It's too bad that the eminently sensible advice in that opinion piece will be ignored by techies because it comes from a guy perceived as icky.
It's too bad that anyone who takes that advice seriously and wants to act on it, then seeks out RMS for help, will likely be repulsed at some point.
In times of upheaval, ideologues are often the only people thinking straight enough to find a way out. Why did ours have to come wrapped in this particular package, a marketing nightmare that makes selling good sense so difficult even within the tech community?
I despair for the future and this is but one reason among legions.
All in all, just have a drink, and try not to think about your day tomorrow. Cheers!
Back atcha! Of course, I'm retired now so I can have a drink any time.
About 18 months after I retired, I went back to the office for the annual Christmas party. I had been replaced with 3 contractors. Somehow, I found that personally satisfying even though I know it was fiscal stupidity on the part of the government. But it's not my problem, anymore...so I think I'll head downstairs for a nice snifter of 7-star Metaxa and kick back for the evening. Life is good.
Have you ever worked with the government full-time long-term employees?
I was one for almost 30 years.
Anybody with a clue leaves after a few years to get paid anything near what they are worth.
No. Just, no.
As a sysadmin in the 1990s, I was sought out multiple times and typically offered 4 times my salary. A couple of times, I got substantially bigger offers than that. I did not take them.
Why?
All the offers came with requirements to always wear a pager, be on call all the time for no extra pay, and work ridiculous hours. Contrast that to the position I held where I worked 40 hours a week because we actually hired enough people to get the work done and pager duty rotated between three people. Also, on those occasions when more than 40 hours a week was needed, I got paid time and a half, minimum. I've worked plenty of 100-hour weeks, straight through weekends and holidays, when something major had to be accomplished but that was NOT the norm, unlike what turned out to be the normal workflow at some of the organizations that recruited me.
None of the people that offered me jobs offered anything resembling the sick days, vacations days, and holidays feds get.
None of those offers came with even halfway reasonable group health, life, or long-term care insurance coverage.
None offered any sort of pension.
In the end, I know I was severely underpaid for the work I did compared to the private sector. With sufficient pay, for example, I could have overcome the last two negatives cited immediately prior to this paragraph. However, my willingness to delay monetary gratification brought even more rewards than just reasonable work hours.
I will forever have a deep satisfaction in my service to my country. I can't overstress how meaningful that was to me.
I got to do fascinating work that was always a challenge. Because I was good and we had enough people to cover the work, I got to do a lot more than babysit servers.
I had a reasonable work/life balance.
It was a steady job. I knew my employer wasn't going out of existence like has since happened, iirc, to every company that tried to poach me from my government job.
Now that I'm retired, I have a small pension, a decent federal 401K (called a Thrift Savings Plan), and reasonably priced insurance.
I think that was a good deal, overall. Obviously, YMMV.
Jumping ship for the big bucks isn't always the smart play in the long run. Assuming that everyone worthwhile should automatically jump ship for the big bucks is, at best, a naive outlook. Every situation is different and these are personal choices.
Anyone in a skilled occupation who works for the government is underpaid (often severely) and is doing the work because "cash up front" is not the only motivator in their life. That can be good or bad (sometimes, with the admittedly too-common deadwood, it's very bad) but it's quite ignorant to assume that anyone who chooses to stay is "just a warm body looking to do the minimum to get paid."
Contractors are mercenaries. They're here to deliver this project, and once they get their paycheck they're on to other work. They won't be around to deal with the fall-out and maintenance headaches from their work, and they don't have any vested interest in the quality of their work as long as it's good enough to pass review and get their payment check cut. In fact, poor quality is actually an opportunity to get paid twice since fixing the problems is a new project. Full-time permanent employees may not be as efficient as contractors, but on the other hand they've got a vested interest in making sure the system doesn't create any more problems than necessary because they know they're the ones who're going to have to clean up the messes. Long-term employees also have a better grasp of what's already involved in the current system, which translates directly into a better grasp of what the new system will need to do. They're less likely to miss major complications because they already have to deal with them.
I've already posted so I can't mod you up but I'm sure you'll hit 5, anyway.
Government software should be written (and subequently further developed and supported at every level) by full-time, long-term government employees.
Thank you for outlining so concisely some of the major reasons this is true.
...experienced IT contractors (such as Booz Allen Hamilton...
made me laugh.
I've been in the unfortunate situation of working for a government agency when Booze Allen Hamilton came in to help make changes and improve things. They did much of the former and none of the latter.
Typically, dealing with whoever was going to actually use the process they were changing was something the Boozers did just to check off an item on a list. They did not listen to users because they assumed government employees were all idiots and could tell them nothing they really needed to know about the processes they were about to change.
Personally, if I were going to change business processes that had been in place for decades I'd want to talk to the people who work the current processes and find out how they work before I started trying to think up better ways of doing things. BAH never did that. They brought in workers for planning sessions, listened for a couple of days, then distilled the results of those discussions into a document of findings that was obviously written before the research ever started and contained exactly zero input from the field workers who truly understood job requirements.
Boozers, in my organization, were almost universally so convinced that their shit didn't stink that they were worse than useless. In the course of years of contacts with them, I met exactly ONE who listened, learned, and improved things.
Based on those past experiences, I can only surmise that the folks responsible for this current fiasco simply said "Oh, we don't need to talk to anyone from the government about how they run web sites that stand up to incredible traffic swings. We know what we're doing."
And some idiot government executives trusted them.
You're saying that if someone has a legitimate reason to hate me and my organization (which happens to be an arm of the government), then trying to kill mass numbers of us, an action clearly intended not just to accomplish mass murder but also to highlight the evils of a government gone wrong, is NOT an act of terrorism.
You're saying that if we're a bunch of middle-class office drones, not especially unique, then targeting us is, by some definition you've neglected to explicity state, NOT terrorism.
Personally, I think that every person who flew a plane into a building on 9/11 truly felt they had legitimate reasons to hate something about the U.S. and that killing a bunch of middle-class office drones was a good way to send some sort of message to the world about the legitimacy of their complaints.
Knocking down a building full of government bureacrats who have been forced into a high-density gathering, without regard to which agency they report, is a pretty clear way to kill lots of people, send a political message, and create fear among the population. If that wouldn't qualify as terrorism, then neither would 9/11 or the Boston bombings or the Nidal shooting or the Murrah building. Yet I don't think too many intellectually honest people would quibble with categorizing those 4 incidents as terrorism against (mostly) unremarkable people who are not high (dollar) value targets.
Boiled down, you're saying that if you kill a bunch of people you have a reason to hate, even when that hate clearly has a political component, then the act may be reprehensible but it's not terrorism. I'm having trouble seeing the difference.
To me, terrorism is an act of violence, usually against the innocent or symbolic, with at least some political motivation. If killing concentrations of government employees doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does. The value of the target is not in how much it (or, more properly, they) cost to replace; value is a function of how big a statement is made, how effectively, and how the government reacts. Drawing an equivalency between the value of a target to a terrorist and the dollar cost of rebuilding facilities and replacing people is simultaneously naive and offensive.
I've sat by the memorial in OKC and cried for the dead I knew and their children that I didn't. I find it hard to believe you could deny that bombing was an act of terrorism simply because most people don't like the agency that employed the victims yet, by extension of the reasoning in your post, you would do exactly that.
BTW, two things about Joe Stack. First, have you read his "manifesto"/suicide note? I have. He had personal motivations, sure. I'm guessing all terrorists have some but there is also no doubt he intended to make a political statement. Second, there is also no doubt he intended to kill lots more people than he did. The reason the entire side of the building was covered in a sheet of flame was that his plane precisely center-punched a main support column, causing all the fuel he had loaded into the fuselage to spread out at 90 degrees from the impact. If he had flown his plane five feet on either side of that impact point, he would have poured a giant fireball into the center of a crowded office killing, at minimum, dozens. He did all that to make a very political statement about his hatred of a particular government entity and to highlight a large number of additional grievances (see his suicide note) about other government behavior.
Yet you say that's not terrorism. It's an odd dictionary that provided you with whatever definition you're using for that term.
You're not "high-value target" if you're putzing about in an office waiting to get furloughed.
The agency in which I spent ~30 years was the IRS. The guy who was killed when a nut flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin was an acquaintance of mine. The number of nuts we caught at the door with guns over the years was staggering. During about a third of my time with the agency, I was a field officer and I was credibly threatened multiple times, attacked more than once, held hostage twice, and had dogs set on me more times than I can remember.
You're mostly right in what you say. I agree with it all, really. But please forgive me if my circle of co-workers was a tad more paranoid than most federal workers have a need to be.
By statute, email was not sufficient for notification. Every employee had to show up to the office and be given a formal-on-paper memo telling them they were furloughed. Remember, by statute, the in-person delivery of a notice on paper was required. That meant that *every* field employee had to make there way back to the office the same morning to receive their paper. Special Agents were called off of stake-outs. Employees permamently assigned to work from home or from desks at non-government entities had to leave their normal workspace and come into the federal building that was, theoretically, their place of employment...even if they *never* set foot in that building under normal circumstances.
At the last shutdown, every federal building was packed. There wasn't room for all the people who were forced to show up all at the same time. Halls were lined with people standing around because they had no place to sit. Friends gathered in groups of 4 or 5 around the desk of the one guy in their group who actually had a desk.
All of this may have been changed in the meantime.
However, post-9/11 we used to discuss the prospect of another shutdown and always concluded the same. Congress would be stupid to do it. The mechanics of the process made every federal building in the nation an incredibly enticing, super-target-rich environment for any nut job with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
What I've never understood though is why one would want to use Ubuntu over straight-up debian... (or Fedora over RH/CentOS).
Leaving aside the case for servers, for me the answer is the same for both. As a clueless (selectively, by choice) user, I just want my computer to work. When I build a new one, I just want to tick a box at installation to fully encrypt every attached drive.
For me, this little advantage means there's a whole body of knowledge about partitioning and file systems that I can simply ignore yet I get a machine where the data-at-rest problem is solved completely. I'm using Mint atm, as should be apparent from the link above.
I haven't checked in a while, though. Do any other distros make whole-disk encryption this easy? That single feature has been my make-or-break decision factor for the better part of a decade, at least.
Remember when we used to think that U.S. LEOs still had some sense of ethics and would never actually send child porn to anyone to make a case? Now we know that, at least for a while, the FBI was running the servers. The FBI was responsible for serving up, by all accounts, half the *.onion-based child porn sites in the world.
Is this the first time they crossed this line? Or have they done so before?
When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?
Because sometimes anything, any time, anywhere, isn't optimum.
Quality requires exclusivity. That's not an absolute rule, but pretty close.
You don't go around a race circuit fastest in a minivan, so if you like racing you should get a vehicle that does it better. It may be shit for all other uses but the quality of the exclusive experience makes it worth the investment.
Even if my girlfriend wanted to fuck me anywhere, any time, the quality of the experience would be enhanced by taking some time off and going to a nice, peaceful, private place where I can concentrate on her, exclusively.
Music can and is enjoyed anywhere, any time. But NOTHING compares to actually disconnecting from the wired world and sitting in a good concert hall, listening to an orchestra do what it does so well.
I could go on with a hundred more example. Just like all of them, TVs have a place. Yes, I can suck down media content anywhere, any time, but sometimes I actually like to FUCKING PAY ATTENTION to the movie on a big screen in a dark room with a superior sound system, sitting in a comfy chair with no interruptions.
What sort of distracted ass would ask "Why have a TV?" Is there nothing you think is worth doing well? Or is a half-assed look all you need?
People who ask this question would be just as happy with a poster of a Picasso thumbtacked to their wall as with the experience of seeing it in person. I feel sorry for them. No matter what generation they're from or what generation they feel entitled to insult, they need to learn to appreciate art...not just consume it willy-nilly, without thought, without quality but happy as a clam because they can accomplish such consumption while simultaneously washing clothes and updating Twitter.
You don't know what you're missing. Please, no matter what your age, grow up and figure it out.
...US law enforcement felt the need to exploit a Firefox bug in order to deanonymize some Tor users.
One thing to keep in mind about the takeover of Freedom Hosting and injection of malicious code by LE was that they continued to operate Freedom Hosting for a while. That means that LE freely hosted about, by the best estimates, half of all the child porn.onion sites in the world for a day or two.
It scares me when LE is willing to disseminate child pornography or, as in this case, trample all over the whole notion of free speech in the pursuit of their questionable goals.
I say "questionable" because, well, how can their goals be legitimate if they're willing to do such evil things to achieve them?
30 years ago I worked with a former social worker of long experience who had just changed jobs seeking a steadier paycheck. She said that poverty produced a constant stress over not feeling safe that basic needs would be met. Her view was that that constant stress often resulted in serious mental disfunction.
"Poverty makes you crazy...or at least stupid" was her standard rejoinder whenever we ran across someone who did something stupid with what little money they had.
From the Hierarchy of Needs, to my co-worker, to this new study - has anything changed? Not really. But it seems the relevant points need to be made over and over again because they just aren't getting through.
I was on the phone with HP Premier Support when the Fiorina departure news hit their office. I almost couldn't finish the call because of the chaos that erupted on the other end. The entire office was cheering, crying with joy, shouting in celebration...and someone in the background started singing at the top of his voice "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"
When the FBI took down Freedom Hosting, apparently most Tor hidden services for obscene material closed down. If all or some significant portion of those people move to Freenet, it'll have lots of traffic. Right?
My organization wanted to lower headcount, so a couple of years ago they offered early (reduced) retirement to us oldsters. I took it.
I went back for the office Christmas party last year and found I had been replaced by 3 contractors. The organization wound up spending more money to get my work done than they saved by letting me go.
The comment on inventory losses hits home. I'm retired from a large government agency. Back in the day, IT understood that it was our job to keep other, more important employees working. To that end, my division bought 110 laptops for every 100 laptop users. It kept the extras in stock as close to the users as possible.
When a user had problems, it was a 30 minute fix to swap hard drives into a new laptop, test, do the paperwork, and send the user back to work. If a drive died, it was about an hour of work to pull a new machine off the shelf, image it, and back up the user data from the local servers.
Unfortunately, most IT techs discovered those 30 minute hard drive swaps could be cut to 15 minutes or less if you neglected the paperwork. Laptops got lost. IT thought they were doing a great job. Our users loved us because we got them back to work asap. The executives, however, didn't like it.
They had to sit in front of a Congressional oversight committee every year and explain why a large number of laptops seemed to be missing. They weren't lost out of the organization, of course. They were temporarily misplaced. They were always found, eventually. There were no data losses.
Neither the executives nor Congress cared about our core mission when they had a juicy headline to bash us with in the press, every year, without fail.
The executives and IT hashed it out. They decided that the core business of the bureau was completely unimportant. The execs decreed that no matter what it took, they should never have to sit in front of a committee and explain things ever again.
Spare equipment was cut to the point of non-existence. All spare equipment was centralized in a half-dozen "depot" sites spread around the country. They were as far from the end users as possible. Getting anything replaced required dealing with a depot and doing overnight shipments.
The minimum time frame to fix a dead hard drive became, at minimum, several days. A highly paid employee who brought in a dead laptop on Monday morning would give it to IT and, in the best possible case, it would get shipped out that day, arrive at the depot on Tuesday who would ship a replacement, arrive back locally on Wednesday where it would be imaged and delivered back to the user later that day. That's 2.5 days AT BEST with a highly paid employee effectively idled.
If a single person (the IT tech, the local inventory specialist, the depot inventory specialist, the depot shipping clerk, and maybe more) was out of place, add a day to that cycle time. Average repair times, when hardware had to be replaced, jumped to ~4 days.
Prior to that, no matter how big the meltdown, an individual user could be back to work inside 2 hours and often in less than a half hour.
The troops were on the verge of mutiny and morale on computer issues went into the toilet.
The executives were insanely happy. They had set up a special IT department for themselves that worked the old way so they never suffered delays. Plus, they didn't have to testify before Congress any more.
I said all that to say this - When you read that some big government agency is losing computers it does NOT mean that data is being lost. It may well mean the IT department is actually doing their jobs instead of sacrificing the efficiency of their entire agency to cover the executive asses.
So when the quoted source says that losing a few laptops is no big deal, cut him some slack. He's right.
...wolf (and fox) urine is useful stuff. If your attic becomes infested with squirrels or other small mammals, put a few (literally, just 5 or 6) drops in the attic and they'll skedaddle. Now seal up whatever hole they were using to get in and your problem is solved.
...a full-size iPad will fit in the back pocket of 5.11 Tactical cargo pants. 5.11s, in any size, are designed to have the largest back pockets possible.
I've lost a lot of weight and this trick no longer works for me...but I don't mind at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's too bad that the eminently sensible advice in that opinion piece will be ignored by techies because it comes from a guy perceived as icky.
It's too bad that anyone who takes that advice seriously and wants to act on it, then seeks out RMS for help, will likely be repulsed at some point.
In times of upheaval, ideologues are often the only people thinking straight enough to find a way out. Why did ours have to come wrapped in this particular package, a marketing nightmare that makes selling good sense so difficult even within the tech community?
I despair for the future and this is but one reason among legions.
Back atcha! Of course, I'm retired now so I can have a drink any time.
About 18 months after I retired, I went back to the office for the annual Christmas party. I had been replaced with 3 contractors. Somehow, I found that personally satisfying even though I know it was fiscal stupidity on the part of the government. But it's not my problem, anymore...so I think I'll head downstairs for a nice snifter of 7-star Metaxa and kick back for the evening. Life is good.
I was one for almost 30 years.
No. Just, no.
As a sysadmin in the 1990s, I was sought out multiple times and typically offered 4 times my salary. A couple of times, I got substantially bigger offers than that. I did not take them.
Why?
In the end, I know I was severely underpaid for the work I did compared to the private sector. With sufficient pay, for example, I could have overcome the last two negatives cited immediately prior to this paragraph. However, my willingness to delay monetary gratification brought even more rewards than just reasonable work hours.
I think that was a good deal, overall. Obviously, YMMV.
Jumping ship for the big bucks isn't always the smart play in the long run. Assuming that everyone worthwhile should automatically jump ship for the big bucks is, at best, a naive outlook. Every situation is different and these are personal choices.
Anyone in a skilled occupation who works for the government is underpaid (often severely) and is doing the work because "cash up front" is not the only motivator in their life. That can be good or bad (sometimes, with the admittedly too-common deadwood, it's very bad) but it's quite ignorant to assume that anyone who chooses to stay is "just a warm body looking to do the minimum to get paid."
I've already posted so I can't mod you up but I'm sure you'll hit 5, anyway.
Government software should be written (and subequently further developed and supported at every level) by full-time, long-term government employees.
Thank you for outlining so concisely some of the major reasons this is true.
This
made me laugh.
I've been in the unfortunate situation of working for a government agency when Booze Allen Hamilton came in to help make changes and improve things. They did much of the former and none of the latter.
Typically, dealing with whoever was going to actually use the process they were changing was something the Boozers did just to check off an item on a list. They did not listen to users because they assumed government employees were all idiots and could tell them nothing they really needed to know about the processes they were about to change.
Personally, if I were going to change business processes that had been in place for decades I'd want to talk to the people who work the current processes and find out how they work before I started trying to think up better ways of doing things. BAH never did that. They brought in workers for planning sessions, listened for a couple of days, then distilled the results of those discussions into a document of findings that was obviously written before the research ever started and contained exactly zero input from the field workers who truly understood job requirements.
Boozers, in my organization, were almost universally so convinced that their shit didn't stink that they were worse than useless. In the course of years of contacts with them, I met exactly ONE who listened, learned, and improved things.
Based on those past experiences, I can only surmise that the folks responsible for this current fiasco simply said "Oh, we don't need to talk to anyone from the government about how they run web sites that stand up to incredible traffic swings. We know what we're doing."
And some idiot government executives trusted them.
I don't know who to be more disgusted with.
You're saying that if someone has a legitimate reason to hate me and my organization (which happens to be an arm of the government), then trying to kill mass numbers of us, an action clearly intended not just to accomplish mass murder but also to highlight the evils of a government gone wrong, is NOT an act of terrorism.
You're saying that if we're a bunch of middle-class office drones, not especially unique, then targeting us is, by some definition you've neglected to explicity state, NOT terrorism.
Personally, I think that every person who flew a plane into a building on 9/11 truly felt they had legitimate reasons to hate something about the U.S. and that killing a bunch of middle-class office drones was a good way to send some sort of message to the world about the legitimacy of their complaints.
Knocking down a building full of government bureacrats who have been forced into a high-density gathering, without regard to which agency they report, is a pretty clear way to kill lots of people, send a political message, and create fear among the population. If that wouldn't qualify as terrorism, then neither would 9/11 or the Boston bombings or the Nidal shooting or the Murrah building. Yet I don't think too many intellectually honest people would quibble with categorizing those 4 incidents as terrorism against (mostly) unremarkable people who are not high (dollar) value targets.
Boiled down, you're saying that if you kill a bunch of people you have a reason to hate, even when that hate clearly has a political component, then the act may be reprehensible but it's not terrorism. I'm having trouble seeing the difference.
To me, terrorism is an act of violence, usually against the innocent or symbolic, with at least some political motivation. If killing concentrations of government employees doesn't qualify, I'm not sure what does. The value of the target is not in how much it (or, more properly, they) cost to replace; value is a function of how big a statement is made, how effectively, and how the government reacts. Drawing an equivalency between the value of a target to a terrorist and the dollar cost of rebuilding facilities and replacing people is simultaneously naive and offensive.
I've sat by the memorial in OKC and cried for the dead I knew and their children that I didn't. I find it hard to believe you could deny that bombing was an act of terrorism simply because most people don't like the agency that employed the victims yet, by extension of the reasoning in your post, you would do exactly that.
BTW, two things about Joe Stack. First, have you read his "manifesto"/suicide note? I have. He had personal motivations, sure. I'm guessing all terrorists have some but there is also no doubt he intended to make a political statement. Second, there is also no doubt he intended to kill lots more people than he did. The reason the entire side of the building was covered in a sheet of flame was that his plane precisely center-punched a main support column, causing all the fuel he had loaded into the fuselage to spread out at 90 degrees from the impact. If he had flown his plane five feet on either side of that impact point, he would have poured a giant fireball into the center of a crowded office killing, at minimum, dozens. He did all that to make a very political statement about his hatred of a particular government entity and to highlight a large number of additional grievances (see his suicide note) about other government behavior.
Yet you say that's not terrorism. It's an odd dictionary that provided you with whatever definition you're using for that term.
The agency in which I spent ~30 years was the IRS. The guy who was killed when a nut flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin was an acquaintance of mine. The number of nuts we caught at the door with guns over the years was staggering. During about a third of my time with the agency, I was a field officer and I was credibly threatened multiple times, attacked more than once, held hostage twice, and had dogs set on me more times than I can remember.
You're mostly right in what you say. I agree with it all, really. But please forgive me if my circle of co-workers was a tad more paranoid than most federal workers have a need to be.
Retiree checks will continue to go out on schedule.
I was there for the last shutdown.
By statute, email was not sufficient for notification. Every employee had to show up to the office and be given a formal-on-paper memo telling them they were furloughed. Remember, by statute, the in-person delivery of a notice on paper was required. That meant that *every* field employee had to make there way back to the office the same morning to receive their paper. Special Agents were called off of stake-outs. Employees permamently assigned to work from home or from desks at non-government entities had to leave their normal workspace and come into the federal building that was, theoretically, their place of employment...even if they *never* set foot in that building under normal circumstances.
At the last shutdown, every federal building was packed. There wasn't room for all the people who were forced to show up all at the same time. Halls were lined with people standing around because they had no place to sit. Friends gathered in groups of 4 or 5 around the desk of the one guy in their group who actually had a desk.
All of this may have been changed in the meantime.
However, post-9/11 we used to discuss the prospect of another shutdown and always concluded the same. Congress would be stupid to do it. The mechanics of the process made every federal building in the nation an incredibly enticing, super-target-rich environment for any nut job with a bomb or a gun who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
We tended to think that putting all government employees in central locations, metaphorically under a giant banner that said "All terrorists attack here. Multiple high-value targets present. High level of success guaranteed." was so stupid that even Congress wouldn't do it.
Of course, we might have been wrong about that.
Leaving aside the case for servers, for me the answer is the same for both. As a clueless (selectively, by choice) user, I just want my computer to work. When I build a new one, I just want to tick a box at installation to fully encrypt every attached drive.
In Ubuntu and Fedora, you just check the box. Uninstall the installer in Mint, intall the latest version, and you can do the same in Mint. (See: http://forum.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=118398&sid=af61d80a5eabe54c26935b841ccfacae )
For me, this little advantage means there's a whole body of knowledge about partitioning and file systems that I can simply ignore yet I get a machine where the data-at-rest problem is solved completely. I'm using Mint atm, as should be apparent from the link above. I haven't checked in a while, though. Do any other distros make whole-disk encryption this easy? That single feature has been my make-or-break decision factor for the better part of a decade, at least.
Remember when we used to think that U.S. LEOs still had some sense of ethics and would never actually send child porn to anyone to make a case? Now we know that, at least for a while, the FBI was running the servers. The FBI was responsible for serving up, by all accounts, half the *.onion-based child porn sites in the world.
Is this the first time they crossed this line? Or have they done so before?
You are being cynical and your words are sad, sad, sad.
Unfortunately, you're probably right.
Phooey.
This is, as Binky says, old news. It has come up in
2005 - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144771&cid=12124437
2002 - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37712&cid=4041961
2003 - http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53299&cid=5272198
and probably a bunch of other times, too.
Give. Me. A. Break.
Because sometimes anything, any time, anywhere, isn't optimum.
Quality requires exclusivity. That's not an absolute rule, but pretty close.
You don't go around a race circuit fastest in a minivan, so if you like racing you should get a vehicle that does it better. It may be shit for all other uses but the quality of the exclusive experience makes it worth the investment.
Even if my girlfriend wanted to fuck me anywhere, any time, the quality of the experience would be enhanced by taking some time off and going to a nice, peaceful, private place where I can concentrate on her, exclusively.
Music can and is enjoyed anywhere, any time. But NOTHING compares to actually disconnecting from the wired world and sitting in a good concert hall, listening to an orchestra do what it does so well.
I could go on with a hundred more example. Just like all of them, TVs have a place. Yes, I can suck down media content anywhere, any time, but sometimes I actually like to FUCKING PAY ATTENTION to the movie on a big screen in a dark room with a superior sound system, sitting in a comfy chair with no interruptions.
What sort of distracted ass would ask "Why have a TV?" Is there nothing you think is worth doing well? Or is a half-assed look all you need?
People who ask this question would be just as happy with a poster of a Picasso thumbtacked to their wall as with the experience of seeing it in person. I feel sorry for them. No matter what generation they're from or what generation they feel entitled to insult, they need to learn to appreciate art...not just consume it willy-nilly, without thought, without quality but happy as a clam because they can accomplish such consumption while simultaneously washing clothes and updating Twitter.
You don't know what you're missing. Please, no matter what your age, grow up and figure it out.
One thing to keep in mind about the takeover of Freedom Hosting and injection of malicious code by LE was that they continued to operate Freedom Hosting for a while. That means that LE freely hosted about, by the best estimates, half of all the child porn .onion sites in the world for a day or two.
It scares me when LE is willing to disseminate child pornography or, as in this case, trample all over the whole notion of free speech in the pursuit of their questionable goals.
I say "questionable" because, well, how can their goals be legitimate if they're willing to do such evil things to achieve them?
30 years ago I worked with a former social worker of long experience who had just changed jobs seeking a steadier paycheck. She said that poverty produced a constant stress over not feeling safe that basic needs would be met. Her view was that that constant stress often resulted in serious mental disfunction.
"Poverty makes you crazy...or at least stupid" was her standard rejoinder whenever we ran across someone who did something stupid with what little money they had.
From the Hierarchy of Needs, to my co-worker, to this new study - has anything changed? Not really. But it seems the relevant points need to be made over and over again because they just aren't getting through.
I was on the phone with HP Premier Support when the Fiorina departure news hit their office. I almost couldn't finish the call because of the chaos that erupted on the other end. The entire office was cheering, crying with joy, shouting in celebration...and someone in the background started singing at the top of his voice "Ding, dong, the witch is dead!"
I am not kidding.
When the FBI took down Freedom Hosting, apparently most Tor hidden services for obscene material closed down. If all or some significant portion of those people move to Freenet, it'll have lots of traffic. Right?
My organization wanted to lower headcount, so a couple of years ago they offered early (reduced) retirement to us oldsters. I took it.
I went back for the office Christmas party last year and found I had been replaced by 3 contractors. The organization wound up spending more money to get my work done than they saved by letting me go.
Weird and stupid, but I'm enjoying my retirement.
So, they're a strong pro-civil-rights/basic human rights organization, eh? Sounds good to me.
The comment on inventory losses hits home. I'm retired from a large government agency. Back in the day, IT understood that it was our job to keep other, more important employees working. To that end, my division bought 110 laptops for every 100 laptop users. It kept the extras in stock as close to the users as possible.
When a user had problems, it was a 30 minute fix to swap hard drives into a new laptop, test, do the paperwork, and send the user back to work. If a drive died, it was about an hour of work to pull a new machine off the shelf, image it, and back up the user data from the local servers.
Unfortunately, most IT techs discovered those 30 minute hard drive swaps could be cut to 15 minutes or less if you neglected the paperwork. Laptops got lost. IT thought they were doing a great job. Our users loved us because we got them back to work asap. The executives, however, didn't like it.
They had to sit in front of a Congressional oversight committee every year and explain why a large number of laptops seemed to be missing. They weren't lost out of the organization, of course. They were temporarily misplaced. They were always found, eventually. There were no data losses.
Neither the executives nor Congress cared about our core mission when they had a juicy headline to bash us with in the press, every year, without fail.
The executives and IT hashed it out. They decided that the core business of the bureau was completely unimportant. The execs decreed that no matter what it took, they should never have to sit in front of a committee and explain things ever again.
Spare equipment was cut to the point of non-existence. All spare equipment was centralized in a half-dozen "depot" sites spread around the country. They were as far from the end users as possible. Getting anything replaced required dealing with a depot and doing overnight shipments.
The minimum time frame to fix a dead hard drive became, at minimum, several days. A highly paid employee who brought in a dead laptop on Monday morning would give it to IT and, in the best possible case, it would get shipped out that day, arrive at the depot on Tuesday who would ship a replacement, arrive back locally on Wednesday where it would be imaged and delivered back to the user later that day. That's 2.5 days AT BEST with a highly paid employee effectively idled.
If a single person (the IT tech, the local inventory specialist, the depot inventory specialist, the depot shipping clerk, and maybe more) was out of place, add a day to that cycle time. Average repair times, when hardware had to be replaced, jumped to ~4 days.
Prior to that, no matter how big the meltdown, an individual user could be back to work inside 2 hours and often in less than a half hour.
The troops were on the verge of mutiny and morale on computer issues went into the toilet.
The executives were insanely happy. They had set up a special IT department for themselves that worked the old way so they never suffered delays. Plus, they didn't have to testify before Congress any more.
I said all that to say this - When you read that some big government agency is losing computers it does NOT mean that data is being lost. It may well mean the IT department is actually doing their jobs instead of sacrificing the efficiency of their entire agency to cover the executive asses.
So when the quoted source says that losing a few laptops is no big deal, cut him some slack. He's right.
Please. People who understand proper English are becoming rare and should be rewarded.
...wolf (and fox) urine is useful stuff. If your attic becomes infested with squirrels or other small mammals, put a few (literally, just 5 or 6) drops in the attic and they'll skedaddle. Now seal up whatever hole they were using to get in and your problem is solved.
...a full-size iPad will fit in the back pocket of 5.11 Tactical cargo pants. 5.11s, in any size, are designed to have the largest back pockets possible.
I've lost a lot of weight and this trick no longer works for me...but I don't mind at all.
There are usenet newsgroups that seem to be entirely dedicated to encrypted dead drop communications. I wonder what's going on there?