I only consider it NOT stealing if the following conditions are met:
1. They provide a fully balanced accounting of all the money spent on firefighting and roads, itemized to the penny. I want to know what the contractor's profit margin was, I want to know how much the firetruck company spent to lobby the city commission.
2. They provide proof the funds actually came from tax revenue and not borrowed money at insanely high interest rates. If money must be borrowed (after removing all non-essential costs), it should be at the best possible rate, since we taxpayers are paying the interest on it.
3. Just like in personal finance, care should be taken to balance the budget and create a surplus if possible to make a rainy day fund in case something bad happens.
The problem is that the system is so corrupt, there's so much dick sucking going on, it's like a swedish porn party in government today. Cities are blowing their governor for cash, governors are blowing congress. Cities purposely run with as few funds as possible so if they have some sort of crisis, they can come begging to the higher-ups for free money. Of course, with all the accountants and lawyers you need for a good bailout, the money ends up costing money. And where does that come from? My favorite is the mill-levy, wherin they just borrow the money from future tax revenue! Great!
Anyway, yes, I consider it stealing. I feel sorry for firefighters having to work for such a corrupt system and it's not their fault. They don't understand numbers, that's why they're FIREFIGHTERS. The problem is the people who actually understand the numbers get PAID MORE the more fucked up everything is. OH SHIT, WE JUST LOST 60% of the City books! Bill 6000 more hours! And in the unlikely event someone wants to challenge it, there's a big payday for the lawyers (who write the laws to begin with).
Use addslashes, use the mysqli DB calls (_prepare(), etc.), use STORED PROCEDURES which are finally available on MySQL. Take the DB stuff out of PHP and you're left with a pretty stable secure scripting language. Granted, there are some issues with typing, bounds checking, etc. but PHP is not an "enterprise" scripting language. It's not designed to write bank software. It works great for everything else.
They need to pay us a shitload more so I don't have to worry about doing my laundry or making food etc. Sort of like a General in an Army. Sales in my eyes will always be the foot soldiers. Put sales UNDER IT.
THe problem is that "business" is "making money", not doing things right. And so, it's only a slow evolution, even with well capitalized places like MS and GOOG (who are both really publishing companies, NOT software). Software really IS interactive art. Any usefulness it has is just a side benefit. Just like music or movies, if something's good, people pick it up and use it. If it's garbage, you can't force it down their throat. You make it better until they WANT to use it. Thus there are a lot of failed bands, bad movies and.. abandoned software projects. Of course, if you make the right app, you might just change the world.
Sure is a different way to look at things...life without sales.
Tip of my hat: He does mention starting small and iterating. I think that's the best way to build software.
Object oriented programming. If you do anything more than once, make a method that does it. Then it's easy to make changes withour editing 1291 different places. If you export/import a veriable more than once, put it in the object and make an interface.
The problem is this takes time. Sometimes it's better to just write in long hand, the whole app, and THEN filter it down into smaller modules. Meanwhile you are editing a lot but pledge to yourself the second time you make a major edit in many spots you're going to cut that out and replace it with a function!
That's why I like the Dr.Dobbs quick-kill project plan--you make a list of features you're NOT going to develop also, and have the stakeholders sign off on it;)
If everyone is doing something and making money, it's a bubble--if it has these characteristics:
1. It serves no apparent useful purpose 2. You don't see easily how anyone can make money doing it 3. Everyone you know has made so much money doing it
Anything that inflates to quickly will POP. The problem is that ANYTHING that makes money these days is pounced upon by get rich quick assholes who drive up prices and kill the whole thing. There's no such thing as an unsaturated market unless you innovate or invent a new market. Basically, if you aren't changing the world and making a lot of money, it's a bubble.
So I can walk up to girls now and say, "How would you like to have a longer, healther life?" and if they say yes it means "Yes, you may buy me a drink."
I think it could be expanded to be even more exciting than the original. There are tons of remotely operated drones, planes, bombs, robots, etc. that could be controlled by the system. There are still plenty of missles around. Beyond that, there is electronically controlled everything else, such as air traffic control, power grids, nuclear power plants, water supplies, etc. Maybe the idea (for the movie) would be the terrorist gets into the system, starts messing with shit, and the innocent hacker gets framed. PUT ON YOUR ROLLERBLADES AND VR GOOGLES, WE'RE GOING TO THE FUTURE!
Actually, it could if you had recorded a 1-800 calling card number, a calling card number and pin and the number you wished to access.
And you could actually record the tones of the coin drop from the remote end (it filtered out on the payphone end) by calling your friend and having a tape on the line. Then you just drop 2 or 3 bucks in various coins down the chute and when you're done you hit the coin return and get it all back. Of course, then they started cutting the transmitter part of the phone until you dropped at least one coin in, so you had to spend a minimum of a nickel.
Oh, and you could modify a radio shack tone dialer to generate the tones with a 6.565mhz crystal, then you used the "*" on speed dial to represent a nickel. 2 * for a dime and 5 * for a quarter.
I still have it around here somewhere. It doesn't work anymore, of course.
Interesting. Obviously you probably wouldn't want to raise that all up to 200 degrees C but you could get some extra lift by heating it above ambient temps. And with a radiation barrier, you could keep most of the heat inside permanently. I was under the assumption that a helium-based ship is probably weighted to neutral weight in the air and uses air thrusters to move it up and down. As it gets higher you drop ballast (water, probably) to maintain the balance and to land you dump a little helium/hot helium.
I'm thinking that because the improvement in density would be relatively smaller for helium than it is for air, it probably would take much less energy to raise the helium's tempurature. I'm also guessing that there's quite a bit of air that ends up in the bag with the helium and that would benefit from the added heat also. I mean, I don't see what the big deal is considering complete amateurs float hot air balloons all the time. You'd think it would be possible to do this safely with helium..
Try booting a Tivo; it takes like 10 minutes. My DVD player takes about 1 minute to figure out to boot the disc or report there's not one in it. My toaster takes 5 minutes to toast bread. A good espresso always takes 25 seconds. WTF IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE? Just strap yourself in bed with a lifetime supply of IV nutrients and a hypnotic, get someone to pay your mortgage and you'll have everything you'll ever need right at your fingertips for the rest of your life. Have some patience or tweak your box to not load anything at startup (hell, run Dos 6.11 with no autoexec or config.sys or something). Or run an AS/400 for a while and manually start processes for 20 minutes before you're fully booted up? Or shit, buy a Vic 20. One flip of the switch and before the TV can even warm up, READY?
It *is* poorly designed. That's why everyone knows to set the pagefile to a static size and then reboot and defrag. Then the pagefile ends up on the end of the disk and is never moved again.
Windows boots slow out of the box. Yes, this is true, there's no denying it. However, there are a lot of ways to make it boot faster. Number one, if you're running NTFS you have to disable the last access timestamp (FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1). Every read it does from the time the NTFS volume is mounted is accompanied by a write to update the last accessed timestamp. This slows boot (and everyday performance) immensely.
Also, go thru services, start/programs/startup, and hklm(hklu)/ms/win/cv/run stuff and stop/disable any unneeded services. For instance, the wireless zero configuration service runs on every default XP SP2 install regardless of whether you have a wireless adapter or not. With the registry and the other config files you can pretty much disable anything you want. I have seen windows boot in under 2 seconds to the login window and another 2 seconds after login to bring up the desktop. If you configure your machine correctly, you'll have a good boot time and it will run more stable because you don't have a bunch of crap hogging ram, threads, i/o and cpu. Also, if you're running a network with DHCP, that slows the boot time a lot (on linux too!) if the os has to wait around for the IP. There are millions of things, but most everything in windows is configurable just like linux. Yeah, you can't recompile the binaries so there's a lot you can't mess with but most of the binaries are totally controlled by the registry (as far as we know).
I think the most important part of Open Source development of ANYTHING is standards. You need to have a standards body. The problem with the auto industry today is there are no real standards. Take for example custom wheels--a simple, non-moving piece of metal that basically holds the tire. It's main purpose is cosmetic after the basic functionality that all wheels share (round, has bolt holes in the middle, etc.). You'd think it would be simple to get a different wheel for your car, but if you ever try you'll find hundreds of different widths, bolt-patterns, diameters, etc.
This Open Source car would only be better if there were standards employed in these particular sections. Or have any connections be customizeable on both sides of the connection. So, if someone invents a better wheel pattern, it's easy to change the disc brake assembly to to fit it (dependency).
The problem is that just having the design isn't going to get you very far because of the specialized components involved. A car is very expensive to build but at million plus quantities it's very cheap. But try to one-off one gear for a transmission sometime (it'll be THOUSANDS to get the precision in a $900 off-the-shelf manual transmission like Mazda makes for Ford).
Instead, from the design stage, standardize everything. A standard ring or star topology for communications and power bussing throughout the car. Then each powered device has a microcontroller that turns it off or on. Then the microcontroller can report back it's status to a central computer. Most of the electricals are easily standardized. Where you run into problems is precision machined steel parts of an engine and transmission. Replacing also those with electrics is the way to go. Use electric motors, magnetic suspension, etc. Modular body panels can have their own microcontrollers also, so the car can reconfigure itself based on what you have mounted. You have the rear door in place, the rear door up/down button appears on the interface. The top is off, no sense showing the moonroof control. Etc etc.
RFC's and the like are what's really made stuff like linux possible. It's not just having the source but having the standards that really make everything easy to work with, and make sure that many different programmers can all work on different sections of the project without worrying about if their module can talk with the others.
Yeah, but you get the feeling consolidation is what he WANTS, not necessarily what's going to happen. I think a lot of small businesses don't like eBay, which has become a bastion of SE Asian importers and crooks for most commodity items. Sure, you can still find some decent categories that aren't flooded with.01 cent starting bids for trinkets but they are few and far between. The small businessperson innovator is going to go his own way and not follow the crowd any more than possible. There will always be crowd-followers, and that's who Sun will cater to if that's their strategy. But to get the big growth, you need to find the innovators, and those people are not always going to subscribe to the service model. They just don't trust anyone else to do the job right.
But they bought up loads of dark "fibre" a while ago to places just like this. Google is a trendsetter, they don't need to go where the bandwidth is; they go, bandwidth follows. Washington and Oregon have about the cheapest power in the U.S. because they have so many deep rivers and with that comes hydro-plants and nuke-plants. There are 14 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia river alone. Because they sell most of it to California, they have a nice tax on power exports that then subsidizes in-state uses. That's why a lot of aluminum plants are in Washington, etc.
Sorry for that. The story mentions that this person had prior convictions for minor crimes on his record when he was hired. They didn't run a background check on him before they put him in control of over 2,000 servers. Then they screwed him on his bonus and he screwed them. Now he's going to jail.
It sounds to me like their HR department was incompetent, the management was incompetent and they gave an employee too much control. I don't think any one employee should have that much control over a company's IT infrastructure. And you NEVER give high level people root access. Instead, you break your organization into regions, with a top admin for each region. Then no one person has complete control over the infrastructure. Ideally you would spread the information across many datacenters also, with journalled backups/replication going both ways. When you get to a certain size, you need to have checks and balances. Smaller businesses can get away with that stuff, provided you have a good backup policy. Again, you need to have multiple copies of the current dataset in the control of many different people.
Of course, you probably have proprietary software that gets worked on by 5 or 6 programmers that gets disseminated out to every machine, which is also a weak spot. Tight controls on those people are necessary also, but there's little you can do to stop a programmer from trojanning proprietary software for some future date when he's in the islands somewhere under a false identity.
Can a background check stop a determined employee from wreacking havoc within his box? No. But everyone knows it's not a bad idea to know your employees a little before giving them that kind of access.
It's nice to hear someone positive for a change. Reading the article, it seems like more negative crap--"These peopleare getting overwhelmed and burning out" wah wah wah.. But what they fail to mention (and what the parent poster explained perfectly) is that these people are NOT VICTIMS. They are living a flawed lifestyle. It's not necessarily the job but the fact that they aren't willing to find a new one. Or they can't handle the job they're in so they aren't able to keep up. And if they HAVE to work the job just to pay for all of their shit bills, they painted THEMSELVES into the corner. Here's what you NEED:
Food, and not gourmet herb encrusted butter meals but just food. White rice, vegetables, maybe some meat.
Shelter, and not a 6 bedroom 6000 sq foot house with the thickest pad in the carpet, tile this and that and let's make sure to keep it 75 in the winter and 68 in the summer but just a house. A roof, 4 walls and enough room to hold your food and clothing.
Love, and not $500/hour, snort the coke off my tits love. Just love, another person, a friend to share the world with, to build a life together.
EVERYTHING ELSE is luxury. CAR? Luxury. You can buy a running used car for $500 these days. It's CRAZY what you can get for cheap since everyone thinks they are rich and need an Audi nowadays. CABLE? Pft, I bought a $20 antenna at WalMart and get 10+ channels in my metro area, not that I'm watching it. INTERNET? The library has free internet. For the home, there's a generous neighbor who will gladly share his WiFi connection with you for $5 a month, if you ask.
And then there's other stuff for your personal enjoyment, like art. Now, that's different. But I see all these losers filling their houses with mass-produced made-in-China bought-at-Target metal trinkets that EVERYONE ELSE HAS IN THEIR HOUSE! Whereas for the same money you can go to your local art festival/walk and buy stuff real people made with their hands and get a card to go with it and when the artist makes it big the item actually goes up in value! Of course, you have to do your research and have good taste, but it's not that hard. Plus the money isn't filtering to some huge institutional shareholder's pocket--it's staying in the community and going to someone who probably buys stuff from other local businesses.
What you say? This sounds like going back in time to the way America was before 50 years ago. You mean the suburbs don't work and we have to go back to the way things used to be? One way or another we will. When the oil stops flowing like it is, you can forget about practically free shit from China and everywhere else. You're going to have to learn to shop local. And if you aren't doing it now, it's pretty likely they won't be around when you need them.
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I only consider it NOT stealing if the following conditions are met:
1. They provide a fully balanced accounting of all the money spent on firefighting and roads, itemized to the penny. I want to know what the contractor's profit margin was, I want to know how much the firetruck company spent to lobby the city commission.
2. They provide proof the funds actually came from tax revenue and not borrowed money at insanely high interest rates. If money must be borrowed (after removing all non-essential costs), it should be at the best possible rate, since we taxpayers are paying the interest on it.
3. Just like in personal finance, care should be taken to balance the budget and create a surplus if possible to make a rainy day fund in case something bad happens.
The problem is that the system is so corrupt, there's so much dick sucking going on, it's like a swedish porn party in government today. Cities are blowing their governor for cash, governors are blowing congress. Cities purposely run with as few funds as possible so if they have some sort of crisis, they can come begging to the higher-ups for free money. Of course, with all the accountants and lawyers you need for a good bailout, the money ends up costing money. And where does that come from? My favorite is the mill-levy, wherin they just borrow the money from future tax revenue! Great!
Anyway, yes, I consider it stealing. I feel sorry for firefighters having to work for such a corrupt system and it's not their fault. They don't understand numbers, that's why they're FIREFIGHTERS. The problem is the people who actually understand the numbers get PAID MORE the more fucked up everything is. OH SHIT, WE JUST LOST 60% of the City books! Bill 6000 more hours! And in the unlikely event someone wants to challenge it, there's a big payday for the lawyers (who write the laws to begin with).
I just hate seeing
$page=$_REQUEST['page'];
include($page);
Use addslashes, use the mysqli DB calls (_prepare(), etc.), use STORED PROCEDURES which are finally available on MySQL. Take the DB stuff out of PHP and you're left with a pretty stable secure scripting language. Granted, there are some issues with typing, bounds checking, etc. but PHP is not an "enterprise" scripting language. It's not designed to write bank software. It works great for everything else.
I'm sorry, we don't hire gay-female-Eskimo-single-parents at Acme Corporation.
Perhaps you could use the printer to make the mold, then pour hot metal or plastic or whatever into it.
They need to pay us a shitload more so I don't have to worry about doing my laundry or making food etc. Sort of like a General in an Army. Sales in my eyes will always be the foot soldiers. Put sales UNDER IT.
THe problem is that "business" is "making money", not doing things right. And so, it's only a slow evolution, even with well capitalized places like MS and GOOG (who are both really publishing companies, NOT software). Software really IS interactive art. Any usefulness it has is just a side benefit. Just like music or movies, if something's good, people pick it up and use it. If it's garbage, you can't force it down their throat. You make it better until they WANT to use it. Thus there are a lot of failed bands, bad movies and.. abandoned software projects. Of course, if you make the right app, you might just change the world.
Sure is a different way to look at things...life without sales.
Tip of my hat: He does mention starting small and iterating. I think that's the best way to build software.
Object oriented programming. If you do anything more than once, make a method that does it. Then it's easy to make changes withour editing 1291 different places. If you export/import a veriable more than once, put it in the object and make an interface.
The problem is this takes time. Sometimes it's better to just write in long hand, the whole app, and THEN filter it down into smaller modules. Meanwhile you are editing a lot but pledge to yourself the second time you make a major edit in many spots you're going to cut that out and replace it with a function!
That's why I like the Dr.Dobbs quick-kill project plan--you make a list of features you're NOT going to develop also, and have the stakeholders sign off on it ;)
Yeah, even the new James Bond movie was far to serious for my taste. Where are the gadgets, the unbelievable turns, the cars, the women?
In Soviet Russia, the launches of spacecrafts will be lesser than what this year has been seen.
What if they were IP addresses?
;)
207 46 225 60 207 46 18 30
If everyone is doing something and making money, it's a bubble--if it has these characteristics:
1. It serves no apparent useful purpose
2. You don't see easily how anyone can make money doing it
3. Everyone you know has made so much money doing it
Anything that inflates to quickly will POP. The problem is that ANYTHING that makes money these days is pounced upon by get rich quick assholes who drive up prices and kill the whole thing. There's no such thing as an unsaturated market unless you innovate or invent a new market. Basically, if you aren't changing the world and making a lot of money, it's a bubble.
So I can walk up to girls now and say, "How would you like to have a longer, healther life?" and if they say yes it means "Yes, you may buy me a drink."
I think it could be expanded to be even more exciting than the original. There are tons of remotely operated drones, planes, bombs, robots, etc. that could be controlled by the system. There are still plenty of missles around. Beyond that, there is electronically controlled everything else, such as air traffic control, power grids, nuclear power plants, water supplies, etc. Maybe the idea (for the movie) would be the terrorist gets into the system, starts messing with shit, and the innocent hacker gets framed. PUT ON YOUR ROLLERBLADES AND VR GOOGLES, WE'RE GOING TO THE FUTURE!
Actually, it could if you had recorded a 1-800 calling card number, a calling card number and pin and the number you wished to access.
And you could actually record the tones of the coin drop from the remote end (it filtered out on the payphone end) by calling your friend and having a tape on the line. Then you just drop 2 or 3 bucks in various coins down the chute and when you're done you hit the coin return and get it all back. Of course, then they started cutting the transmitter part of the phone until you dropped at least one coin in, so you had to spend a minimum of a nickel.
Oh, and you could modify a radio shack tone dialer to generate the tones with a 6.565mhz crystal, then you used the "*" on speed dial to represent a nickel. 2 * for a dime and 5 * for a quarter.
I still have it around here somewhere. It doesn't work anymore, of course.
Interesting. Obviously you probably wouldn't want to raise that all up to 200 degrees C but you could get some extra lift by heating it above ambient temps. And with a radiation barrier, you could keep most of the heat inside permanently. I was under the assumption that a helium-based ship is probably weighted to neutral weight in the air and uses air thrusters to move it up and down. As it gets higher you drop ballast (water, probably) to maintain the balance and to land you dump a little helium/hot helium.
I'm thinking that because the improvement in density would be relatively smaller for helium than it is for air, it probably would take much less energy to raise the helium's tempurature. I'm also guessing that there's quite a bit of air that ends up in the bag with the helium and that would benefit from the added heat also. I mean, I don't see what the big deal is considering complete amateurs float hot air balloons all the time. You'd think it would be possible to do this safely with helium..
The first thing I thought was to use hot HELIUM. I mean, why not? Surely hot Helium will have even more lifting power than regular helium.
I meant
3583 Bytes Free
Ready.
K thanks bye
Try booting a Tivo; it takes like 10 minutes. My DVD player takes about 1 minute to figure out to boot the disc or report there's not one in it. My toaster takes 5 minutes to toast bread. A good espresso always takes 25 seconds. WTF IS THE MATTER WITH PEOPLE? Just strap yourself in bed with a lifetime supply of IV nutrients and a hypnotic, get someone to pay your mortgage and you'll have everything you'll ever need right at your fingertips for the rest of your life. Have some patience or tweak your box to not load anything at startup (hell, run Dos 6.11 with no autoexec or config.sys or something). Or run an AS/400 for a while and manually start processes for 20 minutes before you're fully booted up? Or shit, buy a Vic 20. One flip of the switch and before the TV can even warm up, READY?
It *is* poorly designed. That's why everyone knows to set the pagefile to a static size and then reboot and defrag. Then the pagefile ends up on the end of the disk and is never moved again.
Windows boots slow out of the box. Yes, this is true, there's no denying it. However, there are a lot of ways to make it boot faster. Number one, if you're running NTFS you have to disable the last access timestamp (FSUTIL behavior set disablelastaccess 1). Every read it does from the time the NTFS volume is mounted is accompanied by a write to update the last accessed timestamp. This slows boot (and everyday performance) immensely.
Also, go thru services, start/programs/startup, and hklm(hklu)/ms/win/cv/run stuff and stop/disable any unneeded services. For instance, the wireless zero configuration service runs on every default XP SP2 install regardless of whether you have a wireless adapter or not. With the registry and the other config files you can pretty much disable anything you want. I have seen windows boot in under 2 seconds to the login window and another 2 seconds after login to bring up the desktop. If you configure your machine correctly, you'll have a good boot time and it will run more stable because you don't have a bunch of crap hogging ram, threads, i/o and cpu. Also, if you're running a network with DHCP, that slows the boot time a lot (on linux too!) if the os has to wait around for the IP. There are millions of things, but most everything in windows is configurable just like linux. Yeah, you can't recompile the binaries so there's a lot you can't mess with but most of the binaries are totally controlled by the registry (as far as we know).
Good luck,
I think the most important part of Open Source development of ANYTHING is standards. You need to have a standards body. The problem with the auto industry today is there are no real standards. Take for example custom wheels--a simple, non-moving piece of metal that basically holds the tire. It's main purpose is cosmetic after the basic functionality that all wheels share (round, has bolt holes in the middle, etc.). You'd think it would be simple to get a different wheel for your car, but if you ever try you'll find hundreds of different widths, bolt-patterns, diameters, etc.
This Open Source car would only be better if there were standards employed in these particular sections. Or have any connections be customizeable on both sides of the connection. So, if someone invents a better wheel pattern, it's easy to change the disc brake assembly to to fit it (dependency).
The problem is that just having the design isn't going to get you very far because of the specialized components involved. A car is very expensive to build but at million plus quantities it's very cheap. But try to one-off one gear for a transmission sometime (it'll be THOUSANDS to get the precision in a $900 off-the-shelf manual transmission like Mazda makes for Ford).
Instead, from the design stage, standardize everything. A standard ring or star topology for communications and power bussing throughout the car. Then each powered device has a microcontroller that turns it off or on. Then the microcontroller can report back it's status to a central computer. Most of the electricals are easily standardized. Where you run into problems is precision machined steel parts of an engine and transmission. Replacing also those with electrics is the way to go. Use electric motors, magnetic suspension, etc. Modular body panels can have their own microcontrollers also, so the car can reconfigure itself based on what you have mounted. You have the rear door in place, the rear door up/down button appears on the interface. The top is off, no sense showing the moonroof control. Etc etc.
RFC's and the like are what's really made stuff like linux possible. It's not just having the source but having the standards that really make everything easy to work with, and make sure that many different programmers can all work on different sections of the project without worrying about if their module can talk with the others.
Yeah, but you get the feeling consolidation is what he WANTS, not necessarily what's going to happen. I think a lot of small businesses don't like eBay, which has become a bastion of SE Asian importers and crooks for most commodity items. Sure, you can still find some decent categories that aren't flooded with .01 cent starting bids for trinkets but they are few and far between. The small businessperson innovator is going to go his own way and not follow the crowd any more than possible. There will always be crowd-followers, and that's who Sun will cater to if that's their strategy. But to get the big growth, you need to find the innovators, and those people are not always going to subscribe to the service model. They just don't trust anyone else to do the job right.
Since Earthlink was founded by a scientoligist, there's a pretty good chance 90% of your email is going their personal blackmail file on you.
But they bought up loads of dark "fibre" a while ago to places just like this. Google is a trendsetter, they don't need to go where the bandwidth is; they go, bandwidth follows. Washington and Oregon have about the cheapest power in the U.S. because they have so many deep rivers and with that comes hydro-plants and nuke-plants. There are 14 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia river alone. Because they sell most of it to California, they have a nice tax on power exports that then subsidizes in-state uses. That's why a lot of aluminum plants are in Washington, etc.
Sorry for that. The story mentions that this person had prior convictions for minor crimes on his record when he was hired. They didn't run a background check on him before they put him in control of over 2,000 servers. Then they screwed him on his bonus and he screwed them. Now he's going to jail.
It sounds to me like their HR department was incompetent, the management was incompetent and they gave an employee too much control. I don't think any one employee should have that much control over a company's IT infrastructure. And you NEVER give high level people root access. Instead, you break your organization into regions, with a top admin for each region. Then no one person has complete control over the infrastructure. Ideally you would spread the information across many datacenters also, with journalled backups/replication going both ways. When you get to a certain size, you need to have checks and balances. Smaller businesses can get away with that stuff, provided you have a good backup policy. Again, you need to have multiple copies of the current dataset in the control of many different people.
Of course, you probably have proprietary software that gets worked on by 5 or 6 programmers that gets disseminated out to every machine, which is also a weak spot. Tight controls on those people are necessary also, but there's little you can do to stop a programmer from trojanning proprietary software for some future date when he's in the islands somewhere under a false identity.
Can a background check stop a determined employee from wreacking havoc within his box? No. But everyone knows it's not a bad idea to know your employees a little before giving them that kind of access.
It's nice to hear someone positive for a change. Reading the article, it seems like more negative crap--"These peopleare getting overwhelmed and burning out" wah wah wah.. But what they fail to mention (and what the parent poster explained perfectly) is that these people are NOT VICTIMS. They are living a flawed lifestyle. It's not necessarily the job but the fact that they aren't willing to find a new one. Or they can't handle the job they're in so they aren't able to keep up. And if they HAVE to work the job just to pay for all of their shit bills, they painted THEMSELVES into the corner. Here's what you NEED:
Food, and not gourmet herb encrusted butter meals but just food. White rice, vegetables, maybe some meat.
Shelter, and not a 6 bedroom 6000 sq foot house with the thickest pad in the carpet, tile this and that and let's make sure to keep it 75 in the winter and 68 in the summer but just a house. A roof, 4 walls and enough room to hold your food and clothing.
Love, and not $500/hour, snort the coke off my tits love. Just love, another person, a friend to share the world with, to build a life together.
EVERYTHING ELSE is luxury. CAR? Luxury. You can buy a running used car for $500 these days. It's CRAZY what you can get for cheap since everyone thinks they are rich and need an Audi nowadays. CABLE? Pft, I bought a $20 antenna at WalMart and get 10+ channels in my metro area, not that I'm watching it. INTERNET? The library has free internet. For the home, there's a generous neighbor who will gladly share his WiFi connection with you for $5 a month, if you ask.
And then there's other stuff for your personal enjoyment, like art. Now, that's different. But I see all these losers filling their houses with mass-produced made-in-China bought-at-Target metal trinkets that EVERYONE ELSE HAS IN THEIR HOUSE! Whereas for the same money you can go to your local art festival/walk and buy stuff real people made with their hands and get a card to go with it and when the artist makes it big the item actually goes up in value! Of course, you have to do your research and have good taste, but it's not that hard. Plus the money isn't filtering to some huge institutional shareholder's pocket--it's staying in the community and going to someone who probably buys stuff from other local businesses.
What you say? This sounds like going back in time to the way America was before 50 years ago. You mean the suburbs don't work and we have to go back to the way things used to be? One way or another we will. When the oil stops flowing like it is, you can forget about practically free shit from China and everywhere else. You're going to have to learn to shop local. And if you aren't doing it now, it's pretty likely they won't be around when you need them.