As dark as his humor tries to be, he does have a point. What happens if something like this reaches India or Pakistan, or perhaps one or more of several nations in South America, in which shantytowns with no sanitation and crushing population density? It's entirely possible that we could see millions die before it could be brought under control. But what of the political upheaval? TB can kill in weeks to months once it takes hold, and spreads via airborne particles. Most of those nations aren't that stable to begin with, and those that are (like India and Brazil) have significant undercurrents of tension that could erupt into even bigger problems.
While the world's resources could use the strain of a few hundred million fewer people, this is probably not the best way to achieve that.
No, this is what happens when people get viral infections and demand antibiotics from their doctors, which are 100% useless against viruses. Those carrying TB and overdoing antibiotics can give the virus an opportunity to evolve defenses against penicillin.
Tip to help the world avoid this: Ask your doctor what his professional opinion is about the source of your illness. If he/she believes that it's viral, ask what kind of OTC medications (NyQuil, Benadryl, whatever) will work best to deal with the symptoms. It may not slow things much, but at least you'll know that you weren't the cause for the strain that kills us all.
Considering how dead @Stake has been since they changed their name (aside from a couple of minor tool releases [LC4 notwithstanding], some me-too advisories, and an attempt to launch a quarterly security magazine for WAY too much money), I don't think it will change anything other than a few bank accounts.
The US is somewhat lax in dealing with the Canadian border, but there's also a force on the other side of that border that's interested in keeping people from crossing illegally. And how many people even try to come in from Canada?
This year, it's expected that more than four million people will illegally try to make it across the Mexican border with the US. Of those, three million will make it through. The Border Patrol has said that it's arrested about 55,000 people who were not Mexican from Oct 1, 2003, to Aug 25, 2004. Extrapolated out to the end of the fiscal year, that's 61,000 OTMs that will be arrested. Working on the 1:4 arrest ratio, that means that nearly a quarter of a million non-Mexicans will make it across the border into the US this year.
If you were trying to wreak havoc in another country and had a 75% chance of getting in through a given means, wouldn't you try it?
Aside from that are the costs of supporting illegal immigrants once they're here, which is some $5.5 billion per year in California and $1.3 billion per year in Arizona, very little of which is reimbursed by the federal government. I can think of a lot of things that can be done for that amount of money.
From a speech that Kerry gave on the Senate floor, February 1992:
The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them; that one help identify the positive things that we learned about ourselves and about our nation, not play to the divisions and differences of that crucible of our generation.
We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways. Someone who was deeply against the war in 1969 or 1970 may well have served their country with equal passion and patriotism by opposing the war as by fighting in it. Are we now, 20 years or 30 years later, to forget the difficulties of that time, of families that were literally torn apart, of brothers who ceased to talk to brothers, of fathers who disowned their sons, of people who felt compelled to leave the country and forget their own future and turn against the will of their own aspirations?
There were plenty of accusations that Clinton did evade military service during Vietnam, even within his own party. This speech was made just after Sen. Bob Kerrey (a Democrat) tried to make Clinton's lack of service an issue in the Democrat primary race -- a race in which John Kerry was a candidate.
Why was it bad to talk about candidates' experiences (or lack thereof) serving in the military in 1992 and 1996, and somewhat taboo in 2000, but suddenly it's the only thing that anyone talks about? This is ridiculous.
From both candidates, I want to get solid answers to the following questions, among others:
Will you, or will you not, push the re-implementation of the budget rules that required that all spending increases be balanced by tax increases, and tax cuts by spending cuts? Why or why not?
What specific cuts will you push to balance the budget?
What is the strategy to exit Iraq in a reasonable time period? What things could accelerate or delay this strategy?
Why, if you're in favor of securing the nation, is the southern US border among the most weakly patrolled in the western world? What plans do you have to decrease the number of illegals getting into the country via land borders to as close to zero as possible?
How will you change enforcement of laws against hiring illegal immigrants?
The plan is not to make larger nuclear weapons, but smaller, more precise weapons. This is far more difficult. If you look at the size of warheads over the years, you'll see that the average sizes rose on a fairly steady curve (the USSR's 40MT+ bombs notwithstanding), and then declined on a more rapid curve as warhead guidance systems became more accurate.
Mind you, I don't support the development of the new weapons. I'd rather put money into more reasonable and useful systems like hypersonic drones to deliver high-kinetic-energy slugs. There's a greater chance of a civilian payoff from that, more chance that it will work as planned, and it's politically less divisive.
The government also requires changes in business practices, and this usually means also submitting to accounting actions that determine that the company is not just passing along the costs and merrily doing things as before. The money (theoretically) comes out of the profits of the company. Fines can also pave the way to class-action lawsuits, as this establishes the existence of the practice in one court, making it far easier to bring into another court.
Most companies I know of that are interested in backing up their users' data either require that all data be saved on a network drive, or they implement roaming profiles. It's a rare company in my experience that deploys agents to the desktops to manage backups, as it's far more complex and expensive than the other possible routes.
OTOH, they could still do this using remote power-on and shutdown capabilities. That would allow them to power down overnight to save electricity, but still do their backups, with reports in the morning on which systems didn't come online the night before.
Is this perhaps an attempt to get something more user-friendly out in front of people without the Debian name on it, in order to get feedback without getting flamed by the crowd that so dearly loves the traditional Debian installer?
Funny, I was always under the impression that the liquid hydrogen in the shuttle's external fuel supply was held in a tank, and that it was supplied from a tank, and maybe even transported by a truck pulling a tank of hydrogen (unless it's generated on-site).
In many cases, it is that level of administrator that I fear most. That's not to say that corporate teams of admins will always do better. I've seen some pretty horrible cludges designed by committee. But I've been downright shocked by what I've seen in small-to-mid-sized companies.
Storing hydrogen in tanks and then later burning it is relatively cheap and easy, whereas fuel cells are more expensive and temperamental. I'm not sure of the difference in efficiencies, since cells are generating power directly and burning the gas needs to go through a conversion from heat to electricity, probably through a dynamo.
The problem is, the people that need Social Security the most in their old age just plain didn't make enough money to have a reasonable saving rate.
Split the difference and require that a certain portion of the money be invested. This ensures that those that make less will still invest it. You could perhaps even be allowed to take a certain amount of the interest out (say, 25%) if the person's gross wages are below a certain amount. This ensures continued growth while allowing the person to have a little hedge against bad times.
I used to know a guy much like you, though a bit worse. He refused to install any patches from Microsoft because "they only break things." Just as SP4 was coming out, he said proudly that he was still running Windows 2000 Gold, with IE 5.0. That was it. He didn't run a firewall or AV, either, because he was behind a router, so he couldn't get infected. Your viewpoint annoys me because Slammer, Nimda, Code Red, and other worms wouldn't have gotten a foothold if the patches had been universally installed within a few months of their release. This other guy used to infuriate me. I almost drove to Colorado just to smack him.
But what about costs? I can buy 100 workstations, monitor included, for about $65K. How much does a dual-server setup (including terminals) for 100 users cost?
Part of the problem is that while I don't trust users to keep their machines running properly, I barely trust a lot of server admins to do any better. I've seen the way a lot of servers are put together, and how often they need some really inane maintenance. It's scary. The penalty for a bad user is usually limited to affecting one or two people; the penalty for a bad admin can affect entire departments or even more.
No, if she'd had some sort of way out, and the criminal remained trapped, then she wouldn't have needed to speak in 'Yes' and 'No' to the police, she would have just walked out of sight from the crook and called them.
Scenario: The attacker gets in and holds a gun to her. She then is ordered to take him in the back. The only way through is this mantrap. They walk through, and then there's a card-access door at the other end. With him still holding the gun to her back, she uses her badge to open the other door, knowing that the alarm has already been tripped.
Had he gotten in on his own and entered the mantrap, it's entirely possible, depending on the design, that he could have gone through one door and, not having badge access to get through, is caught in the mantrap with the alarm company and police notified.
In the two cases where I worked, there was on-site security 24/7, and the mantrap had a camera on each door. Walk in without a badge, and you didn't walk out without security (or the police) escorting you.
I throw in occasional extra servers into yum.conf that aren't there because the ones that are listed in the Fedora Faq get hammered sometimes. It's useful to have some lesser-known, higher-bandwidth locations to use when major patches come out.
There may be more to it than is described in the opinion, and Forchia may have had some kind of access out. I've seen similar setups where anyone can walk into the trap, but you have to have badge access to get out of it in either direction. The doors are typically very heavy wood or steel doors, so bashing one's way out is not really practical.
As a clarification, most mantraps are legal, at least in the US. I work at a government facility with one, and I've worked at a datacenter with one. In addition, a mantrap is in place in at least one location for America's Cash Express, as mentioned as a point of fact in this decision.
What I think etymxris was speaking of are lethal mantraps that use some kind of weapon (i.e., open the door and get a shotgun to the chest). Those are definitely illegal.
I got the file, and aside from a mention that Lucas originally told him that there would be three trilogies, and asking him on the earlier set if he wanted to be in Ep9 (to be made around 2011), there's nothing new in there. It's a lot of talk about what went on behind the scenes in standard studio politics.
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Sorry. Typo on my part. The sentence should have read:
Those carrying TB and overdoing antibiotics can give the bacteria an opportunity to evolve defenses against penicillin.
As dark as his humor tries to be, he does have a point. What happens if something like this reaches India or Pakistan, or perhaps one or more of several nations in South America, in which shantytowns with no sanitation and crushing population density? It's entirely possible that we could see millions die before it could be brought under control. But what of the political upheaval? TB can kill in weeks to months once it takes hold, and spreads via airborne particles. Most of those nations aren't that stable to begin with, and those that are (like India and Brazil) have significant undercurrents of tension that could erupt into even bigger problems.
While the world's resources could use the strain of a few hundred million fewer people, this is probably not the best way to achieve that.
No, this is what happens when people get viral infections and demand antibiotics from their doctors, which are 100% useless against viruses. Those carrying TB and overdoing antibiotics can give the virus an opportunity to evolve defenses against penicillin.
Tip to help the world avoid this: Ask your doctor what his professional opinion is about the source of your illness. If he/she believes that it's viral, ask what kind of OTC medications (NyQuil, Benadryl, whatever) will work best to deal with the symptoms. It may not slow things much, but at least you'll know that you weren't the cause for the strain that kills us all.
Considering how dead @Stake has been since they changed their name (aside from a couple of minor tool releases [LC4 notwithstanding], some me-too advisories, and an attempt to launch a quarterly security magazine for WAY too much money), I don't think it will change anything other than a few bank accounts.
The US is somewhat lax in dealing with the Canadian border, but there's also a force on the other side of that border that's interested in keeping people from crossing illegally. And how many people even try to come in from Canada?
This year, it's expected that more than four million people will illegally try to make it across the Mexican border with the US. Of those, three million will make it through. The Border Patrol has said that it's arrested about 55,000 people who were not Mexican from Oct 1, 2003, to Aug 25, 2004. Extrapolated out to the end of the fiscal year, that's 61,000 OTMs that will be arrested. Working on the 1:4 arrest ratio, that means that nearly a quarter of a million non-Mexicans will make it across the border into the US this year.
If you were trying to wreak havoc in another country and had a 75% chance of getting in through a given means, wouldn't you try it?
Aside from that are the costs of supporting illegal immigrants once they're here, which is some $5.5 billion per year in California and $1.3 billion per year in Arizona, very little of which is reimbursed by the federal government. I can think of a lot of things that can be done for that amount of money.
From a speech that Kerry gave on the Senate floor, February 1992:
The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them; that one help identify the positive things that we learned about ourselves and about our nation, not play to the divisions and differences of that crucible of our generation.
We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways. Someone who was deeply against the war in 1969 or 1970 may well have served their country with equal passion and patriotism by opposing the war as by fighting in it. Are we now, 20 years or 30 years later, to forget the difficulties of that time, of families that were literally torn apart, of brothers who ceased to talk to brothers, of fathers who disowned their sons, of people who felt compelled to leave the country and forget their own future and turn against the will of their own aspirations?
There were plenty of accusations that Clinton did evade military service during Vietnam, even within his own party. This speech was made just after Sen. Bob Kerrey (a Democrat) tried to make Clinton's lack of service an issue in the Democrat primary race -- a race in which John Kerry was a candidate.
From both candidates, I want to get solid answers to the following questions, among others:
The plan is not to make larger nuclear weapons, but smaller, more precise weapons. This is far more difficult. If you look at the size of warheads over the years, you'll see that the average sizes rose on a fairly steady curve (the USSR's 40MT+ bombs notwithstanding), and then declined on a more rapid curve as warhead guidance systems became more accurate.
Mind you, I don't support the development of the new weapons. I'd rather put money into more reasonable and useful systems like hypersonic drones to deliver high-kinetic-energy slugs. There's a greater chance of a civilian payoff from that, more chance that it will work as planned, and it's politically less divisive.
The government also requires changes in business practices, and this usually means also submitting to accounting actions that determine that the company is not just passing along the costs and merrily doing things as before. The money (theoretically) comes out of the profits of the company. Fines can also pave the way to class-action lawsuits, as this establishes the existence of the practice in one court, making it far easier to bring into another court.
How many companies actually do that?
Most companies I know of that are interested in backing up their users' data either require that all data be saved on a network drive, or they implement roaming profiles. It's a rare company in my experience that deploys agents to the desktops to manage backups, as it's far more complex and expensive than the other possible routes.
OTOH, they could still do this using remote power-on and shutdown capabilities. That would allow them to power down overnight to save electricity, but still do their backups, with reports in the morning on which systems didn't come online the night before.
Is this perhaps an attempt to get something more user-friendly out in front of people without the Debian name on it, in order to get feedback without getting flamed by the crowd that so dearly loves the traditional Debian installer?
It's a fine, not a settlement. They're expected to cut a check for the amount to the government, not reimburse consumers.
Funny, I was always under the impression that the liquid hydrogen in the shuttle's external fuel supply was held in a tank, and that it was supplied from a tank, and maybe even transported by a truck pulling a tank of hydrogen (unless it's generated on-site).
I guess I must be wrong, then.
In many cases, it is that level of administrator that I fear most. That's not to say that corporate teams of admins will always do better. I've seen some pretty horrible cludges designed by committee. But I've been downright shocked by what I've seen in small-to-mid-sized companies.
Storing hydrogen in tanks and then later burning it is relatively cheap and easy, whereas fuel cells are more expensive and temperamental. I'm not sure of the difference in efficiencies, since cells are generating power directly and burning the gas needs to go through a conversion from heat to electricity, probably through a dynamo.
The problem is, the people that need Social Security the most in their old age just plain didn't make enough money to have a reasonable saving rate.
Split the difference and require that a certain portion of the money be invested. This ensures that those that make less will still invest it. You could perhaps even be allowed to take a certain amount of the interest out (say, 25%) if the person's gross wages are below a certain amount. This ensures continued growth while allowing the person to have a little hedge against bad times.
I used to know a guy much like you, though a bit worse. He refused to install any patches from Microsoft because "they only break things." Just as SP4 was coming out, he said proudly that he was still running Windows 2000 Gold, with IE 5.0. That was it. He didn't run a firewall or AV, either, because he was behind a router, so he couldn't get infected. Your viewpoint annoys me because Slammer, Nimda, Code Red, and other worms wouldn't have gotten a foothold if the patches had been universally installed within a few months of their release. This other guy used to infuriate me. I almost drove to Colorado just to smack him.
Even so, do you really think there is a solid link between MS Security Support and 911? Honestly, is there a real comparison there?
There just might be.
But what about costs? I can buy 100 workstations, monitor included, for about $65K. How much does a dual-server setup (including terminals) for 100 users cost?
Part of the problem is that while I don't trust users to keep their machines running properly, I barely trust a lot of server admins to do any better. I've seen the way a lot of servers are put together, and how often they need some really inane maintenance. It's scary. The penalty for a bad user is usually limited to affecting one or two people; the penalty for a bad admin can affect entire departments or even more.
No, if she'd had some sort of way out, and the criminal remained trapped, then she wouldn't have needed to speak in 'Yes' and 'No' to the police, she would have just walked out of sight from the crook and called them.
Scenario: The attacker gets in and holds a gun to her. She then is ordered to take him in the back. The only way through is this mantrap. They walk through, and then there's a card-access door at the other end. With him still holding the gun to her back, she uses her badge to open the other door, knowing that the alarm has already been tripped.
Had he gotten in on his own and entered the mantrap, it's entirely possible, depending on the design, that he could have gone through one door and, not having badge access to get through, is caught in the mantrap with the alarm company and police notified.
In the two cases where I worked, there was on-site security 24/7, and the mantrap had a camera on each door. Walk in without a badge, and you didn't walk out without security (or the police) escorting you.
It's good.
Until the central server crashes and nobody can do anything.
I throw in occasional extra servers into yum.conf that aren't there because the ones that are listed in the Fedora Faq get hammered sometimes. It's useful to have some lesser-known, higher-bandwidth locations to use when major patches come out.
There may be more to it than is described in the opinion, and Forchia may have had some kind of access out. I've seen similar setups where anyone can walk into the trap, but you have to have badge access to get out of it in either direction. The doors are typically very heavy wood or steel doors, so bashing one's way out is not really practical.
As a clarification, most mantraps are legal, at least in the US. I work at a government facility with one, and I've worked at a datacenter with one. In addition, a mantrap is in place in at least one location for America's Cash Express, as mentioned as a point of fact in this decision.
What I think etymxris was speaking of are lethal mantraps that use some kind of weapon (i.e., open the door and get a shotgun to the chest). Those are definitely illegal.
I got the file, and aside from a mention that Lucas originally told him that there would be three trilogies, and asking him on the earlier set if he wanted to be in Ep9 (to be made around 2011), there's nothing new in there. It's a lot of talk about what went on behind the scenes in standard studio politics.