It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
On the other hand, it doesn't take an explosion for a fertilizer company to leave land toxic, uninhabitable, and a risk to groundwater for over 30 years:
all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology. But that costs money, and we're not going to spend it.
So fuck you future people. Your problem. Sucks to be you.
To be fair, the problem is not just money, but also political. Many people want no new reactors, even if a new reactor will replace one of an older, less safe design.
Any large industrial accident can take decades to clean up. More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez accident, there are still lingering effects. There are many Superfund toxic waste sites that have been on the Superfund list for 30 years (the list was started 30 years ago or many would have listed longer)
What about stereos? Probably going to have to ban those too. And kids.
The bottom line is that people can be distracted by many things. We don't need a law for each and every possibility. We just need to have a universal distracted driving law and have officers enforce it.
I think car stereos are less distracting because they are completely passive. I listen to podcasts in the car regularly, and sometimes in heavy traffic I find that I've missed most of the podcast because I'm concentrating on the traffic rather than the podcast. Conversely, when talking on the phone, I'm an active participant and have to pay attention enough to follow the conversation and respond - sometimes after talking on the the phone while driving, I find that I can't remember miles of driving while on the phone.
The problem with general distracted driving laws is that they leave too much discretion in the hands of police - one officer might not ticket you for distracted driving unless you had both hands off the wheel while wiping your daughter's face in the back seat, while another may ticket you for itching your neck while driving.
It's difficult to fairly enforce broadly worded laws.
That's what *civil* court is for if they damage your property and mess up your well when they mess up. Further, the EPA will read them the riot act.
That's great, but does you no good when you discover groundwater contamination ars after the well is drilled and the company that did it is a shell company that's already gone out of business.
Besides... You do realize that if they "mess up" now and then, they will have *wasted* a large sum of cash because the effectiveness of the frack job is dependent on getting the materials into the rock where the gas is. If it gets wasted at 300 feet where it messes up the water table when they are shooting for 3,000, somebody ain't going to be happy about having a well that doesn't produce when it should have. It may happen, but not very often.
Sure, the gulf oil spill will likely cost BP many billions of dollars when it's all accounted for. Accidents happen. It may not happen very often, but if a bad fracking job contaminates a municipal aquifer, hundreds of thousands of people may be paying for the mistake.
Some of us are young, single, and childless (not necessarily male). It's a neat perk that keeps the cost of living down, and in the Bay Area those costs are already ludicrously expensive.
Besides, who wants to take advice from a four year old no name company just barely out of its diapers? Come back when you've been around at least a decade.
There's plenty of cheap (and good) food in the bay area - if you can afford the cost of Bay Area housing, dinners needn't be a major expense. I can pick up a decent meal (Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, etc) for $6 - $8 within a 10 minute walk from home or from the office. Though I usually end up cooking.
Um... They do say that, but it seems likely that when fracking is done properly, it's pretty safe. Of course, if you frack in the water table, or are not careful to seal your well as it goes though the water table, then sure, it's going to be a problem.
Sure, fracking may be safe when performed properly, but with thousands of new fracking wells each year, even if they do it right 99.9% of the time, there's still lots of room for water contamination.
You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.
He didn't say it was "withheld", he said it was unavailable, which is true.
If the FBI wanted to test crowdsourcing, they could easily come up with a mechanism to make all of the video and still photos available to the public - they could set up a web page (leveraging commercial offerings like Youtube and Flickr if they didn't want to build their own) with every single piece of footage they have. There are lots of reasons why they wouldn't do that, of course, but to claim that crowdsourcing failed when the crowd didn't have access to the all of the data that the investigators had is not fair.
chroot() jail of RHEL3 binaries. The new kernel runs old binaries just fine.
If all of the binaries (including libraries) are in the chroot jail, how does that solve the problem of keeping an out of date system patched and up to date? A security hole in a library (like a buffer overflow) would never be patched. She may as well just run WinXP in a VM.
RHEL 3 was released a couple years after WinXP and goes out of support a few months before WinXP does.
If her software was written for RHEL 3 and she couldn't afford to pay for the updated software that runs on RHEL6 version, how would Open Source help her? Would some Open Source developer port the code for her for free while still giving her assurance that it meets HIPAA requirements?
but claiming that it would somehow magically be better (and cheaper) if they just issued iPods to everyone and let them download no-fly-list updates from the Apple Store is not realistic
Luckily for all of us (except you, perhaps) that OP made no such claim, and didn't even hint that that might be a solution.
What was actually suggested was that PICTURES accompany NAMES on the No-Fly List, since there are frequently multiple people with the same name in the USA (note that I have an unusual surname, and yet I've managed to run into several people who knew someone with my FULL NAME)...
What did he mean by:
how INSANE it was that a system that cost SOOOO much money was less advanced than an iPod that fits in his pocket
He's comparing two entirely different things, he may as well complain that it's insane that a new car costs sooooo much more money than an iPod despite the fact that the only similarity between the two is that they both use CPU's and display devices.
I like David E Kelley's Boston Legal in general. Granted, lots of people hated his shows because his main characters tended to go on rants and act as mouth-pieces for his political views, but I enjoyed his shows and think that even if you disagree that he would at least make good points about them.
Anyway, there was an episode about the No Fly list and that monologue always stuck with me.
The main character (Alan Shore) went on and on about how poorly contrived it was and how INSANE it was that a system that cost SOOOO much money was less advanced than an iPod that fits in his pocket. That the iPod could store meta-data AND pictures for 20,000+ items but the No Fly List only handled names. Names which could be faked AND shared with others.
An iPod is not a distributed database system, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Sure, there may be weaknesses in the no-fly list infrastructure, but claiming that it would somehow magically be better (and cheaper) if they just issued iPods to everyone and let them download no-fly-list updates from the Apple Store is not realistic - the iPod is just a display (and storage) device, it's no better than whatever computer is used to access the list today.
The Boston bombers were able to travel to Chechnya, learn how to make bombs and travel back. Very effective guys, who would've thought they didn't need to bring the nails and ball bearings on the plane with them to do that??? Certainly not the TSA.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but no one (not even the TSA) thinks airport screenings will stop bombs from coming into the USA - the TSA screening is only there to help prevent bombs from making it onto the plane. The no-fly list isn't even meant to keep known terrorists out of the country, it's meant to prevent them from boarding a plane, hence the name "No-FLY list"
Does a spy camera on the side of the road really justify comparisons to 1984? Are we really anywhere close to the type of life portrayed in 1984?
What is the minimum criteria for comparing society to a literary work -- Is there some percentage of the work that have to similar to justify the comparison?
I can certainly see how hidden government surveillance cabinets (if there's one, there's likely to be more than one, and who knows how many - maybe they are on every street corner?) could be compared to the ubiquitous surveillance decribed in 1984. We may be a long way from government surveillance in our homes, when we can't walk to the corner store without the government knowing about it, it seems that we're a lot closer than we used to. And now we don't even need a trusted Party official to keep track of us - thanks to facial recognition, the government can record and indefinitely store all of our public movements for later data mining.
Who here is still using the x86 in their server farms? I'm interested in hearing why.
Because Windows only runs on x86, and once I've built up my VMWare or HyperV infrastructure to run the Windows side, why use a completely different processor architecture for the non-windows servers?
There are cheap cameras today that do full HD, low artifacts, and run 30 frames a second. These images were from old equipment and software. The smudged faces is that. They should be replaced. All replaced. The city I live has less than one FPS on its non-traffic cameras. It's pathetic what salesman push on the HLS-cash-infused cities when cheaper, and much better, hardware and software is available right now. You get what you pay for, and sometimes, not even that.
These look like local business security cams -- who is going to pay the businesses to replace the cameras and DVR's every year to keep up with the latest and greatest technology? Or do you think the government should blanket every public space with hi-def facial recognition cameras covering every inch of every public space so they are prepared for the next time this happens?
Don't forget to factor in the storage needs - my "action cam" generates 8GB of data/hour for 1080p 30fps -- if a small municipality has 200 cameras, that's over 1 Petabyte of data/month. Video compression can help, but only to a point since you don't want to lose any of that high resolution that your expensive camera is providing. And at around 20mbit/sec of data per camera, that's 4 gbit/sec of network bandwidth. And of course, someone has to monitor and repair those cameras - every time someone paints over the lens or otherwise damages the camera, someone's got to go out and fix it. There's no telling whether spraypaint over the lens is random graffiti or a precursor to an attack.
It's certainly a solvable problem - casinos are reported to have hundreds or thousands of cameras throughout the facility, but implementing such a system is not cheap, good thing casinos have people handing over bucketloads of cash to pay for it.
Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap
And history has shown that you pay for what you get.
Right, if you cheap out and pay for a single availability zone in a single region, when that AZ or Region goes down, your site is down.
If you pay for multi-AZ and Multi-region deployments you get much better availability.
Just like Amazon says.
Over the past 2 years, Amazon has been more reliable than the coloc we moved away from, mostly due to the triple (!) disk failure that took out our SAN RAID array - one disk failed, and while we were waiting for the replacement, another disk went down, after we replaced those two, another disk went down while rebuilding the RAID-6 array.
With AWS, an entire region can go offline and we can bring up the backup site on the other side of the country (or, starting next month, we could bring up our Ireland region).
All this for less than half the cost we were paying for the coloc + equipment maintenance.
neither does amazon unless you pay them a lot more $$$
Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap -- if you just want a cold or warm site to fail over to, you don't need to keep your entire infrastructure running at the secondary site, just replicate the data, and then spin up the servers over there when you need to fail over.
That's what my company does - we have about a dozen servers to run our website, but the secondary site has only a couple micro instances to receive data. When we need to failover, we just tell one of those servers to wake up the rest of the infrastructure and update the databases from the snapshots that have already been transferred over, including repointing DNS to the backup site. We could make the failover fully automatic, but are afraid of "split brain syndrome" leading to the failover site taking over when the primary is still fine so it's still a manual process. Our backup site is never more than 15 minutes out of date from production.
This has worked well in testing - we've done some "live" late-night failovers and it's relatively seamless -- since it's so cheap to set up the backup site (essentially we just pay for the cost of storage at the backup site), we're going to set up another region overseas for extra redundancy.
You seem to have confused IT with R&D -- it's not Corporate IT's job to invent new technologies like the Internet.
Dude, I work in "Corporate IT", and yes, my job is to invent new technologies. Amusingly, most of the new stuff I write is to fix the broken old stuff they haphazardly implimented because the bean counters said we didn't need a budget as big as originally specified to get the job done.
Sounds like you have a failure in IT Management, not bad Bean Counters. If there's not adequate budget to do the project, then it's the manager's job to either cancel the project, or scale it back to fit withing budget. Pretending to do the project but doing a half-assed job that requires fixing up later doesn't do anyone any good.
The reason the bean counters are counting beans is to make sure there's enough beans to keep the company running.
The reason us engineers refer to them as bean counters is due to the old proverb "penny wise and pound foolish." Bean counters cut corners wherever they can. The bean counter says if we use this kind of concrete instead of that kind, it'll cure faster and we'll save on labor. The engineer knows that the concrete was chosen because it has less fracturing risk. So the bean counter saves the project $30,000 now, but then the bridge needs an additional $350,000 in materials and labor over the service life. That's why we hate bean counters -- they only thing of the "now". They rarely look at the big picture.
Again, that's a management failure - in my company, bean counters aren't giving line item veto power over the project budget. They may ask for a 10% cut in budget, but it's the business unit and IT's job to decide what to cut out of the project to meet the new budget. And again, that doesn't mean doing a half-assed job at implementation.
In my experience, the Bean Counters do look at the big picture when it's presented to them. If a project costs $X to implement but saves $Y/year in labor and maintenance, it needs to be spelled out when getting project approval. But you can count on them coming back to you in a year for proof that you saved $Y/year so make sure your project proposal included the analytics to show the cost savings.
Installing the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology is rarely the best option unless...
Whoa there cowboy. Nobody said adopting the "latest and greatest". We're talking about packet-switched networks needing a redesign because they're costing us a fortune in security, labor, etc., because of a design decision made early on that turned out to be less than optimal. The argument here is that we can spend more up front, but save a lot more in maintenance down the road. It has nothing to do with "cutting edge" anything.
Sure, I'm not arguing against using current technology, just against using ignoring cost justifications and using bleeding edge technology just because "If you think you can do it, go for it." If you "think" you can do it, you probably didn't do enough research on the solution and probably shouldn't be doing it. What you're describing is a cost-justified implementation "we can spend more up front, but save a lot more in maintenance down the road". If you can write that up and present it to your Bean Counters, they may very well approve it. Or maybe not, maybe cash is tight and they don't want to spend $100,000 today to save $20,000/year over 5 years.
Once again, bean counters chime in with the usual rhetoric. "It's impossible. It can't work! It'll be too expensive! Implimentation will be difficult! The benefits aren't enough!"
Sorry, with an attitude like that, the Internet wouldn't exist. Let me tell you something about IT: Never listen to the bean counters. If you think you can do it, go for it. Nothing pisses people off more than saying it's impossible and then being shoved out of the way by the person doing it. And I'm all for pissing off the mediocre... any day of the week.
You seem to have confused IT with R&D -- it's not Corporate IT's job to invent new technologies like the Internet. It's IT's job to implement business solutions that meet the needs of the business -- and that includes satisfying the bean counters that there's a good return on investment.
The reason the bean counters are counting beans is to make sure there's enough beans to keep the company running.
Installing the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology is rarely the best option unless you have special needs that can only be met by that product - you'll pay a premium to be an early adopter as well as becoming an unwitting beta tester, and then you'll find that it's almost, but not quite compatible with the standards based products that come out a year later. Like the "Draft-N" Wifi routers that couldn't be upgraded to the full 802.11N standard (or maybe they could but the vendor didn't bother since he wants to sell you all new equipment).
I realize that TFS is a copy & paste job, but WTF? Whomever was quoted shouldn't be allowed to use a phone ever just because they can't speak coherently.
Here's a summary of the summary:
During a disaster there are too many people trying to make calls and not enough cell sites for them all. More cell sites cost more money. Cell sites that are damaged by a disaster don't work.
One disadvantage of gold is that it depends on the scarcity of the metal.... if Asteroid Mining ever becomes a reality and someone happens to snag an asteroid with thousands of tons of easily extracted gold, the gold market will tank overnight. (and it can happen before the first ounce of gold is mined if there's verified proof of the deposit).
Not a good straw man argument. That effect of the influx would be temporary. Gold would still be scarce.
The direct effect of 1000 tons of asteroid gold may be temporary, but the effect on the markets will last much longer. Even if that solid gold asteroid was a one in a billion anomaly, investors aren't going to trust in the scarcity of gold when they think there could be millions of tons of gold within easy reach.
Of course, we're decades away from such large scale asteroid mining being possible, so gold is still a safe investment.
Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production.
One disadvantage of gold is that it depends on the scarcity of the metal.... if Asteroid Mining ever becomes a reality and someone happens to snag an asteroid with thousands of tons of easily extracted gold, the gold market will tank overnight. (and it can happen before the first ounce of gold is mined if there's verified proof of the deposit).
That xkcd does not include instructions on how to make such a bomb. It doesn't mention black powder at all, or ball bearings.
It is also quite incorrect. It claims that a consumer-grade cooker won't go above 2 atm. That's patently absurd. If you block the exit and the safety valve fails, the pressure can easily reach a level that the metal will burst.
I think most modern pressure cookers are designed so the gasket between the lid and the pot will give way and leak pressure before the metal pot explodes so you'd have to have a failure of the pressure valve, the pressure release safety valve *and* the gasket. Older pressure cookers often didn't have that that gasket level of safety, so a failure of the pressure valve and safety *could* result in explosion.
But that's if the safety valve fails. Well, the best course of action in any operation is to never assume that the safety valve will work properly and to never push the envelope where it has to work to keep you alive.
Isn't that pretty much the normal use-case for the pressure cooker. The normal pressure valve is typically small and relatively easily clogged, so everytime you use it, you're counting on the safety release valve being there just in case the primary pressure release becomes clogged. If there wasn't that extra safety valve, people would be afraid to cook anything but plain water to prevent clogging the pressure valve.
Even if the safety valve functions, the hole it opens is limited in size. If the amount of heat being applied creates the pressure more rapidly than it can be released by the safety valve, you still get enough pressure to rupture the vessel. Using black powder as the pressure generation source would most likely create enough pressure fast enough, and if one of those ball bearing happened to block the safety valve hole, you suddenly have no safety valve.
Safety valve or no, a big enough explosive is going to rupture the device, but that's well outside of the normal operating conditions of a pressure cooker - a household stove can only put so much energy into the pressure cooker and a 1cm hole can let out an awful lot of steam.
Along with assuming the safety valve functions properly, there is the assumption that the pressure vessel has not been compromised. Stress fractures or damage to the vessel can create a weakness that can rupture.
And that, dear reader, means that the worst that can happen in a normal kitchen is that it can, indeed, explode and kill you.
Yeah, that's the worst case, but you're probably more likely to die from your stove leaking natural gas into your house than having a modern pressure cooker explode.
And revoke their "Press" privileges : the access passes,etc if they exceed a specified number (and maybe grade) of "inaccuracy events" Their job is to present facts and not opinions, so this should be relatively easy to implement
If they did that, the only news would be "Explosions reported at Boston Marathon, check back next month for details when we tell you what the authorities want you to know".
Without news crews on the ground, people would only get one side of the story, after it has been sanitized by the government. A terrorist attack (or disaster) is chaotic, even authoritative sources will sometimes release inaccurate or incomplete information. Independent witnesses interviewed at the scene will sometimes have wildly different versions of the events depending on their vantage point and own personal experience.
I don't know how the news media can be graded on accuracy of facts when the facts themselves are in dispute even among official sources.
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It doesn't take 40 years to clean up after a fertilizer plant explodes. BTW, what happens if they get another tsunami while they're cleaning up the mess?
On the other hand, it doesn't take an explosion for a fertilizer company to leave land toxic, uninhabitable, and a risk to groundwater for over 30 years:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/vwsoalphabetic/Frontier+Fertilizer?OpenDocument
all 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology. But that costs money, and we're not going to spend it.
So fuck you future people. Your problem. Sucks to be you.
To be fair, the problem is not just money, but also political. Many people want no new reactors, even if a new reactor will replace one of an older, less safe design.
Any large industrial accident can take decades to clean up. More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez accident, there are still lingering effects. There are many Superfund toxic waste sites that have been on the Superfund list for 30 years (the list was started 30 years ago or many would have listed longer)
What about stereos? Probably going to have to ban those too. And kids.
The bottom line is that people can be distracted by many things. We don't need a law for each and every possibility. We just need to have a universal distracted driving law and have officers enforce it.
I think car stereos are less distracting because they are completely passive. I listen to podcasts in the car regularly, and sometimes in heavy traffic I find that I've missed most of the podcast because I'm concentrating on the traffic rather than the podcast. Conversely, when talking on the phone, I'm an active participant and have to pay attention enough to follow the conversation and respond - sometimes after talking on the the phone while driving, I find that I can't remember miles of driving while on the phone.
The problem with general distracted driving laws is that they leave too much discretion in the hands of police - one officer might not ticket you for distracted driving unless you had both hands off the wheel while wiping your daughter's face in the back seat, while another may ticket you for itching your neck while driving.
It's difficult to fairly enforce broadly worded laws.
That's what *civil* court is for if they damage your property and mess up your well when they mess up. Further, the EPA will read them the riot act.
That's great, but does you no good when you discover groundwater contamination ars after the well is drilled and the company that did it is a shell company that's already gone out of business.
Besides... You do realize that if they "mess up" now and then, they will have *wasted* a large sum of cash because the effectiveness of the frack job is dependent on getting the materials into the rock where the gas is. If it gets wasted at 300 feet where it messes up the water table when they are shooting for 3,000, somebody ain't going to be happy about having a well that doesn't produce when it should have. It may happen, but not very often.
Sure, the gulf oil spill will likely cost BP many billions of dollars when it's all accounted for. Accidents happen. It may not happen very often, but if a bad fracking job contaminates a municipal aquifer, hundreds of thousands of people may be paying for the mistake.
Some of us are young, single, and childless (not necessarily male). It's a neat perk that keeps the cost of living down, and in the Bay Area those costs are already ludicrously expensive.
Besides, who wants to take advice from a four year old no name company just barely out of its diapers? Come back when you've been around at least a decade.
There's plenty of cheap (and good) food in the bay area - if you can afford the cost of Bay Area housing, dinners needn't be a major expense. I can pick up a decent meal (Chinese, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, etc) for $6 - $8 within a 10 minute walk from home or from the office. Though I usually end up cooking.
Um... They do say that, but it seems likely that when fracking is done properly, it's pretty safe. Of course, if you frack in the water table, or are not careful to seal your well as it goes though the water table, then sure, it's going to be a problem.
Sure, fracking may be safe when performed properly, but with thousands of new fracking wells each year, even if they do it right 99.9% of the time, there's still lots of room for water contamination.
You're acting as if information was "withheld"...it wasn't. There is no mechanism to release every single piece of evidence collected by every agency to the internet and "crowdsource" it.
He didn't say it was "withheld", he said it was unavailable, which is true.
If the FBI wanted to test crowdsourcing, they could easily come up with a mechanism to make all of the video and still photos available to the public - they could set up a web page (leveraging commercial offerings like Youtube and Flickr if they didn't want to build their own) with every single piece of footage they have. There are lots of reasons why they wouldn't do that, of course, but to claim that crowdsourcing failed when the crowd didn't have access to the all of the data that the investigators had is not fair.
chroot() jail of RHEL3 binaries. The new kernel runs old binaries just fine.
If all of the binaries (including libraries) are in the chroot jail, how does that solve the problem of keeping an out of date system patched and up to date? A security hole in a library (like a buffer overflow) would never be patched. She may as well just run WinXP in a VM.
Yet again the closed source model fails society.
RHEL 3 was released a couple years after WinXP and goes out of support a few months before WinXP does.
If her software was written for RHEL 3 and she couldn't afford to pay for the updated software that runs on RHEL6 version, how would Open Source help her? Would some Open Source developer port the code for her for free while still giving her assurance that it meets HIPAA requirements?
Luckily for all of us (except you, perhaps) that OP made no such claim, and didn't even hint that that might be a solution.
What was actually suggested was that PICTURES accompany NAMES on the No-Fly List, since there are frequently multiple people with the same name in the USA (note that I have an unusual surname, and yet I've managed to run into several people who knew someone with my FULL NAME)...
What did he mean by:
how INSANE it was that a system that cost SOOOO much money was less advanced than an iPod that fits in his pocket
He's comparing two entirely different things, he may as well complain that it's insane that a new car costs sooooo much more money than an iPod despite the fact that the only similarity between the two is that they both use CPU's and display devices.
I like David E Kelley's Boston Legal in general. Granted, lots of people hated his shows because his main characters tended to go on rants and act as mouth-pieces for his political views, but I enjoyed his shows and think that even if you disagree that he would at least make good points about them.
Anyway, there was an episode about the No Fly list and that monologue always stuck with me.
The main character (Alan Shore) went on and on about how poorly contrived it was and how INSANE it was that a system that cost SOOOO much money was less advanced than an iPod that fits in his pocket. That the iPod could store meta-data AND pictures for 20,000+ items but the No Fly List only handled names. Names which could be faked AND shared with others.
An iPod is not a distributed database system, you're comparing apples and oranges.
Sure, there may be weaknesses in the no-fly list infrastructure, but claiming that it would somehow magically be better (and cheaper) if they just issued iPods to everyone and let them download no-fly-list updates from the Apple Store is not realistic - the iPod is just a display (and storage) device, it's no better than whatever computer is used to access the list today.
The Boston bombers were able to travel to Chechnya, learn how to make bombs and travel back. Very effective guys, who would've thought they didn't need to bring the nails and ball bearings on the plane with them to do that??? Certainly not the TSA.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but no one (not even the TSA) thinks airport screenings will stop bombs from coming into the USA - the TSA screening is only there to help prevent bombs from making it onto the plane. The no-fly list isn't even meant to keep known terrorists out of the country, it's meant to prevent them from boarding a plane, hence the name "No-FLY list"
Does a spy camera on the side of the road really justify comparisons to 1984? Are we really anywhere close to the type of life portrayed in 1984?
What is the minimum criteria for comparing society to a literary work -- Is there some percentage of the work that have to similar to justify the comparison?
I can certainly see how hidden government surveillance cabinets (if there's one, there's likely to be more than one, and who knows how many - maybe they are on every street corner?) could be compared to the ubiquitous surveillance decribed in 1984. We may be a long way from government surveillance in our homes, when we can't walk to the corner store without the government knowing about it, it seems that we're a lot closer than we used to. And now we don't even need a trusted Party official to keep track of us - thanks to facial recognition, the government can record and indefinitely store all of our public movements for later data mining.
Who here is still using the x86 in their server farms? I'm interested in hearing why.
Because Windows only runs on x86, and once I've built up my VMWare or HyperV infrastructure to run the Windows side, why use a completely different processor architecture for the non-windows servers?
There are cheap cameras today that do full HD, low artifacts, and run 30 frames a second. These images were from old equipment and software. The smudged faces is that. They should be replaced. All replaced. The city I live has less than one FPS on its non-traffic cameras. It's pathetic what salesman push on the HLS-cash-infused cities when cheaper, and much better, hardware and software is available right now. You get what you pay for, and sometimes, not even that.
These look like local business security cams -- who is going to pay the businesses to replace the cameras and DVR's every year to keep up with the latest and greatest technology? Or do you think the government should blanket every public space with hi-def facial recognition cameras covering every inch of every public space so they are prepared for the next time this happens?
Don't forget to factor in the storage needs - my "action cam" generates 8GB of data/hour for 1080p 30fps -- if a small municipality has 200 cameras, that's over 1 Petabyte of data/month. Video compression can help, but only to a point since you don't want to lose any of that high resolution that your expensive camera is providing. And at around 20mbit/sec of data per camera, that's 4 gbit/sec of network bandwidth. And of course, someone has to monitor and repair those cameras - every time someone paints over the lens or otherwise damages the camera, someone's got to go out and fix it. There's no telling whether spraypaint over the lens is random graffiti or a precursor to an attack.
It's certainly a solvable problem - casinos are reported to have hundreds or thousands of cameras throughout the facility, but implementing such a system is not cheap, good thing casinos have people handing over bucketloads of cash to pay for it.
Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap
And history has shown that you pay for what you get.
Right, if you cheap out and pay for a single availability zone in a single region, when that AZ or Region goes down, your site is down.
If you pay for multi-AZ and Multi-region deployments you get much better availability.
Just like Amazon says.
Over the past 2 years, Amazon has been more reliable than the coloc we moved away from, mostly due to the triple (!) disk failure that took out our SAN RAID array - one disk failed, and while we were waiting for the replacement, another disk went down, after we replaced those two, another disk went down while rebuilding the RAID-6 array.
With AWS, an entire region can go offline and we can bring up the backup site on the other side of the country (or, starting next month, we could bring up our Ireland region).
All this for less than half the cost we were paying for the coloc + equipment maintenance.
neither does amazon unless you pay them a lot more $$$
Depending on your needs, setting up geographical redundancy with Amazon can be extremely cheap -- if you just want a cold or warm site to fail over to, you don't need to keep your entire infrastructure running at the secondary site, just replicate the data, and then spin up the servers over there when you need to fail over.
That's what my company does - we have about a dozen servers to run our website, but the secondary site has only a couple micro instances to receive data. When we need to failover, we just tell one of those servers to wake up the rest of the infrastructure and update the databases from the snapshots that have already been transferred over, including repointing DNS to the backup site. We could make the failover fully automatic, but are afraid of "split brain syndrome" leading to the failover site taking over when the primary is still fine so it's still a manual process. Our backup site is never more than 15 minutes out of date from production.
This has worked well in testing - we've done some "live" late-night failovers and it's relatively seamless -- since it's so cheap to set up the backup site (essentially we just pay for the cost of storage at the backup site), we're going to set up another region overseas for extra redundancy.
You seem to have confused IT with R&D -- it's not Corporate IT's job to invent new technologies like the Internet.
Dude, I work in "Corporate IT", and yes, my job is to invent new technologies. Amusingly, most of the new stuff I write is to fix the broken old stuff they haphazardly implimented because the bean counters said we didn't need a budget as big as originally specified to get the job done.
Sounds like you have a failure in IT Management, not bad Bean Counters. If there's not adequate budget to do the project, then it's the manager's job to either cancel the project, or scale it back to fit withing budget. Pretending to do the project but doing a half-assed job that requires fixing up later doesn't do anyone any good.
The reason the bean counters are counting beans is to make sure there's enough beans to keep the company running.
The reason us engineers refer to them as bean counters is due to the old proverb "penny wise and pound foolish." Bean counters cut corners wherever they can. The bean counter says if we use this kind of concrete instead of that kind, it'll cure faster and we'll save on labor. The engineer knows that the concrete was chosen because it has less fracturing risk. So the bean counter saves the project $30,000 now, but then the bridge needs an additional $350,000 in materials and labor over the service life. That's why we hate bean counters -- they only thing of the "now". They rarely look at the big picture.
Again, that's a management failure - in my company, bean counters aren't giving line item veto power over the project budget. They may ask for a 10% cut in budget, but it's the business unit and IT's job to decide what to cut out of the project to meet the new budget. And again, that doesn't mean doing a half-assed job at implementation.
In my experience, the Bean Counters do look at the big picture when it's presented to them. If a project costs $X to implement but saves $Y/year in labor and maintenance, it needs to be spelled out when getting project approval. But you can count on them coming back to you in a year for proof that you saved $Y/year so make sure your project proposal included the analytics to show the cost savings.
Installing the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology is rarely the best option unless...
Whoa there cowboy. Nobody said adopting the "latest and greatest". We're talking about packet-switched networks needing a redesign because they're costing us a fortune in security, labor, etc., because of a design decision made early on that turned out to be less than optimal. The argument here is that we can spend more up front, but save a lot more in maintenance down the road. It has nothing to do with "cutting edge" anything.
Sure, I'm not arguing against using current technology, just against using ignoring cost justifications and using bleeding edge technology just because "If you think you can do it, go for it." If you "think" you can do it, you probably didn't do enough research on the solution and probably shouldn't be doing it. What you're describing is a cost-justified implementation "we can spend more up front, but save a lot more in maintenance down the road". If you can write that up and present it to your Bean Counters, they may very well approve it. Or maybe not, maybe cash is tight and they don't want to spend $100,000 today to save $20,000/year over 5 years.
Once again, bean counters chime in with the usual rhetoric. "It's impossible. It can't work! It'll be too expensive! Implimentation will be difficult! The benefits aren't enough!"
Sorry, with an attitude like that, the Internet wouldn't exist. Let me tell you something about IT: Never listen to the bean counters. If you think you can do it, go for it. Nothing pisses people off more than saying it's impossible and then being shoved out of the way by the person doing it. And I'm all for pissing off the mediocre... any day of the week.
You seem to have confused IT with R&D -- it's not Corporate IT's job to invent new technologies like the Internet. It's IT's job to implement business solutions that meet the needs of the business -- and that includes satisfying the bean counters that there's a good return on investment.
The reason the bean counters are counting beans is to make sure there's enough beans to keep the company running.
Installing the latest and greatest bleeding edge technology is rarely the best option unless you have special needs that can only be met by that product - you'll pay a premium to be an early adopter as well as becoming an unwitting beta tester, and then you'll find that it's almost, but not quite compatible with the standards based products that come out a year later. Like the "Draft-N" Wifi routers that couldn't be upgraded to the full 802.11N standard (or maybe they could but the vendor didn't bother since he wants to sell you all new equipment).
I realize that TFS is a copy & paste job, but WTF? Whomever was quoted shouldn't be allowed to use a phone ever just because they can't speak coherently.
Here's a summary of the summary:
During a disaster there are too many people trying to make calls and not enough cell sites for them all. More cell sites cost more money. Cell sites that are damaged by a disaster don't work.
But doesn't everyone already know that?
One disadvantage of gold is that it depends on the scarcity of the metal.... if Asteroid Mining ever becomes a reality and someone happens to snag an asteroid with thousands of tons of easily extracted gold, the gold market will tank overnight. (and it can happen before the first ounce of gold is mined if there's verified proof of the deposit).
Not a good straw man argument. That effect of the influx would be temporary. Gold would still be scarce.
The direct effect of 1000 tons of asteroid gold may be temporary, but the effect on the markets will last much longer. Even if that solid gold asteroid was a one in a billion anomaly, investors aren't going to trust in the scarcity of gold when they think there could be millions of tons of gold within easy reach.
Of course, we're decades away from such large scale asteroid mining being possible, so gold is still a safe investment.
Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production.
One disadvantage of gold is that it depends on the scarcity of the metal.... if Asteroid Mining ever becomes a reality and someone happens to snag an asteroid with thousands of tons of easily extracted gold, the gold market will tank overnight. (and it can happen before the first ounce of gold is mined if there's verified proof of the deposit).
That xkcd does not include instructions on how to make such a bomb. It doesn't mention black powder at all, or ball bearings.
It is also quite incorrect. It claims that a consumer-grade cooker won't go above 2 atm. That's patently absurd. If you block the exit and the safety valve fails, the pressure can easily reach a level that the metal will burst.
I think most modern pressure cookers are designed so the gasket between the lid and the pot will give way and leak pressure before the metal pot explodes so you'd have to have a failure of the pressure valve, the pressure release safety valve *and* the gasket. Older pressure cookers often didn't have that that gasket level of safety, so a failure of the pressure valve and safety *could* result in explosion.
But that's if the safety valve fails. Well, the best course of action in any operation is to never assume that the safety valve will work properly and to never push the envelope where it has to work to keep you alive.
Isn't that pretty much the normal use-case for the pressure cooker. The normal pressure valve is typically small and relatively easily clogged, so everytime you use it, you're counting on the safety release valve being there just in case the primary pressure release becomes clogged. If there wasn't that extra safety valve, people would be afraid to cook anything but plain water to prevent clogging the pressure valve.
Even if the safety valve functions, the hole it opens is limited in size. If the amount of heat being applied creates the pressure more rapidly than it can be released by the safety valve, you still get enough pressure to rupture the vessel. Using black powder as the pressure generation source would most likely create enough pressure fast enough, and if one of those ball bearing happened to block the safety valve hole, you suddenly have no safety valve.
Safety valve or no, a big enough explosive is going to rupture the device, but that's well outside of the normal operating conditions of a pressure cooker - a household stove can only put so much energy into the pressure cooker and a 1cm hole can let out an awful lot of steam.
Along with assuming the safety valve functions properly, there is the assumption that the pressure vessel has not been compromised. Stress fractures or damage to the vessel can create a weakness that can rupture.
And that, dear reader, means that the worst that can happen in a normal kitchen is that it can, indeed, explode and kill you.
Yeah, that's the worst case, but you're probably more likely to die from your stove leaking natural gas into your house than having a modern pressure cooker explode.
And revoke their "Press" privileges : the access passes,etc if they exceed a specified number (and maybe grade) of "inaccuracy events"
Their job is to present facts and not opinions, so this should be relatively easy to implement
If they did that, the only news would be "Explosions reported at Boston Marathon, check back next month for details when we tell you what the authorities want you to know".
Without news crews on the ground, people would only get one side of the story, after it has been sanitized by the government. A terrorist attack (or disaster) is chaotic, even authoritative sources will sometimes release inaccurate or incomplete information. Independent witnesses interviewed at the scene will sometimes have wildly different versions of the events depending on their vantage point and own personal experience.
I don't know how the news media can be graded on accuracy of facts when the facts themselves are in dispute even among official sources.