Ok my knee jerk Six-Sigma reflex has just kicked in. On the manfacturing of those defect-free crystals... and about the cost effect and scaling for "overtaking... in 5 years..."
Ok, here is a tip:
Anytime a politician or scientist taks about 5,8, and 12 year targets there is a reason:
Two 4 year terms = 8 years; when the project falls out they can blame the canidate currently in office.
5 years = A single Term but just a touch beyond to provide an incentive for re-election because if you don't they might cancel the project
12 Year = Two terms for canidiate A and a term for his\her heir... "Don't let the evil Democrats\Republicans kill the project!"
Now last I checked more then a few grants come in at 3,5,8 and 12 year durations... I never hear things coming to fruition in 7 years, or 6 years, or 9 years, or 11 years, or 18 years, 6 months, and 3 days.
There is just something about 5, 8, and 12 they love. Which due to the frequency they cite those values implies there is some weird cosmic alignment which causes innovations to pop at those figures... or I smell 4/5 dentists approve BS.
Another one is the 20 years from now number. What is the maturity on that investment I made...
I would honestly have a lot more respect for senior scientists if they didn't spend every waking hour working on getting grant money leaving the actual work to low-paying interns and students then claiming the work as their own offering nothing more then a second hand "my team and I" comment...
The problem is that it used to be that an "invention" was largely self describing. The other day, I noticed a vice grip attached to the back of a pickup truck of some maintenance workers. This is the sort of thing where thinking of it is equivalent to knowing how to build it. This is increasingly less true, but patent law hasn't been keeping up.
If I sat around all day thinking up bullshit patents I could make a fortune off extortion as a parasitic leech on people who actually contribute to society. Ideas are a dime a dozen, the hard part is building them. Come up with a cool car idea? Great, now build one. Isn't so easy, is it?
If Apple decides to patent some technology essential to a smart phone (they probably have), and refuses to license it, this creates a monopoly not just on their particular invention, but on all similar inventions. I feel that patent laws were intended to give people monopoly on a particular good, not on all things that might possibly resemble or compete with it.
Of course, the solution here is cross licensing agreements and defensive patenting, but that only works if you're a huge corporation.
Average cost of a patent just in paperwork alone is over $2000 bucks. If you have an idea to patent 30 ideas good luck scraping together $60,000 bucks.
I have 3 patent ideas and the only takers demand a 90% share of the patent in order to front the patent costs.
Patents have nothing to do with innovation, it's nothing more then intellectual share cropping now.
The par-for-the-course failures of old we not a result of blatant oversights for the most part. Failures and setback due to unforeseen issues and the unknown are one thing, the last 5 years... not so much. Now lets just pray that the Range Safety Officer isn't watching pr0n on his iPhone when he's supposed to be at the ready for that button push you mentioned.
I remember when NASA could sling shot a satellite 40,000+ miles looping around a planet 32 times, ricochet of an asteroid and drop a golf ball in a cup of coffee in the middle of Denver blindfolded with both hands behind their back.
Now they can't remember to convert metric to imperial (and back again) and can't launch a ballon...
Damn NASA used to be the best and the brightest. I worry if we'll be able to feed ourselves by the end of the year:P
NASA's performance was once the measure of the USA's intellectual success... I'm worried... apparently more money on education doesn't = smarter people...
I helped set up a simple solution to this scenario years ago for a local hear aid provider.
The root password for their systems was double-blind. The CIO came in and set the password. The Lead network engineer changed the name of the root account (but didn't know the password).
Each component was forwarded to legal records hold for archiving in separate email.
Since no one was allowed to use the root\admin accounts (everything via sudo effectively, hence the double blind setup) in the event of an emergency a simple phone call to legal records hold would retrieve the information if the CIO and admin were not available. Add the two together and problem solved.
Child's could have just as easily secured the password before hand with a policy doing something as simple as a 2-part cypher with 1 part in the hands of the govenor and the other part documented with instructions on retriving the 1st part from the govenor.
e.g. passwd (Disable backspace key sequence) (Admin types first 4 characters, leaves room) (CIO types last 4 characters hit's enter.)
Admin and CIO email legal record hold with their portions.
This was about paranoid liability of someone busting the network, not securing a core password.
I've had to L0phat more then one NT server that a rogue admin tried to lockout the system after getting canned during my career (retired geek now thank God). The most recent one was a net admin that had a $100,000 quarterly budget but we could only find 22k worth of assets at the company (And why did he need 3 22 inch monitors and had every workstation running NT Server edition even though they only paid for 4 licenses of Server....).
From a liability standpoint Terry, or anyone can follow this simple guideline:
If your company has a legal record hold service, periodically gather your configuration files and documentation and forward that information to legal record hold. If not periodically print them, label them as "Legal Record Hold" or "Legal Retain" and sign and date them.
Most government offices have a legal record hold office. If you are terminated and they come back after you you can have your lawyer request the last copy of the configs you sent to legal records hold and compare the current config. Not only that but a quick check of the config's last modified date will confirm if you you have legitimately made that change. In addition if they try and come back and say you came into the system after being canned, the burden of proof is one them to show you had access. It would be a staggering embarrasment if they didn't change master passwords you had access to.
If possible I would go further and use mandatory CVS\RCS\Git etc... for config files of any kind in your process with an audit. The RCS system should be in the hands of the legal records retainment (i.e. independent of netOps) for auditing. Liability then can be quickly determined (Jeff left the company on 3/12 and no issues. On 3/24 Eric made a change and all hell broke loose. No point in going after Jeff, no liability. Eric likely broke it... wait Eric was on vacation and lives in Utah, the VPN came from Washington... where Jeff lives with a similar IP as Jeff's last! Oh shit call the cops!)
Network admins tend to forget\overlook the need to audit the configs, not just for operational purposes, but for legal due-dilligence reasons as well.
Revision Control on Configs + Audits + Double Blind Root\Admin + Mandatory sudo = Reasonable Liability Tracker.
I'm retired now... almost 5 years now I think and I am sure things have changed so don't take my suggestions as gospel but at least out of this we can starting thinking a bit more on how we manage our networks, not just from an operational standpoint but Risk, Liability, Business Continuity, and Legal viewpoint as well.
AND USE A RCS FOR CONFIGS!!! IT'S NOT JUST FOR TRACKING CODE CHANGES! IT'S AN AUDIT TRAIL AS WELL!
I used to work for a company that dealt with additives for (Hod help my spelling) Flurothermalploymers. I did computer matenance on a rehometer that they used to see if they got "shark scales" when extruding basically fishing line. The chemist Ludima was always curious on how when pulling the raw line out what extruding in low-g would do.
I bet there is more then 1 Dyneon employee that would be interested in those results.
lack of coffee. I spit out/. posts in the morning while drinking coffee waiting for the wife to get ready (we car pool) so I write in a hurry. No time for spell check.
Sadly since I pissed off 1 to many NASA engineers in the past (blah blah Crusader project by UDLP, blah blah trying making some money... blah blah blah remote mining and processing project... sub orbital meteor mining is a stupid idea...)
Anyway they'll no likely to talk to me (ever again) so here are my suggestions. Please feel free to run with them:
1: Sex (Duh. We all want to know.) 2: Artifical ring construction via centrifical force =
Take a spinning sphere and launch a tethered satellite while still spinning. from the teathered satellite launch another teather out such that the secondary teather is long enough to have the circumfrence of the satellite's oribital circumfurance. See if you can get it to hook up back to the original satellite to create an artifical ring on which we can construct stuff. (may required 2 satellites at opposite sides.
3: Behavior of molten metal in low gravity for crystal structure analysis (see if effect is more brittle or harded.)
4: Better estimate of open space survival time of a human being.
5: Field test atmosphering re-entry capable space suit for orbital deployment of troops (GETA LL WARHAMMA 40K ON YA!)
6: Polymer extrusion and blown film line test in low gravity for polymer chain linkage testing.
7: Smoking in the cargo bay in low-G (Can you blow smoke rings in low-g)
8: Will a paper airplain with a weight of less then.5 lbs survive re-entry to Earth?
9: Subspace structural testing to see if spacial structure exists (e.g. test if space itself has an actual shape, e.g. a quantum of space itself (rather then an infinitly divisible continum))
10: Test if the bullshit in DC is so thick you can really smell it on the ISS.
With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?
Statistically speaking, not very accurately.
Reasons: Engaged troops are not tweeting while deployed. We are talking people at a barracks and those locations are hardly secret.
Mobile units are not likely to be tweeting while on recon. A goat herder with a cell phone can just as easily report troop movements.
But let us assume there is some deployed tweeting going on.
A: We would first need to know the average # of tweets per troop given a time frame (lets say 1 hour).
B: We could try and gauge, via normal distribution that a region has 58 tweets an hour and with (for the sake of easy math) 1 tweet per hour per troop we could guesstimate that there are roughly 58 troops there. The problem is the confidence interval is so wide based on that, that the data is somewhat useless.
C: We would also need to know a % of deployment for a given period of time. We could have 800 troops but only 10 are back on base tweeting at a given time frame. We would need to know more indepth their deployment orders, routine activities, etc.
D: Largely the tweets just become a dependent variable in a regression but the significance is really not there (There is a vastly larger and better set of data to gauge troop strength then tweets). The reasoning is tweets are just too random in their distribution of individuals. Some people might send out 300 tweets in a day while a vast majority wouldn't send any at all. You could with more confidence gauge the tech-savvy nature of a unit based on the number of tweets but by that same token a tech-savvy trooper is probably gonna think "Tweeting right now might be a security risk." So the chicken kills the egg.
The real danger would be developing a real-time logistics twitter communication network (e.g. reporting current fuel levels, black box like info, velocity, etc.) because once that kind of information network is exposed you have real time positioning. Cryptography is crucial in that regard.
The best way to date to track units is simple seismic activity triangulation (ground radar in essence.) A friggin tank driving around generates a lot of vibration. Troop positions post WWII aren't the crucial intel piece it once was. In the day of Long Bowmen and Cavalry sure, but post-tank + airpower... you just can't move 60 tons of firepower and not triangulate it.
Special Ops on foot is another story but those types aren't tweeting while on a mission either.
Not to mention that simple infrared cameras on ballons (especially at night) and covert cameras placed on commerical airliners can easily snap thermal imaging.
No Fly Zone + Light weight troops = People still need to eat and shit so there is a logistics wick to be followed there.
This is the 21st century, 12 century positional tactics went away when the Red Baron got famous.
WWII brought about the mobile front rendering hard positional tactics a second tier place and the advent of the space age rendered positionals a 3rd tier concern. Remember if they can find us there is a good chance we can also see them coming.
IANA4kYOAGBIPOOTV
(I am not a 400 year old asian general but I've played on on televion);)
There is this dude. He's kewl. Then there is this chick. She's hot in a quirky kind of way. Then there is this other dude. He's bad-ass. Then there is this smarmy guy who wants to exploit the bad-ass dude. The bad-ass dude eventually double crosses the smarmy guy and total fucks with the kewl dude. The hot-in-a-quirky-way chick gets caught in the middle. Then there is this other dude who isn't quite as kewl as the kewl dude who is like "dude!" and the other dude is like "no dude" but "dude!", They team up to fight bad-ass dude all the while the chick, the kewl dude, the not quite as kewl dude deal inbetween relentless violence deal with periodic moments of character development. Eventually kewl dude wins.
So was that a review of Iron Man 2, Robocop, Star Wars, Gone with the Wind, Star Ship Troopers, or Freddie vs. Jason?
Feel free to include any other films this review may cover....
I never got what the big deal was with The Pope anyways.
The problem is at some point the Catholic Church came up with the idea of Papal Infallability:
In short, he's can't be wrong.
Most Catholics I doubt buy into that but from an organizational position, well... his actions are well, supposed to be divinely guided. You have to remember that the Roman Catholic Church is the last link to the old Christian world. It is the direct lineage of Peter and they are struggling with the blow, to this day, that Martin Luther brought about.
The problem is most bigots in the world rather then understand just look at the surface of issues rather then any real introspect.
Great point is the opposition to contraceptives. There is a lot more to the reasoning behind the opposition then simple birth control. But bigots don't think, they react to their own stereotypes. The Church is crippled, no one wants to talk about the fact that 90% of the cases is male-male assaults (despite equal access to female minors), and the fact that the whole "Priest's Can't Marry" is a relatively new tenenant.
The Anti-Religious (versus athiests, there is a difference) movement wants to destroy religion with an obbsession that revolves around "humans in the absence of religion are enlightened."
Anyone with a passing understanding of human nature understands we tend to "regress to the lowest common denominator" (Idiocracy, Lord of the Flies, etc...) That is the moral relativism he's bitching about.
Millions, perhaps, billions, look to a Pope (or Imam, Dali Lama, Rabbi, Philosophers, etc.) as a guide to "Where do I go from here" in building a system of beliefs. The big deal I'd wager is this Pope, like many others, doesn't know where to go next.
Oddly the bigots forget the simple lessons a deer hunter can tell you on why the Church has so many pedophiles.
"You see when you hunter deer, you are the predator and the deer is the prey. You don't hunter for deer downtown, there are no deer there. You don't hunt deer at a deer sanctuary, you can't get access to the deer to hunt them. Let me ask you something: where does a predator go to hunt their prey? Predators go to places where there is not only prey, but they can get access to that prey. And not only that, but where the predator is likely not to be in harms way."
The problem has always been is the Church see's itself still, as a country, a nation unto itself. Until "The Vatican" let's go of that, these problems will continue.
Science always advances faster then the moral and ethics of the society.
Science Fiction tends to serve as the cursory warning of the abuses of science. Please reply with suggetsions on reading that our fellow scientists should watch when they are not busy playing God (in the figurative sense.)
The Island comes to mind but even comic books like the Micronauts foretold the warnings of Body Bank abuses. The Repo Men is a recent film that from what I can gather might also make for a good reading.
Oh how I wish that science would first think: "Ok if this works what are the ethics" rather then "do it first, then we'll worry about the ethics later."
I'm all for science, I just have the crippling burden of being a history buff, knowing how often science gives birth to atrocities. Comparing post-1600s science has made religion look tame.
(Disclosure) I admit I've been a corporate tool for the better part of 15 years now. As an IT consultant I've worked for over 10 years across the Twin Cities area and now currently retired from IT work. I work at a bank now as my personal gift for years of IT hell and I am happy. As I've been eye deep in corporate culture since high school I can easily see a possible reason.
We here at Slashdot can readily accept that any game with DRM will lose some sales. By default, if a game performs poorly senior and executive management apparently are in the habit of blaming software piracy. By putting DRM on a potential goose of a game they can claim double the excuses for poor performance to shareholders and create a perfect Chicken\Egg argument:
"We have to have the DRM to stop the piracy, it's a vicious circle that only a government subsidy can offset in the form of a piracy tax to reimburse our low sales..."
This is simply a theory that, if this was intentional, may explain the mind set.
The problem is now that I've documented that potential strategy I've rendered it useless.
1: Blame Piracy for Low Sales 2: Add DRM to products 3: Console gaming market declines as mobile apps eat up market share 4: Blame DRM and piracy for depressed sales ignoring the growing mobile and web game marketshare 5: Demand government do something about Piracy that is killing their sales 6: Get a government subsidy 7: Shift development efforts to web and mobile game markets 8: Profit Twice Over
Sadly, Ultima is produced by Origin games. Anyone else attempting to provide an Ultima game besides Origin games is sellling nothing more then a rip off of something that was great.
Sorry EA, putting the Ultima name on anything with Origin and Lord British is just smoke up our asses and I am gassy enough as it is...
If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like
for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {
System.out.println(i); }
So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?
Anyone else getting an Intellectual Property vibe from this?
I think you should sue anyone using your intellectual property!
I'm serious!
"Look there is no possible way you came up with that on your own. It's UNPOSSIBLE that any two people could come up with the same solution with the same characters! Resuing code is unacceptable!Yet another example of intellectual PIRACY!!"
Think about it: Couple draconian copyright protection with searchable databases. Did I mention that apparently data in a database can by copyrighted? So apparently all the student submissions store in the database are now the copyright property of the vendor...
"I'm sorry but your FOR loop is an obvious copy of EA's Duke Nukem Forver's code that was registered in the database in 1998. Based on database analysis, 60% of your code is an exact match against the existing Duke Nukem source code. Please go to jail and die now and have a great day!"
and in further news: "Apparently 90% of the Linux source code, based on database analysis exists in existing IBM source code. A simple search of 12 billion lines of code on copyright from IBM indicates the Linux kernel violated their right by extensively using existing code copied from various products. The offending code:
loopCounter++;
was used more then 3 million times!."
That is their mentality? God help us all if that is there measuring stick.
Woot first point for the day. As usual idealists live in a 1 dimensional universe where they again fail to see the whole cost beyound the end of their nose.
He isn't on to something, and anyone that thinks this is a great idea is a stark raving idiot.
A: Treadmills don't far well outside. More roofed covered space. Nor to treadmills grow on trees.
B: Carbon footprint for the manfacturing of said treadmills
C: Additional feed for active cows now burning more calories. More waste from more feed too
D: Energy loss in conversion to heat from friction from transmission points
E: More wiring and cabling sucking down more copper from an already stressed raw material market. Ohms.....Ohms.....
F: Who in their right mind thinks: taking solar energy and water and converting it into biomass
Then using millions of tons of fossil fuels to build machinery to develop and harvest biomass.
Feed said biomass to another animal
To use millions of tons of fossil fuels in manufacturing a kinetic engery transfomation device (treadmill)
To then power a machine to generate a fraction of the energy "THE SUN PUT OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE!?
Jebus Rice we are getting shit-eating stupid pretty damn fast when people think "Hey they're on to something..."
Narrow minded morons never looking past their own nose on what real costs are.
Because regulating body temperature, corrdinating over 20 organs, regulating resparation in response to oxygen demand, food processing, maintaining balance by manipulating spinal alignment along with extremeties while tossing in corrdinating queues from the inner ear speech faculties vision and depth perception memory storage and retrieval object permancy analysis checking out the hot chick's legs
All are going on at once and some brainless twit wants to tell us there is a two task limit in the brain?
Is this the same tard that submitted his thesis indicating a radical new way to get fresh water by using solar radiation to evaporate ocean water then condense it back down into fresh water where the peer comittiee rejected his 2 year long thesis work with a single sentence, "You mean like rain?"
Science is dead, long live the Idiocracy....
Human Brain != Computer. Computer is a deterministic device, the brain is not. It's not even an apple and orange comparison (where they are both fruit at least) it's more of an "Apple and Liter" comparison where one is an actual object and a fruit where the other is an abstract and abritrary measurement of fluids.
Yes we do because we need to find out the real statistical weight (significance) of which regressors gives us the best return on our money.
An excellent real world example is the disparity in blacks for sentencing. We find that it is more statstically significant that the reasons black comprise more of the prision population isn't because they are black per say, it just happens that blacks comprise more of the lower income. Income is more significant then just being black so if you want to reduce the disparity in sentencing, dollar for dollar you are better off spending money on improving job opportunities then say, sensitivity training for prosecutors.
The point of using computer systems is to dig through bias and perceptions and get to a root cause.
In the case of youth intervention it comes down to finding out which circumstances are the most relevant and addressable. Yeah we know of about 4000 regressors that factor into a child's success... it's finding out which of the 4000 we can address and which of those not only help the child, but save us money rather then just subsidize bad behaviors.
The fear is unfounded since it wouldn't be admissible in sentencing guidelines, no more then a genetic predisposition would be. The courts are pretty clear on what can be taken into account in sentencing and none of this would be allow to be factored in under existing laws and guidelines. Even if they tried it wouldn't make it past an appeal, (IANALBMWIAP)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok my knee jerk Six-Sigma reflex has just kicked in. On the manfacturing of those defect-free crystals... and about the cost effect and scaling for "overtaking ... in 5 years..."
Ok, here is a tip:
Anytime a politician or scientist taks about 5,8, and 12 year targets there is a reason:
Two 4 year terms = 8 years; when the project falls out they can blame the canidate currently in office.
5 years = A single Term but just a touch beyond to provide an incentive for re-election because if you don't they might cancel the project
12 Year = Two terms for canidiate A and a term for his\her heir... "Don't let the evil Democrats\Republicans kill the project!"
Now last I checked more then a few grants come in at 3,5,8 and 12 year durations... I never hear things coming to fruition in 7 years, or 6 years, or 9 years, or 11 years, or 18 years, 6 months, and 3 days.
There is just something about 5, 8, and 12 they love. Which due to the frequency they cite those values implies there is some weird cosmic alignment which causes innovations to pop at those figures... or I smell 4/5 dentists approve BS.
Another one is the 20 years from now number. What is the maturity on that investment I made...
I would honestly have a lot more respect for senior scientists if they didn't spend every waking hour working on getting grant money leaving the actual work to low-paying interns and students then claiming the work as their own offering nothing more then a second hand "my team and I" comment...
The problem is that it used to be that an "invention" was largely self describing. The other day, I noticed a vice grip attached to the back of a pickup truck of some maintenance workers. This is the sort of thing where thinking of it is equivalent to knowing how to build it. This is increasingly less true, but patent law hasn't been keeping up.
If I sat around all day thinking up bullshit patents I could make a fortune off extortion as a parasitic leech on people who actually contribute to society. Ideas are a dime a dozen, the hard part is building them. Come up with a cool car idea? Great, now build one. Isn't so easy, is it?
If Apple decides to patent some technology essential to a smart phone (they probably have), and refuses to license it, this creates a monopoly not just on their particular invention, but on all similar inventions. I feel that patent laws were intended to give people monopoly on a particular good, not on all things that might possibly resemble or compete with it.
Of course, the solution here is cross licensing agreements and defensive patenting, but that only works if you're a huge corporation.
Average cost of a patent just in paperwork alone is over $2000 bucks. If you have an idea to patent 30 ideas good luck scraping together $60,000 bucks.
I have 3 patent ideas and the only takers demand a 90% share of the patent in order to front the patent costs.
Patents have nothing to do with innovation, it's nothing more then intellectual share cropping now.
Q: "how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? "
A: "According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day"
They should be locked up for that.
The difference is I can vaccume and do dishes while watching tv, try vaccuming and playing Halflife at the same time. Your cats will hate you 4evah.
The par-for-the-course failures of old we not a result of blatant oversights for the most part. Failures and setback due to unforeseen issues and the unknown are one thing, the last 5 years... not so much. Now lets just pray that the Range Safety Officer isn't watching pr0n on his iPhone when he's supposed to be at the ready for that button push you mentioned.
I remember when NASA could sling shot a satellite 40,000+ miles looping around a planet 32 times, ricochet of an asteroid and drop a golf ball in a cup of coffee in the middle of Denver blindfolded with both hands behind their back.
Now they can't remember to convert metric to imperial (and back again) and can't launch a ballon...
Damn NASA used to be the best and the brightest. I worry if we'll be able to feed ourselves by the end of the year :P
NASA's performance was once the measure of the USA's intellectual success... I'm worried... apparently more money on education doesn't = smarter people...
I mean come on it's not rocke...errr wait...
I helped set up a simple solution to this scenario years ago for a local hear aid provider.
The root password for their systems was double-blind. The CIO came in and set the password. The Lead network engineer changed the name of the root account (but didn't know the password).
Each component was forwarded to legal records hold for archiving in separate email.
Since no one was allowed to use the root\admin accounts (everything via sudo effectively, hence the double blind setup) in the event of an emergency a simple phone call to legal records hold would retrieve the information if the CIO and admin were not available. Add the two together and problem solved.
Child's could have just as easily secured the password before hand with a policy doing something as simple as a 2-part cypher with 1 part in the hands of the govenor and the other part documented with instructions on retriving the 1st part from the govenor.
e.g. passwd
(Disable backspace key sequence)
(Admin types first 4 characters, leaves room)
(CIO types last 4 characters hit's enter.)
Admin and CIO email legal record hold with their portions.
This was about paranoid liability of someone busting the network, not securing a core password.
I've had to L0phat more then one NT server that a rogue admin tried to lockout the system after getting canned during my career (retired geek now thank God). The most recent one was a net admin that had a $100,000 quarterly budget but we could only find 22k worth of assets at the company (And why did he need 3 22 inch monitors and had every workstation running NT Server edition even though they only paid for 4 licenses of Server....).
From a liability standpoint Terry, or anyone can follow this simple guideline:
If your company has a legal record hold service, periodically gather your configuration files and documentation and forward that information to legal record hold. If not periodically print them, label them as "Legal Record Hold" or "Legal Retain" and sign and date them.
Most government offices have a legal record hold office. If you are terminated and they come back after you you can have your lawyer request the last copy of the configs you sent to legal records hold and compare the current config. Not only that but a quick check of the config's last modified date will confirm if you you have legitimately made that change. In addition if they try and come back and say you came into the system after being canned, the burden of proof is one them to show you had access. It would be a staggering embarrasment if they didn't change master passwords you had access to.
If possible I would go further and use mandatory CVS\RCS\Git etc... for config files of any kind in your process with an audit. The RCS system should be in the hands of the legal records retainment (i.e. independent of netOps) for auditing. Liability then can be quickly determined (Jeff left the company on 3/12 and no issues. On 3/24 Eric made a change and all hell broke loose. No point in going after Jeff, no liability. Eric likely broke it... wait Eric was on vacation and lives in Utah, the VPN came from Washington... where Jeff lives with a similar IP as Jeff's last! Oh shit call the cops!)
Network admins tend to forget\overlook the need to audit the configs, not just for operational purposes, but for legal due-dilligence reasons as well.
Revision Control on Configs + Audits + Double Blind Root\Admin + Mandatory sudo = Reasonable Liability Tracker.
I'm retired now ... almost 5 years now I think and I am sure things have changed so don't take my suggestions as gospel but at least out of this we can starting thinking a bit more on how we manage our networks, not just from an operational standpoint but Risk, Liability, Business Continuity, and Legal viewpoint as well.
AND USE A RCS FOR CONFIGS!!! IT'S NOT JUST FOR TRACKING CODE CHANGES! IT'S AN AUDIT TRAIL AS WELL!
I used to work for a company that dealt with additives for (Hod help my spelling) Flurothermalploymers. I did computer matenance on a rehometer that they used to see if they got "shark scales" when extruding basically fishing line. The chemist Ludima was always curious on how when pulling the raw line out what extruding in low-g would do.
I bet there is more then 1 Dyneon employee that would be interested in those results.
lack of coffee. I spit out /. posts in the morning while drinking coffee waiting for the wife to get ready (we car pool) so I write in a hurry. No time for spell check.
Sadly since I pissed off 1 to many NASA engineers in the past (blah blah Crusader project by UDLP, blah blah trying making some money... blah blah blah remote mining and processing project... sub orbital meteor mining is a stupid idea...)
Anyway they'll no likely to talk to me (ever again) so here are my suggestions. Please feel free to run with them:
1: Sex (Duh. We all want to know.)
2: Artifical ring construction via centrifical force =
Take a spinning sphere and launch a tethered satellite while still spinning. from the teathered satellite launch another teather out such that the secondary teather is long enough to have the circumfrence of the satellite's oribital circumfurance. See if you can get it to hook up back to the original satellite to create an artifical ring on which we can construct stuff. (may required 2 satellites at opposite sides.
3: Behavior of molten metal in low gravity for crystal structure analysis (see if effect is more brittle or harded.)
4: Better estimate of open space survival time of a human being.
5: Field test atmosphering re-entry capable space suit for orbital deployment of troops (GETA LL WARHAMMA 40K ON YA!)
6: Polymer extrusion and blown film line test in low gravity for polymer chain linkage testing.
7: Smoking in the cargo bay in low-G (Can you blow smoke rings in low-g)
8: Will a paper airplain with a weight of less then .5 lbs survive re-entry to Earth?
9: Subspace structural testing to see if spacial structure exists (e.g. test if space itself has an actual shape, e.g. a quantum of space itself (rather then an infinitly divisible continum))
10: Test if the bullshit in DC is so thick you can really smell it on the ISS.
Just a few...
Did Charter get honorable mention at least?
With some sort of Algorithm could one not track troop movements and strengths then?
Statistically speaking, not very accurately.
Reasons:
Engaged troops are not tweeting while deployed. We are talking people at a barracks and those locations are hardly secret.
Mobile units are not likely to be tweeting while on recon. A goat herder with a cell phone can just as easily report troop movements.
But let us assume there is some deployed tweeting going on.
A: We would first need to know the average # of tweets per troop given a time frame (lets say 1 hour).
B: We could try and gauge, via normal distribution that a region has 58 tweets an hour and with (for the sake of easy math) 1 tweet per hour per troop we could guesstimate that there are roughly 58 troops there. The problem is the confidence interval is so wide based on that, that the data is somewhat useless.
C: We would also need to know a % of deployment for a given period of time. We could have 800 troops but only 10 are back on base tweeting at a given time frame. We would need to know more indepth their deployment orders, routine activities, etc.
D: Largely the tweets just become a dependent variable in a regression but the significance is really not there (There is a vastly larger and better set of data to gauge troop strength then tweets). The reasoning is tweets are just too random in their distribution of individuals. Some people might send out 300 tweets in a day while a vast majority wouldn't send any at all. You could with more confidence gauge the tech-savvy nature of a unit based on the number of tweets but by that same token a tech-savvy trooper is probably gonna think "Tweeting right now might be a security risk." So the chicken kills the egg.
The real danger would be developing a real-time logistics twitter communication network (e.g. reporting current fuel levels, black box like info, velocity, etc.) because once that kind of information network is exposed you have real time positioning. Cryptography is crucial in that regard.
The best way to date to track units is simple seismic activity triangulation (ground radar in essence.) A friggin tank driving around generates a lot of vibration. Troop positions post WWII aren't the crucial intel piece it once was. In the day of Long Bowmen and Cavalry sure, but post-tank + airpower... you just can't move 60 tons of firepower and not triangulate it.
Special Ops on foot is another story but those types aren't tweeting while on a mission either.
Not to mention that simple infrared cameras on ballons (especially at night) and covert cameras placed on commerical airliners can easily snap thermal imaging.
No Fly Zone + Light weight troops = People still need to eat and shit so there is a logistics wick to be followed there.
This is the 21st century, 12 century positional tactics went away when the Red Baron got famous.
WWII brought about the mobile front rendering hard positional tactics a second tier place and the advent of the space age rendered positionals a 3rd tier concern. Remember if they can find us there is a good chance we can also see them coming.
IANA4kYOAGBIPOOTV
(I am not a 400 year old asian general but I've played on on televion) ;)
Forgot Blazing Saddles
How about a single slide:
"Kick Bad Guy's Asses"
There is this dude. He's kewl. Then there is this chick. She's hot in a quirky kind of way. Then there is this other dude. He's bad-ass. Then there is this smarmy guy who wants to exploit the bad-ass dude. The bad-ass dude eventually double crosses the smarmy guy and total fucks with the kewl dude. The hot-in-a-quirky-way chick gets caught in the middle. Then there is this other dude who isn't quite as kewl as the kewl dude who is like "dude!" and the other dude is like "no dude" but "dude!", They team up to fight bad-ass dude all the while the chick, the kewl dude, the not quite as kewl dude deal inbetween relentless violence deal with periodic moments of character development. Eventually kewl dude wins.
So was that a review of Iron Man 2, Robocop, Star Wars, Gone with the Wind, Star Ship Troopers, or Freddie vs. Jason?
Feel free to include any other films this review may cover....
Too many nods to too many people. We would just be head-banging all week long to give proper props to the sci-fi writers of past and present.
I never got what the big deal was with The Pope anyways.
The problem is at some point the Catholic Church came up with the idea of Papal Infallability:
In short, he's can't be wrong.
Most Catholics I doubt buy into that but from an organizational position, well... his actions are well, supposed to be divinely guided. You have to remember that the Roman Catholic Church is the last link to the old Christian world. It is the direct lineage of Peter and they are struggling with the blow, to this day, that Martin Luther brought about.
The problem is most bigots in the world rather then understand just look at the surface of issues rather then any real introspect.
Great point is the opposition to contraceptives. There is a lot more to the reasoning behind the opposition then simple birth control. But bigots don't think, they react to their own stereotypes. The Church is crippled, no one wants to talk about the fact that 90% of the cases is male-male assaults (despite equal access to female minors), and the fact that the whole "Priest's Can't Marry" is a relatively new tenenant.
The Anti-Religious (versus athiests, there is a difference) movement wants to destroy religion with an obbsession that revolves around "humans in the absence of religion are enlightened."
Anyone with a passing understanding of human nature understands we tend to "regress to the lowest common denominator" (Idiocracy, Lord of the Flies, etc...) That is the moral relativism he's bitching about.
Millions, perhaps, billions, look to a Pope (or Imam, Dali Lama, Rabbi, Philosophers, etc.) as a guide to "Where do I go from here" in building a system of beliefs. The big deal I'd wager is this Pope, like many others, doesn't know where to go next.
Oddly the bigots forget the simple lessons a deer hunter can tell you on why the Church has so many pedophiles.
"You see when you hunter deer, you are the predator and the deer is the prey. You don't hunter for deer downtown, there are no deer there. You don't hunt deer at a deer sanctuary, you can't get access to the deer to hunt them. Let me ask you something: where does a predator go to hunt their prey? Predators go to places where there is not only prey, but they can get access to that prey. And not only that, but where the predator is likely not to be in harms way."
The problem has always been is the Church see's itself still, as a country, a nation unto itself. Until "The Vatican" let's go of that, these problems will continue.
Science always advances faster then the moral and ethics of the society.
Science Fiction tends to serve as the cursory warning of the abuses of science. Please reply with suggetsions on reading that our fellow scientists should watch when they are not busy playing God (in the figurative sense.)
The Island comes to mind but even comic books like the Micronauts foretold the warnings of Body Bank abuses. The Repo Men is a recent film that from what I can gather might also make for a good reading.
Oh how I wish that science would first think:
"Ok if this works what are the ethics" rather then "do it first, then we'll worry about the ethics later."
I'm all for science, I just have the crippling burden of being a history buff, knowing how often science gives birth to atrocities. Comparing post-1600s science has made religion look tame.
(Disclosure) I admit I've been a corporate tool for the better part of 15 years now. As an IT consultant I've worked for over 10 years across the Twin Cities area and now currently retired from IT work. I work at a bank now as my personal gift for years of IT hell and I am happy. As I've been eye deep in corporate culture since high school I can easily see a possible reason.
We here at Slashdot can readily accept that any game with DRM will lose some sales. By default, if a game performs poorly senior and executive management apparently are in the habit of blaming software piracy.
By putting DRM on a potential goose of a game they can claim double the excuses for poor performance to shareholders and create a perfect Chicken\Egg argument:
"We have to have the DRM to stop the piracy, it's a vicious circle that only a government subsidy can offset in the form of a piracy tax to reimburse our low sales..."
This is simply a theory that, if this was intentional, may explain the mind set.
The problem is now that I've documented that potential strategy I've rendered it useless.
1: Blame Piracy for Low Sales
2: Add DRM to products
3: Console gaming market declines as mobile apps eat up market share
4: Blame DRM and piracy for depressed sales ignoring the growing mobile and web game marketshare
5: Demand government do something about Piracy that is killing their sales
6: Get a government subsidy
7: Shift development efforts to web and mobile game markets
8: Profit Twice Over
Sadly, Ultima is produced by Origin games. Anyone else attempting to provide an Ultima game besides Origin games is sellling nothing more then a rip off of something that was great.
Sorry EA, putting the Ultima name on anything with Origin and Lord British is just smoke up our asses and I am gassy enough as it is...
If someone asked me to (in Java say) print the numbers from 1 to 10, I would probably do something like
for (int i=1;i=10;i++) {
System.out.println(i);
}
So would most other people. Would this flag me as a cheater?
Anyone else getting an Intellectual Property vibe from this?
I think you should sue anyone using your intellectual property!
I'm serious!
"Look there is no possible way you came up with that on your own. It's UNPOSSIBLE that any two people could come up with the same solution with the same characters! Resuing code is unacceptable!Yet another example of intellectual PIRACY!!"
Think about it: Couple draconian copyright protection with searchable databases. Did I mention that apparently data in a database can by copyrighted? So apparently all the student submissions store in the database are now the copyright property of the vendor...
"I'm sorry but your FOR loop is an obvious copy of EA's Duke Nukem Forver's code that was registered in the database in 1998. Based on database analysis, 60% of your code is an exact match against the existing Duke Nukem source code. Please go to jail and die now and have a great day!"
and in further news:
"Apparently 90% of the Linux source code, based on database analysis exists in existing IBM source code. A simple search of 12 billion lines of code on copyright from IBM indicates the Linux kernel violated their right by extensively using existing code copied from various products. The offending code:
loopCounter++;
was used more then 3 million times!."
That is their mentality? God help us all if that is there measuring stick.
Woot first point for the day. As usual idealists live in a 1 dimensional universe where they again fail to see the whole cost beyound the end of their nose.
He isn't on to something, and anyone that thinks this is a great idea is a stark raving idiot.
A: Treadmills don't far well outside. More roofed covered space. Nor to treadmills grow on trees.
B: Carbon footprint for the manfacturing of said treadmills
C: Additional feed for active cows now burning more calories. More waste from more feed too
D: Energy loss in conversion to heat from friction from transmission points
E: More wiring and cabling sucking down more copper from an already stressed raw material market. Ohms.... .Ohms.....
F: Who in their right mind thinks: taking solar energy and water and converting it into biomass
Then using millions of tons of fossil fuels to build machinery to develop and harvest biomass.
Feed said biomass to another animal
To use millions of tons of fossil fuels in manufacturing a kinetic engery transfomation device (treadmill)
To then power a machine to generate a fraction of the energy "THE SUN PUT OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE!?
Jebus Rice we are getting shit-eating stupid pretty damn fast when people think "Hey they're on to something..."
Narrow minded morons never looking past their own nose on what real costs are.
Everything you've mentioned points to the people using the system rather then the system itself. Please explain the failure in the assumption.
Because regulating body temperature,
corrdinating over 20 organs,
regulating resparation in response to oxygen demand,
food processing,
maintaining balance by manipulating spinal alignment along with extremeties while tossing in corrdinating queues from the inner ear
speech faculties
vision and depth perception
memory storage and retrieval
object permancy analysis
checking out the hot chick's legs
All are going on at once and some brainless twit wants to tell us there is a two task limit in the brain?
Is this the same tard that submitted his thesis indicating a radical new way to get fresh water by using solar radiation to evaporate ocean water then condense it back down into fresh water where the peer comittiee rejected his 2 year long thesis work with a single sentence, "You mean like rain?"
Science is dead, long live the Idiocracy....
Human Brain != Computer. Computer is a deterministic device, the brain is not. It's not even an apple and orange comparison (where they are both fruit at least) it's more of an "Apple and Liter" comparison where one is an actual object and a fruit where the other is an abstract and abritrary measurement of fluids.
Yes we do because we need to find out the real statistical weight (significance) of which regressors gives us the best return on our money.
An excellent real world example is the disparity in blacks for sentencing. We find that it is more statstically significant that the reasons black comprise more of the prision population isn't because they are black per say, it just happens that blacks comprise more of the lower income. Income is more significant then just being black so if you want to reduce the disparity in sentencing, dollar for dollar you are better off spending money on improving job opportunities then say, sensitivity training for prosecutors.
The point of using computer systems is to dig through bias and perceptions and get to a root cause.
In the case of youth intervention it comes down to finding out which circumstances are the most relevant and addressable. Yeah we know of about 4000 regressors that factor into a child's success... it's finding out which of the 4000 we can address and which of those not only help the child, but save us money rather then just subsidize bad behaviors.
The fear is unfounded since it wouldn't be admissible in sentencing guidelines, no more then a genetic predisposition would be. The courts are pretty clear on what can be taken into account in sentencing and none of this would be allow to be factored in under existing laws and guidelines. Even if they tried it wouldn't make it past an appeal, (IANALBMWIAP)
Any reason why we are angry with this? The whole point appears to identify at-risk kids and make sure they get the support they need.
A: Kid is from a low income family
B: Kid lives in drug ridden neighborhood
C: Kid eats twice a day
D: Kid is in a single parent home
Kid is BLAH BLAH% likely to commit a violent crime.
A is 38% weighted
B: is 14% weighted
C: is 17% weighted
D: is 9% weighted
Per $ ROI indicates that an additional $4.22 spent weekly on school lunch program (C) will save $19.22 over 10 years in reduced criminal activity.
Blah blah blah...
Seems par for the course...