Far left ideology? Man you Americans have some strange ideas about what left-wing ideology means. "hard left" where I live would mean slashing military expenditure to perhaps 5% of the current levels, instituting proper free healthcare everywhere, proper free education everywhere,.. actually HARD left would mean making private education illegal. Try googling "socialist workers party" for some hints at what "hard left" really means.
Pardon my knee-jerk euroweenieism (I take some pills but they've not started working yet) but... isn't the US economy far more vulnerable to an oil shock, partly because there's very little tax on it over there (compared to.uk anyway), and thus the relative jump in gas prices is great when crude goes from $15 to $150 (and how much higher, and for how much longer?)? And also because, due to that incredibly cheap petrol, US society and economy is predicated on cheap long distance travel? Seems to me that a lot of people are going to be discovering the lost arts of growing their own veg and tinkering at broken radios with a soldering iron rather than chucking it away and getting a new cheaper faster model...
So, that being the case, and seeing as the industrialised economies are already clearly wavering as they try to decide whether this is going to be a short but nasty recession, 1991 style, or a decade or two of stagflation like Japan in the 90s and the US / Europe in the 70s/80s... I really think people will be worrying about other stuff in five years' time. (My personal bet is oil isn't coming back below $100 until there's a major world recession and/or a big technological breakthrough which slashes demand - which I don't think will happen.
Because the IRA never bombed the tube. After some PR catastrophes in the 70s they mostly abandoned attacks aimed directly and purely at people and things that they couldn't claim were "legitimate targets" (their words.) Of course if "ordinary people" happened to be in the wrong building or walking next to the wrong car or whatever, tough. By the time I was in London around 1990 their last major campaign was gigantic lorry bombs set off at 3am in places like Bishopsgate (which got it twice), right in the heart of the City (the oldest part of London and the financial centre these days.) The aim was economic damage and disruption, and 3am was to try to minimise civilian casualties (although passers by were killed by all the truck bombs that actually went up, IIRC.)
No, the reason another hijacking can't happen is much simpler (and more reliable): the cockpit doors are strengthened. No way the crew will open that door next time, no matter how many people they torture outside the door.
Come on, setting aside all the technology in that film, the idea that there could be a secret, unscrutinised government-within-a-government working out of the basement of the USG is plainly ridiculous. After Watergate a system of checks and balances and congressional oversight was introduced which, although it probably does mean some bad guys are caught later than would otherwise be the case, guarantees that constitutional rights are protected.
SURE it does. AMAZING intelligence y'all got these days, AMAZING. With those satellites I hear they can read the LICENSE PLATES of the car bombs the BAD GUYS are sitting in. That's why they always get intercepted before they blow some unfortunate working class kid's arms and legs off, or incinerate a few dozen civilians. (Boy I bet those incinerated civilians are just dying to tell Dubya how grateful they are to have been liberated in the name of WMD that weren't there and the 9/11 connection that never existed. 'Cos the INTELLIGENCE is NEVER wrong, ohhhh no, any anyone who says different is a whining liberal who hates America. And anyway, a few shreds of charred flesh tell no tales, you get me?
Jesus wept, what are they teaching the kids at school these days! Have you never heard of a chap called Fleming [wikipedia.org]? Pennicilin? Ringing any bells? A type of LIVING BACTERIA that kills OTHER BACTERIA? Hello?
Hygiene? What the hell planet are you on? I bet you're the sort of person that wears latex gloves when gardening. Guess what, exposure to normal environmental pathogens is not only 99.99999% harmless, it's actually GOOD for you. You have this thing called an immune system, see, and it needs to know what Bad Stuff looks like...
It's just working today and it'll probably just work tomorrow, but the day when the Apple CodeRed or Nimda strikes is getting closer every day that someone repeats the stupid lie that Macs are immune from security problems. And oh my god, will we security types be laughing our arses off when that day comes - not to mention the long, long thread on the associated/. story of people saying "we told you so".
Fair point. In order to quieten the clamouring hoards let me put some answers on the record. OK, so this story's gone down the memory tube forever, but this is for posterity.
I'm in the UK
It was local Sunday when I posted
Yes I was working at the same time. There's a sort of informal quid-pro-quo that's grown up at work. I don't complain when I unexpectedly lose my weekend or every evening for a couple of weeks; they don't complain when I show up an hour or two late, or bail early now & then, or work from home when it's more convenient at the time, and/especially/ when I kill 15 mins on Slashdot or the Reg now and then. Yes, this is lucky in many respects, but OTOH I'm single & childless (and pretty much running out of time for that now - I'm in my early 40s) so... *shrug*
I was actually working at home, anyway, and my web traffic's not forcibly routed through and webwasher proxies or suchlike.
Look, it was just a ten-second joke, alright? Enough already.
Is that a mandatory requirement? I'd say we've got along pretty well so far without some automatic system that "allows quickly tracking down criminals". If you believe your requirement is mandatory then why not embed tracking chips in people's heads so that the FBI knows who's where, 24/7? That would give you a couple of nines in your clear-up rate.
Actually it's the other way round. A police state leads to centralised databases on guilty and innocent alike, not vice versa. Ask my sister-in-law (who grew up in the then DDR) or girlfriend (Brezhnev's USSR and Tito (and then Milosevic's) Yugoslavia.)
The implication of this phrase is that AQ are hacking into banks and stealing funds, or attacking military (or indeed civilian) targets over the net in a, well, "terroristic manner". Collapsing banks, disrupting the military, crashing CNI (critical national infrastructure) and so on. Which is patently false.
No doubt they do have some IT and media-literate people, but so what? That's not an "online offensive" except in the metaphorical sense of "offensive" that Pepsi would use about their forthcoming marketing campaign. (campaign, another military word coopted by marketing types.)
Posit, for the sake of stimulating discussion (feel free to -1 troll me if it helps you to relax):
I assert that this entire thing is a waste of time money and cycles. A pound to a penny the supposed manned lunar landings are cancelled long before launch. I can believe the Ares-1 will fly, because without that there's no US manned launch capability so big political symbolism, but with the economy guaranteed to be in the toilet for the next five years and with oil permanently at least ten times more expensive than the historical average, "Apollo (slight reprise)" simply won't have enough domestic political support to avoid the axe. No doubt Dubya had something like that scenario in mind when he announced the ludicrous and engineeringly illiterate "first the Moon, then Mars" scheme but denied it the funding in the first place. And with the relative costs of fantastically amazing missions like MRO, MER and Phoenix compared to manned operations, then frankly I'm glad.
Answer one: buy yourself a cheap low-end Cisco router big enough to hold a full table, get yourself an Autonomous System, a presence at a reasonable peering location, buy transit from the NSPs of your choice. Oh and you'll be needing to spend a few years with your nose in Cisco Press books learning BGP. BTW the AS costs $5000, last time I needed to know.
Second answer: assuming you already have DSL or cable from one provider, get a second line from a different provider (this means cable if you already have DSL and vice-versa, unless you can fool a retail telco into wiring your house with a second line. ) Set up a Linux or BSD box with two interfaces. Spend a lot of time with your nose in networking how-tos, tutorials, scripting, and man pages.
Just to back this up, here's a quote from an earlier NetworkWorld story (just click thru the links on the page to find the original):
The mandate requires federal backbone networks to be capable of transmitting IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and supporting IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
However, the OMB mandate doesnâ(TM)t require agencies to turn IPv6 on or to use it by the end of June 2008. Agencies have to support IPv6 on their backbone networks only, not on their desktops or peripherals. Nor do their applications need to be IPv6-enabled by the target date.
Experts say the OMB mandate is easy to meet. Agencies must upgrade the software on their core routers to support IPv6 and then show they can carry IPv6 traffic through their service providers.
Slashdot Mirror
Far left ideology? Man you Americans have some strange ideas about what left-wing ideology means. "hard left" where I live would mean slashing military expenditure to perhaps 5% of the current levels, instituting proper free healthcare everywhere, proper free education everywhere,.. actually HARD left would mean making private education illegal. Try googling "socialist workers party" for some hints at what "hard left" really means.
The word you're looking for is stagflation.
So, that being the case, and seeing as the industrialised economies are already clearly wavering as they try to decide whether this is going to be a short but nasty recession, 1991 style, or a decade or two of stagflation like Japan in the 90s and the US / Europe in the 70s/80s... I really think people will be worrying about other stuff in five years' time. (My personal bet is oil isn't coming back below $100 until there's a major world recession and/or a big technological breakthrough which slashes demand - which I don't think will happen.
Because the IRA never bombed the tube. After some PR catastrophes in the 70s they mostly abandoned attacks aimed directly and purely at people and things that they couldn't claim were "legitimate targets" (their words.) Of course if "ordinary people" happened to be in the wrong building or walking next to the wrong car or whatever, tough. By the time I was in London around 1990 their last major campaign was gigantic lorry bombs set off at 3am in places like Bishopsgate (which got it twice), right in the heart of the City (the oldest part of London and the financial centre these days.) The aim was economic damage and disruption, and 3am was to try to minimise civilian casualties (although passers by were killed by all the truck bombs that actually went up, IIRC.)
No, the reason another hijacking can't happen is much simpler (and more reliable): the cockpit doors are strengthened. No way the crew will open that door next time, no matter how many people they torture outside the door.
Come on, setting aside all the technology in that film, the idea that there could be a secret, unscrutinised government-within-a-government working out of the basement of the USG is plainly ridiculous. After Watergate a system of checks and balances and congressional oversight was introduced which, although it probably does mean some bad guys are caught later than would otherwise be the case, guarantees that constitutional rights are protected.
SURE it does. AMAZING intelligence y'all got these days, AMAZING. With those satellites I hear they can read the LICENSE PLATES of the car bombs the BAD GUYS are sitting in. That's why they always get intercepted before they blow some unfortunate working class kid's arms and legs off, or incinerate a few dozen civilians. (Boy I bet those incinerated civilians are just dying to tell Dubya how grateful they are to have been liberated in the name of WMD that weren't there and the 9/11 connection that never existed. 'Cos the INTELLIGENCE is NEVER wrong, ohhhh no, any anyone who says different is a whining liberal who hates America. And anyway, a few shreds of charred flesh tell no tales, you get me?
Go watch Robinson in Space and discover the mystic land that lies beyond the Ocean of Boredom.
"Chemicals that don't hurt you". I swear...
I live in Wales. What is this "sunshine" of which you speak?
Hygiene? What the hell planet are you on? I bet you're the sort of person that wears latex gloves when gardening. Guess what, exposure to normal environmental pathogens is not only 99.99999% harmless, it's actually GOOD for you. You have this thing called an immune system, see, and it needs to know what Bad Stuff looks like...
Sure he's got a "wife"; he gets her out of the box and inflates her twice a week.
It's just working today and it'll probably just work tomorrow, but the day when the Apple CodeRed or Nimda strikes is getting closer every day that someone repeats the stupid lie that Macs are immune from security problems. And oh my god, will we security types be laughing our arses off when that day comes - not to mention the long, long thread on the associated /. story of people saying "we told you so".
I think they're just placing different relative weightings on the importance of your two requirements (privacy, swift accurate justice)
Fair point. In order to quieten the clamouring hoards let me put some answers on the record. OK, so this story's gone down the memory tube forever, but this is for posterity.
Is that a mandatory requirement? I'd say we've got along pretty well so far without some automatic system that "allows quickly tracking down criminals". If you believe your requirement is mandatory then why not embed tracking chips in people's heads so that the FBI knows who's where, 24/7? That would give you a couple of nines in your clear-up rate.
Hmmmm.
And who in their right mind is going to click a link to "pinktentacle.com"?! Some of us read Slashdot from work you know...
while illegal immigrants are killing more Americans than died on 9/11 every year.
[ CITATION NEEDED ]
No doubt they do have some IT and media-literate people, but so what? That's not an "online offensive" except in the metaphorical sense of "offensive" that Pepsi would use about their forthcoming marketing campaign. (campaign, another military word coopted by marketing types.)
Nothing to see here etc etc.
I assert that this entire thing is a waste of time money and cycles. A pound to a penny the supposed manned lunar landings are cancelled long before launch. I can believe the Ares-1 will fly, because without that there's no US manned launch capability so big political symbolism, but with the economy guaranteed to be in the toilet for the next five years and with oil permanently at least ten times more expensive than the historical average, "Apollo (slight reprise)" simply won't have enough domestic political support to avoid the axe. No doubt Dubya had something like that scenario in mind when he announced the ludicrous and engineeringly illiterate "first the Moon, then Mars" scheme but denied it the funding in the first place. And with the relative costs of fantastically amazing missions like MRO, MER and Phoenix compared to manned operations, then frankly I'm glad.
"Zis is not nuts, zis is super-nuts!"
Second answer: assuming you already have DSL or cable from one provider, get a second line from a different provider (this means cable if you already have DSL and vice-versa, unless you can fool a retail telco into wiring your house with a second line. ) Set up a Linux or BSD box with two interfaces. Spend a lot of time with your nose in networking how-tos, tutorials, scripting, and man pages.
Still time to chip in your contribution towards the Planetary Society's second attempt to do a working solar sail.
The mandate requires federal backbone networks to be capable of transmitting IPv4 and IPv6 traffic and supporting IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. However, the OMB mandate doesnâ(TM)t require agencies to turn IPv6 on or to use it by the end of June 2008. Agencies have to support IPv6 on their backbone networks only, not on their desktops or peripherals. Nor do their applications need to be IPv6-enabled by the target date. Experts say the OMB mandate is easy to meet. Agencies must upgrade the software on their core routers to support IPv6 and then show they can carry IPv6 traffic through their service providers.