it looks.
My town of 40k just spent something like 60,000 on deep diving equipment for the dive rescue team from a homeland security grant. We have 1 lake in the entire county that is deep enough to need this equipment. The counties view is "hey, its free federal money" Its not free, we are all paying for it.. Mulitply this by x number of stupid grants for stupid things, and you get a very, very large amount wasted.
There was an interesting piece in this months "Maxim" magazine.. Not an article, but a little sidebar. Showed that if your taxable income was $32k this year, you paid X amount for the war in Iraq. I forget the number, but it was around $125, and was something like 2/3 of a box of Ammo for an M16. (a couple of clips) Was kinda scary to read.
My question to Slashdot is: How good is MythPC?
Your asking this to Slashdot? We can't decide if Apple, MS, and Google are good or bad.. We flip flop on this daily!
You might have gotten that fuel, before they saw your post on the slashdot, posted as "Marxist Hacker 42"
The flight control and FAA systems have a rigorus backup system, and redundancies. They have certification levels for the software developers, and even the install too! (like, good luck plugging your airport radar controller into a ordinary wall outlet, let alone one without a battery backup and generator, and you do test your generator monthly, right?). And all hardware is tested like crazy, and certified.. (you buy this system, with this power supply, this exact model of nic, etc) Their are paper trails, backups, redundant systems, etc..
If serious questions were raised about the accuracy of these systems (like has happened to diebold) the project would be put on hold, and all questions would be answered.. Often times, the source code has to go into "escrow" in case your company goes out of business too..
the Internet Security Center at sans.org had an interesting article about getting ready for defcon.. (in order to protect your privacy) While it does not go into very detailed how-to's, it does give a hell of a parnoid BOFH type mindset for defcon. There are some basic guidlines for secure connections using tunneling over SSL in that discussion..
So the question that LEAPS out at me, is how can they block groups.gooogle.com as being a "bad" site, and still allow access to slashdot? WTF??
Seriously, one of the problems has a relatively simple solution. Antivirus is running, and blocking SMTP. I am assuming that you run an "enterprise" edition of some anti-virus software. They probably have one group policy set for all machines, since everyone uses outlook or something.. This is not taking into account your groups machines, that need it to get work done. Usually,, you can create another "group" in the software, and give them slightly different configs.. (like letting SMTP through) and only putting your machines that NEED it in that group..
The other possiblity (wasn't explained well) is that they block port 25 on the network. This is a little more difficult. I personally have my routers set to deny any outbound port 25 connection that is not from a list of mail servers.. It gets logged, I get an email, and I have a pretty good idea what machine is infected with a virus... (also handy for other ports, 110, 443, 135, etc)
Egress filtering! its good to be a nice Net-Neighbor!
I am a government employee. (work at a small college). Had a broken Digital Projector. Called them up, described the problem, was told that $PART was broken, and it would be $2400 to fix. I kind of went silent for a few minutes, and pointed out that their new projectors of the same Lumens cost $1500. Do customers really do this? His response was that sometimes, especially with government accounts, there is no budget for new equipment, but money in the repair budget. I remember saying, "So instead of spending $1500 on a new projector with a warranty, they spend $2400 on repairing a 3 year old projector? Don't you feel good about where your tax dollars are going?" I have seen this far too many times in government. Rules are so strict and rigid (often because of abuses) that it is easier to spend twice as much money than to get approval to move the amount from one budget account to another..
I think the key to this working is looking at the recent partnerships between video.google.com and CBS, ABC, and the NBA. They can target you if your downloading or streaming the video's from their systems. They can profile your location, what other shows you watched, what ads you clicked on, etc. Seems to me that the combination of Cable boxes that use the Internet for updates (vs the phone lines the old ones used) and Digital broadcast TV, and a new wave of "tivo" type set top boxes might just start a revolution in broadcasting.. Imagine a "googleTV" broadcasting in the Digital TV range. Or just using a broadband box in your living room to stream your content directly from video.google.com.. (or itunes, or whatever). Why pay for Cable TV, when you can get it streamed into your home, just the shows you want, when you want them, and advertisers love it because the ads are targeted at the audience that it is geared to.
Is to let the RIAA have their way with tiered pricing.. Obviously, if new songs aren't being bought at $.99, they will be purchased in droves at $2.99 for that hit new single...
Am I incorrect, or didn't they sue Palm a few years ago over the "thumb keyboards" on the new treo's infringing on RIM's patents? Man, funny how Karma works..
Ditto to this.. We love ours.. You did not mention how many POTS lines you have, and how many desk phones. Shoretel has some hardware that comes in 3 flavors, the shoregear 8/12/24. These are sweet. Set aside the first 4 lines for your POTS to the central office, the 5th one for a fax machine, and the real cool thing is, for every analog port you disable on the device, it allows 5 IP phones to be used. We use the Shoregear PRI (for a 23-24 line telco t1 for phones, ) and a shoregear 24. This allows us faxes, alarm systems, credit card machines, a few old analog phones we didn't want to run ethernet to in other buildings, and 75 voip phones. I had the whole system up and running in 2 days, and really, 1.5 days of that was deploying the phones and showing people how they work. The voicemail stuff is absolutely sweet, runs on your own win2k3 server. Seriously, if you want more info, give me an email (up above) and i'll answer more questions.. No, i don't sell these, i'm just a very, very happy small school network admin..
I hate to respond to my own post, but if you look at Hamster Havoc you will find that cmdTaco made a silly video in the summer of 96. I know that a hamster is different from a mouse, but their genetic structure is very, very similar.
I think that what you meant to say was:
"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"
"Same thing we do every night, Pinky: Keep posting duplicate articles with bad grammar!"
Obviously, these articles are to prepare us for finding out the truth about cmdTaco..
Amen, I am also at a college, and this has saved my tired little soul... Too many college textbooks contain CD's that have old versions of Authorware, and require Admin rights.. (newsflash to publishers!!! not many schools use Windows 95 and 98 anymore!). So, I setup everyone with admin rights, and freeze them.. Well worth the price any way you look at it. I have gone from spending huge amounts of time and bandwith reghosting machines that had crap installed to only ghosting once a term to make sure they have the newest software.. Total lifesaver.. I actually got a huge SHHH in the library the first time I tested deepfreeze, installed Kazaa, AIM, any other spyware I could think of, and rebooted.. I laughed with glee so loud I disturbed 40 students!
No where have I seen the dns address to query.. I would like to check my Named Logs, and see if there are any infected machines on my office network. (about 200pc's, most in student labs). Does anyone have any idea what the domain is that it searches for?
she also mentioned the word Paradigm.. don't for get that one..
Is if Sony practices what they preach?? If I start sharing $SYS$Daredevil.AVI and $SYS$AllMetalicaSongs.mp3.zip, will their network monitoring tools not notice it? Seeing what they have done with their little rootkit, that seems only logical for them..
There is a large market for using embedded and custom hardware running a non-proprietary control program (like linux). There are a ton of embedded projects that use proprietary technology and put an Open OS on it. Think Linux running on motorola based embedded microcontrollers, or Intel or AMD microcontrollers..
There is a corallary saying to yours, that I personally believe.. "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a hell of a lot of fun!"
So, i guess my point, since i got sidetracked, is that smaller communities can be quickly setup, with it being very easy to "blanket" a smaller rural town, and start building up revenue streams. Especially when you consider that rural areas don't have as much competition. I could spend $150k, and get 5000 customers paying $15 a month all within a few months.. whereas in a bigger city, you could get more revenue per tower, but not nearly as quickly, as you need more towers to cover the city (higher infrastructure costs), and lots more competetion.
Yes, they enforce draconian "standards of decency" that are not documented. They used to have the "7 dirty words", and all broadcasters knew to avoid them. Now, anything goes. They assign frequencies, and enforce a undefined moral standard on the people. (for the children, of course!)
What on earth are you talking about? I've been to the bay area doesn't of times.. if there is one thing I have definately noticed, its that you can live under a bridge, but you sure as hell better have a Mercedes! Californian's without cars? Thats like Oregonians without rainjackets! (yeah, we rust, not tan)
Actually, while not directly connected to the internet, a College I work with has started to move all of their classroom flouresent lights to IP addressable dimmable balasts. This enables them to adjust the light, depending on the ambient light coming in from the windows, having certain lights dim when the network gets a broadcast saying the networked projector is turning on, alert maintenance when a light burns out, alert someone to the fact that the lights have turned on at 3 am and maybe security should head over and check it out, and other fun stuff.. Also, all their sound is now over IP. I know, this is not "over the internet" and does use private IP address space, but still, there are more IP devices coming out than you would think..
You forgot one little detail about the freedom of speech, that I think is rather important. You should have the right to protest when you want to. that is speaking.. You should not be sent to a "free speech zone" in a razor wire cage a mile from the event you are protesting.. National Security my ass!
Oh, and the other key part of the freedom of speach, the corallary I guess, (maybe the inverse).. I should have a right to not listen....