It sounds like it is at least (in part) intended as a standoff weapon - something that can be fired at a target 20 or more miles away. Fire rate becomes less important if you're out of the range of the enemy's anti-aircraft guns.
The legality of an action does not always carry the weight it should with the corporate world - witness Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, etc. There are plenty of companies out there that couldn't give a damn about whether it's legal or not, because the odds are that their H1B dealings will never be audited. My employer unfortunately is one of them, and the poor Sri Lankans I work with have to deal with the result.
Well, report your employer to the Government then. If my employer had tried to pay me less (they didn't; in fact they treated me extremely well and I have absolutely no complaints against them) I would have told management "either you pay me equal to the rest of the staff, or the INS will find out". Of course, it's a bit easier for me than a Sri Lankan because if they refuse and I quit, I go back to a nice, first world country with widespread broadband access, not some third-world hellhole. But there's nothing stopping you from trying to persuade management (anonymously, if necessary) to pay the Sri Lankans a fair wage.
There's too many myths about H1-B. Being a former H1-B (and prior to that, L1) worker, I've seen it for myself. I've now moved back home instead of doing the green card thing because (a) the INS dehumanization process is too humiliating, and living in the United States is just not worth going through that bullshit, and (b) the Isle of Man is just much nicer than Houston:-) and (c) the quality of life is much better for workers here - 4 weeks vacation when you're hired and a 37 hour work week instead of ungodly hours and 2 weeks vacation if you're lucky.
Myths:
H1-B workers are paid less than U.S. workers. This is in fact illegal. I was actually paid more than my co-workers. Also the company had to go through the expense of the H1 process, which is bureaucratic, officious and generally a pain in the arse.
H1-B workers are hired in preference to U.S. workers. I never did see any evidence of this. U.S. workers who got let go (I was in the U.S. during the boom years) were let go because they didn't make the grade - simple as that.
H1-B workers are now being hired in preference to U.S. workers. According to other posters, most job ads now are specifying U.S. citizens or permanent residents only. H1-B workers are locked out of these jobs.
It seems that the article is more sour grapes than anything else. Don't get me wrong - I don't dislike the United States, but I feel it's a better place to go on vacation than to actually live. Especially with the post-9/11 restrictions on the freedoms that actually made the country attractive in the first place.
I don't think age has a lot to do with G-force tolerance (well, at least the normal active agebracket). I took a friend of mine (who's a new private pilot) who's 18 years old and in good physical condition up in the Decathalon to do some aerobatics. He blacked out during a split-S that pulled 4.5Gs, and complained of nausea (so we went home after that one). One the other hand, one of the aerobatic instructors at H&R at La Porte is 80 years old and happily pulls over 5Gs without a problem. I've known aerobatic instructors who look terribly unfit (250lb fat guys) who would be tired out from a mile walk, but who don't have a problem yanking and banking.
I've been getting MORE g-force tolerant as I've got older. But that may be to do with the fact I fly aerobatics (typically pull about 4Gs in the entry to a loop, around 5 during a split-S, and occasionally -2.5 during a "blown manuver" - these are sustained for a few seconds, not incredibly brief like on roller coasters). The only thing that gets me dizzy these days are inverted spins, but they are fun:-]
What I don't understand is why the Hewlett-Paqard merger is called a merger - not a takeover, which it is (it may not be a hostile takeover, but it's a takeover nonetheless).
My Dad always told me that there are never marriages in business, only rapes. Calling it a "merger" is just to make it sound nice and huggy-feely when it's really takeover and destroy.
That maybe so, but it's one more megacorporation, one less competitor and ultimately, worse for the end-user as the big manufacturers clump together inevitably reducing competition.
Why they call it a merger I don't know - it was a takeover: HP eliminating a competitor simply by buying them out. There are no marriages in business; only rapes!
I may be biased - living in Houston, we are expecting our unemployment rate to go up as a direct result of this takeover.
Still doesn't stop you from being sued. Blizzard have moved from a DMCA "takedown" to simply sueing the bnetd developers in court. This can happen regardless of where the server is located.
The other problem is that HavenCo's colo is horrendously expensive. I doubt the bnetd developers really want to be spending that much money. A better solution would be to rename bnetd to something else to deflect the trademark violation charge - let's say, stratgamed or similar - then mirror far and wide.
You obviously didn't live under "Enhanced Class B" airspace. I did. Unfortunately, my aircraft is VFR only. That meant my plane (with a brand new cylinder at great new expense) was totally useless. I had to rent an IFR-certified aircraft and file IFR in beautiful weather. But a lot of pilots at my field aren't instrument rated; they were SOL.
Political action can have results - even with the money.
Here's a little story. It might seem off-topic at first, but keep reading. After September 11th, despite the fact that general aviation had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, GA (specifically, the smallest and least harmful aircraft involved in aviation) were grounded for a LONG time (on the order of two months).
The airlines and many politicians have always wanted to get rid of light planes. They are considered a "nuisance" - and this was a way to take our freedoms away (despite the fact the FAA wanted to have GA flying again two days after Sept. 11 since the FAA knows that an aircraft weighing less than a compact car isn't a big threat).
What's this got to do with encryption, the RIAA, MPAA, SSSCA (or whatever they renamed it to this week?)
Political action worked for GA. There are only about 300,000 active GA pilots in the entire country - i.e. about the same as the total number of Slashdot readers. AOPA organized a day where all pilots would call up their local congresscritters - all on the same day.
Every representitive's office in the country got HUNDREDS of calls on the issue of VFR pilots still remaining grounded. They were still getting calls the next day. And the next day.
Very quickly, the issue was a hot topic. Not long after that, the restrictions were pretty much totally dropped.
Slashdot has at least as many regular readers as aopa.org - and this issue has MANY more than 300,000 people interested in the SSSCA (or whatever it's now called) being passed as law.
So it's time for political action. Slashdot should do the same as AOPA did - organize a single day where everyone calls their local representitive and spells out this issue. A few hundred thousand phone calls from voters and they WILL listen. It worked for AOPA and GA pilots - it should also work for us!
I should imagine that by the time we can make 'artificial gravity' (or antigravity), we'll have equipment to generate enough thrust for a long enough time to continuously accelerate a Mars mission ship at a rate such that the acceleration alone is enough.
Make a spacecraft that can, say, put out enough thrust to continously accelerate at 0.5G acceleration. Flip the ship at the halfway point, and decelerate at 0.5G.
It's still difficult to beat the good ol' Unix shell. I do virtually all of my Internet-type things (email, irc, Usenet) etc. and can do development things (compiler on the server, decent editors like Vim and Emacs) using nothing more than an ssh client. I can do it from wherever I am. I just keep a copy of PuTTY on a floppy (or download the exe) and go, wherever I am at.
If I *really* need a GUI, I can use xvnc or simply use X forwarding with SSH. If I need X under MS Windows, I use cygwin to provide the X server, or alternately, just use the VNC client and xvnc on the server.
The down side is these readers can cost upwards of $300 to $500 and the Driver Software leaves -little- to be desired (VB anyone ?), but then again, it's OEM hardware so we were lucky to even get software support.
Try and get one of those keyboard-wedge style MSRs. They don't need special drivers - all you need to do is look for the track header/trailer scancodes to differentiate MSR input from keyboard input.
Erm, the energy already gets used up. The washing of the waves up and down (without the wave generators) gets turned into sound/heat energy anyway.
Think of this energy like using the steam coming off a kettle to drive a kid's toy windmill - you won't affect the rate at which the kettle boils (but you will change where the kinetic energy from the steam is turned into heat)
At the university I went to, they named all the workstations and servers with food related names. The server was called "chef" and the workstations had names like carrot, potato, radish etc.
Of course, there's only so many vegetables. The sysadmin of that particular network was not only vegetarian but excrutiatingly politically correct. As the vegetable names ran short, I had to irritate him with my suggestions. Which were of course things like "steak", "bacon" and "veal":-)
Well, for any attempt on my box from a machine where I could trace someone responsible, I'd email them. I often got "Thanks, yes we were owned" replies, or replies from sysadmins telling me "I told that idiot to secure his RedHat box three months ago" kind of thing.
Also, hack attempts from systems that have reverse DNS entries like "ns1.foo.com" or "smtp.bar.net" are almost certainly 0wn3d machines - it's unlikely that a legitimate user is using those boxes as hack-launch platforms. I got a surprisingly large number attempts on my box from machines like that.
Then there were the hundreds of Linux systems on RoadRunner, @home etc. which were more than likely 0wn3d boxes (because rr.com and @home tend to kick people off for hacking, so it's unlikely the box owner was aware of what was going on).
Some attacks were undoubtedly done by the machine owner, but a large volume really was from 0wn3d Linux and Solaris systems.
As for the MIPS system, it doesn't run Irix. It's Linux on a MIPS system - and therefore reasonably obscure. Don't get me wrong - I do take security very seriously and I upgraded OpenSSH on this box as well as on the Intel machine - you never know who's lurking out there looking for any chink in your armour. Most skript kiddie tools are aimed squarely at the ubiquitous - Linux on Intel (or AMD). That's not to say that there's NOT someone out there targetting Linux/MIPS, but there are many orders of magnitude of attacks aimed at the Intel boxes.
Did you build the *portable* version (not the *BSD version?)
The portable version built cleanly and ran on both my Intel-based Linux system and my ancient MIPS-based Linux system. The *BSD version will not compile on Linux. Make sure you have the right version!
The hacker world would rather beat more simple targets like Windows than go for something complicated like SSH on Linux.
Don't bet on it. A while back, for kicks, I checked to see who was bombarding what ports on my box with attempted hacks. A large portion of them came from 0wn3d Linux systems. I'm just glad that (a) I kept things patched (b) didn't have a default RedHat install and (c) had a MIPS processor that obfuscated any hole I didn't yet know about.
If you don't patch a potentially remote-root hole, it's not a case of "if". It's a case of "when" you'll be 0wn3d.
One thing I've noticed is that there's an awful lot of organizations (well, certainly a big handful) which have entire allocations of the old Class As. But virtually all their IP address space is hidden and non-public. People like the United States Postal Service (56.0.0.0 - 56.255.255.255), IBM (9.0.0.0 - 9.255.255.255). These organizations have barely a handful of publically-visible IP addresses, but these massive blocks in the IPv4 space. The USPS has 24 million IP addresses in their block, but probably less actually visible than a small Midwestern mom-and-pop ISP.
Why aren't these organizations told that they have, say, 2 years to move to a private 10.x.x.x network, thus freeing many millions of IPv4 addresses, instead of forcing small organizations to come up with huge justifications for a very small number of addresses?
The MIPS Cobalts do run Linux (2.0.x kernel). I'd like to upgrade mine to 2.4.17; it's been done, I just can't find a HOWTO on how to do it. (The CobaltRaQs don't appear to have Lilo, and I've not found any docs on how to make it boot a different kernel than the one that comes with the machine. Since the system is not physically accessable to me, I really need good, workable HOWTO information so I don't break the box).
Many of these cast-offs make great webservers, NAT routers, firewalls, DNS servers etc. (and can do all this stuff at once). You don't need vast amounts of computing power for a typical home/small office NAT router or webserver or firewall or DNS server. I'm not spending thousands on the latest Pentium-4 for my NAT router - I'd rather spend a few beans on a cast-off Sun or DEC machine which has some geek appeal precisely because it isn't the ubiquitous Wintel or Lintel system.
...Or dot-bomb auction-offs (although these are getting a little thin on the ground by now). Last year, I got a rather nice Sun Ultra 5 for a budget price. It's reasonably fast (333MHz, 512MB RAM, so it can actually hack running Gnome )
You may be interested to know that our favorite software company, Elcomsoft (of Dmitry Skylarov fame) is a company that sells spamming tools. Take a look at their massmail.ru site for confirmation (scroll down and you'll see the (c) Elcomsoft bit). Their software looks quite comprehensive and does things like checking the email address you're about to spam is valid.
Funnily enough, when I submitted a story about this, the Slashdot editors rejected it within minutes:-)
Why does everyone see the replacement of humans by machines as so sinister?
Maybe it's just the next step in our evolution. A reliable machine matched with technology that can 'dump' the contents of your brain into this machine, and you can replace your fragile body with a durable long lasting body with easily replacable parts. You'd no longer need, say, a life-supporting spaceship to go to Mars, because you can just use a suitable spacecraft body. Or you need to fly to Tokyo? Use your aircraft body. Ageing? Replace the worn bearing.
If this is all happening around 2030-2040, all of us here will be old and our natural bodies will be getting a bit on the worn out side. Wouldn't you spring for a nice reliable mechanical body instead that doesn't hurt from haemmeroids every time you move?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like it is at least (in part) intended as a standoff weapon - something that can be fired at a target 20 or more miles away. Fire rate becomes less important if you're out of the range of the enemy's anti-aircraft guns.
Well, report your employer to the Government then. If my employer had tried to pay me less (they didn't; in fact they treated me extremely well and I have absolutely no complaints against them) I would have told management "either you pay me equal to the rest of the staff, or the INS will find out". Of course, it's a bit easier for me than a Sri Lankan because if they refuse and I quit, I go back to a nice, first world country with widespread broadband access, not some third-world hellhole. But there's nothing stopping you from trying to persuade management (anonymously, if necessary) to pay the Sri Lankans a fair wage.
Myths:
It seems that the article is more sour grapes than anything else. Don't get me wrong - I don't dislike the United States, but I feel it's a better place to go on vacation than to actually live. Especially with the post-9/11 restrictions on the freedoms that actually made the country attractive in the first place.
I don't think age has a lot to do with G-force tolerance (well, at least the normal active agebracket). I took a friend of mine (who's a new private pilot) who's 18 years old and in good physical condition up in the Decathalon to do some aerobatics. He blacked out during a split-S that pulled 4.5Gs, and complained of nausea (so we went home after that one). One the other hand, one of the aerobatic instructors at H&R at La Porte is 80 years old and happily pulls over 5Gs without a problem. I've known aerobatic instructors who look terribly unfit (250lb fat guys) who would be tired out from a mile walk, but who don't have a problem yanking and banking.
I've been getting MORE g-force tolerant as I've got older. But that may be to do with the fact I fly aerobatics (typically pull about 4Gs in the entry to a loop, around 5 during a split-S, and occasionally -2.5 during a "blown manuver" - these are sustained for a few seconds, not incredibly brief like on roller coasters). The only thing that gets me dizzy these days are inverted spins, but they are fun :-]
What I don't understand is why the Hewlett-Paqard merger is called a merger - not a takeover, which it is (it may not be a hostile takeover, but it's a takeover nonetheless).
My Dad always told me that there are never marriages in business, only rapes. Calling it a "merger" is just to make it sound nice and huggy-feely when it's really takeover and destroy.
That maybe so, but it's one more megacorporation, one less competitor and ultimately, worse for the end-user as the big manufacturers clump together inevitably reducing competition.
Why they call it a merger I don't know - it was a takeover: HP eliminating a competitor simply by buying them out. There are no marriages in business; only rapes!
I may be biased - living in Houston, we are expecting our unemployment rate to go up as a direct result of this takeover.
Still doesn't stop you from being sued. Blizzard have moved from a DMCA "takedown" to simply sueing the bnetd developers in court. This can happen regardless of where the server is located.
The other problem is that HavenCo's colo is horrendously expensive. I doubt the bnetd developers really want to be spending that much money. A better solution would be to rename bnetd to something else to deflect the trademark violation charge - let's say, stratgamed or similar - then mirror far and wide.
You obviously didn't live under "Enhanced Class B" airspace. I did. Unfortunately, my aircraft is VFR only. That meant my plane (with a brand new cylinder at great new expense) was totally useless. I had to rent an IFR-certified aircraft and file IFR in beautiful weather. But a lot of pilots at my field aren't instrument rated; they were SOL.
Political action can have results - even with the money.
Here's a little story. It might seem off-topic at first, but keep reading. After September 11th, despite the fact that general aviation had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, GA (specifically, the smallest and least harmful aircraft involved in aviation) were grounded for a LONG time (on the order of two months).
The airlines and many politicians have always wanted to get rid of light planes. They are considered a "nuisance" - and this was a way to take our freedoms away (despite the fact the FAA wanted to have GA flying again two days after Sept. 11 since the FAA knows that an aircraft weighing less than a compact car isn't a big threat).
What's this got to do with encryption, the RIAA, MPAA, SSSCA (or whatever they renamed it to this week?)
Political action worked for GA. There are only about 300,000 active GA pilots in the entire country - i.e. about the same as the total number of Slashdot readers. AOPA organized a day where all pilots would call up their local congresscritters - all on the same day.
Every representitive's office in the country got HUNDREDS of calls on the issue of VFR pilots still remaining grounded. They were still getting calls the next day. And the next day.
Very quickly, the issue was a hot topic. Not long after that, the restrictions were pretty much totally dropped.
Slashdot has at least as many regular readers as aopa.org - and this issue has MANY more than 300,000 people interested in the SSSCA (or whatever it's now called) being passed as law.
So it's time for political action. Slashdot should do the same as AOPA did - organize a single day where everyone calls their local representitive and spells out this issue. A few hundred thousand phone calls from voters and they WILL listen. It worked for AOPA and GA pilots - it should also work for us!
I should imagine that by the time we can make 'artificial gravity' (or antigravity), we'll have equipment to generate enough thrust for a long enough time to continuously accelerate a Mars mission ship at a rate such that the acceleration alone is enough.
Make a spacecraft that can, say, put out enough thrust to continously accelerate at 0.5G acceleration. Flip the ship at the halfway point, and decelerate at 0.5G.
It's still difficult to beat the good ol' Unix shell. I do virtually all of my Internet-type things (email, irc, Usenet) etc. and can do development things (compiler on the server, decent editors like Vim and Emacs) using nothing more than an ssh client. I can do it from wherever I am. I just keep a copy of PuTTY on a floppy (or download the exe) and go, wherever I am at.
If I *really* need a GUI, I can use xvnc or simply use X forwarding with SSH. If I need X under MS Windows, I use cygwin to provide the X server, or alternately, just use the VNC client and xvnc on the server.
Try and get one of those keyboard-wedge style MSRs. They don't need special drivers - all you need to do is look for the track header/trailer scancodes to differentiate MSR input from keyboard input.
Erm, the energy already gets used up. The washing of the waves up and down (without the wave generators) gets turned into sound/heat energy anyway.
Think of this energy like using the steam coming off a kettle to drive a kid's toy windmill - you won't affect the rate at which the kettle boils (but you will change where the kinetic energy from the steam is turned into heat)
At the university I went to, they named all the workstations and servers with food related names. The server was called "chef" and the workstations had names like carrot, potato, radish etc.
:-)
Of course, there's only so many vegetables. The sysadmin of that particular network was not only vegetarian but excrutiatingly politically correct. As the vegetable names ran short, I had to irritate him with my suggestions. Which were of course things like "steak", "bacon" and "veal"
Well, for any attempt on my box from a machine where I could trace someone responsible, I'd email them. I often got "Thanks, yes we were owned" replies, or replies from sysadmins telling me "I told that idiot to secure his RedHat box three months ago" kind of thing.
Also, hack attempts from systems that have reverse DNS entries like "ns1.foo.com" or "smtp.bar.net" are almost certainly 0wn3d machines - it's unlikely that a legitimate user is using those boxes as hack-launch platforms. I got a surprisingly large number attempts on my box from machines like that.
Then there were the hundreds of Linux systems on RoadRunner, @home etc. which were more than likely 0wn3d boxes (because rr.com and @home tend to kick people off for hacking, so it's unlikely the box owner was aware of what was going on).
Some attacks were undoubtedly done by the machine owner, but a large volume really was from 0wn3d Linux and Solaris systems.
As for the MIPS system, it doesn't run Irix. It's Linux on a MIPS system - and therefore reasonably obscure. Don't get me wrong - I do take security very seriously and I upgraded OpenSSH on this box as well as on the Intel machine - you never know who's lurking out there looking for any chink in your armour. Most skript kiddie tools are aimed squarely at the ubiquitous - Linux on Intel (or AMD). That's not to say that there's NOT someone out there targetting Linux/MIPS, but there are many orders of magnitude of attacks aimed at the Intel boxes.
Did you build the *portable* version (not the *BSD version?)
The portable version built cleanly and ran on both my Intel-based Linux system and my ancient MIPS-based Linux system. The *BSD version will not compile on Linux. Make sure you have the right version!
Don't bet on it. A while back, for kicks, I checked to see who was bombarding what ports on my box with attempted hacks. A large portion of them came from 0wn3d Linux systems. I'm just glad that (a) I kept things patched (b) didn't have a default RedHat install and (c) had a MIPS processor that obfuscated any hole I didn't yet know about.
If you don't patch a potentially remote-root hole, it's not a case of "if". It's a case of "when" you'll be 0wn3d.
One thing I've noticed is that there's an awful lot of organizations (well, certainly a big handful) which have entire allocations of the old Class As. But virtually all their IP address space is hidden and non-public. People like the United States Postal Service (56.0.0.0 - 56.255.255.255), IBM (9.0.0.0 - 9.255.255.255). These organizations have barely a handful of publically-visible IP addresses, but these massive blocks in the IPv4 space. The USPS has 24 million IP addresses in their block, but probably less actually visible than a small Midwestern mom-and-pop ISP.
Why aren't these organizations told that they have, say, 2 years to move to a private 10.x.x.x network, thus freeing many millions of IPv4 addresses, instead of forcing small organizations to come up with huge justifications for a very small number of addresses?
Their spam-software site is here. Scroll down to the bottom to see the (c) Elcomsoft.
Of course, the Slashdot editors rejected this story :-)
The MIPS Cobalts do run Linux (2.0.x kernel). I'd like to upgrade mine to 2.4.17; it's been done, I just can't find a HOWTO on how to do it. (The CobaltRaQs don't appear to have Lilo, and I've not found any docs on how to make it boot a different kernel than the one that comes with the machine. Since the system is not physically accessable to me, I really need good, workable HOWTO information so I don't break the box).
Many of these cast-offs make great webservers, NAT routers, firewalls, DNS servers etc. (and can do all this stuff at once). You don't need vast amounts of computing power for a typical home/small office NAT router or webserver or firewall or DNS server. I'm not spending thousands on the latest Pentium-4 for my NAT router - I'd rather spend a few beans on a cast-off Sun or DEC machine which has some geek appeal precisely because it isn't the ubiquitous Wintel or Lintel system.
...Or dot-bomb auction-offs (although these are getting a little thin on the ground by now). Last year, I got a rather nice Sun Ultra 5 for a budget price. It's reasonably fast (333MHz, 512MB RAM, so it can actually hack running Gnome )
Funnily enough, when I submitted a story about this, the Slashdot editors rejected it within minutes :-)
Why does everyone see the replacement of humans by machines as so sinister?
Maybe it's just the next step in our evolution. A reliable machine matched with technology that can 'dump' the contents of your brain into this machine, and you can replace your fragile body with a durable long lasting body with easily replacable parts. You'd no longer need, say, a life-supporting spaceship to go to Mars, because you can just use a suitable spacecraft body. Or you need to fly to Tokyo? Use your aircraft body. Ageing? Replace the worn bearing.
If this is all happening around 2030-2040, all of us here will be old and our natural bodies will be getting a bit on the worn out side. Wouldn't you spring for a nice reliable mechanical body instead that doesn't hurt from haemmeroids every time you move?