Here's another site with videos from both low and high power rockets: www.videorocketry.com (videos available Here)
One prime candidate for a low power camera is the discontinued Intel Play Digital Movie Creator. You record video onto a chip and upload to your PC via USB. I believe I saw this camera resurface at Toys R Us under the manufacturer name "Digital Blue". Anyone?
From the material reactivity testing video, it doesn't look like there will be a business class section on their rockets any time soon (peroxide + leather = FIRE!)
As a Lynx owner myself, I can reccomend The GOAT (Games Of All Types) Store. Decent prices and an OK selection, and customer service is great; they sent me a second free game because I screwed up my address on the order form the first time. And, they ship internationally.
Thanks to them, I added Rampart and KLAX to my collection; both of which are great games.
If you don't have it already, Stun Runner is also good for replay value.
But stay away from Hydra and Batman Returns; big stinkers there.
You might also try GameDude; you can buy & sell cartridges from old systems through them, and they're in California, so shipping to BC should be fairly quick. Haven't done business with them in a while, but they were easy to deal with.
As a final note, you can try out games on the Lynx Emulator before you buy them.
Best of luck to you!
Here are my favorite warning labels (showing what not to do) from an old John Deere riding lawn mower manual. Feel free to add them to a larger image repository if one exists somewhere.
Of course, the problem many of us will have with our PCs is a Frankenstein system as we have a beige case with black CD/floppy drives (or vice versa) as we upgrade. We're already having issues like that with some Sun Ultra 80s having black DVD drives (to match the Sunblades and servers).
Kind of like the redneck pickup trucks with body panels from 3 other trucks? Maybe you should paint some of your stuff with grey automotive primer to finish off the look.:)
Any patterns you used, or just manual editing? I try to opt for the Perl oneliners myself; it's a good way to get more experience with them. Here's a sample:
#replace a tab with spaces perl -p -i.orig -e 's{\t}{ }g' spambot_trap.txt
#replace lines containing only spaces with nothing. (the hex A0 is for nbsp conversions (ASCII char 160) perl -p -i.orig -e 's{^[\s \xA0]+$}{}g' spambot_trap.txt
#lastly, remove multiple newlines. the -00 undefines the record separator, so you can match on the newline character. The other way you see this alot is -0777. As long as you pick a value that is null or not a valid ASCII character (0-255), it works. perl -p -i.orig -00 -e 's{\n\n}{\n}g' spambot_trap.txt
I had the text too, but I kept getting blocked by the Slashdot filter when I tried to repost it. I even tried using Striff Tummel. What's your trick to weed out the stuff that triggers the Slashdot filter?
As a state employee, I can say for me the answer is yes. We do data warehousing, and there are plenty of little details involved in converting source system data to Oracle 8i, and joining separate feeds into a single table. The wages are below industry averages, but the benefits are great, and overtime is actually frowned upon (because you are contractually required to be reimbursed for it).
I am always surprised when they list Nerf toys as dangerous and encouraging kids to be violent. It's Nerf for goodness sakes!
Not only that, but when they do single out a Nerf toy, it's usually one of the pathetically underpowered ones. Case in point: Their 1988-89 Dirty Dozen List shows the Nerf Pulsator as the top offender. My favorite gripe of theirs: "box refers to the darts as "ammo."".
I share AC's hesitation in thinking this might be a trick question, but it looks like you are loading register BC with the number 65535 and counting down to zero. It's a Wait loop. To calculate the exact time of the delay, you'd take into account the clock frequency (somewhere around 2 MHz).
Then again, there might be a trick about loading that large of a value, or using the BC register.
I rememebr programming a Z80 Microtrainer in college; it had a keypad for hex code, but I managed to smuggle in a friend's copy of the ZAD cross-compiler to the lab. We had these old 286's with serial-to-headphone jacks that connected to the microtrainer. You typed in your assembly code on the 286, ran it through ZAD, and uploaded it to the microtrainer. You could even hear the data being transfered via the speaker on the microtrainer.
I remember having my first real experience with handling Interrupt Requests in a lab with the Z80. Too bad the company is having trouble.
I tried to find a pic of the old microtrainer (made by CAMI Research), but alas, they no longer support it.
I did manage to find a link to another University that used them for ECE projects. (Thanks Google!)
I searched in the 2001 Congressional Record for any speeches made by Judd Gregg on Thursday, September 13th. (query was "GREGG AND ENCRYPTION")
Here is the entire speech, selected from the matching page.
I have bolded the snippets used in the Wired article.
Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late
for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on
how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is
a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before
yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of
terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue
of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of
the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact
that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic
intelligence and our communities focused on international
intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a
probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States
and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you
saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly
professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives
of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to
help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives
that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first
responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as
to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has
been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the
chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their
point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in
most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true
in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of
support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the
way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent
lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as
a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves
families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to
penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of
a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks
martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as
part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their
religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of
individuals without creating more problems, without creating more
people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to
pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you
have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have
made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of
the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit
the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence.
Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and
defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human
intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not
allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to
basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who
could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a
democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we
found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual
intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as
a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use
of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies
in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address
specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as
they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability
of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it
happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist
activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a
nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to
it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt
information--just from telephone conversation to telephone
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even
our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.
So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics.
These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they
should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure
clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause
and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our
people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic
encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on
which we need to have movement in order to get the information that
allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York
and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people
on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--
and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the
other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the
communications activities and to track the various funding activities
of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial
world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call
must go forth, in my opinion.
Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which,
again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own
Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our
exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence
activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in
responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action
between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and
in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been
incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these
agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush
administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of
one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines
and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment,
the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language
which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-
agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may
not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt
to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney
General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and
coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the
authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal
Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency
head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who
can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at
least within the law enforcement area and within much of the
consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is
understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of
FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief
efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where
you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the
New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in
anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event.
Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of
confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a
culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their
message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have
to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing
authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely
critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of
activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in
Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't
right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is
something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition
as an officer or your
knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your
State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney,
but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no
one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping,
NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop
shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they
go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is
going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government.
It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form
that will be effective and responsive to people.
Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about
all the technical things we can do as a government and all the
important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit
the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in
the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that
we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to
any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot
allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and
our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably,
these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people
who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make
every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to
win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a
society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to
do that.
So as we rededicate ourselves, as we all continue to see the image of
those buildings collapsing and the horror that followed--and we all
obviously want retribution and we are all angered by it--we have to
react in the context of a democracy. We have to pursue this in the
context of what has made us great, which is that we are a people who
unite when we confront such a threat. We unite and we focus our
energies on defeating that threat. But we don't allow that threat to
win by undermining our basic rights and our openness as a society.
In summary, I appreciate all the efforts of the chairman of the
committee to bring forward a bill which, regrettably, understood that
this type of event could occur and attempted to address it even before
it did. Now I think it is important we pass this legislation. It does
empower key agencies within the Government who have a responsibility to
address the issue of counterterrorism not only with the dollars but
with the policies they need in order to be more successful in their
efforts.
There is still a great deal to do. There is still a lot of changes we
need to make, a lot of changes in the law we should make in order to
empower these agencies to be even more effective. Certainly there is
going to be a great deal more funds that have to be committed than what
are in this bill in order to give these agencies--the FBI and the State
Department--the resources they need to be strong and be successful in
pursuing the people who committed this horrific act and in protecting
Americans around the world and especially protecting our freedoms and
liberties here in the United States.
This bill is clearly a step in the right direction. I congratulate
the chairman for bringing it forward.
If you are a New Hampshire resident, you can get a reply snail mailed to you.
Remember, New Hampshire natives, we are his constituients;
let him know what our interests are so he can better represent them!
My first job out of college was programming for a.COM startup. They payed a decent salary, but the best part was the relaxed environment (free soda + nerf guns at work + renovated factory as an office space: LOTS of room) and the company's encouragement for me to learn Perl. Free (reimbursed) Books, and a free Cable Modem connection and computer (eMachines... not a serious Gamez box, but a solid workstation) so I could work from home most of the time.
When the bottom started falling out of the company 4 months after I joined, I stuck with them. I even worked for free for about a month while the senior management tried to get investors. But in the end, the company folded.
I had no problems going down with the ship, because of the experience I gained as a programmer. But I was only a "lowly" programmer, so I didn't have the extra pressure of a management position; worrying about the people working under me; like you do. I also didn't have a family to support at that time, so it was OK to work for free (while looking for a job at the same time).
In my case, it was better that I stayed, because it benefitted my programming skills. but if your job isn't doing anything for you, you should probably move on before you get burned.
Slashdot Mirror
Found it. Digital Blue Digital Movie Creator
Here's another site with videos from both low and high power rockets:
www.videorocketry.com
(videos available Here)
One prime candidate for a low power camera is the discontinued Intel Play Digital Movie Creator. You record video onto a chip and upload to your PC via USB. I believe I saw this camera resurface at Toys R Us under the manufacturer name "Digital Blue". Anyone?
Here is an example of the Intel camera at work in an off-the-shelf Estes rocket with a payload bay added
And here is a rocket with Gumby as the pilot.
What, you mean These Fox Trot comics?
From the material reactivity testing video, it doesn't look like there will be a business class section on their rockets any time soon (peroxide + leather = FIRE!)
In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world
So they're filling academics with formaldehyde and stripping them naked? Sounds like quite a Party!
Can't mod you up so I'll just give you a "hee hee!".
As a Lynx owner myself, I can reccomend The GOAT (Games Of All Types) Store. Decent prices and an OK selection, and customer service is great; they sent me a second free game because I screwed up my address on the order form the first time. And, they ship internationally.
Thanks to them, I added Rampart and KLAX to my collection; both of which are great games.
If you don't have it already, Stun Runner is also good for replay value.
But stay away from Hydra and Batman Returns; big stinkers there.
You might also try GameDude; you can buy & sell cartridges from old systems through them, and they're in California, so shipping to BC should be fairly quick. Haven't done business with them in a while, but they were easy to deal with.
As a final note, you can try out games on the Lynx Emulator before you buy them.
Best of luck to you!
Here are my favorite warning labels (showing what not to do) from an old John Deere riding lawn mower manual. Feel free to add them to a larger image repository if one exists somewhere.
Keep Riders Off Machine
Protect Children
Avoid Tipping
Park Tractor Safely
Of course, the problem many of us will have with our PCs is a Frankenstein system as we have a beige case with black CD/floppy drives (or vice versa) as we upgrade. We're already having issues like that with some Sun Ultra 80s having black DVD drives (to match the Sunblades and servers).
:)
Kind of like the redneck pickup trucks with body panels from 3 other trucks? Maybe you should paint some of your stuff with grey automotive primer to finish off the look.
Any patterns you used, or just manual editing? I try to opt for the Perl oneliners myself; it's a good way to get more experience with them. Here's a sample:
#replace a tab with spaces
perl -p -i.orig -e 's{\t}{ }g' spambot_trap.txt
#replace lines containing only spaces with nothing. (the hex A0 is for nbsp conversions (ASCII char 160)
perl -p -i.orig -e 's{^[\s \xA0]+$}{}g' spambot_trap.txt
#lastly, remove multiple newlines. the -00 undefines the record separator, so you can match on the newline character. The other way you see this alot is -0777. As long as you pick a value that is null or not a valid ASCII character (0-255), it works.
perl -p -i.orig -00 -e 's{\n\n}{\n}g' spambot_trap.txt
I had the text too, but I kept getting blocked by the Slashdot filter when I tried to repost it. I even tried using Striff Tummel. What's your trick to weed out the stuff that triggers the Slashdot filter?
As a state employee, I can say for me the answer is yes. We do data warehousing, and there are plenty of little details involved in converting source system data to Oracle 8i, and joining separate feeds into a single table. The wages are below industry averages, but the benefits are great, and overtime is actually frowned upon (because you are contractually required to be reimbursed for it).
Hey, all of the great Greek plays were known to the audience, but people still turned out to see how it was portrayed on stage.
Here's a page with links to previous years' Dirty Dozen lists.
I am always surprised when they list Nerf toys as dangerous and encouraging kids to be violent. It's Nerf for goodness sakes!
Not only that, but when they do single out a Nerf toy, it's usually one of the pathetically underpowered ones. Case in point: Their 1988-89 Dirty Dozen List shows the Nerf Pulsator as the top offender. My favorite gripe of theirs: "box refers to the darts as "ammo."".
Wow, I just did a few college labs on the Z80, but it sounds like you actually did work on it. A-mazing.
Do you suppose there are some Z-80 powered Satellites floating around up there?
I share AC's hesitation in thinking this might be a trick question, but it looks like you are loading register BC with the number 65535 and counting down to zero. It's a Wait loop. To calculate the exact time of the delay, you'd take into account the clock frequency (somewhere around 2 MHz).
Then again, there might be a trick about loading that large of a value, or using the BC register.
Am I at least in the ballpark?
I rememebr programming a Z80 Microtrainer in college; it had a keypad for hex code, but I managed to smuggle in a friend's copy of the ZAD cross-compiler to the lab. We had these old 286's with serial-to-headphone jacks that connected to the microtrainer. You typed in your assembly code on the 286, ran it through ZAD, and uploaded it to the microtrainer. You could even hear the data being transfered via the speaker on the microtrainer.
t or/
I remember having my first real experience with handling Interrupt Requests in a lab with the Z80. Too bad the company is having trouble.
I tried to find a pic of the old microtrainer (made by CAMI Research), but alas, they no longer support it.
I did manage to find a link to another University that used them for ECE projects. (Thanks Google!)
http://comet.ctr.columbia.edu/msl/2000class/eleva
Unless he got a fake ID when he was a kid, Email looks to be older than 30:i l.jpg.html
http://www.attrition.org/gallery/computing/tn/ema
I would have posted this earlier, but attrition.org was filtered from work by WebNot.
I searched in the 2001 Congressional Record for any speeches made by Judd Gregg on Thursday, September 13th. (query was "GREGG AND ENCRYPTION")
Here is the entire speech, selected from the matching page.
I have bolded the snippets used in the Wired article.
Mr. GREGG. Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me.
I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late
for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on
how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is
a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before
yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of
terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue
of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of
the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact
that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic
intelligence and our communities focused on international
intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a
probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States
and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you
saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly
professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives
of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to
help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives
that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first
responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as
to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has
been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the
chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their
point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in
most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true
in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of
support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the
way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent
lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as
a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves
families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to
penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of
a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks
martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as
part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their
religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of
individuals without creating more problems, without creating more
people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to
pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you
have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have
made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of
the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit
the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence.
Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and
defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human
intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not
allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to
basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who
could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a
democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we
found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual
intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I
think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as
a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use
of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies
in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural
inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and
seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our
intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address
specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I
asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--
and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this
response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as
they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability
of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it
happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist
activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because
of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a
nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to
it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt
information--just from telephone conversation to telephone
conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even
our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.
So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have
the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive
community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics.
These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they
should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation
to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure
clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause
and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our
people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic
encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The
manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has
been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact
is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on
which we need to have movement in order to get the information that
allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York
and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have
the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their
targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people
on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--
and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the
other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the
communications activities and to track the various funding activities
of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial
world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call
must go forth, in my opinion.
Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which,
again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own
Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our
exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence
activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in
responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action
between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and
in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been
incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these
agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush
administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of
one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines
and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment,
the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language
which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-
agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may
not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt
to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney
General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and
coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the
authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal
Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency
head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who
can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at
least within the law enforcement area and within much of the
consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is
understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of
FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief
efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where
you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the
New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in
anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event.
Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of
confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a
culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their
message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have
to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing
authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely
critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of
activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in
Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't
right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is
something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition
as an officer or your
knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your
State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney,
but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no
one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping,
NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop
shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they
go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is
going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government.
It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form
that will be effective and responsive to people.
Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about
all the technical things we can do as a government and all the
important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit
the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in
the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that
we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to
any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot
allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and
our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably,
these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people
who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make
every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to
win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a
society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to
do that.
So as we rededicate ourselves, as we all continue to see the image of
those buildings collapsing and the horror that followed--and we all
obviously want retribution and we are all angered by it--we have to
react in the context of a democracy. We have to pursue this in the
context of what has made us great, which is that we are a people who
unite when we confront such a threat. We unite and we focus our
energies on defeating that threat. But we don't allow that threat to
win by undermining our basic rights and our openness as a society.
In summary, I appreciate all the efforts of the chairman of the
committee to bring forward a bill which, regrettably, understood that
this type of event could occur and attempted to address it even before
it did. Now I think it is important we pass this legislation. It does
empower key agencies within the Government who have a responsibility to
address the issue of counterterrorism not only with the dollars but
with the policies they need in order to be more successful in their
efforts.
There is still a great deal to do. There is still a lot of changes we
need to make, a lot of changes in the law we should make in order to
empower these agencies to be even more effective. Certainly there is
going to be a great deal more funds that have to be committed than what
are in this bill in order to give these agencies--the FBI and the State
Department--the resources they need to be strong and be successful in
pursuing the people who committed this horrific act and in protecting
Americans around the world and especially protecting our freedoms and
liberties here in the United States.
This bill is clearly a step in the right direction. I congratulate
the chairman for bringing it forward.
You can email Senator Gregg at
mailbox@gregg.senate.gov
or you can fill out a form at
http://gregg.senate.gov/body_e-mail.htm
If you are a New Hampshire resident, you can get a reply snail mailed to you.
Remember, New Hampshire natives, we are his constituients;
let him know what our interests are so he can better represent them!
In order to avoid getting your personal informaiton stolen by Cross-site scripting, CERT Advises:
"Web Users Should Not Engage in Promiscuous Browsing" (see Section III: Solutions)
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UNI%
My first job out of college was programming for a .COM startup. They payed a decent salary, but the best part was the relaxed environment (free soda + nerf guns at work + renovated factory as an office space: LOTS of room) and the company's encouragement for me to learn Perl. Free (reimbursed) Books, and a free Cable Modem connection and computer (eMachines... not a serious Gamez box, but a solid workstation) so I could work from home most of the time.
When the bottom started falling out of the company 4 months after I joined, I stuck with them. I even worked for free for about a month while the senior management tried to get investors. But in the end, the company folded.
I had no problems going down with the ship, because of the experience I gained as a programmer. But I was only a "lowly" programmer, so I didn't have the extra pressure of a management position; worrying about the people working under me; like you do. I also didn't have a family to support at that time, so it was OK to work for free (while looking for a job at the same time).
In my case, it was better that I stayed, because it benefitted my programming skills. but if your job isn't doing anything for you, you should probably move on before you get burned.
No, When I called, I had 3 options:
1. Opt out for 2 years
2. Opt Back in (Ha!)
3. Opt out PERMANANTLY
Maybe it's a recently added option, or perhaps you didn't wait to hear all of the options.
Best of luck!