Read the report. Quoting from page 7: "Unnecessary services were enabled on routers (moderate risk)"
Whatever was enabled was judged by the report authors to be of only moderate risk. The paragraph that provides specifics is redacted but that paragraph is quite short. It's clear to me that this wasn't an error on the scale of "They left all the defaults untouched." Rather, the inspectors found a service or two that someone overlooked when configuring a router. It's an error and it needs to be corrected but it was judged to be of only moderate risk, not high risk.
You don't really think the "Slashdot effect" would seriously impact the IRS, do you?
Every April, the IRS web presence gets hammered in ways most people can't imagine. It stays available. That speaks volumes about the ability of Treasury to handle traffic.
It's linked from the story. It's short and, like all such reports, its has a proforma organization that makes it easy to read. The synopsis tends to have the spin (and that's what got the attention of PC World and the Slashdot folks) but the actual findings are also clearly stated so that you can draw your own conclusions.
The inspectors made three findings.
1. "Intrusion detection systems were deployed effectively."
2. "Access controls over firewall and router system administrator accounts are operating effectively"
3. "Management of firewall and router audit logs needs to be improved."
Under # 3, they found one high-risk error, the only high-risk error in the report. That finding was "Audit logs were not independently reviewed".
The IRS agreed with all findings and promised to fix things.
My personal opinion? I think a report that says, to paraphrase, "All your stuff works fine. However, you aren't regularly running it all past someone not in the normal administrative chain; that failure is a serious error" is certainly something to be taken seriously but it's unlikely to be a career-killer for anyone. I've seen far, far worse reports on many different subjects from amny different agencies. The IRS, however, is really big and touches everyone so a finding that procedures are suboptimal is far more newsworthy than some of the truly horrific crap that passes for security practice at other agencies. I certainly feel no ill will towards those who are publishing this stuff. When you work for the IRS, you get used to seeing bad news (mostly exaggerated bad news) almost exclusively. Such is life.
///snip/// various bits of excuse-making skipped over because I'm too tired and lazy to formulate snappy comebacks about really serious stuff///snip///
- the 500 years of the dark ages when Christianity ruled over science and anyone questioning the authority of the church was killed (murder/massacre)
OK, now you got me.
If humanity was 500 years further along, we'd all have our flying cars by now. So, ultimately, if you want to condemn Christianity then blame us for the lack of flying cars. That one really hurts.
I wonder if there's an application that will do as you suggest in even more structured environments where such things really ought to be easily possible.
I'd give a minor digit if my Usenet newsreader would tag every download with where I got it from, when, who posted it, and a few other items that should be easily and consistently retrievable from the message headers (that supposedly conform to a defined format). I'd also love it if my web browser would tag every right-click/downloaded picture with the URL it came from and maybe a few other data elements.
Alas, I suppose it's too late for me. Terabytes of unlabeled, unsorted content will probably remain on my computers until long past my demise.
That's a program that turns Usenet into human-readable form, not some sort of Web3.0/push/feed/buzzword thingie that beeps your cell phone whenever your girlfriend goes to the can. (Just thought I'd clear that up for you younguns.)
Pan is 32-bit and OK but I find all sorts of nagging problems with it. The biggest is that if you try to get headers from a newsgroup with lots of messages (say, over a million) it just hangs.
Running Windows Usenet clients in Wine is one solution, but I'd really like a FOSS solution.
Anybody got any suggestions? I'm an old fart and won't give up my Usenet until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
This stuff is really complex. Drop figures can't be accurately calculated straight across from flight time. You can get really close but "really close" isn't good enough if the ranges get long enough. Generally, bullets generate a small amount of aerodynamic lift so bullet drop is always just a tad less than a simple time of flight calculation would indicate. At extreme distances and widely varying velocities, that lift can induce enough uncertainty to be interesting. Atmospheric variables can induce enough additional uncertainty to make things *really* interesting. That's why very-long range shooting is such a fun sport.
Which games? I'm not sure. The last I saw a big display of them was at the NRAs national convention in Houston which was, iirc, at least 4 years ago. I'm filtered at work and can't do much searching but I'm not turning anything up via Google. I know I played the demo at the convention and the varmint game got panned on that TechTV game review show, X-Play - you know, the one with Morgan Webb and the irritating guy.
At 100 yards, most of those factors are irrelevant.
Depends.
For short-range benchrest shooters, a "screamer" is a group in the "0's" - that is, a group where five shots all fall within 0.0x inches of each other. (You can get a patch to put on your jacket when you shoot one.) It takes just a puff of wind, the sort of thing most people wouldn't even notice, to move a group from the zeroes to the ones or twos. Accounting for all the factors that literally can move a bullet less than a tenth of an inch at 100 yards is the sort of thing only the obsessive and compulsive can really master. These guys show up at matches with portable weather stations. They have wind-measuring devices placed all along the bullet path, from rifle to target. They study optics like a physicist since atmospheric temperature differentials between them and the target may make the apparent position of the target shift a few thousandths one way or the other.
The sport is fascinating to read about but way too egg-headed for me. When it was translated into a game, I'm really not surprised that average folks found it simultaneously boring and daunting.
Oh, and just as an aside, dealing with shooting at opponents instead of static targets - a very standard test of rifle marksmanship for police snipers when they report to training is to require them to uncase their rifle, load a round (no practice, no warmup, no prep time at all), and hit a one-inch circle at 100 yards. Generally, if you can't do that, you're nowhere near competent as a sniper. Somehow, most video games seem to fall short of an entertaining simulation of that sort of skill. I don't think it's possible to make an accurate simulation that's actually entertaining. Thus, most computer games involving any sort of "realistic" shooting tend to leave me cold.
I don't think so. The National Rifle Association in the United States has slapped their logo on various games that did a very good job of replicating the real-world problems involved in shooting accurately. IIRC, there have been games covering benchrest, hi-power, and varmint (if you're a shooter, you'll know specifically what those are).
Those games got panned by the gaming press as boring, boring, boring. They actually required people to think, account for all the variables, and then be satisfied when they merely score a correct hit. Just like real life. The gamers, however, wanted things to move faster. They wanted more Bang! Splat! Oof! to go with their game play. The notion of actually taking something close to real-life time to set up a shot was, to them, just needless tedium.
So, no, I don't think if you make the difficulty of in-game shooting more accurately mirror real life, gamers will be happy.
Then again, if you give them an infallible auto-aim, they'll complain about that, too.
Hmmm.
I'm really glad my livelihood doesn't depend on making decisions about these kinds of things.
They built their business on pants. Amazing product - comfy, incredibly durable, excellent pocket design, and don't look bad in any circumstances. I don't think I've worn any other pants for years.
Special note for the Slashdot crowd: They're avaliable in waist sizes up to 54 inches.:-)
The difference between art and porn is interesting. The True Teen case out of Utah illustrated it clearly. (I'm at work, so I can't Google for links and details. Feel free to fill in, folks.) In that case, the defendant, a photographer with a web site selling sexy but clothed pics of girls, won in a slam-dunk after the evidence showed that he did not produce the material for his own sexual gratification, an essential element of the crime under the law in that state at that time. IOW, he won because he was able to prove his state of mind to the court. (The details are probably unique...Wish I had links.)
Later, on his web site, the photographer published an essay in which he opined that he could take far more revealing photos and sell them for far more money IF he were to sell in book form, rather than online. His point was that online sales of the material at a reasonable price to the masses meant that the knee-jerk reaction of LEA was that it couldn't be art. Art is expensive; his stuff wasn't. Art is a tangible thing that you hang on the wall or put on a bookshelf; his product didn't fit the profile. Art is printed on paper or something flat and doesn't require electricity; his was just light emitting from a monitor.
He is of the opinion that he could put *anything* (almost) in an expensive, coffee-table-style "art" book and sell it without harrassment. However, he feels that even the most innocent content, if sold online, was a risky business.
I agree with him. I have a copy of Larry Clark's beautiful book "Teenage Lust" in which he reproduces several photo and text essays on growing up, running with the gang, getting in trouble, and getting laid. (I hope I've got that title right; it's been years sinice I looked at the book.) If the thing were a web site, Clark would be in jail for life. But I paid ridiculous money to get it at an internationally-famous art exhibition and it's a BOOK instead of just a computer file. No way anyone is going to get prosecuted over that; the few times that bluenoses have famously tried, they've failed. Sally Mann, David Hamilton and others have been harrassed and have re-located or changed their art, but none of the high-profile investigations of serious artists over the last 30 years (that I'm aware of; please tell me if I'm wrong) have actually resulted in anyone being convicted of this crime.
The lesson for pervs? Just brazenly publish your work in high-quality books with high prices. That should be enough to shield you from any charges.
The lesson for the rest of us? The laws in this area have hinged on thoughtcrime for far longer than most people realize. All pictures of kids are illegal if the prosecutor can convince a jury you got some sick jollies from them.
I have no idea how to protect against that. Burn your family albums, I suppose.
I'll be opening a site next year that will be static html. There are wonderful tools to make static pages that are easily updatable. The use of static html doesn't mean a site can't be fresh. Yes, I'll have some fancier stuff in an associated forum but even the user-contributed content will be edited and added to the main site as static html.
Why am I doing it this way? I think the key (well, one of the main keys) to a successful site is simply knowing your audience and giving them what they want and need. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "This is boring; I need to click somewhere else", then you need to employ fancier tools. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "I need to read this to see if it contains information I can use", then static html is fine and dandy. Because I'll be targeting an audience that is older and cares far more about good, updated, detailed information than about eye candy, static html for my core pages is the right choice.
In my day job I work for the Internal Revenue Service. Years ago, I helped prototype a "lead development" process looking for tax non-compliance in entities that promoted themselves online. (Nowadays, that's everybody but not back then.) We started out looking at porn, hate peddlers, and rogue CPAs who dispensed bad advice (whatever you wanted to hear) for hefty fees. The CPAs were easy to find but the porn and hate guys? Not so much. You'd be surprised how many wholesome Midwest couples supplement their income by making beast porn and not paying taxes on their receipts. And if you think any of the white supremacist groups or similar wack-jobs out there actually comply with tax laws, I would like to tell you different.
The problem was that when we tried to find these dodgy porn sellers and hatemongers, they were tough to find. A search engine that actually had useful results would have been a good thing.
In other matters, I can remember when cjb.net was filled with not just awful porn but also cracker sites containing useful nuggets of tech information. They were also infested with whatever malware was around. At that time (What was it? About 5-8 years ago?), Google did index them. But I can easily imagine a need to get to similar neighborhoods today and finding that search engines are reluctant to point you to their malware-laden pages.
It hasn't been my job to poke around in such places for a long time but I think it's obvious that there are legitimate reasons to do so.
i wasnt aware that google filtered out porn or hate-sites
Google doesn't filter much. I know that there are lots of sites that simply don't appear in their results but I have no idea whether Google purges those sites because of potentially illegal content or if the sites themselves are opting out of being crawled. But no matter the cause of non-appearances, there still don't seem to be any search engines I know of that do a good job of indexing the content they have for these types of sites.
For example, in the situation I described a couple of paragraphs ago we found that the hate sites were very hard to track until we realized that long before we got interested in them, there were other people (namely, their victims) who had a huge interest in cataloging them. The Anti Defamation League catalog of hate sites was a gold mine, an absolutely invaluable resource. They had compiled their catalog by talking to victims and dealing with the bad guys. Trying to compile the same sort of catalog from Google results would be very, very difficult. (To be fair, back when I was doing this I mostly used HotBot and NorthernLight; this isn't a Google-specific complaint.) We started from the ADL catalog and spidered out from there, essentially building our own search database. It would have need nice if someone else had already done the work for us.
Besides, what's wrong with occasionally proving Rule 34?:-)
I wonder if there's a demand for a search engine that specializes in taking you to all the "bad places" on the 'net. What if a search engine indexed everything that others don't - hate sites, porn, spam markets, malware, everything - with the disclaimer that "You'd better not use us to get to any sites unless you've got a really hardened workstation and you're willing to assume all the risks"?
There have been times when I could have used such a thing; I'm wondering if the same is true for anyone else.
Guess what happens when your encrypted disk can't be booted? You can't boot under a windows/emergency restore disk, because your partition is not readable.
I have to feel for you. I'm really sorry that whatever solution you've implemented is this crude.
This sounds like you're talking about situations, even physical damage, where an unencrypted disk could be slaved to another machine and the data recovered. In those cases, where I work we slave the disk to a functioning machine and mount it with an encryption cert sent to us from the group that centrally manages our encryption. Then we copy the data (or, if it was just a software problem, fix what was wrong), build the user a new machine, put the data on the new machine, and the user walks away happy. They'll be without a computer for a day but, even though our security policies are absolutely ass-aholic about requiring full-disk encryption *everywhere*, we've been able to recover data in every case where we would have been able to recover it from unencrypted disks.
There are states where 16 is legal. However, the Protect Act will kick in if the partner is under 18. We have one Supreme Court Justice who went on record as saying the age ought to be set at 12, so opinions vary widely about how things *ought* to be. Thus, the laws on the subject are a crazy-quilt of seemingly conflicting provisions.
Just a few years ago, the age in Hawaii was 14. It's a cultural conflict thing that would take too long to explain, but a few people got up in arms about it and claimed that Hawaii was in danger of becoming a haven for perverts. Notwithstanding the fact that a significant portion of the population felt that the age of 14 was set too HIGH already (there's that cultural thing) and that the governor went on record as saying the legislation addressed a non-existent problem, the law was changed and the age of consent was raised. What was most interesting about the change was the way the proponents of the change acted like anyone who disagreed with them was a sub-human pervert not worth debating. There was just no allowance AT ALL made for any discussion. If you didn't go along with the change, you were a closeted molestor. Period.
I found the whole tenor of that process quite unseemly and essentially anti-democratic. I guess it's true what they say about people who love the law or sausages shouldn't see how they're made.
"the judicial tradition of suppressing evidence entirely because it was produced without a proper warrant is absurd. The man was clearly guilty and the evidence was there. Instead, fine the police for doing the wrong thing"
Here, I agree -- to a point. It doesn't change the fact that in the context of the system as it exists, the court's action is correct, though; today the remedy for illegal search is suppression of evidence.
But yes, I think holding law enforcement personally responsible when they violate the rights of the accused would be more just than penalizing the victim (and any potential future victims) by preventing a conviction when the accused really is guilty -- if such a system can be made to work.
I wish I could remember the author and book name but I can't so take this as anecdotal until someone comes up with references.
A while back, there was a book getting some attention on CSPAN and in the literary and legal press that posited warrants were not conceived as common things. A warrant, so the thinking went, would indemnify the police from damages if they searched an innocent party. If the police searched someone without first getting a warrant and that person turned out to be guilty, then the search was fine in a "no harm, no foul" sense. If the police did not get a warrant and searched someone innocent, then the person searched would take legal action and be directly awarded large penalties from the police.
The position of the book was that warrants were originally conceived to be rare things, only gotten when there was an edge case where the police reasonably suspected wrongdoing but weren't absolutely sure of their facts. Supposedly, if the police were absolutely sure, they should be free to go ahead and kick in doors. Generally, though, the police were assumed to be unwilling to do so in any but the most obvious cases because to do so incorrectly would bring major penalties down on their heads.
The book cited old English and colonial cases where police made mistakes and courts then ordered the police to directly pay damages to the former suspect.
Such a system could have worked back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. So much of what is illegal these days is invisible or not easily discernible that the need for warrants, even under the old criteria, is huge. Add to that the common practice of police not acting with integrity (I came of age in Houston, Texas in the 1970s. If you learned to deal with cops in that time and place, you'll never, ever, ever trust any cop to tell the truth about anything. You will forever assume that any evidence found by cops was planted. Period.), and the whole "Cops won't hurt innocents because they're afraid of the repercussions" notion simply falls apart.
I said all that to say this - I have some appreciation of the reasonableness of the attitude that if evidence of a crime is found, it doesn't really matter how it was obtained. On balance, I don't agree with that position but I do believe that it should not dismissed out of hand. It has some theoretical merit. It has no practical utility these days, but the theory isn't all crap.
Life begins when you can slow down, relax and think.
Old guys can still get in their licks. Literally.
I'm an old fart. I was at a Renaissance Faire, getting a big kick out of watching 3 or 4 tough-acting, frat-boy types, half-drunk, trying to impress the little hotties in their posse. They were trying to ring the bell at that old carnival game where you hit a teeter-totter thing to launch a metal pellet upwards.
I don't think any of them had ever done any physical labor. Swinging a sledge isn't all that hard if you just relax and use the momentum instead of trying to muscle it through. These guys wore themselves out and most didn't get halfway up the scale.
I slid up to the lady selling the tickets, winked at her, and asked if she'd play along. She nodded yes, so I cut in line, grabbed a sledge, and, seemingly without much effort at all, took a nice slow swing completely through the target.
The bell rang like, well, a bell.
And then I heard, behind me, exactly what I knew I was going to hear. Some sweet-looking little college girl, drunk, blurts out "The old guy rang the bell!" I turned around and saw her with her mouth hanging open in amazement. Then I launched into a little blurb I do.
"Young lady, feel free to play with all these lean little boys for as long as you want. But when you get bored with their huffing and puffing and getting nothing done, when you want a man who knows how to get the job done - then you look for an old man. Mark my words, little girl..." (by this time, I was playing large, to the whole assembled crowd) "...It's an old man you want - when you want a man who knows how to Ring Your Bell!"
I swept the ticket girl off her feet and planted a big kiss on her, handed the sledge to the college girl (she dropped it), and walked away to the sound of all the old men in the area cheering. The ticket girl was laughing her ass off.
And the college kids were just standing there with a "WTF?" look on their faces.
Damn, that was fun. I had almost forgotten about that. Just goes to show you that, as you said, life is better when you slow down, relax, and think your way through it.
Remove the keyboard, screen, and wireless stuff. Add one or two ethernet ports and one to three USB ports. Cut the price to $100, max. Then you'd have a perfectly useful micro-server, good for all those tasks that don't take much processor oomph. I could use one or two of what I've described. But this thing? It's neither fish nor fowl and I don't see the use of it.
...how...do you fly into Europe or Japan with a gun...?
Air marshalls do it. They carry a stack of paperwork with them. It's tough for a foreigner to get a concealed-carry permit in most countries but it can be done. Where it can't, air marshalls don't fly.
Anyone on a diplomatic passport can do it. (Note that in some countries, this is frowned on and if carrying a gun isn't part of your job, you don't pull this crap with complete impunity.)
Head-of-state protective details do it. (They are also covered under the previous point.)
Hunters do it. Anywhere there's big game to be hunted and money to be made from rich Europeans or Americans who will spend multiple thousands of dollars to fly to your country and shoot your exotic animals, there will be some exceptions built into the law to allow the temporary importation of firearms.
Target shooters do it. Olympic rifle, pistol, and shotgun teams travel pretty much unimpeded (yes, there's paperwork and approvals to be completed long beforehand) to any place holding a competition. I have friends who travel to Brazil to compete every couple of years, each time carrying a pile of pistols. The world benchrest championships will see teams from all over the world going to whatever venue is selected. It happens *all* the time.
No, Europe and Japan are unlike the U.S. in that you don't throw a gun in your bags routinely just to get better luggage treatment. However, if you have a legit reason, you can take your guns with you to most countries. I'm retiring soon and the list of places I want to go to compete, carrying a couple of pistols with me, is too long for me to be able to afford them all. However, over the next few years I expect to take my guns to some subset of: Finland, France, Czech Republic, Spain, Russia, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the report. Quoting from page 7: "Unnecessary services were enabled on routers (moderate risk)"
Whatever was enabled was judged by the report authors to be of only moderate risk. The paragraph that provides specifics is redacted but that paragraph is quite short. It's clear to me that this wasn't an error on the scale of "They left all the defaults untouched." Rather, the inspectors found a service or two that someone overlooked when configuring a router. It's an error and it needs to be corrected but it was judged to be of only moderate risk, not high risk.
You don't really think the "Slashdot effect" would seriously impact the IRS, do you?
Every April, the IRS web presence gets hammered in ways most people can't imagine. It stays available. That speaks volumes about the ability of Treasury to handle traffic.
It's linked from the story. It's short and, like all such reports, its has a proforma organization that makes it easy to read. The synopsis tends to have the spin (and that's what got the attention of PC World and the Slashdot folks) but the actual findings are also clearly stated so that you can draw your own conclusions.
The inspectors made three findings.
1. "Intrusion detection systems were deployed effectively."
2. "Access controls over firewall and router system administrator accounts are operating effectively"
3. "Management of firewall and router audit logs needs to be improved."
Under # 3, they found one high-risk error, the only high-risk error in the report. That finding was "Audit logs were not independently reviewed".
The IRS agreed with all findings and promised to fix things.
My personal opinion? I think a report that says, to paraphrase, "All your stuff works fine. However, you aren't regularly running it all past someone not in the normal administrative chain; that failure is a serious error" is certainly something to be taken seriously but it's unlikely to be a career-killer for anyone. I've seen far, far worse reports on many different subjects from amny different agencies. The IRS, however, is really big and touches everyone so a finding that procedures are suboptimal is far more newsworthy than some of the truly horrific crap that passes for security practice at other agencies. I certainly feel no ill will towards those who are publishing this stuff. When you work for the IRS, you get used to seeing bad news (mostly exaggerated bad news) almost exclusively. Such is life.
///snip/// various bits of excuse-making skipped over because I'm too tired and lazy to formulate snappy comebacks about really serious stuff ///snip///
OK, now you got me.
If humanity was 500 years further along, we'd all have our flying cars by now. So, ultimately, if you want to condemn Christianity then blame us for the lack of flying cars. That one really hurts.
I wonder if there's an application that will do as you suggest in even more structured environments where such things really ought to be easily possible.
I'd give a minor digit if my Usenet newsreader would tag every download with where I got it from, when, who posted it, and a few other items that should be easily and consistently retrievable from the message headers (that supposedly conform to a defined format). I'd also love it if my web browser would tag every right-click/downloaded picture with the URL it came from and maybe a few other data elements.
Alas, I suppose it's too late for me. Terabytes of unlabeled, unsorted content will probably remain on my computers until long past my demise.
That's a program that turns Usenet into human-readable form, not some sort of Web3.0/push/feed/buzzword thingie that beeps your cell phone whenever your girlfriend goes to the can. (Just thought I'd clear that up for you younguns.)
Pan is 32-bit and OK but I find all sorts of nagging problems with it. The biggest is that if you try to get headers from a newsgroup with lots of messages (say, over a million) it just hangs.
Running Windows Usenet clients in Wine is one solution, but I'd really like a FOSS solution.
Anybody got any suggestions? I'm an old fart and won't give up my Usenet until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I do NOT come to Slashdot to look in the mirror!!!
I've done a little searching and I think I'm remembering this game and this game.
I generally don't like to reply to myself, but...
...here's the link that I was thinking of. It's a thought-provoking read.
Yes, no, sorta, and not really.
This stuff is really complex. Drop figures can't be accurately calculated straight across from flight time. You can get really close but "really close" isn't good enough if the ranges get long enough. Generally, bullets generate a small amount of aerodynamic lift so bullet drop is always just a tad less than a simple time of flight calculation would indicate. At extreme distances and widely varying velocities, that lift can induce enough uncertainty to be interesting. Atmospheric variables can induce enough additional uncertainty to make things *really* interesting. That's why very-long range shooting is such a fun sport.
Which games? I'm not sure. The last I saw a big display of them was at the NRAs national convention in Houston which was, iirc, at least 4 years ago. I'm filtered at work and can't do much searching but I'm not turning anything up via Google. I know I played the demo at the convention and the varmint game got panned on that TechTV game review show, X-Play - you know, the one with Morgan Webb and the irritating guy.
Depends.
For short-range benchrest shooters, a "screamer" is a group in the "0's" - that is, a group where five shots all fall within 0.0x inches of each other. (You can get a patch to put on your jacket when you shoot one.) It takes just a puff of wind, the sort of thing most people wouldn't even notice, to move a group from the zeroes to the ones or twos. Accounting for all the factors that literally can move a bullet less than a tenth of an inch at 100 yards is the sort of thing only the obsessive and compulsive can really master. These guys show up at matches with portable weather stations. They have wind-measuring devices placed all along the bullet path, from rifle to target. They study optics like a physicist since atmospheric temperature differentials between them and the target may make the apparent position of the target shift a few thousandths one way or the other.
The sport is fascinating to read about but way too egg-headed for me. When it was translated into a game, I'm really not surprised that average folks found it simultaneously boring and daunting.
Oh, and just as an aside, dealing with shooting at opponents instead of static targets - a very standard test of rifle marksmanship for police snipers when they report to training is to require them to uncase their rifle, load a round (no practice, no warmup, no prep time at all), and hit a one-inch circle at 100 yards. Generally, if you can't do that, you're nowhere near competent as a sniper. Somehow, most video games seem to fall short of an entertaining simulation of that sort of skill. I don't think it's possible to make an accurate simulation that's actually entertaining. Thus, most computer games involving any sort of "realistic" shooting tend to leave me cold.
Really?
I don't think so. The National Rifle Association in the United States has slapped their logo on various games that did a very good job of replicating the real-world problems involved in shooting accurately. IIRC, there have been games covering benchrest, hi-power, and varmint (if you're a shooter, you'll know specifically what those are).
Those games got panned by the gaming press as boring, boring, boring. They actually required people to think, account for all the variables, and then be satisfied when they merely score a correct hit. Just like real life. The gamers, however, wanted things to move faster. They wanted more Bang! Splat! Oof! to go with their game play. The notion of actually taking something close to real-life time to set up a shot was, to them, just needless tedium.
So, no, I don't think if you make the difficulty of in-game shooting more accurately mirror real life, gamers will be happy.
Then again, if you give them an infallible auto-aim, they'll complain about that, too.
Hmmm.
I'm really glad my livelihood doesn't depend on making decisions about these kinds of things.
They built their business on pants. Amazing product - comfy, incredibly durable, excellent pocket design, and don't look bad in any circumstances. I don't think I've worn any other pants for years.
Special note for the Slashdot crowd: They're avaliable in waist sizes up to 54 inches. :-)
In practical terms, yes. That, and the storage format.
The difference between art and porn is interesting. The True Teen case out of Utah illustrated it clearly. (I'm at work, so I can't Google for links and details. Feel free to fill in, folks.) In that case, the defendant, a photographer with a web site selling sexy but clothed pics of girls, won in a slam-dunk after the evidence showed that he did not produce the material for his own sexual gratification, an essential element of the crime under the law in that state at that time. IOW, he won because he was able to prove his state of mind to the court. (The details are probably unique...Wish I had links.)
Later, on his web site, the photographer published an essay in which he opined that he could take far more revealing photos and sell them for far more money IF he were to sell in book form, rather than online. His point was that online sales of the material at a reasonable price to the masses meant that the knee-jerk reaction of LEA was that it couldn't be art. Art is expensive; his stuff wasn't. Art is a tangible thing that you hang on the wall or put on a bookshelf; his product didn't fit the profile. Art is printed on paper or something flat and doesn't require electricity; his was just light emitting from a monitor.
He is of the opinion that he could put *anything* (almost) in an expensive, coffee-table-style "art" book and sell it without harrassment. However, he feels that even the most innocent content, if sold online, was a risky business.
I agree with him. I have a copy of Larry Clark's beautiful book "Teenage Lust" in which he reproduces several photo and text essays on growing up, running with the gang, getting in trouble, and getting laid. (I hope I've got that title right; it's been years sinice I looked at the book.) If the thing were a web site, Clark would be in jail for life. But I paid ridiculous money to get it at an internationally-famous art exhibition and it's a BOOK instead of just a computer file. No way anyone is going to get prosecuted over that; the few times that bluenoses have famously tried, they've failed. Sally Mann, David Hamilton and others have been harrassed and have re-located or changed their art, but none of the high-profile investigations of serious artists over the last 30 years (that I'm aware of; please tell me if I'm wrong) have actually resulted in anyone being convicted of this crime.
The lesson for pervs? Just brazenly publish your work in high-quality books with high prices. That should be enough to shield you from any charges.
The lesson for the rest of us? The laws in this area have hinged on thoughtcrime for far longer than most people realize. All pictures of kids are illegal if the prosecutor can convince a jury you got some sick jollies from them.
I have no idea how to protect against that. Burn your family albums, I suppose.
I'll be opening a site next year that will be static html. There are wonderful tools to make static pages that are easily updatable. The use of static html doesn't mean a site can't be fresh. Yes, I'll have some fancier stuff in an associated forum but even the user-contributed content will be edited and added to the main site as static html.
Why am I doing it this way? I think the key (well, one of the main keys) to a successful site is simply knowing your audience and giving them what they want and need. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "This is boring; I need to click somewhere else", then you need to employ fancier tools. If the first reaction of your target audience to a plain page of static content is "I need to read this to see if it contains information I can use", then static html is fine and dandy. Because I'll be targeting an audience that is older and cares far more about good, updated, detailed information than about eye candy, static html for my core pages is the right choice.
Fair question.
In my day job I work for the Internal Revenue Service. Years ago, I helped prototype a "lead development" process looking for tax non-compliance in entities that promoted themselves online. (Nowadays, that's everybody but not back then.) We started out looking at porn, hate peddlers, and rogue CPAs who dispensed bad advice (whatever you wanted to hear) for hefty fees. The CPAs were easy to find but the porn and hate guys? Not so much. You'd be surprised how many wholesome Midwest couples supplement their income by making beast porn and not paying taxes on their receipts. And if you think any of the white supremacist groups or similar wack-jobs out there actually comply with tax laws, I would like to tell you different.
The problem was that when we tried to find these dodgy porn sellers and hatemongers, they were tough to find. A search engine that actually had useful results would have been a good thing.
In other matters, I can remember when cjb.net was filled with not just awful porn but also cracker sites containing useful nuggets of tech information. They were also infested with whatever malware was around. At that time (What was it? About 5-8 years ago?), Google did index them. But I can easily imagine a need to get to similar neighborhoods today and finding that search engines are reluctant to point you to their malware-laden pages.
It hasn't been my job to poke around in such places for a long time but I think it's obvious that there are legitimate reasons to do so.
Google doesn't filter much. I know that there are lots of sites that simply don't appear in their results but I have no idea whether Google purges those sites because of potentially illegal content or if the sites themselves are opting out of being crawled. But no matter the cause of non-appearances, there still don't seem to be any search engines I know of that do a good job of indexing the content they have for these types of sites.
For example, in the situation I described a couple of paragraphs ago we found that the hate sites were very hard to track until we realized that long before we got interested in them, there were other people (namely, their victims) who had a huge interest in cataloging them. The Anti Defamation League catalog of hate sites was a gold mine, an absolutely invaluable resource. They had compiled their catalog by talking to victims and dealing with the bad guys. Trying to compile the same sort of catalog from Google results would be very, very difficult. (To be fair, back when I was doing this I mostly used HotBot and NorthernLight; this isn't a Google-specific complaint.) We started from the ADL catalog and spidered out from there, essentially building our own search database. It would have need nice if someone else had already done the work for us.
Besides, what's wrong with occasionally proving Rule 34? :-)
I wonder if there's a demand for a search engine that specializes in taking you to all the "bad places" on the 'net. What if a search engine indexed everything that others don't - hate sites, porn, spam markets, malware, everything - with the disclaimer that "You'd better not use us to get to any sites unless you've got a really hardened workstation and you're willing to assume all the risks"?
There have been times when I could have used such a thing; I'm wondering if the same is true for anyone else.
Wow. When you say this:
I have to feel for you. I'm really sorry that whatever solution you've implemented is this crude.
This sounds like you're talking about situations, even physical damage, where an unencrypted disk could be slaved to another machine and the data recovered. In those cases, where I work we slave the disk to a functioning machine and mount it with an encryption cert sent to us from the group that centrally manages our encryption. Then we copy the data (or, if it was just a software problem, fix what was wrong), build the user a new machine, put the data on the new machine, and the user walks away happy. They'll be without a computer for a day but, even though our security policies are absolutely ass-aholic about requiring full-disk encryption *everywhere*, we've been able to recover data in every case where we would have been able to recover it from unencrypted disks.
There are states where 16 is legal. However, the Protect Act will kick in if the partner is under 18. We have one Supreme Court Justice who went on record as saying the age ought to be set at 12, so opinions vary widely about how things *ought* to be. Thus, the laws on the subject are a crazy-quilt of seemingly conflicting provisions.
Just a few years ago, the age in Hawaii was 14. It's a cultural conflict thing that would take too long to explain, but a few people got up in arms about it and claimed that Hawaii was in danger of becoming a haven for perverts. Notwithstanding the fact that a significant portion of the population felt that the age of 14 was set too HIGH already (there's that cultural thing) and that the governor went on record as saying the legislation addressed a non-existent problem, the law was changed and the age of consent was raised. What was most interesting about the change was the way the proponents of the change acted like anyone who disagreed with them was a sub-human pervert not worth debating. There was just no allowance AT ALL made for any discussion. If you didn't go along with the change, you were a closeted molestor. Period.
I found the whole tenor of that process quite unseemly and essentially anti-democratic. I guess it's true what they say about people who love the law or sausages shouldn't see how they're made.
I wish I could remember the author and book name but I can't so take this as anecdotal until someone comes up with references.
A while back, there was a book getting some attention on CSPAN and in the literary and legal press that posited warrants were not conceived as common things. A warrant, so the thinking went, would indemnify the police from damages if they searched an innocent party. If the police searched someone without first getting a warrant and that person turned out to be guilty, then the search was fine in a "no harm, no foul" sense. If the police did not get a warrant and searched someone innocent, then the person searched would take legal action and be directly awarded large penalties from the police.
The position of the book was that warrants were originally conceived to be rare things, only gotten when there was an edge case where the police reasonably suspected wrongdoing but weren't absolutely sure of their facts. Supposedly, if the police were absolutely sure, they should be free to go ahead and kick in doors. Generally, though, the police were assumed to be unwilling to do so in any but the most obvious cases because to do so incorrectly would bring major penalties down on their heads.
The book cited old English and colonial cases where police made mistakes and courts then ordered the police to directly pay damages to the former suspect.
Such a system could have worked back in the day. Nowadays, not so much. So much of what is illegal these days is invisible or not easily discernible that the need for warrants, even under the old criteria, is huge. Add to that the common practice of police not acting with integrity (I came of age in Houston, Texas in the 1970s. If you learned to deal with cops in that time and place, you'll never, ever, ever trust any cop to tell the truth about anything. You will forever assume that any evidence found by cops was planted. Period.), and the whole "Cops won't hurt innocents because they're afraid of the repercussions" notion simply falls apart.
I said all that to say this - I have some appreciation of the reasonableness of the attitude that if evidence of a crime is found, it doesn't really matter how it was obtained. On balance, I don't agree with that position but I do believe that it should not dismissed out of hand. It has some theoretical merit. It has no practical utility these days, but the theory isn't all crap.
Old guys can still get in their licks. Literally.
I'm an old fart. I was at a Renaissance Faire, getting a big kick out of watching 3 or 4 tough-acting, frat-boy types, half-drunk, trying to impress the little hotties in their posse. They were trying to ring the bell at that old carnival game where you hit a teeter-totter thing to launch a metal pellet upwards.
I don't think any of them had ever done any physical labor. Swinging a sledge isn't all that hard if you just relax and use the momentum instead of trying to muscle it through. These guys wore themselves out and most didn't get halfway up the scale.
I slid up to the lady selling the tickets, winked at her, and asked if she'd play along. She nodded yes, so I cut in line, grabbed a sledge, and, seemingly without much effort at all, took a nice slow swing completely through the target.
The bell rang like, well, a bell.
And then I heard, behind me, exactly what I knew I was going to hear. Some sweet-looking little college girl, drunk, blurts out "The old guy rang the bell!" I turned around and saw her with her mouth hanging open in amazement. Then I launched into a little blurb I do.
"Young lady, feel free to play with all these lean little boys for as long as you want. But when you get bored with their huffing and puffing and getting nothing done, when you want a man who knows how to get the job done - then you look for an old man. Mark my words, little girl..." (by this time, I was playing large, to the whole assembled crowd) "...It's an old man you want - when you want a man who knows how to Ring Your Bell!"
I swept the ticket girl off her feet and planted a big kiss on her, handed the sledge to the college girl (she dropped it), and walked away to the sound of all the old men in the area cheering. The ticket girl was laughing her ass off.
And the college kids were just standing there with a "WTF?" look on their faces.
Damn, that was fun. I had almost forgotten about that. Just goes to show you that, as you said, life is better when you slow down, relax, and think your way through it.
Thank you. That's a good tip.
Remove the keyboard, screen, and wireless stuff. Add one or two ethernet ports and one to three USB ports. Cut the price to $100, max. Then you'd have a perfectly useful micro-server, good for all those tasks that don't take much processor oomph. I could use one or two of what I've described. But this thing? It's neither fish nor fowl and I don't see the use of it.
Air marshalls do it. They carry a stack of paperwork with them. It's tough for a foreigner to get a concealed-carry permit in most countries but it can be done. Where it can't, air marshalls don't fly.
Anyone on a diplomatic passport can do it. (Note that in some countries, this is frowned on and if carrying a gun isn't part of your job, you don't pull this crap with complete impunity.)
Head-of-state protective details do it. (They are also covered under the previous point.)
Hunters do it. Anywhere there's big game to be hunted and money to be made from rich Europeans or Americans who will spend multiple thousands of dollars to fly to your country and shoot your exotic animals, there will be some exceptions built into the law to allow the temporary importation of firearms.
Target shooters do it. Olympic rifle, pistol, and shotgun teams travel pretty much unimpeded (yes, there's paperwork and approvals to be completed long beforehand) to any place holding a competition. I have friends who travel to Brazil to compete every couple of years, each time carrying a pile of pistols. The world benchrest championships will see teams from all over the world going to whatever venue is selected. It happens *all* the time.
No, Europe and Japan are unlike the U.S. in that you don't throw a gun in your bags routinely just to get better luggage treatment. However, if you have a legit reason, you can take your guns with you to most countries. I'm retiring soon and the list of places I want to go to compete, carrying a couple of pistols with me, is too long for me to be able to afford them all. However, over the next few years I expect to take my guns to some subset of: Finland, France, Czech Republic, Spain, Russia, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Brazil.