What the other person replying is referencing is other sources who verified the document, such as this one. They touched it, viewed it, took high resolution photos of it, and confirmed it's authenticity.
The serial number was available, and was provided by other sources. The campaign rightly redacted particular information. It can easily be believed that some information should remain private.
Really, has any other President, or Presidential candidate been subject to such nonsense? Prove your an American. No, your own statement isn't good enough. No, your birth certificate isn't good enough. No, witnesses of your birth and childhood in America aren't good enough. No a personal statement by the caretaker of records where you were born stating the birth certificate isn't good enough. Damn, he can provide more than I can about my place of birth. The people arguing the point are biggoted racists, looking to do anything they could to him.
Since you're agreeing that he is an American, I don't even know what you're arguing. Just the redacted serial number? Since that *has* been provided more than 2 years ago, please tell me you have some better arguing point. Well, other than just trolling to annoy people.
And the most damning evidence, Snopes, the mighty disprovers of lies and conspiracies, was forced through unknown means (obviously a 3-letter agency that we've never heard of) to print their first and only completely fraudulent article.
Of course, the reptilian aliens, beyond their ability to travel space and take human form to overthrow the governments of the world (and Snopes), apparently have time travel, and went back to 1961 to have false records published in two newspapers. Crafty devils, aren't they?
All praise the flying spaghetti monster. He's the only one who will save us from the evil before us.
St. Petersburg Times probably is a better example. They run a daily newspaper that runs on advertising but their journalists are isolated from their executives and advertisers, and the 'not-for-profit' charter protects them from the takeovers
In 1978, the majority shareholder passed away, and willed his shares to a non-profit school for journalists, which bears his name.
In 1988, they almost lost control of the paper, because an investor who had purchased outstanding shares tried to take the company over. 2 years and $56 million later, the school is again/still the owner.
I think Wikipedia could probably adapt that 'not-for-profit' model successfully, and do away with their hot and cold running begathon forever.
You're right here though. Not necessarily with the "not-for-profit" model, but dammit, any business model other than the hopeful "We'll do it for free. People will help us for free. When we need money, we'll just beg for it." Simply enough, that's not a business model of any sort. You'd think with the $4 million that Google and eBay dropped on them, they could have afforded to rent some professional business men for a few hours.
They could be supporting themselves with simple banner ads (text or image) in half the space they're wasting with that god awful "Please, g'vnar, pretty please, can we have some shillings? It's so cold. We're so hungry. We only made $7 million through donations this year." (the summary and article show different numbers, so that's a guess at the income)
They're playing in the world of business, but pretending they're kids having fun. I guess they forgot that they signed contracts for pesky things like their office, datacenters, bandwidth. I'd guess that at least part of their infrastructure is leased, so there are revolving payments there too. It's a business, not a playtoy.
Hell, even my playtoy, my own news site, I had to give up on the donation-only method. We were lucky to make $1/wk. So I went shopping between advertising services. Who pays (just a few), doesn't pay (quite a few), gives fair rates (hahaa!), doesn't cheat the hit counters much (they all do), and aren't obnoxious, intrusive (interstitial ads/flash/etc), or riddled with malware. I was testing one on offline pages that only I saw, and within about 10 views of the testing front page, my antivirus was screaming about malware. I reported it to them with some friendly terms like "if you can't keep this off your advertising network, I won't use you." They danced around, and two weeks later said "oh no, it won't happen ever again." I re-enabled them on my testing page, and the second page view was hit again. Most of the rest I've tested were clean, but they had a terrible reporting or payout rate. Really, if I know I have an average of X users per day, and ad position Y gets so many average clicks per day, then I switch the ads over to a new provider, that report X/10 users, and Y/20 ad clicks without a change in real traffic, there's a problem.
People like us know how to disable ads. The other 99.8% of the users will provide them with more than enough ad revenue.
Eventually, they'll have to adopt/develop a business model, or threaten to fold. I'm sure they day they're ready to shut the doors, someone will buy them out.
This has got to be one of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard. No, not you, you are stating the facts. It's the conspiracy nuts grasping at any conspiracy they can.
The idea that Obama (in chronological order):... was born in and is a citizen of another country.... was groomed for the last 40-some years to become President of the United States.... was not vetted by the Democratic party.... was not vetted by any of his previous employers, associates, affiliates, political enemies, etc.... plans to take over the world.
is just nuts. I can make up my own list, that sounds just as plausible.
As for being a commodity, I know at the least I personally am ingrained deeply enough in too many and too vital a parts of the company's day to day business that I have some pretty solid job security, and I show enough loyalty that I have political capital to spend when I needs it.
Be careful, I was where you are. I had built the company up from negative cashflow to a healthy net 8-figure company. I was very frugal with expenses. Literally the profit from two days of the year covered all the IT expenses, including hardware and salaries, but not including bandwidth. Things ran wonderfully. Any problems were addressed immediately. I'd get phone calls from about 9am to 4am, and I was always there to answer them and manage them. They'd present an impossible problem, and I'd come back within 15 minutes with a proposal to a solution, and frequently would implement it over the weekend. I managed the IT department from where ever I happened to be. With geographically diverse datacenters, I couldn't possibly be close to them all, but as far as the company was concerned, I was always there to put out any fire.
We made a huge cost cutting move, dropping bandwidth and hosting costs. Then the bosses started looking at salaries. Why pay someone like me with one assistant, when they could pay a management company 30% of that, and pocket the rest. The day before Thanksgiving, after working there for 8 years, I found I couldn't get on my servers. Something was horribly wrong, and I wasn't getting answers from anyone. I was half way through booking a flight to get to our primary datacenter. I assumed it was a huge intrusion, but we were locked down tight, so I had no idea who or how they were doing it.
Finally I got a call. "Don't book your ticket. Just wait." That's all I got. Thanksgiving day, I got a phone call from one of the senior management. "You don't work here any more. You will receive 2 weeks severance."
I've had news trickling in over the subsequent years. From what I gathered from various sources, the folks who were locking me out were using a very manual method, and failed to use our built in methods. Over the next few months, they wiped out everything on the servers, and started from scratch. Everything I touched over those 8 years, they rewrote, to the tune of a low 6-figures. They went to such extremes, because they couldn't find my back doors. I didn't have any, so there was nothing to find. Over those months, I'd get calls and emails from people who knew I ran the network, to tell me the sites were down. I'd tell them that I wasn't working there any more, and it's not my problem.
Their traffic began dropping after I left. The only thing I can attribute it to was mismanagement of the servers. In reality, it seems the "management company" who took over had no experience with such high volume traffic (to the tune of millions of viewers per day). Their traffic dropped for more than a year after that, until they were able to deploy enough servers to handle it. I still think that's hilarious. They more than doubled the footprint, to handle less load.
The obvious solution would have been to bring me back to fix their problems. Nope, the pride of the owners wouldn't allow it.
So... No, you aren't as secure in your job as you'd like to believe. There is always someone who will say anything to take your job, even at a fraction of what you were paid. It may be some kid right out of college (or even high school), a corporation offering "fanatical support", or even a small outfit in India who can take a low 6-figure departmental budget, and offer the "same" service for 200,000 rupees/yr (roughly USD $4,425/yr).
Don't ever fall into complacency. The minute you do, you'll find yourself with a fat mortgage, car payment, and the only jobs you'll find will barely pay for the gas to get to work and
I'd say it would be terminating (shooting) any aggressive subordinates (foxes) who may have hopes for senior management (raiding the hen house). It's easier to have passive employees (sheep) who can do what you hired them for (slaughter), and not ever hope to move up (continue grazing).
Many middle-managers see the corporate ladder as being broken below them. They don't want or need their subordinates climbing up to steal "their" promotion, or even their job. Despite that, the middle-managers do see the corporate ladder as their well deserved goal, and will keep trying to climb it. Well, until they are terminated by their superiors who feel that Mr. Middle Manager is pushing too hard to do better.
Unfortunately, I've seen it in plenty of businesses, where even pushing for equality isn't welcome. One particular case was an employee making $35k/yr. About a year after he started, new people in his department, with equal skills but lower workloads were brought in at $55k. Two more years later new people were brought in with equal skills and even lower workloads and they were making $75k.
The management saw this as perfectly acceptable. Keep the employee at $35k. Ignore the fact that he does no less than double the work of any other single employee in the department. That employee started becoming rather upset, with just cause in my opinion. He talked to me about complaining to the senior management. I warned him not to unless he had another job lined up. There was no next option at the time. He asked for equal pay to the new hires. They laughed at him. Then over the next month he proceeded to ask twice more. About a week after the second time, he was taken into the conference room, and was told that he was fired. He didn't even have the luxury of collecting his belongings. They preferred to fire the employee making $35k and hire a replacement at $75k, as long as the new employee would accept the fact that there is no opportunity for raises or advancement.
Employees are a commodity that can be bought (hired) and sold (fired). Who cares if you lay off the entire department, you can find replacements that are happy to do the same job until they too are terminated. The idea of loyalty is now a one way street. The employer expects the employee to be completely loyal and dedicated to the company. When it's time for the employee to rely on the employer, you're screwed. The idea of "I've been a hard worker, sacrificing my nights, weekends, and holidays for the company, they won't fire me", is long since gone. Right along with yearly raises and any hopes of advancement. You can't trust an employer beyond the next paycheck. If you get one, keep working. If you don't, walk away from it. The most you'll lose is one check, and still keep your dignity intact.
I still maintain that you miss most of the CGI effects that you see.
You know, I was going to say something very similar. Good CGI or "special effects" are never seen. They are simply a tool to allow the film convey a story. Unfortunately, too many films are based on the CGI, and don't have a story to hold them together.
A viewer should be watching the story in amazement, and believe the story. I'm impressed when a movie has me believing every second I saw, as if it all just happened. For the most part, we don't see the special effects, we just accept that they happened. Like you said, the sky is extra blue, the rain very clear. It could be other things too, like removing a telephone pole; removing a blemish on a starlets face; or clearing unwanted cars on a busy street, so you only see the stars vehicle in a deserted Manhattan. The only way we know any of these happens is if it's shown on the bonus tracks.
Looking at the graphs, it shows failure to do good capacity planning. But, it's pretty clear that we aren't looking at the big picture. We're provided a few graphs, where there should be others to show the whole story. I seriously doubt that Comcast aggregates all of their connectivity out to one pipe, from all the cities that they service.
We had a graph that looked very similar to that one once. I had GigE circuits in several cities with Level3. They simply ran out of capacity in one city, so we had to move our traffic over to other cities until they were able to upgrade for us. We always used the 80% rule for our bandwidth. Don't plan to exceed 80% on any circuit or even any server. When we had our problem, we were only at about 60% of that line, but since we had room in other cities, we were able to drop the effected city down to about 10% until the problem was resolved. I was shown Level3's graph of that cities circuits, and it looked just about the same as the Comcast graph. It took a few months for them to bring more capacity in, and then everyone was happy.
Actually, I was agreeing with him. Despite what has made the media, there hasn't been a viable attempt to bring down or take over an aircraft in years.
And s/you|your/their/ . I'm sure you mean the figurative "you", as in not the speaker, but just in case... I wouldn't ever have an intention to break an aircraft. I prefer the mostly graceful reunion of my feet with the ground, which is less likely to happen if something were to happen with the aircraft.... and with that said...
I won't bother figure out the actual numbers, but your dynamite scenario mentioned above has a flaw. You mention the difference between an explosion in a rock, or over it. Anything inside the cabin/cargo area would be more like a stick of dynamite inside a rock. The cabin, for the sake of this example, is a sealed container. When the cabin over-pressurizes (the resulting volume of heated gasses due to the dynamite detonation), it would either contain the pressure and injure the occupants, or not contain it and the cabin would rupture in less than graceful ways.
The more interesting questions are what is the resulting volume from detonation, and what is the burst pressure of the cabin.
Shreds of evidence are abundant. They've caught people trying to carry guns, knives, screwdrivers, and baby bottles onto airplanes. I don't know what the numbers are, but since they've confiscated several screwdrivers and half-empty soda bottles from me, I'm sure the numbers are huge.
What you're really looking for is solid evidence. Prove that any significant number of threats have been stopped because of any new technology or methodology. The publicized cases were:
1) Shoe bomber. Defeated by his inability to work a book of matches, and stopped by other passengers and flight crew.
2) Underwear bomber. Defeated by his inability to acquire functional explosives. Again, he was stopped by other passengers and flight crew.
3) Binary explosive bomber. The explosives weren't binary (to be mixed for explosion), they were pre-mixed. They never made it anywhere near an aircraft, and were possibly yet another law enforcement operation to catch those who may consider doing something by guiding them far enough to prosecute.
So no, what you see happening in airports is security theater. It creates the illusion of security, because the common citizens have to jump through the hoops, in the name of security.
za. 172800 IN NS za1.dnsnode.net. za. 172800 IN NS disa.tenet.ac.za. za. 172800 IN NS nsza.is.co.za. za. 172800 IN NS za-ns.anycast.pch.net. za. 172800 IN NS sns-pb.isc.org. hippo.ru.ac.za. 172800 IN A 146.231.128.1 hippo.ru.ac.za. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:4200:1010:0:0:0:0:1 disa.tenet.ac.za. 172800 IN A 196.21.79.50 disa.tenet.ac.za. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:4200:ffff:a:0:0:0:1 daisy.ee.und.ac.za. 172800 IN A 146.230.192.18 nsza.is.co.za. 172800 IN A 196.4.160.27 ns1.coza.net.za. 172800 IN A 66.135.62.20
The InterNIC can givith, and takeith away. Just as they provided the glue of the IP's of those nameservers, they could provide alternative information.
evil.hacker.example.za. 172800 IN A 127.0.0.1
Even without such deliberate and obvious (and potentially dangerous) methods, they at very least have the IP's for that NIC. The TLD p2p still must have records with InterNIC. It's not a matter of "we're distributed, we're safe", it's a matter that there can be pressures on some or all providers to make sure things stop.
The only way around this is methods that have been tried before. Alternative NIC's, with their own systems. Build a system, and you can hope that things will work better. In all reality, you or I or 99% of the folks on here could put up their own nameservers and say "hey, use this instead". That's all fine and dandy, but the truth is it will not be financially viable.
Say I set up my nameservers with the tld's of.xxx,.p2p,.torrent. I could advertise it as loud as I could (and my budget doesn't go much beyond posting this). Get your ISP's to change over to our dark side. It's not going to happen, even if we properly respect the legitimate zones. You might get a few. You'll never get the majority. There's too much liability. Think if all the fiber and cable broadband providers said "sure, we'll use you instead." That would be all fun and games until the first lawsuit came down.
So you won't get the ISP's to switch. Run your own nameserver at home, you say. Great. Again, you, I, and 99% of the readers here can do it. What about the other billion people on the Internet. So you have the next killer site, freewarez.p2p. You and your group of friends who did it can get to it. You'll never make a penny on it. Why think about money? Because it costs money to keep your server up.
And of course, you'd have to pay whoever is being authorative for the tld's. Those machines take a beating all day every day. It's not just one machine on a residential line. It's clusters of machines distributed world wide to ensure reliability.
So you retool the way DNS works. Hey, that's a great idea. Until you realize that you have to gain acceptance from every OS distro out there. You may get segments of the Linux and *bsd crowed involved. Good luck getting Microsoft and Apple to sign into it. You'd have a better chance creating your own SSL signing authority and getting them to add those to their browsers (again, good luck there).
I'm not saying it won't happen. It can and should happen. It just isn't likely any time soon. It will be years from rollout of a working platform, to acceptance by even a part of the Internet. It will be quite a few years from that to getting the end users to accept it. Look at the tld.com, a
Nope, we're just unaware of time travelers for a few reasons.
1) They do their research first, and don't stick out.
2) They do their best to avoid paradoxes.
3) Why would a time traveler stop by and say "hi" to you or anyone you know?
4) This period in time is boring. Any event that we consider "significant" right now is uninteresting in the whole scope of things, or at least to a culture that is born from an invention 20,000 years from now. There's no good reason for anyone to be the least bit interested in this primitive culture.
Waking or sleeping, it doesn't matter. It will be dark, and there will be lots of time for plotting my revenge. Every day, and every night, one thought will remain, revenge on those who did this to me.
I know you do not have the technology nor budget to send a roughly man sized concrete block to orbit, The Moon, Mars, nor Alpha Centauri. I will remain on Terra Firma, and celebrate at the place where your rotting mortal container is placed.
You do not need to see the bullets. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There are no bullets. Then you'll see, it's not the bullets that need to move, it is only the idea of where they are aren't.
I have a friend who is all the time bothering another friend with ideas for development that are impossible, things that would require an AI to do.
They're not impossible. They're just impractical within the given parameters.
I've had to explain that to quite a few people over the years. They make an impractical suggestion, so I tell them what I just said above. They give me a funny look, and ask "what", "why", or some other grunt of a question.
I've had people ask me if we could make the next "Google". It's impractical. Someone with no budget, and dreams of great things wants to spider the whole Internet, or at least the popular parts of it, aggregate that data, and present it in some usable form to end users. It is possible. Give me a team of programmers (including design architects, DBA,QA,etc). A few teams of systems and network engineers. Oh and lets not forget the size of the server farm. We'll give it a year or three to go through design, testing, qa testing, and beta testing. Now you're ready to go live with it. The databases are humming away. The servers are waiting patiently, and... oh ya. No one knows who you are. They forgot the marketing team, and even if they didn't, how do you take your project, and make it a household name overnight? Well, without spilling gov't secrets out on the net, and running from criminal charges.:)
1% idea. 48% hard work, and 51% dumb luck. What made Google any better than Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Metacrawler, etc, etc, etc. Dumb luck. They had a silly name, slightly less silly than Yahoooooooooo!, slightly less snobbish than asking your butler, slightly less creepy than a 10000 legged spider. Sorry, I couldn't think of anything for Altavista.
Unfortunately, I've known a lot of people who have made (and lost) a fortune due to dumb luck.
So back to the original idea. Nope, his ideas are impractical. He doesn't have the financial nor technical backing required to bring his ideas to be a full fledged product. There are plenty of folks out there who will milk him for every penny he has getting from nothing to nowhere though.
I've had so many ideas thrown at me over the years, it isn't even funny. And ya, either there was a written or implied NDA attached to it. "If we could do this, and this, it'd make a fortune. Can you build it? We don't have any money right now, but we'll give you a percentage of the profits." Most were people trying to ride on someone else's hugely popular current idea.
As far as people coming up with the next killer app, and just needing a programmer, that falls into plenty of other arenas too. I want to build a trans-dimensional spacecraft. I just need.... Well, you get the idea. Forward looking statements without proper supporting information is just a pipe dream. And sure as hell, working for someone with the "forward looking" statement and no real supporting information, not matter how spiffy keen the business plan they've written, is worth anything at all.
Really though, I have some ideas for future stuff. And I don't say anything to anyone about it until I can back it up with proof that it will work. And that proof is never pointing at another project and saying "he did it, so can we." I've learned a lot on a lot of topics, because I've researched my own ideas that I thought would be successful. Some were. Some weren't. Some needed design adjustments. Some needed outside consultation, but only after I've done my due diligence, and the consultation was for precise elements, not "I have an idea, can you build it for me?"
Concrete doesn't last forever. It's even less if the structure is torn down.
It may be a long dark dream, but in the scale of eternity, that's a very short time. I can wait. By the time I awaken from my nap, I will have thought of very evil ways to get my revenge. Prison of any sort isn't punishment, it's a way of delaying the inevitable. Then there will be only one.
It'd be easy enough to throw a VM like VirtualBox on your machine, assuming you have full control over it. I do it for something that simply wouldn't install on a couple machines I have. You could give him access, and all he/they would have access to is that virtual machine.
There are larger risks though. How long until the feds come knocking on your door. That's not just US based, you could likely have your nations law enforcement seizing all of your equipment. Even if they didn't, I'm sure the DDoS attacks will come back. They may be by some kid in a country you've never heard of, some militant group, or by governments around the world trying to suppress the information. A DDoS from seemingly random locations is a lot easier to pull off and a lot more anonymous than a court order to seize property.
I thought about mirroring his stuff. I actually did, but it's not available to anyone else yet. I can't weigh the continuity of my own sites and freedom, versus the need to get his information of dubious sources out to the general public.
I do believe in free speech, and I believe he should be allowed to run with it. Hell, there are plenty of conspiracy nuts out there, that put up all kinds of anti-government propaganda. The pressures being put against him are only serving to make it clear that there is some truth to what he's putting out there.
Damn, I thought I already killed off the rest of you.
Ok, meet me on top of the mountain, in the middle of a thunderstorm. Be sure to bring your sword, so it isn't too easy to do. I really enjoyed my "last" kill, because I thought it made me the only one. Now you've ruined it, so I'm going to have to thoroughly enjoy this one too.
There was a news story from September, that said they were trying to unload the building. It could have gone for anything. It was in Google's (and our) best interest, that it remain a carrier hotel.
Slashdot Mirror
What the other person replying is referencing is other sources who verified the document, such as this one. They touched it, viewed it, took high resolution photos of it, and confirmed it's authenticity.
The serial number was available, and was provided by other sources. The campaign rightly redacted particular information. It can easily be believed that some information should remain private.
Really, has any other President, or Presidential candidate been subject to such nonsense? Prove your an American. No, your own statement isn't good enough. No, your birth certificate isn't good enough. No, witnesses of your birth and childhood in America aren't good enough. No a personal statement by the caretaker of records where you were born stating the birth certificate isn't good enough. Damn, he can provide more than I can about my place of birth. The people arguing the point are biggoted racists, looking to do anything they could to him.
Since you're agreeing that he is an American, I don't even know what you're arguing. Just the redacted serial number? Since that *has* been provided more than 2 years ago, please tell me you have some better arguing point. Well, other than just trolling to annoy people.
Well, it's a dumb argument because ...
His birth certificate was made available to the public in June of 2008.
It was also a matter of public record August 4, 1961.
And the most damning evidence, Snopes, the mighty disprovers of lies and conspiracies, was forced through unknown means (obviously a 3-letter agency that we've never heard of) to print their first and only completely fraudulent article.
Of course, the reptilian aliens, beyond their ability to travel space and take human form to overthrow the governments of the world (and Snopes), apparently have time travel, and went back to 1961 to have false records published in two newspapers. Crafty devils, aren't they?
All praise the flying spaghetti monster. He's the only one who will save us from the evil before us.
Well, that's not totally accurate.
http://www.tampabay.com/company/about-us/times-history
In 1978, the majority shareholder passed away, and willed his shares to a non-profit school for journalists, which bears his name.
In 1988, they almost lost control of the paper, because an investor who had purchased outstanding shares tried to take the company over. 2 years and $56 million later, the school is again/still the owner.
You're right here though. Not necessarily with the "not-for-profit" model, but dammit, any business model other than the hopeful "We'll do it for free. People will help us for free. When we need money, we'll just beg for it." Simply enough, that's not a business model of any sort. You'd think with the $4 million that Google and eBay dropped on them, they could have afforded to rent some professional business men for a few hours.
They could be supporting themselves with simple banner ads (text or image) in half the space they're wasting with that god awful "Please, g'vnar, pretty please, can we have some shillings? It's so cold. We're so hungry. We only made $7 million through donations this year." (the summary and article show different numbers, so that's a guess at the income)
They're playing in the world of business, but pretending they're kids having fun. I guess they forgot that they signed contracts for pesky things like their office, datacenters, bandwidth. I'd guess that at least part of their infrastructure is leased, so there are revolving payments there too. It's a business, not a playtoy.
Hell, even my playtoy, my own news site, I had to give up on the donation-only method. We were lucky to make $1/wk. So I went shopping between advertising services. Who pays (just a few), doesn't pay (quite a few), gives fair rates (hahaa!), doesn't cheat the hit counters much (they all do), and aren't obnoxious, intrusive (interstitial ads/flash/etc), or riddled with malware. I was testing one on offline pages that only I saw, and within about 10 views of the testing front page, my antivirus was screaming about malware. I reported it to them with some friendly terms like "if you can't keep this off your advertising network, I won't use you." They danced around, and two weeks later said "oh no, it won't happen ever again." I re-enabled them on my testing page, and the second page view was hit again. Most of the rest I've tested were clean, but they had a terrible reporting or payout rate. Really, if I know I have an average of X users per day, and ad position Y gets so many average clicks per day, then I switch the ads over to a new provider, that report X/10 users, and Y/20 ad clicks without a change in real traffic, there's a problem.
People like us know how to disable ads. The other 99.8% of the users will provide them with more than enough ad revenue.
Eventually, they'll have to adopt/develop a business model, or threaten to fold. I'm sure they day they're ready to shut the doors, someone will buy them out.
This has got to be one of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard. No, not you, you are stating the facts. It's the conspiracy nuts grasping at any conspiracy they can.
The idea that Obama (in chronological order): ... was born in and is a citizen of another country. ... was groomed for the last 40-some years to become President of the United States. ... was not vetted by the Democratic party. ... was not vetted by any of his previous employers, associates, affiliates, political enemies, etc. ... plans to take over the world.
is just nuts. I can make up my own list, that sounds just as plausible.
Obama was... ... born the son of Malcolm X. ... is really a reptilian alien. ... was trained by senior Nazi officers in South Africa. ... to take over the United States, ... and then take over the world.
And oh my gosh, that last link explains how serious the matter really is. :)
Be careful, I was where you are. I had built the company up from negative cashflow to a healthy net 8-figure company. I was very frugal with expenses. Literally the profit from two days of the year covered all the IT expenses, including hardware and salaries, but not including bandwidth. Things ran wonderfully. Any problems were addressed immediately. I'd get phone calls from about 9am to 4am, and I was always there to answer them and manage them. They'd present an impossible problem, and I'd come back within 15 minutes with a proposal to a solution, and frequently would implement it over the weekend. I managed the IT department from where ever I happened to be. With geographically diverse datacenters, I couldn't possibly be close to them all, but as far as the company was concerned, I was always there to put out any fire.
We made a huge cost cutting move, dropping bandwidth and hosting costs. Then the bosses started looking at salaries. Why pay someone like me with one assistant, when they could pay a management company 30% of that, and pocket the rest. The day before Thanksgiving, after working there for 8 years, I found I couldn't get on my servers. Something was horribly wrong, and I wasn't getting answers from anyone. I was half way through booking a flight to get to our primary datacenter. I assumed it was a huge intrusion, but we were locked down tight, so I had no idea who or how they were doing it.
Finally I got a call. "Don't book your ticket. Just wait." That's all I got. Thanksgiving day, I got a phone call from one of the senior management. "You don't work here any more. You will receive 2 weeks severance."
I've had news trickling in over the subsequent years. From what I gathered from various sources, the folks who were locking me out were using a very manual method, and failed to use our built in methods. Over the next few months, they wiped out everything on the servers, and started from scratch. Everything I touched over those 8 years, they rewrote, to the tune of a low 6-figures. They went to such extremes, because they couldn't find my back doors. I didn't have any, so there was nothing to find. Over those months, I'd get calls and emails from people who knew I ran the network, to tell me the sites were down. I'd tell them that I wasn't working there any more, and it's not my problem.
Their traffic began dropping after I left. The only thing I can attribute it to was mismanagement of the servers. In reality, it seems the "management company" who took over had no experience with such high volume traffic (to the tune of millions of viewers per day). Their traffic dropped for more than a year after that, until they were able to deploy enough servers to handle it. I still think that's hilarious. They more than doubled the footprint, to handle less load.
The obvious solution would have been to bring me back to fix their problems. Nope, the pride of the owners wouldn't allow it.
So... No, you aren't as secure in your job as you'd like to believe. There is always someone who will say anything to take your job, even at a fraction of what you were paid. It may be some kid right out of college (or even high school), a corporation offering "fanatical support", or even a small outfit in India who can take a low 6-figure departmental budget, and offer the "same" service for 200,000 rupees/yr (roughly USD $4,425/yr).
Don't ever fall into complacency. The minute you do, you'll find yourself with a fat mortgage, car payment, and the only jobs you'll find will barely pay for the gas to get to work and
I'd say it would be terminating (shooting) any aggressive subordinates (foxes) who may have hopes for senior management (raiding the hen house). It's easier to have passive employees (sheep) who can do what you hired them for (slaughter), and not ever hope to move up (continue grazing).
Many middle-managers see the corporate ladder as being broken below them. They don't want or need their subordinates climbing up to steal "their" promotion, or even their job. Despite that, the middle-managers do see the corporate ladder as their well deserved goal, and will keep trying to climb it. Well, until they are terminated by their superiors who feel that Mr. Middle Manager is pushing too hard to do better.
Unfortunately, I've seen it in plenty of businesses, where even pushing for equality isn't welcome. One particular case was an employee making $35k/yr. About a year after he started, new people in his department, with equal skills but lower workloads were brought in at $55k. Two more years later new people were brought in with equal skills and even lower workloads and they were making $75k.
The management saw this as perfectly acceptable. Keep the employee at $35k. Ignore the fact that he does no less than double the work of any other single employee in the department. That employee started becoming rather upset, with just cause in my opinion. He talked to me about complaining to the senior management. I warned him not to unless he had another job lined up. There was no next option at the time. He asked for equal pay to the new hires. They laughed at him. Then over the next month he proceeded to ask twice more. About a week after the second time, he was taken into the conference room, and was told that he was fired. He didn't even have the luxury of collecting his belongings. They preferred to fire the employee making $35k and hire a replacement at $75k, as long as the new employee would accept the fact that there is no opportunity for raises or advancement.
Employees are a commodity that can be bought (hired) and sold (fired). Who cares if you lay off the entire department, you can find replacements that are happy to do the same job until they too are terminated. The idea of loyalty is now a one way street. The employer expects the employee to be completely loyal and dedicated to the company. When it's time for the employee to rely on the employer, you're screwed. The idea of "I've been a hard worker, sacrificing my nights, weekends, and holidays for the company, they won't fire me", is long since gone. Right along with yearly raises and any hopes of advancement. You can't trust an employer beyond the next paycheck. If you get one, keep working. If you don't, walk away from it. The most you'll lose is one check, and still keep your dignity intact.
You know, I was going to say something very similar. Good CGI or "special effects" are never seen. They are simply a tool to allow the film convey a story. Unfortunately, too many films are based on the CGI, and don't have a story to hold them together.
A viewer should be watching the story in amazement, and believe the story. I'm impressed when a movie has me believing every second I saw, as if it all just happened. For the most part, we don't see the special effects, we just accept that they happened. Like you said, the sky is extra blue, the rain very clear. It could be other things too, like removing a telephone pole; removing a blemish on a starlets face; or clearing unwanted cars on a busy street, so you only see the stars vehicle in a deserted Manhattan. The only way we know any of these happens is if it's shown on the bonus tracks.
Yup, I noticed that too.
Looking at the graphs, it shows failure to do good capacity planning. But, it's pretty clear that we aren't looking at the big picture. We're provided a few graphs, where there should be others to show the whole story. I seriously doubt that Comcast aggregates all of their connectivity out to one pipe, from all the cities that they service.
We had a graph that looked very similar to that one once. I had GigE circuits in several cities with Level3. They simply ran out of capacity in one city, so we had to move our traffic over to other cities until they were able to upgrade for us. We always used the 80% rule for our bandwidth. Don't plan to exceed 80% on any circuit or even any server. When we had our problem, we were only at about 60% of that line, but since we had room in other cities, we were able to drop the effected city down to about 10% until the problem was resolved. I was shown Level3's graph of that cities circuits, and it looked just about the same as the Comcast graph. It took a few months for them to bring more capacity in, and then everyone was happy.
Actually, I was agreeing with him. Despite what has made the media, there hasn't been a viable attempt to bring down or take over an aircraft in years.
And s/you|your/their/ . I'm sure you mean the figurative "you", as in not the speaker, but just in case... I wouldn't ever have an intention to break an aircraft. I prefer the mostly graceful reunion of my feet with the ground, which is less likely to happen if something were to happen with the aircraft. ... and with that said ...
I won't bother figure out the actual numbers, but your dynamite scenario mentioned above has a flaw. You mention the difference between an explosion in a rock, or over it. Anything inside the cabin/cargo area would be more like a stick of dynamite inside a rock. The cabin, for the sake of this example, is a sealed container. When the cabin over-pressurizes (the resulting volume of heated gasses due to the dynamite detonation), it would either contain the pressure and injure the occupants, or not contain it and the cabin would rupture in less than graceful ways.
The more interesting questions are what is the resulting volume from detonation, and what is the burst pressure of the cabin.
Any individual can only control themselves. We sure as hell can't make everyone else do it.
But ugly isn't just their weight. Actually, there are a lot of just plain ugly people out there.
I really expected your link to go to something like this. It would definitely help thin out the herd, as it could be said.
Shreds of evidence are abundant. They've caught people trying to carry guns, knives, screwdrivers, and baby bottles onto airplanes. I don't know what the numbers are, but since they've confiscated several screwdrivers and half-empty soda bottles from me, I'm sure the numbers are huge.
What you're really looking for is solid evidence. Prove that any significant number of threats have been stopped because of any new technology or methodology. The publicized cases were:
1) Shoe bomber. Defeated by his inability to work a book of matches, and stopped by other passengers and flight crew.
2) Underwear bomber. Defeated by his inability to acquire functional explosives. Again, he was stopped by other passengers and flight crew.
3) Binary explosive bomber. The explosives weren't binary (to be mixed for explosion), they were pre-mixed. They never made it anywhere near an aircraft, and were possibly yet another law enforcement operation to catch those who may consider doing something by guiding them far enough to prosecute.
So no, what you see happening in airports is security theater. It creates the illusion of security, because the common citizens have to jump through the hoops, in the name of security.
Being a frequent traveler, I can assure you of one thing. Attractive people are by far the minority.
The root servers hold the root zones (oddly enough)
ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/root.zone
In that, there are entries for each tld.
za. 172800 IN NS za1.dnsnode.net.
za. 172800 IN NS disa.tenet.ac.za.
za. 172800 IN NS nsza.is.co.za.
za. 172800 IN NS za-ns.anycast.pch.net.
za. 172800 IN NS sns-pb.isc.org.
hippo.ru.ac.za. 172800 IN A 146.231.128.1
hippo.ru.ac.za. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:4200:1010:0:0:0:0:1
disa.tenet.ac.za. 172800 IN A 196.21.79.50
disa.tenet.ac.za. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:4200:ffff:a:0:0:0:1
daisy.ee.und.ac.za. 172800 IN A 146.230.192.18
nsza.is.co.za. 172800 IN A 196.4.160.27
ns1.coza.net.za. 172800 IN A 66.135.62.20
The InterNIC can givith, and takeith away. Just as they provided the glue of the IP's of those nameservers, they could provide alternative information.
evil.hacker.example.za. 172800 IN A 127.0.0.1
Even without such deliberate and obvious (and potentially dangerous) methods, they at very least have the IP's for that NIC. The TLD p2p still must have records with InterNIC. It's not a matter of "we're distributed, we're safe", it's a matter that there can be pressures on some or all providers to make sure things stop.
The only way around this is methods that have been tried before. Alternative NIC's, with their own systems. Build a system, and you can hope that things will work better. In all reality, you or I or 99% of the folks on here could put up their own nameservers and say "hey, use this instead". That's all fine and dandy, but the truth is it will not be financially viable.
Say I set up my nameservers with the tld's of .xxx, .p2p, .torrent. I could advertise it as loud as I could (and my budget doesn't go much beyond posting this). Get your ISP's to change over to our dark side. It's not going to happen, even if we properly respect the legitimate zones. You might get a few. You'll never get the majority. There's too much liability. Think if all the fiber and cable broadband providers said "sure, we'll use you instead." That would be all fun and games until the first lawsuit came down.
So you won't get the ISP's to switch. Run your own nameserver at home, you say. Great. Again, you, I, and 99% of the readers here can do it. What about the other billion people on the Internet. So you have the next killer site, freewarez.p2p. You and your group of friends who did it can get to it. You'll never make a penny on it. Why think about money? Because it costs money to keep your server up.
And of course, you'd have to pay whoever is being authorative for the tld's. Those machines take a beating all day every day. It's not just one machine on a residential line. It's clusters of machines distributed world wide to ensure reliability.
So you retool the way DNS works. Hey, that's a great idea. Until you realize that you have to gain acceptance from every OS distro out there. You may get segments of the Linux and *bsd crowed involved. Good luck getting Microsoft and Apple to sign into it. You'd have a better chance creating your own SSL signing authority and getting them to add those to their browsers (again, good luck there).
I'm not saying it won't happen. It can and should happen. It just isn't likely any time soon. It will be years from rollout of a working platform, to acceptance by even a part of the Internet. It will be quite a few years from that to getting the end users to accept it. Look at the tld .com, a
Nope, we're just unaware of time travelers for a few reasons.
1) They do their research first, and don't stick out.
2) They do their best to avoid paradoxes.
3) Why would a time traveler stop by and say "hi" to you or anyone you know?
4) This period in time is boring. Any event that we consider "significant" right now is uninteresting in the whole scope of things, or at least to a culture that is born from an invention 20,000 years from now. There's no good reason for anyone to be the least bit interested in this primitive culture.
Waking or sleeping, it doesn't matter. It will be dark, and there will be lots of time for plotting my revenge. Every day, and every night, one thought will remain, revenge on those who did this to me.
I know you do not have the technology nor budget to send a roughly man sized concrete block to orbit, The Moon, Mars, nor Alpha Centauri. I will remain on Terra Firma, and celebrate at the place where your rotting mortal container is placed.
With deepest regards,
Highlander Smythe
The Only One (tm)
You do not need to see the bullets. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth. There are no bullets. Then you'll see, it's not the bullets that need to move, it is only the idea of where they are aren't.
That sounds like a defective weapon. Or one hell of a long classroom, and a really good eye for observing very small supersonic objects.
They're not impossible. They're just impractical within the given parameters.
I've had to explain that to quite a few people over the years. They make an impractical suggestion, so I tell them what I just said above. They give me a funny look, and ask "what", "why", or some other grunt of a question.
I've had people ask me if we could make the next "Google". It's impractical. Someone with no budget, and dreams of great things wants to spider the whole Internet, or at least the popular parts of it, aggregate that data, and present it in some usable form to end users. It is possible. Give me a team of programmers (including design architects, DBA,QA,etc). A few teams of systems and network engineers. Oh and lets not forget the size of the server farm. We'll give it a year or three to go through design, testing, qa testing, and beta testing. Now you're ready to go live with it. The databases are humming away. The servers are waiting patiently, and ... oh ya. No one knows who you are. They forgot the marketing team, and even if they didn't, how do you take your project, and make it a household name overnight? Well, without spilling gov't secrets out on the net, and running from criminal charges. :)
1% idea. 48% hard work, and 51% dumb luck. What made Google any better than Yahoo, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Metacrawler, etc, etc, etc. Dumb luck. They had a silly name, slightly less silly than Yahoooooooooo!, slightly less snobbish than asking your butler, slightly less creepy than a 10000 legged spider. Sorry, I couldn't think of anything for Altavista.
Unfortunately, I've known a lot of people who have made (and lost) a fortune due to dumb luck.
So back to the original idea. Nope, his ideas are impractical. He doesn't have the financial nor technical backing required to bring his ideas to be a full fledged product. There are plenty of folks out there who will milk him for every penny he has getting from nothing to nowhere though.
I've had so many ideas thrown at me over the years, it isn't even funny. And ya, either there was a written or implied NDA attached to it. "If we could do this, and this, it'd make a fortune. Can you build it? We don't have any money right now, but we'll give you a percentage of the profits." Most were people trying to ride on someone else's hugely popular current idea.
As far as people coming up with the next killer app, and just needing a programmer, that falls into plenty of other arenas too. I want to build a trans-dimensional spacecraft. I just need.... Well, you get the idea. Forward looking statements without proper supporting information is just a pipe dream. And sure as hell, working for someone with the "forward looking" statement and no real supporting information, not matter how spiffy keen the business plan they've written, is worth anything at all.
Really though, I have some ideas for future stuff. And I don't say anything to anyone about it until I can back it up with proof that it will work. And that proof is never pointing at another project and saying "he did it, so can we." I've learned a lot on a lot of topics, because I've researched my own ideas that I thought would be successful. Some were. Some weren't. Some needed design adjustments. Some needed outside consultation, but only after I've done my due diligence, and the consultation was for precise elements, not "I have an idea, can you build it for me?"
Concrete doesn't last forever. It's even less if the structure is torn down.
It may be a long dark dream, but in the scale of eternity, that's a very short time. I can wait. By the time I awaken from my nap, I will have thought of very evil ways to get my revenge. Prison of any sort isn't punishment, it's a way of delaying the inevitable. Then there will be only one.
It'd be easy enough to throw a VM like VirtualBox on your machine, assuming you have full control over it. I do it for something that simply wouldn't install on a couple machines I have. You could give him access, and all he/they would have access to is that virtual machine.
There are larger risks though. How long until the feds come knocking on your door. That's not just US based, you could likely have your nations law enforcement seizing all of your equipment. Even if they didn't, I'm sure the DDoS attacks will come back. They may be by some kid in a country you've never heard of, some militant group, or by governments around the world trying to suppress the information. A DDoS from seemingly random locations is a lot easier to pull off and a lot more anonymous than a court order to seize property.
I thought about mirroring his stuff. I actually did, but it's not available to anyone else yet. I can't weigh the continuity of my own sites and freedom, versus the need to get his information of dubious sources out to the general public.
I do believe in free speech, and I believe he should be allowed to run with it. Hell, there are plenty of conspiracy nuts out there, that put up all kinds of anti-government propaganda. The pressures being put against him are only serving to make it clear that there is some truth to what he's putting out there.
Someone's gotta walk away with the bag of loot. It may as well be me. Any amount of money is most easily split one way.
I've been compared to worse. Unfortunately, I don't have a hot chick sidekick with a fetish for explosives. Oh, what I wouldn't give...
Damn, I thought I already killed off the rest of you.
Ok, meet me on top of the mountain, in the middle of a thunderstorm. Be sure to bring your sword, so it isn't too easy to do. I really enjoyed my "last" kill, because I thought it made me the only one. Now you've ruined it, so I'm going to have to thoroughly enjoy this one too.
There was a news story from September, that said they were trying to unload the building. It could have gone for anything. It was in Google's (and our) best interest, that it remain a carrier hotel.