Not particularly. There was no physical evidence left, and it wasn't my house.:)
That's one of those particularly bad mistakes. Criminals that get caught put the body in the trunk of their own car, and/or keep it at their house. There's more more damning evidence than being caught with a dead body in the trunk, or on your own property. How exactly do you say "no, I didn't know the guy who was shot with my gun, was in the trunk of my car, with my bloody fingerprints all over the place." I just don't know how long it's really going to take them to check out Bill Gates' house. Come on, I've been making the anonymous phone calls for months now.:) I left the body in the back of his spare Corvette stretch limo, that he never uses.:)
[Note for the federal agencies who may view this, it was all a joke, except for the fact that Gates does own two custom built Corvette stretch limo's. I have not in the past, nor any time in the foreseeable future, considered nor committed homicide. No bodies have been placed anywhere either accidentally or intentionally. If a body is found on the Gates estate, I assure you I wasn't there, I had nothing to do with it, and I have witnesses to verify where I was at the time of any alleged incident.]
WOW. I don't get how the hell he was driving straight, nor how he managed to keep moving. Usually when you're down to rims, they'll just spin and make sparks. There isn't enough friction to push with. I'm guessing his two right side tires were ok, which gave him enough to keep the car moving, and somehow managed to steer. It must have had a really nasty pull to the left. He oughta have a mechanic look at it, I'm not sure what could be wrong. hehe
I figured some people would make that mistake. Some others (like you) actually know the difference. Ya, I'd prefer to not have a cooked contractor. They kinda smell, and it tends to make other contractors not want to work with you.:)
I was very happy to have not been at the site when it happened, but I did have to fly up to check all of our equipment.
About half our servers wouldn't come back online, either due to power or networking faults. The network switch somehow lost it's saved configuration, and due to that, all my normal means of getting back in remotely were gone. It was a mess that took a few hours to clean up. Being redundant though, it wasn't catastrophic, I just don't like leaving sites down, just in case the next disaster happens.
When I got there, a few people told me it hadn't been pretty. I guess there was a good bit of chaos between the time it happened, and the time I arrived. They were very pleased that I wasn't screaming.:) What did I care? We remained operational with one of DC's completely off the map for a couple hours, and half operational for the following 8 hours. I got on the only direct evening flight, so I could get up there and assess the damage. My return was the morning direct flight back. Ahh, nothing like flying across the country, spending the night in the DC, and flying home in the morning. I was actually done by 1am, so I had to entertain myself for several hours til I could catch my flight home.
If Mr. Obama and I were friends, I probably won't be hanging out on Slashdot very much.
"Hey B', mind if I borrow a VC-25A, and head down to the Nellis bombing range? General Hoog called, and said they have something "neat" that you may like to see. Something about a hypersonic something. There was a lot of noise in the background, I was having a hard time hearing him. I'll preview it for you, and let you know if it's worth the trip. You know how last time they couldn't even get the thing started. I wouldn't want you to waste a trip.":)
Hehe.. Umm.. Well.. Ya, I guess we could.:) We never referred to it as that though.:)
I did turn them up to "lets see when smoke comes out", but somehow we never had the magic smoke released. Except that one new years, but an old server seemed like a great launch platform for fireworks.:) It was flat, hard, and cost a few thousand dollars. What better to put explosives on.:)
Normal Operations: City 1 - 33.3% City 2 - 33.3% City 3 - 33.3%
City 1 stops: City 1 - 0% City 2 - 33.3% City 3 - 33.3%
Other cities take up the slack: City 1 - 0% City 2 - 33.3% + 16.6% = 49.9% (mol) City 3 - 33.3% + 16.6% = 49.9% (mol)
If you are really bent about the missing 0.2%, you can work it out in fractions instead.:)
City 1 - 0/3 City 2 - 1/3 + 1/6 = 3/6 = 1/2 City 3 - 1/3 + 1/6 = 3/6 = 1/2
I have a better time adding and rounding decimals in my head. Since nothing on the Internet is actually perfect, 1% off on an estimate isn't catastrophic.:) In real life, we'd frequently end up with something like a 33% 32% 35% split or a 48% 52% split on a city failure. There were plenty of days where it came in right on 33.3% 33.4% 33.3% and 50% 50%. There were a whole stack of factors involved that were out of our control. I could encourage things around a little better, but trying to force it rather than encouraging it could lead to trouble, but we already had our ways to mitigate that (lots of redundancy):)
In my state, your drivers license number is calculated based on your name (first letter of first name, first letter of middle name, first letter of last name, and soundex of last name), date of birth, and sex. Pretty cool, huh? Well, it's all fun and games until it turns out that there were two J W Smythe's born on Dec 31, 1969. The last name doesn't even have to exactly match, it would only need to be close enough for a soundex match.
Twins Jim and Jon, both with a middle name W and a last name Smythe, would have the same drivers license number.
It's their paperwork that requires a SSN. As far as I know, it's never been printed the number on the cards here.
Ya, I really don't like the "privacy" crap. I was at Wachovia bank (now Wells Fargo) to close my account. They didn't even ask to see my photo id. They had me swipe my debit card. I typed in my PIN. I told them my name, SSN, and birth date. That's all they wanted. Hell, I could have beat down someone outside and gathered that information, and closed their account for them. Well, I could have swiped their wallet and done the same thing without as much of the physical violence.
I was considering becoming a hit man. The person buying the contract wouldn't want to be seen face-to-face, and the recipient of the "gift" would shut up when I was done.
Do you have any other suggestions for other lines of work?
Be nice, people don't read the books nor RFC's any more.
At the biggest operation I ran, I had redundant servers in multiple cities, and DNS servers in each city. If we lost a city, it was never a big deal, other than the others needing to handle the load. With say 3 cities, a one-city outage only accounted for a 16.6% increase in the other two. Each city was set up to handle >100% of the typical peak day traffic, so it was never a big deal. I don't think we ever suffered a two-city simultaneous failure, even though we simulated them by shutting down a city for a few minutes. Testing days were always my favorite. I loved to prove what we could or couldn't do. I peaked out one provider in a city once. We had the capacity as far as the lines went, but they couldn't handle the bandwidth. It was entertaining when they argued, so I dumped the other two cities to the one in question, and they were begging me to stop. "Oh, so there is a fault. Care to fix it?"
I could quantify anything (and everything) at that place. I could tell you a month or so in advance what the peak bandwidth would be on a given day, and how many of which class of servers we needed to have operating to handle it. I classed servers by CPU and memory, which in turn gave how many users and how much bandwidth each could do. I only wanted our machines to every peak out at 80%, but sometimes it was fun to run them up through 100%. I set the limits a little low, so we could run at say 105% without a failure.
Such information let us know if we had a server problem, before we knew we did. I'd notice a server was running 10% low, and that really means that it is going to fail. We'd watch for a little while, and it would.:) We'd power it down, and leave it in the datacenter until we had another scheduled site visit.
I've had equipment and/or worked in many datacenters over the last decade or so. I've worked with even more clients who have had equipment in other datacenters.
I've only experienced 3 power related outages that I can think of.
One was a brownout in that area, which cooked the contactors that switched between grid power and their own DC room.
One was an accident, where a contractor accidentally shorted out a subpanel, and took out about a row of cabinets. I was there for that one. I saw the flash out of the corner of my eye, and by the time I turned my head, he was just flying into the row of cabinets.
One was a mistake in the colo, where there was a mislabeled circuit, so they cut power to 1/3 of one of our racks.
There have been even more outages related to connectivity problems. With one major provider who was just terrible (and is now out of business), they had a fault about once a week or less. Every time we called, they said "there was a train derailment that cut a section of fiber in [arbitrary state], which effected their whole network." It was funny at first, but annoying when we started questioning them about why there was no news about all these train derailments. We had to make up our own excuses for the customers, because we couldn't keep telling them the BS story the provider gave. We were smart about it though, and at least had decent excuses, and the whole staff knew which BS story to give for a particular day. The sad part was, we had a T3, and that was huge at the time.
At my last job, they wanted a full post-mortum done on any fault. If a customer across the country suffered bad latency or packet loss, it was our job to find out why and "fix" it. The management wouldn't accept that there are 3rd party providers who handle some of the transit. So, we'd call our provider demanding it to be fixed (which they couldn't do), and then call the broken provider (who hung up since we weren't their customer), and then got reamed by the boss because we couldn't fix it. Delay tactics worked best after a while. If you're "investigating" a problem long enough, and hold the phone up to your ear enough, the problem will likely be fixed by those who really can. We'd still log a ticket with our provider, because the boss would eventually call the provider referencing the ticket number, and find out there was still nothing that could be done.
There's pretty much guaranteed to be a fault of some sort between two points on the Internet every day. All anyone can really do is make sure it isn't with your own equipment. That's something I always did before calling to complain about anything. It's embarrassing to hear "did you reboot your router?" and that turns out to really be the problem.
The only real solution to this is, redundancy. Not just in one facility, but across multiple facilities. If you spread things out enough, sure an isolated problem will effect some people, but not everyone. You want a service to be reliable, redundant machines in each datacenter is the only way to go. When I was running the network (and everything technical) at one job, a datacenter outage wasn't a concern, it was just a minor annoyance. I filed a trouble ticket, and told them to call me when it was fixed. We'd demand reimbursement on the outage time, and made them handle the difference on our 95th percentile bandwidth charges at the end of the month. I wasn't going to take a hit on the bill just because they had an outage in a city, and my other cities had to take the traffic during the outage. When your bill is measured in multiple Gb/s, you have a little more say in how they handle the billing.:)
If they were filed sequentially, and no other filing happened between your two records, they should.
Read up on SSN's.
The first 3 digits is the area (state) which it was issued, which does not necessarily match the state where the person was born.
The second 2 are a group number. These groups are given out in an odd order. Check the SSA site or wikipedia for the details on that.
The last 4 digits are a serial number.
If you know the state where it was issued (either their birth or residence state), and the group number assigned in the likely period when they received a number, then you pretty much have the first two parts of the SSN. I'm curious to how they calculated the last 4 digits.
I would suspect in 1989, they started automatically issuing SSN's at birth, which made the target much easier, if they had the birth month and year available. And yes, this does bring the number pool way down to 9,999 potential SSNs.
Someone like me, I was born in one state, but I was not issued a card until I lived in another state, and was a few years older. You can't base it on my birth date nor location. The best guess would be where I lived, but you can't narrow it down to month or year, because you don't know when it happened. Was I 2 months old, or 5 years old? Maybe I simply never got one until I was 16 and wanted a job. I knew people in school who didn't have one, which threw off some of the school's paperwork.:) Someone I knew didn't have one until he was 21, because he didn't have a birth certificate (born at home, no surviving witnesses other than his parents). He finally did get one, and then got his drivers license.:) They wouldn't issue his drivers license until he has a SSN.
They really should have never gone with SSN's as an identification. It's bad to have a serial number issued by the government. Really, any American isn't an American, we are our SSN, and the name associated with it is an arbitrary value.
Your last line is probably the best advice I've seen given in a while.
I may be scooting along on an interstate, and some little car that shouldn't go over 80 will go buzzing past. I know my car can go fast, and simply because of what it is, I can't get tires installed that are rated less than "Z". I use "Y" rated tires (186mph), and they are the only tires suggested for my car by any source I've found. I could go check the book, but I'm too lazy to walk out to my car.:) They figure, if it'll go that fast, they don't need to risk me actually doing it and blowing the tires out. My car's listed "max speed" was 162mph, but that is not a speed limiter, nor is it the RPM max in 6th gear. I suspect it may be a mechanical limitation as provided stock, but mine hasn't been quite stock for quite a while.
I wish there were a rating system for vehicles, where say different license plates (and required licenses accordingly) to allow for different speed limits. For example, my wife had a Honda CR-V. I wouldn't take it past 80mph if it could and you paid me to. It just wasn't safe for that. That car has long since been sold, but it had cheap tires to replace the bald ones. It's not like it needed performance tires. I could get out and push it faster than it could accelerate on it's own.:)
Really, such a rule would be good. In testing my car across the country, I found that I had improving gas milage as I cruised at higher speeds. The fastest I tested was 85mph. I did a little (or actually a lot) of math, and the best fuel economy should come at about 95mph in 6th gear. It's roughly a 5mpg difference doing 85 than 70. The Honda CR-V? Oh, that'd be down around 55mph somewhere. If cars were licensed to cruise on highways at speeds that were better for their configuration, people could save gas. Since just asking people to do it, and the general "drive the speed limit" rules aren't accurate, there has to be a better way to do it. I got into that extensively with a friend who drove a Prius. He insisted if everyone drove 5mph under the speed limit, they would get better mileage. I quantified the results for him with over the road analysis, plus calculations. He rephrased it average out, which may be more accurate, but I never found a way to average out all the cars on the road in the country or the world, even in stock configuration.
That's why D&D playing usually ends right about the time puberty kicks in. Well, it divides the players into two groups. The ones who are at home all weekend playing, and the ones who are out dating.
I haven't touched dice since I was 13. Well, except a dirty set of dice, and those were only used during foreplay, until we gave up and decided to just do what we wanted. Sex, just like life, shouldn't be controlled by the roll of the dice.
You know, every time I hear that directed towards me, it sends me into a little rage inside.
Today is special though. It's bring your gun to work Monday. I have something a little more special for you today. I'd to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Glock. It's not a matter of workplace violence. It's a matter of attitude control.
It's the same thing that TGIBennaChilies does. Make sure you have a smile, talk warm and friendly, and oh dear god make sure you're wearing enough flair.:)
First thing in the morning, don't expect a smile on my face, unless I was up all night the night before, and had a morning quickie before leaving the house. Even then, I've never had a job that made me want to smile in the morning. Work is work, it's not to be freakin' enjoyed.
I prefer that work ethic. I don't need shiny happy people asking how they can help me. I need someone to answer my question correctly in only as many works as required. No, there's nothing else they can help me with. I don't care that your name is Melissa or Steve or Joanne, I can read your nametag just like any other literate customer. If I need something else, I'm not going to hunt you down, I'm going to ask the sales person who's closest. And no, I don't want to supersize it, and I don't care that it's only 35 cents more.
I went in a store today to buy cigarettes. There's a really cute girl working the counter. Eye candy goes a long way.:) I asked for a carton of cigarettes. She said they only have 9 packs. I said that would be fine, and she gave me my total. I paid, and was out the door in less than a minute. *THAT* is what I want. If I wanted warm and friendly, I'd go play with a cat. If I want a girl to flirt with me and blow smoke up my ass, I'd go see an escort. I'd say my wife, but any married man knows, once the ring goes on the finger, friendliness and complements are gone, unless she wants something. The friendlier she is, the more expensive the thing she wants.
The Veyron? Because they can afford it. Me? Because it actually gets good highway mileage, handles great on wet or dry roads, and I have the power to get around things. I have choices if the person beside be starts drifting into my lane. I can motor out of their way, or hit the brakes.
For the coffee can club, I can bump the gas from a stop light without spinning my tires, and be 6 car lengths ahead when I reach the speed limit and set the cruise. Hopefully they got the idea by that, but they don't always. It's funny watching them continue accelerating, and eventually get pulled over. The thing is, I don't even have to accelerate hard. I can wait behind them, and they'll still speed and get the ticket.:) I guess they're trying to show off that they're "fast". Congrats on that, hope you like the ticket.
I'd rather be in a modified Ford Crown Vic than a exotic sports car, as far as that goes. As long as the mods are mechanical and not cosmetic or noise creating, it would blend in pretty nicely. Either your a cop, taxi, an old person, or driving a retired police car.:)
For stealth, I'd go with a white van with Verizon markings on it. Park where ever you'd like, and put cones behind your truck, and no one will bother you.
It's a very very very bad idea to get involved in a police chase.
Just because there's a patrol car following a motorcycle at high rates of speed doesn't mean anything. What if the motorcycle driver was an off-duty officer, and they were both rushing to an incident? What if the motorcycle was going to be only one who could keep up with whatever other vehicle they were chasing? Most police don't have lights on their off-duty vehicles. That varies by location though. I knew a cop in a small town who had a Porsche. He had lights on the dash. You couldn't really see them until he turned them on. He could keep up with fast cars, where the regular patrol cars couldn't, and it was sanctioned by the police chief.
Now, if you see a car run a cop off the road, and it's a fast car, AND you have a fast car, pull over and help the cop. Tell him to get in, and he can tell you what to do. You won't be making the stop, but you can keep visibility on the suspect. He may be very thankful for the assistance.
You aren't a cop, and you don't have a police radio, so you don't know the circumstances of what's happening. Just stay out of their way. They'd rather make an arrest than deal with a fatality during a chase.
It doesn't take a fast or exotic car to lose a cop that way.
I don't like being followed. When it's become more than obvious that I am being followed, I've lost them. Maybe I'm a good target. Maybe they're bored. Whatever. The police like to say, if they follow someone long enough, they can get them for something. I got a "careless driving" ticket once, because the cop said I swerved a little. He followed me for over 10 miles, and I hadn't swerved once. I had the cruise set to just under the speed limit, and I was very aware of my driving the whole time because I knew he was behind me. It was a ticket that neither of us could prove. He didn't bother to show up to court, so the case was dropped.
All it takes is getting out of their visibility, and staying out of it. Two turns on back streets, and change your original direction can work wonders. You can be in an unmarked work van, or an exotic sports car. The difference with a work van is, once you're out of view, your van looks like so many others on the road. How many exotic sports cars just like yours are driving around in the area? I've parked in strangers driveways and laid down on the floor, just so they wouldn't see anyone in it. Ok, that's not the van because it's parked. Oddly enough, it works.
My current car is fairly obvious to spot, unfortunately. The police that patrol where I drive frequently recognize it, and know I don't do anything stupid. Sometimes they'll wave to me, so we're all good. There's a road close to home that's wide open, and would be a good candidate at night to do in excess of 100mph on. The speed limit is 45mph. I do 45mph. My friend has a similar car. I guess they don't like her as much. She's been pulled over a few times. The last time was for a burnt out tag light, and she was ticketed for it.
I was cruising between... Well, I don't know. Nowhere and nowhere. Somewhere west of San Antonio, Somewhere east of El Paso. If I recall correctly, the speed limit is 75mph. The cruise was set to 85mph, and I still felt like I was getting nowhere fast. I kept thinking "160mph would cut this trip in half". I was trying to psyche myself up to just open up and go. I had been cruising in the left lane for quite a while. Every 10 or 15 minutes, I'd pass a car that was in the right lane. While I was doing fuel calculations in my head and still telling myself "160mph would cut this trip in half", a police car came the other way from a mountain pass. He turned around, so I reset my cruise for 74mph.
He just gave me the warm friendly, "The speed limit is 75mph", ran my plate and drivers license to make sure I legal, and let me go. With the cruise set to 80mph, and I wasn't touched again.
I'm sure he would have preferred 160mph. The next thing resembling a town was 40 miles a way. 15 minutes is plenty of time to set up a roadblock. It's not like there was anywhere else to go out there.
I wouldn't have minded taking 100 miles of road, and seeing how fast I could really go.:)
I know people race in the desert in California. I know people get caught out there too. California has some rather insane rules regarding racing. First offense, you lose your car for a month (30 day impound). If it has been modified for racing, instead of impound, it's crushed.
I can testify to that. My car is right around 4 seconds 0-60. I can jump ahead of just about anyone up through about 120mph. Pushing through 140, it's pushing. I've only accelerated just through 150, but ran out of road. A lot of the high speed numbers are worthless, because they'll never be reached.
They say in the article, "...you can outrun not only the 5-0's cruisers, but their helicopters, too. If they wanna catch you, they're gonna have to dust off Airwolf...", but that's sensationalized journalism. Like I said, I've been up through 150mph, or 220 feet per second. Driving along at a mile every 24 seconds has it's drawbacks, like a 5 mile stretch takes 118 seconds to cross. What was a nice long straight stretch of road suddenly becomes very very short. What should take 5 minutes to drive at the speed limit is gone less than 2 minutes. God forbid that you're driving on land, where animals may wander across the road, or a car may come out of a side street. It's not like you're going to swerve without some serious side effects.
I ran across a neat video on YouTube where a motorcycle driver was running from the police. Sure, they couldn't keep up, because he'd zip away in no time. Max air speed for an good unladen police helicopter (no extra equipment, seats, and minimal fuel) is 150mph. If they're carrying their normal equipment and enough fuel to follow with, that drops. He was doing over 150mph, and the helicopter kept up pretty nicely. Why? Because despite the fact that he was able to pull away from the helicopter at points, the helicopter didn't have to follow the road, encounter traffic, nor slow down for intersections. He was driving fast, he wasn't suicidal. A bend in the road creates a shorter intercept route for the helicopter to follow.
If they're really after you, it doesn't matter how fast you're going. They may radio ahead and say to set up a roadblock, which sometimes can be avoided, but it's hard to avoid a shoulder to shoulder nail strip. 4 flat tires will keep you from getting away, no matter how fast your car was. That nail strip can mean a fatality when you hit it, if you're going way too fast.
Do I speed as a daily thing? Nope. I cruise right about the speed limit, depending on conditions. My high speeds have been on tracks, where they belong. I know my car is really fast, so I don't have to prove it to anyone. Even if it's a kid with a Honda Civic and a coffee can for a muffler.:) I'm at the "why bother" phase of my life. Do I need to burn up extra fuel just to prove that I can go faster than him? Not really. It's not worth wasting my fuel, and potentially getting a ticket (or worse).
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Not particularly. There was no physical evidence left, and it wasn't my house. :)
That's one of those particularly bad mistakes. Criminals that get caught put the body in the trunk of their own car, and/or keep it at their house. There's more more damning evidence than being caught with a dead body in the trunk, or on your own property. How exactly do you say "no, I didn't know the guy who was shot with my gun, was in the trunk of my car, with my bloody fingerprints all over the place." I just don't know how long it's really going to take them to check out Bill Gates' house. Come on, I've been making the anonymous phone calls for months now. :) I left the body in the back of his spare Corvette stretch limo, that he never uses. :)
[Note for the federal agencies who may view this, it was all a joke, except for the fact that Gates does own two custom built Corvette stretch limo's. I have not in the past, nor any time in the foreseeable future, considered nor committed homicide. No bodies have been placed anywhere either accidentally or intentionally. If a body is found on the Gates estate, I assure you I wasn't there, I had nothing to do with it, and I have witnesses to verify where I was at the time of any alleged incident.]
WOW. I don't get how the hell he was driving straight, nor how he managed to keep moving. Usually when you're down to rims, they'll just spin and make sparks. There isn't enough friction to push with. I'm guessing his two right side tires were ok, which gave him enough to keep the car moving, and somehow managed to steer. It must have had a really nasty pull to the left. He oughta have a mechanic look at it, I'm not sure what could be wrong. hehe
I figured some people would make that mistake. Some others (like you) actually know the difference. Ya, I'd prefer to not have a cooked contractor. They kinda smell, and it tends to make other contractors not want to work with you. :)
I was very happy to have not been at the site when it happened, but I did have to fly up to check all of our equipment.
About half our servers wouldn't come back online, either due to power or networking faults. The network switch somehow lost it's saved configuration, and due to that, all my normal means of getting back in remotely were gone. It was a mess that took a few hours to clean up. Being redundant though, it wasn't catastrophic, I just don't like leaving sites down, just in case the next disaster happens.
When I got there, a few people told me it hadn't been pretty. I guess there was a good bit of chaos between the time it happened, and the time I arrived. They were very pleased that I wasn't screaming. :) What did I care? We remained operational with one of DC's completely off the map for a couple hours, and half operational for the following 8 hours. I got on the only direct evening flight, so I could get up there and assess the damage. My return was the morning direct flight back. Ahh, nothing like flying across the country, spending the night in the DC, and flying home in the morning. I was actually done by 1am, so I had to entertain myself for several hours til I could catch my flight home.
If Mr. Obama and I were friends, I probably won't be hanging out on Slashdot very much.
"Hey B', mind if I borrow a VC-25A, and head down to the Nellis bombing range? General Hoog called, and said they have something "neat" that you may like to see. Something about a hypersonic something. There was a lot of noise in the background, I was having a hard time hearing him. I'll preview it for you, and let you know if it's worth the trip. You know how last time they couldn't even get the thing started. I wouldn't want you to waste a trip." :)
Ya, no, it wasn't the POTUS. :)
Hehe.. Umm.. Well.. Ya, I guess we could. :) We never referred to it as that though. :)
I did turn them up to "lets see when smoke comes out", but somehow we never had the magic smoke released. Except that one new years, but an old server seemed like a great launch platform for fireworks. :) It was flat, hard, and cost a few thousand dollars. What better to put explosives on. :)
Normal Operations:
City 1 - 33.3%
City 2 - 33.3%
City 3 - 33.3%
City 1 stops:
City 1 - 0%
City 2 - 33.3%
City 3 - 33.3%
Other cities take up the slack:
City 1 - 0%
City 2 - 33.3% + 16.6% = 49.9% (mol)
City 3 - 33.3% + 16.6% = 49.9% (mol)
If you are really bent about the missing 0.2%, you can work it out in fractions instead. :)
City 1 - 0/3
City 2 - 1/3 + 1/6 = 3/6 = 1/2
City 3 - 1/3 + 1/6 = 3/6 = 1/2
I have a better time adding and rounding decimals in my head. Since nothing on the Internet is actually perfect, 1% off on an estimate isn't catastrophic. :) In real life, we'd frequently end up with something like a 33% 32% 35% split or a 48% 52% split on a city failure. There were plenty of days where it came in right on 33.3% 33.4% 33.3% and 50% 50%. There were a whole stack of factors involved that were out of our control. I could encourage things around a little better, but trying to force it rather than encouraging it could lead to trouble, but we already had our ways to mitigate that (lots of redundancy) :)
In my state, your drivers license number is calculated based on your name (first letter of first name, first letter of middle name, first letter of last name, and soundex of last name), date of birth, and sex. Pretty cool, huh? Well, it's all fun and games until it turns out that there were two J W Smythe's born on Dec 31, 1969. The last name doesn't even have to exactly match, it would only need to be close enough for a soundex match.
Twins Jim and Jon, both with a middle name W and a last name Smythe, would have the same drivers license number.
It's their paperwork that requires a SSN. As far as I know, it's never been printed the number on the cards here.
Ya, I really don't like the "privacy" crap. I was at Wachovia bank (now Wells Fargo) to close my account. They didn't even ask to see my photo id. They had me swipe my debit card. I typed in my PIN. I told them my name, SSN, and birth date. That's all they wanted. Hell, I could have beat down someone outside and gathered that information, and closed their account for them. Well, I could have swiped their wallet and done the same thing without as much of the physical violence.
I was considering becoming a hit man. The person buying the contract wouldn't want to be seen face-to-face, and the recipient of the "gift" would shut up when I was done.
Do you have any other suggestions for other lines of work?
Be nice, people don't read the books nor RFC's any more.
At the biggest operation I ran, I had redundant servers in multiple cities, and DNS servers in each city. If we lost a city, it was never a big deal, other than the others needing to handle the load. With say 3 cities, a one-city outage only accounted for a 16.6% increase in the other two. Each city was set up to handle >100% of the typical peak day traffic, so it was never a big deal. I don't think we ever suffered a two-city simultaneous failure, even though we simulated them by shutting down a city for a few minutes. Testing days were always my favorite. I loved to prove what we could or couldn't do. I peaked out one provider in a city once. We had the capacity as far as the lines went, but they couldn't handle the bandwidth. It was entertaining when they argued, so I dumped the other two cities to the one in question, and they were begging me to stop. "Oh, so there is a fault. Care to fix it?"
I could quantify anything (and everything) at that place. I could tell you a month or so in advance what the peak bandwidth would be on a given day, and how many of which class of servers we needed to have operating to handle it. I classed servers by CPU and memory, which in turn gave how many users and how much bandwidth each could do. I only wanted our machines to every peak out at 80%, but sometimes it was fun to run them up through 100%. I set the limits a little low, so we could run at say 105% without a failure.
Such information let us know if we had a server problem, before we knew we did. I'd notice a server was running 10% low, and that really means that it is going to fail. We'd watch for a little while, and it would. :) We'd power it down, and leave it in the datacenter until we had another scheduled site visit.
I've had equipment and/or worked in many datacenters over the last decade or so. I've worked with even more clients who have had equipment in other datacenters.
I've only experienced 3 power related outages that I can think of.
One was a brownout in that area, which cooked the contactors that switched between grid power and their own DC room.
One was an accident, where a contractor accidentally shorted out a subpanel, and took out about a row of cabinets. I was there for that one. I saw the flash out of the corner of my eye, and by the time I turned my head, he was just flying into the row of cabinets.
One was a mistake in the colo, where there was a mislabeled circuit, so they cut power to 1/3 of one of our racks.
There have been even more outages related to connectivity problems. With one major provider who was just terrible (and is now out of business), they had a fault about once a week or less. Every time we called, they said "there was a train derailment that cut a section of fiber in [arbitrary state], which effected their whole network." It was funny at first, but annoying when we started questioning them about why there was no news about all these train derailments. We had to make up our own excuses for the customers, because we couldn't keep telling them the BS story the provider gave. We were smart about it though, and at least had decent excuses, and the whole staff knew which BS story to give for a particular day. The sad part was, we had a T3, and that was huge at the time.
At my last job, they wanted a full post-mortum done on any fault. If a customer across the country suffered bad latency or packet loss, it was our job to find out why and "fix" it. The management wouldn't accept that there are 3rd party providers who handle some of the transit. So, we'd call our provider demanding it to be fixed (which they couldn't do), and then call the broken provider (who hung up since we weren't their customer), and then got reamed by the boss because we couldn't fix it. Delay tactics worked best after a while. If you're "investigating" a problem long enough, and hold the phone up to your ear enough, the problem will likely be fixed by those who really can. We'd still log a ticket with our provider, because the boss would eventually call the provider referencing the ticket number, and find out there was still nothing that could be done.
There's pretty much guaranteed to be a fault of some sort between two points on the Internet every day. All anyone can really do is make sure it isn't with your own equipment. That's something I always did before calling to complain about anything. It's embarrassing to hear "did you reboot your router?" and that turns out to really be the problem.
The only real solution to this is, redundancy. Not just in one facility, but across multiple facilities. If you spread things out enough, sure an isolated problem will effect some people, but not everyone. You want a service to be reliable, redundant machines in each datacenter is the only way to go. When I was running the network (and everything technical) at one job, a datacenter outage wasn't a concern, it was just a minor annoyance. I filed a trouble ticket, and told them to call me when it was fixed. We'd demand reimbursement on the outage time, and made them handle the difference on our 95th percentile bandwidth charges at the end of the month. I wasn't going to take a hit on the bill just because they had an outage in a city, and my other cities had to take the traffic during the outage. When your bill is measured in multiple Gb/s, you have a little more say in how they handle the billing. :)
If they were filed sequentially, and no other filing happened between your two records, they should.
Read up on SSN's.
The first 3 digits is the area (state) which it was issued, which does not necessarily match the state where the person was born.
The second 2 are a group number. These groups are given out in an odd order. Check the SSA site or wikipedia for the details on that.
The last 4 digits are a serial number.
If you know the state where it was issued (either their birth or residence state), and the group number assigned in the likely period when they received a number, then you pretty much have the first two parts of the SSN. I'm curious to how they calculated the last 4 digits.
I would suspect in 1989, they started automatically issuing SSN's at birth, which made the target much easier, if they had the birth month and year available. And yes, this does bring the number pool way down to 9,999 potential SSNs.
Someone like me, I was born in one state, but I was not issued a card until I lived in another state, and was a few years older. You can't base it on my birth date nor location. The best guess would be where I lived, but you can't narrow it down to month or year, because you don't know when it happened. Was I 2 months old, or 5 years old? Maybe I simply never got one until I was 16 and wanted a job. I knew people in school who didn't have one, which threw off some of the school's paperwork. :) Someone I knew didn't have one until he was 21, because he didn't have a birth certificate (born at home, no surviving witnesses other than his parents). He finally did get one, and then got his drivers license. :) They wouldn't issue his drivers license until he has a SSN.
They really should have never gone with SSN's as an identification. It's bad to have a serial number issued by the government. Really, any American isn't an American, we are our SSN, and the name associated with it is an arbitrary value.
Your last line is probably the best advice I've seen given in a while.
I may be scooting along on an interstate, and some little car that shouldn't go over 80 will go buzzing past. I know my car can go fast, and simply because of what it is, I can't get tires installed that are rated less than "Z". I use "Y" rated tires (186mph), and they are the only tires suggested for my car by any source I've found. I could go check the book, but I'm too lazy to walk out to my car. :) They figure, if it'll go that fast, they don't need to risk me actually doing it and blowing the tires out. My car's listed "max speed" was 162mph, but that is not a speed limiter, nor is it the RPM max in 6th gear. I suspect it may be a mechanical limitation as provided stock, but mine hasn't been quite stock for quite a while.
I wish there were a rating system for vehicles, where say different license plates (and required licenses accordingly) to allow for different speed limits. For example, my wife had a Honda CR-V. I wouldn't take it past 80mph if it could and you paid me to. It just wasn't safe for that. That car has long since been sold, but it had cheap tires to replace the bald ones. It's not like it needed performance tires. I could get out and push it faster than it could accelerate on it's own. :)
Really, such a rule would be good. In testing my car across the country, I found that I had improving gas milage as I cruised at higher speeds. The fastest I tested was 85mph. I did a little (or actually a lot) of math, and the best fuel economy should come at about 95mph in 6th gear. It's roughly a 5mpg difference doing 85 than 70. The Honda CR-V? Oh, that'd be down around 55mph somewhere. If cars were licensed to cruise on highways at speeds that were better for their configuration, people could save gas. Since just asking people to do it, and the general "drive the speed limit" rules aren't accurate, there has to be a better way to do it. I got into that extensively with a friend who drove a Prius. He insisted if everyone drove 5mph under the speed limit, they would get better mileage. I quantified the results for him with over the road analysis, plus calculations. He rephrased it average out, which may be more accurate, but I never found a way to average out all the cars on the road in the country or the world, even in stock configuration.
Better order some extra bunnies for tomorrow. I'm having a good day today. :)
I used to have a poster from despair.com on my office wall.
And so begins the intended attitude adjustments. :)
I'm not a whore, I'm a slut, but lets keep my personal life out of this, ok?
That's why D&D playing usually ends right about the time puberty kicks in. Well, it divides the players into two groups. The ones who are at home all weekend playing, and the ones who are out dating.
I haven't touched dice since I was 13. Well, except a dirty set of dice, and those were only used during foreplay, until we gave up and decided to just do what we wanted. Sex, just like life, shouldn't be controlled by the roll of the dice.
You know, every time I hear that directed towards me, it sends me into a little rage inside.
Today is special though. It's bring your gun to work Monday. I have something a little more special for you today. I'd to introduce you to my friend, Mr. Glock. It's not a matter of workplace violence. It's a matter of attitude control.
I guess it would matter what your definition of "terminated" is.
It's the same thing that TGIBennaChilies does. Make sure you have a smile, talk warm and friendly, and oh dear god make sure you're wearing enough flair. :)
First thing in the morning, don't expect a smile on my face, unless I was up all night the night before, and had a morning quickie before leaving the house. Even then, I've never had a job that made me want to smile in the morning. Work is work, it's not to be freakin' enjoyed.
I prefer that work ethic. I don't need shiny happy people asking how they can help me. I need someone to answer my question correctly in only as many works as required. No, there's nothing else they can help me with. I don't care that your name is Melissa or Steve or Joanne, I can read your nametag just like any other literate customer. If I need something else, I'm not going to hunt you down, I'm going to ask the sales person who's closest. And no, I don't want to supersize it, and I don't care that it's only 35 cents more.
I went in a store today to buy cigarettes. There's a really cute girl working the counter. Eye candy goes a long way. :) I asked for a carton of cigarettes. She said they only have 9 packs. I said that would be fine, and she gave me my total. I paid, and was out the door in less than a minute. *THAT* is what I want. If I wanted warm and friendly, I'd go play with a cat. If I want a girl to flirt with me and blow smoke up my ass, I'd go see an escort. I'd say my wife, but any married man knows, once the ring goes on the finger, friendliness and complements are gone, unless she wants something. The friendlier she is, the more expensive the thing she wants.
The Veyron? Because they can afford it. Me? Because it actually gets good highway mileage, handles great on wet or dry roads, and I have the power to get around things. I have choices if the person beside be starts drifting into my lane. I can motor out of their way, or hit the brakes.
For the coffee can club, I can bump the gas from a stop light without spinning my tires, and be 6 car lengths ahead when I reach the speed limit and set the cruise. Hopefully they got the idea by that, but they don't always. It's funny watching them continue accelerating, and eventually get pulled over. The thing is, I don't even have to accelerate hard. I can wait behind them, and they'll still speed and get the ticket. :) I guess they're trying to show off that they're "fast". Congrats on that, hope you like the ticket.
Yup.
I'd rather be in a modified Ford Crown Vic than a exotic sports car, as far as that goes. As long as the mods are mechanical and not cosmetic or noise creating, it would blend in pretty nicely. Either your a cop, taxi, an old person, or driving a retired police car. :)
For stealth, I'd go with a white van with Verizon markings on it. Park where ever you'd like, and put cones behind your truck, and no one will bother you.
It's a very very very bad idea to get involved in a police chase.
Just because there's a patrol car following a motorcycle at high rates of speed doesn't mean anything. What if the motorcycle driver was an off-duty officer, and they were both rushing to an incident? What if the motorcycle was going to be only one who could keep up with whatever other vehicle they were chasing? Most police don't have lights on their off-duty vehicles. That varies by location though. I knew a cop in a small town who had a Porsche. He had lights on the dash. You couldn't really see them until he turned them on. He could keep up with fast cars, where the regular patrol cars couldn't, and it was sanctioned by the police chief.
Now, if you see a car run a cop off the road, and it's a fast car, AND you have a fast car, pull over and help the cop. Tell him to get in, and he can tell you what to do. You won't be making the stop, but you can keep visibility on the suspect. He may be very thankful for the assistance.
You aren't a cop, and you don't have a police radio, so you don't know the circumstances of what's happening. Just stay out of their way. They'd rather make an arrest than deal with a fatality during a chase.
It doesn't take a fast or exotic car to lose a cop that way.
I don't like being followed. When it's become more than obvious that I am being followed, I've lost them. Maybe I'm a good target. Maybe they're bored. Whatever. The police like to say, if they follow someone long enough, they can get them for something. I got a "careless driving" ticket once, because the cop said I swerved a little. He followed me for over 10 miles, and I hadn't swerved once. I had the cruise set to just under the speed limit, and I was very aware of my driving the whole time because I knew he was behind me. It was a ticket that neither of us could prove. He didn't bother to show up to court, so the case was dropped.
All it takes is getting out of their visibility, and staying out of it. Two turns on back streets, and change your original direction can work wonders. You can be in an unmarked work van, or an exotic sports car. The difference with a work van is, once you're out of view, your van looks like so many others on the road. How many exotic sports cars just like yours are driving around in the area? I've parked in strangers driveways and laid down on the floor, just so they wouldn't see anyone in it. Ok, that's not the van because it's parked. Oddly enough, it works.
My current car is fairly obvious to spot, unfortunately. The police that patrol where I drive frequently recognize it, and know I don't do anything stupid. Sometimes they'll wave to me, so we're all good. There's a road close to home that's wide open, and would be a good candidate at night to do in excess of 100mph on. The speed limit is 45mph. I do 45mph. My friend has a similar car. I guess they don't like her as much. She's been pulled over a few times. The last time was for a burnt out tag light, and she was ticketed for it.
I-10 could be great for it.
I was cruising between ... Well, I don't know. Nowhere and nowhere. Somewhere west of San Antonio, Somewhere east of El Paso. If I recall correctly, the speed limit is 75mph. The cruise was set to 85mph, and I still felt like I was getting nowhere fast. I kept thinking "160mph would cut this trip in half". I was trying to psyche myself up to just open up and go. I had been cruising in the left lane for quite a while. Every 10 or 15 minutes, I'd pass a car that was in the right lane. While I was doing fuel calculations in my head and still telling myself "160mph would cut this trip in half", a police car came the other way from a mountain pass. He turned around, so I reset my cruise for 74mph.
He just gave me the warm friendly, "The speed limit is 75mph", ran my plate and drivers license to make sure I legal, and let me go. With the cruise set to 80mph, and I wasn't touched again.
I'm sure he would have preferred 160mph. The next thing resembling a town was 40 miles a way. 15 minutes is plenty of time to set up a roadblock. It's not like there was anywhere else to go out there.
I wouldn't have minded taking 100 miles of road, and seeing how fast I could really go. :)
I know people race in the desert in California. I know people get caught out there too. California has some rather insane rules regarding racing. First offense, you lose your car for a month (30 day impound). If it has been modified for racing, instead of impound, it's crushed.
I can testify to that. My car is right around 4 seconds 0-60. I can jump ahead of just about anyone up through about 120mph. Pushing through 140, it's pushing. I've only accelerated just through 150, but ran out of road. A lot of the high speed numbers are worthless, because they'll never be reached.
They say in the article, "...you can outrun not only the 5-0's cruisers, but their helicopters, too. If they wanna catch you, they're gonna have to dust off Airwolf...", but that's sensationalized journalism. Like I said, I've been up through 150mph, or 220 feet per second. Driving along at a mile every 24 seconds has it's drawbacks, like a 5 mile stretch takes 118 seconds to cross. What was a nice long straight stretch of road suddenly becomes very very short. What should take 5 minutes to drive at the speed limit is gone less than 2 minutes. God forbid that you're driving on land, where animals may wander across the road, or a car may come out of a side street. It's not like you're going to swerve without some serious side effects.
I ran across a neat video on YouTube where a motorcycle driver was running from the police. Sure, they couldn't keep up, because he'd zip away in no time. Max air speed for an good unladen police helicopter (no extra equipment, seats, and minimal fuel) is 150mph. If they're carrying their normal equipment and enough fuel to follow with, that drops. He was doing over 150mph, and the helicopter kept up pretty nicely. Why? Because despite the fact that he was able to pull away from the helicopter at points, the helicopter didn't have to follow the road, encounter traffic, nor slow down for intersections. He was driving fast, he wasn't suicidal. A bend in the road creates a shorter intercept route for the helicopter to follow.
If they're really after you, it doesn't matter how fast you're going. They may radio ahead and say to set up a roadblock, which sometimes can be avoided, but it's hard to avoid a shoulder to shoulder nail strip. 4 flat tires will keep you from getting away, no matter how fast your car was. That nail strip can mean a fatality when you hit it, if you're going way too fast.
Do I speed as a daily thing? Nope. I cruise right about the speed limit, depending on conditions. My high speeds have been on tracks, where they belong. I know my car is really fast, so I don't have to prove it to anyone. Even if it's a kid with a Honda Civic and a coffee can for a muffler. :) I'm at the "why bother" phase of my life. Do I need to burn up extra fuel just to prove that I can go faster than him? Not really. It's not worth wasting my fuel, and potentially getting a ticket (or worse).