You realize this isn't true right? If I lose my Kindle or it's destroyed I simply buy another, tell Amazon, and my books transfer. In fact if I have a family and we ALL have Kindles on the same account we can ALL read the same books no problem. This is books purchased from Amazon mind you. If I update my Kindle the new one gets all my Amazon rights - it's nice. Sadly the publishers dorked the price up and I don't buy from them anymore so I must maintain my own backups now...
Oh but the publishers say that we're getting a bargain with their high prices because it's a huge discount off of new LIST prices. Mind you I've never paid list for a book! These books are also way more portable so of course they are a better value. And you know printing presses cost a ton of money so eBooks have to help support that. No seriously! Go read through the last year's worth of posts on the Macmillen blog http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ I swear these guys think their customers are stupid...
Where are you seeing these prices for new Sci-Fi? Last I looked they sure as hell weren't $6. All of them I've wanted have been higher with a little love note from Amazon pointing out that the price is now set by the F'ing publisher. Some of them were even more expensive than new paper books. The industry has gone the way of the music industry so far as I'm concerned. Screw 'em.
Thankfully some authors are taking notice of this guy http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ and you'll also note that often the highest sellers on the Kindle lists are lower priced - like this guy's work. He even gives away some books on his site. Sadly it's just not my kind of writing but he sure does tell it like it is on his blog! The publishers are screwing us and the authors and piracy is ramping up as a result!
A "few months ago" I wouldn't have thought about pirating a book. I could get my favorite books for under $10 and I was reading them like crazy. Then here comes iPad and the bullshit deal Apple setup with the publishers to let THEM set the price and break Amazon's lock on E-books. Publishers, led by Macmillan, put the hurt on Amazon, and now they too are forced to let Publishers set book prices. Damn near overnight my buying of books came to a screeching halt as nothing I was interested in reading could be had for what I felt was a reasonable price. Some of the books I looked up were CHEAPER in hard copy! Books that have been out 6-7 YEARS for $12++?!
So I too looked towards Torrent sites and elsewhere and sure enough there was tons of books available. I haven't bought a single book from Amazon, hard or soft copy, since this change in pricing went into effect. the sad thing is that E-books are so small no one ever just shares one, it's ineffective. Instead you see huge collections thrown together in order to make the file size decent.
Thankfully some authors are getting a clue! Hopefully more will follow this guy's lead -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
Why would this need to be large scale? Plenty of folks would have something to gain by chaos and apparently many could care less. This need not be a nation state it could be anyone who's malicious. Shipped any toner cartridges lately?
In any case I think it's pretty obvious that someone screwing with infrastructure could do some nasty damage with little risk to themselves. You can moan about how no one would do that but I think that's foolish. It only takes one asshat with enough skill to make a mess. Better to secure it now and build it better, doesn't have to be some huge grandiose research thing but really some basic security would likely make it a TON better. I spoke with someone who pen-tested a nuke plant once, it wasn't pretty. Just basic security stuff on infrastructure and manufacturing would be a step forward for sure. That's hardly an obsession with scary things but rather the desire to keep some punk kid playing around from trashing a sewage or electric plant.
It's not the military systems that are at risk with regards to "warfare" but rather the industrial systems that are public and supply things like water, electricity, and sanitation.
Boy that would be a fun ride - strapped into a plane with all of the sensitive equipment set to burn or blow! I do agree that it's disappointing that more wasn't done to destroy the equipment. Perhaps not having the super secret stuff strewn all over would have made it easier? Honestly this is the first I'd heard that what was on that plane was compromised so badly - it was reported at the time that it was all trashed. Did they not have any time on the ground to destroy it or did they bug out the moment it touched down?
Almost all of our power stations apparently rely on outside power to start and have contracts with other power plants to supply this cold start power. There's a power plant in Palestine that is actually a pretty good study in this since obviously resources to keep that plant running are pretty restricted. I read about a black start for that plant done after an air strike damaged it that was done by basically finding as many car batteries as they could to get a smaller generator running to then finally get part of the main facility running to then get the rest sort of back online. Rube Goldberg would be proud, those guys have kept that plant running in pretty trying circumstances. A bit of a stretch to think we'd be in that position but a cascading failure - stupidly discounted in this article - could certainly take out far more than an isolated piece of infrastructure. The idiots that wrote this article make it sound like our grid is a bunch of islands when in fact it's ALL connected together and I'd bet that our adversaries have spent more time understanding that than we have - to include the weak points. Just as we probably have dissected their grids... I've seen some stories on how cascading failures in the past have occurred and as I recall the last one damaged a power plant in NYC pretty badly from an overload, why does everyone think things have gotten very much better?
Mind you - "resources to build other technologies" would likely require electricity. Chicken and egg I'm afraid if you wish to do this post attack. This is part of why people are banging the drum NOW.
Oh come on, everyone knows that a security review of code is just the last speed bump to getting a program out the door! Usually done right after most of the contributing programmers have been moved on to other programs. Doing security from the beginning would be more expensive for heaven's sake!/sarcasm
yeah but come on they DID slant it to be anti-US. Armed in an area like that says AK47 but RPG? I know they're dirt cheap over there but that's not something you use to defend yourself! It's not something to shoot game with. That's a serious offensive weapon.
Actually I have NO issue with the video having been released. I do have an issue with the obvious slant that Wikileaks applied to it however - in my eyes they ruined their credibility with their agenda. when I first saw that video I was very very upset. When I saw that video dissected and stills of weapons blown up I was much less upset. Fact is we weren't there and it's a pretty good chance any evidence that would support the US side was sanitized by the folks with an agenda.
Everyone should know that war is horrific. Perhaps if folks had a greater sense of this they would be less likely to commit it. However in this case the folks we're fighting are using our emotions to sway minds while they could care less about some of the truly sick shit they're doing...
The helicopter was not below the horizon. Short of launching a guided missile of some sort the ordinance fired needed line of sight - it was a gun. Oh, guns are usually loud. I'll grant that they were far enough away he might not have associated the gunfire with the scene he came upon but from the pilot's POV it was pretty fishy. He will have to live with what followed as will we:-(
You've obviously not seen the rebuttal video that clearly shows that some on the ground were armed and that a rocket launcher was held by one - a clear danger to aircraft and ground troops. Yes, an AP reporter was killed, he was pretty much embedded with a group of insurgants hoping to catch them on film attacking US troops who it turns out were pretty close by on the ground.
as for the civilians yes it does suck and it sucks badly. War is NOT a Hollywood movie and both sides get chewed up pretty badly and when one of those sides in in the midst of civilians THEY get chewed up too! This has occurred in every single war and the only reason we see it more today is because it is so much better documented. However if you think you have some magic to change this I'm all for hearing it. Sadly the enemy isn't going to make it easier as they wish to hide among civilians and ARE civilians when they aren't shooting at us. Asking our guys to somehow positively ID every single thing they shoot at beforehand simply means that a great many more of our troops would be dead - that's not workable.
Perhaps we'd be better off carpet bombing them? fire bombing cities and villages where the are holed up? THAT is how this was solved in the past and it was far far worse but we DID win - at least most of the time:-(
Those are system, not something you're going to be putting together at home it seems. Sounds like maybe XenServer might be the way to go for more hardware compatibility...
After seeing the gunship video they presented... and then later the way it was torn apart by others examining the film I no longer get too worked up over anything Wikileaks has to say. It's sad really but they will do just about anything they can to skew what they present:-(
You might want to look into DeepFeeeze for that Windows install if you want easy clean up:-) I've never seen a more effective way to keep an install clean in a kiosk or other wide open environment. Have a problem? Reboot - all is well.
You need to know more peeps then - I don't have this issue. I'm careful about what I install and I pay attention. I use the free MSFT AV package and thus far, several years in on this box, I have had no issues. No issues on the previous Vista 64 box either - still have it too. Win7 64bit and Vista 64bit have some decent security. Not perfect but then neither is Linux - which I also run on multiple boxes. Right tool for the right job is all....
For HOME use what's a good platform for ESXi? I do not want to use it to run anything but virtual machines, nothing on the desktop. I have a machine I've tried to use but during install it stops dead at the NIC. I'd love to build a cheap multicore machine to host all sorts of things! But I'm not going to be running to Dell or elsewhere to buy an "approved" platform - I just need to know what's compatible from NewEgg:-(
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You realize this isn't true right? If I lose my Kindle or it's destroyed I simply buy another, tell Amazon, and my books transfer. In fact if I have a family and we ALL have Kindles on the same account we can ALL read the same books no problem. This is books purchased from Amazon mind you. If I update my Kindle the new one gets all my Amazon rights - it's nice. Sadly the publishers dorked the price up and I don't buy from them anymore so I must maintain my own backups now...
Oh but the publishers say that we're getting a bargain with their high prices because it's a huge discount off of new LIST prices. Mind you I've never paid list for a book! These books are also way more portable so of course they are a better value. And you know printing presses cost a ton of money so eBooks have to help support that. No seriously! Go read through the last year's worth of posts on the Macmillen blog http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ I swear these guys think their customers are stupid...
Where are you seeing these prices for new Sci-Fi? Last I looked they sure as hell weren't $6. All of them I've wanted have been higher with a little love note from Amazon pointing out that the price is now set by the F'ing publisher. Some of them were even more expensive than new paper books. The industry has gone the way of the music industry so far as I'm concerned. Screw 'em.
Here's an example from the action stuff I've been reading lately - check the paper and Kindle pricing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Spy-ebook/dp/B0038BZOYA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289098451&sr=1-2
Another - http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Empire-Fargo-Adventure-ebook/dp/B003XQEVD0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289098451&sr=1-1
NYT Bestseller - Hardcover is CHEAPER than eBook -> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ZK58WM/ref=s9_al_bw_ir01?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1YNQWHDQP69J4JEHSTCP&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1278657562&pf_rd_i=322189011
Here's one I wanted to read pretty badly - http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Dust-Masters-Disguise-Operations/dp/0743428528/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289098993&sr=8-1-catcorr Note the date it was released.....
Thankfully some authors are taking notice of this guy http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ and you'll also note that often the highest sellers on the Kindle lists are lower priced - like this guy's work. He even gives away some books on his site. Sadly it's just not my kind of writing but he sure does tell it like it is on his blog! The publishers are screwing us and the authors and piracy is ramping up as a result!
A "few months ago" I wouldn't have thought about pirating a book. I could get my favorite books for under $10 and I was reading them like crazy. Then here comes iPad and the bullshit deal Apple setup with the publishers to let THEM set the price and break Amazon's lock on E-books. Publishers, led by Macmillan, put the hurt on Amazon, and now they too are forced to let Publishers set book prices. Damn near overnight my buying of books came to a screeching halt as nothing I was interested in reading could be had for what I felt was a reasonable price. Some of the books I looked up were CHEAPER in hard copy! Books that have been out 6-7 YEARS for $12++?!
So I too looked towards Torrent sites and elsewhere and sure enough there was tons of books available. I haven't bought a single book from Amazon, hard or soft copy, since this change in pricing went into effect. the sad thing is that E-books are so small no one ever just shares one, it's ineffective. Instead you see huge collections thrown together in order to make the file size decent.
Thankfully some authors are getting a clue! Hopefully more will follow this guy's lead -> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/
ask any ladder manufacturer what hell product liability has become...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design#Examples
Not so fast, you might want to read up on a bit of history.
Why would this need to be large scale? Plenty of folks would have something to gain by chaos and apparently many could care less. This need not be a nation state it could be anyone who's malicious. Shipped any toner cartridges lately?
In any case I think it's pretty obvious that someone screwing with infrastructure could do some nasty damage with little risk to themselves. You can moan about how no one would do that but I think that's foolish. It only takes one asshat with enough skill to make a mess. Better to secure it now and build it better, doesn't have to be some huge grandiose research thing but really some basic security would likely make it a TON better. I spoke with someone who pen-tested a nuke plant once, it wasn't pretty. Just basic security stuff on infrastructure and manufacturing would be a step forward for sure. That's hardly an obsession with scary things but rather the desire to keep some punk kid playing around from trashing a sewage or electric plant.
It's not the military systems that are at risk with regards to "warfare" but rather the industrial systems that are public and supply things like water, electricity, and sanitation.
The car wash recycles and filters the water for reuse, do you?
Boy that would be a fun ride - strapped into a plane with all of the sensitive equipment set to burn or blow! I do agree that it's disappointing that more wasn't done to destroy the equipment. Perhaps not having the super secret stuff strewn all over would have made it easier? Honestly this is the first I'd heard that what was on that plane was compromised so badly - it was reported at the time that it was all trashed. Did they not have any time on the ground to destroy it or did they bug out the moment it touched down?
Are you seriously attributing sanity to the Chinese? Suppose we didn't know who did it?
Actually it could get pretty bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
Almost all of our power stations apparently rely on outside power to start and have contracts with other power plants to supply this cold start power. There's a power plant in Palestine that is actually a pretty good study in this since obviously resources to keep that plant running are pretty restricted. I read about a black start for that plant done after an air strike damaged it that was done by basically finding as many car batteries as they could to get a smaller generator running to then finally get part of the main facility running to then get the rest sort of back online. Rube Goldberg would be proud, those guys have kept that plant running in pretty trying circumstances. A bit of a stretch to think we'd be in that position but a cascading failure - stupidly discounted in this article - could certainly take out far more than an isolated piece of infrastructure. The idiots that wrote this article make it sound like our grid is a bunch of islands when in fact it's ALL connected together and I'd bet that our adversaries have spent more time understanding that than we have - to include the weak points. Just as we probably have dissected their grids... I've seen some stories on how cascading failures in the past have occurred and as I recall the last one damaged a power plant in NYC pretty badly from an overload, why does everyone think things have gotten very much better?
There's an interesting book named One Second After http://www.amazon.com/One-Second-After-William-Forstchen/dp/0765317583/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1288356308&sr=1-1 That discusses what it's like living after a fairly straightforward EMP attack. Now obviously an EMP attack actually destroys infrastructure but the difficulties in surviving without electricity are pretty clear in this book and done correctly a "cyber attack" could damage some hardware.
Mind you - "resources to build other technologies" would likely require electricity. Chicken and egg I'm afraid if you wish to do this post attack. This is part of why people are banging the drum NOW.
Oh come on, everyone knows that a security review of code is just the last speed bump to getting a program out the door! Usually done right after most of the contributing programmers have been moved on to other programs. Doing security from the beginning would be more expensive for heaven's sake! /sarcasm
yeah but come on they DID slant it to be anti-US. Armed in an area like that says AK47 but RPG? I know they're dirt cheap over there but that's not something you use to defend yourself! It's not something to shoot game with. That's a serious offensive weapon.
Never seen? Look for some of the blowups online from stills in that vid. I saw them and I got more background info - calmed my anger significantly.
Yes a news org would slant it - but then so did Wikileaks!
Sure they did, however their editorial of it skipped a few things like AK47 and RPG. And the US troops they were peeking around the corner at...
Actually I have NO issue with the video having been released. I do have an issue with the obvious slant that Wikileaks applied to it however - in my eyes they ruined their credibility with their agenda. when I first saw that video I was very very upset. When I saw that video dissected and stills of weapons blown up I was much less upset. Fact is we weren't there and it's a pretty good chance any evidence that would support the US side was sanitized by the folks with an agenda.
Everyone should know that war is horrific. Perhaps if folks had a greater sense of this they would be less likely to commit it. However in this case the folks we're fighting are using our emotions to sway minds while they could care less about some of the truly sick shit they're doing...
The helicopter was not below the horizon. Short of launching a guided missile of some sort the ordinance fired needed line of sight - it was a gun. Oh, guns are usually loud. I'll grant that they were far enough away he might not have associated the gunfire with the scene he came upon but from the pilot's POV it was pretty fishy. He will have to live with what followed as will we :-(
You've obviously not seen the rebuttal video that clearly shows that some on the ground were armed and that a rocket launcher was held by one - a clear danger to aircraft and ground troops. Yes, an AP reporter was killed, he was pretty much embedded with a group of insurgants hoping to catch them on film attacking US troops who it turns out were pretty close by on the ground.
as for the civilians yes it does suck and it sucks badly. War is NOT a Hollywood movie and both sides get chewed up pretty badly and when one of those sides in in the midst of civilians THEY get chewed up too! This has occurred in every single war and the only reason we see it more today is because it is so much better documented. However if you think you have some magic to change this I'm all for hearing it. Sadly the enemy isn't going to make it easier as they wish to hide among civilians and ARE civilians when they aren't shooting at us. Asking our guys to somehow positively ID every single thing they shoot at beforehand simply means that a great many more of our troops would be dead - that's not workable.
Perhaps we'd be better off carpet bombing them? fire bombing cities and villages where the are holed up? THAT is how this was solved in the past and it was far far worse but we DID win - at least most of the time :-(
So what? My Linux boxes require reboots occasionally too. I don't condemn either OS for not being 100% perfect....
Those are system, not something you're going to be putting together at home it seems. Sounds like maybe XenServer might be the way to go for more hardware compatibility...
After seeing the gunship video they presented... and then later the way it was torn apart by others examining the film I no longer get too worked up over anything Wikileaks has to say. It's sad really but they will do just about anything they can to skew what they present :-(
You might want to look into DeepFeeeze for that Windows install if you want easy clean up :-) I've never seen a more effective way to keep an install clean in a kiosk or other wide open environment. Have a problem? Reboot - all is well.
You need to know more peeps then - I don't have this issue. I'm careful about what I install and I pay attention. I use the free MSFT AV package and thus far, several years in on this box, I have had no issues. No issues on the previous Vista 64 box either - still have it too. Win7 64bit and Vista 64bit have some decent security. Not perfect but then neither is Linux - which I also run on multiple boxes. Right tool for the right job is all....
For HOME use what's a good platform for ESXi? I do not want to use it to run anything but virtual machines, nothing on the desktop. I have a machine I've tried to use but during install it stops dead at the NIC. I'd love to build a cheap multicore machine to host all sorts of things! But I'm not going to be running to Dell or elsewhere to buy an "approved" platform - I just need to know what's compatible from NewEgg :-(