Biden doesn't go way out of his way to look stupid. Palin on the other hand makes every effort to get in front of a camera. I was fairly sure for a while that she was sabotaging herself. It's pretty obvious now that it's just stupidity. It's not stupidity, it's attention whoring at it's worst. The higher or closer she gets to the top of politics, the bigger her ego will inflate. While she has 60% of the people laughing at her, she still has 40% favoring her, and probably 10% loving her. Even 1% would be 3 million people praising the word of Palin.
She is a party supported cult figure. If she hadn't been sponsored by a political party, she would have already been taken out in the interest of national security.
1) "Am I free to go?"
and
2) "I have nothing more to say without my lawyer present."
Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing you can say to help yourself. Any statement you make can only be used against you. It won't possibly help you. By the time you're being questioned, they already have evidence against you.
They can plaster on the national news that you are a suspect. The worst thing you can do is comment, even to deny it.
Make sure you have a signed consent form, and two witnesses. It may seem a bit odd for witnesses to be in the room the whole time, but it'll protect you against future litigation. At least they can run the cameras for you.
It wasn't just too small to draw any real conclusions, it's too small to amount to anything other than a few writeups for misbehaving staff. That is, if they had provided the tracking numbers and times of the incidents. Without that information, all we know is that somewhere along the line, things didn't go as well as they should have.
The data set should have been thousands. They should have been shipped in such a way that they were delivered through various facilities. Some facilities do badly. Even with that data, I cannot say if one company is better than another. We shipped through a few common routes.
Those incidents cannot be considered indicative of how the entire company operates.
I've shipped probably thousands of items over the years. Most came through with no problem. A few were packing mistakes and rough handling. A very few were due to mishandling that was beyond my responsibility (i.e., packed well, but still damaged).
One local UPS facility, I never received a package that wasn't damaged on the outside. One FedEx location had a terrible habit of claiming to have attempted delivery without ever trying. Once, the building was closed for some reason, I parked my car at the entrance that the FedEx driver used. I waited, checking the tracking status frequently. About an hour after I expected it, I watched the driver fly by, not even slowing down, even though I was waving at him to stop. I needed that shipment that day. I called and complained. Then I found out the depot it would be arriving at, drove over there, and waited for it. According to him, the marked hours on the door indicated we were closed. We didn't have any hours marked at the door. The manager apologized profusely, but that didn't change the fact that I needed the package to do a server upgrade, and that cut into my maintenance window. I did get the job done on time, but I was lucky there were no problems.
One was a brand new 1u server, being shipped from our office, to a remote datacenter. I packed it in the OEM box, which was great. I personally handed it off to the shipping company. It was shipped to be delivered in 5 days. I flew up the next day. When it arrived, it had clearly been skewered by a forklift (I've driven forklifts in a past life). My package was probably at the bottom of the pallet, and the forklift driver missed by about 8 inches. We were lucky. It graze the top of the case, leaving a pretty noticeable dent, but the machine itself was perfectly functional, and it still fit in the rack normally.
Another interesting one was a shipment of 3 little 1u machines. They were light, and we were shipping a lot of stuff, so 3 were packed per box. The packing was done by a 3rd party under supervision of one of our managers. The box arrived, and I had to start taking pictures before I even opened it. The whole thing was oil soaked. It was clean motor oil, if I wasn't mistaken. The box couldn't even stand up under it's own weight. The peanuts inside were wet with the oil. Luckly, the machines were bagged, so they didn't get any oil on them at all.
Then there are the instances of obvious abuse. Corners were crushed. There were marks from roll doors being closed on them. The occasional puncture where something was slammed into the side of it.
Anyone who has worked in a warehouse knows, you're suppose to be very careful, but productivity is more important. You'll get written up if you break something and you're caught. If you don't keep your productivity up, you'll be looking for a job real quick.
It doesn't help much that UPS is commonly known with the workers as "United Pot Smokers".:) The USPS has their own reputation for high stress, low pay, and the ability to drive folks to snap (i.e., "going postal"). I don't know if FedEx or DHL have anything like that, but I haven't personally known any employees from either one.
Be careful, you're on the edge of invoking Godwin's law. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I'd hate for a perfectly good statement to be nullified from simple misphrasing.
Seizes property: check
Person: check
Thought: as expressed through action, speech, writing, or art... check.
We're not so far from sliding into an Orwellian nightmare.
or...
Big Brother is watching you. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Hopefully that leadership role can happen before incarceration. As far as I know, every government has legal provisions to mitigate dissidents, so incarceration or erasure (aka disappeared) is more likely. Anyone with enough backing is dangerous to the current administration, and will be neutralized.
No, actually you pay for the privilege of letting the bank hold onto the idea of your money. Once you hand it over, it's just a number in a database. With that privilege, you let them make money by loaning out your money, until which point where you may want it back. Converting that idea of the money back to currency is at the discretion of the bank. For example, if you've deposited $100/wk into your account every week for 10 years, you can't just walk in and tell them to give you $52,000. They may give you another idea of your money, in the form of a cashiers check, but rarely does a bank have that much cash on hand. Any mistake on the bank's part leaves the burden of proof on you. If you deposit $1,000, but the bank teller miskeys it as $10.00, you have to prove that the amount was wrong. Good luck with that. Additionally, any time a transaction should fail, the burden of arbitrary fees falls on you. An "overdraft" of even $1.00 can result in $70 or more in fees. It's a much higher rate than interest on a loan, if they were simply to open a line of credit for that error.
While the bank has your money, they'll invest it as they see fit, use it to issue loans, etc. The loans that they make go to others who don't have the funds. The bank makes a very healthy profit from the interest on the loan, while you most likely won't see a penny of it. If your account happens to be an interest bearing account, you might see a very small percentage of that loan activity, but don't hold your breath.
You're better off purchasing a good fireproof/waterproof safe. That is, one that is rated for real fires, and submersion, not the crap that you can buy at big box stores. It should be bolted to the floor (or mounted in the floor), so it cannot be stolen. If your house should burn down, be flooded, or burglarized, your property should remain safe. Consider, how many times have those three issues happened at your own home? Compare that to how many times you've been charged fees by the bank. Which has the higher risk? If you've had accounts open for several years, think about to how much you've paid the bank for the luxury of holding your money. It's probably a lot more than the cost of a safe.
The proverbial "under my mattress", as long as it's thought of as "a safe place in my home" is safer and more cost effective than using a bank. Just don't tell anyone else that you have a safe with cash in it. The criminal element know that banks have cash. They don't know that you have a safe at home. In the event of a random home burglary, they may steal your TV, but they won't be able to steal a properly secured safe.
Politicians, psychologists, preachers, and policemen are selected for duty because of their inordinately strong desire to control others.
I found this out a long time ago, when I started on the path into law enforcement. My intention was to help people. It was too obvious that (generally) the profession isn't about that.
That's why so many Americans end up in prison, are committed to insane asylums or are subjected to ECT, get their pockets picked and their brains washed by guys with bad hair in polyester Sans-A-Belt slacks, and get beaten with clubs.
Sadly, you are correct. There are leaders, and followers. We fall into one of the two casts. In either cast, there are benevolent, greedy, and almost infinite shades of gray in between. Followers make great employees, brainwashed masses, or cultists. Benevolent leaders are few and far between. They're the ones who make excellent (military) officers, C-level executives, etc. Unfortunately, the greedy followers are likely to usurp the attempts of the benevolent.
I don't "preach passive acceptance", but I am fresh out of ideas. What are yours?
I have ideas. I can't say that I'm the mighty thinker and savior. I read a lot, listen when others talk, and analyze what they're saying. Most who jump forward and say "I have the better idea, follow me" frequent have a bad plan, if a plan at all. In general, it comes down to widespread and rapid change. People in general don't like change. They'll live in the same house for decades, even if it's falling apart around them. They'll stay with a terrible low pay job, even though they're qualified for something better. Change always requires a push in the right direction.
The last time I seriously analyzed the required change, it was during the Bush administration. It wouldn't have been very pretty, but it looked like the Bush administration was going to people enough to cause it. The push would have brought the people against the established administration, rather than encouragement to enjoy a peaceful future.
With the administration change, I don't see the people edging up on wanting to force the change. They're again passively accepting what their rulers are giving them. The only real exception to this is the TSA manhandling of constitutionally ensured liberties. Even this wasn't a huge revolt, it was simply enough people saying "No, you may not xray (or microwave) me". I too was one of those people, not as a political stand, but because I don't feel confident in the technology nor the handling of privacy (i.e., images of me through my clothes).
So what would I suggest? Passive resistance, followed by active resistance. Peacefully say "no" to actions were are constitutionally protected from. Say "no" to government abuses, and when threatened by arrest take that as pride that you are doing the right thing. Just make damned sure the "right" thing you are doing is really right. Groups, such as ELF (Earth Liberation Front), have a message, but are not doing the right thing to get their message across.
In time, either government will react appropriately and start treating the population as the should be, or... well... a bloody revolution will begin. Unfortunately, steps towards that were taken in 2006 with modifications of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act. If the people should resist, the military can enforce the government's decision. Unfortunately, through other laws, the people cannot possess anything resembling the same force that can be brought down upon them by the military.
I quote the Insurrection Act:
The President may employ the armed forces, including the National Guard in Federal service, to restore public order and enforce the laws of the
I wasn't suggesting that it is a hoax. Actually, being a government contractor, I fully believed that they were authorized. Running on one IP, with both nameservers on the same subnet, it appears to be just a little site, and extremely vulnerable to DDoS traffic. It appears to be a Linux box running Apache. That gives no hints on it's capabilities. Slashdot effect may cripple it (if it had been posted in the story), or it may be a well equipped, and the only thing that would slow it down is the available bandwidth.
It's kind of doubtful that anyone running a botnet would hit it though. They're usually after financial gain (extortion after downing a site). That's about what it would probably take to do it undetected. Really in the end it wouldn't matter though. If the servers are hit with a DDoS, the page simply won't load. Either way, as far as the government is concerned, the original site still isn't reachable.
I'd suspect it won't be very long. The Internet was generally untouchable. With flexing new found power, they will expand the use of it until the people complain too much about it.
Consider air travel. It went from x-rays and metal detectors, to puff/sniffer rooms to detect for explosives, to full bodyscans and intrusive patdowns. When enough people started refusing to get more radiation on every flight than they get from normal medical screenings, it became a problem. And yes, I'm one of them. I refused standing in the machines, not for the sake of a political stand, but for the sake that it's not necessary. We, a people as a whole, are refusing to submit to the continued abuses, and they realize that they have to back down.
I guess the question then becomes, what action will the people take about this? Do they passively accept that the government did this for our safety? Then the actions will continue. Soon enough, people will see that sites like this are now directed to seizedservers.com, with two IP's and the web server on the same subnet at CaroNet Managed Hosting, Inc, and the domains are now "owned" by "immexGroup IT Solutions", a government contractor. Expect the DDoS to begin, but not without retaliation by the government.
Americans have become passivized. They may moan and groan about things that they don't like, but they won't take actions against it. Most likely, users of seized sites will just say "oh, that sucks", and move on to somewhere else, until they find that the other things they enjoy are gone also.
Slashdot is down the list a bit, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if some folks would like to see it go away. There are the trolls, who can just (and still) be ignored. There are those who preach passive acceptance, which is in the best interest of the government overreaching their powers. And finally, there are some who say "Stand up against what you believe are injustices". If there's anything the government hates more than those who mess with corporate America, it's those who try to suppress the government's uncontrolled powers. And I am one of the later. If you don't like it, stand up against it. Don't just make a little noise. Make a lot. If you do this, you may find yourself with a good number of followers, and you yourself may find yourself participating in government. What would we do with leaders who actually believe in and protect the freedoms of the individuals?
That isn't the way I understood it. Everyone on the flight were already dead. That's why they were on the plane (or the idea of the plane).
The fact that the island was unreachable from land, there was no communication, was because it simply didn't exist in the "real" world, as we understand it. The flight was symbolic, like Charon's ferry crossing the River Styx. It could easily be understood that the island was their purgatory, where the souls had an opportunity to be cleansed before passing on.
In the last episode, their parallel existences merged, once they had settled their unfinished business, and they moved on into the light. The "plane" was shown crashed on the beach, with no indication that anyone had ever been there. So the symbolic ferry landed, and the spirits finished their existence before moving on.
Any irregularities throughout the show can be easily explained as subconscious decisions by those occupying that purgatory. Impossible things became perfectly practical (like the Dharma food airdrops, smoke monsters, impossible explosions, and even the island moving) since they were all imaginary. Conflicts of the subconscious fought each other (like 40+ people in the same dream, and they are all trying to control it) until they all built the place to "move on" (the church in Los Angeles).
Or not. It was a crappy ending, to a show that lived years past the original story line, and the writers had to create something new and interesting, and then were told "ok, now wrap it up." I believe it was Jon Stewart on The Daily Show who gave a parity of the writers reaction. It went something like "ABC has announced that Lost was continuing for three more seasons. The writers response was "Oh fuck."":)
Well, not really. They were already dead, they just didn't realize it. Anything could have been there. They could have found a VW Bus with a funky logo on the front, that starts up, has gas, and is drivable after sitting for decades, and it would have been perfectly acceptable.
I kind of doubt they would. Possession of the stolen information has a stack of laws against it here in the US. Corporate America would prefer to ignore any indiscretions on the part of foreign corporations, especially where it's in their best interest.
I have to wonder what the terribly expensive secrets were though. Most automobile parts are reverse engineered rather rapidly. Check our your local auto parts store, and see how many aftermarket options there are for any given part. For most parts, you'll find several aftermarket companies producing identical replacements.
If I were them, I'd be more concerned with the outsourced factories selling parts made for that manufacturer, to third parties at a more competitive price. It happens an awful lot. I can't say that I've bought more than a dozen OEM parts for any cars that I've worked on.
Why?:) I know. meme. It's just, I've built a couple Beowulf clusters for fun, and didn't have an application written to use MPI (or any of the alphabet soup of protocols), so it was just an exercise, not for any practical use. It's not like most of us are crunching numbers hard enough to need one, and it won't help out playing games or even building kernels.
I'd like to see a 1k core machine on my desktop, but that's beyond the practical limits of any software currently available. Linux can only go to 256 cores. Windows 2008 tops out at 64. But hey, if they did come to market, I know who would be first to support all those cores, and it doesn't come from Redmond (or their offshore outsourced developers).
Those would be worthless after the apocalypse. Ammunition and food rations are worth more than all the paper currency and gold bullion that you could possibly store.
Then again, my girlfriend and I are doing a marathon of the Resident Evil movies right now, so my priorities may be a little out of whack.:)
A lot of us have privacy concerns also. I guess for some, it's ok for all of your data, databases, accounting information, internal emails, etc, to be hosted on someone else's hardware. Lots of "managed hosting" providers have physical and root/administrator access. Great. What's a database of industry specific customers worth on the black market? Way more than the technicians on site will make in a month (or possibly a year).
Depending on the data, they may be contractually obliged to maintain their data in a secure location, where no one but a limited list of vetted employees can possibly have access to it. Google, Amazon, or even folks like Rackspace, won't give up their employee list with names, SSN's, home addresses, etc, for background verification. You'd be lucky to get the first and last name from the guy who you're talking to on the phone, much less a clue of who just logged onto the console to do a repair.
That was secure, as in if you are a hardware developer (or OS, if the ability was not integrated into the hardware), you would need to sign up with the SD group to get permission to decrypt it. No magic required there.
That was a problem when I was playing with "Familiar" Linux on the iPaq. At the time, they didn't have access to the required libraries, so they couldn't use SD cards. We could use MMC cards, but not SD. I gave up on it after a while, when I realized I had now put linux onto an otherwise not interesting toy.
Nice idea, but it would seem that you are wrong. There are a plethora of tools available to recover the password if the original device is available to you. Otherwise, you can still wipe it, and have a perfectly good functioning card.
I skimmed the articles, and they were short on information regarding exactly what was done.
I don't know anyone with a Win7 phone, nor do I expect that any of my friends will get one, so I won't have a chance to test it. My suspicion is that they use yet another filesystem, which is unusable by other platforms. To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to permanently write to a card so it can only be used on a device. The only way to make a card unusable is to write to it too much, making it worthless to any device. I've only done that to a few.:) If there is a way, I'd love to know how. It would be nice to set up a card that can only be read on *MY* machine, so if someone snags it, they can't read the contents.
They make a lot more, if they take bribes to ensure a good grade. And suddenly the light clicks on. Oh, that's how he graduated from Yale.
Re:the long tradition of bigging up criminals
on
The Great Cyberheist
·
· Score: 1
I agree.
I've had frank conversations with folks that work in banks. I've also had to cash some large checks, which is frequently a nightmare to pull off. It's not all in verification, that's easy. They call the issuer, the issuer verifies it. The hard part is for them to come up with the funds. I've been left waiting for up to an hour for the armored truck to arrive and drop off more cash, so I could get mine. Teller drawers rarely have enough to make a bank robbery a valid risk. You may walk off with a few hundred. If you're lucky, a few thousand. Once in a great while the bank wasn't following it's written procedures, and someone will walk out with a bunch of cash, but that's rare. Most likely, a bank robber will walk out with the few hundred, and an exploding dye pack, and get nabbed within a block of the bank. Not all cops do what is shown on TV. They *WANT* you to come outside. You're now without any sort of defensible area, and without any potential hostages.
He was right in one thing though, most people who do commit those types of crimes are stupid. Then they get greedy. If they get away with a couple, then they'll start getting sloppy, and they may as well put on their own handcuffs and climb into the back of the patrol car.
Risk evaluation for criminal activity is fun to do. Well, as a hobby. Trying to figure out the "perfect" crime, and then trying to pull it off means you are dumb.
I'll never commit any sort of crime like that, because I know perfectly well that even if I did formulate the "perfect" plan, the random event will get me caught. It'd be something stupid like, getting in and out undetected, and getting a flat tire a few miles down the road. Despite the fact that cops are never friendly enough to stop and help when you're actually stuck, it would be almost guaranteed that one would stop to help me, and pull the probable cause card for searching me and my vehicle, and voila, I'm in jail. No thanks.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Shoot the sender.
Shoot the messenger.
Shoot the recipient.
You have to tie up all the loose ends. No body, no witnesses, no crime.
It's like you people have never disappeared a person or dozen to cover up something that may or may not have happened.
There's no time like the present to pick up an old hobby. :)
BTW, be sure to copy those VHS tapes to DVD, before they degrade too much.
Biden doesn't go way out of his way to look stupid. Palin on the other hand makes every effort to get in front of a camera. I was fairly sure for a while that she was sabotaging herself. It's pretty obvious now that it's just stupidity. It's not stupidity, it's attention whoring at it's worst. The higher or closer she gets to the top of politics, the bigger her ego will inflate. While she has 60% of the people laughing at her, she still has 40% favoring her, and probably 10% loving her. Even 1% would be 3 million people praising the word of Palin.
She is a party supported cult figure. If she hadn't been sponsored by a political party, she would have already been taken out in the interest of national security.
No, there are only two things to say.
1) "Am I free to go?"
and
2) "I have nothing more to say without my lawyer present."
Otherwise, there is absolutely nothing you can say to help yourself. Any statement you make can only be used against you. It won't possibly help you. By the time you're being questioned, they already have evidence against you.
They can plaster on the national news that you are a suspect. The worst thing you can do is comment, even to deny it.
Make sure you have a signed consent form, and two witnesses. It may seem a bit odd for witnesses to be in the room the whole time, but it'll protect you against future litigation. At least they can run the cameras for you.
But no mention of undead authors. Ah, a nice loophole I've found for myself.
This posting is (c) JWSmythe, 2010 - eternity.
It wasn't just too small to draw any real conclusions, it's too small to amount to anything other than a few writeups for misbehaving staff. That is, if they had provided the tracking numbers and times of the incidents. Without that information, all we know is that somewhere along the line, things didn't go as well as they should have.
The data set should have been thousands. They should have been shipped in such a way that they were delivered through various facilities. Some facilities do badly. Even with that data, I cannot say if one company is better than another. We shipped through a few common routes.
Those incidents cannot be considered indicative of how the entire company operates.
I've shipped probably thousands of items over the years. Most came through with no problem. A few were packing mistakes and rough handling. A very few were due to mishandling that was beyond my responsibility (i.e., packed well, but still damaged).
One local UPS facility, I never received a package that wasn't damaged on the outside. One FedEx location had a terrible habit of claiming to have attempted delivery without ever trying. Once, the building was closed for some reason, I parked my car at the entrance that the FedEx driver used. I waited, checking the tracking status frequently. About an hour after I expected it, I watched the driver fly by, not even slowing down, even though I was waving at him to stop. I needed that shipment that day. I called and complained. Then I found out the depot it would be arriving at, drove over there, and waited for it. According to him, the marked hours on the door indicated we were closed. We didn't have any hours marked at the door. The manager apologized profusely, but that didn't change the fact that I needed the package to do a server upgrade, and that cut into my maintenance window. I did get the job done on time, but I was lucky there were no problems.
One was a brand new 1u server, being shipped from our office, to a remote datacenter. I packed it in the OEM box, which was great. I personally handed it off to the shipping company. It was shipped to be delivered in 5 days. I flew up the next day. When it arrived, it had clearly been skewered by a forklift (I've driven forklifts in a past life). My package was probably at the bottom of the pallet, and the forklift driver missed by about 8 inches. We were lucky. It graze the top of the case, leaving a pretty noticeable dent, but the machine itself was perfectly functional, and it still fit in the rack normally.
Another interesting one was a shipment of 3 little 1u machines. They were light, and we were shipping a lot of stuff, so 3 were packed per box. The packing was done by a 3rd party under supervision of one of our managers. The box arrived, and I had to start taking pictures before I even opened it. The whole thing was oil soaked. It was clean motor oil, if I wasn't mistaken. The box couldn't even stand up under it's own weight. The peanuts inside were wet with the oil. Luckly, the machines were bagged, so they didn't get any oil on them at all.
Then there are the instances of obvious abuse. Corners were crushed. There were marks from roll doors being closed on them. The occasional puncture where something was slammed into the side of it.
Anyone who has worked in a warehouse knows, you're suppose to be very careful, but productivity is more important. You'll get written up if you break something and you're caught. If you don't keep your productivity up, you'll be looking for a job real quick.
It doesn't help much that UPS is commonly known with the workers as "United Pot Smokers". :) The USPS has their own reputation for high stress, low pay, and the ability to drive folks to snap (i.e., "going postal"). I don't know if FedEx or DHL have anything like that, but I haven't personally known any employees from either one.
Be careful, you're on the edge of invoking Godwin's law. I'm not saying you are wrong, but I'd hate for a perfectly good statement to be nullified from simple misphrasing.
Seizes property: check
Person: check
Thought: as expressed through action, speech, writing, or art... check.
We're not so far from sliding into an Orwellian nightmare.
or...
Big Brother is watching you. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Hopefully that leadership role can happen before incarceration. As far as I know, every government has legal provisions to mitigate dissidents, so incarceration or erasure (aka disappeared) is more likely. Anyone with enough backing is dangerous to the current administration, and will be neutralized.
No, actually you pay for the privilege of letting the bank hold onto the idea of your money. Once you hand it over, it's just a number in a database. With that privilege, you let them make money by loaning out your money, until which point where you may want it back. Converting that idea of the money back to currency is at the discretion of the bank. For example, if you've deposited $100/wk into your account every week for 10 years, you can't just walk in and tell them to give you $52,000. They may give you another idea of your money, in the form of a cashiers check, but rarely does a bank have that much cash on hand. Any mistake on the bank's part leaves the burden of proof on you. If you deposit $1,000, but the bank teller miskeys it as $10.00, you have to prove that the amount was wrong. Good luck with that. Additionally, any time a transaction should fail, the burden of arbitrary fees falls on you. An "overdraft" of even $1.00 can result in $70 or more in fees. It's a much higher rate than interest on a loan, if they were simply to open a line of credit for that error.
While the bank has your money, they'll invest it as they see fit, use it to issue loans, etc. The loans that they make go to others who don't have the funds. The bank makes a very healthy profit from the interest on the loan, while you most likely won't see a penny of it. If your account happens to be an interest bearing account, you might see a very small percentage of that loan activity, but don't hold your breath.
You're better off purchasing a good fireproof/waterproof safe. That is, one that is rated for real fires, and submersion, not the crap that you can buy at big box stores. It should be bolted to the floor (or mounted in the floor), so it cannot be stolen. If your house should burn down, be flooded, or burglarized, your property should remain safe. Consider, how many times have those three issues happened at your own home? Compare that to how many times you've been charged fees by the bank. Which has the higher risk? If you've had accounts open for several years, think about to how much you've paid the bank for the luxury of holding your money. It's probably a lot more than the cost of a safe.
The proverbial "under my mattress", as long as it's thought of as "a safe place in my home" is safer and more cost effective than using a bank. Just don't tell anyone else that you have a safe with cash in it. The criminal element know that banks have cash. They don't know that you have a safe at home. In the event of a random home burglary, they may steal your TV, but they won't be able to steal a properly secured safe.
I found this out a long time ago, when I started on the path into law enforcement. My intention was to help people. It was too obvious that (generally) the profession isn't about that.
Sadly, you are correct. There are leaders, and followers. We fall into one of the two casts. In either cast, there are benevolent, greedy, and almost infinite shades of gray in between. Followers make great employees, brainwashed masses, or cultists. Benevolent leaders are few and far between. They're the ones who make excellent (military) officers, C-level executives, etc. Unfortunately, the greedy followers are likely to usurp the attempts of the benevolent.
I have ideas. I can't say that I'm the mighty thinker and savior. I read a lot, listen when others talk, and analyze what they're saying. Most who jump forward and say "I have the better idea, follow me" frequent have a bad plan, if a plan at all. In general, it comes down to widespread and rapid change. People in general don't like change. They'll live in the same house for decades, even if it's falling apart around them. They'll stay with a terrible low pay job, even though they're qualified for something better. Change always requires a push in the right direction.
The last time I seriously analyzed the required change, it was during the Bush administration. It wouldn't have been very pretty, but it looked like the Bush administration was going to people enough to cause it. The push would have brought the people against the established administration, rather than encouragement to enjoy a peaceful future.
With the administration change, I don't see the people edging up on wanting to force the change. They're again passively accepting what their rulers are giving them. The only real exception to this is the TSA manhandling of constitutionally ensured liberties. Even this wasn't a huge revolt, it was simply enough people saying "No, you may not xray (or microwave) me". I too was one of those people, not as a political stand, but because I don't feel confident in the technology nor the handling of privacy (i.e., images of me through my clothes).
So what would I suggest? Passive resistance, followed by active resistance. Peacefully say "no" to actions were are constitutionally protected from. Say "no" to government abuses, and when threatened by arrest take that as pride that you are doing the right thing. Just make damned sure the "right" thing you are doing is really right. Groups, such as ELF (Earth Liberation Front), have a message, but are not doing the right thing to get their message across.
In time, either government will react appropriately and start treating the population as the should be, or ... well ... a bloody revolution will begin. Unfortunately, steps towards that were taken in 2006 with modifications of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act. If the people should resist, the military can enforce the government's decision. Unfortunately, through other laws, the people cannot possess anything resembling the same force that can be brought down upon them by the military.
I quote the Insurrection Act:
I wasn't suggesting that it is a hoax. Actually, being a government contractor, I fully believed that they were authorized. Running on one IP, with both nameservers on the same subnet, it appears to be just a little site, and extremely vulnerable to DDoS traffic. It appears to be a Linux box running Apache. That gives no hints on it's capabilities. Slashdot effect may cripple it (if it had been posted in the story), or it may be a well equipped, and the only thing that would slow it down is the available bandwidth.
It's kind of doubtful that anyone running a botnet would hit it though. They're usually after financial gain (extortion after downing a site). That's about what it would probably take to do it undetected. Really in the end it wouldn't matter though. If the servers are hit with a DDoS, the page simply won't load. Either way, as far as the government is concerned, the original site still isn't reachable.
I'd suspect it won't be very long. The Internet was generally untouchable. With flexing new found power, they will expand the use of it until the people complain too much about it.
Consider air travel. It went from x-rays and metal detectors, to puff/sniffer rooms to detect for explosives, to full bodyscans and intrusive patdowns. When enough people started refusing to get more radiation on every flight than they get from normal medical screenings, it became a problem. And yes, I'm one of them. I refused standing in the machines, not for the sake of a political stand, but for the sake that it's not necessary. We, a people as a whole, are refusing to submit to the continued abuses, and they realize that they have to back down.
I guess the question then becomes, what action will the people take about this? Do they passively accept that the government did this for our safety? Then the actions will continue. Soon enough, people will see that sites like this are now directed to seizedservers.com, with two IP's and the web server on the same subnet at CaroNet Managed Hosting, Inc, and the domains are now "owned" by "immexGroup IT Solutions", a government contractor. Expect the DDoS to begin, but not without retaliation by the government.
Americans have become passivized. They may moan and groan about things that they don't like, but they won't take actions against it. Most likely, users of seized sites will just say "oh, that sucks", and move on to somewhere else, until they find that the other things they enjoy are gone also.
Slashdot is down the list a bit, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if some folks would like to see it go away. There are the trolls, who can just (and still) be ignored. There are those who preach passive acceptance, which is in the best interest of the government overreaching their powers. And finally, there are some who say "Stand up against what you believe are injustices". If there's anything the government hates more than those who mess with corporate America, it's those who try to suppress the government's uncontrolled powers. And I am one of the later. If you don't like it, stand up against it. Don't just make a little noise. Make a lot. If you do this, you may find yourself with a good number of followers, and you yourself may find yourself participating in government. What would we do with leaders who actually believe in and protect the freedoms of the individuals?
That isn't the way I understood it. Everyone on the flight were already dead. That's why they were on the plane (or the idea of the plane).
The fact that the island was unreachable from land, there was no communication, was because it simply didn't exist in the "real" world, as we understand it. The flight was symbolic, like Charon's ferry crossing the River Styx. It could easily be understood that the island was their purgatory, where the souls had an opportunity to be cleansed before passing on.
In the last episode, their parallel existences merged, once they had settled their unfinished business, and they moved on into the light. The "plane" was shown crashed on the beach, with no indication that anyone had ever been there. So the symbolic ferry landed, and the spirits finished their existence before moving on.
Any irregularities throughout the show can be easily explained as subconscious decisions by those occupying that purgatory. Impossible things became perfectly practical (like the Dharma food airdrops, smoke monsters, impossible explosions, and even the island moving) since they were all imaginary. Conflicts of the subconscious fought each other (like 40+ people in the same dream, and they are all trying to control it) until they all built the place to "move on" (the church in Los Angeles).
Or not. It was a crappy ending, to a show that lived years past the original story line, and the writers had to create something new and interesting, and then were told "ok, now wrap it up." I believe it was Jon Stewart on The Daily Show who gave a parity of the writers reaction. It went something like "ABC has announced that Lost was continuing for three more seasons. The writers response was "Oh fuck."" :)
Well, not really. They were already dead, they just didn't realize it. Anything could have been there. They could have found a VW Bus with a funky logo on the front, that starts up, has gas, and is drivable after sitting for decades, and it would have been perfectly acceptable.
I kind of doubt they would. Possession of the stolen information has a stack of laws against it here in the US. Corporate America would prefer to ignore any indiscretions on the part of foreign corporations, especially where it's in their best interest.
I have to wonder what the terribly expensive secrets were though. Most automobile parts are reverse engineered rather rapidly. Check our your local auto parts store, and see how many aftermarket options there are for any given part. For most parts, you'll find several aftermarket companies producing identical replacements.
If I were them, I'd be more concerned with the outsourced factories selling parts made for that manufacturer, to third parties at a more competitive price. It happens an awful lot. I can't say that I've bought more than a dozen OEM parts for any cars that I've worked on.
The only thing I'd be compensating for is the fact I can't do calculations at Exaflop rates in my head.
Just like my car only compensates for the fact I can't run at 165mph. :)
Why? :) I know. meme. It's just, I've built a couple Beowulf clusters for fun, and didn't have an application written to use MPI (or any of the alphabet soup of protocols), so it was just an exercise, not for any practical use. It's not like most of us are crunching numbers hard enough to need one, and it won't help out playing games or even building kernels.
I'd like to see a 1k core machine on my desktop, but that's beyond the practical limits of any software currently available. Linux can only go to 256 cores. Windows 2008 tops out at 64. But hey, if they did come to market, I know who would be first to support all those cores, and it doesn't come from Redmond (or their offshore outsourced developers).
Those would be worthless after the apocalypse. Ammunition and food rations are worth more than all the paper currency and gold bullion that you could possibly store.
Then again, my girlfriend and I are doing a marathon of the Resident Evil movies right now, so my priorities may be a little out of whack. :)
I agree with you totally.
A lot of us have privacy concerns also. I guess for some, it's ok for all of your data, databases, accounting information, internal emails, etc, to be hosted on someone else's hardware. Lots of "managed hosting" providers have physical and root/administrator access. Great. What's a database of industry specific customers worth on the black market? Way more than the technicians on site will make in a month (or possibly a year).
Depending on the data, they may be contractually obliged to maintain their data in a secure location, where no one but a limited list of vetted employees can possibly have access to it. Google, Amazon, or even folks like Rackspace, won't give up their employee list with names, SSN's, home addresses, etc, for background verification. You'd be lucky to get the first and last name from the guy who you're talking to on the phone, much less a clue of who just logged onto the console to do a repair.
That was secure, as in if you are a hardware developer (or OS, if the ability was not integrated into the hardware), you would need to sign up with the SD group to get permission to decrypt it. No magic required there.
That was a problem when I was playing with "Familiar" Linux on the iPaq. At the time, they didn't have access to the required libraries, so they couldn't use SD cards. We could use MMC cards, but not SD. I gave up on it after a while, when I realized I had now put linux onto an otherwise not interesting toy.
Nice idea, but it would seem that you are wrong. There are a plethora of tools available to recover the password if the original device is available to you. Otherwise, you can still wipe it, and have a perfectly good functioning card.
I skimmed the articles, and they were short on information regarding exactly what was done.
I don't know anyone with a Win7 phone, nor do I expect that any of my friends will get one, so I won't have a chance to test it. My suspicion is that they use yet another filesystem, which is unusable by other platforms. To the best of my knowledge, there's no way to permanently write to a card so it can only be used on a device. The only way to make a card unusable is to write to it too much, making it worthless to any device. I've only done that to a few. :) If there is a way, I'd love to know how. It would be nice to set up a card that can only be read on *MY* machine, so if someone snags it, they can't read the contents.
They make a lot more, if they take bribes to ensure a good grade. And suddenly the light clicks on. Oh, that's how he graduated from Yale.
I agree.
I've had frank conversations with folks that work in banks. I've also had to cash some large checks, which is frequently a nightmare to pull off. It's not all in verification, that's easy. They call the issuer, the issuer verifies it. The hard part is for them to come up with the funds. I've been left waiting for up to an hour for the armored truck to arrive and drop off more cash, so I could get mine. Teller drawers rarely have enough to make a bank robbery a valid risk. You may walk off with a few hundred. If you're lucky, a few thousand. Once in a great while the bank wasn't following it's written procedures, and someone will walk out with a bunch of cash, but that's rare. Most likely, a bank robber will walk out with the few hundred, and an exploding dye pack, and get nabbed within a block of the bank. Not all cops do what is shown on TV. They *WANT* you to come outside. You're now without any sort of defensible area, and without any potential hostages.
He was right in one thing though, most people who do commit those types of crimes are stupid. Then they get greedy. If they get away with a couple, then they'll start getting sloppy, and they may as well put on their own handcuffs and climb into the back of the patrol car.
Risk evaluation for criminal activity is fun to do. Well, as a hobby. Trying to figure out the "perfect" crime, and then trying to pull it off means you are dumb.
I'll never commit any sort of crime like that, because I know perfectly well that even if I did formulate the "perfect" plan, the random event will get me caught. It'd be something stupid like, getting in and out undetected, and getting a flat tire a few miles down the road. Despite the fact that cops are never friendly enough to stop and help when you're actually stuck, it would be almost guaranteed that one would stop to help me, and pull the probable cause card for searching me and my vehicle, and voila, I'm in jail. No thanks. :)