It's been a while, and I'm too lazy to fully read Wikipedia, but I want to say from the decomposition of neutrons. Neutron decay = 1 electron, 1 proton, & 1 neutrino. Though I may be wrong.
Wait, checked it. Close, the above is Beta negative decay, so it emits an anti-neutrino. So, you want Beta positive for a regular (electron) neutrino.
Agreed. I mean, what self-respecting super-villain doesn't have a particle collider of their own? The ones having trouble coming up with this month's rent, that's who.
*shrugs* It may be possible to travel faster than light. However, we do tend to have a good idea how fast various known particles DO travel. There may be unknown particles that do travel faster than light, and / or other methods that allow normal matter to traverse space / time much faster than what is currently considered feasible.
However, CERN wasn't, to our knowledge, using wormholes or exotic matter or what not that particular day (Thursdays are wormhole days, Fridays are black-hole days, Saturdays are the day that they perform tune-ups on the chips they implanted in the EU politicians' brains, Sundays are tapioca pudding days), so no one is taking the experimental results too seriously.
No one is debating that. The original press release said that they were checking results elsewhere to ensure that they were correct. Broken / miscalibrated equipment is the bane of every scientist, and with-holding of results until after several of your friends confirm things is always a good idea (it helps prevent publications of perpetual motion machines and what not).
While not belittling CERN's accomplishments nor their professionalism, it is a little annoying to let the press pump out another headline talking about 'hope' while they are still dealing with potential errors in their experimental setup. It ranks up there with the "New Cures for AIDS" postings on r/Science, where a new cure is apparently found every week -> it becomes tabloid material.
The standard protocol remains the same -> fix the broken equipment, run the experiment, check results, run the experiment again, check the results again, call some of your friends somewhere else & have them run the experiment a few times, compare results, call another friend, run the experiment again, compare results...and so on, at least a dozen or so times...then, very cautiously, inform the scientific community that you are intending to put out a paper regarding said results, and have your editor & interested parties review an advance copy to try and find any errors, then publish & batten down the hatches. The general idea being that someone, somewhere will have properly functioning equipment, and they will spot the error before removing it (at a later time) becomes a political problem. Once it makes it into the science textbooks, it becomes almost impossible to remove, and what more, a lot of people will be operating with the incorrect information.
So, CERN should fix the equipment (upgrade if they can), check their results, do the rest of the above, then call in the reporters to state whether or not we need to worry about rewriting the known laws of physics.
Yes, but joking about murdering someone, and that person suddenly showing up dead, makes for a very difficult lifestyle.
"The vast majority of the time, fakeable data happens to be true since almost no one bothers to fake it." -> An assumption that a quick glance of Facebook would easily disprove.
What more, it's interesting, sometimes, to choose who receives what information, and see where it reappears. A recently divorced friend of mine has that kind of issue (needing to weed out problems), as some of his friends are still reporting things back to his ex.
"In a serious investigation, either the police are going to get a confession once they have enough circumstantial evidence or they are going to get the warrants they need to collect more solid evidence."
My, my, where to begin here. The police can illicit a confession with or without evidence, circumstantial non-withstanding, guilt or innocence non-withstanding; it's amazing how many false confessions a good interrogator can acquire, if given the chance. What more, a warrant doesn't determine whether the police can consider you a suspect, nor whether they can treat you as a suspect (take that for what you will, but the life of a suspect is utter hell; until that cloud of mistrust (did he / she do it?) is cleared (and that's assuming it ever clears), your every action is watched / word recorded, and you yourself shunned by everyone you know).
Indeed. And that's frightening, to think that someone could wield that level of disproportionate power over various individuals who are tied to the land, and forced into mandated programs, until the age of emancipation. The first sixteen odd years of your life, arguably the best years of your life, taken without your consent, and sacrificed to keep the wheels of the great machine moving. The next few dozen years will be spent etching out a meager existence, while working (typically) for the various organs contained within. The final years of your life, should you live so long, are remanded to your custody, to spend with failing eyes and softening bones, as you find your savings accounts dwindling, your progeny fighting to see who can get a bigger share of your things (they say they pray for your ailing health, but quietly, they wish for a quicker death), and spend more time staring off into the distance, seeing things that aren't there, than you realize.
The open assumption is that the data put on Facebook is entirely valid. Since it cannot be held to be valid, it becomes NP-Hard to sort through all the data for the bits which are true and the bits which are false.
It's entirely possible to setup an identity for someone who doesn't exist (trolls + marketers do this all the time); that's one strike against the data. It's also possible to have a user simply lie, such as saying they were at a party or visiting a cousin when they weren't. Job applicants could maintain an entire account simply for the purposes of appearing social while maintaining a carefully controlled, carefully tailored public image. Finally, other people may post things, or even borrow someone's account, and change the user's profile to something unsavory, as a prank.
Anyone who puts stock in this data as some sort of glimpse into another's thinking should not be allowed to make any kind of lasting decision.
Of course, this is not to say that a portion of that data may not be true, only that it is impossible to know what quantity of it.
Arguably, strawmen are what defines the more exceptional of our legislation: where would we be, if not for the Welfare Queens, the Islamic Terrorists, and Wall St. fat cats?
Hardly. A cop thinking something exists != something illegal exists. How many times have the police shot someone when they thought he / she was going for a weapon, only to find out later it was a cellphone.
In the event of an encrypted hard drive, there may be all manner of information that is not illegal that the defendant would not like viewed; it need not be illegal to ruin someone's life. I challenge any LEO, Judge, or Prosecutor who believes otherwise to submit a copy of their hard drive to me to prove otherwise (and no getting cute by submitting a new hard drive with just the OS installed; I mean the machine you use to browse porn / email your relatives / write your legal strategies); that noise you'll hear, that noise that sounds like "FUCK THAT," is exactly the feeling that the common people have.
That I am a somewhat capable Computer Scientist, and can DO things with that information, should I be so motivated, does not mean you should trust me any less...*puts on BOFH hat*...so let's uh, let's take a look at that data. I'm sure the DA has nothing to hide, and I'm sure an intensive scan of his firm's hard drives + the quiet logging of the emails from his Blackberry will confirm that. I'm sure the DA has never said anything that might be taken out of context in a personal e-mail or text message. I'm sure he's never told an off-color joke that the media wouldn't use for a temporary ratings hike. I'm sure he doesn't mind it if I bring in a few friends from the local law firms, to help me interpret these documents containing his legal strategies for his next series of upcoming cases..remember, it's all *wink wink* confidential, and I am sure that NDA I get them to sign will certainly keep them from using that information against him in the near future. These lawyers will just tell themselves to forget, and it will happen.
With SSL, you have complete control over your side of the connection. Not both sides, just your side.
With DRM, you do not have complete control over your side of the connection. It's akin to a foreign embassy inside a your country, and justifiably treated as such. It's inside 'trusted' territory (your country's borders), and thus is a constant worry for your country's intelligence people (embassies are notorious for espionage operations). The other side will tell you whatever reassurances you want to hear just to get a foothold.
More and more I've found that it's for lack of prospecting that we believe our resources to be so limited, not because we've already searched everywhere and come up empty.
Indeed. However, the general thought is that although the [Insert Foreign Power] can tacitly back one of their chosen industries, to do so they must pull resources from somewhere else, which creates an opening.
Think of the marketplace as a battlefield. To put 5 more tanks on the lines protecting [Insert Politically-Favored Company], they must draw 5 tanks away from [Insert Some Other Company Not Held In As High Regard]. They strengthen one, at the cost of another; by focusing on their front lines, they've left their flanks unguarded. When the imbalance becomes large enough, competition from within and without begins appearing in earnest, destroying what's left of those weakened companies, and coming up from behind on those previously favored companies.
To protect GM, the United States had to ultimately sacrifice a fair number of less-favored, weaker, and / or newly created companies. Ultimately, it's a form of cannibalization, where Saturn eats his sons to maintain his power (to mix in some Roman mythology here, just for fun).
This is why protectionist economies eventually fail -> the market moves at light-speed or faster, cannot be bribed, and is constantly checking for weaknesses; the people working the protectionist racket move at human speeds, can be bribed, and are not always aware of weaknesses in either themselves, their friends, or their enemies. As the effects of poor decisions take some time to ripple throughout the markets (the effects thereof, not the decisions themselves), endlessly cascading until they hit a particular resonance (at which point destruction, creative or otherwise appears), things such as high tariffs may take several years to destroy a healthy economy. Feel me? It's like losing a loved one, acknowledging the fact thereof for many months, but only realizing it / feeling it on some quiet afternoon when you suddenly break out in tears, but don't know why.
You will need to persuade the 'people in charge' that it's in their own best self-interest.
Senator Bob (name chosen at random) doesn't care about the people getting groped as long as it doesn't affect him personally. I.e. It destroys his chance at election, or he books a flight on something other than his personal jet.
As highlighted earlier in this article, the representative didn't really care until she was subjected to this level of embarrassment. So it is with all legislation.
Honestly? The LEOs of today, based off of what limited information I have gathered, pale somewhat in comparison with the LEOs of yesteryear. That is to say the quality has dropped a fair amount with regards to the new recruits. Now, it's possible that the quality has remained the same, and it's only with the advent of new technology (cellphone cameras) are we finding out just how poor that quality has been all along...however, there are some limited indicators which suggest it may have been, on average, better at some point in the past.
Investigators who need information spoon-fed to them, troopers who need to be constantly reminded of the laws they are supposed to be upholding...it's pretty bad.
How does this relate to GPS? Well, as I outlined in a post a while back, officers are more reliant on technology today than times past. Mind you, I said reliant, not augmented by. As such, a typical officer cannot be guaranteed to actually memorize the various roads and streets that make up their own town / city, let alone the surrounding towns / cities. So, if you manage to knock out their GPS navigation systems, it's possible that they will not be able to find a route, let alone a quick one, to the scene of the crime nor plot an intercept course to pursue a suspect if he / she is still at large.
If you pair up GPS jammers in concert with radio jammers, you can prevent officers from being notified about a crime in progress, as well as prevent them from finding their way to the scene (thus buying yourself time) is they manage to get around that (by using their cellphones or something more creative). In the event of a chase, officers typically need some level of communication to box-in a suspect (to get a car on either side, one in back, one in front, to force you to slow down). And so on.
Since this is taking place in the UK, it could be a prelude to something 'interesting': rolling with the cliches here, someone planning a bank heist or to swipe the crown jewels. Or not: it could easily be a broken device broadcasting on the wrong channel, with the owner unaware; a broken CB radio in California once overpowered cellphones in the surrounding area, and no criminal intent was found. Or a prank.
Not so much. The machine which is being attacked typically has a competent admin who will capture the IP addresses of the attackers (assuming the packets are not forged), who can then forward the addresses to his / her upstream network provider. Directly contacting the ISP of the afflicted machines would require some extra work, but is possible.
Hmm. I'd think termination of their contract, if their machine is caught attacking one of my DNS servers through neglect. I'd take the fiscal hit willingly.
Mind you, the logging used to diagnose who, exactly, is attacking my servers is different from the kind of logging that SOPA / ACTA would mandate (it cannot be modified / re-purposed to fits their needs).
The idea of a network administrator running from classroom to classroom, dealing with day to day issues (printer is empty, I forgot my password, I need this software installed, my computer isn't working...) is insane. Taking care of teachers in addition to students requires at least seven full-time seasoned IT people, for a school of 500. More if you want any decent performance / turn-around time / planning & integration of that technology. If you want to peel off 2 or 3 of them to teach the teachers the latest technology at a moment's notice (i.e. not during the summer, when the teachers are otherwise on trips and what not), you're down to 4 people manning the front-lines. What more, if / when technology issues arise, the teachers think you are doing it to them personally, so entire wars can erupt from not spending enough time politicking.
So yes, Open Source is awesome if you are running a Data Center, or doing sh*t at home, or work for a company with several other programmers, or have a lot of free time. It's not so hot when the latest version of Ubuntu goes tits-up during a power-point presentation or video, and a teacher is trying to teach a class.
How do you protect yourself from liars? Do you begin lying yourself? The short term advantages of one-skilled liar can be so detrimental to others, that by the time the long-term disadvantages of lying catch up, everyone else has converted to lying to keep themselves alive.
As principled as you may imagine yourself to be, duress, like most forms of torture, can force a more pragmatic approach.
A recent study with machines, posted on reddit, showed that when they were forced to compete for scarce resources, and allowed to evolve, lying would appear. There is, however, a cut-off for this behavior; a population / group allows for not more than a percentage of lying to take place, or the population will collapse (or something to that effect).
You'll score a job at a place which values your expertise, probably with higher pay. The institution you worked for will go under, not because you left, but because it's fairly obvious that it's already borderline, and the people in charge have their heads up their asses -> Misallocation of appropriated funds is not looked kindly upon by the press, and following the fomenting scandal, the state may be forced to shutdown the school. Since it's already a low-performing school, an argument will be made that the state's SAT scores will rise by getting rid of this particular institution, and after a fight by the local Teacher's union (you need a leg to stand on to win these kinds of battles, and they won't have one), some dagger work will be pushed through, and the problem (the school) will be made to "go away."
You probably feel for these kids, and you want to help them out; however, you can't. You have neither the time nor the resources necessary to change the pervading mentality that IT is the asst. supervisor's trick. Given that, the best you can do is hope that their future will not be terribly impacted by the ensuing shit-storm, and get yourself out of the line of fire.
And be sure to document all further interactions with people of interest, in either written or electronic form. Keep a nightly off-site backup of your emails, as you may be charged at some point for complicity in this madness, and will need an alibi. Remember, a bureaucrat will not hesitate to throw an underling under a bus to save himself, and no one believes the accused.
"Most boxes that they current have, utilize 1% of network traffic, less than 1% of CPU, and about 10% of hard disk space." -> I will point out that that's not a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a while, and I'm too lazy to fully read Wikipedia, but I want to say from the decomposition of neutrons. Neutron decay = 1 electron, 1 proton, & 1 neutrino.
Though I may be wrong.
Wait, checked it. Close, the above is Beta negative decay, so it emits an anti-neutrino. So, you want Beta positive for a regular (electron) neutrino.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay
Agreed. I mean, what self-respecting super-villain doesn't have a particle collider of their own? The ones having trouble coming up with this month's rent, that's who.
*shrugs* It may be possible to travel faster than light. However, we do tend to have a good idea how fast various known particles DO travel. There may be unknown particles that do travel faster than light, and / or other methods that allow normal matter to traverse space / time much faster than what is currently considered feasible.
However, CERN wasn't, to our knowledge, using wormholes or exotic matter or what not that particular day (Thursdays are wormhole days, Fridays are black-hole days, Saturdays are the day that they perform tune-ups on the chips they implanted in the EU politicians' brains, Sundays are tapioca pudding days), so no one is taking the experimental results too seriously.
No one is debating that. The original press release said that they were checking results elsewhere to ensure that they were correct. Broken / miscalibrated equipment is the bane of every scientist, and with-holding of results until after several of your friends confirm things is always a good idea (it helps prevent publications of perpetual motion machines and what not).
While not belittling CERN's accomplishments nor their professionalism, it is a little annoying to let the press pump out another headline talking about 'hope' while they are still dealing with potential errors in their experimental setup. It ranks up there with the "New Cures for AIDS" postings on r/Science, where a new cure is apparently found every week -> it becomes tabloid material.
The standard protocol remains the same -> fix the broken equipment, run the experiment, check results, run the experiment again, check the results again, call some of your friends somewhere else & have them run the experiment a few times, compare results, call another friend, run the experiment again, compare results...and so on, at least a dozen or so times...then, very cautiously, inform the scientific community that you are intending to put out a paper regarding said results, and have your editor & interested parties review an advance copy to try and find any errors, then publish & batten down the hatches. The general idea being that someone, somewhere will have properly functioning equipment, and they will spot the error before removing it (at a later time) becomes a political problem. Once it makes it into the science textbooks, it becomes almost impossible to remove, and what more, a lot of people will be operating with the incorrect information.
So, CERN should fix the equipment (upgrade if they can), check their results, do the rest of the above, then call in the reporters to state whether or not we need to worry about rewriting the known laws of physics.
Yes, but joking about murdering someone, and that person suddenly showing up dead, makes for a very difficult lifestyle.
"The vast majority of the time, fakeable data happens to be true since almost no one bothers to fake it." -> An assumption that a quick glance of Facebook would easily disprove.
What more, it's interesting, sometimes, to choose who receives what information, and see where it reappears. A recently divorced friend of mine has that kind of issue (needing to weed out problems), as some of his friends are still reporting things back to his ex.
"In a serious investigation, either the police are going to get a confession once they have enough circumstantial evidence or they are going to get the warrants they need to collect more solid evidence."
My, my, where to begin here. The police can illicit a confession with or without evidence, circumstantial non-withstanding, guilt or innocence non-withstanding; it's amazing how many false confessions a good interrogator can acquire, if given the chance. What more, a warrant doesn't determine whether the police can consider you a suspect, nor whether they can treat you as a suspect (take that for what you will, but the life of a suspect is utter hell; until that cloud of mistrust (did he / she do it?) is cleared (and that's assuming it ever clears), your every action is watched / word recorded, and you yourself shunned by everyone you know).
Indeed. And that's frightening, to think that someone could wield that level of disproportionate power over various individuals who are tied to the land, and forced into mandated programs, until the age of emancipation. The first sixteen odd years of your life, arguably the best years of your life, taken without your consent, and sacrificed to keep the wheels of the great machine moving. The next few dozen years will be spent etching out a meager existence, while working (typically) for the various organs contained within. The final years of your life, should you live so long, are remanded to your custody, to spend with failing eyes and softening bones, as you find your savings accounts dwindling, your progeny fighting to see who can get a bigger share of your things (they say they pray for your ailing health, but quietly, they wish for a quicker death), and spend more time staring off into the distance, seeing things that aren't there, than you realize.
And they call this progress...
The open assumption is that the data put on Facebook is entirely valid. Since it cannot be held to be valid, it becomes NP-Hard to sort through all the data for the bits which are true and the bits which are false.
It's entirely possible to setup an identity for someone who doesn't exist (trolls + marketers do this all the time); that's one strike against the data. It's also possible to have a user simply lie, such as saying they were at a party or visiting a cousin when they weren't. Job applicants could maintain an entire account simply for the purposes of appearing social while maintaining a carefully controlled, carefully tailored public image. Finally, other people may post things, or even borrow someone's account, and change the user's profile to something unsavory, as a prank.
Anyone who puts stock in this data as some sort of glimpse into another's thinking should not be allowed to make any kind of lasting decision.
Of course, this is not to say that a portion of that data may not be true, only that it is impossible to know what quantity of it.
And in other news, the MPAA is fighting piracy by releasing movies that aren't worth copying, thus destroying piracy at the source.
As am I, but only on Saturday nights. I take the rest of the week off, as too much smartness is double plus ungood.
Arguably, strawmen are what defines the more exceptional of our legislation: where would we be, if not for the Welfare Queens, the Islamic Terrorists, and Wall St. fat cats?
Agreed. Mod parent up.
Hardly. A cop thinking something exists != something illegal exists. How many times have the police shot someone when they thought he / she was going for a weapon, only to find out later it was a cellphone.
In the event of an encrypted hard drive, there may be all manner of information that is not illegal that the defendant would not like viewed; it need not be illegal to ruin someone's life. I challenge any LEO, Judge, or Prosecutor who believes otherwise to submit a copy of their hard drive to me to prove otherwise (and no getting cute by submitting a new hard drive with just the OS installed; I mean the machine you use to browse porn / email your relatives / write your legal strategies); that noise you'll hear, that noise that sounds like "FUCK THAT," is exactly the feeling that the common people have.
That I am a somewhat capable Computer Scientist, and can DO things with that information, should I be so motivated, does not mean you should trust me any less...*puts on BOFH hat*...so let's uh, let's take a look at that data. I'm sure the DA has nothing to hide, and I'm sure an intensive scan of his firm's hard drives + the quiet logging of the emails from his Blackberry will confirm that. I'm sure the DA has never said anything that might be taken out of context in a personal e-mail or text message. I'm sure he's never told an off-color joke that the media wouldn't use for a temporary ratings hike. I'm sure he doesn't mind it if I bring in a few friends from the local law firms, to help me interpret these documents containing his legal strategies for his next series of upcoming cases..remember, it's all *wink wink* confidential, and I am sure that NDA I get them to sign will certainly keep them from using that information against him in the near future. These lawyers will just tell themselves to forget, and it will happen.
With SSL, you have complete control over your side of the connection. Not both sides, just your side.
With DRM, you do not have complete control over your side of the connection. It's akin to a foreign embassy inside a your country, and justifiably treated as such. It's inside 'trusted' territory (your country's borders), and thus is a constant worry for your country's intelligence people (embassies are notorious for espionage operations). The other side will tell you whatever reassurances you want to hear just to get a foothold.
Indeed, that was what I was thinking.
More and more I've found that it's for lack of prospecting that we believe our resources to be so limited, not because we've already searched everywhere and come up empty.
Indeed. However, the general thought is that although the [Insert Foreign Power] can tacitly back one of their chosen industries, to do so they must pull resources from somewhere else, which creates an opening.
Think of the marketplace as a battlefield. To put 5 more tanks on the lines protecting [Insert Politically-Favored Company], they must draw 5 tanks away from [Insert Some Other Company Not Held In As High Regard]. They strengthen one, at the cost of another; by focusing on their front lines, they've left their flanks unguarded. When the imbalance becomes large enough, competition from within and without begins appearing in earnest, destroying what's left of those weakened companies, and coming up from behind on those previously favored companies.
To protect GM, the United States had to ultimately sacrifice a fair number of less-favored, weaker, and / or newly created companies. Ultimately, it's a form of cannibalization, where Saturn eats his sons to maintain his power (to mix in some Roman mythology here, just for fun).
This is why protectionist economies eventually fail -> the market moves at light-speed or faster, cannot be bribed, and is constantly checking for weaknesses; the people working the protectionist racket move at human speeds, can be bribed, and are not always aware of weaknesses in either themselves, their friends, or their enemies. As the effects of poor decisions take some time to ripple throughout the markets (the effects thereof, not the decisions themselves), endlessly cascading until they hit a particular resonance (at which point destruction, creative or otherwise appears), things such as high tariffs may take several years to destroy a healthy economy. Feel me? It's like losing a loved one, acknowledging the fact thereof for many months, but only realizing it / feeling it on some quiet afternoon when you suddenly break out in tears, but don't know why.
You will need to persuade the 'people in charge' that it's in their own best self-interest.
Senator Bob (name chosen at random) doesn't care about the people getting groped as long as it doesn't affect him personally. I.e. It destroys his chance at election, or he books a flight on something other than his personal jet.
As highlighted earlier in this article, the representative didn't really care until she was subjected to this level of embarrassment. So it is with all legislation.
Hmm. Does anyone know just how well the various resources of the United States have been mapped?
Honestly? The LEOs of today, based off of what limited information I have gathered, pale somewhat in comparison with the LEOs of yesteryear. That is to say the quality has dropped a fair amount with regards to the new recruits. Now, it's possible that the quality has remained the same, and it's only with the advent of new technology (cellphone cameras) are we finding out just how poor that quality has been all along...however, there are some limited indicators which suggest it may have been, on average, better at some point in the past.
Investigators who need information spoon-fed to them, troopers who need to be constantly reminded of the laws they are supposed to be upholding...it's pretty bad.
How does this relate to GPS? Well, as I outlined in a post a while back, officers are more reliant on technology today than times past. Mind you, I said reliant, not augmented by. As such, a typical officer cannot be guaranteed to actually memorize the various roads and streets that make up their own town / city, let alone the surrounding towns / cities. So, if you manage to knock out their GPS navigation systems, it's possible that they will not be able to find a route, let alone a quick one, to the scene of the crime nor plot an intercept course to pursue a suspect if he / she is still at large.
If you pair up GPS jammers in concert with radio jammers, you can prevent officers from being notified about a crime in progress, as well as prevent them from finding their way to the scene (thus buying yourself time) is they manage to get around that (by using their cellphones or something more creative). In the event of a chase, officers typically need some level of communication to box-in a suspect (to get a car on either side, one in back, one in front, to force you to slow down). And so on.
Since this is taking place in the UK, it could be a prelude to something 'interesting': rolling with the cliches here, someone planning a bank heist or to swipe the crown jewels. Or not: it could easily be a broken device broadcasting on the wrong channel, with the owner unaware; a broken CB radio in California once overpowered cellphones in the surrounding area, and no criminal intent was found. Or a prank.
Not so much. The machine which is being attacked typically has a competent admin who will capture the IP addresses of the attackers (assuming the packets are not forged), who can then forward the addresses to his / her upstream network provider. Directly contacting the ISP of the afflicted machines would require some extra work, but is possible.
No inspection of traffic is needed.
Hmm. I'd think termination of their contract, if their machine is caught attacking one of my DNS servers through neglect. I'd take the fiscal hit willingly.
Mind you, the logging used to diagnose who, exactly, is attacking my servers is different from the kind of logging that SOPA / ACTA would mandate (it cannot be modified / re-purposed to fits their needs).
Mod parent up.
The idea of a network administrator running from classroom to classroom, dealing with day to day issues (printer is empty, I forgot my password, I need this software installed, my computer isn't working...) is insane. Taking care of teachers in addition to students requires at least seven full-time seasoned IT people, for a school of 500. More if you want any decent performance / turn-around time / planning & integration of that technology. If you want to peel off 2 or 3 of them to teach the teachers the latest technology at a moment's notice (i.e. not during the summer, when the teachers are otherwise on trips and what not), you're down to 4 people manning the front-lines. What more, if / when technology issues arise, the teachers think you are doing it to them personally, so entire wars can erupt from not spending enough time politicking.
So yes, Open Source is awesome if you are running a Data Center, or doing sh*t at home, or work for a company with several other programmers, or have a lot of free time. It's not so hot when the latest version of Ubuntu goes tits-up during a power-point presentation or video, and a teacher is trying to teach a class.
Which is precisely the problem.
How do you protect yourself from liars? Do you begin lying yourself? The short term advantages of one-skilled liar can be so detrimental to others, that by the time the long-term disadvantages of lying catch up, everyone else has converted to lying to keep themselves alive.
As principled as you may imagine yourself to be, duress, like most forms of torture, can force a more pragmatic approach.
A recent study with machines, posted on reddit, showed that when they were forced to compete for scarce resources, and allowed to evolve, lying would appear. There is, however, a cut-off for this behavior; a population / group allows for not more than a percentage of lying to take place, or the population will collapse (or something to that effect).
Quit.
You'll score a job at a place which values your expertise, probably with higher pay. The institution you worked for will go under, not because you left, but because it's fairly obvious that it's already borderline, and the people in charge have their heads up their asses -> Misallocation of appropriated funds is not looked kindly upon by the press, and following the fomenting scandal, the state may be forced to shutdown the school. Since it's already a low-performing school, an argument will be made that the state's SAT scores will rise by getting rid of this particular institution, and after a fight by the local Teacher's union (you need a leg to stand on to win these kinds of battles, and they won't have one), some dagger work will be pushed through, and the problem (the school) will be made to "go away."
You probably feel for these kids, and you want to help them out; however, you can't. You have neither the time nor the resources necessary to change the pervading mentality that IT is the asst. supervisor's trick. Given that, the best you can do is hope that their future will not be terribly impacted by the ensuing shit-storm, and get yourself out of the line of fire.
And be sure to document all further interactions with people of interest, in either written or electronic form. Keep a nightly off-site backup of your emails, as you may be charged at some point for complicity in this madness, and will need an alibi. Remember, a bureaucrat will not hesitate to throw an underling under a bus to save himself, and no one believes the accused.
"Most boxes that they current have, utilize 1% of network traffic, less than 1% of CPU, and about 10% of hard disk space." -> I will point out that that's not a bad thing.