that's all I can say really. This sounds worse than sony's disabling of features in a firmware update. Only this one you can't just not do. (and deal with the consequences of not being up to date)
But I bet this one gets sufficient backlash to require them to backpedal. Significantly altering the behavior of a purchased product by remote control, without opt-out. Arguably illegal?
I think it's necessary to put it into perspective on the moles though. We're dealing with gasses here, and not particularly high flow rates either. Plants do this in a roundabout sort of way in their chlorophyl, using only sunlight as energy. Thing with them though is they're doing it pretty slowly, and at a much slower rate than an animal breathes at. The process can't be that prohibitively expensive if plants are doing it all the time and haven't already evolved a way around it. You're a lot farther ahead on the chemistry than I am so maybe you can figure the answers if you have the right questions.
What needs to be worked out here is how much energy is required for say, an hour's breathing time for a moderately active average adult, assuming perfect efficiency which we know we won't get, but just for starters lets go with that. Need to figure out how many moles of CO2 need to be processed, and then multiply by your previous results, and finally convert that into a number most of us are more familiar with, such as watts / amp-hours (instead of Joules), since we're really talking about running something like this on DC power, possibly battery.
I really don't know what to expect, which is why this whole thing interests me. Assuming a process can be developed that does it, (a previous poster said "only plants can do this", well that's only because we haven't figured out an easy way to do it using our crude methods, look at what new doors fuel cells have opened recently) it would be very interesting to see if the process has a reasonable energy requirement. If this requires say, 5-10 watts, that would be very practical. And I have some confidence that the number of moles above is going to be small enough to make this worth a serious look.
CO2 must also be removed. that's probably what ultimately killed the rabbits.
Besides overloading the red blood cells with CO2 and preventing the removal from the cells, it also screws up the PH of the blood really quick. I assume that with this process it could get bad enough to lead to shock.
Now what would be really cool would be if they could come up with a sold-state exchanger for CO2 to O2. Something like a fuel cell in reverse - create a chemical exchange from an electrical power. Implant that into a body and it could run on batteries instead of breathing. But I don't think that technology in that form currently exists. They have "rebreathers" but those are huge space-suit-size affairs and operate on a far more involved process.
But I bet someone's working on it right now. Probably several someones.
But would you be arrested for obstruction of justice if you deleted the video off of your Google Glass because you knew you were speeding?
Probably more of a "destruction of evidence" charge, but yes that would be possible. There would be a burden of proof to show that (1) recognized the video was evidence of a criminal act, and (2) you destroyed or altered it for the purpose of interfering with justice.
(2) can be difficult to prove. "I always clear it every morning and did it out of habit without thinking that accident yesterday might go to court" alone could cast reasonable doubt against (2). Usually requires some other supporting evidence like testimony that you told someone that you deliberately wiped it, or asked someone if it was admissible as evidence before you wiped it etc. The rules of proof for destruction of evidence are a little more lenient however due to the nature of the crime.
I foresee this going at about the pace that perpendicular recording did with hard drives. Remember how we heard about this whiz-bang great new idea years ago, and look how long it took to actually come to the practical market.
But now it's ubiquitous. So I suppose the same will happen with the chip. And I can see this dealing a crushing blow to the already hurting spinning disc hard drives with them being able to vastly increase flash storage density.
They're taking massive advantage of ground effect, and are using the distributed rotors to magnify the effect more than a single rotor could. That's probably the primary reason they did so well.
The entire thing seems to be an exercise in futility. Helicopters aren't very efficient. I'd be much more interested in seeing more of the human-powered-glider competitions. Those guys can keep them up in the air quite a lot longer.
That wasn't a "failed" product, it was a prototype.
But that's what everyone is calling the "new surface" now, it's just a prototype, that's why nothing works yet. But just wait, it's coming, we promise! (just like the original Surface)
That wasn't a product demo, it was a dream demo "this is what we are going to TRY to make". They spent most of their time speaking the word "surface" over and over like they were trying to brainwash the viewers, while telling everyone over and over ad nauseum how wonderful the clicking sound of the stand was etc. It was insulting. It wasn't a product demo, they were there to tell us what opinion of their product we are supposed to have, without any physical reason to back it up.
The demo itself was a disaster. That poor guy was up on stage, I felt sorry for him when he kept saying "xxx is wonderful!" and tried to get it to work, and it didn't. And so he just moved on to the next thing, "and yyy is wonderful!" and it also failed to work. He finally gave up and grabbed a hot spare off the table and it immediately failed to work on the next thing. "and it plays great games!" (game fails to launch) "and the video is great!" and the video still opens but the video refuses to start playing. "and this keyboard is wonderful!" (but I'm not going to ever attempt to type on it!) "and these menus are great!" (and no menu will stay open) I bet he headed to the bar after that demo. Considering the train wreck that it was though, he was pretty smooth with it.
Someone else a little above here was saying the difference between MS and Apple demos is that Apple is shipping units to the stores when the put them on demo. MS is demoing a product that may never make it to the stores. They aren't even finished designing it yet. They're so late to the tablet game that they're throwing a barely bootable early prototype up on stage and dangling it on a string over reviewers heads trying to stall for time. All they've done is shown their hand about where they'd like to be in 6 months. By then there will probably be a dozen tablets that have magnetic clicky keyboard cover/stand accessories available for them. This demo is probably going to do them more harm than good. And if they're as consistent with the Surface's "early preview" launch as they usually are, a few of the features they talked about it having won't even BE in the final product.
This thing has "Zune" written all over it. (although at least the Zune's demo went fairly well, before it cratered)
As a bank, you'd think they would be able to deploy the patch to only a couple of their user base to see if there's anything wrong. Or at the very least test it in a closed test environment.
Sometimes there's a limit to what you can test. Simulating a multilevel network with very broad trees, as a big bank probably uses, probably makes do with a significantly simplified environment. All it takes is some yutz somewhere to try to freeze an account that's already frozen (or do something else obtuse that's very hard to predict) to trigger an untested path bug and BOOM.
Being able to roll back a patch becomes a very useful feature at that point. But rolling back large amounts of financial transactions is a whole 'nother big can of worms.
Sometimes they just have to turn things on they shouldn't, to get the water flowing again, and try to clean up as best they can next weekend while they pour over the logs trying to catch things that got rolled back wrong etc. My bank had this happen once in their recent upgrades that I've caught, and it turned out to be a "bank error in your favor, collect $130". (they auto-paid a bill of mine and never debited my account) But that's the cheaper price they pay for screwing up. The alternative would be to let everyone know that they screwed up the books and are going to be fixing things for the next week, and that drops peoples' confidence in their bank which is incredibly bad for business at a bank, people really flip out when their bank tells them they don't quite know where all their money is right at the moment. So they just take a deep breath and take some little hits here and there to avoid much worse PR damage.
Two years ago we go a call telling us the levies might not hold and if they burst (1 block away) we'd have 8 ft of water. We didn't really have a battle plan and we had a lot less to deal with than it sounds like you did, but we learned some lessons.
1) praise the lord we had good network documentation. Now is not the time to be writing down how the firewall and public and private LANs are plugged in together. Shut stuff down, and start placing network hardware in big plastic tubs. Have tubs handy for this, they nest nicely when not in use. Toss cables in a different tub. just wind them up best you can into loops and toss them in. there's probably not time for neatness, you can deal with that later. TAKE THE DOCUMENTATION WITH YOU. You'll feel mighty silly if that's left pinned on the wall. or I assume you have an electronic copy you can print when you get offsite. Make sure any servers with complex cable attachments (like to phone banks or security systems) have labels on the connectors.
1b) got your phone system documented too? this is a whole 'nother can of worms that often is forgotten about. Does anyone have a diagram of where all those punched down wires go on each block? If you have phone switching hardware to pack, make sure the cables are labeled, they will all probably look the same with the giant connectors that attach to the blocks. "We'll just call Al, he does our phone stuff." Oh, you don't think Al is going to be BUSY helping everyone else that is returning? Nothing's as fun as a 2-3 day wait to get your phones back up and running huh?
2) Label ac adapters. You need to know which unit wants 12vdc and which has 24vac, you don't want to fry stuff when you are trying to reassemble. every pack should have the model of the unit it goes to written on it. Gear WILL get separated from its pack during the evac.
3) label staff's hardware. It's very annoying trying to figure out whose beige box is whose later. and they will probably fight over monitors and keyboards later. save yourself the headache. If you are already under the gun, run to the store and get a dozen rolls of masking tape and sharpies and have the staff label their equipment while you're packing things up, full initials or names, I bet you have duplicate first names you don't want to deal with later. Make sure you label the phones.
4) have a plan for things you can't easily move. the corp office was also forecast to get 8ft of water and they were on the WRONG side of the dike so it was more of a "when" than "if". they had a very expensive multifunction printer that the service people told them they could have a tech out to take it apart (so it fit out the door) in three days, which obviously was silly. They rushed in a bunch of cinder blocks and lifted it up and set it on them 8.5' up. (I have no idea how they lifted it) In retrospect, the building got 14" of water and totaled it, they SHOULD have killed power to the building and took a saws all to a wall. OR at least watertight wrapped it before lifting. I've seen this done with entire cars when faced with an incoming flood or hurricane. Even if it doesn't keep out the water 100%, at least it will keep out the mud, which you may be very grateful later. Got a plan for your big server room ups's? those can be quite large and heavy, and are often hardwired into the AC, are you able and qualified to unhook it? Maybe you should call in an electrician now and change that armored cable to a dryer type plug? Have a place you can move big stuff that can't be evac'd to where it will be at least more likely to survive. Think of flood, fire, and tornado/hurricane, there's probably not one single place that will work best in all three cases. Smoke damage can be very destructive, simply having something wrapped in mover's visqueen may prevent unnecessary loss that the fire missed but the smoke got. Do you have a plan for that rack that's bolted down or won't even fit through the door?
5) Document what's been left behind. A simple way to
I have a high quality very solid entertainment center with reinforced glass doors, no sound escapes it. Though I did notice the fan on the PS3 can get loud when the door is open.
Sadly, despite them kicking us in the junk all the time, they do make a lot of superior products.
My most recent purchase was a PS3, not for the games, for the bluray player. The first one I bought was complete garbage. And was pleasantly surprised to find I could stream movies from my extensive video library on my computer too.
But that's probably why they're abusive and still around, there are enough people that tolerate the abuse because they otherwise have the best product.
and its also absolutely worthless. someone can easily bring their own laptop to work, wifi into the corporate network
There's quite a big difference between "covers most of the exits" and "completely worthless".
First off, physical security is entirely beyond the scope of the OP's problem. If you want to secure your digital assets, you are going to require both an electronic and a physical policy because data can take either shape when leaving the building. The limitations of one side really have no bearing on the other side, and if one side is your job and the other is not, don't look at how the other team is doing to determine how much effort you put into your end of the task. The goalie doesn't just not bother if his strikers aren't doing well that day. You do your job, and let them do theirs.
Second, giving up an any security just because there's a weakness somewhere isn't the answer. If you're going to consider for extreme scenarios and then throw up your hands and say "see we're not prepared for that, lets jut give up!" is entirely the wrong attitude. You're not likely to stop a CIA mole among your staff regardless of what you do, and that's not a sensible justification for completely giving up on security.
DLP is like antivirus. Only a PHB will expect 100% protection, there's going to be that 0.001% lurking around no matter how crazy you get. So you just have to decide how many 9's you need, and strike the right balance between usability and security.
And to the numerous people above complaining about accessing financial and medial records at work... what makes you think your employer is required to provide you with private access via their network while you are at work? Do this at home, duh. Same for the phone - if you're at work and pick up the company phone to talk with your doctor about your STD, do you really expect privacy on that phonecall? The internet connection there is the same way. About the only privacy you're entitled to at work is in the bathroom. It's really embarrassing that anyone makes assumptions here. Those employers are simply doing some CYA by notifying the employees of the policy (probably got your signature too) and by forcing you to use their root CA to https at work so you have zero grounds to tell a judge later that you had any expectation of privacy.
If you're going to steal, steal big. The punishment is often nonexistent, and at worst you end up in a nice minimum security facility.
Yep. I recall a TV interview with I believe an ex-FBI agent discussing the "does crime pay?" topic. His answer was short and simple. "If you're going to do it, do it once and do it big." The smart criminals that do one and only one big job that sets them for life or years are rarely caught. It's the smaller-time ones that keep going back for more that end up getting caught.
Even at 20% odds, it probably makes sense. If you have a 80% chance of being set for life, vs a 20% chance of being locked up for a few years, it's easy to see where those with an obviously poor future consider crime.
they were begging the company to call me and get me back. Of course I never heard peep from them
Pride, one of the many contributing factors that lead to business collapse... Pride has no place in a manager's head, certainly not to be put before the good of the company. ("Pride cometh before a fall")
The fun "academic question" though is, "would you have gone back, and under what terms?" Usually this mean yes but it's gonna cost ya.
You have two competing goals, company security BY the employees, vs company security FROM the employees.
IT are like the cops in town. In order for them to do their job you have to trust them with powers that can be abused. There is no perfect solution to this problem. The best thing you can do if you are a reasonable sized organization is to simply have the power spread out horizontally well, so the watchers can watch each other.
In small businesses, you may have a small IT staff tree that's composed of people that do jobs that have very little overlap, and that makes their position more abusable.
I've seen it work both ways on the way out. I've seen people get 6 weeks of advance notice, and I've personally been handed papers when I arrived in the parking lot. Paranoia varies, just as trust varies. If you're in an "at-will state" you can get the rug pulled out at any time, and many companies do this as a matter of policy. I consider it very double-standardish, that last place my manager told me he expected me to give two weeks notice if I was leaving, but when I asked how much notice he'd give me, well, that's different! IMHO, employers that think that's playing fair deserve zero day notice, and should consider that the tradeoff for having a zero-day notice for their employees.
Considering the present economy, the value of job security has gone up, and I would certainly find a job less attractive if I knew my employer had a "meet you at the door on Monday with a box of your stuff" policy. But what if I were going to be evil? Then I'd say you need to train your HR people to hire people with better character, good references, and thorough background and job-history checks. You need to be able to trust your IT staff, because of the nature of their position, just like the city needs to be able to trust the cops it hires. If you don't hire people you don't trust, you don't have to zero-day bomb them when layoffs are required. Promote from within instead of hiring off the street into positions of trust and power. If a new hire isn't trustworthy, thank him for his time and give him his two weeks and find someone else. Don't burn people that are in a position of power.
You think it's unfair when a semi-key staff walks on you? Try being that staff when he gets to go home and sit on the couch all day waiting for the wife to get off work, trying to figure out how to tell her he's unemployed as of now. It hits the employee a lot harder than it should hit the company. And in any reasonable sized company, no single person walking should be able to do great damage, nothing like your home income dropping 50 (or 100) percent overnight.
I also read from time to time about karma coming back and biting employers that zero-day a key IT. And I'm not talking about the cases where Joe Fired remotes in and makes a mess etc. I mean the "this broke again, oh crap, Joe usually fixes this, what do we do now?" sort of cases. Responsible employees try to prevent this sort of dependency but companies often don't give enough time or resources to accomplish it. (time to document, hours to crosstrain, etc) So you can't just blindly go blaming the employee. And so now you're left with missing key experience, and a burned bridge. I watched that happen twice at one company. They zero-day'd a key person, only to find that he was the best go-to man for certain things, and a company mass-mail went out to NOT call that person for help. (because they had made it clear they were going to charge for every support call they received a result of his departure) So that leaves us all fumbling around for hours at a tim trying to figure things out that a 10 second phonecall could have solved. Wonderful waste of resources, makes us look like bumbling idiots in front of the client, etc. "Why are you here? Where's Joe, he's always the one you send to work on our server? Really? Are you going to be able to fix this? (after a few hrs...) Can't we just call
Imprisonment removes your freedom. This should be punishment enough. Once you are in there, the idea is not to get you even more agitated or depressed.
Compared to how some people live on the street, prison is living it large. I've read numerous accounts of people getting out of jail, and deliberately doing something to get thrown back into jail. (like walking into a bank with a gun, get handed some cash, and wait for the police) For many, the tradeoff of freedom of movement is a welcome trade for all that the prison system provides. Or at least "its not that bad". Prison needs to be something that people fear ending up in and factor into their actions.
It's just lost a lot of it's "deterrent factor". I still hear people comparing "regular" prison to federal prison. Apparently there's still a difference, and criminals weigh their activities more heavily when "it's federal".
So yes, I'd rather see them out in the yard breaking rocks than playing volleyball. I don't think that attitude fills the prisons, I think that helps empty them because people make different decisions because they have a stronger wish to avoid prison.
And I don't like the state giving prisoners better benefits than members of the public. Take away some of the amenities of prison life and redirect that funding toward say, community activity such as boys and girls club, job training, rehab, public schooling, etc. That will help reduce the problem of prison population from both ends of the stick. Get youth on a better track to begin with, and instill a stronger wish to say OUT of prison. And if they ever wind up there, never want to go back.
I had the same experience when I had to have a wisdom tooth dug out (one of SIX... thanks for that) while I wasn't insured. I remember being shocked by the bill, it was about 30% less than the other two before it, and the three to follow.
I wonder, are the doctors soaking the insurance companies, or just averaging their costs out by charging more for the insured and less for the uninsured?
Though I imagine what plays mostly into it is they bill "as much as possible" for insurance claims. Those will pay "up to $xxx for procedure $yyy", and they just set their bill accordingly. But when someone comes in without insurance, it's in their best interest to set a more reasonable price. Because that will probably influence your provider decision later when you are insured.
Innocent until proven guilty is criminal law... which I don't believe patent suits fall under.
Actually patents are polar opposite. If I file a patent dispute against you, the burden of proof lies with you, you must prove your innocence or I win. And there's very little teeth in the ways for you to recover additional damages from me to cover your defense expenses, the inconvenience, the time your product was pulled off the market. That's the other fun thing, while you are trying to prove your innocence, I can get the govt to pull your product off the market so you don't have any money coming in to spend on lawyers for the ~18 months it'll take. Only the big businesses have those kinds of reserves. Even if you do win, you're down a year and a half of income and have lost a lot of market share that you'll have a very hard time getting back since the new customers have been buying from someone else due to lack of you as an option.
Combine that with near rubber-stamp patent reviews on overly-broad wording, and you have the mess that is the current patent system.
there's no immediate benefit and it increases the expense. I could see this quickly going the way of FireWire.
"go the way of firewire"? firewire (particularly 800) has been the fast-and-easy solution for years. Though for some reason it never caught on with PCs. (I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?) 79MB/sec is sweet compared to USB "high speed" that tops out at 39MB/sec. USB3 is the tech that seems to be stumbling out the gate as far as adoption goes. It had a head start on thunderbolt and failed to capture the market and now TB is going to turn it into a young but obsolete technology.
So lets hope thunderbolt "goes the way of firewire".;)
Most people in the US are not in prison for "violating someone else's rights". Most are in there for non-violent drug offenses that have violated nobody's rights.
The best stats I could find quickly are here, and show drug offenses at (a somewhat surprising to me) 48%. Lump in immigration at 12% and you've covered most of the non-rights-violators at 60%.
Then add up Weapons, Explosives, Arson, Robbery, Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses, Extortion, Fraud, Bribery, Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses and get about 30% of the population. So it's not the majority, but it's certainly not small.
But now that the dry statistics are actually quantified, lets look at "rights violation". How many of those drug offenses are for users, and how many are for dealers and trafficers? It doesn't say in that chart, unfortunately. I would classify dealers and trafficers as rights violators, though you may not. They're certainly AREN'T in the "not hurting anyone but themselves" camp. Your turn to go dig up some statistics.
(and this is ignoring the reality that a lot of druggies fund their habit using predatory behavior, and have a lot of collateral damage on their friends and family - saying "they're not hurting anyone but themselves" doesn't cut it when their kids haven't eaten a square meal in months because mommy has to have her crack)
but yes, people should have access to computers in prison.
I'm just one of those old-fashoned type people that think that prison should be a strong deterrent against breaking the law. Violate someone else's rights and find yourself in a hole with all your privileges taken away for awhile.
As it is now, go to prison, get free health care, free internet access, free weight room, free cable tv, free library, free sports, free laundry, free education, free housing, free food, free clothing, free dental.
Must be nice. This is deterrent to commit crime? Sounds more like incentive to!
Now some of that I can see as helpful to rehabilitation. But some of it is spoiling them (weight room, cable tv) and a lot of the rest they should have to work for while they're there instead of putting the tab on my taxes. They violate my rights, then the state charges me for it, lovely system we have here.
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that's all I can say really. This sounds worse than sony's disabling of features in a firmware update. Only this one you can't just not do. (and deal with the consequences of not being up to date)
But I bet this one gets sufficient backlash to require them to backpedal. Significantly altering the behavior of a purchased product by remote control, without opt-out. Arguably illegal?
typical americans. like everything about it except the bill. I'm in favor of everything about it except that "I have to pay for it" part....
I think it's necessary to put it into perspective on the moles though. We're dealing with gasses here, and not particularly high flow rates either. Plants do this in a roundabout sort of way in their chlorophyl, using only sunlight as energy. Thing with them though is they're doing it pretty slowly, and at a much slower rate than an animal breathes at. The process can't be that prohibitively expensive if plants are doing it all the time and haven't already evolved a way around it. You're a lot farther ahead on the chemistry than I am so maybe you can figure the answers if you have the right questions.
What needs to be worked out here is how much energy is required for say, an hour's breathing time for a moderately active average adult, assuming perfect efficiency which we know we won't get, but just for starters lets go with that. Need to figure out how many moles of CO2 need to be processed, and then multiply by your previous results, and finally convert that into a number most of us are more familiar with, such as watts / amp-hours (instead of Joules), since we're really talking about running something like this on DC power, possibly battery.
I really don't know what to expect, which is why this whole thing interests me. Assuming a process can be developed that does it, (a previous poster said "only plants can do this", well that's only because we haven't figured out an easy way to do it using our crude methods, look at what new doors fuel cells have opened recently) it would be very interesting to see if the process has a reasonable energy requirement. If this requires say, 5-10 watts, that would be very practical. And I have some confidence that the number of moles above is going to be small enough to make this worth a serious look.
Friend of mine had an atari and a set of wireless controllers. We could play that game for hours, we made a very good team.
CO2 must also be removed. that's probably what ultimately killed the rabbits.
Besides overloading the red blood cells with CO2 and preventing the removal from the cells, it also screws up the PH of the blood really quick. I assume that with this process it could get bad enough to lead to shock.
Now what would be really cool would be if they could come up with a sold-state exchanger for CO2 to O2. Something like a fuel cell in reverse - create a chemical exchange from an electrical power. Implant that into a body and it could run on batteries instead of breathing. But I don't think that technology in that form currently exists. They have "rebreathers" but those are huge space-suit-size affairs and operate on a far more involved process.
But I bet someone's working on it right now. Probably several someones.
Probably more of a "destruction of evidence" charge, but yes that would be possible. There would be a burden of proof to show that (1) recognized the video was evidence of a criminal act, and (2) you destroyed or altered it for the purpose of interfering with justice.
(2) can be difficult to prove. "I always clear it every morning and did it out of habit without thinking that accident yesterday might go to court" alone could cast reasonable doubt against (2). Usually requires some other supporting evidence like testimony that you told someone that you deliberately wiped it, or asked someone if it was admissible as evidence before you wiped it etc. The rules of proof for destruction of evidence are a little more lenient however due to the nature of the crime.
I foresee this going at about the pace that perpendicular recording did with hard drives. Remember how we heard about this whiz-bang great new idea years ago, and look how long it took to actually come to the practical market.
But now it's ubiquitous. So I suppose the same will happen with the chip. And I can see this dealing a crushing blow to the already hurting spinning disc hard drives with them being able to vastly increase flash storage density.
They're taking massive advantage of ground effect, and are using the distributed rotors to magnify the effect more than a single rotor could. That's probably the primary reason they did so well.
The entire thing seems to be an exercise in futility. Helicopters aren't very efficient. I'd be much more interested in seeing more of the human-powered-glider competitions. Those guys can keep them up in the air quite a lot longer.
But that's what everyone is calling the "new surface" now, it's just a prototype, that's why nothing works yet. But just wait, it's coming, we promise! (just like the original Surface)
That wasn't a product demo, it was a dream demo "this is what we are going to TRY to make". They spent most of their time speaking the word "surface" over and over like they were trying to brainwash the viewers, while telling everyone over and over ad nauseum how wonderful the clicking sound of the stand was etc. It was insulting. It wasn't a product demo, they were there to tell us what opinion of their product we are supposed to have, without any physical reason to back it up.
The demo itself was a disaster. That poor guy was up on stage, I felt sorry for him when he kept saying "xxx is wonderful!" and tried to get it to work, and it didn't. And so he just moved on to the next thing, "and yyy is wonderful!" and it also failed to work. He finally gave up and grabbed a hot spare off the table and it immediately failed to work on the next thing. "and it plays great games!" (game fails to launch) "and the video is great!" and the video still opens but the video refuses to start playing. "and this keyboard is wonderful!" (but I'm not going to ever attempt to type on it!) "and these menus are great!" (and no menu will stay open) I bet he headed to the bar after that demo. Considering the train wreck that it was though, he was pretty smooth with it.
Someone else a little above here was saying the difference between MS and Apple demos is that Apple is shipping units to the stores when the put them on demo. MS is demoing a product that may never make it to the stores. They aren't even finished designing it yet. They're so late to the tablet game that they're throwing a barely bootable early prototype up on stage and dangling it on a string over reviewers heads trying to stall for time. All they've done is shown their hand about where they'd like to be in 6 months. By then there will probably be a dozen tablets that have magnetic clicky keyboard cover/stand accessories available for them. This demo is probably going to do them more harm than good. And if they're as consistent with the Surface's "early preview" launch as they usually are, a few of the features they talked about it having won't even BE in the final product.
This thing has "Zune" written all over it. (although at least the Zune's demo went fairly well, before it cratered)
Sometimes there's a limit to what you can test. Simulating a multilevel network with very broad trees, as a big bank probably uses, probably makes do with a significantly simplified environment. All it takes is some yutz somewhere to try to freeze an account that's already frozen (or do something else obtuse that's very hard to predict) to trigger an untested path bug and BOOM.
Being able to roll back a patch becomes a very useful feature at that point. But rolling back large amounts of financial transactions is a whole 'nother big can of worms.
Sometimes they just have to turn things on they shouldn't, to get the water flowing again, and try to clean up as best they can next weekend while they pour over the logs trying to catch things that got rolled back wrong etc. My bank had this happen once in their recent upgrades that I've caught, and it turned out to be a "bank error in your favor, collect $130". (they auto-paid a bill of mine and never debited my account) But that's the cheaper price they pay for screwing up. The alternative would be to let everyone know that they screwed up the books and are going to be fixing things for the next week, and that drops peoples' confidence in their bank which is incredibly bad for business at a bank, people really flip out when their bank tells them they don't quite know where all their money is right at the moment. So they just take a deep breath and take some little hits here and there to avoid much worse PR damage.
Salsa Saturated Dorito
Two years ago we go a call telling us the levies might not hold and if they burst (1 block away) we'd have 8 ft of water. We didn't really have a battle plan and we had a lot less to deal with than it sounds like you did, but we learned some lessons.
1) praise the lord we had good network documentation. Now is not the time to be writing down how the firewall and public and private LANs are plugged in together. Shut stuff down, and start placing network hardware in big plastic tubs. Have tubs handy for this, they nest nicely when not in use. Toss cables in a different tub. just wind them up best you can into loops and toss them in. there's probably not time for neatness, you can deal with that later. TAKE THE DOCUMENTATION WITH YOU. You'll feel mighty silly if that's left pinned on the wall. or I assume you have an electronic copy you can print when you get offsite. Make sure any servers with complex cable attachments (like to phone banks or security systems) have labels on the connectors.
1b) got your phone system documented too? this is a whole 'nother can of worms that often is forgotten about. Does anyone have a diagram of where all those punched down wires go on each block? If you have phone switching hardware to pack, make sure the cables are labeled, they will all probably look the same with the giant connectors that attach to the blocks. "We'll just call Al, he does our phone stuff." Oh, you don't think Al is going to be BUSY helping everyone else that is returning? Nothing's as fun as a 2-3 day wait to get your phones back up and running huh?
2) Label ac adapters. You need to know which unit wants 12vdc and which has 24vac, you don't want to fry stuff when you are trying to reassemble. every pack should have the model of the unit it goes to written on it. Gear WILL get separated from its pack during the evac.
3) label staff's hardware. It's very annoying trying to figure out whose beige box is whose later. and they will probably fight over monitors and keyboards later. save yourself the headache. If you are already under the gun, run to the store and get a dozen rolls of masking tape and sharpies and have the staff label their equipment while you're packing things up, full initials or names, I bet you have duplicate first names you don't want to deal with later. Make sure you label the phones.
4) have a plan for things you can't easily move. the corp office was also forecast to get 8ft of water and they were on the WRONG side of the dike so it was more of a "when" than "if". they had a very expensive multifunction printer that the service people told them they could have a tech out to take it apart (so it fit out the door) in three days, which obviously was silly. They rushed in a bunch of cinder blocks and lifted it up and set it on them 8.5' up. (I have no idea how they lifted it) In retrospect, the building got 14" of water and totaled it, they SHOULD have killed power to the building and took a saws all to a wall. OR at least watertight wrapped it before lifting. I've seen this done with entire cars when faced with an incoming flood or hurricane. Even if it doesn't keep out the water 100%, at least it will keep out the mud, which you may be very grateful later. Got a plan for your big server room ups's? those can be quite large and heavy, and are often hardwired into the AC, are you able and qualified to unhook it? Maybe you should call in an electrician now and change that armored cable to a dryer type plug? Have a place you can move big stuff that can't be evac'd to where it will be at least more likely to survive. Think of flood, fire, and tornado/hurricane, there's probably not one single place that will work best in all three cases. Smoke damage can be very destructive, simply having something wrapped in mover's visqueen may prevent unnecessary loss that the fire missed but the smoke got. Do you have a plan for that rack that's bolted down or won't even fit through the door?
5) Document what's been left behind. A simple way to
I have a high quality very solid entertainment center with reinforced glass doors, no sound escapes it. Though I did notice the fan on the PS3 can get loud when the door is open.
Sadly, despite them kicking us in the junk all the time, they do make a lot of superior products.
My most recent purchase was a PS3, not for the games, for the bluray player. The first one I bought was complete garbage. And was pleasantly surprised to find I could stream movies from my extensive video library on my computer too.
But that's probably why they're abusive and still around, there are enough people that tolerate the abuse because they otherwise have the best product.
There's quite a big difference between "covers most of the exits" and "completely worthless".
First off, physical security is entirely beyond the scope of the OP's problem. If you want to secure your digital assets, you are going to require both an electronic and a physical policy because data can take either shape when leaving the building. The limitations of one side really have no bearing on the other side, and if one side is your job and the other is not, don't look at how the other team is doing to determine how much effort you put into your end of the task. The goalie doesn't just not bother if his strikers aren't doing well that day. You do your job, and let them do theirs.
Second, giving up an any security just because there's a weakness somewhere isn't the answer. If you're going to consider for extreme scenarios and then throw up your hands and say "see we're not prepared for that, lets jut give up!" is entirely the wrong attitude. You're not likely to stop a CIA mole among your staff regardless of what you do, and that's not a sensible justification for completely giving up on security.
DLP is like antivirus. Only a PHB will expect 100% protection, there's going to be that 0.001% lurking around no matter how crazy you get. So you just have to decide how many 9's you need, and strike the right balance between usability and security.
And to the numerous people above complaining about accessing financial and medial records at work... what makes you think your employer is required to provide you with private access via their network while you are at work? Do this at home, duh. Same for the phone - if you're at work and pick up the company phone to talk with your doctor about your STD, do you really expect privacy on that phonecall? The internet connection there is the same way. About the only privacy you're entitled to at work is in the bathroom. It's really embarrassing that anyone makes assumptions here. Those employers are simply doing some CYA by notifying the employees of the policy (probably got your signature too) and by forcing you to use their root CA to https at work so you have zero grounds to tell a judge later that you had any expectation of privacy.
Yep. I recall a TV interview with I believe an ex-FBI agent discussing the "does crime pay?" topic. His answer was short and simple. "If you're going to do it, do it once and do it big." The smart criminals that do one and only one big job that sets them for life or years are rarely caught. It's the smaller-time ones that keep going back for more that end up getting caught.
Even at 20% odds, it probably makes sense. If you have a 80% chance of being set for life, vs a 20% chance of being locked up for a few years, it's easy to see where those with an obviously poor future consider crime.
Pride, one of the many contributing factors that lead to business collapse... Pride has no place in a manager's head, certainly not to be put before the good of the company. ("Pride cometh before a fall")
The fun "academic question" though is, "would you have gone back, and under what terms?" Usually this mean yes but it's gonna cost ya.
You have two competing goals, company security BY the employees, vs company security FROM the employees.
IT are like the cops in town. In order for them to do their job you have to trust them with powers that can be abused. There is no perfect solution to this problem. The best thing you can do if you are a reasonable sized organization is to simply have the power spread out horizontally well, so the watchers can watch each other.
In small businesses, you may have a small IT staff tree that's composed of people that do jobs that have very little overlap, and that makes their position more abusable.
I've seen it work both ways on the way out. I've seen people get 6 weeks of advance notice, and I've personally been handed papers when I arrived in the parking lot. Paranoia varies, just as trust varies. If you're in an "at-will state" you can get the rug pulled out at any time, and many companies do this as a matter of policy. I consider it very double-standardish, that last place my manager told me he expected me to give two weeks notice if I was leaving, but when I asked how much notice he'd give me, well, that's different! IMHO, employers that think that's playing fair deserve zero day notice, and should consider that the tradeoff for having a zero-day notice for their employees.
Considering the present economy, the value of job security has gone up, and I would certainly find a job less attractive if I knew my employer had a "meet you at the door on Monday with a box of your stuff" policy. But what if I were going to be evil? Then I'd say you need to train your HR people to hire people with better character, good references, and thorough background and job-history checks. You need to be able to trust your IT staff, because of the nature of their position, just like the city needs to be able to trust the cops it hires. If you don't hire people you don't trust, you don't have to zero-day bomb them when layoffs are required. Promote from within instead of hiring off the street into positions of trust and power. If a new hire isn't trustworthy, thank him for his time and give him his two weeks and find someone else. Don't burn people that are in a position of power.
You think it's unfair when a semi-key staff walks on you? Try being that staff when he gets to go home and sit on the couch all day waiting for the wife to get off work, trying to figure out how to tell her he's unemployed as of now. It hits the employee a lot harder than it should hit the company. And in any reasonable sized company, no single person walking should be able to do great damage, nothing like your home income dropping 50 (or 100) percent overnight.
I also read from time to time about karma coming back and biting employers that zero-day a key IT. And I'm not talking about the cases where Joe Fired remotes in and makes a mess etc. I mean the "this broke again, oh crap, Joe usually fixes this, what do we do now?" sort of cases. Responsible employees try to prevent this sort of dependency but companies often don't give enough time or resources to accomplish it. (time to document, hours to crosstrain, etc) So you can't just blindly go blaming the employee. And so now you're left with missing key experience, and a burned bridge. I watched that happen twice at one company. They zero-day'd a key person, only to find that he was the best go-to man for certain things, and a company mass-mail went out to NOT call that person for help. (because they had made it clear they were going to charge for every support call they received a result of his departure) So that leaves us all fumbling around for hours at a tim trying to figure things out that a 10 second phonecall could have solved. Wonderful waste of resources, makes us look like bumbling idiots in front of the client, etc. "Why are you here? Where's Joe, he's always the one you send to work on our server? Really? Are you going to be able to fix this? (after a few hrs...) Can't we just call
Compared to how some people live on the street, prison is living it large. I've read numerous accounts of people getting out of jail, and deliberately doing something to get thrown back into jail. (like walking into a bank with a gun, get handed some cash, and wait for the police) For many, the tradeoff of freedom of movement is a welcome trade for all that the prison system provides. Or at least "its not that bad". Prison needs to be something that people fear ending up in and factor into their actions.
It's just lost a lot of it's "deterrent factor". I still hear people comparing "regular" prison to federal prison. Apparently there's still a difference, and criminals weigh their activities more heavily when "it's federal".
So yes, I'd rather see them out in the yard breaking rocks than playing volleyball. I don't think that attitude fills the prisons, I think that helps empty them because people make different decisions because they have a stronger wish to avoid prison.
And I don't like the state giving prisoners better benefits than members of the public. Take away some of the amenities of prison life and redirect that funding toward say, community activity such as boys and girls club, job training, rehab, public schooling, etc. That will help reduce the problem of prison population from both ends of the stick. Get youth on a better track to begin with, and instill a stronger wish to say OUT of prison. And if they ever wind up there, never want to go back.
I had the same experience when I had to have a wisdom tooth dug out (one of SIX... thanks for that) while I wasn't insured. I remember being shocked by the bill, it was about 30% less than the other two before it, and the three to follow.
I wonder, are the doctors soaking the insurance companies, or just averaging their costs out by charging more for the insured and less for the uninsured?
Though I imagine what plays mostly into it is they bill "as much as possible" for insurance claims. Those will pay "up to $xxx for procedure $yyy", and they just set their bill accordingly. But when someone comes in without insurance, it's in their best interest to set a more reasonable price. Because that will probably influence your provider decision later when you are insured.
Actually patents are polar opposite. If I file a patent dispute against you, the burden of proof lies with you, you must prove your innocence or I win. And there's very little teeth in the ways for you to recover additional damages from me to cover your defense expenses, the inconvenience, the time your product was pulled off the market. That's the other fun thing, while you are trying to prove your innocence, I can get the govt to pull your product off the market so you don't have any money coming in to spend on lawyers for the ~18 months it'll take. Only the big businesses have those kinds of reserves. Even if you do win, you're down a year and a half of income and have lost a lot of market share that you'll have a very hard time getting back since the new customers have been buying from someone else due to lack of you as an option.
Combine that with near rubber-stamp patent reviews on overly-broad wording, and you have the mess that is the current patent system.
"go the way of firewire"? firewire (particularly 800) has been the fast-and-easy solution for years. Though for some reason it never caught on with PCs. (I'll assume you're speaking from a windows point of view on FW?) 79MB/sec is sweet compared to USB "high speed" that tops out at 39MB/sec. USB3 is the tech that seems to be stumbling out the gate as far as adoption goes. It had a head start on thunderbolt and failed to capture the market and now TB is going to turn it into a young but obsolete technology.
So lets hope thunderbolt "goes the way of firewire". ;)
The best stats I could find quickly are here, and show drug offenses at (a somewhat surprising to me) 48%. Lump in immigration at 12% and you've covered most of the non-rights-violators at 60%.
Then add up Weapons, Explosives, Arson, Robbery, Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses, Extortion, Fraud, Bribery, Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses and get about 30% of the population. So it's not the majority, but it's certainly not small.
But now that the dry statistics are actually quantified, lets look at "rights violation". How many of those drug offenses are for users, and how many are for dealers and trafficers? It doesn't say in that chart, unfortunately. I would classify dealers and trafficers as rights violators, though you may not. They're certainly AREN'T in the "not hurting anyone but themselves" camp. Your turn to go dig up some statistics.
(and this is ignoring the reality that a lot of druggies fund their habit using predatory behavior, and have a lot of collateral damage on their friends and family - saying "they're not hurting anyone but themselves" doesn't cut it when their kids haven't eaten a square meal in months because mommy has to have her crack)
I'm just one of those old-fashoned type people that think that prison should be a strong deterrent against breaking the law. Violate someone else's rights and find yourself in a hole with all your privileges taken away for awhile.
As it is now, go to prison, get free health care, free internet access, free weight room, free cable tv, free library, free sports, free laundry, free education, free housing, free food, free clothing, free dental.
Must be nice. This is deterrent to commit crime? Sounds more like incentive to!
Now some of that I can see as helpful to rehabilitation. But some of it is spoiling them (weight room, cable tv) and a lot of the rest they should have to work for while they're there instead of putting the tab on my taxes. They violate my rights, then the state charges me for it, lovely system we have here.
Then computers in the prisons should be a good rehab route?