My big question is, how do *I* get involved in the game?
It's nice and all to hire private 'security' companies, and have all the agencies beating up on it, but it's already been proven that the most dangerous folks out there are just regular folks (regardless of age). Regular people are the ones finding the exploits to break perfectly good security. It's not a 'security' company with a library of those works who are the most dangerous threats, it's the kid who just figured out an exploit on his own and hasn't released the information to anyone.
I'd like to play, just for the sake of trying. What damage could I do in an environment set up to test how much damage could be done?
I've had labs set up for exactly that over the years. I'd do my own penetration testing, and then use other tools. I've actually slipped up on occasion, and accidentally crashed a machine that I thought was bullet proof. I took a fully patched and current machine, and absolutely beat on it. I left top running on the console, just to see that things were still happening, and the machine hadn't gotten overloaded. I finally ran another penetration testing program on it, and mid-run the machine crashed.
As it turns out, the test that was being run when it died was a test for an older kernel exploit. I was running the current kernel from the distro, but it was.0.1 older than kernel.org. The exploit was known to crash kernels over.1.? older than mine. There was no mention of patching it in the changelog, but upgrading the kernel beyond the distro kernel fixed it.
This has found bad things quite often. What if a simple "nmap -sV -O" were to stop a custom server? I've seen it happen, but it would only stop it on particular ports, because those are the only ports that nmap touched. It solved a long standing mystery with that group, but made a new headache that they needed to fix the oops.
What if the test infrastructure wasn't set up to protect against something as simple as flooding a core router IP? Wouldn't that be significant to know? What if.. what if..
How long would a network survive, if they invited all Slashdot readers to do their worst to it? That would be with the agreement that the people involved would disclose any method they used to damage the network?
As I found, no matter how bad *I* try to be to any network I've tested, I've always had worse with high traffic environments. As I always explained, with over 6 million daily viewers, if say 0.01% of them were semi-capable hackers, that still leaves an awful lot of people trying to damage my equipment. I had a lot of practice defending things.:)
The enemy can, and quite likely will, do something unexpected.
Consider this ground combat scenario.
If I see an enemy platoon flanking us on the right, and an enemy platoon holding their position in front of us, normal strategy would be to assume that the platoon flanking to the right is going to come in on the right, or possibly the rear but risk crossfire.
So, I'd rearrange MY troops to guard the front and right positions, with sentries watching the rear and left.
Normally, this would be a valid case, assuming we were equipped well enough to handle the enemy forces.
If they knew we did not have the firepower to hold them off, they may be trying to force us into a retreat to the rear or left, with an ambush waiting.
We may be calling in reinforcements, or digging in for a fight.
As it may turn out, it was 4 members of their platoon making a lot of noise to appear to be 2 full platoons, and they were really just distracting us, as a bombing run takes out the dam at the top of the valley.
In war, there's no such thing as cheating, there are only winners, losers, and casualty counts. It's all an attempt to keep you on the winning side, and keep your casualty count as low as possible, while making the enemy casualty count as high as possible.
That story was disappointing. I was hoping to hear something more exciting, like they've been sending their spy satellites over Alaska for the last 15 years, spying on the activity at HAARP, and have built their own, that's twice as big, and powerful enough to do almost anything they'd like.. Like, they could give a nice big rain storm a couple days before the Olympics, and then let it dry out for the people. Like, It'll be comfortable. (not dusty, not wet). Maybe induce just enough cloud cover so it won't be too hot..:)
It would be a bigger show if they could cause a huge area to have inner-cloud lightning strikes that would form the Olympic rings. hehe.
Seeding clouds is boring old tech. I wanna know how to control it from my living room, without needing to get out of the Lazy-Boy..:)
Some of the content doesn't get a serious look over on a regular basis, like that footer. It was done once and pretty much forgotten. We get the occasional email noting little mistakes, but not very often. As far as I can remember, we haven't touched that part of the site in at least 2 years.:)
Those are the little things they don't care if people see.:)
Consider the "Blackstar" project, which may or may not be disinformation. They had to build what was seen somewhere, and they needed a big runway to take off from. It never shows up.
I'm sure they hide plenty of projects out there, again, they just leave normal stuff out for folks to see. That's good security. Most people will be satisfied that they've seen "it all", so fewer questions will be drawn.
It's not just all black helicopters and various metal buildings...
But, what if the yellow wire was broken my a micrometeorite sometime since it's launch? Then the self-destruct has already been aborted before it started..
Some facilities shut down entirely, just to not be spotted by the satellite on it's regular orbits.
That's also why you'll never see any of the cool gear on the satellite photos over Area 51. They stick it away somewhere safe when they know an observation satellite is coming.
There are plenty of SSL signers who just need someone at your domain to respond to an email saying that someone at your domain requested it.
Like, if you're example.com, they'll send to admin@example.com to confirm.
And these days, you can get a credit/debit card from WalMart to buy the cert with. Put it under any name you'd like. The only really traceable part of an SSL cert is the credit card you buy it with.
Just don't get it signed with the really big signing authorities, or they'll make you jump through ALL kinds of hoops.
First, any provider can and will give in to pressures. Just because they're not "in" the United States doesn't mean that they won't be leaned on by the United States.
Every provider connects to someone else. Otherwise, you being on your residential Cable/DSL/whatever wouldn't be able to reach Rajhed's IndiaPorn.:)
Being that it is true, the gov't could simply lean on American held companies, or companies with American interests, to find out who you are, find out what's on your servers, or simply get you unplugged. Just because you host at Sealand, in central Siberia, or whereever, you still run the risk of provider A strongly encouraging provider B to do something about it.
Been there. Done that. Got the Federal agent sitting in my office about it. Of course, I played stupid until I found out what the hell he was talking about, and then made some phone calls to find out the rest of the story.:) (short story, our customer handed over an exploited server. It was only because it was exploited, it had nothing to do with the content. They had already put a new machine up with restored content, as good exploit protocol suggests.)
Second, what the hell do you think you're going to say, that will get the feds knocking on your door, on the hosting facility's door, etc, etc?
I run http://freeinternetpress.com/ . If you read what we say, and have said for years, by all the legend of the National Security letters, we quite likely should have our phones tapped, servers confiscated, and been visiting Southeastern Cuba for more than a few days.
In reality though, we've had every (like, EVERY) intelligence agency in the world read our news. That was scary at first, but I made some friends (through other means) who had worked in intelligence, and they broke the bad news to me. The feds aren't watching us because they're interested in getting us. They're watching us because we are a good news source. Even though we've NEVER had a single contact regarding Free Internet Press, we're read every day. Above that, you'd be surprised to find out how many intelligence agencies there are out there. It took us quite a while to decode a lot of the hostnames, even when we ran them up and down a few of our grapevines. My favorite that I still like to brag about is eop.gov . They were monthly visitors.
I haven't bothered to re-check our logs to see what odd hostnames come in any more. It's entertaining, but serves no other purpose.
I'm VERY close with my hosting company. (like, VERY). I'd know the moment they were sniffing around, mostly because I'd be the one to open the cabinet door for them.:)
If it came down to it though, we'd just dump the hostname off to another server (I have a few spare hosting accounts in my pocket, all under different people's names, at different facilities), and put it right back online with a big notice "WE GOT SHUT DOWN BY THE FEDS, Here's the documents!"
If I didn't do it, there are a dozen or so other people with enough access to do it for me. Like, if I ended up in Southeastern Cuba, with an orange jumpsuit, a blanket, and a copy of the Koran (they issue 'em to everyone, from what I understand).
So, what's going to keep you from landing in hot water?
1) Don't say you're going to kill someone.
2) Don't threaten to blow something up.
3) Don't make claims above and beyond anything you're really willing to do.
For example (EXAMPLE!) if you were to say, "I'm going to blow up the Whitehouse tomorrow", if you're not serious, you're stupid for saying it. If you are serious, you deserve to get beaten down and thrown in jail for a long time. While I'll disagree with
Ummm, if I remember right, it's 20/20 vision corrected. The military requires 20/20 uncorrected.
The rest I agree with.:)
I've flown a little bit. It's a lot of fun, but even with a few planes in the air, I've seen some almost incidents. Like, what happens when one plane is landing (approach at approx 65 knots), and another plane taxis onto the runway for takeoff... Oh ya, everyone sh1ts themselves.
Before they could make this work, the FAA would have to adopt a very complex ATC scheme. Right now, they're managing just a few airways, because there aren't that many aircraft in controlled airspace. Uncontrolled airspace isn't too bad, because there aren't that many planes up at a time, and they are all playing nice (generally). Most of the incidents I've heard about are self induced. Like, landing on something that isn't a runway, overrunning runways, coming in a bit improperly and bending a prop, or forgetting to lower the gear.
That air car does look dangerous in the event of an engine failure or loss of fuel. I hope they'd have emergency parachutes (for the whole "car"), and that ATC would have a way to manage traffic around it. For some reason, I could see that being a very bad thing on a 8 lane, 8 layer road in rush hour traffic. But really, if a car breaks down in the center lane of an interstate in a metro area, that makes a mess too.
And just like alien encounters and past life recollections, some people can be guided to "remember" anything.:)
I saw a UFO once.
I was sure it was a UFO.
I couldn't think of ANYTHING else it could be. It was low, fast, silent....
In talking to a military pilot, he mentioned (vaguely, because it's probably classified) that there are military helicopters unofficially stationed in the area. They practice fire on occasion.
My UFO, which is still 100% accurate, because I couldn't identify it, was probably a practice missile, which had already burnt out it's fuel. At the point where I saw it, it would have still been red hot, flying very quickly, and not making a sound.
Some people could have probably been guided into believing that it was more of something. It had a very definiate disk shape, right? Ummm, I guess so. It was traveling much faster than any aircraft could? Umm, I guess so.
Really, knowing what the military does, and where they do it, although I was unaware of this particular airspace (although it's marked on the air navigation charts), it's the obvious answer. Now I just think it's funny. They probably even knew we were there, because we were in the middle of nowhere. I'd bet they were laughing their asses off.:)
If we're in a VR, on a well constructed sphere, and everything above us is simulated just out of our reach, but beyond that limit simply wraps to another point, you'd never have an edge to touch.
It may become obvious that you can never leave without coming back, but then we'd theorize on curved space, and not think of what else is out there, because we can obviously travel to all the extremes, and always end up back here.
I believe it was an "Outer Limits" episode where that happened.
There was a VR simulation, where the people appeared real. As far as they were concerned, they were real.
Inside that simulation, they created the equipment to produce another VR world, where inside THEY were real (again, in their own opinion).
There was something about some subset of them finding a way out of their simulation. It's been too long since I've seen it to remember any more details. I think there was a hot chick though.:) Any good SciFi has a hot chick in it.:)
Why does the god entity have to be a single being? Or why does it have to be categorized into a sexual role (male or female), when those roles are part of our reproduction, which aparently isn't necessary.
But if there is any credibility to the VR idea, why does the god entity have to be a single unit? You'd think that a VR of any significant size would be coded by more than one entity. If it was a dozen humans, half male, and half female, all of the 'god' role, which is most proper, to address it as 'he', 'she', 'it', or 'they'.
Buy hey, polytheism was very popular for many years. It's more recently that the monotheistic religions were forced on most people.
Hallucinations are hallucinations. It doesn't matter if they're induced by illegal drugs, abused products (like the DXM in Robitussin, the nitrous oxide in whipped cream cans, or other of thousands of abused products), lack of sleep, or lack of oxygen to the brain, they're all still hallucinations.
A few that have been passed on to me have been...
Are they giant purple lizards crawling along the roof tops, following you around?
Separating from your body, having your spirit become one with the universe, being everywhere, and then thinking to yourself, "I had a body once. I wonder what that was like..." only to be slammed back into reality a few seconds later.
The ceiling turning into a gridwork, then the cells of the grid being filled with green paisley patterns, which all began to spin simultaniously. The sound of the music turned into taste and color, and your body becomes one with the waves of music.
Or..
Lying in a bed, a dark spirit floats above you, with an evil face, and large tattered black wings, who simply says "it's not your time yet", and then disappears.
Some people relate that when hallucinating, they are easily guided into their hallucination, either through ideas that have been impressed upon them before, or during the hallucination. "Are those ants all over your body??". We've all heard of the floating spirit hallucination, and the light at the end of the tunnel hallucination. Since those have been so impressed on us as the way it's going to be, it's very easy for that to be a driving factor in such hallucinations.
In my only near death experiences, I saw.... black.... Lots of nothing. There's nothing in the great beyond, because I have no preconceptions to guide my hallucinations.
The story mentions 106 stores, owned by CompUSA of Dallas.
Oh, I guess it's nation wide. Their site says they have 103 stores. I assumed they were bigger, as every metro area I've gone has one (or two, or three). Tampa, FL has 4, including close by cities. I assumed bigger cities had more.
I know they have weird losses. In Tampa, they bought Circuit City, and then made it a second CompUSA. Those two stores are 3.6 miles apart, and both are crappy parking lots to get in and out of.
With the decent number of competitive stores in the area, and the... well... Not great staff, and not great prices, I usually stopped at the store, checked prices, and then drove on to other stores. It was fairly rare that I went back to pick something up, but they usually do have some of the smaller stuff that I'd need.
I miss Fry's. I was out in California for a few years, and that place, despite the chaos that the store seems to be, was really cool.
I could walk out with 100 store brand network cables to rewire a site, without going broke, or a few feet of fiber optics for our switches, and never wonder if they'd have them in stock the next day. I had a love/hate relationship with them though. I hated that they'd slap discount labels on anything returned, and put it back on the shelf, but at least I could buy the discounted return, find it didn't work, and return it for a brand new one.:) That was almost habitual. If I had time, I'd buy the returned one, just for the discount, since I knew I'd be coming back in a few hours to exchange it.
Here on the east coast now, I don't know of anywhere like it. They'd put a good size dent in the business of any place they were close to.:)
When you're running the country into bankruptcy to keep a war going, there isn't a lot of money to put into other ventures, no matter how much noise is made saying it's going to happen.
They already have. Your memory implant keeps a perfect record of what you see, here, and experience. You've therefore made illegal copies of said works. Either pay the fines accordingly, or have the device destroyed.
What? It would be fatal to remove it from your brain? Who cares.
Those of us with flawed implants have nothing to worry about.:)
Slashdot Mirror
My big question is, how do *I* get involved in the game?
.0.1 older than kernel.org. The exploit was known to crash kernels over .1.? older than mine. There was no mention of patching it in the changelog, but upgrading the kernel beyond the distro kernel fixed it.
:)
It's nice and all to hire private 'security' companies, and have all the agencies beating up on it, but it's already been proven that the most dangerous folks out there are just regular folks (regardless of age). Regular people are the ones finding the exploits to break perfectly good security. It's not a 'security' company with a library of those works who are the most dangerous threats, it's the kid who just figured out an exploit on his own and hasn't released the information to anyone.
I'd like to play, just for the sake of trying. What damage could I do in an environment set up to test how much damage could be done?
I've had labs set up for exactly that over the years. I'd do my own penetration testing, and then use other tools. I've actually slipped up on occasion, and accidentally crashed a machine that I thought was bullet proof. I took a fully patched and current machine, and absolutely beat on it. I left top running on the console, just to see that things were still happening, and the machine hadn't gotten overloaded. I finally ran another penetration testing program on it, and mid-run the machine crashed.
As it turns out, the test that was being run when it died was a test for an older kernel exploit. I was running the current kernel from the distro, but it was
This has found bad things quite often. What if a simple "nmap -sV -O" were to stop a custom server? I've seen it happen, but it would only stop it on particular ports, because those are the only ports that nmap touched. It solved a long standing mystery with that group, but made a new headache that they needed to fix the oops.
What if the test infrastructure wasn't set up to protect against something as simple as flooding a core router IP? Wouldn't that be significant to know? What if.. what if..
How long would a network survive, if they invited all Slashdot readers to do their worst to it? That would be with the agreement that the people involved would disclose any method they used to damage the network?
As I found, no matter how bad *I* try to be to any network I've tested, I've always had worse with high traffic environments. As I always explained, with over 6 million daily viewers, if say 0.01% of them were semi-capable hackers, that still leaves an awful lot of people trying to damage my equipment. I had a lot of practice defending things.
But a simulated war game should see all options.
The enemy can, and quite likely will, do something unexpected.
Consider this ground combat scenario.
If I see an enemy platoon flanking us on the right, and an enemy platoon holding their position in front of us, normal strategy would be to assume that the platoon flanking to the right is going to come in on the right, or possibly the rear but risk crossfire.
So, I'd rearrange MY troops to guard the front and right positions, with sentries watching the rear and left.
Normally, this would be a valid case, assuming we were equipped well enough to handle the enemy forces.
If they knew we did not have the firepower to hold them off, they may be trying to force us into a retreat to the rear or left, with an ambush waiting.
We may be calling in reinforcements, or digging in for a fight.
As it may turn out, it was 4 members of their platoon making a lot of noise to appear to be 2 full platoons, and they were really just distracting us, as a bombing run takes out the dam at the top of the valley.
In war, there's no such thing as cheating, there are only winners, losers, and casualty counts. It's all an attempt to keep you on the winning side, and keep your casualty count as low as possible, while making the enemy casualty count as high as possible.
It won't matter after 2012 anyways. That is December 21st 2012, at 11:11. (or was that December 23rd 2012 at 23:23?)
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012
http://survive2012.com/
That story was disappointing. I was hoping to hear something more exciting, like they've been sending their spy satellites over Alaska for the last 15 years, spying on the activity at HAARP, and have built their own, that's twice as big, and powerful enough to do almost anything they'd like.. Like, they could give a nice big rain storm a couple days before the Olympics, and then let it dry out for the people. Like, It'll be comfortable. (not dusty, not wet). Maybe induce just enough cloud cover so it won't be too hot.. :)
:)
It would be a bigger show if they could cause a huge area to have inner-cloud lightning strikes that would form the Olympic rings. hehe.
Seeding clouds is boring old tech. I wanna know how to control it from my living room, without needing to get out of the Lazy-Boy..
gpuk,
Thanks.
Some of the content doesn't get a serious look over on a regular basis, like that footer. It was done once and pretty much forgotten. We get the occasional email noting little mistakes, but not very often. As far as I can remember, we haven't touched that part of the site in at least 2 years.
Disinformation is a wonderful thing.
Honestly, I wonder how much work they really do at Area 51.
More than likely they do even more interesting work elsewhere, but since they keep doing weird stuff at Area 51, people will keep looking there.
Then again, they're paying a lot of people to do BS work, if there's nothing going on there.
Maybe they just run the IRS call center out of there.
haha.
Nah, if it was Fox, I would have quoted about it, and we would have both laughed.
It's the better side, and I still can't say who.
Those are the little things they don't care if people see. :)
Consider the "Blackstar" project, which may or may not be disinformation. They had to build what was seen somewhere, and they needed a big runway to take off from. It never shows up.
I'm sure they hide plenty of projects out there, again, they just leave normal stuff out for folks to see. That's good security. Most people will be satisfied that they've seen "it all", so fewer questions will be drawn.
It's not just all black helicopters and various metal buildings...
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=37.628036,+-116.848060&t=k&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=37.095961,-116.093146&spn=0.002614,0.004511&z=18&iwloc=addr&om=0
Sometimes you just have to go "hmmmm" Was this a decoy, or is it really something.
But, what if the yellow wire was broken my a micrometeorite sometime since it's launch? Then the self-destruct has already been aborted before it started..
:)
Oh no! The humanity!
Why would the US Gov't WANT to catch him?
It's a well known fact, without an enemy, you can't have a war.
If bin Laden was taken out of the picture, the enemy is now just small groups of nutjobs around the world, with no "leadership".
It's advantageous for the US to ensure that he DOESN'T get captured.
Then again, with the recent speed boat "attack" by Iran, maybe they'll have a new enemy, at least for a short while.
Please refer to the following chart, to avoid misidentification of "unidentified" flying objects.
https://freeinternetpress.com/mirrors/usaf/airforce-id-chart.jpg
12 tons
:)
17,000 mph
[breaking out the "really big" calculator]
Ummm.
REALLY thick.
I suggest at least a mile, and don't be under it when it hits.
Do you have a good supplier for tin foil?
I'll pass this on from a trustworthy source.
They do that.
Some facilities shut down entirely, just to not be spotted by the satellite on it's regular orbits.
That's also why you'll never see any of the cool gear on the satellite photos over Area 51. They stick it away somewhere safe when they know an observation satellite is coming.
Bullshit.
There are plenty of SSL signers who just need someone at your domain to respond to an email saying that someone at your domain requested it.
Like, if you're example.com, they'll send to admin@example.com to confirm.
And these days, you can get a credit/debit card from WalMart to buy the cert with. Put it under any name you'd like. The only really traceable part of an SSL cert is the credit card you buy it with.
Just don't get it signed with the really big signing authorities, or they'll make you jump through ALL kinds of hoops.
There are two big things with this.
:)
:) (short story, our customer handed over an exploited server. It was only because it was exploited, it had nothing to do with the content. They had already put a new machine up with restored content, as good exploit protocol suggests.)
:)
First, any provider can and will give in to pressures. Just because they're not "in" the United States doesn't mean that they won't be leaned on by the United States.
Every provider connects to someone else. Otherwise, you being on your residential Cable/DSL/whatever wouldn't be able to reach Rajhed's IndiaPorn.
Being that it is true, the gov't could simply lean on American held companies, or companies with American interests, to find out who you are, find out what's on your servers, or simply get you unplugged. Just because you host at Sealand, in central Siberia, or whereever, you still run the risk of provider A strongly encouraging provider B to do something about it.
Been there. Done that. Got the Federal agent sitting in my office about it. Of course, I played stupid until I found out what the hell he was talking about, and then made some phone calls to find out the rest of the story.
Second, what the hell do you think you're going to say, that will get the feds knocking on your door, on the hosting facility's door, etc, etc?
I run http://freeinternetpress.com/ . If you read what we say, and have said for years, by all the legend of the National Security letters, we quite likely should have our phones tapped, servers confiscated, and been visiting Southeastern Cuba for more than a few days.
In reality though, we've had every (like, EVERY) intelligence agency in the world read our news. That was scary at first, but I made some friends (through other means) who had worked in intelligence, and they broke the bad news to me. The feds aren't watching us because they're interested in getting us. They're watching us because we are a good news source. Even though we've NEVER had a single contact regarding Free Internet Press, we're read every day. Above that, you'd be surprised to find out how many intelligence agencies there are out there. It took us quite a while to decode a lot of the hostnames, even when we ran them up and down a few of our grapevines. My favorite that I still like to brag about is eop.gov . They were monthly visitors.
I haven't bothered to re-check our logs to see what odd hostnames come in any more. It's entertaining, but serves no other purpose.
I'm VERY close with my hosting company. (like, VERY). I'd know the moment they were sniffing around, mostly because I'd be the one to open the cabinet door for them.
If it came down to it though, we'd just dump the hostname off to another server (I have a few spare hosting accounts in my pocket, all under different people's names, at different facilities), and put it right back online with a big notice "WE GOT SHUT DOWN BY THE FEDS, Here's the documents!"
If I didn't do it, there are a dozen or so other people with enough access to do it for me. Like, if I ended up in Southeastern Cuba, with an orange jumpsuit, a blanket, and a copy of the Koran (they issue 'em to everyone, from what I understand).
So, what's going to keep you from landing in hot water?
1) Don't say you're going to kill someone.
2) Don't threaten to blow something up.
3) Don't make claims above and beyond anything you're really willing to do.
For example (EXAMPLE!) if you were to say, "I'm going to blow up the Whitehouse tomorrow", if you're not serious, you're stupid for saying it. If you are serious, you deserve to get beaten down and thrown in jail for a long time. While I'll disagree with
Ummm, if I remember right, it's 20/20 vision corrected. The military requires 20/20 uncorrected.
:)
The rest I agree with.
I've flown a little bit. It's a lot of fun, but even with a few planes in the air, I've seen some almost incidents. Like, what happens when one plane is landing (approach at approx 65 knots), and another plane taxis onto the runway for takeoff... Oh ya, everyone sh1ts themselves.
Before they could make this work, the FAA would have to adopt a very complex ATC scheme. Right now, they're managing just a few airways, because there aren't that many aircraft in controlled airspace. Uncontrolled airspace isn't too bad, because there aren't that many planes up at a time, and they are all playing nice (generally). Most of the incidents I've heard about are self induced. Like, landing on something that isn't a runway, overrunning runways, coming in a bit improperly and bending a prop, or forgetting to lower the gear.
That air car does look dangerous in the event of an engine failure or loss of fuel. I hope they'd have emergency parachutes (for the whole "car"), and that ATC would have a way to manage traffic around it. For some reason, I could see that being a very bad thing on a 8 lane, 8 layer road in rush hour traffic. But really, if a car breaks down in the center lane of an interstate in a metro area, that makes a mess too.
And just like alien encounters and past life recollections, some people can be guided to "remember" anything. :)
:)
I saw a UFO once.
I was sure it was a UFO.
I couldn't think of ANYTHING else it could be. It was low, fast, silent....
In talking to a military pilot, he mentioned (vaguely, because it's probably classified) that there are military helicopters unofficially stationed in the area. They practice fire on occasion.
My UFO, which is still 100% accurate, because I couldn't identify it, was probably a practice missile, which had already burnt out it's fuel. At the point where I saw it, it would have still been red hot, flying very quickly, and not making a sound.
Some people could have probably been guided into believing that it was more of something. It had a very definiate disk shape, right? Ummm, I guess so. It was traveling much faster than any aircraft could? Umm, I guess so.
Really, knowing what the military does, and where they do it, although I was unaware of this particular airspace (although it's marked on the air navigation charts), it's the obvious answer. Now I just think it's funny. They probably even knew we were there, because we were in the middle of nowhere. I'd bet they were laughing their asses off.
It's all in what units you're discussing.
1+1=5.
If one box is 2.5 pounds...
1+1 = 5 pounds.
2 boxes = 5 pounds
or
1 = 2.5
You should really be clear about what you're discussing, as confusion may make you believe you're in a VR.
Not if there isn't an "edge" to poke.
If we're in a VR, on a well constructed sphere, and everything above us is simulated just out of our reach, but beyond that limit simply wraps to another point, you'd never have an edge to touch.
It may become obvious that you can never leave without coming back, but then we'd theorize on curved space, and not think of what else is out there, because we can obviously travel to all the extremes, and always end up back here.
I believe it was an "Outer Limits" episode where that happened.
There was a VR simulation, where the people appeared real. As far as they were concerned, they were real.
Inside that simulation, they created the equipment to produce another VR world, where inside THEY were real (again, in their own opinion).
There was something about some subset of them finding a way out of their simulation. It's been too long since I've seen it to remember any more details. I think there was a hot chick though.
Why does the god entity have to be a single being? Or why does it have to be categorized into a sexual role (male or female), when those roles are part of our reproduction, which aparently isn't necessary.
But if there is any credibility to the VR idea, why does the god entity have to be a single unit? You'd think that a VR of any significant size would be coded by more than one entity. If it was a dozen humans, half male, and half female, all of the 'god' role, which is most proper, to address it as 'he', 'she', 'it', or 'they'.
Buy hey, polytheism was very popular for many years. It's more recently that the monotheistic religions were forced on most people.
Ahhh, and you've figured it out.
.... black .... Lots of nothing. There's nothing in the great beyond, because I have no preconceptions to guide my hallucinations.
Hallucinations are hallucinations. It doesn't matter if they're induced by illegal drugs, abused products (like the DXM in Robitussin, the nitrous oxide in whipped cream cans, or other of thousands of abused products), lack of sleep, or lack of oxygen to the brain, they're all still hallucinations.
A few that have been passed on to me have been...
Are they giant purple lizards crawling along the roof tops, following you around?
Separating from your body, having your spirit become one with the universe, being everywhere, and then thinking to yourself, "I had a body once. I wonder what that was like..." only to be slammed back into reality a few seconds later.
The ceiling turning into a gridwork, then the cells of the grid being filled with green paisley patterns, which all began to spin simultaniously. The sound of the music turned into taste and color, and your body becomes one with the waves of music.
Or..
Lying in a bed, a dark spirit floats above you, with an evil face, and large tattered black wings, who simply says "it's not your time yet", and then disappears.
Some people relate that when hallucinating, they are easily guided into their hallucination, either through ideas that have been impressed upon them before, or during the hallucination. "Are those ants all over your body??". We've all heard of the floating spirit hallucination, and the light at the end of the tunnel hallucination. Since those have been so impressed on us as the way it's going to be, it's very easy for that to be a driving factor in such hallucinations.
In my only near death experiences, I saw
The story mentions 106 stores, owned by CompUSA of Dallas.
Oh, I guess it's nation wide. Their site says they have 103 stores. I assumed they were bigger, as every metro area I've gone has one (or two, or three). Tampa, FL has 4, including close by cities. I assumed bigger cities had more.
I know they have weird losses. In Tampa, they bought Circuit City, and then made it a second CompUSA. Those two stores are 3.6 miles apart, and both are crappy parking lots to get in and out of.
With the decent number of competitive stores in the area, and the
I miss Fry's. I was out in California for a few years, and that place, despite the chaos that the store seems to be, was really cool.
I could walk out with 100 store brand network cables to rewire a site, without going broke, or a few feet of fiber optics for our switches, and never wonder if they'd have them in stock the next day. I had a love/hate relationship with them though. I hated that they'd slap discount labels on anything returned, and put it back on the shelf, but at least I could buy the discounted return, find it didn't work, and return it for a brand new one.
Here on the east coast now, I don't know of anywhere like it. They'd put a good size dent in the business of any place they were close to.
When you're running the country into bankruptcy to keep a war going, there isn't a lot of money to put into other ventures, no matter how much noise is made saying it's going to happen.
They already have. Your memory implant keeps a perfect record of what you see, here, and experience. You've therefore made illegal copies of said works. Either pay the fines accordingly, or have the device destroyed.
:)
What? It would be fatal to remove it from your brain? Who cares.
Those of us with flawed implants have nothing to worry about.