Compared to the average person in your same field, with your same skills, as an expert coder/hacker/etc? Not even close.
Federal jobs are great if you're a lower skilled worker, whether office or otherwise (although good luck getting those jobs, as many of the ones the government used to have are now contracted out to save money). The higher your skills, and the more in demand your position, the worse the pay disparity with your counterparts in the private sector get.
Now, that's not to say there aren't necessarily other benefits, but it's hardly something that you're going to get rich on as a skilled exploit coder.
More specifically, don't use it against anything other than a system (or better yet, a virtual machine) you yourself personally own. Do NOT run any of it on your company's network without written authorization.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that Penetration Testing isn't just about the technical aspects. You need to be up to speed on all the legal aspects, not just in terms of know what laws govern the particular industry/company you happen to be conducting a test for, but in terms of liability. You really don't want to wind up finding yourself accused of breaking the law, whether state or federal, in the course of your job - and without a degree of caution, that's certainly not an impossible thing.
Remember, most of what gets done in any penetration test worth a damn would otherwise be illegal on any number of levels if you were doing it without the express authorization of the owner of those systems. Make sure you know what you're doing, and that the lawyers sign off on it first so that your company is covering your butt if anything goes bad.
That's exactly what it's in reference to, as I understand it. At least, that's the most controversial decision by Halsey that I'm aware of, and the most likely candidate for the line:
"Ryan? I read your book! Your conclusions were all wrong, Halsey acted stupidly."
Not to the point that Battleships were considered obsolete, which was the assertion I was replying to. That same act authorized the construction of 7 battleships (though the US did not complete all of those so authorized).
They were in no way considered "obsolete", at least not yet.
No - Musashi was sunk by US warplanes in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, which was a part of the larger engagement of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and had been part of a group that included the Yamato and a few other ships. Musashi was the only one sunk at the Sibuyan Sea, though a Heavy Cruiser was crippled. Leyte Gulf on the whole though was Japan's last attempt to turn the tide at sea through direct battle, and it was after that when they turned to predominantly suicide tactics and missions instead, such as the idea to run the Yamato aground and use it as a gun platform on Okinawa.
Although the Iowa class's speed allowing it to keep up with the Carrier Task Forces was certainly useful, that wasn't the dividing line between relevance and obsolescence. If anything, I would argue that Battleships are not completely obsolete even today, it's just that they're economically inefficient at the tasks and role they perform. As for secondary and antiaircraft guns, those were a standard factor for pretty much every Battleship, US or otherwise, and certainly not unique in any way to the Iowas.
The US was building battleships pretty consistently until about 1942, ironically far more so than Japan. In the same 1936-1946 time frame, Japan built the two Yamato class, the USA built and completed ten battleships. Moreover, if you consider the time frame, the Yamato's US contemporary is the North Carolina, not the Iowa. Both were designed in the aftermath of the Second London Naval Treaty, as was Britain's King George V and France's Richelieu - the difference is that Japan didn't sign the treaty, and thus built a ship vastly in excess of what the treaty would restrict. They also did so in secret, meaning that the full extent of Yamato's design and strength wasn't known in the USA.
It depends on how you consider it. The Battle of Leyte Gulf comprised multiple actions in and around the Philippines between 23 and 26 October 1944, including the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, the Battle of Surigao Strait, the Battle of Cape Engano and the Battle off Samar, as well as a few other related actions. The Battle of the Sibuyan Sea was geographically separate from the others, being generally west and south of Luzon, while the other three were east or northeast of Luzon and Leyte. The map on the wikipedia article helps illustrate the dispersal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#mediaviewer/File:Leyte_map_annotated.jpg
Yamato was present at the Battle of Midway - it was Admiral Yamamoto's flagship. It didn't take part in any of the fighting though. As for Guadalcanal and the various actions thereof, neither Yamato nor Musashi took part, but there were several notable surface actions that did not involve carriers, and were among some of the few direct battleship on battleship fights of the Pacific War.
World War 2 was definitely the era of the Aircraft Carrier ascendant, and it's rather telling that the Shinano was completed as a carrier rather than as a third battleship. However, at the time the Yamato and Musashi were built, that realization had yet to sink in anywhere, and the US was still building heavy battleships during the same timeframe, including the Iowa class, and had plans for more. It was only by 1942 that the shift had become apparent, and the two keels laid down for the Montana class were first altered to be two more Iowas (Illinois and Kentucky), and then later cancelled a few years later. The last US Battleship wasn't launched until December 1943 (USS Wisconsin).
I'm not so sure the challenge was in identifying it though, rather than finding it - as the Japanese expert I quoted above noted, there was only one battleship lost in the Sibuyan Sea, so it's hard to consider that it would be anything but the Musashi.
According to at least one expert interviewed by Japanese public broadcaster NHK:
"Judging from the location, it must be the Musashi," the head of a private museum specializing in the battleship Yamato, Musashi's sister vessel, said the details in the images matched those of the Musashi, which was the only battleship that sank in the area.
If anything, I'm surprised it took this long to find it. I don't think the water is unusually deep there, or at least, not in comparison to other famous sunken ships.
If you're a climate scientist who says there's no Anthropogenic Climate Change, there are lots of Fossil Fuel groups that will shower you with money - much like Tobacco companies would to any Scientists that said Smoking doesn't cause Cancer.
And yet, it's the ones who report the opposite that get accused of being on the take, when their findings match what everyone else in their field (except those taking money from the fossil fuel industry) almost universally report.
Just because someone doesn't have a monopoly, doesn't meant they can't have outsized impacts on the markets. Windows has never had a complete monopoly on operating systems, but that didn't mean they weren't guilty of monopolistic abuse by bundling Internet Explorer to cut out Netscape/etc. Comcast certainly didn't have a complete monopoly on connections between Netflix and Netflix's customers, but that didn't mean that when Comcast choked off reliable access between them that Netflix wasn't affected, or that it wouldn't be a significant hit to Netflix's bottom line.
Now, to be fair, while I don't think they should necessarily be regulated as suggested by the DT exec. I do think it's an interesting question as to what we consider Google, though, and what sort of power and influence it has, for good or ill.
Facebook, on the other hand, is just an Evil Organization, and should be handled as such.:)
What I bet they're kicking themselves over is that they never patented the game upgrade treadmill - think of all the royalties they could have charged Ubisoft, Activision, and EA!
Like many things, the theory is great, but the execution isn't necessarily so. I agree that the "needs to not be big enough to corrupt the entities that should be overseeing/counterbalancing" part, and would add that it also works best in areas where other competition exists. For instance, the government (or some level thereof) is the only "consumer" for private prison services. There's no outside expertise specific to this area, save to the extent that we create it by privatizing an inherently governmental function. On the other hand, things like construction are commonplace, because everyone uses it, and it makes no sense for the government not to rely on the same private companies that everyone else does when they want to put up a new building.
To toss in a pair of anecdotes from my personal experience:
When I was in the military, I saw what I'd consider a "good" example. Instead of having soldiers run the dining halls during basic training, rotating in a new group of wholly untrained people every 1-2 weeks, and taking that time away from training (at severe cost to the government, who was paying not only salary but food/housing/etc), they contracted it out to a food service company, that brought in regular workers at prevailing wages. This not only cost less than using trainees, but provided a lot more consistency in terms of service (which can be very important in terms of proper food handling).
On the other hand, I later got to see what happened with contracting in the Intelligence community. Now, this was a while ago, but the situation still hasn't changed at all. Essentially, the government was/is paying more to bring in contract workers. The supposed advantage was that they were easier to hire/fire, but in practice this rarely seemed to come into play. What was worse was that the vast majority of these people were former government/military personnel, because pretty much the only place to get training/experience in that field is......working for the government. It basically amounts to creating increased competition for the same pool of workers, causing the cost for those workers to rise, which winds up costing the government far more. To some degree it's good for the workers, since they have more options for more money, but most of the extra money isn't going to them - it's going to the companies, some as wasted duplicative overhead, but mostly as profit.
The question really was where his personal beliefs and loyalties lay. For instance, if your job is to represent a certain set of interests, you may do so wholeheartedly, even though you think exactly the opposite (lawyers in particular). Now, most (moral) humans aren't really capable of doing this for overly long periods of time, so we tend to gravitate more towards positions that conflict less with our own personal beliefs - that is, unless we've decided that the money involved outweighs the cost of our cognitive dissonance.
Thus, it was not an unreasonable assumption that based on his prior position as head of the cable industry lobbying association, either A) he had decided that his sympathies lay more with the cable/telco industry, or B) that his financial interests would be better served by ignoring any conflicting personal beliefs of his own.
We should all be thankful that it appears that neither of these was the case; an increasing rarity (or at least seemingly so) in today's world. Instead of a dingo, we wound up with a guard dog.
A single individual has the option to move to another location outside that municipality. While this may not be easy or ideal, it's certainly moreso than the notion of the municipality moving to another state.
As far as the concerns regarding tax-subsidized business ventures competing with private firms, while that may be valid in some instances, that's not been the case in the instances in question here. Furthermore, this is the sort of area where municipalities in general have a long history of providing exactly these kinds of services, at reasonable cost, such as water, gas, trash pickup, etc.
Can it be abused, or turn bad? Certainly, as with all manner of human endeavor, corruption is always possible. However, the answer is not for state laws to ban all municipal internet services, especially at the behest of the incumbent providers who are refusing to provide the kind of service that the residents are asking for, and are willing to pay for. Municipal government is generally the most responsive to its citizens, and the easiest to change and reform - certainly moreso than state or federal.
And yet no one related to the debate on anything to do with the internet is even remotely talking about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, except for the right-wing demagogues who are trying to conflate it with "Net Neutrality" in the minds of their adherents, because it benefits them (and their corporate buddies) for people to think Obama and the FCC want to impose that kind of thing. It's scaremongering, and it's dishonest.
And while one or two may talk about it, the key word here is " a handful". I've heard politicians propose we should bring back the Draft, but do you think it has even a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon? There's a majority of support for legalizing marijuana, among the overall US population, but even that's still not gotten through yet.
Doing that would probably just push the FCC to move to mandate local loop unbundling though. After all, the various companies have already divested, so it's even easier to say that the one who owns/maintains and rents out the physical infrastructure to the ISP company is itself a utility, and that it needs to offer that same service to anyone who wants to compete with the ISP.
The good news is that this doesn't preclude future rule changes if they prove necessary. One way to look at this is that the FCC has been very "hands off" up until the point where events proved there was a need for them to step in, such as the recent crap with throttling of Netflix in order to extort payments from Comcast/etc. If new/different abuses occur, and there's a similar groundswell of public opinion that it needs to change, then I do hope we can get something like local loop unbundling added so that there's real competition in the ISP market in order to address it.
The good news is that nothing in this prevents local loop unbundling in the future. The other thing that many people are missing is that this isn't simply the government stepping in to affect the ISP market. What they're doing is stepping in to prevent local monopolies in the ISP market from abusing that monopoly against other markets, such as the streaming video market, or anything else that takes place over the internet.
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Compared to the average person in the USA, maybe.
Compared to the average person in your same field, with your same skills, as an expert coder/hacker/etc? Not even close.
Federal jobs are great if you're a lower skilled worker, whether office or otherwise (although good luck getting those jobs, as many of the ones the government used to have are now contracted out to save money). The higher your skills, and the more in demand your position, the worse the pay disparity with your counterparts in the private sector get.
Now, that's not to say there aren't necessarily other benefits, but it's hardly something that you're going to get rich on as a skilled exploit coder.
More specifically, don't use it against anything other than a system (or better yet, a virtual machine) you yourself personally own. Do NOT run any of it on your company's network without written authorization.
One thing you need to keep in mind is that Penetration Testing isn't just about the technical aspects. You need to be up to speed on all the legal aspects, not just in terms of know what laws govern the particular industry/company you happen to be conducting a test for, but in terms of liability. You really don't want to wind up finding yourself accused of breaking the law, whether state or federal, in the course of your job - and without a degree of caution, that's certainly not an impossible thing.
Remember, most of what gets done in any penetration test worth a damn would otherwise be illegal on any number of levels if you were doing it without the express authorization of the owner of those systems. Make sure you know what you're doing, and that the lawyers sign off on it first so that your company is covering your butt if anything goes bad.
Obligatory HHGTTG:
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
That's exactly what it's in reference to, as I understand it. At least, that's the most controversial decision by Halsey that I'm aware of, and the most likely candidate for the line:
"Ryan? I read your book! Your conclusions were all wrong, Halsey acted stupidly."
Not to the point that Battleships were considered obsolete, which was the assertion I was replying to. That same act authorized the construction of 7 battleships (though the US did not complete all of those so authorized).
They were in no way considered "obsolete", at least not yet.
No - Musashi was sunk by US warplanes in the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, which was a part of the larger engagement of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and had been part of a group that included the Yamato and a few other ships. Musashi was the only one sunk at the Sibuyan Sea, though a Heavy Cruiser was crippled. Leyte Gulf on the whole though was Japan's last attempt to turn the tide at sea through direct battle, and it was after that when they turned to predominantly suicide tactics and missions instead, such as the idea to run the Yamato aground and use it as a gun platform on Okinawa.
I believe American technology and signals intelligence saw to it that he couldn't be there to see it, if memory serves correctly.
Although the Iowa class's speed allowing it to keep up with the Carrier Task Forces was certainly useful, that wasn't the dividing line between relevance and obsolescence. If anything, I would argue that Battleships are not completely obsolete even today, it's just that they're economically inefficient at the tasks and role they perform. As for secondary and antiaircraft guns, those were a standard factor for pretty much every Battleship, US or otherwise, and certainly not unique in any way to the Iowas.
The US was building battleships pretty consistently until about 1942, ironically far more so than Japan. In the same 1936-1946 time frame, Japan built the two Yamato class, the USA built and completed ten battleships. Moreover, if you consider the time frame, the Yamato's US contemporary is the North Carolina, not the Iowa. Both were designed in the aftermath of the Second London Naval Treaty, as was Britain's King George V and France's Richelieu - the difference is that Japan didn't sign the treaty, and thus built a ship vastly in excess of what the treaty would restrict. They also did so in secret, meaning that the full extent of Yamato's design and strength wasn't known in the USA.
It depends on how you consider it. The Battle of Leyte Gulf comprised multiple actions in and around the Philippines between 23 and 26 October 1944, including the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, the Battle of Surigao Strait, the Battle of Cape Engano and the Battle off Samar, as well as a few other related actions. The Battle of the Sibuyan Sea was geographically separate from the others, being generally west and south of Luzon, while the other three were east or northeast of Luzon and Leyte. The map on the wikipedia article helps illustrate the dispersal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#mediaviewer/File:Leyte_map_annotated.jpg
Yamato was present at the Battle of Midway - it was Admiral Yamamoto's flagship. It didn't take part in any of the fighting though. As for Guadalcanal and the various actions thereof, neither Yamato nor Musashi took part, but there were several notable surface actions that did not involve carriers, and were among some of the few direct battleship on battleship fights of the Pacific War.
World War 2 was definitely the era of the Aircraft Carrier ascendant, and it's rather telling that the Shinano was completed as a carrier rather than as a third battleship. However, at the time the Yamato and Musashi were built, that realization had yet to sink in anywhere, and the US was still building heavy battleships during the same timeframe, including the Iowa class, and had plans for more. It was only by 1942 that the shift had become apparent, and the two keels laid down for the Montana class were first altered to be two more Iowas (Illinois and Kentucky), and then later cancelled a few years later. The last US Battleship wasn't launched until December 1943 (USS Wisconsin).
I'm not so sure the challenge was in identifying it though, rather than finding it - as the Japanese expert I quoted above noted, there was only one battleship lost in the Sibuyan Sea, so it's hard to consider that it would be anything but the Musashi.
According to at least one expert interviewed by Japanese public broadcaster NHK:
"Judging from the location, it must be the Musashi," the head of a private museum specializing in the battleship Yamato, Musashi's sister vessel, said the details in the images matched those of the Musashi, which was the only battleship that sank in the area.
If anything, I'm surprised it took this long to find it. I don't think the water is unusually deep there, or at least, not in comparison to other famous sunken ships.
"In God We Trust... ...All Others We Monitor."
If you're a climate scientist who says there's no Anthropogenic Climate Change, there are lots of Fossil Fuel groups that will shower you with money - much like Tobacco companies would to any Scientists that said Smoking doesn't cause Cancer.
And yet, it's the ones who report the opposite that get accused of being on the take, when their findings match what everyone else in their field (except those taking money from the fossil fuel industry) almost universally report.
Just because someone doesn't have a monopoly, doesn't meant they can't have outsized impacts on the markets. Windows has never had a complete monopoly on operating systems, but that didn't mean they weren't guilty of monopolistic abuse by bundling Internet Explorer to cut out Netscape/etc. Comcast certainly didn't have a complete monopoly on connections between Netflix and Netflix's customers, but that didn't mean that when Comcast choked off reliable access between them that Netflix wasn't affected, or that it wouldn't be a significant hit to Netflix's bottom line.
:)
Now, to be fair, while I don't think they should necessarily be regulated as suggested by the DT exec. I do think it's an interesting question as to what we consider Google, though, and what sort of power and influence it has, for good or ill.
Facebook, on the other hand, is just an Evil Organization, and should be handled as such.
What I bet they're kicking themselves over is that they never patented the game upgrade treadmill - think of all the royalties they could have charged Ubisoft, Activision, and EA!
Judging on my past usage patterns, a lack of a removable battery isn't a big deal for me; but the SD card is.
Anyone have any suggestions for a good new model phone that still comes with one, since Samsung is apparently out?
Like many things, the theory is great, but the execution isn't necessarily so. I agree that the "needs to not be big enough to corrupt the entities that should be overseeing/counterbalancing" part, and would add that it also works best in areas where other competition exists. For instance, the government (or some level thereof) is the only "consumer" for private prison services. There's no outside expertise specific to this area, save to the extent that we create it by privatizing an inherently governmental function. On the other hand, things like construction are commonplace, because everyone uses it, and it makes no sense for the government not to rely on the same private companies that everyone else does when they want to put up a new building.
...working for the government. It basically amounts to creating increased competition for the same pool of workers, causing the cost for those workers to rise, which winds up costing the government far more. To some degree it's good for the workers, since they have more options for more money, but most of the extra money isn't going to them - it's going to the companies, some as wasted duplicative overhead, but mostly as profit.
To toss in a pair of anecdotes from my personal experience:
When I was in the military, I saw what I'd consider a "good" example. Instead of having soldiers run the dining halls during basic training, rotating in a new group of wholly untrained people every 1-2 weeks, and taking that time away from training (at severe cost to the government, who was paying not only salary but food/housing/etc), they contracted it out to a food service company, that brought in regular workers at prevailing wages. This not only cost less than using trainees, but provided a lot more consistency in terms of service (which can be very important in terms of proper food handling).
On the other hand, I later got to see what happened with contracting in the Intelligence community. Now, this was a while ago, but the situation still hasn't changed at all. Essentially, the government was/is paying more to bring in contract workers. The supposed advantage was that they were easier to hire/fire, but in practice this rarely seemed to come into play. What was worse was that the vast majority of these people were former government/military personnel, because pretty much the only place to get training/experience in that field is...
The question really was where his personal beliefs and loyalties lay. For instance, if your job is to represent a certain set of interests, you may do so wholeheartedly, even though you think exactly the opposite (lawyers in particular). Now, most (moral) humans aren't really capable of doing this for overly long periods of time, so we tend to gravitate more towards positions that conflict less with our own personal beliefs - that is, unless we've decided that the money involved outweighs the cost of our cognitive dissonance.
Thus, it was not an unreasonable assumption that based on his prior position as head of the cable industry lobbying association, either A) he had decided that his sympathies lay more with the cable/telco industry, or B) that his financial interests would be better served by ignoring any conflicting personal beliefs of his own.
We should all be thankful that it appears that neither of these was the case; an increasing rarity (or at least seemingly so) in today's world. Instead of a dingo, we wound up with a guard dog.
A single individual has the option to move to another location outside that municipality. While this may not be easy or ideal, it's certainly moreso than the notion of the municipality moving to another state.
As far as the concerns regarding tax-subsidized business ventures competing with private firms, while that may be valid in some instances, that's not been the case in the instances in question here. Furthermore, this is the sort of area where municipalities in general have a long history of providing exactly these kinds of services, at reasonable cost, such as water, gas, trash pickup, etc.
Can it be abused, or turn bad? Certainly, as with all manner of human endeavor, corruption is always possible. However, the answer is not for state laws to ban all municipal internet services, especially at the behest of the incumbent providers who are refusing to provide the kind of service that the residents are asking for, and are willing to pay for. Municipal government is generally the most responsive to its citizens, and the easiest to change and reform - certainly moreso than state or federal.
And yet no one related to the debate on anything to do with the internet is even remotely talking about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, except for the right-wing demagogues who are trying to conflate it with "Net Neutrality" in the minds of their adherents, because it benefits them (and their corporate buddies) for people to think Obama and the FCC want to impose that kind of thing. It's scaremongering, and it's dishonest.
And while one or two may talk about it, the key word here is " a handful". I've heard politicians propose we should bring back the Draft, but do you think it has even a snowball's chance in hell of passing anytime soon? There's a majority of support for legalizing marijuana, among the overall US population, but even that's still not gotten through yet.
Not really. If Comcast is against it, I'm pretty sure that I'm okay with it.
Doing that would probably just push the FCC to move to mandate local loop unbundling though. After all, the various companies have already divested, so it's even easier to say that the one who owns/maintains and rents out the physical infrastructure to the ISP company is itself a utility, and that it needs to offer that same service to anyone who wants to compete with the ISP.
The good news is that this doesn't preclude future rule changes if they prove necessary. One way to look at this is that the FCC has been very "hands off" up until the point where events proved there was a need for them to step in, such as the recent crap with throttling of Netflix in order to extort payments from Comcast/etc. If new/different abuses occur, and there's a similar groundswell of public opinion that it needs to change, then I do hope we can get something like local loop unbundling added so that there's real competition in the ISP market in order to address it.
The good news is that nothing in this prevents local loop unbundling in the future. The other thing that many people are missing is that this isn't simply the government stepping in to affect the ISP market. What they're doing is stepping in to prevent local monopolies in the ISP market from abusing that monopoly against other markets, such as the streaming video market, or anything else that takes place over the internet.