It doesn't happen a lot. What does happen is, I may not be answering the phone, and people freak out. If they can see I'm in the vicinity of one of my normal haunts (work, home, or friends), then they can calm down.:)
Last year with work, I traveled a lot. Instead of asking "are you at home, we want to do something", they can see I'm in the wrong state and just say "Hey, how are you liking the snow?":)
I'm going racing with a friend, and we are on each other's lists, so I'll be able to see if he's on his way, or already there. The resolution is kind of rough, so it won't tell me if he's on the other side of the pits, but I can just call and ask.
I told my friends, if I should go missing, I don't answer the phone, and I'm not showing somewhere I should be, that's a good place to start looking for me. Still, the resolution isn't great, but the police would appreciate an approximate location with the missing persons report.
Not really. Your trail isn't very hard to follow. You posted at 8pm on a Friday. You're probably not still at work. My guess is home.
45.374226, -122.748914
I'd come by and check, but it's a bit of a drive, and I'm not convinced that you're telling the truth about the doors. That, and all I'd really be there to do is lock them for you. Or, do you park in the garage? I'm not up for B&E just to see if you really locked your car doors.
In my case, I have a wonderful GPS equipped blackberry, with the GPS disabled by the provider. {sigh}. My "location" is determined by the tower that I an connected to, and my signal strength.
As I found out by dialing 911 because I needed an ambulance where I was (long story, not a happy ending), even though GPS was enabled for emergency services in the configuration, they had absolutely no idea where I was. There was too much noise because of the road traffic, so all they knew is I had an emergency. I was on a long interstate, and was probably in their county, since the towers connect to the local emergency operations center. She never repeated back my location that I told her several times. She said someone would be on the way. 15 minutes later, no one had arrived. I opted to transport the person in my car instead. e911 is worthless. They don't really know where you are.
What Google Latitude shows is my nearest tower, and a circle indicating where I might be, based on my signal strength, as detected on my phone.
Whatever agency may be hunting you down (are you really paranoid?) gets either good coordinates if your phone provides it, or range around the nearest tower. Since it's provided by a non-governmental company, I'm sure they're happy to sell that information to whoever pays enough for it. It's not terribly accurate. Right now, it shows me within a 5 mile radius of the closest tower. I could be somewhere. There are only several hundred buildings to check in that area. Am I on the move? Maybe I'm in a car. Am I driving? Does the driver even know I'm laying in the back of his truck? Am I camped out on the back porch of an empty house? There are plenty of empty foreclosed houses these days.
So, am I concerned about my privacy? Not really. A few friends have been added to my list. They're the same friends that I've told "Now you know where I am." I always tell them anyways.
If some spooky agency wanted to pick me up, wouldn't it be a simple matter of checking the tax record, and finding where I work, or any of dozens of resources to find where I live? Most people are fairly predictable. They go to work in the morning. They come home at night. Occasionally they go out and do something else, but most people aren't paid enough to go out on a regular basis any more.
It's a good thing I just don't care. If a user starts sucking up too much bandwidth with weird traffic, I'll just shut down their port until we figure out what the problem is.
If you, an employee of company X agree to the EULA, and start sharing the P2P, there's nothing to preclude me, a network administrator of company X from monitoring the traffic. Once I've identified what the offending traffic is, I could block it, ignore it, or report it in any way that I see fit.
I never necessarily saw the EULA nor installed the software. Sometimes it's as simple as going to the user (you) and asking "Hey, did you install something new on your computer? I see some weird traffic coming from here."
"Oh ya, the new CNN P2P software, so we can use up our bandwidth instead of them."
Now, the IP's probably won't do me much good. I suspect I won't see much else right off.
Where this is going to start upsetting people, is at the providers. The normal flow of traffic is going to change. Instead of 90% down, 10% up (normal traffic patterns), the pattern will be reversed when the customer is typically not doing anything. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few providers start blocking the related ports if it becomes a problem.
Then again, it may be helpful.
CNN used Akamai for their edge network, which put their content as close to customers as they could get. The providers still had to pay for the bandwidth.
Now, with the data being downloaded once and shared within the provider, it could lower their bill. That is assuming CNN's traffic is even a detectable percentage of the overall traffic for any provider. When I've monitored traffic on a few office networks, I rarely noticed CNN.
I guess the important question would be, is this CNN doing this for themselves, to get away from Akamai, or is this CNN distributing a new tool for Akamai? This could effectively cut Akamai's footprint down to just a few machines in a few datacenters. Right now, I've noticed them in almost every datacenter I've worked in. I suspect the ones I haven't seen them in, I just didn't happen to walk past their cabinet or cage. Their bill just for space and power must be huge. I won't even attempt to guess what their bandwidth bill is like.
Normally, I would suggest that this must be justified by the losses.
Would the customer have purchased the software, if they could not have pirated it? In these cases, probably not. There is no loss, because the customer would not have paid if given no other choice.
Now, if someone is selling illegally generated licenses, and the end user IS purchasing them, then there is a financial loss. The end user did intend to purchase, and they did pay for a license, so someone other than you was paid.
In your case, assuming they are unpaid licenses by people unwilling to pay, there wouldn't normally be a financial loss. These licenses are generating support requests which are causing an additional workload, therefore a financial loss for you. You'll have to find a way to use this to your advantage, either through better licensing schemes, or only providing per-incident paid support.
I've used software that must call home at every start. If they don't receive the appropriately encrypted message from the author's servers, they will not run. The bad part has been, what if the author no longer maintains their authentication server? Then the software that was paid for will no longer work. I can't remember which software did this to me, but it was annoying in that I liked it and had paid for it, but I could no longer use it.
I miss the good old days, where I could buy a disk, use it, and the license was just a decoration in the box. Of course, those were the days when the Internet didn't exist for most people, and piracy was rather limited.
Well, as I found when searching for houses, growing food in your own garden may be illegal.
An area zoned as "residential" may be forbidden from farming, which can be considered agricultural or industrial.
The restrictions by the county or HOA may indicate no plants other than X Y or Z.
My mom lives in an extreme of this. She is permitted up to 3 potted plants on her front porch. She is permitted short bushes, no more than X inches (I think something like 24"), that may be no more than X inches from the edge of a sidewalk. Anything else may be removed by the HOA paid landscapers. You don't have a choice.
Where I am, you could (in theory) plant, but coverage from trees is too heavy for many plants to grow. If you were to raise something like corn, that would be a serious problem. You can do almost anything you want, as long as it's not visible from the neighboring houses.
If you grow your own crops to SELL, you fall into a whole new headache.
Are you licensed to grow? Are you following the FDA guidelines? Are you paying your sales tax appropriately. Since you're selling a product, you must file appropriately. The tax man wants their cut, because you generated the product in their area. Remember, they own the land you're standing on, you don't.
And besides the obvious illegal products (marijuana, opium poppies, etc), did you know that it is illegal to sell milk? There's a little more to that story, but you'll be surprised.
The way it works out, yes, the government does want to force you to buy from grocery stores. It's a centralized tax collection location. They'd rather get fat checks from a few grocery chains, than millions of smaller checks from every schmuck that's selling stuff from their homes (which is impossible to enforce all the time).
It was more entertaining when we ran BBS's. We usually had it set up so we could see the connect string. Some people shared the BBS with their voice line, so you'd have to yell for them over the modem tone. Sometimes I'm yell first, and then start whistling to make the connect.:)
If I remember right, the fastest I got was something like 24000 baud. It was one of those oddball speeds. 9600 got to be pretty easy to do.:) Of course, I was just emulating the handshake, when we got to the data part, there was no way in hell I could emulate that.:) I just made a hissing sound, and it'd think it was garbled data, but try to correct.:)
It helps to whistle while breathing in (it takes practice). That'll keep you from blowing on the handset, and making your own line noise.:)
It was educational though. I got to know the tones very well, so I could tell you what speed someone connected at. It wasn't just the tones either, part is the duration, and when the tones change. It also helped us diagnose problems. I could usually say if a connection would handshake too slow, and disconnect before it finished.:)
I almost miss the BBS days. Stupid door games. freq'ing files. Arguing with people all around the world.... But, I met a lot of people through them. We'd drag our computers to each other's houses, connect via null modem, and copy our crap around..:) Now we have the Internet for all that.
Ahhh, a topic I don't even want to think about... Some exit ports should remain designated only as such.:)
Well, that and dating anyone substantially younger than me again. It was nice dating a 21 year old (she was pretty), but... ok, we'll leave it at that.
Way back in the day, I confused a teacher. I was playing with Quickbasic on I think a Win3.1 box. I made a silly random graphic thing, at 640x480 resolution. It would draw lines on the screen, and throw random blocks of color around. I was bored.
Random characters went well, until it hit the bell character.:) The beep gave me away at first, so I changed it to just do the blocks at random coordinates.
The teacher came by, saw what I was doing, and asked.
"Oh, I was just writing a little program to make something pretty on the screen. I was bored."
This was a beginning computer class. The teacher was sure that it was impossible, so I broke it and showed him the code. I was told not to do it any more.
Ya, I remember why I didn't like school much. It was boring.
You don't know me very well. Well, most people online don't know me very well unless they really follow what I write.
I completely and whole heartedly agree with you, Bush committed many illegal acts. I do hope that he and those in his administration that acted illegally, will be prosecuted.
Would "Deep Throat" have been caught if the actions taken in recent history were in place then? No. He was a very careful man. Not surprising, considering he was the Deputy Director of the FBI. He may have changed his methodology, but would have leaked the information that he did.
Information is a very very powerful thing, and must be used carefully. Acquisition of information can be very useful in the pursuit of criminals, or in vengeance for political or personal reasons. In theory that's why we have very distinct security protocols and clearances. I, unfortunately, don't hold a security clearance of any sort. It has been limiting me from taking some excellent jobs. If I ever do find an employer who can obtain the security clearances for me, they will find that there are secrets that I hold, that will never be told.
There are downsides to it. What if, for example, I found that because I held a very high security clearance, my home and phone lines were monitored? What if my wife was cheating on me. I could never tell her that I knew because of evidence collected by my employer. That's part of the job. I'm a very attentive person, and notice things that may seem mundane facts, but together they make a valid case. If such a thing were to happen to me, I wouldn't need my employer telling me, I'd still find enough evidence other ways. (been there, done that, have the ex's to prove it.)
I don't agree with the blatant disregard for the US Constitution and laws that have been broken by our administration, but I do recognize the fact that some rules are going to be bent for the greater good. On the scale that the laws have been bent and broken, I honestly don't believe a "greater good" has come of it.
> They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
Never underestimate the human capacity for taking a problem, and cascading it into a catastrophe. If nothing else, we're probably the best known in the universe for taking a good idea, and destroying something with it.
Knife -> hunting tool -> interpersonal weapon
Gunpowder -> Tool for removing rocks/stumps -> tool for blowing each other up.
Nuclear power -> clean energy -> mass destruction and constant threat of global annihilation.
Hell, we can do it with anything.
Biofuels -> deforestation -> profit {sigh}
I have full faith in humanity that we'll completely destroy this planet. I don't know if it'll be this year, or this century, but I'm confident at some point in the future it will be an uninhabitable sister planet to the 4th planet in the Sol system. Future archeologists may find traces of something, but then again, maybe not.
Nope, if you had a working replica bomb in your basement, you'd never know when it went off. You'd simply be vaporized, as would your neighbors for a few miles. When they identified the center of the crater, then they'd know it was you, but there wouldn't be much to prosecute. I don't think they'd try to prosecute "the atoms previously known as Polygamous Ranch Kid".
Skewing slightly off topic, how the heck do you manage to be polygamous? I can only handle being with one woman at a time. I couldn't handle a whole cluster of them. Even a Beowulf cluster of them.:)
First, hire me. It'll be the best thing you'd ever do. I'm a little pricey, but worth it.
Then we'll make a proper evaluation of your proposed facility. Well take input from the staff. We'll find out what vendors are available and what requirements there will be to maintain it.
Once that is complete, we'll draw up several proposals for how what the staff and administration want could be accomplished.
We won't make an "Ask Slashdot" for a shot in the dark of how it should work. That's all any of us can provide right now.
I interviewed with them about a year ago in Maynard. It seemed like they had a decent shop set up. The folks that I interviewed with were knowledgeable.
I got there just after a huge blizzard blew through. My first flight was canceled. My second flight late. I barely got any sleep at a friend's place before heading out there.
If they'd hired me, and if I had access to catch something easy like "all your passwords are plain text" are one thing. Even if I kicked and screamed, I don't know if they would have changed anything. If I've learned anything in the corporate world, all it takes is one person senior to me to say "It's too difficult to change that." and it goes away.
All I really got out of it was a lot of flying; seeing a friend who I'd only talked to via email and phones for years; and the lovely experience of showing up to my then night shift job, dressed very nicely for freezing weather. I got off the plane, into my car, and drove straight to work. I'm living in Florida right now, so I was very very much out of place.
It seems they have a pretty large *nix infrastructure now. I don't know how much of it is used for what though. They were moderately open with me, but not so much as I'd walk out with any company secrets.
That's gotta be the best Star Wars summary I've ever seen.
Of course, it sounds like she's gotten all of her information from passing conversation for the last few years. At least she got some of the character names right.
I'm pretty sure someone will be around that'll remember 50 years ago, we used 120VAC 60hz sine wave. It's not too hard to find information on "the way it was". Like, back in 1890, the Niagara Falls plant provided customers with 110VAC 25hz. That wouldn't exactly work for the common PC, but it would work incandescent lights fine.
Now, if anyone remembers how to work Linux, OSX, or Vista in 50 years, that'll be the important question. How many folks can attempt to operate state of the art equipment from 1959?
For giggles, I installed Windows 3.11 in a virtual machine. It installed fine, but I couldn't remember how to use it. It took me a while, but I found instructions on getting TCP/IP networking installed, and still I had problems. Relatively, Win3.11 isn't all that old.
I think the bigger concern will be the physical hardware. Pieces will corrode. Parts will fall apart. Media will decay. Maybe, just maybe, it will even turn on.
I was excited to find an old "Novell UnixWare 1.1" (circa 1994) box at an office someone I knew worked at. It was still shrink wrapped from the factory. It sat on the shelf in a climate controlled office. It had been delivered, just in case they had to use it. In about 2005, I decided to install it into a VM. I had to scrounge to find a 5.25" floppy drive to install it. The drive was brand new too, still in it's shrink wrapped box. I happened to have an old floppy cable that I could connect it to, and my BIOS still supported 5.25" drives. I carefully unsealed the box. I then carefully broke the seal on the disk package, after reading it of course.
Everything was going great. I booted to the first disk. It worked! I started the install, and got the bad news. The media was corrupt. I tried to make it work. The host machine was a Linux box, so I tried to make images of the disks, so I could try to restore them back to new disks. The first disk had errors about half way through, which is what I encountered. The second disk was unreadable. I finally gave up. No ancient Unix for me.
I've done the same for old hardware. The "I wonder whats on this hard drive" game is always fun. IDE is IDE, and should (hopefully) work. The drives worked when they were unplugged (according to the note I had attached years before). Some didn't even spin. Others didn't even read.
So, good luck preserving a modern machine for 50 years. You may have a cool ancient toy to play with, or you may have something you can set in the corner and admire.:) Good luck finding replacement parts in 50 years.
Manually, it would be useless. With a good system for tying information together, it would be golden.
Then again, I don't work for the NSA (hey guys, hire me!), so I don't know what they have in place, except I do know they have some really big, really nifty computers.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Barrett Arms 50 cal Model 82A1 - Check
Ammonium Nitrate - Check
Diesel Fuel - Check
Detonator - Check
Iron pipe - Check
Glass bottle and rag - Check
I'm pretty sure it isn't a problem. :)
It doesn't happen a lot. What does happen is, I may not be answering the phone, and people freak out. If they can see I'm in the vicinity of one of my normal haunts (work, home, or friends), then they can calm down. :)
Last year with work, I traveled a lot. Instead of asking "are you at home, we want to do something", they can see I'm in the wrong state and just say "Hey, how are you liking the snow?" :)
Definately.
I'm going racing with a friend, and we are on each other's lists, so I'll be able to see if he's on his way, or already there. The resolution is kind of rough, so it won't tell me if he's on the other side of the pits, but I can just call and ask.
I told my friends, if I should go missing, I don't answer the phone, and I'm not showing somewhere I should be, that's a good place to start looking for me. Still, the resolution isn't great, but the police would appreciate an approximate location with the missing persons report.
Not really. Your trail isn't very hard to follow. You posted at 8pm on a Friday. You're probably not still at work. My guess is home.
45.374226, -122.748914
I'd come by and check, but it's a bit of a drive, and I'm not convinced that you're telling the truth about the doors. That, and all I'd really be there to do is lock them for you. Or, do you park in the garage? I'm not up for B&E just to see if you really locked your car doors.
This is different, but only slightly...
In my case, I have a wonderful GPS equipped blackberry, with the GPS disabled by the provider. {sigh}. My "location" is determined by the tower that I an connected to, and my signal strength.
As I found out by dialing 911 because I needed an ambulance where I was (long story, not a happy ending), even though GPS was enabled for emergency services in the configuration, they had absolutely no idea where I was. There was too much noise because of the road traffic, so all they knew is I had an emergency. I was on a long interstate, and was probably in their county, since the towers connect to the local emergency operations center. She never repeated back my location that I told her several times. She said someone would be on the way. 15 minutes later, no one had arrived. I opted to transport the person in my car instead. e911 is worthless. They don't really know where you are.
What Google Latitude shows is my nearest tower, and a circle indicating where I might be, based on my signal strength, as detected on my phone.
Whatever agency may be hunting you down (are you really paranoid?) gets either good coordinates if your phone provides it, or range around the nearest tower. Since it's provided by a non-governmental company, I'm sure they're happy to sell that information to whoever pays enough for it. It's not terribly accurate. Right now, it shows me within a 5 mile radius of the closest tower. I could be somewhere. There are only several hundred buildings to check in that area. Am I on the move? Maybe I'm in a car. Am I driving? Does the driver even know I'm laying in the back of his truck? Am I camped out on the back porch of an empty house? There are plenty of empty foreclosed houses these days.
So, am I concerned about my privacy? Not really. A few friends have been added to my list. They're the same friends that I've told "Now you know where I am." I always tell them anyways.
If some spooky agency wanted to pick me up, wouldn't it be a simple matter of checking the tax record, and finding where I work, or any of dozens of resources to find where I live? Most people are fairly predictable. They go to work in the morning. They come home at night. Occasionally they go out and do something else, but most people aren't paid enough to go out on a regular basis any more.
It's a good thing I just don't care. If a user starts sucking up too much bandwidth with weird traffic, I'll just shut down their port until we figure out what the problem is.
It still doesn't stop data mining.
If you, an employee of company X agree to the EULA, and start sharing the P2P, there's nothing to preclude me, a network administrator of company X from monitoring the traffic. Once I've identified what the offending traffic is, I could block it, ignore it, or report it in any way that I see fit.
I never necessarily saw the EULA nor installed the software. Sometimes it's as simple as going to the user (you) and asking "Hey, did you install something new on your computer? I see some weird traffic coming from here."
"Oh ya, the new CNN P2P software, so we can use up our bandwidth instead of them."
Now, the IP's probably won't do me much good. I suspect I won't see much else right off.
Where this is going to start upsetting people, is at the providers. The normal flow of traffic is going to change. Instead of 90% down, 10% up (normal traffic patterns), the pattern will be reversed when the customer is typically not doing anything. I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few providers start blocking the related ports if it becomes a problem.
Then again, it may be helpful.
CNN used Akamai for their edge network, which put their content as close to customers as they could get. The providers still had to pay for the bandwidth.
Now, with the data being downloaded once and shared within the provider, it could lower their bill. That is assuming CNN's traffic is even a detectable percentage of the overall traffic for any provider. When I've monitored traffic on a few office networks, I rarely noticed CNN.
I guess the important question would be, is this CNN doing this for themselves, to get away from Akamai, or is this CNN distributing a new tool for Akamai? This could effectively cut Akamai's footprint down to just a few machines in a few datacenters. Right now, I've noticed them in almost every datacenter I've worked in. I suspect the ones I haven't seen them in, I just didn't happen to walk past their cabinet or cage. Their bill just for space and power must be huge. I won't even attempt to guess what their bandwidth bill is like.
At any moment, the reds will try to invade us, and this will become the Soviet State of Amerika!
Normally, I would suggest that this must be justified by the losses.
Would the customer have purchased the software, if they could not have pirated it? In these cases, probably not. There is no loss, because the customer would not have paid if given no other choice.
Now, if someone is selling illegally generated licenses, and the end user IS purchasing them, then there is a financial loss. The end user did intend to purchase, and they did pay for a license, so someone other than you was paid.
In your case, assuming they are unpaid licenses by people unwilling to pay, there wouldn't normally be a financial loss. These licenses are generating support requests which are causing an additional workload, therefore a financial loss for you. You'll have to find a way to use this to your advantage, either through better licensing schemes, or only providing per-incident paid support.
I've used software that must call home at every start. If they don't receive the appropriately encrypted message from the author's servers, they will not run. The bad part has been, what if the author no longer maintains their authentication server? Then the software that was paid for will no longer work. I can't remember which software did this to me, but it was annoying in that I liked it and had paid for it, but I could no longer use it.
I miss the good old days, where I could buy a disk, use it, and the license was just a decoration in the box. Of course, those were the days when the Internet didn't exist for most people, and piracy was rather limited.
Well, as I found when searching for houses, growing food in your own garden may be illegal.
An area zoned as "residential" may be forbidden from farming, which can be considered agricultural or industrial.
The restrictions by the county or HOA may indicate no plants other than X Y or Z.
My mom lives in an extreme of this. She is permitted up to 3 potted plants on her front porch. She is permitted short bushes, no more than X inches (I think something like 24"), that may be no more than X inches from the edge of a sidewalk. Anything else may be removed by the HOA paid landscapers. You don't have a choice.
Where I am, you could (in theory) plant, but coverage from trees is too heavy for many plants to grow. If you were to raise something like corn, that would be a serious problem. You can do almost anything you want, as long as it's not visible from the neighboring houses.
If you grow your own crops to SELL, you fall into a whole new headache.
Are you licensed to grow? Are you following the FDA guidelines? Are you paying your sales tax appropriately. Since you're selling a product, you must file appropriately. The tax man wants their cut, because you generated the product in their area. Remember, they own the land you're standing on, you don't.
And besides the obvious illegal products (marijuana, opium poppies, etc), did you know that it is illegal to sell milk? There's a little more to that story, but you'll be surprised.
The way it works out, yes, the government does want to force you to buy from grocery stores. It's a centralized tax collection location. They'd rather get fat checks from a few grocery chains, than millions of smaller checks from every schmuck that's selling stuff from their homes (which is impossible to enforce all the time).
It was more entertaining when we ran BBS's. We usually had it set up so we could see the connect string. Some people shared the BBS with their voice line, so you'd have to yell for them over the modem tone. Sometimes I'm yell first, and then start whistling to make the connect. :)
If I remember right, the fastest I got was something like 24000 baud. It was one of those oddball speeds. 9600 got to be pretty easy to do. :) Of course, I was just emulating the handshake, when we got to the data part, there was no way in hell I could emulate that. :) I just made a hissing sound, and it'd think it was garbled data, but try to correct. :)
It helps to whistle while breathing in (it takes practice). That'll keep you from blowing on the handset, and making your own line noise. :)
It was educational though. I got to know the tones very well, so I could tell you what speed someone connected at. It wasn't just the tones either, part is the duration, and when the tones change. It also helped us diagnose problems. I could usually say if a connection would handshake too slow, and disconnect before it finished. :)
I almost miss the BBS days. Stupid door games. freq'ing files. Arguing with people all around the world.... But, I met a lot of people through them. We'd drag our computers to each other's houses, connect via null modem, and copy our crap around.. :) Now we have the Internet for all that.
Ahhh, a topic I don't even want to think about... Some exit ports should remain designated only as such. :)
Well, that and dating anyone substantially younger than me again. It was nice dating a 21 year old (she was pretty), but ... ok, we'll leave it at that.
Age of consent (like, you can have sex) Was 14, raised to 16 effective May 01, 2008
Driving age - 16
Military service age - 16
Smoking age - 19
Drinking age - 19
I can't think of any other age specific restrictions that he could be referring to. As far as I know, there isn't an age limit on using a radio. :)
I'm thinking more like BBS's and FidoNet.
I can still whistle connect tones well enough to get faxes and modems to connect. Ahh, there's a talent that's lost on most people today.
I'm in love, and she has a gun... I'll always treat her right. :)
I hope she's not short, fat, ugly, and reads Slashdot religiously. :) Two of those I can deal with. Two I can't.
The complaint was definitely a much better read. Now I'm just trying to figure out who Jessica Nye is.
A girl... with a badge... and gun... that actually understands IT! I'm in love! :)
Way back in the day, I confused a teacher. I was playing with Quickbasic on I think a Win3.1 box. I made a silly random graphic thing, at 640x480 resolution. It would draw lines on the screen, and throw random blocks of color around. I was bored.
Random characters went well, until it hit the bell character. :) The beep gave me away at first, so I changed it to just do the blocks at random coordinates.
The teacher came by, saw what I was doing, and asked.
"Oh, I was just writing a little program to make something pretty on the screen. I was bored."
This was a beginning computer class. The teacher was sure that it was impossible, so I broke it and showed him the code. I was told not to do it any more.
Ya, I remember why I didn't like school much. It was boring.
You don't know me very well. Well, most people online don't know me very well unless they really follow what I write.
I completely and whole heartedly agree with you, Bush committed many illegal acts. I do hope that he and those in his administration that acted illegally, will be prosecuted.
Would "Deep Throat" have been caught if the actions taken in recent history were in place then? No. He was a very careful man. Not surprising, considering he was the Deputy Director of the FBI. He may have changed his methodology, but would have leaked the information that he did.
Information is a very very powerful thing, and must be used carefully. Acquisition of information can be very useful in the pursuit of criminals, or in vengeance for political or personal reasons. In theory that's why we have very distinct security protocols and clearances. I, unfortunately, don't hold a security clearance of any sort. It has been limiting me from taking some excellent jobs. If I ever do find an employer who can obtain the security clearances for me, they will find that there are secrets that I hold, that will never be told.
There are downsides to it. What if, for example, I found that because I held a very high security clearance, my home and phone lines were monitored? What if my wife was cheating on me. I could never tell her that I knew because of evidence collected by my employer. That's part of the job. I'm a very attentive person, and notice things that may seem mundane facts, but together they make a valid case. If such a thing were to happen to me, I wouldn't need my employer telling me, I'd still find enough evidence other ways. (been there, done that, have the ex's to prove it.)
I don't agree with the blatant disregard for the US Constitution and laws that have been broken by our administration, but I do recognize the fact that some rules are going to be bent for the greater good. On the scale that the laws have been bent and broken, I honestly don't believe a "greater good" has come of it.
> They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.
Never underestimate the human capacity for taking a problem, and cascading it into a catastrophe. If nothing else, we're probably the best known in the universe for taking a good idea, and destroying something with it.
Knife -> hunting tool -> interpersonal weapon
Gunpowder -> Tool for removing rocks/stumps -> tool for blowing each other up.
Nuclear power -> clean energy -> mass destruction and constant threat of global annihilation.
Hell, we can do it with anything.
Biofuels -> deforestation -> profit {sigh}
I have full faith in humanity that we'll completely destroy this planet. I don't know if it'll be this year, or this century, but I'm confident at some point in the future it will be an uninhabitable sister planet to the 4th planet in the Sol system. Future archeologists may find traces of something, but then again, maybe not.
Nope, if you had a working replica bomb in your basement, you'd never know when it went off. You'd simply be vaporized, as would your neighbors for a few miles. When they identified the center of the crater, then they'd know it was you, but there wouldn't be much to prosecute. I don't think they'd try to prosecute "the atoms previously known as Polygamous Ranch Kid".
Skewing slightly off topic, how the heck do you manage to be polygamous? I can only handle being with one woman at a time. I couldn't handle a whole cluster of them. Even a Beowulf cluster of them. :)
First, hire me. It'll be the best thing you'd ever do. I'm a little pricey, but worth it.
Then we'll make a proper evaluation of your proposed facility. Well take input from the staff. We'll find out what vendors are available and what requirements there will be to maintain it.
Once that is complete, we'll draw up several proposals for how what the staff and administration want could be accomplished.
We won't make an "Ask Slashdot" for a shot in the dark of how it should work. That's all any of us can provide right now.
I interviewed with them about a year ago in Maynard. It seemed like they had a decent shop set up. The folks that I interviewed with were knowledgeable.
I got there just after a huge blizzard blew through. My first flight was canceled. My second flight late. I barely got any sleep at a friend's place before heading out there.
If they'd hired me, and if I had access to catch something easy like "all your passwords are plain text" are one thing. Even if I kicked and screamed, I don't know if they would have changed anything. If I've learned anything in the corporate world, all it takes is one person senior to me to say "It's too difficult to change that." and it goes away.
All I really got out of it was a lot of flying; seeing a friend who I'd only talked to via email and phones for years; and the lovely experience of showing up to my then night shift job, dressed very nicely for freezing weather. I got off the plane, into my car, and drove straight to work. I'm living in Florida right now, so I was very very much out of place.
It seems they have a pretty large *nix infrastructure now. I don't know how much of it is used for what though. They were moderately open with me, but not so much as I'd walk out with any company secrets.
That's gotta be the best Star Wars summary I've ever seen.
Of course, it sounds like she's gotten all of her information from passing conversation for the last few years. At least she got some of the character names right.
I'm pretty sure someone will be around that'll remember 50 years ago, we used 120VAC 60hz sine wave. It's not too hard to find information on "the way it was". Like, back in 1890, the Niagara Falls plant provided customers with 110VAC 25hz. That wouldn't exactly work for the common PC, but it would work incandescent lights fine.
Now, if anyone remembers how to work Linux, OSX, or Vista in 50 years, that'll be the important question. How many folks can attempt to operate state of the art equipment from 1959?
For giggles, I installed Windows 3.11 in a virtual machine. It installed fine, but I couldn't remember how to use it. It took me a while, but I found instructions on getting TCP/IP networking installed, and still I had problems. Relatively, Win3.11 isn't all that old.
I think the bigger concern will be the physical hardware. Pieces will corrode. Parts will fall apart. Media will decay. Maybe, just maybe, it will even turn on.
I was excited to find an old "Novell UnixWare 1.1" (circa 1994) box at an office someone I knew worked at. It was still shrink wrapped from the factory. It sat on the shelf in a climate controlled office. It had been delivered, just in case they had to use it. In about 2005, I decided to install it into a VM. I had to scrounge to find a 5.25" floppy drive to install it. The drive was brand new too, still in it's shrink wrapped box. I happened to have an old floppy cable that I could connect it to, and my BIOS still supported 5.25" drives. I carefully unsealed the box. I then carefully broke the seal on the disk package, after reading it of course.
Everything was going great. I booted to the first disk. It worked! I started the install, and got the bad news. The media was corrupt. I tried to make it work. The host machine was a Linux box, so I tried to make images of the disks, so I could try to restore them back to new disks. The first disk had errors about half way through, which is what I encountered. The second disk was unreadable. I finally gave up. No ancient Unix for me.
I've done the same for old hardware. The "I wonder whats on this hard drive" game is always fun. IDE is IDE, and should (hopefully) work. The drives worked when they were unplugged (according to the note I had attached years before). Some didn't even spin. Others didn't even read.
So, good luck preserving a modern machine for 50 years. You may have a cool ancient toy to play with, or you may have something you can set in the corner and admire. :) Good luck finding replacement parts in 50 years.
Manually, it would be useless. With a good system for tying information together, it would be golden.
Then again, I don't work for the NSA (hey guys, hire me!), so I don't know what they have in place, except I do know they have some really big, really nifty computers. :)