-The drive loss occurred between Oct. 2008 and March 2009. TFA also states that the *data* was Clinton era, not the hardware itself. The data could've been census data from the Grover Cleveland administration for all that it matters to the incident. The disappearance occurred during the switch from the W. Bush to Obama administrations.
-The item stolen was an "external hard drive", which opens up the floor to discussion. Could have been a USB enclosure, could have been an externally attached Fibre Channel storage array.
The thing is this: Your not required by any law, due to the bill of rights, to give up anything when your pulled over.
Look up the definition of "implied consent." By driving a car, which is a privilege granted by the state rather than a fundamental right, your consent to giving a breathalyzer test upon request is implied. Failure to do so, for any reason, will result in the automatic suspension of your drivers license for six months (in Michigan at least.)
The good: This particular breathalyzer has been proven to be the unreliable POS that it apparently is. This unit, and others like it, will finally start being held to a stronger coding standard.
The bad: every sleezeball, ambulance chasing, "call lee free", douchebag of a lawyer will use this case to attack the credibility of any and all breathalyzers made in the past, present, or future, spreading enough FUD to juries everywhere that an unacceptable number of drunken idiots get the God given right to keep their license until they finally end up killing someone.
As a person, I think groups like MADD spend most of their time trying to scare monger politicians into pushing us as close to prohibition as possible. I believe that alcohol can be used responsibly. But I also know that this case is going to result in DUI's getting overturned for people that damn sure don't deserve it. Borderline cases will get knocked down, cases will get thrown out, and the people that broke the law, that did something wrong, will walk out of a court room 'vindicated.' They didn't do anything wrong when they had six beers and drove home, it was that confounded *machine* that *said* they broke the law. The *machine* was busted, ergo they didn't break the law. In short, this case is going to make a lot of O.J. Simpson's. The jury said they didn't commit a crime, so they didn't. No harm no foul. Technicality? Bah! They're as innocent as the sweet baby Jesus.
I'd like to think things will wash out in the end. This case will probably end up making it harder to get off on this particular technicality in the long term. In the short term? Here come the appeals. Maybe the state is partially at fault for buying shoddy equipment. (Or maybe not. Did they do a code review? Do they have the resources to one? Probably not. Did you do a code review of the 3com switch in your server room? Their selection criteria can certainly be questioned, but it probably doesn't change the fact that someone drank enough to blow a.22 then decided to drive home.)
But in the end, the drunks are still going to be drunks. And tomorrow some of them will probably get to file appeals, and some of the ones that shouldn't be on the road, or even in public, will get to slip out of this brand new loophole. I'm not sure that that deserves a cork-popping celebration.
(and yes: We all handle our booze differently. Arbitrary limits that determine "drunk" may or may not be the answer. Hardcore drunks will keep driving even after losing their license. DUI's are as much moneymakers for the States as speeding tickets. Yadda yadda yadda.)
Pretty much. I think in terms of the markets, everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that we're not going to be moving to the "gold bar, shotgun shell, and hard liquor" currency standard any time soon. Now everyone's looking to turn a few bucks.
Besides, with so much cash on hand Microsoft bonds are just ungodly attractive. Especially after the past few years of "these 15,000 crappy mortgages bundled together are a totally sound investment, we swear!" or "Of course GM and Chrysler are going to make good on these bonds. The fact that Vinnie the loanshark thinks the rates are exorbitant means nothing. These are solid American institutions!"
Seriously, even if the cash on hand at MS has been dropping for a while they're still an attractive buy. In this market, a company with 25 billion cash on hand that wants to raise another five or six billion is like throwing a drunk Brad Pitt to Oprah's studio audience.
Your on-call rant aside, the addition of the unreachable person was there to add an additional level of "what the fuck" to the problem. Instead of just running through the standard documented procedure (which for most poorly run shops is "I don't know what to do and am incapable of making decisions! I better call Bob the doormat sysadmin who caters to our every need at the expense of himself!") it added a little bit of extra and unexpected shit to the fan.
The crux of disaster / contingency planning is planning for *every* contingency. Too many IT "teams" are made up of a couple strong talents and a gaggle of fleshy cron jobs.
Yeah, quite the master hacker they seem to have on their hands.
Anyone wanna lay odds as to how long it takes for him to get caught? Ten bucks bucks says the state responds to that e-mail with a 1x1 transparent gif in the message, and nails this uber-genius at a Starbucks.
The state of Michigan had this same scenario play out two years ago. The only difference: it was part of one of their Cyberstorm security exercises. At a round table discussion, the acting IT infrastructure director talked about how the exercise opened. He sat down at his desk one day, opened his e-mail, and found a ransom note that mirrors exactly what's going on now in Virgina.
It gets better. Certain key members of the IT infrastructure were given instructions ahead of time to take the day off, not tell anyone they were told to take the day off and, best of all, not answer their phone or e-mail unless they were being contacted by a specific person. (Someone who was 'in' on the exercise, and who had the authority to say "ah crap, XYZ is down and it's not part of the exercise, call Bob and let him know we actually need him.")
All in all it was an interesting discussion of "what if?" that I'd love to try out in my own workplace. Sure, if someone's on call and doesn't answer their phone, you beat them with at bamboo cane a the next opportunity. But what do you do in the meantime? If crap hits the fan, do your managers & team leads really know their call flows? Or does everyone just freak out and call the guy that usually knows what he's doing? What happens when that guy gets hit by a bus?
Hiring only one herd seems very un-google like. Perhaps they should have hired a second herd for from a proper RAIG (redundant array of inexpensive goats) array. Scottish researchers have already proven technologies that could be used to form a common RAIG-1 array. Simple genetic manipulation with the common Equus quagga would create a RAIG-10 (Stripped - Mirror) array.
I would say that a RAIG-5 array would offer the best performance, but I am wholly unaware of any current methods for calculating goat parity. I also have no desire to try and troubleshoot RAIG-Controller corruption...
I vaguely recall a stat that came out during "Titanic" mania. If you could've invested a single dollar in the production of the film, you'd have gotten about $1.03 back as return on investment. Had you invested that same dollar in the production of "The Full Monty", you've have gotten back several THOUSAND dollars in return.
The argument that I've heard for natural gas is that you don't *have* to store it. Even during the blackout, we had natural gas service, and natural gas mains don't require much pressure anyway. You're still depending on the outside services, so I guess is six of one half a dozen of the other. We're not in earthquake country, so natural gas is a tick more reliable than it would be elsewhere (like say, SoCal.)
I (like half the internet) followed that LJ live back in '04. That's what sparked my interest in the "why aren't we on natural gas instead of diesel?" question in the first place.
Four words: Denial of Service Attack. You want the hospital's network cut off from the outside world for 8 hours? Congrats. Done. This was Indiana Jones vs. the Scimitar-wielding Arab. I'd like to this this whole situation has encouraged people to start thinking a little bit more outside the box when it comes to infrastructure planning and what "mission critical" really means.
For example, my last employer took mission critical to heart. They were the regional blood bank, so that mentality was infused (tee hee. I made a pun.) into every aspect of the organization. Microwave links between our sites (and several customer sites. If need be we had the capacity to route traffic in and out through locations that were physically 5-10 miles away), generator power up the wazoo (including written contracts that put us second in line behind the hospital for diesel fuel. on top of the ample reserves we kept on site. Don't know why we weren't natural gas, though I assume that was more capacity than anything else), redundant external power connections to independent grids (which paid off handsomely one day), pneumatic tube connections to two hospitals and a couple other local sites, and a disaster preparedness plan that could have been leather bound and used for Law Office commercials if it wasn't being updated so often.
Infrastructure and disaster planning require some in depth "disaster porn" level of thought. It's hard to excuse civic services for not being ready to handle this sort of outage. Between that job and working in SE Michigan during the '04 blackout, I've learned a lot about just how ready some places think they are vs. how ready they really are to handle a disaster, be it man made or otherwise.
This is just unsubstantiated opinion and spout off but...
I get the feeling that part of the reason that the blanket "warrantless wiretapping is bad, mmmkay?" edict hasn't come yet is because, as of now, the Obama administration probably doesn't have a clear handle on how deep it goes, how much wiretapping we're really doing, and what examples are currently "in play." After 86? 88? days in office, I don't expect them know. Now, in a year....
For example, how many wiretaps are going right now, across all branches? Exact number. What branches are wiretapping. I mean, we can "assume" NSA, CIA, probably FBI. What about DEA? Does DHS have anything going? Who else? veterans affairs? IRS? There's very good reason to know who your shutting down before you go yanking plugs.
Or, in the vein of the old "is abortion wrong if the kid grows up to be the next Hitler?" argument, are there fruit bearing investigations that would be affected? Sure, you go can get a warrant, but what if your evidence for the real warrant gets shot down because your evidence is based on the just-made-illegal wiretap? Fruit of a poison tree is one thing. A Foxnews orgasm over a major terrorist attack that happened because of "those damned liberals" that comes with clearcut evidence would be a nightmare for the direction of the country.
I know that argument is just as gay as the "we don't want the next warning to be a mushroom cloud" bullshit we've been hearing, but I think that, practically speaking, pulling the plug on all warrantless wiretapping without knowing exactly what the scope is would be akin to putting every single soldier in Iraq on a plane tomorrow and expecting things to be hunky-dory.
That said, warrantless wiretapping is a clear violation of the 4th amendment and damn well better be on its way out the door by the time election season rolls around again. Because I can vote "change" again.
Then again, if you do fix it, you get to be the hero. Not sure how many years that kind of stress takes out of your life though.
"The high's are never as high as the lows are low."
Or, to put it another way: If you do a fantastic job, your company may offer you an increase in compensation of a few percent. Fail and your compensation may be reduced to 0%.
What's funny is that my first reaction as I read the article was, "doesn't yeast produce wastes that are foreign and toxic to the human body?" And wouldn't you know it, the next section was entitled, "Waste problem". Guess they're reading my mind.:-P
I hardly find the waste that yeast produces when consuming glucose to be all that offensive...
(yeah, i know, there are byproducts other than tasty, tasty alcohol produced by fermentation...)
Get a concise audit of the software your company has installed, where it's installed, and just how much pirated software you're dealing with. http://www.open-audit.org/ does a serviceable job of software & hardware inventory, but really anything that connects to the WMI for inventory purposes should be able to tell you what license keys are in use. If you're in a small shop then XAMPP + OpenAudit will give you all the information you need in less than an hour from the time you start installing XAMPP.
Get your ducks in a row before you start making moves. You want to able to say "we have X copies of Office, Y installations for Win2k3, and Z copies of Photoshop installed against A,B, and C legitimate, verifiable licenses purchased. It'll cost us approxiamtly Q Dollars for Office, R for Win2k3, and S for Photoshop. I can have this issue resolved in two weeks and have multiple vendors willing to give us quotes" rather than "I don't think we've got enough licenses for all our stuff can I have some money?" It'll also offer you some small amount of protection should you have a less than productive meeting with management. CYA, Get it in writing, and maybe spend a few minutes updating that resume.
The Iowa and Wisconsin are still officially on the register and can be reactivated if need be. The New Jersey and Missouri are in similar condition and, depending on how dire the need, could probably be reinstated to service as well.
I think it was the movie format in general that sucked for Futurama. It was as though they crammed 45 minutes of jokes into a 90 minute movie. The snap just wasn't there. Getting back into a 22-minute box would eliminate that problem. I watched the first movie start to finish, and was a little disappointed. I waited until Beast with a Billion Backs came to comedy central, and found it to be a slightly better presentation.
You're probably thinking of PIMA's B-36, which was never really in "private" hands. B-36's fall under one of the early SALT treaties as strategic heavy bombers. True, the Air Force handled the whole situation poorly, they will come out in the right, if the case actually goes to trial. Any "strategic" arms fall under a whole different set of guidelines, regardless of ownership.
Case in point. There is (I am almost certain) only one B-52 on display at a non-military base in the world. There are others on static display, but only one in civilian hands. It also happens to belong to the museum I volunteer for. Several years after we acquired the aircraft, we moved it up on a concrete stand approximately 15 meters from where it once stood. ALL. HELL. BROKE. LOOSE. We received an unhappy visit from the Air Force, who had gotten a call from the state department, who'd gotten a call from the Russian Consulate, because the Russian air force team in charge of monitoring SALT compliance noticed that the plane had moved since the last photo pass and, since it was supposed to be de-miled, they damn sure wanted to know why.
Interesting aside: The air force is in a unique spot when it comes to their old airframes that have been disposed of to civilian hands. A records fire in the 1960's destroyed the paperwork on hundreds of thousands of disposed aircraft. The Air Force has a very limited paper trail prove that they ever actually owned many Korea / WW2 vintage aircraft that they disposed of at auction. It usually falls to that old legal statute of "possession is 9/10ths of the law."
You're absolutely right on both points. But the Navy being open to any sort of museum request outside of their direct control seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Dealing with the Navy on issues of museums is a bona fide pain in the ass. As far as they're concerned, there is nothing, zip, zero nada, nil that they have ever 'lost.' Whatever it was, where ever it is, it is still theirs and will gladly tie you up in court for the rest of your life to prove this point. They stick to the following excuses when it comes to the issue of recovering one-time Naval Aircraft:
-It's a war grave (the excuse they've given for blocking the recovery of Grumman TBM Avenger dive bombers in Lake Michigan. That the pilots may have survived in most cases makes no difference. They're all war graves.)
-It's still Navy property that they've never bothered to finish recovering (the excuse that's being used after a North Carolina man recovered pieces of an FG-1, a Goodyear-built Corsair. Never mind that the Navy last visited the crash site in 1945.)
-It just plain doesn't exist at all (the excuse that was given for years when attempts were made to recover one of several B-29's that were being used as target practice at China Lake, even after recovery groups showed recent satellite photographs of B-29's out in the desert, the Navy simply responded by saying that they did not, nor did they ever, possess B-29's.)
There is purportedly still one, more-intact-than-most-B-29's B-29 that was moved to a hangar sometime in the 1990's, but the Navy refuses all inquiries regarding that aircraft. To their credit, the Navy also had some bad experiences with allowing warbird recoveries at China lake, as the last group that was allowed in supposedly stuffed their B-29 full of whatever happened to be lying around, instead of just grabbing 'their' plane and leaving. There are a few hundred thousand versions of that story floating around, changing by the minute.
The Navy is an institution unto themselves when it comes to loaning items to museums. Hell, They Scrapped the USS Enterprise. Perhaps it's the type of person that the Navy assigns to handling museum requests, or perhaps its the hundreds of years of Maritime Salvage law that they have to contend with, but based on everything I've heard, they are a bureaucratic nightmare directly out of 'Brazil.'
Slashdot Mirror
TFA does shed some light:
-The drive loss occurred between Oct. 2008 and March 2009. TFA also states that the *data* was Clinton era, not the hardware itself. The data could've been census data from the Grover Cleveland administration for all that it matters to the incident. The disappearance occurred during the switch from the W. Bush to Obama administrations.
-The item stolen was an "external hard drive", which opens up the floor to discussion. Could have been a USB enclosure, could have been an externally attached Fibre Channel storage array.
Exactly. That guy needs to get a q-tip and clean out his ears, rather than trying to put a band-aid on this old wound.
The thing is this: Your not required by any law, due to the bill of rights, to give up anything when your pulled over.
Look up the definition of "implied consent." By driving a car, which is a privilege granted by the state rather than a fundamental right, your consent to giving a breathalyzer test upon request is implied. Failure to do so, for any reason, will result in the automatic suspension of your drivers license for six months (in Michigan at least.)
The good: This particular breathalyzer has been proven to be the unreliable POS that it apparently is. This unit, and others like it, will finally start being held to a stronger coding standard.
The bad: every sleezeball, ambulance chasing, "call lee free", douchebag of a lawyer will use this case to attack the credibility of any and all breathalyzers made in the past, present, or future, spreading enough FUD to juries everywhere that an unacceptable number of drunken idiots get the God given right to keep their license until they finally end up killing someone.
As a person, I think groups like MADD spend most of their time trying to scare monger politicians into pushing us as close to prohibition as possible. I believe that alcohol can be used responsibly. But I also know that this case is going to result in DUI's getting overturned for people that damn sure don't deserve it. Borderline cases will get knocked down, cases will get thrown out, and the people that broke the law, that did something wrong, will walk out of a court room 'vindicated.' They didn't do anything wrong when they had six beers and drove home, it was that confounded *machine* that *said* they broke the law. The *machine* was busted, ergo they didn't break the law. In short, this case is going to make a lot of O.J. Simpson's. The jury said they didn't commit a crime, so they didn't. No harm no foul. Technicality? Bah! They're as innocent as the sweet baby Jesus.
I'd like to think things will wash out in the end. This case will probably end up making it harder to get off on this particular technicality in the long term. In the short term? Here come the appeals. Maybe the state is partially at fault for buying shoddy equipment. (Or maybe not. Did they do a code review? Do they have the resources to one? Probably not. Did you do a code review of the 3com switch in your server room? Their selection criteria can certainly be questioned, but it probably doesn't change the fact that someone drank enough to blow a .22 then decided to drive home.)
But in the end, the drunks are still going to be drunks. And tomorrow some of them will probably get to file appeals, and some of the ones that shouldn't be on the road, or even in public, will get to slip out of this brand new loophole. I'm not sure that that deserves a cork-popping celebration.
(and yes: We all handle our booze differently. Arbitrary limits that determine "drunk" may or may not be the answer. Hardcore drunks will keep driving even after losing their license. DUI's are as much moneymakers for the States as speeding tickets. Yadda yadda yadda.)
Pretty much. I think in terms of the markets, everyone is slowly coming to the conclusion that we're not going to be moving to the "gold bar, shotgun shell, and hard liquor" currency standard any time soon. Now everyone's looking to turn a few bucks.
Besides, with so much cash on hand Microsoft bonds are just ungodly attractive. Especially after the past few years of "these 15,000 crappy mortgages bundled together are a totally sound investment, we swear!" or "Of course GM and Chrysler are going to make good on these bonds. The fact that Vinnie the loanshark thinks the rates are exorbitant means nothing. These are solid American institutions!"
Seriously, even if the cash on hand at MS has been dropping for a while they're still an attractive buy. In this market, a company with 25 billion cash on hand that wants to raise another five or six billion is like throwing a drunk Brad Pitt to Oprah's studio audience.
Hermes: I'm just glad my fat, ugly mother isn't around to see this.
Farnsworth: Leave your promiscuous mother out of this!
Your on-call rant aside, the addition of the unreachable person was there to add an additional level of "what the fuck" to the problem. Instead of just running through the standard documented procedure (which for most poorly run shops is "I don't know what to do and am incapable of making decisions! I better call Bob the doormat sysadmin who caters to our every need at the expense of himself!") it added a little bit of extra and unexpected shit to the fan.
The crux of disaster / contingency planning is planning for *every* contingency. Too many IT "teams" are made up of a couple strong talents and a gaggle of fleshy cron jobs.
Yeah, quite the master hacker they seem to have on their hands.
Anyone wanna lay odds as to how long it takes for him to get caught? Ten bucks bucks says the state responds to that e-mail with a 1x1 transparent gif in the message, and nails this uber-genius at a Starbucks.
The state of Michigan had this same scenario play out two years ago. The only difference: it was part of one of their Cyberstorm security exercises. At a round table discussion, the acting IT infrastructure director talked about how the exercise opened. He sat down at his desk one day, opened his e-mail, and found a ransom note that mirrors exactly what's going on now in Virgina.
It gets better. Certain key members of the IT infrastructure were given instructions ahead of time to take the day off, not tell anyone they were told to take the day off and, best of all, not answer their phone or e-mail unless they were being contacted by a specific person. (Someone who was 'in' on the exercise, and who had the authority to say "ah crap, XYZ is down and it's not part of the exercise, call Bob and let him know we actually need him.")
All in all it was an interesting discussion of "what if?" that I'd love to try out in my own workplace. Sure, if someone's on call and doesn't answer their phone, you beat them with at bamboo cane a the next opportunity. But what do you do in the meantime? If crap hits the fan, do your managers & team leads really know their call flows? Or does everyone just freak out and call the guy that usually knows what he's doing? What happens when that guy gets hit by a bus?
Hiring only one herd seems very un-google like. Perhaps they should have hired a second herd for from a proper RAIG (redundant array of inexpensive goats) array. Scottish researchers have already proven technologies that could be used to form a common RAIG-1 array. Simple genetic manipulation with the common Equus quagga would create a RAIG-10 (Stripped - Mirror) array.
I would say that a RAIG-5 array would offer the best performance, but I am wholly unaware of any current methods for calculating goat parity. I also have no desire to try and troubleshoot RAIG-Controller corruption...
I vaguely recall a stat that came out during "Titanic" mania. If you could've invested a single dollar in the production of the film, you'd have gotten about $1.03 back as return on investment. Had you invested that same dollar in the production of "The Full Monty", you've have gotten back several THOUSAND dollars in return.
The argument that I've heard for natural gas is that you don't *have* to store it. Even during the blackout, we had natural gas service, and natural gas mains don't require much pressure anyway. You're still depending on the outside services, so I guess is six of one half a dozen of the other. We're not in earthquake country, so natural gas is a tick more reliable than it would be elsewhere (like say, SoCal.)
I (like half the internet) followed that LJ live back in '04. That's what sparked my interest in the "why aren't we on natural gas instead of diesel?" question in the first place.
Four words: Denial of Service Attack. You want the hospital's network cut off from the outside world for 8 hours? Congrats. Done. This was Indiana Jones vs. the Scimitar-wielding Arab. I'd like to this this whole situation has encouraged people to start thinking a little bit more outside the box when it comes to infrastructure planning and what "mission critical" really means.
For example, my last employer took mission critical to heart. They were the regional blood bank, so that mentality was infused (tee hee. I made a pun.) into every aspect of the organization. Microwave links between our sites (and several customer sites. If need be we had the capacity to route traffic in and out through locations that were physically 5-10 miles away), generator power up the wazoo (including written contracts that put us second in line behind the hospital for diesel fuel. on top of the ample reserves we kept on site. Don't know why we weren't natural gas, though I assume that was more capacity than anything else), redundant external power connections to independent grids (which paid off handsomely one day), pneumatic tube connections to two hospitals and a couple other local sites, and a disaster preparedness plan that could have been leather bound and used for Law Office commercials if it wasn't being updated so often.
Infrastructure and disaster planning require some in depth "disaster porn" level of thought. It's hard to excuse civic services for not being ready to handle this sort of outage. Between that job and working in SE Michigan during the '04 blackout, I've learned a lot about just how ready some places think they are vs. how ready they really are to handle a disaster, be it man made or otherwise.
This is just unsubstantiated opinion and spout off but...
I get the feeling that part of the reason that the blanket "warrantless wiretapping is bad, mmmkay?" edict hasn't come yet is because, as of now, the Obama administration probably doesn't have a clear handle on how deep it goes, how much wiretapping we're really doing, and what examples are currently "in play." After 86? 88? days in office, I don't expect them know. Now, in a year....
For example, how many wiretaps are going right now, across all branches? Exact number. What branches are wiretapping. I mean, we can "assume" NSA, CIA, probably FBI. What about DEA? Does DHS have anything going? Who else? veterans affairs? IRS? There's very good reason to know who your shutting down before you go yanking plugs.
Or, in the vein of the old "is abortion wrong if the kid grows up to be the next Hitler?" argument, are there fruit bearing investigations that would be affected? Sure, you go can get a warrant, but what if your evidence for the real warrant gets shot down because your evidence is based on the just-made-illegal wiretap? Fruit of a poison tree is one thing. A Foxnews orgasm over a major terrorist attack that happened because of "those damned liberals" that comes with clearcut evidence would be a nightmare for the direction of the country.
I know that argument is just as gay as the "we don't want the next warning to be a mushroom cloud" bullshit we've been hearing, but I think that, practically speaking, pulling the plug on all warrantless wiretapping without knowing exactly what the scope is would be akin to putting every single soldier in Iraq on a plane tomorrow and expecting things to be hunky-dory.
That said, warrantless wiretapping is a clear violation of the 4th amendment and damn well better be on its way out the door by the time election season rolls around again. Because I can vote "change" again.
Then again, if you do fix it, you get to be the hero. Not sure how many years that kind of stress takes out of your life though.
"The high's are never as high as the lows are low."
Or, to put it another way: If you do a fantastic job, your company may offer you an increase in compensation of a few percent. Fail and your compensation may be reduced to 0%.
Is that why so many "Alpha Male" types are knuckle dragging meat heads?
What's funny is that my first reaction as I read the article was, "doesn't yeast produce wastes that are foreign and toxic to the human body?" And wouldn't you know it, the next section was entitled, "Waste problem". Guess they're reading my mind. :-P
I hardly find the waste that yeast produces when consuming glucose to be all that offensive...
(yeah, i know, there are byproducts other than tasty, tasty alcohol produced by fermentation...)
Get a concise audit of the software your company has installed, where it's installed, and just how much pirated software you're dealing with. http://www.open-audit.org/ does a serviceable job of software & hardware inventory, but really anything that connects to the WMI for inventory purposes should be able to tell you what license keys are in use. If you're in a small shop then XAMPP + OpenAudit will give you all the information you need in less than an hour from the time you start installing XAMPP.
Get your ducks in a row before you start making moves. You want to able to say "we have X copies of Office, Y installations for Win2k3, and Z copies of Photoshop installed against A,B, and C legitimate, verifiable licenses purchased. It'll cost us approxiamtly Q Dollars for Office, R for Win2k3, and S for Photoshop. I can have this issue resolved in two weeks and have multiple vendors willing to give us quotes" rather than "I don't think we've got enough licenses for all our stuff can I have some money?" It'll also offer you some small amount of protection should you have a less than productive meeting with management. CYA, Get it in writing, and maybe spend a few minutes updating that resume.
The Iowa and Wisconsin are still officially on the register and can be reactivated if need be. The New Jersey and Missouri are in similar condition and, depending on how dire the need, could probably be reinstated to service as well.
I think it was the movie format in general that sucked for Futurama. It was as though they crammed 45 minutes of jokes into a 90 minute movie. The snap just wasn't there. Getting back into a 22-minute box would eliminate that problem. I watched the first movie start to finish, and was a little disappointed. I waited until Beast with a Billion Backs came to comedy central, and found it to be a slightly better presentation.
Any additional Futurama is welcome.
You're probably thinking of PIMA's B-36, which was never really in "private" hands. B-36's fall under one of the early SALT treaties as strategic heavy bombers. True, the Air Force handled the whole situation poorly, they will come out in the right, if the case actually goes to trial. Any "strategic" arms fall under a whole different set of guidelines, regardless of ownership.
Case in point. There is (I am almost certain) only one B-52 on display at a non-military base in the world. There are others on static display, but only one in civilian hands. It also happens to belong to the museum I volunteer for. Several years after we acquired the aircraft, we moved it up on a concrete stand approximately 15 meters from where it once stood. ALL. HELL. BROKE. LOOSE. We received an unhappy visit from the Air Force, who had gotten a call from the state department, who'd gotten a call from the Russian Consulate, because the Russian air force team in charge of monitoring SALT compliance noticed that the plane had moved since the last photo pass and, since it was supposed to be de-miled, they damn sure wanted to know why.
Interesting aside: The air force is in a unique spot when it comes to their old airframes that have been disposed of to civilian hands. A records fire in the 1960's destroyed the paperwork on hundreds of thousands of disposed aircraft. The Air Force has a very limited paper trail prove that they ever actually owned many Korea / WW2 vintage aircraft that they disposed of at auction. It usually falls to that old legal statute of "possession is 9/10ths of the law."
You're absolutely right on both points. But the Navy being open to any sort of museum request outside of their direct control seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Dealing with the Navy on issues of museums is a bona fide pain in the ass. As far as they're concerned, there is nothing, zip, zero nada, nil that they have ever 'lost.' Whatever it was, where ever it is, it is still theirs and will gladly tie you up in court for the rest of your life to prove this point. They stick to the following excuses when it comes to the issue of recovering one-time Naval Aircraft:
-It's a war grave (the excuse they've given for blocking the recovery of Grumman TBM Avenger dive bombers in Lake Michigan. That the pilots may have survived in most cases makes no difference. They're all war graves.)
-It's still Navy property that they've never bothered to finish recovering (the excuse that's being used after a North Carolina man recovered pieces of an FG-1, a Goodyear-built Corsair. Never mind that the Navy last visited the crash site in 1945.)
-It just plain doesn't exist at all (the excuse that was given for years when attempts were made to recover one of several B-29's that were being used as target practice at China Lake, even after recovery groups showed recent satellite photographs of B-29's out in the desert, the Navy simply responded by saying that they did not, nor did they ever, possess B-29's.)
There is purportedly still one, more-intact-than-most-B-29's B-29 that was moved to a hangar sometime in the 1990's, but the Navy refuses all inquiries regarding that aircraft. To their credit, the Navy also had some bad experiences with allowing warbird recoveries at China lake, as the last group that was allowed in supposedly stuffed their B-29 full of whatever happened to be lying around, instead of just grabbing 'their' plane and leaving. There are a few hundred thousand versions of that story floating around, changing by the minute.
The Navy is an institution unto themselves when it comes to loaning items to museums. Hell, They Scrapped the USS Enterprise. Perhaps it's the type of person that the Navy assigns to handling museum requests, or perhaps its the hundreds of years of Maritime Salvage law that they have to contend with, but based on everything I've heard, they are a bureaucratic nightmare directly out of 'Brazil.'
...is hearing about how poorly the three people that were hired to replace you are doing.
Petty e-mails and parting shots aren't worth it. When they bring me my empty box and escort, I'll be the one smiling.
Though, now that I know it exists, I can't help but think a few bands I know may be getting a suggestion for their live shows...
Eh, It's been done.