Lets not forget that you can sell females in your family, stone people to death, killing your own children to appease god, and a seemingly endless list of fun things that you can cite the bible as being ok.
Luckily, "it's in the bible" still isn't a valid defense in court.
Pretty much, yes. But of course, such a position is taken as an improper joke. It's never fair to mock an imaginary sky creature with another imaginary sky creature.
You'd have to check with the UN counsel on nation status. It's 3 doors down from the UN ministry of silly walks. They base it somewhat on the total number of residents in the nation that are just plain batshit crazy.
I invite you to research this yourself, rather than taking my word on it, nor the word of anyone else. Don't as your local religious leader, your friends, family, or kid brother who knows how to use Google better than you.
Go to various book stores. Purchase copies of different bibles. That's not different bibles with different covers. Unless you don't have access to multiple book stores, or your local book stores are amazingly homogenized. If you live in such a place, try Amazon. That link is directly to Amazon's Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Bibles > "bible" . There are 23,953 results. I am aware that many of these will be repeated and from various publishers. Pick out a dozen or so different bibles. Compare them line by line.
It's ok, I'll wait while you finish.......
Ok, now that you've done that, you do see that there are significant differences in just your random sampling of a few bibles.
The Isaiah scroll from Qumran was over 95% word-for-word identical to our modern texts (the earliest dating from 980AD), with the remaining 5% obvious typos or slips of the pen.
So, 95% correct in a version written about 980 years after the events cited. Well, that's not totally accurate either. It's back to say 6,000 years ago (if we believe some of the modern claims). I barely trust that someone can accurately write an account of something that happened a year ago, much less accurately notate something that happened approximately 40 generations earlier (assuming 25 years per generation).
And beyond that, if the bible is suppose to be the written work as passed down from God, then why have significant portions been left out of any modern version that you can get your hands on. You can try to go visit the Vatican archives, but unless you have an amazing knowledge of ancient languages, and you have some amazing pull (like blackmail material on the pope himself), you won't see them all.
Congratulations, you've noticed that I indent my paragraphs. I hope you didn't have to break out a dictionary to figure out how to spell it.
I indent my paragraphs, because it's the way I learned to type, and there has not been a good reason to do otherwise. Formal and information writings can have indented paragraphs. Common business practice is to not indent, but even still I indent those documents.
Oddly enough, no coworker, employer, customer, client, nor readers of any of my works have ever mentioned it, but approximately 3 times on Slashdot people have realized that they had no arguing points, so they preferred to attack my style of writing. There was one troll who was instant that because of the intentions and my online name, that I was Jewish, rich, and for some reason insisted I had a ivy league education.
So, he was wrong on 3 accounts, and you on one.
I never said I am for or against organized religion. I am saying that if any one theology should be taught as factual, all should receive the same treatment. That is never the case in the argument of teaching Christian creationism in school. The argument for it is always that it must be Christian creationism, and it is either to be taught side-by-side with evolution, or specifically excluding evolution.
Why does Christianity get any preferential treatment over facts or other theologies? Just because there is a large number of people who will make noise, and a church can have every member show up to school board meetings. That is a cultist method, trying to force non-believers to follow their dogma.
If it's all fine and dandy to allow Christian theology to be taught as fact, you shouldn't be opposed to ditching the Christian creation myth, and replacing it with the fact that the universes are made by Lord Brahma the Creator, maintained by Lord Vishnu the Preserver and destroyed by Lord Shiva. *THAT* creation myth has been around for much longer than the Christian creation myth. How about the fact that the sons of Bor carried Ymir to the middle of Ginnungagap and made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken. That myth has been around longer than either of the prior.
Those are Hindu and Norse creation myths, respectively.
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
We haven't given up, but more than 75% of the population are such cultists. Demanding logic and sanity has become much like a black man walking into a KKK meeting and demanding equal rights. What would you give his life expectancy?
From the article: "In 2009 the Texas Board of Education said that students should be taught "all sides" of current scientific theories."
but creationism isn't allowed because it's religious. I'm so confused.
That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.
Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
If it's truly necessary to discuss every unsubstantiated creation theory, all sides of the story should be taught. Not just all 190 versions from the "bible", but all creation legends according to all religions and cultures.
Or we could stick with teaching substantiated facts. Nah, that would make way too much sense.
The majority of citizens have taken the word of their respective cults as reality, and fail to recognize anything factual. Factual evidence is passed off as garbage, and ancient fairy tales are the truth. Worse, they don't even cite their own fairy tales properly, and continue to spew more recent urban legends that have been adopted by the cult majority as fact.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
I am now a resident of the certifiably most insane nation in the world, which unfortunately also possesses the largest quantity and most dangerous weapons in the world.
You haven't been paying attention to the United States Congress lately. Besides shoving an official religion down the throats of Americans, they've also begun to torpedo woman's rights. There are now several things that women are not legally allowed to do without "a male family member". If you do not have a male family member available to sign off on what the female thinks she wants, the court will appoint a male representative.
I'm not saying I agree with either. I can't provide the specifics off the top of my head, but my girlfriend has been watching the issues carefully, and sending complaints to all congressional representatives involved. It's not because she's any kind of crazy fringe womans rights activist. It's because our government is coming out with some really fucked up laws.
The current Congress is trying to rapidly turn womens right backwards over 100 years. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in the next 20 years it was turned back so far that women aren't allowed to drive, work outside of the home, or be allowed in public without a male relative present.
PS C:\Users\User> foo The term 'foo' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:4 + foo <<<<
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (foo:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
More often than not, when I've done something wrong slightly wrong, I don't get anything useful back. Someone mentioned "Perl for Windows" comes with Windows now. Bah.
PS C:\Users\User> perl The term 'perl' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelli ng of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:5 + perl <<<<
+ CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (perl:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
I know, I know, install ActivePerl. But installing a 3rd party package does *not* mean that it comes with it. I was trying to use Windows Services for Unix (SFU). I was trying to do a comparison on SMB to CIFS to NFS for access speed tests. It was a Linux server, with Win2k3AS and Win2k8 Server VM's. If you ever want to give yourself a massive headache, try this. I also connected to the same services with a stand-alone Linux (Slackware64) machine. The standalone machine had no problems. Trying to get SFU (which I read as Shut the Fuck Up) was a painful exercise in how not to get anything done for two days. As I recall, I did finally get it installed. I'm pretty sure it was the Win2k3AS server that required a download from Microsoft, and their one and only link for downloading the 150MB (if I recall right) file was broken, so I finally got it from a 3rd party who happened to have a copy.
Oh, and setting up the Linux client? About 10 minutes, and that was because I was interrupted a few times. Come on, setting a service to run (chmod 755/etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd), a few lines in fstab, and it's done. Samba or CIFS? chmod 755/etc/rc.d/rc.samba, a few lines in fstab, and it's done.
Right now, I'm looking at the lovely possibliity of changing the file shares on every machine on the network. Everyone has a dozen or so shares mounted, and they're all different drive letters. The easy way to find out? I scanned them all in Cygwin.
I'm jealous. I don't have any machines with that much uptime. There's always something. Changing datacenters, upgrading kernels for new functionality, and the famous "sorry dude, I kinda unplugged your server, hope you don't mind."
The best I had was 3 years, and then had to move the servers. I forgot to get the uptime before I moved them.
Amazingly enough, that's something I'm doing right now. (no, I'm not the original author). I smoothed over the rough spots as much as possible, and now we're doing the Linux migration. It's a long, slow process to change a decade of deep rooted Windows-isms, but it will happen soon enough. The only Windows that will be left will be the workstations for those who choose not to switch over to Linux. In a web based enterprise, there's no excuse for being locked into any platform.
Day 1) Walk in the door, optimistic about what can be done with this "Enterprise" platform.
Day 2) Walk in the door, with a headache, hoping to find an answer for how to manage what were simple tasks under *nix.
Day 3) Walk in the door. Sit down at your desk. Plant your head firmly on the keyboard and cry.
Day 4) Walk in the door, rip your soul out of your chest, stomp on it, and throw it in the nearest recycle bin. Sit down at your desk, and wonder why in 4 days you can't find a valid answer to automation that was so simple under *nix.
Day 5) Walk in the door. Sit down at your desk, and think about how miserable you are now that you're working on a Windows-only network. Leave 2 hours early, and drink away your pain at the nearest bar.
The longer it goes on, the worse the pain gets, until you realize that you have a stash of cheap liquor and pot in your desk drawer, and you use more of both in one day than an entire fraternity use in a hard partying weekend.
I do have some answers for parts of it. Powershell is part of the answer, but far from complete, unless you like virtually every command you type returning worthless 6 line responses. Cygwin may solve some of the problems, but not all of them. ActivePerl may solve some problems. In the end, you will realize that everything is a mouse click away, and those mouse clicks are the only way to do it. Prepare to spend the rest of your life in remote desktop connections, and putting more miles on your mouse than you ever did playing first person shooters.
Those are the tin-foil hat wearing hackers. They've made it so secret, even the USPS doesn't know where it is.
I prefer hiding in plain site. With a population density of about 71,000 per square mile (393 sq/ft per person), it's rather impractical to walk up to each person and say "Excuse me, are you JW Smythe?". When I've visited 31337, the population density of 3 per square mile makes it pretty easy to find a specific person. But hey, if the [feds|aliens|"they"] come looking for those folks, it's easy enough to take everyone and sort them out later. I'm afraid to know how they'd detail 71,000 people to possibly find me.:)
Ya, I know. Some people take them as the easily circumvented jokes that they can be. I preferred to take it seriously. Since the external scan is rarely more than using a web based nmap, I prefer to try harder to break into my own equipment.:)
You know, I was tracking defacement attacks for a while. For the ones I investigated, I found that the "evidence" they left behind rarely if ever really corresponded to the actual hacker. I saw so many "Chinese" and "Russian" defacement, that could be easily traced to kids in the US, especially during school vacations.
Hell, if I just broke into Sony's network, stole a metric fuck-ton of passwords and credit card credentials, I'd sure as hell leave behind some "evidence" that pointed towards someone else. What'd they expect? "Hi, I just broke into your server. My name is JW Smythe. My address is 14 Hacker Way, New York, NY, 10011. Come by and visit me any time. I'll be buying Internet porn with all these stolen cards, so knock before you come in."
Were they the American Sony servers, or the Japanese servers? If it's the American servers, the burden of proof falls upon the defendant to prove they didn't do something. Don't get all confused by those pesky laws, law enforcement and the courts don't.
And being that you posted the same phrase, that means you are part of the group "Anonymous". Congratulations, now we know who the evil "Anonymous" group is.
In other news, the tide goes in, the tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. There is an invisible being in the sky who will torture your soul for all of eternity if you don't talk to him, but he really loves you. And if that isn't clear enough, it was God who did it. God hates Sony and the Japanese, and especially all those heathens who use the Internet.
Excuse me I have some paying customers who need tinfoil hat adjustments to take care of.
The fuel tax already covers that nicely. Truckers are using the most expensive fuel. According to the US Department of Energy, both gasoline and diesel are taxed at 12% average. The average cost of regular gasoline is $3.56/gal. The average cost of diesel is $3.91/gal.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (in 2008 numbers), the average passenger car gets 22.6mpg, and the average other 2 and 4 wheel vehicle (motorcycles, passenger trucks and SUVs) get 18.1mpg. That's average, everyone will claim "mine gets [higher|lower]".
A tractor/trailer rig gets 10mpg unloaded, or about 5 to 7mpg fully loaded. so, on a hypothetically average trip of exactly 1,000 miles, and equally average driving conditions for all involved...
And lets address his complaint of "In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars", lets consider what the car to truck ratio is...
Again, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2000 (the last year this report shows any numbers), there were 133,621,420 passenger cars, 4,346,068 motorcycles, 79,084,979 passenger trucks and SUV's, and 5,926,030 other 2 axle vehicles.
So, 222,978,497 2 axle vehicles, and 2,096,619 truck/trailer combination. So 106 cars for every truck on the road. Consider that those heavy trucks spend far more miles on common routes, (i.e., interstates, state highways, etc) than on the sprawling local roads and community streets. You'll see that it doesn't matter much that they do 9600:1 damage to the highway, they are likely only driving on a very very small percentage of the overall roadways. They only have to repave an interstate once and it's repaired, so the cumulative effect does not equal a 9600:1 burden on the overall paved streets across the country.
Consider your own neighborhood. How many cars drive past your house for every heavy truck. The number probably becomes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to one truck.
But don't let factual statistics get in the way of cherry picking numbers to scream about the awful blight of the heavy truck.:)
Well, I know that when I had to go through it regularly, we did have to complain about some of the remote scanning.
Here's a few of the BS items that we had been flagged with. These are from memory, so I may be wrong on some of the wording.
The server does not respond to ICMP (red flag). Well, the server blocked all unexpected traffic, including ICMP. So we opened the firewall a little for that.
They complained that they were not getting refused connection messages to known ports (telnet, SMTP, etc), so we were flagged for that. That's where I started complaining.
They wanted the firewall completely opened for "testing". This was current production, so I refused. I told them I could allow a single IP for them to test with, but they wouldn't oblige. Since we were always under attack, their IP was one of several hundred during the period where they were most likely testing. 1 tester, and a few hundred attackers. Hmm, no.
They proceeded to search the surrounding network. They red-flagged us for having a server on the network that responded to DNS requests. Oddly enough, that was a DNS server. Then they hit us for having a mail server that accepted mail. Sure, it accepted mail. It only relayed for us, but we did (oh my gosh) receive mail. They didn't receive an instant refusal, because we accepted and dropped those messages.
I passed the word back through our accounting guy that they could go fuck themselves, and to give us a real auditor...
The second auditor wasn't quite so bad. They hit us for not being able to fingerprint the OS. I congratulated them on that, and then told them specifically the OS, distro, and kernel version. They had a few yellow flags for non-broken stuff, such as not responding to ICMP. They didn't mark points against us on that one, it was just a mention. They questioned our remote access ability, since the only ports that responded were 80 and 443. I told them the port number (unusual port) and method, so they beat on that for a while and couldn't touch it. Then they gave us a pass.
We were fully compliant. I wasn't hiding anything from them. I was hiding everything from the constant barrage of hackers who wanted in. People knew we made millions. They knew we had a whole bunch of machines on multiple GigE circuits. If they could compromise just one machine, they'd have a very fast platform to attack from, and I wasn't going to allow that.
We were very successful in never losing any personal info, but we always maintained doing better than PCI compliance required.
How the hell did they maintain PCI compliance? At very least that requires the self-evaluation, and an external scan by a 3rd party. The self-evaluation, they could have easily lied on. The external scan? No way. Well, unless they had the scan pointed at a dummy server. That happens a lot more than it should. For the money I'm sure Sony was pushing through, it should have rated an on-site inspection. One company I worked for only pushed through about $50 million/yr. We were self-eval with external scan. They did threaten physical inspections every quarter, but never showed up. I guess they could have pointed at any rack and said "this is the rack". The insecurity is pure stupidity. There are so many ways to secure the network, from free (iptables on the machine) to inexpensive (dedicated firewall machine running Linux), to expensive hardware solutions. There's no excuse for this.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets not forget that you can sell females in your family, stone people to death, killing your own children to appease god, and a seemingly endless list of fun things that you can cite the bible as being ok.
Luckily, "it's in the bible" still isn't a valid defense in court.
And lets not forget this fine one.... Stop looking at porn, and call a prostitute! It's in the bible, so it's ok.
Pretty much, yes. But of course, such a position is taken as an improper joke. It's never fair to mock an imaginary sky creature with another imaginary sky creature.
You'd have to check with the UN counsel on nation status. It's 3 doors down from the UN ministry of silly walks. They base it somewhat on the total number of residents in the nation that are just plain batshit crazy.
I invite you to research this yourself, rather than taking my word on it, nor the word of anyone else. Don't as your local religious leader, your friends, family, or kid brother who knows how to use Google better than you.
Go to various book stores. Purchase copies of different bibles. That's not different bibles with different covers. Unless you don't have access to multiple book stores, or your local book stores are amazingly homogenized. If you live in such a place, try Amazon. That link is directly to Amazon's Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Bibles > "bible" . There are 23,953 results. I am aware that many of these will be repeated and from various publishers. Pick out a dozen or so different bibles. Compare them line by line.
It's ok, I'll wait while you finish. ... ...
Ok, now that you've done that, you do see that there are significant differences in just your random sampling of a few bibles.
So, 95% correct in a version written about 980 years after the events cited. Well, that's not totally accurate either. It's back to say 6,000 years ago (if we believe some of the modern claims). I barely trust that someone can accurately write an account of something that happened a year ago, much less accurately notate something that happened approximately 40 generations earlier (assuming 25 years per generation).
And beyond that, if the bible is suppose to be the written work as passed down from God, then why have significant portions been left out of any modern version that you can get your hands on. You can try to go visit the Vatican archives, but unless you have an amazing knowledge of ancient languages, and you have some amazing pull (like blackmail material on the pope himself), you won't see them all.
Congratulations, you've noticed that I indent my paragraphs. I hope you didn't have to break out a dictionary to figure out how to spell it.
I indent my paragraphs, because it's the way I learned to type, and there has not been a good reason to do otherwise. Formal and information writings can have indented paragraphs. Common business practice is to not indent, but even still I indent those documents.
Oddly enough, no coworker, employer, customer, client, nor readers of any of my works have ever mentioned it, but approximately 3 times on Slashdot people have realized that they had no arguing points, so they preferred to attack my style of writing. There was one troll who was instant that because of the intentions and my online name, that I was Jewish, rich, and for some reason insisted I had a ivy league education.
So, he was wrong on 3 accounts, and you on one.
I never said I am for or against organized religion. I am saying that if any one theology should be taught as factual, all should receive the same treatment. That is never the case in the argument of teaching Christian creationism in school. The argument for it is always that it must be Christian creationism, and it is either to be taught side-by-side with evolution, or specifically excluding evolution.
Why does Christianity get any preferential treatment over facts or other theologies? Just because there is a large number of people who will make noise, and a church can have every member show up to school board meetings. That is a cultist method, trying to force non-believers to follow their dogma.
If it's all fine and dandy to allow Christian theology to be taught as fact, you shouldn't be opposed to ditching the Christian creation myth, and replacing it with the fact that the universes are made by Lord Brahma the Creator, maintained by Lord Vishnu the Preserver and destroyed by Lord Shiva. *THAT* creation myth has been around for much longer than the Christian creation myth. How about the fact that the sons of Bor carried Ymir to the middle of Ginnungagap and made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken. That myth has been around longer than either of the prior.
Those are Hindu and Norse creation myths, respectively.
In a theology class, a respected Reverend said "Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Over the next several sessions, he covered various cultural and religious beliefs by groups from around the world.
I had known him for years, but it wasn't until that day that I realized, he wasn't a leading member of the church to preach the word of god. He was a leading member of the church to help people who couldn't grasp the fact that there are things we don't fully understand yet. He wasn't preaching the "truth" in gospel. He was helping them from being scared of the unknown.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who take these fairy tales that were intended to help them not be scared, and demand everyone understand it as the truth.
We haven't given up, but more than 75% of the population are such cultists. Demanding logic and sanity has become much like a black man walking into a KKK meeting and demanding equal rights. What would you give his life expectancy?
That would imply that all theories, regardless of any evidence or factual basis, should be taught.
Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
If it's truly necessary to discuss every unsubstantiated creation theory, all sides of the story should be taught. Not just all 190 versions from the "bible", but all creation legends according to all religions and cultures.
Or we could stick with teaching substantiated facts. Nah, that would make way too much sense.
When the family tree doesn't have any branches, it's hard to find useful evolutionary traits.
Just to play their side (don't flame me for it)...
"But, it's in the bible. The bible is the only truth. The bible says you are wrong."
You seem to fail to see the real problem.
The majority of citizens have taken the word of their respective cults as reality, and fail to recognize anything factual. Factual evidence is passed off as garbage, and ancient fairy tales are the truth. Worse, they don't even cite their own fairy tales properly, and continue to spew more recent urban legends that have been adopted by the cult majority as fact.
It is an amazingly sad state of affairs, that the majority of the population have become so complacent in following the lies, that they no longer think for themselves.
I am now a resident of the certifiably most insane nation in the world, which unfortunately also possesses the largest quantity and most dangerous weapons in the world.
You haven't been paying attention to the United States Congress lately. Besides shoving an official religion down the throats of Americans, they've also begun to torpedo woman's rights. There are now several things that women are not legally allowed to do without "a male family member". If you do not have a male family member available to sign off on what the female thinks she wants, the court will appoint a male representative.
I'm not saying I agree with either. I can't provide the specifics off the top of my head, but my girlfriend has been watching the issues carefully, and sending complaints to all congressional representatives involved. It's not because she's any kind of crazy fringe womans rights activist. It's because our government is coming out with some really fucked up laws.
The current Congress is trying to rapidly turn womens right backwards over 100 years. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if in the next 20 years it was turned back so far that women aren't allowed to drive, work outside of the home, or be allowed in public without a male relative present.
Actually, I was referring to this text.
More often than not, when I've done something wrong slightly wrong, I don't get anything useful back. Someone mentioned "Perl for Windows" comes with Windows now. Bah.
I know, I know, install ActivePerl. But installing a 3rd party package does *not* mean that it comes with it. I was trying to use Windows Services for Unix (SFU). I was trying to do a comparison on SMB to CIFS to NFS for access speed tests. It was a Linux server, with Win2k3AS and Win2k8 Server VM's. If you ever want to give yourself a massive headache, try this. I also connected to the same services with a stand-alone Linux (Slackware64) machine. The standalone machine had no problems. Trying to get SFU (which I read as Shut the Fuck Up) was a painful exercise in how not to get anything done for two days. As I recall, I did finally get it installed. I'm pretty sure it was the Win2k3AS server that required a download from Microsoft, and their one and only link for downloading the 150MB (if I recall right) file was broken, so I finally got it from a 3rd party who happened to have a copy.
Oh, and setting up the Linux client? About 10 minutes, and that was because I was interrupted a few times. Come on, setting a service to run (chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.nfsd), a few lines in fstab, and it's done. Samba or CIFS? chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.samba, a few lines in fstab, and it's done.
Right now, I'm looking at the lovely possibliity of changing the file shares on every machine on the network. Everyone has a dozen or so shares mounted, and they're all different drive letters. The easy way to find out? I scanned them all in Cygwin.
I'm jealous. I don't have any machines with that much uptime. There's always something. Changing datacenters, upgrading kernels for new functionality, and the famous "sorry dude, I kinda unplugged your server, hope you don't mind."
The best I had was 3 years, and then had to move the servers. I forgot to get the uptime before I moved them.
Amazingly enough, that's something I'm doing right now. (no, I'm not the original author). I smoothed over the rough spots as much as possible, and now we're doing the Linux migration. It's a long, slow process to change a decade of deep rooted Windows-isms, but it will happen soon enough. The only Windows that will be left will be the workstations for those who choose not to switch over to Linux. In a web based enterprise, there's no excuse for being locked into any platform.
Day 1) Walk in the door, optimistic about what can be done with this "Enterprise" platform.
Day 2) Walk in the door, with a headache, hoping to find an answer for how to manage what were simple tasks under *nix.
Day 3) Walk in the door. Sit down at your desk. Plant your head firmly on the keyboard and cry.
Day 4) Walk in the door, rip your soul out of your chest, stomp on it, and throw it in the nearest recycle bin. Sit down at your desk, and wonder why in 4 days you can't find a valid answer to automation that was so simple under *nix.
Day 5) Walk in the door. Sit down at your desk, and think about how miserable you are now that you're working on a Windows-only network. Leave 2 hours early, and drink away your pain at the nearest bar.
The longer it goes on, the worse the pain gets, until you realize that you have a stash of cheap liquor and pot in your desk drawer, and you use more of both in one day than an entire fraternity use in a hard partying weekend.
I do have some answers for parts of it. Powershell is part of the answer, but far from complete, unless you like virtually every command you type returning worthless 6 line responses. Cygwin may solve some of the problems, but not all of them. ActivePerl may solve some problems. In the end, you will realize that everything is a mouse click away, and those mouse clicks are the only way to do it. Prepare to spend the rest of your life in remote desktop connections, and putting more miles on your mouse than you ever did playing first person shooters.
Those are the tin-foil hat wearing hackers. They've made it so secret, even the USPS doesn't know where it is.
I prefer hiding in plain site. With a population density of about 71,000 per square mile (393 sq/ft per person), it's rather impractical to walk up to each person and say "Excuse me, are you JW Smythe?". When I've visited 31337, the population density of 3 per square mile makes it pretty easy to find a specific person. But hey, if the [feds|aliens|"they"] come looking for those folks, it's easy enough to take everyone and sort them out later. I'm afraid to know how they'd detail 71,000 people to possibly find me. :)
Ya, I know. Some people take them as the easily circumvented jokes that they can be. I preferred to take it seriously. Since the external scan is rarely more than using a web based nmap, I prefer to try harder to break into my own equipment. :)
You know, I was tracking defacement attacks for a while. For the ones I investigated, I found that the "evidence" they left behind rarely if ever really corresponded to the actual hacker. I saw so many "Chinese" and "Russian" defacement, that could be easily traced to kids in the US, especially during school vacations.
Hell, if I just broke into Sony's network, stole a metric fuck-ton of passwords and credit card credentials, I'd sure as hell leave behind some "evidence" that pointed towards someone else. What'd they expect? "Hi, I just broke into your server. My name is JW Smythe. My address is 14 Hacker Way, New York, NY, 10011. Come by and visit me any time. I'll be buying Internet porn with all these stolen cards, so knock before you come in."
Were they the American Sony servers, or the Japanese servers? If it's the American servers, the burden of proof falls upon the defendant to prove they didn't do something. Don't get all confused by those pesky laws, law enforcement and the courts don't.
And being that you posted the same phrase, that means you are part of the group "Anonymous". Congratulations, now we know who the evil "Anonymous" group is.
In other news, the tide goes in, the tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. There is an invisible being in the sky who will torture your soul for all of eternity if you don't talk to him, but he really loves you. And if that isn't clear enough, it was God who did it. God hates Sony and the Japanese, and especially all those heathens who use the Internet.
Excuse me I have some paying customers who need tinfoil hat adjustments to take care of.
The fuel tax already covers that nicely. Truckers are using the most expensive fuel. According to the US Department of Energy, both gasoline and diesel are taxed at 12% average. The average cost of regular gasoline is $3.56/gal. The average cost of diesel is $3.91/gal.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (in 2008 numbers), the average passenger car gets 22.6mpg, and the average other 2 and 4 wheel vehicle (motorcycles, passenger trucks and SUVs) get 18.1mpg. That's average, everyone will claim "mine gets [higher|lower]".
A tractor/trailer rig gets 10mpg unloaded, or about 5 to 7mpg fully loaded. so, on a hypothetically average trip of exactly 1,000 miles, and equally average driving conditions for all involved...
Avg passenger car: Fuel: 45 gallons. Cost: $160.20 Tax: $19.22
Avg tractor/trailer Fuel: 167 gallons. Cost: $652.97 Tax: $78.36
And lets address his complaint of "In fact the (highway) road damage of one 18-wheeler is equivalent to at least 9600 cars", lets consider what the car to truck ratio is...
Again, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, in 2000 (the last year this report shows any numbers), there were 133,621,420 passenger cars, 4,346,068 motorcycles, 79,084,979 passenger trucks and SUV's, and 5,926,030 other 2 axle vehicles.
So, 222,978,497 2 axle vehicles, and 2,096,619 truck/trailer combination. So 106 cars for every truck on the road. Consider that those heavy trucks spend far more miles on common routes, (i.e., interstates, state highways, etc) than on the sprawling local roads and community streets. You'll see that it doesn't matter much that they do 9600:1 damage to the highway, they are likely only driving on a very very small percentage of the overall roadways. They only have to repave an interstate once and it's repaired, so the cumulative effect does not equal a 9600:1 burden on the overall paved streets across the country.
Consider your own neighborhood. How many cars drive past your house for every heavy truck. The number probably becomes tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to one truck.
But don't let factual statistics get in the way of cherry picking numbers to scream about the awful blight of the heavy truck. :)
Well, I know that when I had to go through it regularly, we did have to complain about some of the remote scanning.
Here's a few of the BS items that we had been flagged with. These are from memory, so I may be wrong on some of the wording.
The server does not respond to ICMP (red flag). Well, the server blocked all unexpected traffic, including ICMP. So we opened the firewall a little for that.
They complained that they were not getting refused connection messages to known ports (telnet, SMTP, etc), so we were flagged for that. That's where I started complaining.
They wanted the firewall completely opened for "testing". This was current production, so I refused. I told them I could allow a single IP for them to test with, but they wouldn't oblige. Since we were always under attack, their IP was one of several hundred during the period where they were most likely testing. 1 tester, and a few hundred attackers. Hmm, no.
They proceeded to search the surrounding network. They red-flagged us for having a server on the network that responded to DNS requests. Oddly enough, that was a DNS server. Then they hit us for having a mail server that accepted mail. Sure, it accepted mail. It only relayed for us, but we did (oh my gosh) receive mail. They didn't receive an instant refusal, because we accepted and dropped those messages.
I passed the word back through our accounting guy that they could go fuck themselves, and to give us a real auditor...
The second auditor wasn't quite so bad. They hit us for not being able to fingerprint the OS. I congratulated them on that, and then told them specifically the OS, distro, and kernel version. They had a few yellow flags for non-broken stuff, such as not responding to ICMP. They didn't mark points against us on that one, it was just a mention. They questioned our remote access ability, since the only ports that responded were 80 and 443. I told them the port number (unusual port) and method, so they beat on that for a while and couldn't touch it. Then they gave us a pass.
We were fully compliant. I wasn't hiding anything from them. I was hiding everything from the constant barrage of hackers who wanted in. People knew we made millions. They knew we had a whole bunch of machines on multiple GigE circuits. If they could compromise just one machine, they'd have a very fast platform to attack from, and I wasn't going to allow that.
We were very successful in never losing any personal info, but we always maintained doing better than PCI compliance required.
How the hell did they maintain PCI compliance? At very least that requires the self-evaluation, and an external scan by a 3rd party. The self-evaluation, they could have easily lied on. The external scan? No way. Well, unless they had the scan pointed at a dummy server. That happens a lot more than it should. For the money I'm sure Sony was pushing through, it should have rated an on-site inspection. One company I worked for only pushed through about $50 million/yr. We were self-eval with external scan. They did threaten physical inspections every quarter, but never showed up. I guess they could have pointed at any rack and said "this is the rack". The insecurity is pure stupidity. There are so many ways to secure the network, from free (iptables on the machine) to inexpensive (dedicated firewall machine running Linux), to expensive hardware solutions. There's no excuse for this.
It's just an unsubstantiated rumor. Now move along before we have to send you to a re-education camp.