My TransAm has a rubber skin over most of the outer body, with serious steel reinforcements inside.
A lady ran into me, in her little economy car. The primary damage was scratched paint and a busted mirror. Her car was pretty nicely dented, and that was a low speed accident. She changed lanes into me.
My sister used to own a little Toyota. A girl fell asleep at the wheel going the other way, crossed the median, and hit her head on. After collecting my sister from the hospital (abrasions and a nasty bruise from the belt), we went to her car to collect her personal belongings. The front wheel was bent under the drivers feet. I couldn't even get into the car because it was squished so bad. She's only 5'3". I'm 5'8". If I had been driving, assuming all other things were identical (I couldn't avoid the accident, we still hit head-on), I would have had at least multiple fractures to both legs, and probably a fractured pelvis. Literally, there wasn't enough room between the dash and the back of the seat for me from my pelvis to my knees, and not enough room from the dash to the floor for my knees to my feet.
The police had to pull her from the car, but they didn't have to cut the car to do it.
I've had some things happen over the years, and I know having more metal around me is better.
Now, they could do it better. A design like a NASCAR roll cage is far safer than any car on the road, as manufactured. Parts do give on impact, but the driver area survives intact. Look for pictures of a NASCAR going nose first into a wall at 200mph, and you'll get the idea. They simply don't do that for passenger cars, because it would take up too much interior space. If I had a choice, I'd prefer to sacrifice a little interior space for a full body roll cage, and 5 point seat belts versus 3 point belts, that I know I could survive a 200+mph impact. Think a mac truck at 80mph versus you at 120mph, head on. If you told any officer who's done high speed crash investigations those numbers, they'd say "fatality" without hearing anything else. Unless an undead or God himself was driving, there wouldn't be any survivors in the car.
Don't worry, once you take hostages, it won't be Yahoo responding, it'll be SWAT.:) But when your demands list are solely "I want a human to respond to me from Yahoo", you'll have to deal with the hostages for two weeks, to finally receive a faxed copy of the FAQ.
Trust me, it's one thing to live with an extended family. It's another to have 20 strangers whining about how they want to go home, or they don't like sleeping on the hard floor, or they want more than the bread and water that you're providing, or they need their medication so they don't die. Whine, whine, whine, that's all hostages ever do. And if shoot one as encouragement for the rest to behave, they all just start crying and whining even more. God forbid you release one as a good faith offer. They'll all want to be that one person, and the other 19 that you still have will whine even more about how they should have been the one released. "I have children", "I have a heart condition", "I need my insulin". It's a lose lose situation. 5 minutes after you start, you'll wish you hadn't. By the two weeks it takes to send the fax, you'll have killed half the hostages because they were driving you nuts, and wanted to shoot yourself but realized you already ran out of bullets. Don't worry though, just run out of the building with your empty guns drawn screaming "I'll kill you all", and SWAT will put you out of your misery. Hopefully the shoot to kill. If you're just wounded, now you'll be in pain for a long time, and prison for the rest of your life. Maybe the courts will take some sympathy on you, when they try to get a response from Yahoo regarding the incident and just get faxed back:
Yahoo Legal FAQ
#666 Q: Where should legal subpoenas for Yahoo be sent? A: All subpoenas from the courts should be faxed to us at (555) 382-5968
And the courts will realize, that's where they sent the request to.
The references I found said 300 mile radius. You mention a few more that were grouped with them, so I'd guess your distance estimate is better. The idea of many of those installations were to be outside of the blast radius of a nuke hitting DC.
50 miles would be more practical, but even if they could drive at 120mph, it would take 25 minutes to get to the bunkers. Ya, in an ideal world. Well, I guess a less than ideal world, if the call comes that says "They've launched nukes. They're headed for DC. Take cover", and you find out that you're equidistant to every bunker and with 15 minutes notice, you're still 25 minutes away from any of them. I know in reality, there are plenty of other places to get to, or give HMX-1 a call for immediate pickup.
That is so far from being newsworthy, it's almost funny.
It's pretty much a given that any facility that a world leader will spend a lot of time in, will have a safe room (bunker, if you will). I'd be fairly confident that the Whitehouse has one. The Pentagon is one.:) Camp David has a back entrance to Site-R/Raven Rock Mountain Complex. There's a ring of underground facilities in a 300 mile radius of DC (except for under the water, I assume) that may or may not be connected by a series of tunnels. It's not hard to find information on quite a few of them.
They aren't new. But, they're likely new to people who are surprised by the possibility of a safe room under the VP's residence.
And no, it's not a evil government conspiracy. It's good security. With a whole variety of safe locations to put the people you're suppose to protect, an aggressive attempt by a foreign power would be dramatically spread out to take every possible bunker location. Even with inside information, unless it's someone in the immediate proximity of the President, it would be very difficult for an aggressor to find him.
For example, say I was a secret service agent assigned to the POTUS. I know that there is an aggressive assault on known locations. I also know that someone inside is providing location details to the aggressor. I call in that he is now being transferred by limo to a site Northwest of DC. We send a driver in the limo by himself (with escort following) and then we take a rather plain looking suburban Southwest to another site. Ok, so the President is missing, but he's safe.
Would the aggressor know until the limo stops? Possibly. So instead of one or two known sites, it's almost anywhere in America. Once they can get on a VC-25, E-4B, C-32, or C-40 it becomes anywhere in the world. As far as that goes, he could end up on any sufficiently supplied aircraft (armor, flight range, etc). If they stay up long enough, it'd be a matter of maybe following refueling planes, unless they stop at random large airports for refueling. It may be a foreign government nervous if Air Force One lands at an arbitrary international airport with two fighters circling.:) It would be virtually impossible for a foreign aggressor to monitor every airport capable of taking large aircraft.
The large aircraft requirement gets interesting. In looking for the requirements of those planes, it appears 6k feet can get one down and back up safely. In that thread, someone mentions a C-5 landing a MKC (7k foot runway), and another person mentions a 747 landing at QRA. If it's not loaded down with baggage and passengers, and fuel is kept reasonable, they can get up and down on pretty short runways. It may not be quite as comfortable for the passenger, but I'm sure POTUS will understand in an emergency condition.:)
That's a great story about your dad. He is lucky. Well he had training and experience on his side, but even the best trained people get killed in stupid ways. I'm glad it went the way it did. It sounds like the cop deserved it.
He, being US Army, isn't authorized to operate inside CONUS off of military installations, so drawing his weapon would be a crime. I'm glad the courts saw that it was self defense. Well, that is now opened up thanks to Bush, but I don't see it generally a good thing to have armed military on American streets. If called upon for a special purpose, sure, but not in general.
In my state (which may be different there), that would be aggravated assault, aggravated battery, assault on a police officer, and unlawful display of a firearm, at very least. I'm pretty sure all those are felonies in this state (at least 1 year in jail), but I believe they revised the laws so any first offense involving a firearm mandates at least a 10 year sentence.
But, he was in the right. The cop was being an ass, and deserved to lose his badge.
Most people that you hear about getting caught made stupid mistakes. Like, posting the potential plan to a very public forum. Oops, already done.:)
More than likely, the distribution of the materials won't get them caught. When the source is found out, they'll sing to the authorities about who they gave it to. "Ok, I'm caught. I gave all the info to Bob. He was going to post it online. Bob lives at 14 main street, and his cell phone number is 555-123-4567."
There's always a nasty weak link, and the distribution of the document probably won't be it.:)
Sorry about replying to myself. For the GPS transmission, I had found a tornado hunter group who had a nice little piece of software that they used to track themselves. It uploaded a very small flat file to an FTP server (or HTTP post, if I remember right), containing my current GPS information. I don't remember the name of the software off hand, and I wiped my laptop a while back, so I simply don't have it. You may be able to find it if you google for that information. I don't know that it's still available. Alternatively, write your own. Parsing the GPS data isn't that hard. Remember, you need several of the NEMA sentences to put together all the information on your location.
If you're using Windows, finding the serial port (or virtual serial device, depending on your GPS device) can be tricky. Their software handled that for me, so it was a saved step for me. Using a VZW card on a Linux PC was hackish at best at the time, so I stayed booted into XP. I don't use the card any more, so I can't give any advice on the current state of that.
I did a drive from Florida to Los Angeles (the length of I-10, plus a little), with a webcam running the whole time. When I had cell service, it was uploading the frames as fast as it could to my web server for friends and family to see. I stored all the frames locally too. At the time, I used a Nextel Im1100 wireless card, that was pathetic at best. It was the best thing I could get at the time, but it was terrible.
I then took the whole drive, and consolidated it into a 5 minute video, compressing 2500 miles driven in 2.5 days. Not bad reducing it down to 8.3% of the original drive time. My coworkers enjoyed it, watching the sun rise and set, and what appeared to be me driving at hypersonic speeds across the country.:)
I don't know where I put that video. It was long since lost, but I found some frames that may be from that trip, so I may try to recreate it.
My biggest problems were that the webcam wasn't great in bright light conditions. Near the beginning of the drive (like in the first 50 miles), I stopped at a gas station and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses, and ripped a lens out. I taped that to the front of the webcam, and it made the image look good during the day. When it started getting dark, I had to remove it. The night time driving wasn't much to see. Reflectors flashing by, and the occasional taillights. It didn't tolerate darkness much either, and I when I stopped, I couldn't adjust it out to do any better than darkness, reflectors, and taillights.
I later bought a better webcam, which handled bright lights and darkness much better. You could make out the road and skyline features at night, and during the day it handled flawlessly. It also had a nice wide view, so they could see almost what I saw. I used a lower quality camera to show my rear view, but it died in the first 6 hours of the drive, so I disabled it. I broadcast the opposite drive (Los Angeles to Florida) over a Verizon Wireless Kyocera (KPC650?) with an external antenna. The wireless speed was much better, and I didn't lose service even in the middle of the desert. Frames went down from one to two per second to about 1 every 2 minutes. That was expected. I was also transmitting GPS information back to my web server (Heading, speed, altitude, coordinates), which I had scripted on the server side to integrate with Google Maps. That made the whole thing more interesting. I didn't store the frames locally, though, and because the new laptop had such a high current draw, it toasted one of the inverters I brought along, simply wouldn't work with another one, and blew the fuse in the third inverter when I reached the Texas/Louisiana border fairly late at night. My audience was blind after that. At that point, I had been driving too long to want to stop and find a fuse, so I kept moving. I didn't need the laptop, so I didn't care. I had memorized the route (and had it written on paper), so I just continued on very much alone. No audience. No one to know if I crashed or drove off the road. The rest of the drive took one night, so I was to my destination by about noon that day.
My advice? Record the drive with a webcam, and they'll get a forward facing view of what you saw. Get a camera with a 120 degree view, and they'll have a nice view. Live with the low frame rate or low resolution, or suffer the consequences of a full drive on your laptop fairly quickly.
Really, only a few people had a passing interest in it. After I was to my destination for a couple weeks, no one cared. They don't really care about your drive. A few people who had never driven across the US were interested to see what it looked like, but that was about it.
My biggest problem with both setups was mounting the camera. On the dash, you see the hood and windshield wipers (in my car), so the view is mostly skyline. Unless you put double sided tape on your dash,
I've tried photosynth for several different things, just to play with it. Of course, I have to use it from a Windows machine, so my Linux machine is out.
I recently took a panorama of photos of a friends pool area, where she has flowers around the whole thing (like a freakin' garden, just just the occasional flower). Here's the photosynth.
I tried to follow their guidelines for "best practices". Every frame overlapped. From all four corners, I shot 180 degrees. I overlapped layers, so I could get views from down into the pool, to up into the sky.
The result? Some overlapping frames that they were able to stitch together. There were a whole lot of orphaned pictures too.
I tried to show it to someone, and the cells were pathetically slow to turn into full resolution. It wasn't a connection or a computer problem on their end. Eventually, they would, but it was far from a good panorama.
I wanted to do a photosynth of the SR71 at the Smithsonian's new museum at Dulles. That turned out poorly, even with great overlapping photos. Here's the photosynth.
I did have one turn out well. Here's the photosynth. I shot it from a hotel in Los Angeles, where I had a corner suite in a downtown hotel on a fairly high floor. A coworker had another corner room on the same floor, so I had maybe a 280 degree view. From the window, I shot a skyline layer, a mid-layer, and a street layer. I also followed taller buildings up. I then shot another set of pictures standing back in the room. It was kind of neat that you could pan through, and watch the walls and floors disappear sometimes.
Microsoft Photosynth is far from prime time. Don't get your hopes up. In their original advertising, it was said to merge your photos with other people's photos, to get a better view of a setting. That simply doesn't happen. It fails to recognize a lot of matching photos in the same set. They may get it better, or they may drop it. Either way, I wouldn't hope for it to do something nice, like turn a set of photos from a street into a navigable streetview like Google Maps Streetview.
If only it were so easy to assign the blame elsewhere. Nope, I'm a good white boy, who would blend in statistically with their demographics.
But, blacks didn't have a great time. Unrelated to any of my stories, there was a shooting in one of the towns. I had to go hunting online, but found a transcript from the grand jury on the incident. (ahh, gotta love the Internet)
2 officers were dispatched to a disorderly conduct call at a bar. One black guy was handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. He resisted inside the back of the car, kicking at the doors.
A total of 7 officers showed up.
He was taken out of the car, and while he was resisting, he attacked an officer (by the police accounts of the incident). By the coroner's report, he had skull fractures, crushed testicles, and finally a point blank gunshot wound to the back of the head.
1 guy in handcuffs vs 7 armed police officers.
In the end, the ruling came down that it was justifiable.
Ya, things would have been different if I was black. I probably wouldn't be here to write this.
We're talking about the 80's. They were possible, but not exactly practical. I could have mounted our VHS camcorder somewhere in the car. That wouldn't have been too obvious if they were blind.:)
My dad was a strong candidate for a senior county level elected position.
The incumbent was well rooted in the "good ol' boy" system. He was close friends with the local judges, sheriff, and most of the deputies. This was very apparent during campaign season. You could spot the who's who of local politics at various fundraisers and political events.
That rolled downhill to absorb quite a few other law enforcement people to do "a favor" for them. There was at least one state police officer involved, who later went to jail on bribery and corruption charges. One deputy involved also went away on bribery and corruption charges. Both of those happened after I moved away. I don't keep up with their news much, but a friend told me, and sent the newspaper clippings.
Local police were very friendly with the sheriff's department, as the cities generally didn't have the required manpower at all hours, so through city and county agreements, all of their jurisdictions overlapped. A city police officer from three towns over had arresting powers in any city in the county as well as the unincorporated areas.
When I mentioned that the deputy didn't have anything to hold me on, he didn't. He was actually being a good cop, and didn't want to put his ass on the line for something stupid that he had no knowledge of. The local PD wanted me, but were busy with something else.
By distracting my family with the harassment, I believe they hoped my dad would drop out of politics. They couldn't harass him directly, because they knew he wouldn't screw up. I was a teenager, I'm more likely to do something stupid.
For example, late one night I was driving out of a town towards home. It was a 4 lane divided highway, with only a few cars on the road. I saw a car going the other way, and didn't pay much attention. About a minute later, he had turned around, and was tailgating me. I wasn't sure if it was someone looking for trouble, or a cop, so I drove carefully, expecting them to hit me eventually. After 3 miles of tailgating, it turned out to be a deputy. After a patdown and search of my car, I was given a "careless driving" ticket, that was thrown out when I showed up in court. What if I had floored the gas to get away? I wasn't sure if I should run or not. If I had, that could have been reckless driving, evading law enforcement, blah, blah, blah. a whole stack of misdemeanor charges to put me in jail for a while. I got lucky.
Once I was driving a suspicious car. Oddly enough, it was the only one like it in the area that I knew of.
Once it was that I kept looking in the mirror. Of course I was. A patrol car was following me around.
Once I was told "I observed you tailgating a red truck at through ___ intersection." I clearly remembered that I was following a black car, becuse he was driving slow. I was following at 20mph (in a 35 zone) at about 8 car lengths.
Many were "random" traffic safety stops.
And the hold I mentioned, the officer detaining me did not have any information on why I was being detained, but to keep the situation peaceful, he politely requested me to stay with the car. He was actually very polite, because he had no clue what it was about. He did say that he didn't have legal authority to detain me, but it would likely be escalated by the local PD (he was county). Rather than cause an incident by refusing to stay, I stayed. He sat in his car waiting for further instructions. I stood by my car, and until just before he said we could leave, he wasn't on the radio. This was before the days of laptops in every patrol car, so I know he wasn't doing anything more nefarious.
A lawsuit wouldn't go far. In the area, the "good ol' boy" system was well in place, which is why this was happening in the first place. Me, being a 16 through 19 year old boy during the period, I made enough money to buy gas for my car and a few other things. I definitely couldn't afford a lawyer. I did have several opportunities to speak with lawyers on the subject (on my side). I was advised that I would never beat them. The most I would do would be to upset them more, and find myself in more "random" trouble. My options were to:
1) File lawsuits, and keep appealing up beyond the local "good ol' boy" system. That would be somewhere in the high 6 figures, which it was doubtful I'd ever recover.
2) Get a different car. This worked for about 2 months.
3) Move out of the area. I did this at about 19.
But hey, I don't care if you believe me or not. I know most of the "harassment" stories I read are total irrational paranoia. I thought it was just me for a while, until friends and family started getting annoyed by it, especially when they were in the car with me.
I was informally accused of several crimes. The "where were you on __ day" question was kind of hard. 6 months ago, at 10pm, where were you? I had no clue. At home asleep? At a friends house? At the movies? As the interrogation continued, it became clear that I was the only suspect in a tv/stereo store robbery. As it turned out later, it was insurance fraud, and I was just a good candidate to harass. Maybe it would have been better if they could have solicited a spontaneous confession. I was so clueless on the whole matter that I couldn't even say something wrong that would match the crime. I've since learned (now being older and wiser), STFU. If they want you to confess, even idle conversation will come back to bite you. The smart ass answer "Ok, you've seen my car. How many TV's did I fit in it?" didn't help the situation at all. Luckily, there were no stolen TV's in the crime, but they did use it to continue questioning me on being there. I wasn't.
It would probably help if I explained more of their motive, but... well... honestly, I don't want to tell. It was absolutely nothing criminal in nature though.
Harassment isn't always so obvious. When I was a kid, for political reasons (that I won't go into, but it wasn't directly me), I had my own private escort to and from school by the police. They tried to not be obvious, but they weren't very good at it. I was pulled over in "routine" traffic stops at least once a week.
Once, with my mom in the car, I noticed a patrol car pull behind me. I told her, "We're going to be pulled over.", and she said we weren't doing anything wrong. They followed for about a mile, and when we stopped in a mall parking lot, the officer told us to wait with the car. It wasn't his call, he was just told to keep us there until further notice. There wasn't even an ID check. We were just held for 15 minutes, before the harassing officers radioed over to say to let us go this time. They were busy with something else. I was just an easy target that day.
It became a game with me. I'd spot them before they'd get close behind me, so I'd pull nice polite evasive maneuvers (3 signaled turns on side streets to get out of view, then park and lay the seat down). They may have slowed down my trip by a minute or two, but it was better than being ID'd, personally searched, vehicle searched, questioned, and finally let go.
Once an officer followed me for 5 miles. Very obviously, because he followed my lane changes, turns, etc. I even made some nonsensical turns, like off of the main road, loop through a neighborhood, and back onto the same main road in the same direction. I pulled into a parking lot with a store, and we got out. He parked several rows over and did the same thing. We were slow about getting out of the car, so he didn't want to be obvious, and walked into the store. Once he was in with his back turned, we got back into our car, and drove away. From the exit of the parking lot, we saw him running for his car. He got caught up in traffic, where we made a clean exit (before the traffic), so we had a 2 minute advantage to get out of sight.
I grew up thinking that's how the police treated either kids or drivers in general. It happened until I moved out of the area. I was amazed that I wasn't pulled over for anything for years after that.
I recommend against anything that will make a law enforcement agency want to harass you. If you do, do it very very quietly. In this case, photocopies of the document mailed to the appropriate investigative agencies anonymously are a good idea. Scanning and emailing (from a dummy webmail account in a public location through proxies is good) is a good idea also. Submitting to wikileaks and other similar places is good. Is it interesting enough for the ACLU, EFF, or AlterNet to be interested in?
The big question is, is the risk (continued harassment for years) worth the gain (busting one cop for smoking pot, or whatever?)
You could distribute to be redistributed. It's not hard to my online info (look at my profile), and I can give a hint if it's worth the trouble. Contact me through a dummy account, but remember to check it for my response.
50 copies on the well worn coin fed copy machine at your local grocery store, shipping store, etc. As a note, wear gloves, or when you print them, be sure to dispose of the first and last copies (the ones with your fingerprints on them).
If it's so nasty that the police will retaliate, they're going to fingerprint them to see if they can find the source.
An anonymous drop at all the local and quasi-local publications (like state/regional TV stations and newspapers) will go a long way.
Sure, they may gather the surveillance tapes to try to figure out who did it, so a few copies on various days would work very well. That, or buy an old scanner/printer from a yard sale for cash, and have at it.
I wouldn't worry too much about them tracing the source, but then again, paranoia isn't just a psychological problem, it's a protective mechanism.:)
Actually, their hiring practice is for people with degrees. The bigger your degree, the better your position. People like me, with no degree and a huge excellent work history end up farther down the list.
I don't quite get that. Why would someone who learned exactly the material for tests, but has no real world experience be a preferred candidate over someone who has a decade of practice in the real world and knows virtually every situation that you could encounter, how to fix it and (most importantly) how to avoid it?
What you're asking is if ALL life could adapt quickly enough. But I'm sure the question on your mind is can humans adapt fast enough.
There is plenty of life on the planet that can handle extremely harsh environments. As the weaker life dies off, the stronger life will thrive. New ecosystems will form, and life will continue. We may not be happy with it, but it will be life.
I get that a lot. But lets walk into the server room and I can tell you all about it. You go first, I have to grab something from my desk.
[door slams shut]
[electronic deadbolts engage]
"Hey, what's going on?"
"Oh, don't worry, it's just the automated security system. I forgot to disable it. Gimme one second."
"Hey, the lights just went off!"
"Don't worry. Do you see the red exit light across the room there?"
"ya"
"Just go to that door, it's unlocked."
"WHAAA!"
There's a soft thud as Lunzo falls through the missing raised floor panel, down a strangely located chute, and into the waiting garbage compactor outside.
"Oh, and be careful of the hole. We've been meaning to fix that."
Hmmm, did the red button start the compactor, or unlock the doors? Only one way to find out.
"WHAAAA!"
[crunching sounds]
I would think people would learn not to ask so many questions. Then again, witnesses are a liability.
You bring up the magic question, how many virtual IP's can be on one box? I don't know the limit on a Linux machine. I brought up an entire private/24 on one, just for the fun of it. So, if you considered that each of 50,000 machines had 254 IP's on them (a wild idea, but still), they could have just 197 machines.
There are oddities in there. Like, Google has some decent square footage with QTS in Atlanta.
Is the number, the number of machines in house, or the number of machines managed by the company in house? Places like Equinix have huge facilities, but they don't manage them (except for helping hands support).
Just because a company takes a bigger footprint, does that make them bigger? My old place had an Alexa rank in the top 300, but the main sites were served from maybe 24 machines set up for well over 10 million users/day, not including hot spares and ancillary equipment (DNS, mail, etc). That was unique users, not requests or page views.:)
I know Quantcast has a huge footprint, but they're in someone elses facility. I think it was only one of a few DC's that they're in. I didn't know it was their equipment until I talked to one of their techs. It was a very nice setup. The conversation with my coworkers went "I want to set our stuff up like theirs. Too bad we have dissimilar equipment, it'll never look so good."
Depending on who you're looking at, the footprint isn't the front end either. Places like Google, Quantcast, and many others have a LOT of non-public equipment for doing the fun stuff. Like Google has a slew of spiders crawling, analyzing, etc. It's perfectly likely the could (not necessarily do) get away with just a few dozen front end machines for Google.com, and pass the work off to back end machines.
It's all in the strategy that they use. If you're a multibillion dollar operation, do you squeeze every bit of power you have out of a machine, or stay real low and spread it across many? For my old place, I set up to squeeze everything I could out of them, and then spread out across machines so we could lose machines (hardware failures usually) without hurting the site. We didn't have the budget (the bosses liked the profit), but if I had really wanted, I could have probably spread it across thousands of machines. It just makes for headaches and larger IT staffs to keep up with it.
I've read through some really shitty code before. Sometimes you can't determine if it should work right or not, but when you start spotting flaws of a significant magnitude, you can assume the result is wrong.
Since this was never intended for release, and they got paid for it, as long as it gave something, they were happy. Now it's come to bite them in the ass. Ha!
I try to write like there will be an audience someday, even if it's just me reading my own code years later.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the car.
My TransAm has a rubber skin over most of the outer body, with serious steel reinforcements inside.
A lady ran into me, in her little economy car. The primary damage was scratched paint and a busted mirror. Her car was pretty nicely dented, and that was a low speed accident. She changed lanes into me.
My sister used to own a little Toyota. A girl fell asleep at the wheel going the other way, crossed the median, and hit her head on. After collecting my sister from the hospital (abrasions and a nasty bruise from the belt), we went to her car to collect her personal belongings. The front wheel was bent under the drivers feet. I couldn't even get into the car because it was squished so bad. She's only 5'3". I'm 5'8". If I had been driving, assuming all other things were identical (I couldn't avoid the accident, we still hit head-on), I would have had at least multiple fractures to both legs, and probably a fractured pelvis. Literally, there wasn't enough room between the dash and the back of the seat for me from my pelvis to my knees, and not enough room from the dash to the floor for my knees to my feet.
The police had to pull her from the car, but they didn't have to cut the car to do it.
I've had some things happen over the years, and I know having more metal around me is better.
Now, they could do it better. A design like a NASCAR roll cage is far safer than any car on the road, as manufactured. Parts do give on impact, but the driver area survives intact. Look for pictures of a NASCAR going nose first into a wall at 200mph, and you'll get the idea. They simply don't do that for passenger cars, because it would take up too much interior space. If I had a choice, I'd prefer to sacrifice a little interior space for a full body roll cage, and 5 point seat belts versus 3 point belts, that I know I could survive a 200+mph impact. Think a mac truck at 80mph versus you at 120mph, head on. If you told any officer who's done high speed crash investigations those numbers, they'd say "fatality" without hearing anything else. Unless an undead or God himself was driving, there wouldn't be any survivors in the car.
2.5 days = 3600 minutes.
Oops, sorry, math error. 0.14%
Don't worry, once you take hostages, it won't be Yahoo responding, it'll be SWAT. :) But when your demands list are solely "I want a human to respond to me from Yahoo", you'll have to deal with the hostages for two weeks, to finally receive a faxed copy of the FAQ.
Trust me, it's one thing to live with an extended family. It's another to have 20 strangers whining about how they want to go home, or they don't like sleeping on the hard floor, or they want more than the bread and water that you're providing, or they need their medication so they don't die. Whine, whine, whine, that's all hostages ever do. And if shoot one as encouragement for the rest to behave, they all just start crying and whining even more. God forbid you release one as a good faith offer. They'll all want to be that one person, and the other 19 that you still have will whine even more about how they should have been the one released. "I have children", "I have a heart condition", "I need my insulin". It's a lose lose situation. 5 minutes after you start, you'll wish you hadn't. By the two weeks it takes to send the fax, you'll have killed half the hostages because they were driving you nuts, and wanted to shoot yourself but realized you already ran out of bullets. Don't worry though, just run out of the building with your empty guns drawn screaming "I'll kill you all", and SWAT will put you out of your misery. Hopefully the shoot to kill. If you're just wounded, now you'll be in pain for a long time, and prison for the rest of your life. Maybe the courts will take some sympathy on you, when they try to get a response from Yahoo regarding the incident and just get faxed back:
Yahoo Legal FAQ
#666
Q: Where should legal subpoenas for Yahoo be sent?
A: All subpoenas from the courts should be faxed to us at (555) 382-5968
And the courts will realize, that's where they sent the request to.
The references I found said 300 mile radius. You mention a few more that were grouped with them, so I'd guess your distance estimate is better. The idea of many of those installations were to be outside of the blast radius of a nuke hitting DC.
50 miles would be more practical, but even if they could drive at 120mph, it would take 25 minutes to get to the bunkers. Ya, in an ideal world. Well, I guess a less than ideal world, if the call comes that says "They've launched nukes. They're headed for DC. Take cover", and you find out that you're equidistant to every bunker and with 15 minutes notice, you're still 25 minutes away from any of them. I know in reality, there are plenty of other places to get to, or give HMX-1 a call for immediate pickup.
That is so far from being newsworthy, it's almost funny.
It's pretty much a given that any facility that a world leader will spend a lot of time in, will have a safe room (bunker, if you will). I'd be fairly confident that the Whitehouse has one. The Pentagon is one. :) Camp David has a back entrance to Site-R/Raven Rock Mountain Complex. There's a ring of underground facilities in a 300 mile radius of DC (except for under the water, I assume) that may or may not be connected by a series of tunnels. It's not hard to find information on quite a few of them.
They aren't new. But, they're likely new to people who are surprised by the possibility of a safe room under the VP's residence.
And no, it's not a evil government conspiracy. It's good security. With a whole variety of safe locations to put the people you're suppose to protect, an aggressive attempt by a foreign power would be dramatically spread out to take every possible bunker location. Even with inside information, unless it's someone in the immediate proximity of the President, it would be very difficult for an aggressor to find him.
For example, say I was a secret service agent assigned to the POTUS. I know that there is an aggressive assault on known locations. I also know that someone inside is providing location details to the aggressor. I call in that he is now being transferred by limo to a site Northwest of DC. We send a driver in the limo by himself (with escort following) and then we take a rather plain looking suburban Southwest to another site. Ok, so the President is missing, but he's safe.
Would the aggressor know until the limo stops? Possibly. So instead of one or two known sites, it's almost anywhere in America. Once they can get on a VC-25, E-4B, C-32, or C-40 it becomes anywhere in the world. As far as that goes, he could end up on any sufficiently supplied aircraft (armor, flight range, etc). If they stay up long enough, it'd be a matter of maybe following refueling planes, unless they stop at random large airports for refueling. It may be a foreign government nervous if Air Force One lands at an arbitrary international airport with two fighters circling. :) It would be virtually impossible for a foreign aggressor to monitor every airport capable of taking large aircraft.
The large aircraft requirement gets interesting. In looking for the requirements of those planes, it appears 6k feet can get one down and back up safely. In that thread, someone mentions a C-5 landing a MKC (7k foot runway), and another person mentions a 747 landing at QRA. If it's not loaded down with baggage and passengers, and fuel is kept reasonable, they can get up and down on pretty short runways. It may not be quite as comfortable for the passenger, but I'm sure POTUS will understand in an emergency condition. :)
That's a great story about your dad. He is lucky. Well he had training and experience on his side, but even the best trained people get killed in stupid ways. I'm glad it went the way it did. It sounds like the cop deserved it.
He, being US Army, isn't authorized to operate inside CONUS off of military installations, so drawing his weapon would be a crime. I'm glad the courts saw that it was self defense. Well, that is now opened up thanks to Bush, but I don't see it generally a good thing to have armed military on American streets. If called upon for a special purpose, sure, but not in general.
In my state (which may be different there), that would be aggravated assault, aggravated battery, assault on a police officer, and unlawful display of a firearm, at very least. I'm pretty sure all those are felonies in this state (at least 1 year in jail), but I believe they revised the laws so any first offense involving a firearm mandates at least a 10 year sentence.
But, he was in the right. The cop was being an ass, and deserved to lose his badge.
Most people that you hear about getting caught made stupid mistakes. Like, posting the potential plan to a very public forum. Oops, already done. :)
More than likely, the distribution of the materials won't get them caught. When the source is found out, they'll sing to the authorities about who they gave it to. "Ok, I'm caught. I gave all the info to Bob. He was going to post it online. Bob lives at 14 main street, and his cell phone number is 555-123-4567."
There's always a nasty weak link, and the distribution of the document probably won't be it. :)
Sorry about replying to myself. For the GPS transmission, I had found a tornado hunter group who had a nice little piece of software that they used to track themselves. It uploaded a very small flat file to an FTP server (or HTTP post, if I remember right), containing my current GPS information. I don't remember the name of the software off hand, and I wiped my laptop a while back, so I simply don't have it. You may be able to find it if you google for that information. I don't know that it's still available. Alternatively, write your own. Parsing the GPS data isn't that hard. Remember, you need several of the NEMA sentences to put together all the information on your location.
If you're using Windows, finding the serial port (or virtual serial device, depending on your GPS device) can be tricky. Their software handled that for me, so it was a saved step for me. Using a VZW card on a Linux PC was hackish at best at the time, so I stayed booted into XP. I don't use the card any more, so I can't give any advice on the current state of that.
I did a drive from Florida to Los Angeles (the length of I-10, plus a little), with a webcam running the whole time. When I had cell service, it was uploading the frames as fast as it could to my web server for friends and family to see. I stored all the frames locally too. At the time, I used a Nextel Im1100 wireless card, that was pathetic at best. It was the best thing I could get at the time, but it was terrible.
I then took the whole drive, and consolidated it into a 5 minute video, compressing 2500 miles driven in 2.5 days. Not bad reducing it down to 8.3% of the original drive time. My coworkers enjoyed it, watching the sun rise and set, and what appeared to be me driving at hypersonic speeds across the country. :)
I don't know where I put that video. It was long since lost, but I found some frames that may be from that trip, so I may try to recreate it.
My biggest problems were that the webcam wasn't great in bright light conditions. Near the beginning of the drive (like in the first 50 miles), I stopped at a gas station and bought a pair of cheap sunglasses, and ripped a lens out. I taped that to the front of the webcam, and it made the image look good during the day. When it started getting dark, I had to remove it. The night time driving wasn't much to see. Reflectors flashing by, and the occasional taillights. It didn't tolerate darkness much either, and I when I stopped, I couldn't adjust it out to do any better than darkness, reflectors, and taillights.
I later bought a better webcam, which handled bright lights and darkness much better. You could make out the road and skyline features at night, and during the day it handled flawlessly. It also had a nice wide view, so they could see almost what I saw. I used a lower quality camera to show my rear view, but it died in the first 6 hours of the drive, so I disabled it. I broadcast the opposite drive (Los Angeles to Florida) over a Verizon Wireless Kyocera (KPC650?) with an external antenna. The wireless speed was much better, and I didn't lose service even in the middle of the desert. Frames went down from one to two per second to about 1 every 2 minutes. That was expected. I was also transmitting GPS information back to my web server (Heading, speed, altitude, coordinates), which I had scripted on the server side to integrate with Google Maps. That made the whole thing more interesting. I didn't store the frames locally, though, and because the new laptop had such a high current draw, it toasted one of the inverters I brought along, simply wouldn't work with another one, and blew the fuse in the third inverter when I reached the Texas/Louisiana border fairly late at night. My audience was blind after that. At that point, I had been driving too long to want to stop and find a fuse, so I kept moving. I didn't need the laptop, so I didn't care. I had memorized the route (and had it written on paper), so I just continued on very much alone. No audience. No one to know if I crashed or drove off the road. The rest of the drive took one night, so I was to my destination by about noon that day.
My advice? Record the drive with a webcam, and they'll get a forward facing view of what you saw. Get a camera with a 120 degree view, and they'll have a nice view. Live with the low frame rate or low resolution, or suffer the consequences of a full drive on your laptop fairly quickly.
Really, only a few people had a passing interest in it. After I was to my destination for a couple weeks, no one cared. They don't really care about your drive. A few people who had never driven across the US were interested to see what it looked like, but that was about it.
My biggest problem with both setups was mounting the camera. On the dash, you see the hood and windshield wipers (in my car), so the view is mostly skyline. Unless you put double sided tape on your dash,
I've tried photosynth for several different things, just to play with it. Of course, I have to use it from a Windows machine, so my Linux machine is out.
I recently took a panorama of photos of a friends pool area, where she has flowers around the whole thing (like a freakin' garden, just just the occasional flower). Here's the photosynth.
I tried to follow their guidelines for "best practices". Every frame overlapped. From all four corners, I shot 180 degrees. I overlapped layers, so I could get views from down into the pool, to up into the sky.
The result? Some overlapping frames that they were able to stitch together. There were a whole lot of orphaned pictures too.
I tried to show it to someone, and the cells were pathetically slow to turn into full resolution. It wasn't a connection or a computer problem on their end. Eventually, they would, but it was far from a good panorama.
I wanted to do a photosynth of the SR71 at the Smithsonian's new museum at Dulles. That turned out poorly, even with great overlapping photos. Here's the photosynth.
I did have one turn out well. Here's the photosynth. I shot it from a hotel in Los Angeles, where I had a corner suite in a downtown hotel on a fairly high floor. A coworker had another corner room on the same floor, so I had maybe a 280 degree view. From the window, I shot a skyline layer, a mid-layer, and a street layer. I also followed taller buildings up. I then shot another set of pictures standing back in the room. It was kind of neat that you could pan through, and watch the walls and floors disappear sometimes.
Microsoft Photosynth is far from prime time. Don't get your hopes up. In their original advertising, it was said to merge your photos with other people's photos, to get a better view of a setting. That simply doesn't happen. It fails to recognize a lot of matching photos in the same set. They may get it better, or they may drop it. Either way, I wouldn't hope for it to do something nice, like turn a set of photos from a street into a navigable streetview like Google Maps Streetview.
If only it were so easy to assign the blame elsewhere. Nope, I'm a good white boy, who would blend in statistically with their demographics.
But, blacks didn't have a great time. Unrelated to any of my stories, there was a shooting in one of the towns. I had to go hunting online, but found a transcript from the grand jury on the incident. (ahh, gotta love the Internet)
2 officers were dispatched to a disorderly conduct call at a bar. One black guy was handcuffed, and taken to a patrol car. He resisted inside the back of the car, kicking at the doors.
A total of 7 officers showed up.
He was taken out of the car, and while he was resisting, he attacked an officer (by the police accounts of the incident). By the coroner's report, he had skull fractures, crushed testicles, and finally a point blank gunshot wound to the back of the head.
1 guy in handcuffs vs 7 armed police officers.
In the end, the ruling came down that it was justifiable.
Ya, things would have been different if I was black. I probably wouldn't be here to write this.
We're talking about the 80's. They were possible, but not exactly practical. I could have mounted our VHS camcorder somewhere in the car. That wouldn't have been too obvious if they were blind. :)
Well, a fax would leave a timestamp and origin trail. If he's concerned about the local police retaliating, that would make the trail pretty easy.
I really don't want to tell. ... I guess I should.
My dad was a strong candidate for a senior county level elected position.
The incumbent was well rooted in the "good ol' boy" system. He was close friends with the local judges, sheriff, and most of the deputies. This was very apparent during campaign season. You could spot the who's who of local politics at various fundraisers and political events.
That rolled downhill to absorb quite a few other law enforcement people to do "a favor" for them. There was at least one state police officer involved, who later went to jail on bribery and corruption charges. One deputy involved also went away on bribery and corruption charges. Both of those happened after I moved away. I don't keep up with their news much, but a friend told me, and sent the newspaper clippings.
Local police were very friendly with the sheriff's department, as the cities generally didn't have the required manpower at all hours, so through city and county agreements, all of their jurisdictions overlapped. A city police officer from three towns over had arresting powers in any city in the county as well as the unincorporated areas.
When I mentioned that the deputy didn't have anything to hold me on, he didn't. He was actually being a good cop, and didn't want to put his ass on the line for something stupid that he had no knowledge of. The local PD wanted me, but were busy with something else.
By distracting my family with the harassment, I believe they hoped my dad would drop out of politics. They couldn't harass him directly, because they knew he wouldn't screw up. I was a teenager, I'm more likely to do something stupid.
For example, late one night I was driving out of a town towards home. It was a 4 lane divided highway, with only a few cars on the road. I saw a car going the other way, and didn't pay much attention. About a minute later, he had turned around, and was tailgating me. I wasn't sure if it was someone looking for trouble, or a cop, so I drove carefully, expecting them to hit me eventually. After 3 miles of tailgating, it turned out to be a deputy. After a patdown and search of my car, I was given a "careless driving" ticket, that was thrown out when I showed up in court. What if I had floored the gas to get away? I wasn't sure if I should run or not. If I had, that could have been reckless driving, evading law enforcement, blah, blah, blah. a whole stack of misdemeanor charges to put me in jail for a while. I got lucky.
Fear not, every stop had a legal basis.
Once I was driving a suspicious car. Oddly enough, it was the only one like it in the area that I knew of.
Once it was that I kept looking in the mirror. Of course I was. A patrol car was following me around.
Once I was told "I observed you tailgating a red truck at through ___ intersection." I clearly remembered that I was following a black car, becuse he was driving slow. I was following at 20mph (in a 35 zone) at about 8 car lengths.
Many were "random" traffic safety stops.
And the hold I mentioned, the officer detaining me did not have any information on why I was being detained, but to keep the situation peaceful, he politely requested me to stay with the car. He was actually very polite, because he had no clue what it was about. He did say that he didn't have legal authority to detain me, but it would likely be escalated by the local PD (he was county). Rather than cause an incident by refusing to stay, I stayed. He sat in his car waiting for further instructions. I stood by my car, and until just before he said we could leave, he wasn't on the radio. This was before the days of laptops in every patrol car, so I know he wasn't doing anything more nefarious.
A lawsuit wouldn't go far. In the area, the "good ol' boy" system was well in place, which is why this was happening in the first place. Me, being a 16 through 19 year old boy during the period, I made enough money to buy gas for my car and a few other things. I definitely couldn't afford a lawyer. I did have several opportunities to speak with lawyers on the subject (on my side). I was advised that I would never beat them. The most I would do would be to upset them more, and find myself in more "random" trouble. My options were to:
1) File lawsuits, and keep appealing up beyond the local "good ol' boy" system. That would be somewhere in the high 6 figures, which it was doubtful I'd ever recover.
2) Get a different car. This worked for about 2 months.
3) Move out of the area. I did this at about 19.
But hey, I don't care if you believe me or not. I know most of the "harassment" stories I read are total irrational paranoia. I thought it was just me for a while, until friends and family started getting annoyed by it, especially when they were in the car with me.
I was informally accused of several crimes. The "where were you on __ day" question was kind of hard. 6 months ago, at 10pm, where were you? I had no clue. At home asleep? At a friends house? At the movies? As the interrogation continued, it became clear that I was the only suspect in a tv/stereo store robbery. As it turned out later, it was insurance fraud, and I was just a good candidate to harass. Maybe it would have been better if they could have solicited a spontaneous confession. I was so clueless on the whole matter that I couldn't even say something wrong that would match the crime. I've since learned (now being older and wiser), STFU. If they want you to confess, even idle conversation will come back to bite you. The smart ass answer "Ok, you've seen my car. How many TV's did I fit in it?" didn't help the situation at all. Luckily, there were no stolen TV's in the crime, but they did use it to continue questioning me on being there. I wasn't.
It would probably help if I explained more of their motive, but ... well ... honestly, I don't want to tell. It was absolutely nothing criminal in nature though.
Harassment isn't always so obvious. When I was a kid, for political reasons (that I won't go into, but it wasn't directly me), I had my own private escort to and from school by the police. They tried to not be obvious, but they weren't very good at it. I was pulled over in "routine" traffic stops at least once a week.
Once, with my mom in the car, I noticed a patrol car pull behind me. I told her, "We're going to be pulled over.", and she said we weren't doing anything wrong. They followed for about a mile, and when we stopped in a mall parking lot, the officer told us to wait with the car. It wasn't his call, he was just told to keep us there until further notice. There wasn't even an ID check. We were just held for 15 minutes, before the harassing officers radioed over to say to let us go this time. They were busy with something else. I was just an easy target that day.
It became a game with me. I'd spot them before they'd get close behind me, so I'd pull nice polite evasive maneuvers (3 signaled turns on side streets to get out of view, then park and lay the seat down). They may have slowed down my trip by a minute or two, but it was better than being ID'd, personally searched, vehicle searched, questioned, and finally let go.
Once an officer followed me for 5 miles. Very obviously, because he followed my lane changes, turns, etc. I even made some nonsensical turns, like off of the main road, loop through a neighborhood, and back onto the same main road in the same direction. I pulled into a parking lot with a store, and we got out. He parked several rows over and did the same thing. We were slow about getting out of the car, so he didn't want to be obvious, and walked into the store. Once he was in with his back turned, we got back into our car, and drove away. From the exit of the parking lot, we saw him running for his car. He got caught up in traffic, where we made a clean exit (before the traffic), so we had a 2 minute advantage to get out of sight.
I grew up thinking that's how the police treated either kids or drivers in general. It happened until I moved out of the area. I was amazed that I wasn't pulled over for anything for years after that.
I recommend against anything that will make a law enforcement agency want to harass you. If you do, do it very very quietly. In this case, photocopies of the document mailed to the appropriate investigative agencies anonymously are a good idea. Scanning and emailing (from a dummy webmail account in a public location through proxies is good) is a good idea also. Submitting to wikileaks and other similar places is good. Is it interesting enough for the ACLU, EFF, or AlterNet to be interested in?
The big question is, is the risk (continued harassment for years) worth the gain (busting one cop for smoking pot, or whatever?)
You could distribute to be redistributed. It's not hard to my online info (look at my profile), and I can give a hint if it's worth the trouble. Contact me through a dummy account, but remember to check it for my response.
50 copies on the well worn coin fed copy machine at your local grocery store, shipping store, etc. As a note, wear gloves, or when you print them, be sure to dispose of the first and last copies (the ones with your fingerprints on them).
If it's so nasty that the police will retaliate, they're going to fingerprint them to see if they can find the source.
An anonymous drop at all the local and quasi-local publications (like state/regional TV stations and newspapers) will go a long way.
Sure, they may gather the surveillance tapes to try to figure out who did it, so a few copies on various days would work very well. That, or buy an old scanner/printer from a yard sale for cash, and have at it.
I wouldn't worry too much about them tracing the source, but then again, paranoia isn't just a psychological problem, it's a protective mechanism. :)
Actually, their hiring practice is for people with degrees. The bigger your degree, the better your position. People like me, with no degree and a huge excellent work history end up farther down the list.
I don't quite get that. Why would someone who learned exactly the material for tests, but has no real world experience be a preferred candidate over someone who has a decade of practice in the real world and knows virtually every situation that you could encounter, how to fix it and (most importantly) how to avoid it?
What you're asking is if ALL life could adapt quickly enough. But I'm sure the question on your mind is can humans adapt fast enough.
There is plenty of life on the planet that can handle extremely harsh environments. As the weaker life dies off, the stronger life will thrive. New ecosystems will form, and life will continue. We may not be happy with it, but it will be life.
Of course 1+1=1. Schrödinger only had one cat in the box. 1 living cat + 1 dead cat = 1 cat.
I get that a lot. But lets walk into the server room and I can tell you all about it. You go first, I have to grab something from my desk.
[door slams shut]
[electronic deadbolts engage]
"Hey, what's going on?"
"Oh, don't worry, it's just the automated security system. I forgot to disable it. Gimme one second."
"Hey, the lights just went off!"
"Don't worry. Do you see the red exit light across the room there?"
"ya"
"Just go to that door, it's unlocked."
"WHAAA!"
There's a soft thud as Lunzo falls through the missing raised floor panel, down a strangely located chute, and into the waiting garbage compactor outside.
"Oh, and be careful of the hole. We've been meaning to fix that."
Hmmm, did the red button start the compactor, or unlock the doors? Only one way to find out.
"WHAAAA!"
[crunching sounds]
I would think people would learn not to ask so many questions. Then again, witnesses are a liability.
You bring up the magic question, how many virtual IP's can be on one box? I don't know the limit on a Linux machine. I brought up an entire private /24 on one, just for the fun of it. So, if you considered that each of 50,000 machines had 254 IP's on them (a wild idea, but still), they could have just 197 machines.
That's going to come up with some off numbers.
There are oddities in there. Like, Google has some decent square footage with QTS in Atlanta.
Is the number, the number of machines in house, or the number of machines managed by the company in house? Places like Equinix have huge facilities, but they don't manage them (except for helping hands support).
Just because a company takes a bigger footprint, does that make them bigger? My old place had an Alexa rank in the top 300, but the main sites were served from maybe 24 machines set up for well over 10 million users/day, not including hot spares and ancillary equipment (DNS, mail, etc). That was unique users, not requests or page views. :)
I know Quantcast has a huge footprint, but they're in someone elses facility. I think it was only one of a few DC's that they're in. I didn't know it was their equipment until I talked to one of their techs. It was a very nice setup. The conversation with my coworkers went "I want to set our stuff up like theirs. Too bad we have dissimilar equipment, it'll never look so good."
Depending on who you're looking at, the footprint isn't the front end either. Places like Google, Quantcast, and many others have a LOT of non-public equipment for doing the fun stuff. Like Google has a slew of spiders crawling, analyzing, etc. It's perfectly likely the could (not necessarily do) get away with just a few dozen front end machines for Google.com, and pass the work off to back end machines.
It's all in the strategy that they use. If you're a multibillion dollar operation, do you squeeze every bit of power you have out of a machine, or stay real low and spread it across many? For my old place, I set up to squeeze everything I could out of them, and then spread out across machines so we could lose machines (hardware failures usually) without hurting the site. We didn't have the budget (the bosses liked the profit), but if I had really wanted, I could have probably spread it across thousands of machines. It just makes for headaches and larger IT staffs to keep up with it.
I'd rank those in likelyhood (most to least likely) as:
1. Human fallibility.
2. technical/design problem.
3. Evil humans and conspiracies (e.g. PC worm DDOS attack)
>3 && <10(^10^100). anything else
10(^10^100). Divine retribution.
I've read through some really shitty code before. Sometimes you can't determine if it should work right or not, but when you start spotting flaws of a significant magnitude, you can assume the result is wrong.
Since this was never intended for release, and they got paid for it, as long as it gave something, they were happy. Now it's come to bite them in the ass. Ha!
I try to write like there will be an audience someday, even if it's just me reading my own code years later.