That explains everything -- why, when that guy sold me that Anna Kournikova underwear and I extracted the sweat to clone my own AK, out came a middle-aged Portugese woman with a lisp. I thought maybe I'd gotten swindled, but now I can be sure it was just a freak mutation. Phew!
i wonder if someone at microsoft leaked a touch of info, and someone else beat them to the patent a few months before the big release? seems like a good way to throw a wrench into the engine eh?
when people like this, people with moderate amount of power, yet dont understand what they should be using it for, get scared, strange things happen.
about two years ago, a friend of mine was contacted, they wanted to ask him a few questions about a "recent security violation". apparently the isp he read his email from was setup ni an incredibly odd way, they had a couple of mail servers, pop.theirname.com and popp.thiername.com. pop was the standard mail server that this guy should have been using, however, being moderately slow, he was using popp (its one extra keystroke). apparently popp was reserved for the local rcmp branch (canadas version of the fbi) email, as well as the local police departmnet's email. fine, but apparently everyone else's login/pass works on this server.
my analysis is that they read a log quickly, saw that he had repeatedly logged in successfully to this supposedly secure box, and the isp started thinking legal action. anyhow onto the story, after being called by a threatening sounding person, he got in touch with a friend of his, a lawyer. by the end of that day, pretty much every law enforcement official in the town had swarmed into his place (with a questionable warrant), and taken everything that resembled a peice of electronics. of course after analyzing the poor guys setup, the isp quickly realized what idiots they were, and quickly dropped everything. the local rcmp apparently kept everything for another 6 months out of paranoia. no body seemed to understand that what he was doing was based off of a simple error, the friend didnt even notice, as his email still came in a-o.k.
had the tech reading the log thought for about three minutes, the entire situation could have been avoided. had the law agencies thought, hey, maybe we should get someone to take a second and third look at those logs, the entire situation could have been avoided. had someone spoken to him long enough to realize he didnt know what telnet, tracert, ping, ftp, or even pop stood for (let alone how any of them worked), the entire situation could have been avoided. what im basically saying, is most situations like my friends, and the one in the story could have been avoided. all people need is a bit of logic when dealing with computer security issues.
...that it was like yesterday that i had mentioned something to the tune of, once the netbsd port catches up, we need a beowulf of these. maybe its time to try it;)
as soon as the netbsd port is stable, im considering getting about 10 of these together to try it. hopefully theyll be a bit cheaper by then, not that they arent already ridiculously cheap since they announced the death of them.
im really doubting that head-hunters good enough to come up with a system of filtering based on how quickly people learn in this course would miss qualified applicants who hadnt taken the course. this seems more like a slick way of gathering up and coming talent, not the exclusive way of gathering talent.
as for the irs similarity, im really not seeing it, if this were redhat giving rhce certification to every seceratary/janitor/pizza delivery guy who has worked for them, id see it. this is more like redhat offering jobs to those who get the highest scores on the rhce exams.....
i mean if you take a course to get certified, your probably going to get a job. linuxgruven just wants to make sure that they get an extra advantage when they go scouting. to me the thought of scouting people by training them seems like a very good idea for any firm. how better to get a feel for how good a guy is than to sit and train him for a while.
as they say, they've hired people who werent trained by them before.
its been proven that coffee tends to speed up reaction time a bit for a fairly short period of time, only to lead to a crash (regular old caffeine high). tea on the other hand tends to raise mental stimulation considerably for longer periods of time, without any form of crash, mostly due to the significantly lower amounts of caffiene in tea.
.brad
oh yea, that boston thing, it was about a tax on tea, as a result, most countries still dont tax loose tea sales.
water has been known to reduce brain power (as have most cold beverages), coffee on the other hand does nothing for your brain power short of being mildly carcinogenic. tea on the other hand (especially green tea) has been proven many times to heighten brain activity, stimulate your mind, as well as mildly reproducing brain cells. pretty amazing being as how tea is basically warm water after having tea leaves added to it.
but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about. people who need an itanium will not want x86 code, they wont even want a filesystem that easily supports x86 code.
dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha, that is when we can discount this chip.
embracing a hardware hack like this, and communicating with curious hackers, could allow the entire community to breathe life into new and old willians pinball systems. this is a good thing because the world needs more pinball.
if your going to end up doing a lot of number crunching, you should really look into some form of multiple cpu alpha. the alphas absolutley fly when it comes to floating point calculations. by the sounds of it, you would almost definately benefit from having some form of alpha solution. you will be better served to use compaq's tru64 unix than linux, im pretty sure that any alpha with 16+ cpu's would definately laugh at linux.
well, what i more meant was some form of hardware hack to the ethernet card to allowo it to function as some form of dual port card. there is also the possibility of making some form of splitter to allow two cards to interface through, which of course the software (NetBSD in this case) has to be able to recognize and deal with properly. to me, this seems like the sort of thing a decent hardware hacker would have a fairly fun time doing. this obviously would cause crazy errors if the person were to try to play games throuhg it, but hey, were talking firewall *grin*.
the last interveiw i read with linus said that he was going to think for a bit before releasing the next kernel version. he may be planning to jump straight to version 3.0 next. it seems a touch unlikely to me at least, but who gets the prizes if that happens??
drug war is pure crazyness
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 1
the sick thing is that the 19 billion a year that is spent on the war on drugs is miniscule to what is made each year, by both sides, because of the drug trade. the technology that is needed to basically completely win the war on drugs would cost very, very little. the rest of the money (the other 17 billion) could be used to re-vitalize the us public education system (which is probably the worst funded [and as a result worst performing] public education system in the civilized world). higher education tends to lead to less moronic drug use (which also leads to less moronic drug use related problems). legalization would also eliminate the prolem, and free up a lot of money, which again, the schools would benefit from.
education is the key. smarter people tend to not turn into the drug crazed lunatics that are often pictured whenever legal narcotics are spoken of.
the war on drugs has got to be the largest sham ive personally ever heard of. the figures i have found all seem to say figures to the tune of 19 billion dollars a year, also every few months some congressman manages to add 10 million or so to the yearly pool. 19 billion is a lot of money.
now take a look at what they do with that money, they setup special police forces that go to public schools, concerts, and various other suspect spots. this is great for catching the end user of said substances, but that is hardly stopping the problem.
lets now look at the technology that exists. there are radar style devices out there that can detect very small amounts of cocaine, barbituates, or opiates. now if you think about the bigger drugs, almost all of them fit into these categories. these are also inexpensively mades. if these devices were used instead of being left on the shelf, the us border patrol would not only be able to detect the drugs, but they would also see them about a mile away. the technology that is used, is usually dogs who can supposedly smell larger amounts of drugs.
lets also look at where the border patrol is told to watch. the heavily patrolled area is basically right along the us/mexico border, when in fact, more drugs come through from canada. vancouver, and montreal are the two largest drug centres in north america. both of these are port cities, and both of them are ridiculously close to the us border. i, being a canadian have crossed the us canada border more times than i can count, including several times in the two previously mentioned cities. not once have i ever seen any form of narcotics detection. most drugs that come through mexico are usually flown in, or brought in by people with "special clearance". yes, people who have paid the right people dont even get to be sniffed by the previously mentioned dogs.
yes folks, it seems the us wants to lose the war on drugs, but why? well, there is a lot of money being made from it. i dont mean employing a few hundred people, i mean several thousand occupations seem to benefit from it. the justice system obviously, most of the people in jails in the us wouldnt be there if drugs werent an issue. the police need larger numbers of people, with even more training. the hospital system gets a lot of drug related cases. those on the other side of the law make phenomenal amounts of money. more importantly, this "war on drugs" gives the politicians something to talk about during the debates. they tend to like keeping the real issues quiet. all the parties at hand tend to also make a great deal of money directly from those involved in the drug trade. medical professionals who come into contact with these people are often paid better to keep that whole doctor client secrecy thing a bit tighter, lawyers are paid twice what they normally get, arresting officers are often paid to lose evidence, the list goes on and on.
recently there was a push in vancouver to make needle drugs semi-legal. this is mostly because vancouver is the heroin capital of the western world. aids rates are high, crime in the troubled spots is outstanding (for canada at least). they wanted to make "shooting galleries", to ensure that people had clean needles, as well as having trained staff make sure that if there was an overdose the person would live. they also wanted education to be the focus, and possession of personal amounts to be perfectly legal. everyone in the city (i mean everyone) was excited. all of a sudden most of the people who were voting on it were suddenly against the idea. about four months later, a large drug bust revealed that these people were actually paid by the largest street gang to keep the drug illegal! it seems the gang makes more off of an illegal substance than off of a legal one.
to me this seems like the perfect power source for some form of small submarine style spy tool. add a radar/sonar device, possibly a camera of sorts, a microphone maybe? these things are probably small enough to not get picked up by radar, and could be sent long distances without running out of power.
im sure you guys can think of a few uses for devices like this for use in large bodies of water as well as inside pipes and other common places you wouldnt expect survailence devices...
especially when you compare them to mindstorms. with a few extra expansion packs and some creative hacking mindstorms can do anything. im working on one thatll sweep my floor (it scares the heck outta my cats too).
...but not exactly this. i was actually on the team that was doing the budget for the plan. they basically wanted broadband and free internet terminals with webcams. theyre plan was to have it set-up for web confrencing with other starbucks customers (mostly those long lost friends and family), and have a few cameras in each location that broadcast all of the stores to the internet.
obviously as you can imagine, this was going to cost a boatload of cash (5 terminals, each with webcam, 1 server to be a gateway/firewall/controller for the internet webcams, at every location). It was pure madness. The support bill was more than they had wanted to spend on the entire project.
With this plan however, a lot less hardware is needed. probably a much wiser way to go over all.
Slashdot Mirror
That explains everything -- why, when that guy sold me that Anna Kournikova underwear and I extracted the sweat to clone my own AK, out came a middle-aged Portugese woman with a lisp. I thought maybe I'd gotten swindled, but now I can be sure it was just a freak mutation. Phew!
Back to the lab...
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
>Name one major company using MySQL for a mission-critical database.
.brad
well, NASA, according to this article. that a major enough company?
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organicgreenteas.com
im sure the good folks at the X consortium (you know, X windows) would have a little laugh at that one.
.brad
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organicgreenteas.com
i wonder if someone at microsoft leaked a touch of info, and someone else beat them to the patent a few months before the big release? seems like a good way to throw a wrench into the engine eh?
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
when people like this, people with moderate amount of power, yet dont understand what they should be using it for, get scared, strange things happen.
about two years ago, a friend of mine was contacted, they wanted to ask him a few questions about a "recent security violation". apparently the isp he read his email from was setup ni an incredibly odd way, they had a couple of mail servers, pop.theirname.com and popp.thiername.com. pop was the standard mail server that this guy should have been using, however, being moderately slow, he was using popp (its one extra keystroke). apparently popp was reserved for the local rcmp branch (canadas version of the fbi) email, as well as the local police departmnet's email. fine, but apparently everyone else's login/pass works on this server.
my analysis is that they read a log quickly, saw that he had repeatedly logged in successfully to this supposedly secure box, and the isp started thinking legal action. anyhow onto the story, after being called by a threatening sounding person, he got in touch with a friend of his, a lawyer. by the end of that day, pretty much every law enforcement official in the town had swarmed into his place (with a questionable warrant), and taken everything that resembled a peice of electronics. of course after analyzing the poor guys setup, the isp quickly realized what idiots they were, and quickly dropped everything. the local rcmp apparently kept everything for another 6 months out of paranoia. no body seemed to understand that what he was doing was based off of a simple error, the friend didnt even notice, as his email still came in a-o.k.
had the tech reading the log thought for about three minutes, the entire situation could have been avoided. had the law agencies thought, hey, maybe we should get someone to take a second and third look at those logs, the entire situation could have been avoided. had someone spoken to him long enough to realize he didnt know what telnet, tracert, ping, ftp, or even pop stood for (let alone how any of them worked), the entire situation could have been avoided. what im basically saying, is most situations like my friends, and the one in the story could have been avoided. all people need is a bit of logic when dealing with computer security issues.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
...that it was like yesterday that i had mentioned something to the tune of, once the netbsd port catches up, we need a beowulf of these. maybe its time to try it ;)
as soon as the netbsd port is stable, im considering getting about 10 of these together to try it. hopefully theyll be a bit cheaper by then, not that they arent already ridiculously cheap since they announced the death of them.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
there seems to definately be two different types of pci slots, the bottom one is indeed different than the ones above it. the very top slot is agp.
.brad>
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organicgreenteas.com
im really doubting that head-hunters good enough to come up with a system of filtering based on how quickly people learn in this course would miss qualified applicants who hadnt taken the course. this seems more like a slick way of gathering up and coming talent, not the exclusive way of gathering talent.
as for the irs similarity, im really not seeing it, if this were redhat giving rhce certification to every seceratary/janitor/pizza delivery guy who has worked for them, id see it. this is more like redhat offering jobs to those who get the highest scores on the rhce exams.....
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
i mean if you take a course to get certified, your probably going to get a job. linuxgruven just wants to make sure that they get an extra advantage when they go scouting. to me the thought of scouting people by training them seems like a very good idea for any firm. how better to get a feel for how good a guy is than to sit and train him for a while.
as they say, they've hired people who werent trained by them before.
.brad
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organicgreenteas.com
this project was called lavarand. i spoke to the guy who started this about 3 years ago, smart guy.
heres the url for more info:
http://lavarand.sgi.com
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
its been proven that coffee tends to speed up reaction time a bit for a fairly short period of time, only to lead to a crash (regular old caffeine high). tea on the other hand tends to raise mental stimulation considerably for longer periods of time, without any form of crash, mostly due to the significantly lower amounts of caffiene in tea.
.brad
oh yea, that boston thing, it was about a tax on tea, as a result, most countries still dont tax loose tea sales.
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
water has been known to reduce brain power (as have most cold beverages), coffee on the other hand does nothing for your brain power short of being mildly carcinogenic. tea on the other hand (especially green tea) has been proven many times to heighten brain activity, stimulate your mind, as well as mildly reproducing brain cells. pretty amazing being as how tea is basically warm water after having tea leaves added to it.
.brad
behold my .sig!
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
but, the itanium should excell mostly at running native 64-bit code, hopefully mostly in the floating point area. x86 emulation shouldnt have even been included, let alone talked seriously about. people who need an itanium will not want x86 code, they wont even want a filesystem that easily supports x86 code.
dont judge these things by their x86 emulation, benchmark them against a similarly clocked (or similarly priced) alpha, that is when we can discount this chip.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
embracing a hardware hack like this, and communicating with curious hackers, could allow the entire community to breathe life into new and old willians pinball systems. this is a good thing because the world needs more pinball.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
if your going to end up doing a lot of number crunching, you should really look into some form of multiple cpu alpha. the alphas absolutley fly when it comes to floating point calculations. by the sounds of it, you would almost definately benefit from having some form of alpha solution. you will be better served to use compaq's tru64 unix than linux, im pretty sure that any alpha with 16+ cpu's would definately laugh at linux.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
well, what i more meant was some form of hardware hack to the ethernet card to allowo it to function as some form of dual port card. there is also the possibility of making some form of splitter to allow two cards to interface through, which of course the software (NetBSD in this case) has to be able to recognize and deal with properly. to me, this seems like the sort of thing a decent hardware hacker would have a fairly fun time doing. this obviously would cause crazy errors if the person were to try to play games throuhg it, but hey, were talking firewall *grin*.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
between this and the netbsd port to dreamcast, we're a hell of a lot closer to having a beowulf cluster of these things...
im sure someone will find a way to use these things as firewalls, and when they do, i absolutely need one...
.brad
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organicgreenteas.com
heres another story on the same thing:h ives.asp?ArticleID=22871
.brad
http://www.crn.com/Sections/BreakingNews/dailyarc
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organicgreenteas.com
the last interveiw i read with linus said that he was going to think for a bit before releasing the next kernel version. he may be planning to jump straight to version 3.0 next. it seems a touch unlikely to me at least, but who gets the prizes if that happens??
this is a touch sarcastic...
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
the sick thing is that the 19 billion a year that is spent on the war on drugs is miniscule to what is made each year, by both sides, because of the drug trade. the technology that is needed to basically completely win the war on drugs would cost very, very little. the rest of the money (the other 17 billion) could be used to re-vitalize the us public education system (which is probably the worst funded [and as a result worst performing] public education system in the civilized world). higher education tends to lead to less moronic drug use (which also leads to less moronic drug use related problems). legalization would also eliminate the prolem, and free up a lot of money, which again, the schools would benefit from.
education is the key. smarter people tend to not turn into the drug crazed lunatics that are often pictured whenever legal narcotics are spoken of.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
the war on drugs has got to be the largest sham ive personally ever heard of. the figures i have found all seem to say figures to the tune of 19 billion dollars a year, also every few months some congressman manages to add 10 million or so to the yearly pool. 19 billion is a lot of money.
now take a look at what they do with that money, they setup special police forces that go to public schools, concerts, and various other suspect spots. this is great for catching the end user of said substances, but that is hardly stopping the problem.
lets now look at the technology that exists. there are radar style devices out there that can detect very small amounts of cocaine, barbituates, or opiates. now if you think about the bigger drugs, almost all of them fit into these categories. these are also inexpensively mades. if these devices were used instead of being left on the shelf, the us border patrol would not only be able to detect the drugs, but they would also see them about a mile away. the technology that is used, is usually dogs who can supposedly smell larger amounts of drugs.
lets also look at where the border patrol is told to watch. the heavily patrolled area is basically right along the us/mexico border, when in fact, more drugs come through from canada. vancouver, and montreal are the two largest drug centres in north america. both of these are port cities, and both of them are ridiculously close to the us border. i, being a canadian have crossed the us canada border more times than i can count, including several times in the two previously mentioned cities. not once have i ever seen any form of narcotics detection. most drugs that come through mexico are usually flown in, or brought in by people with "special clearance". yes, people who have paid the right people dont even get to be sniffed by the previously mentioned dogs.
yes folks, it seems the us wants to lose the war on drugs, but why? well, there is a lot of money being made from it. i dont mean employing a few hundred people, i mean several thousand occupations seem to benefit from it. the justice system obviously, most of the people in jails in the us wouldnt be there if drugs werent an issue. the police need larger numbers of people, with even more training. the hospital system gets a lot of drug related cases. those on the other side of the law make phenomenal amounts of money. more importantly, this "war on drugs" gives the politicians something to talk about during the debates. they tend to like keeping the real issues quiet. all the parties at hand tend to also make a great deal of money directly from those involved in the drug trade. medical professionals who come into contact with these people are often paid better to keep that whole doctor client secrecy thing a bit tighter, lawyers are paid twice what they normally get, arresting officers are often paid to lose evidence, the list goes on and on.
recently there was a push in vancouver to make needle drugs semi-legal. this is mostly because vancouver is the heroin capital of the western world. aids rates are high, crime in the troubled spots is outstanding (for canada at least). they wanted to make "shooting galleries", to ensure that people had clean needles, as well as having trained staff make sure that if there was an overdose the person would live. they also wanted education to be the focus, and possession of personal amounts to be perfectly legal. everyone in the city (i mean everyone) was excited. all of a sudden most of the people who were voting on it were suddenly against the idea. about four months later, a large drug bust revealed that these people were actually paid by the largest street gang to keep the drug illegal! it seems the gang makes more off of an illegal substance than off of a legal one.
that cant be an isolated incident.
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
to me this seems like the perfect power source for some form of small submarine style spy tool. add a radar/sonar device, possibly a camera of sorts, a microphone maybe? these things are probably small enough to not get picked up by radar, and could be sent long distances without running out of power.
im sure you guys can think of a few uses for devices like this for use in large bodies of water as well as inside pipes and other common places you wouldnt expect survailence devices...
nifty, yet scary.....
.brad
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organicgreenteas.com
he screwed up his goatsecx link...
.brad
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organicgreenteas.com
especially when you compare them to mindstorms. with a few extra expansion packs and some creative hacking mindstorms can do anything. im working on one thatll sweep my floor (it scares the heck outta my cats too).
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
...but not exactly this. i was actually on the team that was doing the budget for the plan. they basically wanted broadband and free internet terminals with webcams. theyre plan was to have it set-up for web confrencing with other starbucks customers (mostly those long lost friends and family), and have a few cameras in each location that broadcast all of the stores to the internet.
obviously as you can imagine, this was going to cost a boatload of cash (5 terminals, each with webcam, 1 server to be a gateway /firewall /controller for the internet webcams, at every location). It was pure madness. The support bill was more than they had wanted to spend on the entire project.
With this plan however, a lot less hardware is needed. probably a much wiser way to go over all.
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com