Seriously. The government (i.e. the taxpayer) is subsidizing Walmart's unwillingness to pay a living wage while the people on top (Walton's heirs... who did NOT build that, by the way) make out like bandits. Even when the poorly-engineered shit is made in China people still have to pay first-world prices while living on third-world wages.
As I understood it, Mr. Sam Walton was quite for America and American family values. There were community efforts, and things that you probably never noticed, like no alcohol sold in any stores. He wanted affordable products available to people who couldn't afford it.... then he died.
Now you can buy booze, prescriptions, and guns, all in one friendly (yet underpaid) location, while the oil gets changed in your urban assault vehicle.
if Foxconn is willing to pay the average manufacturing wage D.O.E. (and would not go out of their way to crush unionization efforts if it came to that) then it would be a whole different story.
Average manufacturing wage? ha! Unless that happens coincides with minimum wage, minus "docked" pay for not working 30 minutes before clocking in, looking at your manager funny, or wearing the wrong color shoes, or other arbitrary (and illegal) methods of reducing the effective pay rate. I've seen those methods are alive and well in modern America. They work better against younger workers who aren't familiar with the law.
Actually, they could set up in *any* metro area in the US. Pay minimum wage. Make all the employees part time, so they don't have to pay benefits. 2 20hr/wk employees are cheaper than 1 40hr/wk or salary employee. They can maintain a barely OSHA compliant workplace, and items that are too expensive, they can just absorb the cost of fines. Their customers have financial and political leverage, so I'm sure lots could be ignored, especially if they're going to take a few thousand people off of the unemployment rolls, even though they'll make less working.
Pretty much, they'll act just like Walmart. A whole bunch of employees who fall below the poverty line.
Their blog post is *about* the DNS amplification DDoS that they're being attacked with.
I was helping someone diagnose why their network was going to shit a few times a day. It turned out that they had recursive DNS still enabled. Watching the traffic, it looked like Cloudflare was attacking. In reality, it was spoofed traffic slamming them.
I locked down that network, and had a nice conversation with one of their techs about it. Since the network I was working on has no business relationship with Cloudflare, we mutually decided to block the traffic.
The attack is still ongoing. The logs are full of blocked DNS requests "from" Cloudflare. that's one of the pesky problems with spoofed traffic. The attacker doesn't know when the intermediary has blocked it, so they just keep attacking.
I hadn't heard of them before, but I did a little looking. From what I could see from the outside, they have a pretty robust network.
One place I worked was under constant DDoS attacks also. I couldn't even guess at how many attackers there were. They were all using different methods, from all over the world. We protected ourselves the best we could, dropping all unwanted traffic, and dynamically dropping networks based on current attacks. That was years ago, and we had multiple GigE circuits around North America. Since 90% of our traffic was legitimate outbound traffic, we had plenty of room to work with incoming DDoS. Basically, we handled it by having enough gear and bandwidth deployed, so it simply didn't matter. Attacks were a curiosity that we watched, not a catastrophic threat.
What airport have you been flying through, where the sandwiches are only 8 hours old?
Nah, we all know it's security theater.. Oh my gorsh, bad guys could get into the "secure" area.. As we found with the El Al incident a few years ago, people do bad things anywhere they want, even in a major US airport.
I'd be willing to bet that you *could*. Now why you'd drop a bunch of money on a ticket that you can't possibly use, that's the question.:)
Maybe if you're a nefarious criminal with every three letter agency trying to find you, you could slip them up by leaving from gate C4 instead of C12, because... umm... they don't have enough agents to watch two gates..
Nah.. Booking a couple flights, train ticket, bus ticket, and rent a car... At least that would keep them on their toes, while you're camped out in the NoTell-Model with a toothless hooker and half a bag of meth.. Don't worry, I not one to judge you.. That's up to the rest of the Slashdot audience.:)
If it's a bad guy doing it, they'll have a number trying to go through. The ones with flagged boarding passes will turn around and go home. The ones with clean boarding passes will continue through, smile, and say "thank you" to the TSA people (s)he encounters.
Anyone with any remotely planned mission will have such things in place, and already be ready for them. Send 5 guys in with tickets. A few will get caught. Some won't. Remember the recent tests where only 25% of the weapons passed through x-ray were caught. 5 people means 1 or 2 will get caught. Those odds can be improved if they synchronize someone who *will* get caught. It will draw attention away from the others who they want to make it.
I've observed that happening more than once. Someone gets stopped for having something "nefarious", like a bottle of water, or knitting needles. They make noise, more TSA employees go to guard, and now the rest of the lines are understaffed, and more will be waved through unmolested.
Actually, if they have any common sense, they'd verify the barcode read from the ticket to the barcode stored in the airline DB when the ticket was printed. Modifying it would be a huge red flag.
But as we all know, the TSA has no common sense. I've considered it mind numbingly stupid that every time I've gone through an airport since 9/11, the super-duper-secure TSA checkpoint (ha!) doesn't check that my boarding pass actually corresponds to a real ticket issued. We're not talking about anything amazingly high tech, except a barcode reader, and network connection to verify against the airline(s) systems.
The only place that it's cross referenced is boarding, and even that is only most of the airlines I fly. I've been on a few that still just tear the paper boarding pass, and let you on. No verification or anything. At least not before the plane departs. I've been early (just like they ask you to), so I've watched them scanning used boarding passes minutes to hours after the flight leaves. I'm sure we're not suppose to observe procedure, even though it's done right in front of us.
Actually, that would have made an awful lot of sense.. The bridge wouldn't be a physical room, with physical controls.. It could be a dynamically generated and regenerated as needed. It'd also do away with all those pesky sparks, explosions, and steam pipes bursting at inopportune moments.:)
If it had been real life, I suspect something like that would have been done. Since it was fiction, concepts like that were overlooked.:)
The same could be said about away teams... Why teleport the crew, when they could have just teleported a holographic emitter and sensor pack, to give a physical presence at the destination, and safely recreate the scene in the holodeck... That would have eliminated the need for all those pesky red shirts, and their space funerals.:)
I just had a WRT54G die also. I'm fond of the Tomato firmware, but the same idea as DD-WRT.
I've actually owned quite a few, that I've used for various purposes (long distance wireless bridges with high gain antennas, in-house bridges, AP, etc). I don't keep careful track of which is which.
Someone wanted it, so I dug into a box of old wireless gear and pulled it out. It worked for about 2 months, and started dropping all traffic every few hours. I'd already seen that with others in the past.
For the WRT54G (and many others) heat is the cause. The electronics run hot, and they aren't cooled well. Some people hack in CPU heat sinks with fans, to help with the problem. Well, it has to be preemptive. If you do it after it starts going weird, it'll still die.
Basically, consumer grade parts, at consumer grade prices, have consumer grade life expectancy. That's just a few years, if you're lucky. They sell at consumer grade pricing, so you'll be ready to buy a new one when the old one dies.
For our situation, I brought him another router from my box o' parts, and we tossed the old one. No big deal.
As some people have mentioned, noise is a big cause of throughput loss. Yup, definately. For networks I care about (i.e., I use them), I fire up a wifi listener (I love some of the Android apps for it now), and walk the perimeter of the service area. I then pick a noise-free zone.
My mom had a problem with hers.. As it turned out, she was on a channel that was empty when I set her up, but is now saturated (damned neighbors). Switching channels did the trick.
Some of the newer ones automatically change channels, which is why new equipment may appear to work "better". It's nothing someone with a clue about the technology, a laptop or Android device, and 5 minutes to spare couldn't do.
After about a year, she got a new one too. Same deal. The old one just stopped working right, and it wasn't noise related. She got her replacement from my box o' parts too, and has been running on it for about 8 months now. I expect sometime in the next year, she'll be getting another "new" one. She definitely enjoys the fact that all she has to do is ask, and she gets new electronics. I guess I could have my pick of electronic antiques. All I'd have to do is drive over to her place and get them.:)
I was surprised that they went with the typical high wing trainer. On the other hand, going with something well known and very reliable was a good idea to verify that they method works.
Spending $2k on a $500 project does seem silly. Skimming the article, they are mechanical engineering students. It would be more applicable to aeronautical engineering students, to prototype new types of aircraft.
Judging by the picture, they may have gone a little heavy on the wings and fuselage. Mechanically, it was probably stronger than the need, which is a good idea. For aeronautical purposes, it was probably overkill. But hey, it flies, and that's what counts.:)
I would love to see more on the project than the article. It's kind of light on details.
Which part of that did you take too seriously? References from 3 fictional universes? One mistranslated and misinterpreted date? My tag line, "Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade."?
The total of my doomsday plans are:
1) Buy a few boxed of ammo. Put them in the safe. 2) Go out and drink with friends that night. 3) Sometime in the following year, use the ammo at the shooting range.
That was my plan for Dec 31, 1999, Oct 20, 2011, and is for Dec 20, 2012.
Doomsday predictions are a drinking game. Any day that is has sufficient attention of being a doomsday, we get to drink heavily. That also happens to be our plan for most holidays.
Steps 1 and 3 can usually be skipped, since I don't get to the shooting range all that often any more.
The worst thing that I expect is that we may drink too much, and be hung over the next day. Since I have lots of practice, that hasn't happened in over a decade.:)
Cyberdyne, the fictional creator of Skynet, which made the fictional Terminator, bears the same name as Cyberdyne, the real company, who just released a fully functional brain operated exeoskeleton robot?
Or that they made a possibly-autonomous robot named HAL, the same as the fictional computer which had a bad habit of killing people?
Include Cybermen and/or Daleks, and we're one brain-snatching away from three different sci-fi universes colliding with reality.
That may not be all that bad, as long as a guy with a blue box that's larger on the inside than the outside, shows up to give me a ride off of this rock.... and just remember, only 63 more shopping days until doomsday.
Nah, you can buy them on eBay for $14.95 plus shipping. I have a bunch for sale. Trust me, they're legitimate*.
* By purchasing said Higgs Boson, you agree to the license which states the clear epoxy cube may not be tested or examined in any sort of way, at any point in time. Any sort of testing or examination will cause a Schrodinger Effect, rendering the particle to either be or not be there. In some rare cases, examination may result in the cube containing a dead cat.
Sure.. But never introduce opposite polarity time crystals to each other... Most of you won't remember what happened last time. Lets just say, it was really really bad.
Nah, that doesn't have a good ring to it. Lucky he doesn't have a middle name in the books nor on the show.
At least Dexter knows how to get rid of a body. Putting the bloody remains of your freshly deadified wife in the front seat of your car, and having to pull the seat and carpet to get rid of the blood, really isn't good planning.
Actually, since you mentioned it, I looked around a little. Pantone does name a lot of colors. They consider that list intellectual property, and I couldn't just find a number of how many names there are. I'm sure if someone dug enough, they could come back with the number. Pantone does seem to have more number codes than names.. So I guess even they don't have all the names.:)
metallic is a texture (or illusion of), not a color.:)
I like the CYMK argument though. Light blue, yellow, dark red, black. I'm sure someone will say how horribly wrong I am. People understand it, and I don't need to carry a dictionary and 16.5 million color swatches around to explain it.:)
I happen to live in an area that is pretty good for Craigslist usage.. I just post an ad in the free section, and whatever I put out will be gone in about an hour.:)
That's actually one of my favorite games. I usually play it with women. They say something with a color, like "Grab that chartreuse bottle". After 30 seconds of dumb staring, I ask what a chartreuse is. They'll eventually point at the green bottle.. Then I get to explain, guys have a limited color palette. 8 base colors, 3 shades.
Color: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Black, White (and sometimes gray) Shade: Light, Normal, Dark.
That's it. No more. There's a little overlap with light black, dark white, and the 3 shades of gray.
If you want something in sunny day blue, you'd better be very specific in the guy color palette. If you need more precision than that, RGB, CYKM, HSV, or YUV are acceptable substitutes, but they damned well don't have a list of names that everyone (or anyone) can remember. There may be 16.5 million names for the RGB spectrum, but no one knows what all the names are.
Yup.. It's about the same as if I had asked "I get old computer stuff abandon with me. What should I do with it?" . I give it to people who want or need it.
In other industries, there is a standard 90 day storage.. After that, they can do with it as if it is their own. If it's legally titled stuff (like a car), you have to request a court ordered transfer of ownership. Something like a calculator? If the owner didn't come get it, it's yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep the employees off of ladders, try to keep the building from falling in on them, and put handrails on all the stairs.. Sounds tough. ;)
As I understood it, Mr. Sam Walton was quite for America and American family values. There were community efforts, and things that you probably never noticed, like no alcohol sold in any stores. He wanted affordable products available to people who couldn't afford it. ... then he died.
Now you can buy booze, prescriptions, and guns, all in one friendly (yet underpaid) location, while the oil gets changed in your urban assault vehicle.
Average manufacturing wage? ha! Unless that happens coincides with minimum wage, minus "docked" pay for not working 30 minutes before clocking in, looking at your manager funny, or wearing the wrong color shoes, or other arbitrary (and illegal) methods of reducing the effective pay rate. I've seen those methods are alive and well in modern America. They work better against younger workers who aren't familiar with the law.
Actually, they could set up in *any* metro area in the US. Pay minimum wage. Make all the employees part time, so they don't have to pay benefits. 2 20hr/wk employees are cheaper than 1 40hr/wk or salary employee. They can maintain a barely OSHA compliant workplace, and items that are too expensive, they can just absorb the cost of fines. Their customers have financial and political leverage, so I'm sure lots could be ignored, especially if they're going to take a few thousand people off of the unemployment rolls, even though they'll make less working.
Pretty much, they'll act just like Walmart. A whole bunch of employees who fall below the poverty line.
Their blog post is *about* the DNS amplification DDoS that they're being attacked with.
I was helping someone diagnose why their network was going to shit a few times a day. It turned out that they had recursive DNS still enabled. Watching the traffic, it looked like Cloudflare was attacking. In reality, it was spoofed traffic slamming them.
I locked down that network, and had a nice conversation with one of their techs about it. Since the network I was working on has no business relationship with Cloudflare, we mutually decided to block the traffic.
The attack is still ongoing. The logs are full of blocked DNS requests "from" Cloudflare. that's one of the pesky problems with spoofed traffic. The attacker doesn't know when the intermediary has blocked it, so they just keep attacking.
I hadn't heard of them before, but I did a little looking. From what I could see from the outside, they have a pretty robust network.
One place I worked was under constant DDoS attacks also. I couldn't even guess at how many attackers there were. They were all using different methods, from all over the world. We protected ourselves the best we could, dropping all unwanted traffic, and dynamically dropping networks based on current attacks. That was years ago, and we had multiple GigE circuits around North America. Since 90% of our traffic was legitimate outbound traffic, we had plenty of room to work with incoming DDoS. Basically, we handled it by having enough gear and bandwidth deployed, so it simply didn't matter. Attacks were a curiosity that we watched, not a catastrophic threat.
What airport have you been flying through, where the sandwiches are only 8 hours old?
Nah, we all know it's security theater.. Oh my gorsh, bad guys could get into the "secure" area.. As we found with the El Al incident a few years ago, people do bad things anywhere they want, even in a major US airport.
Nah, that was the end of any reason... Actually, it may have ended before that, when I implied that the possibility was there.
I'd be willing to bet that you *could*. Now why you'd drop a bunch of money on a ticket that you can't possibly use, that's the question. :)
Maybe if you're a nefarious criminal with every three letter agency trying to find you, you could slip them up by leaving from gate C4 instead of C12, because ... umm ... they don't have enough agents to watch two gates..
Nah.. Booking a couple flights, train ticket, bus ticket, and rent a car... At least that would keep them on their toes, while you're camped out in the NoTell-Model with a toothless hooker and half a bag of meth.. Don't worry, I not one to judge you.. That's up to the rest of the Slashdot audience. :)
They're stuck on the shoe bombing, because that's the only somewhat viable event that's happened in years.
Actually, nothing.
If it's a bad guy doing it, they'll have a number trying to go through. The ones with flagged boarding passes will turn around and go home. The ones with clean boarding passes will continue through, smile, and say "thank you" to the TSA people (s)he encounters.
Anyone with any remotely planned mission will have such things in place, and already be ready for them. Send 5 guys in with tickets. A few will get caught. Some won't. Remember the recent tests where only 25% of the weapons passed through x-ray were caught. 5 people means 1 or 2 will get caught. Those odds can be improved if they synchronize someone who *will* get caught. It will draw attention away from the others who they want to make it.
I've observed that happening more than once. Someone gets stopped for having something "nefarious", like a bottle of water, or knitting needles. They make noise, more TSA employees go to guard, and now the rest of the lines are understaffed, and more will be waved through unmolested.
Actually, if they have any common sense, they'd verify the barcode read from the ticket to the barcode stored in the airline DB when the ticket was printed. Modifying it would be a huge red flag.
But as we all know, the TSA has no common sense. I've considered it mind numbingly stupid that every time I've gone through an airport since 9/11, the super-duper-secure TSA checkpoint (ha!) doesn't check that my boarding pass actually corresponds to a real ticket issued. We're not talking about anything amazingly high tech, except a barcode reader, and network connection to verify against the airline(s) systems.
The only place that it's cross referenced is boarding, and even that is only most of the airlines I fly. I've been on a few that still just tear the paper boarding pass, and let you on. No verification or anything. At least not before the plane departs. I've been early (just like they ask you to), so I've watched them scanning used boarding passes minutes to hours after the flight leaves. I'm sure we're not suppose to observe procedure, even though it's done right in front of us.
Actually, that would have made an awful lot of sense.. The bridge wouldn't be a physical room, with physical controls.. It could be a dynamically generated and regenerated as needed. It'd also do away with all those pesky sparks, explosions, and steam pipes bursting at inopportune moments. :)
If it had been real life, I suspect something like that would have been done. Since it was fiction, concepts like that were overlooked. :)
The same could be said about away teams... Why teleport the crew, when they could have just teleported a holographic emitter and sensor pack, to give a physical presence at the destination, and safely recreate the scene in the holodeck... That would have eliminated the need for all those pesky red shirts, and their space funerals. :)
I just had a WRT54G die also. I'm fond of the Tomato firmware, but the same idea as DD-WRT.
I've actually owned quite a few, that I've used for various purposes (long distance wireless bridges with high gain antennas, in-house bridges, AP, etc). I don't keep careful track of which is which.
Someone wanted it, so I dug into a box of old wireless gear and pulled it out. It worked for about 2 months, and started dropping all traffic every few hours. I'd already seen that with others in the past.
For the WRT54G (and many others) heat is the cause. The electronics run hot, and they aren't cooled well. Some people hack in CPU heat sinks with fans, to help with the problem. Well, it has to be preemptive. If you do it after it starts going weird, it'll still die.
Basically, consumer grade parts, at consumer grade prices, have consumer grade life expectancy. That's just a few years, if you're lucky. They sell at consumer grade pricing, so you'll be ready to buy a new one when the old one dies.
For our situation, I brought him another router from my box o' parts, and we tossed the old one. No big deal.
As some people have mentioned, noise is a big cause of throughput loss. Yup, definately. For networks I care about (i.e., I use them), I fire up a wifi listener (I love some of the Android apps for it now), and walk the perimeter of the service area. I then pick a noise-free zone.
My mom had a problem with hers.. As it turned out, she was on a channel that was empty when I set her up, but is now saturated (damned neighbors). Switching channels did the trick.
Some of the newer ones automatically change channels, which is why new equipment may appear to work "better". It's nothing someone with a clue about the technology, a laptop or Android device, and 5 minutes to spare couldn't do.
After about a year, she got a new one too. Same deal. The old one just stopped working right, and it wasn't noise related. She got her replacement from my box o' parts too, and has been running on it for about 8 months now. I expect sometime in the next year, she'll be getting another "new" one. She definitely enjoys the fact that all she has to do is ask, and she gets new electronics. I guess I could have my pick of electronic antiques. All I'd have to do is drive over to her place and get them. :)
I was surprised that they went with the typical high wing trainer. On the other hand, going with something well known and very reliable was a good idea to verify that they method works.
Spending $2k on a $500 project does seem silly. Skimming the article, they are mechanical engineering students. It would be more applicable to aeronautical engineering students, to prototype new types of aircraft.
Judging by the picture, they may have gone a little heavy on the wings and fuselage. Mechanically, it was probably stronger than the need, which is a good idea. For aeronautical purposes, it was probably overkill. But hey, it flies, and that's what counts. :)
I would love to see more on the project than the article. It's kind of light on details.
Oh no! Crossover from a 4th fictional universe, in the 8th dimension? It's a sure sign of the end of times! :)
Dude.. Really..
Which part of that did you take too seriously? References from 3 fictional universes? One mistranslated and misinterpreted date? My tag line, "Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade."?
The total of my doomsday plans are:
1) Buy a few boxed of ammo. Put them in the safe.
2) Go out and drink with friends that night.
3) Sometime in the following year, use the ammo at the shooting range.
That was my plan for Dec 31, 1999, Oct 20, 2011, and is for Dec 20, 2012.
Doomsday predictions are a drinking game. Any day that is has sufficient attention of being a doomsday, we get to drink heavily. That also happens to be our plan for most holidays.
Steps 1 and 3 can usually be skipped, since I don't get to the shooting range all that often any more.
The worst thing that I expect is that we may drink too much, and be hung over the next day. Since I have lots of practice, that hasn't happened in over a decade. :)
Cyberdyne, the fictional creator of Skynet, which made the fictional Terminator, bears the same name as Cyberdyne, the real company, who just released a fully functional brain operated exeoskeleton robot?
Or that they made a possibly-autonomous robot named HAL, the same as the fictional computer which had a bad habit of killing people?
Include Cybermen and/or Daleks, and we're one brain-snatching away from three different sci-fi universes colliding with reality.
That may not be all that bad, as long as a guy with a blue box that's larger on the inside than the outside, shows up to give me a ride off of this rock. ... and just remember, only 63 more shopping days until doomsday.
Nah, you can buy them on eBay for $14.95 plus shipping. I have a bunch for sale. Trust me, they're legitimate*.
* By purchasing said Higgs Boson, you agree to the license which states the clear epoxy cube may not be tested or examined in any sort of way, at any point in time. Any sort of testing or examination will cause a Schrodinger Effect, rendering the particle to either be or not be there. In some rare cases, examination may result in the cube containing a dead cat.
Sure.. But never introduce opposite polarity time crystals to each other... Most of you won't remember what happened last time. Lets just say, it was really really bad.
Dexter Bundy Morgan?
Nah, that doesn't have a good ring to it. Lucky he doesn't have a middle name in the books nor on the show.
At least Dexter knows how to get rid of a body. Putting the bloody remains of your freshly deadified wife in the front seat of your car, and having to pull the seat and carpet to get rid of the blood, really isn't good planning.
Actually, since you mentioned it, I looked around a little. Pantone does name a lot of colors. They consider that list intellectual property, and I couldn't just find a number of how many names there are. I'm sure if someone dug enough, they could come back with the number. Pantone does seem to have more number codes than names.. So I guess even they don't have all the names. :)
metallic is a texture (or illusion of), not a color. :)
I like the CYMK argument though. Light blue, yellow, dark red, black. I'm sure someone will say how horribly wrong I am. People understand it, and I don't need to carry a dictionary and 16.5 million color swatches around to explain it. :)
I happen to live in an area that is pretty good for Craigslist usage.. I just post an ad in the free section, and whatever I put out will be gone in about an hour. :)
That's actually one of my favorite games. I usually play it with women. They say something with a color, like "Grab that chartreuse bottle". After 30 seconds of dumb staring, I ask what a chartreuse is. They'll eventually point at the green bottle.. Then I get to explain, guys have a limited color palette. 8 base colors, 3 shades.
Color: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Black, White (and sometimes gray)
Shade: Light, Normal, Dark.
That's it. No more. There's a little overlap with light black, dark white, and the 3 shades of gray.
If you want something in sunny day blue, you'd better be very specific in the guy color palette. If you need more precision than that, RGB, CYKM, HSV, or YUV are acceptable substitutes, but they damned well don't have a list of names that everyone (or anyone) can remember. There may be 16.5 million names for the RGB spectrum, but no one knows what all the names are.
I think I missed the punchline..
OS x Pussy = ??
Don't say profit.. Or sex robots..
Yup.. It's about the same as if I had asked "I get old computer stuff abandon with me. What should I do with it?" . I give it to people who want or need it.
In other industries, there is a standard 90 day storage.. After that, they can do with it as if it is their own. If it's legally titled stuff (like a car), you have to request a court ordered transfer of ownership. Something like a calculator? If the owner didn't come get it, it's yours.