I took over IT at a company, which included badge access to various parts of the building. It always seems to be up to whoever is issuing cards that day. Some low access employees had 24/7 all door. Some senior executives could only open their own office door, but couldn't open the exterior doors outside of 9am to 5pm. There were a whole list of ex-employees, who never turned in their cards, who still had 24/7 all door access.
A long time ago, like at one of my first jobs, I worked cash registers at a major retail chain (no, not Target). That chain had registers throughout the store. I was suppose to be locked down to my store, and a handful of registers in my assigned area.
A year after I left the company, I happened to be shopping at a company store in another city. For giggles, I tried my register login, and it worked. Well, I asked the person at the register to let me log in, and it worked.:) It's not like I could have done a lot. I could have issued credits to credit cards, if they had been used at the store. I could no-sale the register. So, I could walk out of the store with a fistful of cash, and take all the debt off my credit cards.
My access remained for a few years, until someone finally figured out, "Hey, that guy doesn't work here."
Unfortunately, I'm a good guy. I didn't steal anything. I have a terrible allergy to jail.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with jQuery. It's Panasonic who doesn't want it.
Your example is invalid though. You'd use Math.sin(). and Math.pow(), which are already included in javascript.
For actual jQuery problems, he could go straight to the jQuery library, and copy&paste the necessary functions. View the not-minified version, so it looks nice.
So something like:/* This function, foo(), is from
* jQuery JavaScript Library v2.0.3
* http://jquery.com/
*
* Copyright 2005, 2013 jQuery Foundation, Inc. and other contributors
* Released under the MIT license
* http://jquery.org/license
*
* Date: 2013-07-03T13:30Z */
Ya, insurance can get a little funny, but there are plenty of places that will cover you.
I happen to own an retired city bus (transit bus with diesel pusher, not a school bus), that I'm making into a RV. It's in that registration and insurance weird spot. It's not a commercial vehicle any more. It's not a bus. It's not a professionally built RV.
Some people who have done these kind of conversions strip the donor vehicle down to a rolling chassis with drivetrain. I'm keeping the outer body, because... well... that's a lot of material to re-engineer.
It usually takes me an extra 10 minutes or so at the DMV, until they figure that they can put it in the homebuilt vehicle section with the original vehicle VIN. They usually have to get a supervisor override, so that commercial vehicle VIN can be used with a privately owned vehicle.
Getting insurance was a bit rough a few years ago. Mine was stored for a while, but I had to drive it to a new storage lot. That meant renewing the plates, and getting new insurance on it. Insurance was a breeze. It took me about 5 minutes online, and cost $120 for the year. The only field that could be selected was the manufacturer. They didn't have the model in their select list, so they took exactly what I gave.
The insurance carrier had blanks for everything. Like, I could have specified myself as the manufacturer, and they would have gone with it. As long as the insurance matches the registration and tag, I'm fine.
If you're going to use that blackjack, you don't need money for the hookers anyways. But.. that will get you more prison time, if the pimp doesn't kill you first.
The same argument could be made for the other 1,000 lines of his code. Why second guess his 5 lines to replace one function in a library, without loading up the whole library. He could totally bork the other 995 lines of code.
I think we're about on the same page. I use libraries as needed. If I can use one library to do 4 functions well, I won't use 4 different libraries to half-ass it because I found code in a forum post somewhere, and didn't want to think beyond "hey, lets copy & paste this in!" I won't include a library to save myself 3 (or 10) lines of code that I could put into my own function. On occasion, where I only needed a few lines of a huge library, I copy it (license permitting, of course), and note where and why I got it.
He didn't give us a lot to go on for this argument. He was doing something. He wanted to use jQuery. Panasonic said "no". He's complaining that they refused it. It wasn't even clear if he included jQuery with his code, or if he was calling it from Google or elsewhere. (i.e., <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js">) Including it with the code guarantees it won't get updated, ever. Calling it from elsewhere means that the TV must have Internet access to operate that function, which can't be guaranteed. You could quite literally have a bunch of apps, all using different versions of jQuery, wasting memory or storage space, when the functions could have been done in a few lines each, or it may have been unnecessary and leftover from during the dev cycle and never cleaned up.
What happens if next year Google decides not to host jQuery, or say all the pre 2.x versions. It could go the way of all those lovely Google Maps API sites that were v1 and many v2 sites. It's less than idea to force users to update. Users are dumb. That makes a support nightmare for them, for reasons the users simply won't understand.
If his code was very needy of the jQuery library, I could see it as being reasonable, but we can only guess. I know there's lots of cool stuff that can be done with it. I've only done some.:)
This looks like a reinvented sand rail, except not as safe, and not road legal.
I've seen sand rails on the road in some states. Check with your DMV to see about registering "experimental", "homemade" or "homebuilt" vehicles.
You can get a rolling sand rail chassis pretty cheap, and put in your choice of engine, transmission, seat(s), lights, etc. Just like the vehicle in the article, you could assemble one in a few hours.
In my state, besides the obvious (engine/motor, steering wheel, etc), they require: headlights (2), turn signals (4), brakes (2), bumpers (2), fenders (all wheels), horn (1), seat, seat belt (if not a motorcycle), tires (2 or 3 for motorcycle, 4+ for cars). All lighting must be DOT approved, which is easy enough to get from auto parts stores. Lighting and bumpers have to be within a certain height from the ground. I think that was all the requirements. That's from memory.
Pretty much, you just build it. You then go to the DMV and fill out a "Statement of Builder".
You can then drive it (or trailer it) to the DMV for a safety inspection.
They get a lot of homebuilt motorcycles, since you can buy every part without a donor vehicle.
Homebuilt cars are usually custom cars built on existing chassis. If you're building on a sandrail chassis (like this almost appears), you just can't provide the source chassis VIN. If you're proficient with welding, you can build your own chassis, but that takes some skill.
I've put a few homebuilt trailers on the road legally. Pretty much those just required me to go in with a weight and length, and sign off on some papers. It was up to me to affirm that I complied with the safety (lighting, hitch, etc) requirements.
I don't know how well the code runs now, but a long time ago, it was real heavy on the server side. There are plenty of other options, you just have to get users in. I had one up for a while, but with only 4 users it didn't do so well.
There are too many programmers who don't think that way. They'd rather include huge libraries, than write a few lines of code.
It is their (Panasonic's) platform. If they don't want jQuery, don't use jQuery. That seems simple enough.
I've had headaches where I had to put on some dev's code, that required a massive number of libraries. They didn't mind, because their dev machine had them all. They usually can't even say what libraries are really required, it's a game of "lets figure out why their app doesn't work."
I'm logged into one server in particular. One app, 39 different libraries had to be added in addition to the standard libraries included on the system. Some of those would be redundant, except they "wrote" their code with snippets from various places online that seem to do what they want. If you go back and ask what some of them do, they can't even really explain them.
The whole concept is causing the problem. It's implicitly stating that women aren't normally welcome in the field, so we need to recruit some token women.
How about we just treat everyone the same. Their level of skill is what's important. For those with less skill, train them up. Age or gender shouldn't even be a consideration.
Oops, I forgot to say that part.:) They don't want some civilian, or worse a foreign intelligence agency, getting a hold of one.
Ditching in the desert, or ditching in the ocean, as long as it's a hard impact, would scatter pieces. In the ocean, it's much harder to find them and try to figure out how they went together. It's also harder to collect the pieces so others won't find them.
On land, depending on where it hit and who was there, parts or all of it could be retrieved before gov't folks arrived. It would be worse, if it crashed somewhere populated (like downtown San Diego), or somewhere it wouldn't easily returned (like Mexico). The later risks an international incident.
I suspect they opted for water instead of land because of the 2008 F/A-18 crash in San Diego, and others. People get all upset when an airplane crashes in their city.
I'm surprised they don't have pyrotechnics on-board to remove any sensitive equipment. Looking at this report on another crash, they had to go to the crash site to collect the good bits. This one, regarding the same type aircraft says they don't have self-destruct mechanisms, but can wipe their storage if instructed to.
I would have thought a way to make the aircraft a pile of worthless scrap before it hits the ground would have been one of the first things they put on when they decided these would be in a recon/combat role.
They didn't specify what the problem was. It could have been anything from typical aircraft problems, to specialty drone problems. Failed powerplant (i.e., engine broke). Failed aerodynamic surfaces. Failed airframe during high stress maneuver. Inadvertent intersection of flight path with birds.
Or the drone specific problems. Computer failure(s). Uplink failure(s). Intersection of bird with the camera.
Their options may have been very limited. An intentional crash into the water (full throttle, nose down) could mitigate some risk of recovery.
I would think crashing it into empty desert would have been preferred for recovery of all the parts. Maybe making it to the desert may not have been practical.
And, all in all, it's only a few million dollars. It's the gov't, they have plenty of money. {sigh}
I think anyone who's gamed for very long has used the "no-cd" or other "pirate" hacks to fix annoyances. That or they've "pirated" a game because their cd/dvd was scratched so they couldn't reinstall it.
I say "they" because I'd never do any such thing.:)
You are correct about the UPNP protection (or lack thereof). The big advantage is that people scanning for machines vulnerable for 0-day exploits (or exploits in general) won't be able to reach it.
Once a machine is compromised, not much is going to help unless you're doing deep packet inspection.
Really, there's no good reason to give a workstation a public IP. I know people scream about gaming, or some random annoyance. I've had my workstations behind NATs and firewalls (both, not either/or) for plenty of years. The only "problems" I have are firewall issues with specific games, which can be worked around.
The only things I've lost out on with my gaming machines are being able to share local drives out for remote users to SMB connect to, or to put up an arbitrary FTP or web server on my workstation. Those are begging for vulnerabilities and exploits that your workstation shouldn't be exposed to.
Ya, I've seen that on various consumer routers. It's kind of sad when they crash and burn.
I'd still strongly recommend NAT. You really don't want your desktop to be public facing. All it takes is one stupid update, or installing something that seems ok, to put your machine at risk.
We sit behind a Linux firewall for everything, and then a consumer router for the desks. So for the most part, the desks would be safe if I wanted to give them public IPs. With the router, I can keep adding internal stuff without sucking up my public IPs. It's fairly normal for us to have... ummm...
We had some people over, so that number jumped. Everyone got on the LAN with their phones, plus their tablets or laptops. The silly thing was, once they all got online and checked their mail and Facebook, they didn't touch their electronics for most of the visit. But it was available if they wanted it.
It would have been silly to issue them a whole list of static IPs to use, and then run the risk of a conflict if different people came over who were each assigned the same static IPs. Some people can do it. I have better things to think about than if guests may have conflicting IPs.
Most doctor's offices and dentist's offices aren't well protected either. I don't know where or how to extract the radioactive materials from imaging units, but it's just sitting there every night and most weekends, unguarded.
I did some work for a small medical clinic a while back. They put a lot of work into the shielding of the room, and the lockup cabinet for drugs, but their after-hours security was a standard commercial alarm system and motion sensors. LEO response time there was about 5 to 10 minutes. So if you knew the equipment, you could probably ungracefully extract it and leave before anyone showed up.
I don't know what they use for their radiation source, but I'm guessing it's something you don't really want to carry around in your pocket.
I'd just believe most people aren't hitting those offices for radioactive materials, when there are perfectly good drugs to steal and sell that will turn an easier profit.
You have my deepest sympathies on AT&T. I wish you the best of luck getting a good provider in soon.
Have you considered moving?:) Ya, I have actually moved to get better Internet service. At the time I *needed* upload bandwidth. Anything measured in Kb/s just wouldn't do. I frequently created ISOs, and it was troublesome to drive to somewhere with good bandwidth to make them available, especially if I was making a change at 2am, and someone needed it ASAP. The whole "Well, let me get dressed, drive down to the datacenter, and copy it over to a server" just didn't cut it.
Really, your download speeds are very dependant on other factors between you and them. If they're on a 10Mb/s pipe, or they're serving 10,000 users on a GigE pipe, you won't get your 100MB/s. When I go looking for bottlenecks, that's where I find most of the problems.
Friends usually call or email me when they're having throughput issues with sites. They ask me to try downloading from somewhere, because it's slow from there. Sometimes it's the user's problem. Frequently it's something closer to the server.
Edge CDNs, and better bandwidth for servers is helping that a lot. I could be mistaken, but I don't think anyone is being offered 10Mb/s drops any more (thankfully).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. I was trying to stay with the article. :)
Some places are horrible about it.
I took over IT at a company, which included badge access to various parts of the building. It always seems to be up to whoever is issuing cards that day. Some low access employees had 24/7 all door. Some senior executives could only open their own office door, but couldn't open the exterior doors outside of 9am to 5pm. There were a whole list of ex-employees, who never turned in their cards, who still had 24/7 all door access.
A long time ago, like at one of my first jobs, I worked cash registers at a major retail chain (no, not Target). That chain had registers throughout the store. I was suppose to be locked down to my store, and a handful of registers in my assigned area.
A year after I left the company, I happened to be shopping at a company store in another city. For giggles, I tried my register login, and it worked. Well, I asked the person at the register to let me log in, and it worked. :) It's not like I could have done a lot. I could have issued credits to credit cards, if they had been used at the store. I could no-sale the register. So, I could walk out of the store with a fistful of cash, and take all the debt off my credit cards.
My access remained for a few years, until someone finally figured out, "Hey, that guy doesn't work here."
Unfortunately, I'm a good guy. I didn't steal anything. I have a terrible allergy to jail.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with jQuery. It's Panasonic who doesn't want it.
Your example is invalid though. You'd use Math.sin(). and Math.pow(), which are already included in javascript.
For actual jQuery problems, he could go straight to the jQuery library, and copy&paste the necessary functions. View the not-minified version, so it looks nice.
http://ajax.googleapis.com/aja...
And you can use it. You just have to keep the jQuery license in place, at least where that function is.
https://jquery.org/license/
So something like: /* This function, foo(), is from
* jQuery JavaScript Library v2.0.3
* http://jquery.com/
*
* Copyright 2005, 2013 jQuery Foundation, Inc. and other contributors
* Released under the MIT license
* http://jquery.org/license
*
* Date: 2013-07-03T13:30Z
*/
Ya, insurance can get a little funny, but there are plenty of places that will cover you.
I happen to own an retired city bus (transit bus with diesel pusher, not a school bus), that I'm making into a RV. It's in that registration and insurance weird spot. It's not a commercial vehicle any more. It's not a bus. It's not a professionally built RV.
Some people who have done these kind of conversions strip the donor vehicle down to a rolling chassis with drivetrain. I'm keeping the outer body, because ... well ... that's a lot of material to re-engineer.
It usually takes me an extra 10 minutes or so at the DMV, until they figure that they can put it in the homebuilt vehicle section with the original vehicle VIN. They usually have to get a supervisor override, so that commercial vehicle VIN can be used with a privately owned vehicle.
Getting insurance was a bit rough a few years ago. Mine was stored for a while, but I had to drive it to a new storage lot. That meant renewing the plates, and getting new insurance on it. Insurance was a breeze. It took me about 5 minutes online, and cost $120 for the year. The only field that could be selected was the manufacturer. They didn't have the model in their select list, so they took exactly what I gave.
The insurance carrier had blanks for everything. Like, I could have specified myself as the manufacturer, and they would have gone with it. As long as the insurance matches the registration and tag, I'm fine.
If you're going to use that blackjack, you don't need money for the hookers anyways. But.. that will get you more prison time, if the pimp doesn't kill you first.
The same argument could be made for the other 1,000 lines of his code. Why second guess his 5 lines to replace one function in a library, without loading up the whole library. He could totally bork the other 995 lines of code.
I think we're about on the same page. I use libraries as needed. If I can use one library to do 4 functions well, I won't use 4 different libraries to half-ass it because I found code in a forum post somewhere, and didn't want to think beyond "hey, lets copy & paste this in!" I won't include a library to save myself 3 (or 10) lines of code that I could put into my own function. On occasion, where I only needed a few lines of a huge library, I copy it (license permitting, of course), and note where and why I got it.
He didn't give us a lot to go on for this argument. He was doing something. He wanted to use jQuery. Panasonic said "no". He's complaining that they refused it. It wasn't even clear if he included jQuery with his code, or if he was calling it from Google or elsewhere. (i.e., <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js">) Including it with the code guarantees it won't get updated, ever. Calling it from elsewhere means that the TV must have Internet access to operate that function, which can't be guaranteed. You could quite literally have a bunch of apps, all using different versions of jQuery, wasting memory or storage space, when the functions could have been done in a few lines each, or it may have been unnecessary and leftover from during the dev cycle and never cleaned up.
From here: https://developers.google.com/...
They provide ajax.googleapis.com access to versions: 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0, 1.10.2, 1.10.1, 1.10.0, 1.9.1, 1.9.0, 1.8.3, 1.8.2, 1.8.1, 1.8.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.0, 1.6.4, 1.6.3, 1.6.2, 1.6.1, 1.6.0, 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5.0, 1.4.4, 1.4.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.6, 1.2.3
What happens if next year Google decides not to host jQuery, or say all the pre 2.x versions. It could go the way of all those lovely Google Maps API sites that were v1 and many v2 sites. It's less than idea to force users to update. Users are dumb. That makes a support nightmare for them, for reasons the users simply won't understand.
If his code was very needy of the jQuery library, I could see it as being reasonable, but we can only guess. I know there's lots of cool stuff that can be done with it. I've only done some. :)
This looks like a reinvented sand rail, except not as safe, and not road legal.
I've seen sand rails on the road in some states. Check with your DMV to see about registering "experimental", "homemade" or "homebuilt" vehicles.
You can get a rolling sand rail chassis pretty cheap, and put in your choice of engine, transmission, seat(s), lights, etc. Just like the vehicle in the article, you could assemble one in a few hours.
In my state, besides the obvious (engine/motor, steering wheel, etc), they require: headlights (2), turn signals (4), brakes (2), bumpers (2), fenders (all wheels), horn (1), seat, seat belt (if not a motorcycle), tires (2 or 3 for motorcycle, 4+ for cars). All lighting must be DOT approved, which is easy enough to get from auto parts stores. Lighting and bumpers have to be within a certain height from the ground. I think that was all the requirements. That's from memory.
Pretty much, you just build it. You then go to the DMV and fill out a "Statement of Builder".
http://www.flhsmv.gov/dmv/form...
You can then drive it (or trailer it) to the DMV for a safety inspection.
They get a lot of homebuilt motorcycles, since you can buy every part without a donor vehicle.
Homebuilt cars are usually custom cars built on existing chassis. If you're building on a sandrail chassis (like this almost appears), you just can't provide the source chassis VIN. If you're proficient with welding, you can build your own chassis, but that takes some skill.
I've put a few homebuilt trailers on the road legally. Pretty much those just required me to go in with a weight and length, and sign off on some papers. It was up to me to affirm that I complied with the safety (lighting, hitch, etc) requirements.
Ya, people forget that http://slashcode.com/ exists. Or you can just roll your own and probably do better. :)
There are plenty of other sites out there. So why don't you make your own Slashdot? You can get the code for the old (pre-beta) site from http://www.slashcode.com/ , which eventually leads to http://sourceforge.net/project...
I don't know how well the code runs now, but a long time ago, it was real heavy on the server side. There are plenty of other options, you just have to get users in. I had one up for a while, but with only 4 users it didn't do so well.
If we had hookers, why would we need blackjack or Slashdot?
There are too many programmers who don't think that way. They'd rather include huge libraries, than write a few lines of code.
It is their (Panasonic's) platform. If they don't want jQuery, don't use jQuery. That seems simple enough.
I've had headaches where I had to put on some dev's code, that required a massive number of libraries. They didn't mind, because their dev machine had them all. They usually can't even say what libraries are really required, it's a game of "lets figure out why their app doesn't work."
I'm logged into one server in particular. One app, 39 different libraries had to be added in addition to the standard libraries included on the system. Some of those would be redundant, except they "wrote" their code with snippets from various places online that seem to do what they want. If you go back and ask what some of them do, they can't even really explain them.
The whole concept is causing the problem. It's implicitly stating that women aren't normally welcome in the field, so we need to recruit some token women.
How about we just treat everyone the same. Their level of skill is what's important. For those with less skill, train them up. Age or gender shouldn't even be a consideration.
Oops, I forgot to say that part. :) They don't want some civilian, or worse a foreign intelligence agency, getting a hold of one.
Ditching in the desert, or ditching in the ocean, as long as it's a hard impact, would scatter pieces. In the ocean, it's much harder to find them and try to figure out how they went together. It's also harder to collect the pieces so others won't find them.
On land, depending on where it hit and who was there, parts or all of it could be retrieved before gov't folks arrived. It would be worse, if it crashed somewhere populated (like downtown San Diego), or somewhere it wouldn't easily returned (like Mexico). The later risks an international incident.
I suspect they opted for water instead of land because of the 2008 F/A-18 crash in San Diego, and others. People get all upset when an airplane crashes in their city.
I'm surprised they don't have pyrotechnics on-board to remove any sensitive equipment. Looking at this report on another crash, they had to go to the crash site to collect the good bits. This one, regarding the same type aircraft says they don't have self-destruct mechanisms, but can wipe their storage if instructed to.
I would have thought a way to make the aircraft a pile of worthless scrap before it hits the ground would have been one of the first things they put on when they decided these would be in a recon/combat role.
They didn't specify what the problem was. It could have been anything from typical aircraft problems, to specialty drone problems. Failed powerplant (i.e., engine broke). Failed aerodynamic surfaces. Failed airframe during high stress maneuver. Inadvertent intersection of flight path with birds.
Or the drone specific problems. Computer failure(s). Uplink failure(s). Intersection of bird with the camera.
Their options may have been very limited. An intentional crash into the water (full throttle, nose down) could mitigate some risk of recovery.
I would think crashing it into empty desert would have been preferred for recovery of all the parts. Maybe making it to the desert may not have been practical.
And, all in all, it's only a few million dollars. It's the gov't, they have plenty of money. {sigh}
I think anyone who's gamed for very long has used the "no-cd" or other "pirate" hacks to fix annoyances. That or they've "pirated" a game because their cd/dvd was scratched so they couldn't reinstall it.
I say "they" because I'd never do any such thing. :)
You are correct about the UPNP protection (or lack thereof). The big advantage is that people scanning for machines vulnerable for 0-day exploits (or exploits in general) won't be able to reach it.
Once a machine is compromised, not much is going to help unless you're doing deep packet inspection.
Really, there's no good reason to give a workstation a public IP. I know people scream about gaming, or some random annoyance. I've had my workstations behind NATs and firewalls (both, not either/or) for plenty of years. The only "problems" I have are firewall issues with specific games, which can be worked around.
The only things I've lost out on with my gaming machines are being able to share local drives out for remote users to SMB connect to, or to put up an arbitrary FTP or web server on my workstation. Those are begging for vulnerabilities and exploits that your workstation shouldn't be exposed to.
Ya, that happens. If you ever need it adjusted, I do them at very reasonable rates. :)
That way always works. :)
I see your tinfoil hat is in proper working order.
Ya, I've seen that on various consumer routers. It's kind of sad when they crash and burn.
I'd still strongly recommend NAT. You really don't want your desktop to be public facing. All it takes is one stupid update, or installing something that seems ok, to put your machine at risk.
We sit behind a Linux firewall for everything, and then a consumer router for the desks. So for the most part, the desks would be safe if I wanted to give them public IPs. With the router, I can keep adding internal stuff without sucking up my public IPs. It's fairly normal for us to have ... ummm ...
2 workstations, 2 tablets, 2 phones, 1 laptop, 2 e-readers, 1 thermostat (Whoo, web configurable thermostat).
We had some people over, so that number jumped. Everyone got on the LAN with their phones, plus their tablets or laptops. The silly thing was, once they all got online and checked their mail and Facebook, they didn't touch their electronics for most of the visit. But it was available if they wanted it.
It would have been silly to issue them a whole list of static IPs to use, and then run the risk of a conflict if different people came over who were each assigned the same static IPs. Some people can do it. I have better things to think about than if guests may have conflicting IPs.
Most doctor's offices and dentist's offices aren't well protected either. I don't know where or how to extract the radioactive materials from imaging units, but it's just sitting there every night and most weekends, unguarded.
I did some work for a small medical clinic a while back. They put a lot of work into the shielding of the room, and the lockup cabinet for drugs, but their after-hours security was a standard commercial alarm system and motion sensors. LEO response time there was about 5 to 10 minutes. So if you knew the equipment, you could probably ungracefully extract it and leave before anyone showed up.
I don't know what they use for their radiation source, but I'm guessing it's something you don't really want to carry around in your pocket.
I'd just believe most people aren't hitting those offices for radioactive materials, when there are perfectly good drugs to steal and sell that will turn an easier profit.
You have my deepest sympathies on AT&T. I wish you the best of luck getting a good provider in soon.
Have you considered moving? :) Ya, I have actually moved to get better Internet service. At the time I *needed* upload bandwidth. Anything measured in Kb/s just wouldn't do. I frequently created ISOs, and it was troublesome to drive to somewhere with good bandwidth to make them available, especially if I was making a change at 2am, and someone needed it ASAP. The whole "Well, let me get dressed, drive down to the datacenter, and copy it over to a server" just didn't cut it.
Praise the Great Googlie, brother.
Really, your download speeds are very dependant on other factors between you and them. If they're on a 10Mb/s pipe, or they're serving 10,000 users on a GigE pipe, you won't get your 100MB/s. When I go looking for bottlenecks, that's where I find most of the problems.
Friends usually call or email me when they're having throughput issues with sites. They ask me to try downloading from somewhere, because it's slow from there. Sometimes it's the user's problem. Frequently it's something closer to the server.
Edge CDNs, and better bandwidth for servers is helping that a lot. I could be mistaken, but I don't think anyone is being offered 10Mb/s drops any more (thankfully).