I had several games start acting badly. it turned out that Windows Update had been gracious enough to upgrade the video drivers for me, and under load the new driver would overheat the card. Sometimes it was BSOD, sometimes it would just get hung mid-action, including the sound buzzing the last sound made. Looking around, there was lots of discussion on all kinds of video cards, and precisely what versions actually worked while gaming, and what didn't. Once you find the one that works right, the system will stop crashing.
And ya.. Windows 7.
But to stay with the conversation, ping, tracert, ipconfig/all... Those are basics that don't have an integrated equivalent, if you want to see everything.
On Linux, I do just about everything from the cli. On the servers, it *is* everything, as I don't want the unnecessary overhead of a graphic environment that no one looks at. On workstations, I'll admit, the web browser, mail client, and IDE are GUI. Browsing from lynx is nice and all, but sometimes you need to see a picture.:) I'm notorious for having dozens of terminals open, with top, ping, or something else going. It's called "doing my job".
That's odd. I don't see many with generators at retail fueling stations. I guess it varies by area. I'm in Florida, and can't say I've ever noticed one. We're most likely to get knocked down by hurricanes a few times a year, so it'd be a good thing to have. That's one of those things I look for, since I'm very interested in how things work. Well, I have the "how things work" part down pat. Now I just look at how someone else does theirs. What brand equipment do they use, etc, etc.
The gas station reference was for the previous poster. Definitely, off-road diesel is preferred. It's easily transportable, fairly easy to store, and won't generally leak through seals in pressure systems. In a pinch, diesel from a retail fueling station would do, but that means an awful lot of gas cans.:) Retail fueling stations don't keep a huge supply. They keep enough for their demand, plus a little reserve for peak traffic days. If a retail station knows that they sell 1k gallons of diesel a week, they won't have 20k gallons to pump into a truck for them. And of course, the road taxes will kill you.
The only other option I've seen at a large datacenter was one Northeast of Atlanta. They had a flywheel system. Well, there were stages. The DC room had capacity to run for a day. The flywheel was suppose to keep it up for another day or two. Then they'd fall back to diesel generators for longer durations. They were very proud of their flywheel. I just saw it as a huge expense that wasn't necessary. They also went for whiz-bang devices, like a retinal scanner to enter the main doors. That was cute, except I went around to the back door and entered the facility unchallenged. We didn't go with that datacenter, because their cooling sucked. They had a huge amount of cooling, but didn't have their flow designed properly. Walking the facility, there were hot spots in excess of 90 degrees, on the cold side of existing customer equipment. It was a very pretty facility though.
The only gasoline generators I've worked with are at my house, and they're regular consumer portable units (5KW and 5.5KW) I got the 5.5KW because my ex-wife flipped out when a tropical depression came our way, and we had just moved to Florida. She didn't get that "tropical depression" is the same as "normal summer thunderstorm". The 5KW I got real cheap as a non-functional unit. $20 in parts, and now it works. They're really very simple devices, if you know what all the parts do.
That's exactly us! Well, tell her she isn't alone.
If she can get herself diagnosed with a sleep disorder (assuming you're in the US), such things are protected under the ADA. Of course, being legally protected, and getting an employer to hire you, is a huge difference. They have to make reasonable accommodations, but simply enough they just have to say "well, we work from 8am to 6pm, so there's no way to accommodate it."
Employers who are flexible love people like me, because they'll get great stuff done while everyone else is asleep. Finding employers who are willing to work outside of their self imposed structure is the hard part.
Well, no bullshit. It depends on the degree. Some days it's just seeing double and I can't handle any sound, and sometimes it's hiding in the bedroom with my head under the pillows wishing it would stop.
Just because I didn't describe a migraine well enough for you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
If no one disturbs me, I wake up at the crack of noon +- 5 minutes. I get tired at about 4am, and to sleep at 4:30 to 5am. That's my circadian rhythm.
If I force myself to "normal" work day patterns, I'm screwed. First off, it takes several alarm clocks, and usually someone living with me to scream at me that the alarm has been going off for an hour. Alarm clocks that reset themselves after a few minutes are worthless to me. My phone has a very obnoxious alarm clock on it. I set 4 or more alarms, about 6 minutes apart, so if I hit snooze on one, they'll keep going off at irregular intervals.
Assuming I am awake, I'm not really. It's literally just the motions of it. I can shower, drive, and show up to work. I can't hold an intelligent conversation, and I work very slowly. Pretty much how most people would, if they were woken up at 3am and told to work. I take notes, because I won't remember what anyone tells me. Suddenly at noon, I'm wide awake. I can redesign networks in my head, and trouble shoot complex problems that have other people stumped. I don't take lunch until around 4pm, just because companies usually require it. Even then, it's food at my desk. I usually keep going until 8pm to 9pm, getting my assigned work done, plus some. 4 hours in zombie mode, and then 9 good work hours, where I do real work.
When I get home, I have to take sleeping pills to get to sleep. Without them, I won't get sleepy again til 4am. I have to change pills every couple weeks, because I build up a tolerance quickly. My bedside table ends up looking like an OTC pharmacy.
On this work schedule, add large amounts of ibuprofen and antacids. Waking up early leaves me with migraines all day, even after I pass the noon point where I'm actually awake. All the ibuprofen necessitates the antacids.
The only practical way for me to be on a 8am flight is to stay up all night. On my schedule, it's not so bad (read the link above). I'm tired, but not sleepy on the 5am drive to the airport. I breeze through ticketing and security, and fall asleep at the terminal. My 100 or so new temporary closest friends make plenty of noise when it's time to get on the plane. So to my seat, and I finish my nap for the duration of the flight. When noon hits, I'm ready to conquer the world, which hopefully coincides with me getting to my destination.
I'd trade sleep patterns with anyone else. It'd make my life so much easier.
I have had employers who live with it. They recognize I won't be heard from until noon, and everyone knows not to try unless a building is on fire. They learn to appreciate it the fact that I am around to make production changes all night, when customer usage is minimal, and babysit the whole network until the morning shift is alive. They also appreciate the fact that my work day is 16 hours long, and I only occasionally take an hour break to go grocery shopping and the like.:)
I'm writing this at 11am. I tried to move over to a normal day, by sleeping through the day yesterday, waking up at 6pm, going to sleep at 3am, and then I was wide awake at 6am. The migraine is in full swing right now, and I'll actually be awake in another hour.
Yes and we were already going to have flying cars and mars colonies by now.
It took a few more years than expected for the engineers at Area 51 to reverse engineer all that lovey technology they got their hands on in the 1940's. They still haven't figured out the drive systems though. I suspect it will be a while before that happens, since we don't exactly have the fuel here. It's kind of like reverse engineering a Prius in 1890. It could be done. It'll take a long time to re-invent the technologies to make it possible.
I'm surprised no one got the bright idea to get a generator for the gas station.
I was driving out in the middle of the desert a while back. We stopped for gas (never go below 1/4 tank, unless you like walking for hours). The gas station couldn't pump, because their generator was down. They were so far out in the middle of nowhere, they didn't have power lines run to the station. They sent someone off to get a new generator, but it was something like 4 hours round trip to the nearest store that had one.
I guess people take things like power for granted, because it seems like it's always there. The magic wires in the walls just work. Well, until they don't, I guess.
That'd be a lovely idea. They'll be cobranded "gTLD by Google" and "gTLD by Microsoft". Well, I'm sure a few banks would get in on the game too. Anywhere they can make money for nothing is their favorite industry.
As others have mentioned, those decisions don't come down to a sailor on a ship. They come from the command. There are miles and miles of red tape,
Others have also mentioned that the military *does* have provisions for such things. In asking for another way around, he's basically saying that he wants to circumvent the security of the ship for undisclosed reasons.
Sure, there are technical ways that we can suggest to monitor the traffic on the ship side of the VPN. The problem here is that he most likely doesn't have the authority (or even real permission) to explore the options. He's most likely going to find himself in some very uncomfortable discussions with some strong penalties threatened.
As you said, "most". All it takes is one person who wants bad things to happen.
The military have bigger concerns while performing their duties, they shouldn't have to worry about someone intentionally or accidentally leaking information which may lead to their demise.
I've known families of deployed sailors. For the most part, they aren't told when their family is coming home until the last minute. They usually can't even say where they are deployed. It really only takes one message being intercepted.
Say you're a sailor on a ship, and you send a note home to mom (email, physical letter, IM, etc) saying "We're heading over to the Persian Gulf. We'll be there on July 1st. They already told us there's something big happening, so I won't be able to write for a few weeks.."
Then mom posts it on Facebook. ":( Little BitZ wrote. Most of you know he's on the USS SomeCarrier. They're doing something big in the Persian gulf starting July 1st."
Even if it's not prevented by technological measures on the ship, you can be damned sure there are a more rules and regulations that he could spend the rest of his military career reading.
The DoD isn't particularly fond of people doing anything with information that they don't have control over.
Even if the DoD didn't like it, anyone with anything resembling security in mind wouldn't want to open up any sort of security risk. Opening an encrypted tunnel to circumvent packet inspection sounds like a wonderful way to bring in viruses, or send out classified materials. And fuck, potentially compromising any systems on a military vessel could be the difference between surviving and losing all hands.
I do have suggestions on good things to use, for civilians, in civilian environments, where it really doesn't matter if they get some malware, or otherwise hose their system. I won't touch this one. I'm allergic to prison, and more so to military prison.
My first thoughts were "Who?". Then "What launches have they already done?"
All I could find is that they're using recycled Soviet spacecraft and space station(s). That's fine and dandy. Just because you buy a bunch of hardware, it doesn't mean you have a functional space program. From what I read, the don't, and aren't planning, any sort of launch system. They'll be dependent on someone elses rockets. I guess that saves a lot of headaches, assuming they can buy enough rockets to achieve it. 30 people starting in 2014? The capsules they have only hold 3 people. To fulfill that goal, they'll need to buy up 10 Saturn V (or modern equivalents) rockets. Well, 10, assuming everyone in the capsule were tourists, and they didn't have a trained employee at the wheel (helm? joystick? lever? big red "go to moon" button?)
They may be planning on farming out the launch vehicle work to Russia or China. They'd still be operating at a loss, even with each passenger paying $150M/ea.
It wouldn't be the first time someone came up with a great scam. Hell, I'd liberate $150M from a sucker, if he (or she) had the money to throw away.
If they had something that *they* have used, and can show it works, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's someone's pipe dream.
Thank you. So it's an issue with selective breeding bringing out unwelcome traits, rather than more direct genetic manipulation. Either one is bad, we just know the tech involved now.:)
Ya, that had me going too.. I thought maybe they had shortened down SAAP (Software As A Product), or it was one of the billion Symantec products. Two links in from the story, it references this BlackHat PDF, which finally does say SAP AG.
It's great to have short acronyms for stuff, but without any good context its worthless. It's like marketing people love their acronyms, so they can try to talk in military style alphabet soup. Well, at least the military alphabet soup makes perfect sense when it's in context.
I worked at places where they had code named and acronymed everything. They weren't terribly consistent, and there was no reference document. There were also many duplicates. "Work on DC" could have been the servers near Washington DC; the datacenter (pick one, maybe two or three); or domain controller. It could also be an acronym for a client (two matched), or you could have misunderstood it for PC or TC, which were also used. The best was that they had several code names, all two words long, and the first word was the same for most of them. I just called them all [blah]things, and let someone else figure out what I was talking about. That was fine, since there were about a dozen words in use at the company that *all* translated to "thing". Almost everything could be translated to "fix the thing to make the thing work so the other thing works."
Obviously the problem with the SAP thing is relatively important (more so to users of it), but without know it, the thing [SAP] has a security flat with the thing [SAP] router letting remote attackers access the thing [SAP].
And most grassy fields don't kill a herd of livestock.
Plus this is not a GM plant, it's a hybrid.
Since you must be a botanist familiar with grass, can you follow the trail back for me? Did you work with Dr. Burton on it? All I've found is that is a hybrid of PI-290884 and Tifton 68. By the names, I assume they're also hybrid or GM. What is the lineage all the way back to native plants?
Well, knowing how plants do spread over time, this could be catastrophic unless it is quarantined. We've already seen what happens with an invasive plant species.
It's clearly for farming, but I wonder how much has ended up around residences also. In any case, this could be really bad. Looking around, it's most likely in too many areas, so it cannot be quarantined and destroyed.... and I'm not a anti-GM nut.
Well, it could in theory become a problem. 18 people having isolated incidents (like the car accident) at the same time probably won't happen.
If there was an orchestrated attack to destroy the government, a list of 18 people isn't unreasonable.
I found it rather odd that they mentioned a nuke in a briefcase at the end of the summary. They're good for very small areas. The Secret Service is suppose to keep members of the line of succession in different places. It wouldn't have to be a weapon. It could be a pileup on the beltway, a plane crash, or even a structural failure of a building. Mentioning a weapon is only fear mongering.
As I understand it, if the 18 mentioned in the line of succession are incapacitated, it then becomes an act of congress to fill the vacancy of acting President. I believe that to be a majority vote by a congressional quorum. A Quorum for the house and senate is half of the members present or voting. If members were incapacitated by some event (lets say building collapse rather than a nuke), the quorum would then become at least half of the surviving members.
If (and such a huge "if") the 18 in the line of succession,*and* more than half of the house and senate, were to become incapacitated, leaving you with a handful of congress members, a majority vote of them to place an acting President would suffice.
If there were such an event that also incapacitated all of Congress, I'm sure the top brass from the Pentagon, following down the military chain of command, would take control until an acting President could be placed. There are already POTUS Executive Orders to that effect. A disaster of sufficient magnitude would quite literally have to incapacitate all of Washington, every US military base, every naval group, and ever deployed military group. I'm pretty sure any given officer at some remote military station doesn't lose any sleep worrying that he (or she) might have to run the country on a moments notice.
Well, it depends on where you are. In the Los Angeles area, they have fires sprout up all over. When it's very dry and there's a good wind, those fires can move *very* fast. It is possible that when you go home one day, there wasn't a fire. The next morning when you show up, the area may have already been evacuated, or your building is a lovely pile of ash and molten computer parts.
When I moved away from LA, two days before we were to leave, a wildfire started several miles away. The day before we were to leave, we could see it on the next hill, about 1/2 mile away. We left early. The fire continued into the neighborhood after we left.
Disaster planning isn't suppose to be "we can take all the stuff out when the problem happens". It's suppose to be "Some spontaneous event happened, and we've lost all of our equipment." It should be dramatic enough to believe the building spontaneously collapsed, a meteor the size of a cit bus fell on it, or a tornado blew it away.
So, to address the summary, plan for the equipment to be a total loss, and that you'll have to restore from off-site backups.
What I'd do, if I happened to be there, would be to grab the servers, the C-level and Director level workstations (abandon the monitors, keyboards, and mice), and leave the rest. Hopefully everything is on the servers. It's not practical to consider moving 50 workstations, monitors, keyboards, and phones. I'd sure hope their insurance is up to date. We all know that top brass will pitch a fit if their computers are destroyed, which is the only reason for considering them.
There are probably at least a few departments who will need their files (accounting, HR, and sales). For most businesses, that'd fill up the 17' truck pretty quick by itself. That's a good time to talk to the boss about the paperless office concept, off-site backups, and a proper disaster plan.
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Change your video drivers. :)
I had several games start acting badly. it turned out that Windows Update had been gracious enough to upgrade the video drivers for me, and under load the new driver would overheat the card. Sometimes it was BSOD, sometimes it would just get hung mid-action, including the sound buzzing the last sound made. Looking around, there was lots of discussion on all kinds of video cards, and precisely what versions actually worked while gaming, and what didn't. Once you find the one that works right, the system will stop crashing.
And ya.. Windows 7.
But to stay with the conversation, ping, tracert, ipconfig /all... Those are basics that don't have an integrated equivalent, if you want to see everything.
On Linux, I do just about everything from the cli. On the servers, it *is* everything, as I don't want the unnecessary overhead of a graphic environment that no one looks at. On workstations, I'll admit, the web browser, mail client, and IDE are GUI. Browsing from lynx is nice and all, but sometimes you need to see a picture. :) I'm notorious for having dozens of terminals open, with top, ping, or something else going. It's called "doing my job".
That's odd. I don't see many with generators at retail fueling stations. I guess it varies by area. I'm in Florida, and can't say I've ever noticed one. We're most likely to get knocked down by hurricanes a few times a year, so it'd be a good thing to have. That's one of those things I look for, since I'm very interested in how things work. Well, I have the "how things work" part down pat. Now I just look at how someone else does theirs. What brand equipment do they use, etc, etc.
The gas station reference was for the previous poster. Definitely, off-road diesel is preferred. It's easily transportable, fairly easy to store, and won't generally leak through seals in pressure systems. In a pinch, diesel from a retail fueling station would do, but that means an awful lot of gas cans. :) Retail fueling stations don't keep a huge supply. They keep enough for their demand, plus a little reserve for peak traffic days. If a retail station knows that they sell 1k gallons of diesel a week, they won't have 20k gallons to pump into a truck for them. And of course, the road taxes will kill you.
The only other option I've seen at a large datacenter was one Northeast of Atlanta. They had a flywheel system. Well, there were stages. The DC room had capacity to run for a day. The flywheel was suppose to keep it up for another day or two. Then they'd fall back to diesel generators for longer durations. They were very proud of their flywheel. I just saw it as a huge expense that wasn't necessary. They also went for whiz-bang devices, like a retinal scanner to enter the main doors. That was cute, except I went around to the back door and entered the facility unchallenged. We didn't go with that datacenter, because their cooling sucked. They had a huge amount of cooling, but didn't have their flow designed properly. Walking the facility, there were hot spots in excess of 90 degrees, on the cold side of existing customer equipment. It was a very pretty facility though.
The only gasoline generators I've worked with are at my house, and they're regular consumer portable units (5KW and 5.5KW) I got the 5.5KW because my ex-wife flipped out when a tropical depression came our way, and we had just moved to Florida. She didn't get that "tropical depression" is the same as "normal summer thunderstorm". The 5KW I got real cheap as a non-functional unit. $20 in parts, and now it works. They're really very simple devices, if you know what all the parts do.
That's exactly us! Well, tell her she isn't alone.
If she can get herself diagnosed with a sleep disorder (assuming you're in the US), such things are protected under the ADA. Of course, being legally protected, and getting an employer to hire you, is a huge difference. They have to make reasonable accommodations, but simply enough they just have to say "well, we work from 8am to 6pm, so there's no way to accommodate it."
Employers who are flexible love people like me, because they'll get great stuff done while everyone else is asleep. Finding employers who are willing to work outside of their self imposed structure is the hard part.
Well, no bullshit. It depends on the degree. Some days it's just seeing double and I can't handle any sound, and sometimes it's hiding in the bedroom with my head under the pillows wishing it would stop.
Just because I didn't describe a migraine well enough for you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
It could be worse..
If no one disturbs me, I wake up at the crack of noon +- 5 minutes. I get tired at about 4am, and to sleep at 4:30 to 5am. That's my circadian rhythm.
If I force myself to "normal" work day patterns, I'm screwed. First off, it takes several alarm clocks, and usually someone living with me to scream at me that the alarm has been going off for an hour. Alarm clocks that reset themselves after a few minutes are worthless to me. My phone has a very obnoxious alarm clock on it. I set 4 or more alarms, about 6 minutes apart, so if I hit snooze on one, they'll keep going off at irregular intervals.
Assuming I am awake, I'm not really. It's literally just the motions of it. I can shower, drive, and show up to work. I can't hold an intelligent conversation, and I work very slowly. Pretty much how most people would, if they were woken up at 3am and told to work. I take notes, because I won't remember what anyone tells me. Suddenly at noon, I'm wide awake. I can redesign networks in my head, and trouble shoot complex problems that have other people stumped. I don't take lunch until around 4pm, just because companies usually require it. Even then, it's food at my desk. I usually keep going until 8pm to 9pm, getting my assigned work done, plus some. 4 hours in zombie mode, and then 9 good work hours, where I do real work.
When I get home, I have to take sleeping pills to get to sleep. Without them, I won't get sleepy again til 4am. I have to change pills every couple weeks, because I build up a tolerance quickly. My bedside table ends up looking like an OTC pharmacy.
On this work schedule, add large amounts of ibuprofen and antacids. Waking up early leaves me with migraines all day, even after I pass the noon point where I'm actually awake. All the ibuprofen necessitates the antacids.
The only practical way for me to be on a 8am flight is to stay up all night. On my schedule, it's not so bad (read the link above). I'm tired, but not sleepy on the 5am drive to the airport. I breeze through ticketing and security, and fall asleep at the terminal. My 100 or so new temporary closest friends make plenty of noise when it's time to get on the plane. So to my seat, and I finish my nap for the duration of the flight. When noon hits, I'm ready to conquer the world, which hopefully coincides with me getting to my destination.
I'd trade sleep patterns with anyone else. It'd make my life so much easier.
I have had employers who live with it. They recognize I won't be heard from until noon, and everyone knows not to try unless a building is on fire. They learn to appreciate it the fact that I am around to make production changes all night, when customer usage is minimal, and babysit the whole network until the morning shift is alive. They also appreciate the fact that my work day is 16 hours long, and I only occasionally take an hour break to go grocery shopping and the like. :)
I'm writing this at 11am. I tried to move over to a normal day, by sleeping through the day yesterday, waking up at 6pm, going to sleep at 3am, and then I was wide awake at 6am. The migraine is in full swing right now, and I'll actually be awake in another hour.
It took a few more years than expected for the engineers at Area 51 to reverse engineer all that lovey technology they got their hands on in the 1940's. They still haven't figured out the drive systems though. I suspect it will be a while before that happens, since we don't exactly have the fuel here. It's kind of like reverse engineering a Prius in 1890. It could be done. It'll take a long time to re-invent the technologies to make it possible.
You ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive. You still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
I'm surprised no one got the bright idea to get a generator for the gas station.
I was driving out in the middle of the desert a while back. We stopped for gas (never go below 1/4 tank, unless you like walking for hours). The gas station couldn't pump, because their generator was down. They were so far out in the middle of nowhere, they didn't have power lines run to the station. They sent someone off to get a new generator, but it was something like 4 hours round trip to the nearest store that had one.
I guess people take things like power for granted, because it seems like it's always there. The magic wires in the walls just work. Well, until they don't, I guess.
That'd be a lovely idea. They'll be cobranded "gTLD by Google" and "gTLD by Microsoft". Well, I'm sure a few banks would get in on the game too. Anywhere they can make money for nothing is their favorite industry.
How did you get the transcript from their meeting?
I cannot confirm, nor deny, any recollection of the creatures in question. :)
As others have mentioned, those decisions don't come down to a sailor on a ship. They come from the command. There are miles and miles of red tape,
Others have also mentioned that the military *does* have provisions for such things. In asking for another way around, he's basically saying that he wants to circumvent the security of the ship for undisclosed reasons.
Sure, there are technical ways that we can suggest to monitor the traffic on the ship side of the VPN. The problem here is that he most likely doesn't have the authority (or even real permission) to explore the options. He's most likely going to find himself in some very uncomfortable discussions with some strong penalties threatened.
Most of us are too old to still watch children's cartoons.
As you said, "most". All it takes is one person who wants bad things to happen.
The military have bigger concerns while performing their duties, they shouldn't have to worry about someone intentionally or accidentally leaking information which may lead to their demise.
I've known families of deployed sailors. For the most part, they aren't told when their family is coming home until the last minute. They usually can't even say where they are deployed. It really only takes one message being intercepted.
Say you're a sailor on a ship, and you send a note home to mom (email, physical letter, IM, etc) saying "We're heading over to the Persian Gulf. We'll be there on July 1st. They already told us there's something big happening, so I won't be able to write for a few weeks.."
Then mom posts it on Facebook. " :( Little BitZ wrote. Most of you know he's on the USS SomeCarrier. They're doing something big in the Persian gulf starting July 1st."
Oh, and did I mention that mom isn't that great with Facebook, and everything she writes is public? Nah, that'd never happen. And no intelligence agency would monitor public posts for information.
Even if it's not prevented by technological measures on the ship, you can be damned sure there are a more rules and regulations that he could spend the rest of his military career reading.
The DoD isn't particularly fond of people doing anything with information that they don't have control over.
Even if the DoD didn't like it, anyone with anything resembling security in mind wouldn't want to open up any sort of security risk. Opening an encrypted tunnel to circumvent packet inspection sounds like a wonderful way to bring in viruses, or send out classified materials. And fuck, potentially compromising any systems on a military vessel could be the difference between surviving and losing all hands.
I do have suggestions on good things to use, for civilians, in civilian environments, where it really doesn't matter if they get some malware, or otherwise hose their system. I won't touch this one. I'm allergic to prison, and more so to military prison.
My first thoughts were "Who?". Then "What launches have they already done?"
All I could find is that they're using recycled Soviet spacecraft and space station(s). That's fine and dandy. Just because you buy a bunch of hardware, it doesn't mean you have a functional space program. From what I read, the don't, and aren't planning, any sort of launch system. They'll be dependent on someone elses rockets. I guess that saves a lot of headaches, assuming they can buy enough rockets to achieve it. 30 people starting in 2014? The capsules they have only hold 3 people. To fulfill that goal, they'll need to buy up 10 Saturn V (or modern equivalents) rockets. Well, 10, assuming everyone in the capsule were tourists, and they didn't have a trained employee at the wheel (helm? joystick? lever? big red "go to moon" button?)
They may be planning on farming out the launch vehicle work to Russia or China. They'd still be operating at a loss, even with each passenger paying $150M/ea.
It wouldn't be the first time someone came up with a great scam. Hell, I'd liberate $150M from a sucker, if he (or she) had the money to throw away.
If they had something that *they* have used, and can show it works, I'd be impressed. Until then, it's someone's pipe dream.
Thank you. So it's an issue with selective breeding bringing out unwelcome traits, rather than more direct genetic manipulation. Either one is bad, we just know the tech involved now. :)
Ya, that had me going too.. I thought maybe they had shortened down SAAP (Software As A Product), or it was one of the billion Symantec products. Two links in from the story, it references this BlackHat PDF, which finally does say SAP AG.
It's great to have short acronyms for stuff, but without any good context its worthless. It's like marketing people love their acronyms, so they can try to talk in military style alphabet soup. Well, at least the military alphabet soup makes perfect sense when it's in context.
I worked at places where they had code named and acronymed everything. They weren't terribly consistent, and there was no reference document. There were also many duplicates. "Work on DC" could have been the servers near Washington DC; the datacenter (pick one, maybe two or three); or domain controller. It could also be an acronym for a client (two matched), or you could have misunderstood it for PC or TC, which were also used. The best was that they had several code names, all two words long, and the first word was the same for most of them. I just called them all [blah]things, and let someone else figure out what I was talking about. That was fine, since there were about a dozen words in use at the company that *all* translated to "thing". Almost everything could be translated to "fix the thing to make the thing work so the other thing works."
I did everything I could not to recite this.
Obviously the problem with the SAP thing is relatively important (more so to users of it), but without know it, the thing [SAP] has a security flat with the thing [SAP] router letting remote attackers access the thing [SAP].
And most grassy fields don't kill a herd of livestock.
Since you must be a botanist familiar with grass, can you follow the trail back for me? Did you work with Dr. Burton on it? All I've found is that is a hybrid of PI-290884 and Tifton 68. By the names, I assume they're also hybrid or GM. What is the lineage all the way back to native plants?
Once you open Pandora's box, you can't shut it again... This stuff is out there, and I doubt will ever be exterminated.
Well, knowing how plants do spread over time, this could be catastrophic unless it is quarantined. We've already seen what happens with an invasive plant species.
This could be an ecological disaster. The grass isn't "new", and this wasn't a test case. It's been sold to farmers since 1991. https://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&q=Tifton+85+bermudagrass
It's clearly for farming, but I wonder how much has ended up around residences also. In any case, this could be really bad. Looking around, it's most likely in too many areas, so it cannot be quarantined and destroyed. ... and I'm not a anti-GM nut.
Well, it could in theory become a problem. 18 people having isolated incidents (like the car accident) at the same time probably won't happen.
If there was an orchestrated attack to destroy the government, a list of 18 people isn't unreasonable.
I found it rather odd that they mentioned a nuke in a briefcase at the end of the summary. They're good for very small areas. The Secret Service is suppose to keep members of the line of succession in different places. It wouldn't have to be a weapon. It could be a pileup on the beltway, a plane crash, or even a structural failure of a building. Mentioning a weapon is only fear mongering.
As I understand it, if the 18 mentioned in the line of succession are incapacitated, it then becomes an act of congress to fill the vacancy of acting President. I believe that to be a majority vote by a congressional quorum. A Quorum for the house and senate is half of the members present or voting. If members were incapacitated by some event (lets say building collapse rather than a nuke), the quorum would then become at least half of the surviving members.
If (and such a huge "if") the 18 in the line of succession,*and* more than half of the house and senate, were to become incapacitated, leaving you with a handful of congress members, a majority vote of them to place an acting President would suffice.
If there were such an event that also incapacitated all of Congress, I'm sure the top brass from the Pentagon, following down the military chain of command, would take control until an acting President could be placed. There are already POTUS Executive Orders to that effect. A disaster of sufficient magnitude would quite literally have to incapacitate all of Washington, every US military base, every naval group, and ever deployed military group. I'm pretty sure any given officer at some remote military station doesn't lose any sleep worrying that he (or she) might have to run the country on a moments notice.
There's anyone still using it? Last time I looked, it was a huge dying repository of porn spam. That was over 10 years ago.
Well, it depends on where you are. In the Los Angeles area, they have fires sprout up all over. When it's very dry and there's a good wind, those fires can move *very* fast. It is possible that when you go home one day, there wasn't a fire. The next morning when you show up, the area may have already been evacuated, or your building is a lovely pile of ash and molten computer parts.
When I moved away from LA, two days before we were to leave, a wildfire started several miles away. The day before we were to leave, we could see it on the next hill, about 1/2 mile away. We left early. The fire continued into the neighborhood after we left.
Disaster planning isn't suppose to be "we can take all the stuff out when the problem happens". It's suppose to be "Some spontaneous event happened, and we've lost all of our equipment." It should be dramatic enough to believe the building spontaneously collapsed, a meteor the size of a cit bus fell on it, or a tornado blew it away.
So, to address the summary, plan for the equipment to be a total loss, and that you'll have to restore from off-site backups.
What I'd do, if I happened to be there, would be to grab the servers, the C-level and Director level workstations (abandon the monitors, keyboards, and mice), and leave the rest. Hopefully everything is on the servers. It's not practical to consider moving 50 workstations, monitors, keyboards, and phones. I'd sure hope their insurance is up to date. We all know that top brass will pitch a fit if their computers are destroyed, which is the only reason for considering them.
There are probably at least a few departments who will need their files (accounting, HR, and sales). For most businesses, that'd fill up the 17' truck pretty quick by itself. That's a good time to talk to the boss about the paperless office concept, off-site backups, and a proper disaster plan.