It seems an especially false economy because it is rather hard to "close" a school(or any other largish building, particularly in a cold climate, that is actively used much of the time) for short periods.
You can lock the doors and hang a "closed" sign, sure; but you've got to heat the place to keep the pipes from freezing, if in winter, there will likely be some lights you need to keep on, custodial and other support staff may need access to run around and do their thing, IT will want computers on to do patches(and probably won't ever want switch or server racks to be off...)
It just isn't trivial to turn a building on a dime(especially if it is an older unit with slightly cranky or inflexible climate control systems).
And, of course, beyond the material consideration, team finance would probably like to have a word or two with you about the opportunity costs, depreciation costs, and assorted other quantifications of the fact that letting useful stuff just sit there has downsides...
Kodak's mirror(ground to spec, unlike the one that made it up) is now on display somewhere. It never progressed to the metal-coating stage, so you can still see the interior lightweight stiffening structure, pretty cool looking.
Incidentally, would it have been crass for Kodak to send a little gift box containing a copy of the mirror spec and a pair of very strong reading glasses to Perkin-Elmer back when the optical problems were first discovered?
The likely plan in that vein would be to see if there is an NRO or DoD project with coattails of sufficient size. The Hubble itself is said to bear a bit of a family resemblance to the later 'Keyhole' surveillance satellites for financial and engineering reasons. There might be something going up that they could slap a slightly different optics package on and then point away from earth...
By a strange quirk of evolved usage, a 'witch hunt' is only a 'witch hunt' if there is substantial reason to believe that the witches you are hunting aren't actually witches. I'm assuming that, for the moment, there are still enough known regime enthusiasts available that they haven't started to descend into increasingly paranoid and erratic cullings...
Also, why on Earth would they evacuate the Pentagon AFTER the earthquake? Does that make any sense at all?
I'd sort of hope that the Pentagon would be built to better standards than that; but I can think of one reason you might evacuate after a quake: If the shaking cracked/sheared any gas lines, you could theoretically end up with a delightsome fuel-air situation in part of the building. In that case, you'd want the herd out of the building before the situation deteriorates.
With stronger quakes, or shoddier buildings, it isn't unheard of for buildings that don't collapse immediately to do so during the aftershocks, in which case you would prefer to be outside as well.(Again, though, serious risk of collapse in the face of a 5.8 should be a breach of any decent building code, much less the standards that you'd want your giant military headquarters/symbolic structure built to...)
I felt it in upper Manhattan. The building did a slight sway back and forth. First time I ever experience that. But Manhattan land is on solid bedrock, how could the quake effect reach here?
That's exactly how. Earthquakes travel from their epicenter by wave propagation. A nice, dense, more-or-less-continuous medium is perfect for that. If you were in a largish building, the building was probably even resting on/coupled with the bedrock to keep it from shifting in the dirt above. A tuning fork welded to a beam, and somebody hitting the far end with a sledgehammer...
Unstable media can be dangerous in earthquakes, because they have the nasty habit of exhibiting liquefaction; but solid media transmit the waves quite well.
"And in a data point sure to further damage techies' reputation for social skills, Staples Advantage also reported that 30% of tablet users said they used their tablets while at restaurants."
I'm not sure that the techies will be atypically hard hit by this one. Back in the day, when obsessive computer use required an obsessive interest in gaming and/or some techie esoterica, and it was cost-prohibitive to compute on the move(much less get internet access...), the techie social skills reputation was not exactly bolstered by the tendency to stay inside and play with their computers.
Then came the mass adoption of laptops and blackberries by practically every 'road warrior' type suit with a salary high enough that paying for the ability to bug him while he was away from the office made sense. This certainly did include some techies; but the population of management/sales types brandishing their blackberries and monopolizing flat surfaces absolutely exploded.
Now, with cellphones falling well into affordable for all but the most squalid, and Apple having WAFed the hell out of portable computing, it sure isn't techies who I see logging the most socially inappropriate screen time... Not being able to finish a single bloody meal without ignoring the present company to text frantically about nothing is now a mainstream behavior. If anything, the more 'social' people do it more because they have more people to text, and derive greater satisfaction from group-affirming social chatter...
Please correct me if I am wrong on this; but it would seem that, in principle, it would be quite tractable to generate a 'local persistence profile' tracing the activity generated by loading a URL as a series of addition, deletion, and modification operations to the state that existed before the URL was loaded(in the same way the various browsers' dev tools allow you to trace the network activity and script execution associated with loading a URL). With that, the user would have broad power(limited largely by their desire not to wade through a massively complex interface) to immediately roll back all changes made on exit, on leaving the site, or on some schedule. Wrapping that in an interface simple enough to be used and powerful enough to be useful would be a bit tricky; but you'd have an extremely granular revision-control style record to work with, which would make adding a few basic features comparatively simple(ie. "All changes that occur when running in Porn Mode are reverted on exit" or "all changes that occur when I load evil.com are reverted when I navigate away from evil.com".)
It would even be doable, probably through the use of site-specific addons developed by the knowledgable, to selectively roll back certain changes but not others(ie. if webmailfoo writes a cache of my last 30 days of email to a local store, I don't want to roll that back; but I do want to roll back the changes made by the fooad network...) or even to programmatically modify locally stored data(that aren't cryptographically signed, or otherwise protected from any tampering other than deletion...)
The local threat certainly isn't getting any easier or less complex; but it is, at least, a software problem. It's the remote threat that you really have to worry about. Covering your tracks against a reasonably smart remote agent turns out to be pretty difficult, and you can't(legally) just go and purge their systems.
As best I can tell, after going back and reading the paper, TFA is a miserable hatchetjob that has almost nothing to do with the paper.
The paper dealt with modeling the survival or culling of protocols at various layers, under various selection criteria, from a sort of evolutionary-biology standpoint. This did entail examining what conditions resulted in monoculture end states, and what conditions might result in stable multiple-protocols-at-each-layer end states; but all at the level of a fairly abstract model, not an empirical examination of the State of The Intertubes, or much specifically security-related material(In TFA's defense, the paper did suggest that, if you wanted a stable-state outcome with multiple middle layer protocols, they would have to be non-overlapping, which TFA managed to at least parrot accurately, and both agree that the internet as it exists is pretty much an IP monoculture; but the two otherwise bear surprisingly little resemblance to one another.)
TFA seems to be the result of picking the page with the least math, skimming it, and then adding some security-related alarmism...
Do you imagine that, even if so motivated, they could have gotten ideological censorship up and running so quickly?
Long-run, the ISP and the censor have the upper hand, because they touch every packet; but it takes time, money, and expertise to get to the point where you can go from shoving packets down the line as fast as you can and start burning system resources on the task of making service work in some ideologically convenient way...
(More broadly, given that the Libyan government spent some decades showing no intention of going anywhere, and maintaining a fairly tight grip, there is probably a very long list of people whose now-inconvenient history of cooperation with the outgoing regime in no secret at all. If the new chaps are still unsatisfied after they've worked through that backlog, the actual witch-hunting might begin; but there are still loads of active armed remnants and former public officials to deal with first...)
There seems to be the unstated(but vital to the conclusion asserted) assumption that competition actually makes protocols more secure and that competition must occur at the protocol level, rather than the implementation level. Without those assumptions holding, all this article really says is that people use TCP and UDP a lot. Yup. That they do.
This seems like it might be true in the (not necessarily all that common) case of a protocol whose security is fucked-by-design competing with a protocol that isn't fundamentally flawed, in a marketplace with buyers who place a premium on security, rather than price, features, time-to-market, etc.
Outside of that, though, much of the competition and security polishing seems to be at the level of competing implementations of the same protocols(and, particularly in the case of very complex ones, the de-facto modification of the protocol by abandonment of its weirder historical features). It also often seems to be the case that(unless you are in the very small formally-proven-systems-written-in-Ada market, or something of that sort) v1.0 of snazzynewprotocol is a bit of a clusterfuck, and is available in only a single implementation, also highly dubious, while the old standbys have been polished considerably and have a number of implementations available...
Dear Sirs, Downing Street Hacks, and assorted Parliamentarians: We simply convey the tweets. Your nasty little island produced the twits tweeting them.
Yours sincerely,
A useless, but harmless, web startup from somewhere that hasn't had any rioting issues lately.
Since everybody in the group already has a networked computer, a general-purpose system capable of inflicting considerable suffering, why not take advantage of that?
A few days of being stuck using the "Penal Image"(WinME, Incredimail, Bonzibuddy, 800x600), they'll be begging for a chance to redeem themselves.
I'd imagine that the Japanese sensor system has to be pretty good. With their earthquake frequency, population density, and available resources, they'd be nuts to skimp on that.
It will be somewhat interesting to see if anything happens to him. Horrible spine-babies are unlikely; but the thin dividing line between stem cells and good old fashioned cancer(or sometimes 'benign' non-metastasizing tumors in and around the insertion site) is some sort of touchy cellular signallying that is, as yet, not as well understood as it might be...
I know that my 'bad back' would have to be pretty bloody bad to risk growing a nest of tumors around my spine.
The hardware that they let out-of-house is about the most boring 1U rebadge gear ever(in the case of their search appliances) and pretty prosaic netbook(in the case of their ChromeOS units); but their in-house work is indeed interesting...
You and your crazy "dispassionate examination of the aggregate evidence". You'll probably be telling me that cars are more dangerous than airplanes next, despite the fact that Hundreds Can Die a Fiery Death in Just One Crash!
You can tell that anecdotes are the soundest basis for public policy, because they feel so true...
Being purchased by a search engine might be a bit of a shock for people used to producing tangible goods; but I suspect that it beats being purchased by some M&A vulture capital group and chopped up into parts for resale...
I suspect that most of anonymous/lulzsec score low on the religious convictions metric; but they probably score quite high on some combination of 'feeling of invulnerability/untraceability'(whether well founded or not) and 'political conviction that going down the road of myriad sinister quasi-private spooks is a bad thing'...
You don't actually have to be an impoverished nutjob clinging to the crudest flavors of some barbarous Abrahamic death-cult to take ideologically motivated risks.
I'd be curious to know how much of that is specifically tied to cost cutting/outsourcing and how much is tied to the rise of "easy adequacy" in computer specs...
Dell's stateside 'manufacturing' capability has(at least for a long while now, if not always) been assembly of components from elsewhere into final machines. This allowed them to achieve extremely fast turnaround for more or less any combination of modular parts were supported by a given chassis type. They weren't making custom motherboards, or fabricating cases from sheet metal and injection moulding feedstocks; but they could slap pretty much any combination of CPU/RAM/HDD/PCI/PCIe/PCI-X option cards into your choice of chassis, and have it shipped from a domestic location within a day or two.
However, it isn't clear that that is as useful as it used to be. For server customers? Probably, though the bigger ones would also be more likely to trade an extra week or two lead time in exchange for a discount if they are buying hundreds or thousands of the things. For Joe User? Not so clear. If he is buying a Dell, as opposed to building his own or ordering from one of the numerous outfits who will build a 'DIY'-style PC for you, he would probably rather have a cheaper box with specs chosen for broad appeal, rather than a more expensive box with precisely tailored specs...
For reasons of pure shipping speed(unless you fancy paying air-freight from the pacific rim...) overseas finishing cannot compete with the turnaround times of domestic finishing, which makes me wonder how much of this is driven more by a decline in demand for swift customization...
Not that you'd want to be in a situation where this is relevant; but I'd be interested to see if, by shielding the processor and a small amount of RAM in an otherwise unshielded computer device, you could use software that runs within the shielded processor and RAM and monitors the unshielded system RAM for radiation-induced bit-flipping as a crude radiation sensor...
Substantially less sensitive and accurate than a real Geiger counter; but skipping the delicate-glass-tube-and-high-voltage-drive-circuit in a high density embedded device would be nice, and it'd be a cute stunt.
I saw a couple of these 'early warning' systems in action during the Christchurch earthquakes. At best the alert came a few seconds before the quake - hardly early enough to save lives.
Their value depends pretty sharply on where you are relative to the epicenter and what the threat is.
Unfortunately, geologists are Not Ready Yet on actual earthquake prediction(they are, to be fair, pretty good at determining that a given fault is starting to look real damn unhappy; but pinning an event within a decade or a century, or even a year is pretty good on a geologic scale, not so useful for humans. So, if you happen to be standing on top of, or very near, the epicenter, sucks to be you, I hope the local building codes are good; because building buildings that don't fall over, crush their occupants, and then catch fire is pretty much all we can do about that..
If, on the other hand, the epicenter is located some distance away, you get more time to take basic measures like moving to the least collapse-prone/most likely to form a survivable pocket areas of a building(or, in lightly settled districts, running outside).
And, of course, if the epicenter is deep underwater, hundreds of miles away, you'll have fairly decent time; but you'd better start moving uphill now...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems an especially false economy because it is rather hard to "close" a school(or any other largish building, particularly in a cold climate, that is actively used much of the time) for short periods.
You can lock the doors and hang a "closed" sign, sure; but you've got to heat the place to keep the pipes from freezing, if in winter, there will likely be some lights you need to keep on, custodial and other support staff may need access to run around and do their thing, IT will want computers on to do patches(and probably won't ever want switch or server racks to be off...)
It just isn't trivial to turn a building on a dime(especially if it is an older unit with slightly cranky or inflexible climate control systems).
And, of course, beyond the material consideration, team finance would probably like to have a word or two with you about the opportunity costs, depreciation costs, and assorted other quantifications of the fact that letting useful stuff just sit there has downsides...
Kodak's mirror(ground to spec, unlike the one that made it up) is now on display somewhere. It never progressed to the metal-coating stage, so you can still see the interior lightweight stiffening structure, pretty cool looking.
Incidentally, would it have been crass for Kodak to send a little gift box containing a copy of the mirror spec and a pair of very strong reading glasses to Perkin-Elmer back when the optical problems were first discovered?
The likely plan in that vein would be to see if there is an NRO or DoD project with coattails of sufficient size. The Hubble itself is said to bear a bit of a family resemblance to the later 'Keyhole' surveillance satellites for financial and engineering reasons. There might be something going up that they could slap a slightly different optics package on and then point away from earth...
By a strange quirk of evolved usage, a 'witch hunt' is only a 'witch hunt' if there is substantial reason to believe that the witches you are hunting aren't actually witches. I'm assuming that, for the moment, there are still enough known regime enthusiasts available that they haven't started to descend into increasingly paranoid and erratic cullings...
Also, why on Earth would they evacuate the Pentagon AFTER the earthquake? Does that make any sense at all?
I'd sort of hope that the Pentagon would be built to better standards than that; but I can think of one reason you might evacuate after a quake: If the shaking cracked/sheared any gas lines, you could theoretically end up with a delightsome fuel-air situation in part of the building. In that case, you'd want the herd out of the building before the situation deteriorates.
With stronger quakes, or shoddier buildings, it isn't unheard of for buildings that don't collapse immediately to do so during the aftershocks, in which case you would prefer to be outside as well.(Again, though, serious risk of collapse in the face of a 5.8 should be a breach of any decent building code, much less the standards that you'd want your giant military headquarters/symbolic structure built to...)
I felt it in upper Manhattan. The building did a slight sway back and forth. First time I ever experience that. But Manhattan land is on solid bedrock, how could the quake effect reach here?
That's exactly how. Earthquakes travel from their epicenter by wave propagation. A nice, dense, more-or-less-continuous medium is perfect for that. If you were in a largish building, the building was probably even resting on/coupled with the bedrock to keep it from shifting in the dirt above. A tuning fork welded to a beam, and somebody hitting the far end with a sledgehammer...
Unstable media can be dangerous in earthquakes, because they have the nasty habit of exhibiting liquefaction; but solid media transmit the waves quite well.
"And in a data point sure to further damage techies' reputation for social skills, Staples Advantage also reported that 30% of tablet users said they used their tablets while at restaurants."
I'm not sure that the techies will be atypically hard hit by this one. Back in the day, when obsessive computer use required an obsessive interest in gaming and/or some techie esoterica, and it was cost-prohibitive to compute on the move(much less get internet access...), the techie social skills reputation was not exactly bolstered by the tendency to stay inside and play with their computers.
Then came the mass adoption of laptops and blackberries by practically every 'road warrior' type suit with a salary high enough that paying for the ability to bug him while he was away from the office made sense. This certainly did include some techies; but the population of management/sales types brandishing their blackberries and monopolizing flat surfaces absolutely exploded.
Now, with cellphones falling well into affordable for all but the most squalid, and Apple having WAFed the hell out of portable computing, it sure isn't techies who I see logging the most socially inappropriate screen time... Not being able to finish a single bloody meal without ignoring the present company to text frantically about nothing is now a mainstream behavior. If anything, the more 'social' people do it more because they have more people to text, and derive greater satisfaction from group-affirming social chatter...
Please correct me if I am wrong on this; but it would seem that, in principle, it would be quite tractable to generate a 'local persistence profile' tracing the activity generated by loading a URL as a series of addition, deletion, and modification operations to the state that existed before the URL was loaded(in the same way the various browsers' dev tools allow you to trace the network activity and script execution associated with loading a URL). With that, the user would have broad power(limited largely by their desire not to wade through a massively complex interface) to immediately roll back all changes made on exit, on leaving the site, or on some schedule. Wrapping that in an interface simple enough to be used and powerful enough to be useful would be a bit tricky; but you'd have an extremely granular revision-control style record to work with, which would make adding a few basic features comparatively simple(ie. "All changes that occur when running in Porn Mode are reverted on exit" or "all changes that occur when I load evil.com are reverted when I navigate away from evil.com".)
It would even be doable, probably through the use of site-specific addons developed by the knowledgable, to selectively roll back certain changes but not others(ie. if webmailfoo writes a cache of my last 30 days of email to a local store, I don't want to roll that back; but I do want to roll back the changes made by the fooad network...) or even to programmatically modify locally stored data(that aren't cryptographically signed, or otherwise protected from any tampering other than deletion...)
The local threat certainly isn't getting any easier or less complex; but it is, at least, a software problem. It's the remote threat that you really have to worry about. Covering your tracks against a reasonably smart remote agent turns out to be pretty difficult, and you can't(legally) just go and purge their systems.
As best I can tell, after going back and reading the paper, TFA is a miserable hatchetjob that has almost nothing to do with the paper.
The paper dealt with modeling the survival or culling of protocols at various layers, under various selection criteria, from a sort of evolutionary-biology standpoint. This did entail examining what conditions resulted in monoculture end states, and what conditions might result in stable multiple-protocols-at-each-layer end states; but all at the level of a fairly abstract model, not an empirical examination of the State of The Intertubes, or much specifically security-related material(In TFA's defense, the paper did suggest that, if you wanted a stable-state outcome with multiple middle layer protocols, they would have to be non-overlapping, which TFA managed to at least parrot accurately, and both agree that the internet as it exists is pretty much an IP monoculture; but the two otherwise bear surprisingly little resemblance to one another.)
TFA seems to be the result of picking the page with the least math, skimming it, and then adding some security-related alarmism...
Do you imagine that, even if so motivated, they could have gotten ideological censorship up and running so quickly?
Long-run, the ISP and the censor have the upper hand, because they touch every packet; but it takes time, money, and expertise to get to the point where you can go from shoving packets down the line as fast as you can and start burning system resources on the task of making service work in some ideologically convenient way...
(More broadly, given that the Libyan government spent some decades showing no intention of going anywhere, and maintaining a fairly tight grip, there is probably a very long list of people whose now-inconvenient history of cooperation with the outgoing regime in no secret at all. If the new chaps are still unsatisfied after they've worked through that backlog, the actual witch-hunting might begin; but there are still loads of active armed remnants and former public officials to deal with first...)
There seems to be the unstated(but vital to the conclusion asserted) assumption that competition actually makes protocols more secure and that competition must occur at the protocol level, rather than the implementation level. Without those assumptions holding, all this article really says is that people use TCP and UDP a lot. Yup. That they do.
This seems like it might be true in the (not necessarily all that common) case of a protocol whose security is fucked-by-design competing with a protocol that isn't fundamentally flawed, in a marketplace with buyers who place a premium on security, rather than price, features, time-to-market, etc.
Outside of that, though, much of the competition and security polishing seems to be at the level of competing implementations of the same protocols(and, particularly in the case of very complex ones, the de-facto modification of the protocol by abandonment of its weirder historical features). It also often seems to be the case that(unless you are in the very small formally-proven-systems-written-in-Ada market, or something of that sort) v1.0 of snazzynewprotocol is a bit of a clusterfuck, and is available in only a single implementation, also highly dubious, while the old standbys have been polished considerably and have a number of implementations available...
Dear Sirs, Downing Street Hacks, and assorted Parliamentarians: We simply convey the tweets. Your nasty little island produced the twits tweeting them.
Yours sincerely,
A useless, but harmless, web startup from somewhere that hasn't had any rioting issues lately.
Since everybody in the group already has a networked computer, a general-purpose system capable of inflicting considerable suffering, why not take advantage of that?
A few days of being stuck using the "Penal Image"(WinME, Incredimail, Bonzibuddy, 800x600), they'll be begging for a chance to redeem themselves.
I'd imagine that the Japanese sensor system has to be pretty good. With their earthquake frequency, population density, and available resources, they'd be nuts to skimp on that.
It will be somewhat interesting to see if anything happens to him. Horrible spine-babies are unlikely; but the thin dividing line between stem cells and good old fashioned cancer(or sometimes 'benign' non-metastasizing tumors in and around the insertion site) is some sort of touchy cellular signallying that is, as yet, not as well understood as it might be...
I know that my 'bad back' would have to be pretty bloody bad to risk growing a nest of tumors around my spine.
The hardware that they let out-of-house is about the most boring 1U rebadge gear ever(in the case of their search appliances) and pretty prosaic netbook(in the case of their ChromeOS units); but their in-house work is indeed interesting...
You and your crazy "dispassionate examination of the aggregate evidence". You'll probably be telling me that cars are more dangerous than airplanes next, despite the fact that Hundreds Can Die a Fiery Death in Just One Crash!
You can tell that anecdotes are the soundest basis for public policy, because they feel so true...
Being purchased by a search engine might be a bit of a shock for people used to producing tangible goods; but I suspect that it beats being purchased by some M&A vulture capital group and chopped up into parts for resale...
This is one piece of software where skipping the alpha and beta testing stages is totally reasonable: Neither would make it through the chip packages.
Bring on the gamma-testers!
I suspect that most of anonymous/lulzsec score low on the religious convictions metric; but they probably score quite high on some combination of 'feeling of invulnerability/untraceability'(whether well founded or not) and 'political conviction that going down the road of myriad sinister quasi-private spooks is a bad thing'...
You don't actually have to be an impoverished nutjob clinging to the crudest flavors of some barbarous Abrahamic death-cult to take ideologically motivated risks.
I'd be curious to know how much of that is specifically tied to cost cutting/outsourcing and how much is tied to the rise of "easy adequacy" in computer specs...
Dell's stateside 'manufacturing' capability has(at least for a long while now, if not always) been assembly of components from elsewhere into final machines. This allowed them to achieve extremely fast turnaround for more or less any combination of modular parts were supported by a given chassis type. They weren't making custom motherboards, or fabricating cases from sheet metal and injection moulding feedstocks; but they could slap pretty much any combination of CPU/RAM/HDD/PCI/PCIe/PCI-X option cards into your choice of chassis, and have it shipped from a domestic location within a day or two.
However, it isn't clear that that is as useful as it used to be. For server customers? Probably, though the bigger ones would also be more likely to trade an extra week or two lead time in exchange for a discount if they are buying hundreds or thousands of the things. For Joe User? Not so clear. If he is buying a Dell, as opposed to building his own or ordering from one of the numerous outfits who will build a 'DIY'-style PC for you, he would probably rather have a cheaper box with specs chosen for broad appeal, rather than a more expensive box with precisely tailored specs...
For reasons of pure shipping speed(unless you fancy paying air-freight from the pacific rim...) overseas finishing cannot compete with the turnaround times of domestic finishing, which makes me wonder how much of this is driven more by a decline in demand for swift customization...
Software and high speed pizza delivery...
Not that you'd want to be in a situation where this is relevant; but I'd be interested to see if, by shielding the processor and a small amount of RAM in an otherwise unshielded computer device, you could use software that runs within the shielded processor and RAM and monitors the unshielded system RAM for radiation-induced bit-flipping as a crude radiation sensor...
Substantially less sensitive and accurate than a real Geiger counter; but skipping the delicate-glass-tube-and-high-voltage-drive-circuit in a high density embedded device would be nice, and it'd be a cute stunt.
I saw a couple of these 'early warning' systems in action during the Christchurch earthquakes. At best the alert came a few seconds before the quake - hardly early enough to save lives.
Their value depends pretty sharply on where you are relative to the epicenter and what the threat is.
Unfortunately, geologists are Not Ready Yet on actual earthquake prediction(they are, to be fair, pretty good at determining that a given fault is starting to look real damn unhappy; but pinning an event within a decade or a century, or even a year is pretty good on a geologic scale, not so useful for humans. So, if you happen to be standing on top of, or very near, the epicenter, sucks to be you, I hope the local building codes are good; because building buildings that don't fall over, crush their occupants, and then catch fire is pretty much all we can do about that..
If, on the other hand, the epicenter is located some distance away, you get more time to take basic measures like moving to the least collapse-prone/most likely to form a survivable pocket areas of a building(or, in lightly settled districts, running outside).
And, of course, if the epicenter is deep underwater, hundreds of miles away, you'll have fairly decent time; but you'd better start moving uphill now...
Copper Man sympathize if maybe you particular Meat Man insufficiently hardworking/attractive for enslavement.
Copper Man resist replacement since 1951. Copper Man probably still thermal-testing uniforms when Tuesday Soylent Green Day.