Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
Actually, it depends on how spread out everyone gets. Eve has about 6,200 solar systems (not counting wormhole/unknown/uncharted systems), each of which can currently support about 1,500 players. That's a maximum theoretical limit of 9.3 million players. Of course, nobody would be able to move. Assuming 10% total system capacity, that's still 930,000 players. That can be done right now, with nearly no motivation for CCP to push it further due to current player distribution patterns.
Right now, Eve has large areas of essentially empty systems. You can sit there for days with nothing but a handfull of people passing through once in a while on their way to somewhere else. That's rather convenient when you want to be relatively left alone. Adding new systems would be incredibly easy since things like planets, moons, etc are all procedurally created. If it ever became an issue, they could simply buy up some more blade servers, connect them as nodes within Tranquility, and double, triple, or quadruple the total number of systems. The only crunch would be within empire, and that too could be readily expanded.
Eve scales exponentially within a single instance because the things they didn't do right from the start get re-written to be right later.
Eve Online just introduced a new graphical problem (which actually results in a CPU spike too) in the latest expansion (Dominion) that's causing problems with a lot of ATI cards.
This is why I go with nVidia: my card may be slower than your ATI and I may have paid more for it, but I'll have driver updates twice a week that almost universally work flawlessly. Never had any luck at all with ATI's drivers for any product.
With Eve Online's new in-game browser upgrade, he could talk to friends on Facebook and post here without ever leaving the game.
But you can't "win" Eve Online no matter how many quests/missions you complete, how many hours you play, or anything else. Best of all, a gang of noobs could walk right up and gank him at will anyway.
The Chinese have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the US as well. I don't think they're too worried we're going to nuke them.
Besides, they have something better. Go ask an economics professor what happens to the United States if China dumps their $1 Trillion in US debt for $10 Billion.
That depends a lot on the sales staff. In some places I've been to, it's more likely he'd come home with a USB extender cable and a package of AAs.
It's also worth noting that your second example may not be entirely bad. If he went in looking for a simple, basic power strip for sensitive and power-hungry computer equipment ("Hey, I need a power strip for my $2,000 laptop, my desktop, and my wife's desktop and laptop"), a perfectly competent and honest salesman may end up convincing him on the merits of having battery backup power. And seeing as he's making a lot of off-the-cuff estimates on power draw under varying and unknown circumstances, if "dad" is looking for how long this battery thing will keep his equipment running in a blackout, the APC rackmount battery backup may only be slight overkill.
In my living room, I have a 1500VA APC unit providing backup power to a router, switch, cable modem, and HTPC. Why so much? Because it was on a ridiculous sale (model was being replaced) and I had gift cards to that store. In the end, I only paid about $60 for it. I'll probably swap it to the home servers whenever I get around to building them, but for now, I could probably run all my networking and internet equipment for several hours in a blackout.
It's not as though it's a huge issue on XP. Not only is there no remote exploit vulnerability on XP, but XP isn't even vulnerable to the denial of service by default. You must specifically configure XP to be vulnerable to this attack before it's vulnerable to this attack.
So yeah, if you specifically modify XP's default settings in such a way as to be vulnerable to this attack, and if you don't run any sort of firewall or other connection filtering software, and if you don't have any kind of hardware firewall or NAT router between you and your internet connection, then someone can hang up your Windows XP computer.
It'd be nice if they fixed the problem, but frankly, this one shouldn't have any effect whatsoever on 99.999% of the people running XP, especially since many DSL and cable internet providers are now shipping modems which have simple NAT routers built into them.
In the areas where this is taking place, if private citizens spot a police car that's unlocked, they can remove everything from inside there to prevent it from being stolen?
The first item is direct from Slashdot postings. The other isn't actually my opinion and is likely the result of a bad Google summary. In other words, you simply did a Google search on my Slashdot username and came up with a couple tidbits of info based on the results.
If you actually have my name, feel free to post my initials and kudos to you. I have roughly 8 different pseudonyms used across various parts of the internet. I don't believe any one of them is directly connected with my real name or has my picture associated with them in any way.
"There is also legislation in the works that would require states to impose a ban on text messaging while driving or lose a significant portion of their federal highway funding."
This is the same crap the Fedgov pulled when their attempts to force a minimum drinking age on states got shot down in court. It's time 34 states got together for a constitutional convention and crammed an Amendment down the Feds' throats to put an end to stuff like this. It can be narrow in scope to just cover the highway funds, but the effect will be that the Fedgov will be put back in its place and will have to think twice before trying to push the states around again.
Why on God's green Earth would you post anything of any substance to any online account that can be traced back to real you without massive court involvement? These social networking sites are prime candidates for one-stop shopping sprees of information about individuals. We've got people posting everything from offensive tirades to nude pictures of themselves where anyone with a search engine and a free, anonymous account can find them.
Do people seriously think that they exist in a bubble so long as they have a keyboard in front of them? Or are their brains trapped in a bubble of ignorance and short-sightedness?
Separate YOU from online YOU, and if possible, separate online YOU into several different online YOUs such that an individual profile can't be established via common username, cross-linkage, etc. For Christ sakes, people, it's 2009. It's long, long past the point where anyone should be doing stuff this stupid. Every spot where a user can post something on the internet is an enormous billboard so high and large that everyone on Earth can see it for the rest of time. Learn to treat it as such.
That's where you get into router-based anti-virus/anti-malware, IPsec on individual machines (protects you from the rest of the network and the rest of the network from you), VLANs, etc. You can really go to extremes with a lot of other stuff, but you start killing usability once you go too far. That said, attempting to restrict the CFO's actions on the machines he's using and is responsible for probably isn't a great approach. He'll simple bypass whatever restrictions are put in place (which he did in your example) and open up new attack vectors to the network (which he also did). So long as his machine is locked down with solid and up-to-date antivirus, he's VLAN'd off from anything he doesn't need, his server access is as isolated and permissionless as possible, and you've got recent images of the machines he's using regularly, let him blow the thing up as much as he wants.
If he's doing it regularly enough, start filing weekly or monthly reports on areas where IT's time is spent handling preventable issues and keep track (as much as possible) of how much time is being spent poorly along with suggestions to reduce that waste. If the leading "preventable maintenance" (or whatever workplace politics sensitive term you want to use) is the CFO's own stupidity, perhaps it will spur some realizations and/or change. It not, at least you're covering your own arse when the CFO is complaining to the rest of the upper management about how his computer is always down.
Another way to approach it from a design/prevention standpoint is to sit and ponder on how much damage any given person could do (outside the IT administration) if they went nuts and wanted to do as much harm as possible. Ponder how much trouble you could cause if you sat at their computer(s) and did everything bad you possibly could using only their access/permissions. At that point you can really start seeing areas where they have access to stuff they'd never need in a million years. Does the receptionist whose entire job is to answer phones and make coffee have access to the financial database? Why? Do the sales guys have access to support docs? Why? Maybe there's a good reason they do in either or both cases, but ask the questions (to yourself if you know). When users only have the access they actually need to do their jobs (and 99 times out of 100 in every company I've ever seen, everyone has vastly more access than they need) and are locked out of everything else, the chances of a major problem from things like viruses/spyware/malware/trojans/rogue employees/etc are reduced by orders of magnitude.
And if things aren't set up right at a company where you're working, but you're tasked with fixing the chaos which invariably ensues, make it a point to reform the little stuff first (access/configuration for those lowest on the totum pole) since management won't care and then work through a plan that fixes problems in ascending order of impact for the managers who are most likely to kick up a fuss. Look at where you are, come up with a realistic ideal design, and then plot a course that takes you there. Free time to work on that is tightest at the start when you're stuck sorting through the disasters of poor IT infrastructure design, but every step toward the ideal will help with that. For the secretaries who can't help but spyware up the machines every day with flash games and such, SteadyState will solve 90% of their self-inflicted problems with a simple reboot. Train them to do that before calling you and you'll already be leaps ahead of where you began.
Doing consulting for a lot of different companies and institutions, I've turned a lot of regular customers into customers who virtually never call up with a problem that requires much effort. They'll add new things, update things, and occassionally break something minor, but they just don't have the "omgomgwe'retotallydownpleasepleasehelpusrightthissecondorwe'lldie!" panic attack inspiring support requests anymore. I've found that whatever platform you choose to use, sane infras
This is not a hidden cost of Windows, but a hidden cost of having ignorant admins and/or management. If you're spending $2.5 Million cleaning up a virus infection, you've done something terribly wrong along the way. Most machines in most places of business maintain the same software day-in and day-out. Those machines should either be booting via write-protected remote images or using something like SteadyState to keep everything running perfectly. The servers should have correctly created permissions and security which make viral infections nearly impossible. The rest of the machines should be locked down with policies, limited privilege accounts, and software providing protection from infections. They should also be regularly imaged (as in nightly to a SAN/NAS/etc).
That's just the common sense little stuff. There's plenty more that could be done as well, but just the above will all but guarantee you never see a multi-million dollar cleanup bill regardless of your choice of OS.
It's built in and it works. You can get something that's theoretically more efficient with a lot of work, but this is quick, cheap, and simple. Best of all, it actually works.
The client and server each run a checksum against what's on either end after a "successful" transfer. If the xcrc fails, delete and re-send. It's really that easy. If efficiency is an issue, just enable resuming on the client end.
What a simple question. Your problem is solved with about 20 minutes of work/setup/testing and a budget equal to whatever you get paid for 20 minutes worth of work.
By the way, you're of course absolutely correct. Sure a 13 year old boy who had spent time with Michael Jackson was able to nearly perfectly describe Michael Jackson's genitalia and gave graphic descriptions of sex acts virtually no 13 year old would have known existed at the time (as this was pre-internet boom).
But you're right, I don't have a 35mm home video in which Michael Jackson shows his birth certificate while molesting boys also holding up state-certified age verification. Just a bunch of children who say a man sexually abused them, described the abuse in detail, and whose parents stopped cooperating with police investigations once they were paid tens of millions of dollars by said man.
And if you believe everything was perfectly legitimate with all of that, please contact me about some funds that my uncle (the former king of Nigeria) left to me that I need transferred out of the country right away.
See subsequent comments. The large cash settlements between Michael Jackson and the parents of young boys who spent time at his ranch are pretty well documented. Or are you taking the line that $20 Million was paid merely for time and company, and anything that happened was between consenting mental children...?
If the settlements were small in number and in monetary size, that would make a lot of sense. In this case, there were several such settlements amounting into the tens of millions of dollars. If the guy did nothing wrong, it's not going to cost him tens of millions of dollars to show that. You pay a settlement when your risk of losing court cases, assuming a certain level of penalties associated therewith, exceeds what the other party is willing to take. In other words, if I have a strong chance of losing a hundred million in suits or spending an untenable amount of time in prison, losing ten million in a settlement to make it all disappear starts looking good. But why would I stand such a strong chance of losing so much and having it stick past appeals? And how does paying out hush money (merely defined as money paid to keep people quiet) over and over again for tens of millions of dollars not cause incredible amounts of damage?
I don't hate Michael Jackson, I simply hate what he did to young boys. The guy might have been perfectly likable in person; I wouldn't know as I never met him in person. I'm sure there are plenty of likable pedophiles in the world. It doesn't mean I can't hate actions that destroy the lives of children.
And as for the parents, I'll rail against them every day of the week and twice on Sunday. What kind of negligent idiot sends their young child to go sleep in bed with a strange man? Or any man for that matter? Aside from a parent comforting a frightened child, why would any adult want a child in bed with them at all? Regardless of the answer to that question, one has to question the suitability of any parent who allows their child to stay unattended with a strange adult in such a situation. That wasn't someone's kids having a sleepover, it was an adult man inviting young boys to come sleep in his bed and negligent or malicious parents going right along with it.
As for the ones who settled, they're even worse. The first few who allowed it were probably starstruck, naive little fools who sent their kids to that disgusting predator without a second thought. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if all the others (following the initial accusations of molestation and payouts) were looking for a check. And no, it wouldn't surprise me if some later cases were simple blackmail. The one case actually brought to criminal court strikes me as one where Michael Jackson's people couldn't come up with a number to satisfy that nutcase, sociopathic mother.
So no, I don't at all agree with what the parents did. The only reason they had escaped my ire in posts until now comes down to the simple fact that I haven't been watching and hearing everyone glorify them all day long today. That honor has been reserved to the sexual deviant who liked sleeping with little boys.
Like I said, you sing and dance well enough, you can do whatever you want. We used to bestow such immunities on supreme leaders. Now we tend to do it with superstars. People have been treating this as every bit as terrible as when Princess Diana died. It isn't. This is a sick pervert being glorified because he released some great albums 20 years ago. Nevermind that the revenue he gained from those albums was later used to lure children to his bed and keep them and their parents from testifying against him about it after the fact.
You're either missing or ignoring about 3/4 of everything I type.
First, he openly admitted sharing his bed with young boys (not as a parent thereof). In most modern societies, it's considered inappropriate for a grown man to sleep with young boys.
Second, he's paid off multiple families of boys who accused him of molesting them. Payoffs have been reported in the tens of millions after which the accusations suddenly vanished.
Thirdly, the one and only case that was ever brought to criminal court was pretty obviously absurd from the beginning and driven by a sociopathic mother who made the kids call Michael Jackson "daddy" for a long while until she decided he was a bad man. Her inconsistent stories and the puppeteering of her kids killed any credibility to any of the accusations made in that particular case. It's notable that it's the only case Michael Jackson actually fought in court. The rest of the time, families were quietly paid off to go away under strict non-disclosure agreements which quickly ended any potential prosecutions arising from them.
Numerous accusations of sexual molestation of young boys and the only one he ever contested was a farce from the start.
Multiple accusations followed by multiple payouts and a televised admission from a grown man that he shares his bed with young boys.
You don't pay out $20 Million in hush money to just one family (in addition to all the others paid off) unless there's something to hush.
And another thing, this isn't about pedophilia. I don't care what's in someone's head; I care about what they do. If Michael Jackson were just a pedophile who never acted on his impulses, then good for him for overcoming biological screwups to maintain human decency. But regardless of what was going through his head, it's pretty damned obvious what he was up to with those boys. We can debate all day about the extent of his inappropriate relationships with boys, but he admitted some level of inappropriateness on television and paid tens of millions of dollars to families to keep information related to those inappropriate relationships from reaching public ears.
So while you can accuse me of anything you want, you cannot accurately state that I've admitted to inappropriate relationships with young boys on television and you cannot accurately state that I've paid tens of millions in hush money to families of young boys that stayed overnight with me at my secluded residence. All of those things can be accurately stated when speaking about Michael Jackson.
And thus we see the true colors of our society. So long as you can sing, dance, and entertain the world, molesting children and then paying off their parents to make criminal cases go away is just fine with us. You can even come right out and proclaim in televised interviews that you're carrying on inappropriate relationships with children; we'll still either deny or ignore it.
I see all this outpouring of sympathy all over the web for a pedophile who molested children with impunity for years on end and all I can think is that all those Catholic priests should have taken some classes at an art school before doing what they did as it probably would have saved the church some money. I don't care how well you sing or dance. I don't care if you cure Cancer. The moment you start molesting children, society should throw you to the wolves.
That 2-3% loss is probably over a given line of distance X. You're not accounting for all the transformers, stations, substations, etc that the power is needlessly going through because California (more specifically, the citizens of California) won't allow much local power generation at all.
Besides, even if it were only 2-3% of the total imported power for California, it would still amount to 1,530GWh - 2,300GWh in 2008. With that in mind, there's always this: "California also used to have another nuclear power plant, the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station, which produced more than 900 MW. However, it was shut down, and replaced with a solar power plant that produces less than 4 MW." (http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_californias_environmentalism.html)
Your parent is right. There does exist a set of clueless people who straight filter based on RBL's like SORBS. Sure, filter your home mail server any way you want, but the *second* you have third-party people using your system (or the second you run the mail server for a business), you should be outright fired for filtering based solely on something like SORBS.
I figure if there is a real problem, that I will get a support call from a customer and I can act accordingly
That is because I dont waste my time calling you. I call your boss and your sales department. If you really are running a business mail server and filtering based on SORBS, you are basically clueless and I'll gain nothing talking to you Your sales staff though, I'm sure they'd be happy to know you are blocking my customers inquiries into your companies products. And I'm probably also sure that if you are the type who filters like that, they probably have a bunch of other issues with the way you run their systems and this just might be the straw that broke the camels back.
I think you're misreading things a bit. First of all, nearly all modern RBLs are absolutely nothing like SORBS. They work on multiple reports, expire quickly, and narrowly target IPs being used to send spam. Once in a long while you might catch a Comcast or AOL mail server in there, but not very often anymore. Great care and research should be done before implementing any new filtering to ensure it won't create an unacceptably high number of false positives. That's common sense. What isn't common sense is that there are plenty of IP and content URL blacklists which are plenty reliable enough for virtually anyone to confidently use as concrete walls in their filtering scheme.
I admin mail servers which have a total of about 1,200 mailboxes spread over around 100 domains. As they're all small to medium size businesses, there are two simple facts I have to keep in mind: 1) that every piece of spam making it into their employees' inboxes reduced productivity and costs them money and 2) that every false positive has the potential to lose us that customer (assuming it were to create enough of a problem). Well over a million messages a day hit the mail servers I admin, and roughly 96% of those messages never reach my customers because they're filtered as spam. So how do you reliably make all of it work? It's a combination of multi-tiered filters (some of which include blacklists of various sorts) and whitelists, tailored to each customers' individual needs.
For instance, if you're a local ice cream shop who doesn't want or care for any contact outside the country, I'm going to block IP ranges tentatively identified as being from regions high in spam production for your domain. That means China, Russia, and a whole host of others are being cut off right from the start. That's fine for the ice cream shop because they don't care about anyone who isn't local and if a message or two gets dropped here and there due to geo-location issues, then they're just fine with that. But what of the electronic parts manufacturer with regional offices all over the world (including a plant in China)? Well, you can't do country filtering for them at all. Missing email from a potential customer in Moscow could mean thousands of dollars or more of profits out the window in a flash. What you do is let the other filters carry more of a burden and lower their expectations for how much spam is going to end up being filtered. Finding each company's balance between avoiding spam and avoiding false positives is important. The vast majority of my users see less than three spam emails a day in their inbox and probably average a false positive once every three months or so. The ones who are hyper-sensitive about false positives see a bit more of their spam and never have false positives (so far as I'm aware).
What are the two biggest tricks to making it work? 1) Whitelists created specifically for your customers and 2) k
Any mail admin who's depending in any significant way on the anti-spam wasteland of SORBS should be on their way to apply for jobs at local fast food restaurants as soon as possible. Even if someone handling spam control for a decent size business actually believed in SORBS' accuracy or effectiveness, the only effect of SORBS disappearing from the face of the Earth should have is a slight uptick in spam being caught by filters slightly further down the path to their users' mailboxes.
Seriously, is there anyone out there who isn't use a multi-tiered, inter-connected array of spam filtering methods at this stage of the game? ~96% of the mail going to my users is spam. My worst offender has some ~5300 messages a day of spam being filtered prior to reaching their inbox. If my best filter were rendered worthless tomorrow, I wouldn't expect to hear any complaints from users. (of course, I'd be pretty unhappy.)
I think honeypots are probably my best weapon again spammers at the moment, followed by my keyword blacklists.
It's called "we want electricity but we're going to protest any time someone wants to build something that produces electricity in our state because we're so super environmentally friendly that we'd rather drag power from halfway across the country from an ancient, smog and carbon spewing coal plant losing tons of power to transfer loss rather than build clean energy production in our own back yard".
Californomics - not for the feint of heart, the light of wallet, or the comprehending of basic math.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that a liberal state legislature like Washington state's would look to taxation as the solution to any and all problems. Spending more money than you have? Raise taxes. Underestimate costs of various state functions? Taxes. Kids drinking too much alcohol? Tax it to the tune of >50% of the total cost between local, state, and Federal taxes. Kids downloading music? Hit them with tax evasion.
If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
Slashdot Mirror
Chuck a zero on the end of that first number, and change the 3 to at least a 6, then you have WOW. (And that's underestimating their current subscribers.)
Eve would burn to the ground if even half that number tried to use it.
Actually, it depends on how spread out everyone gets. Eve has about 6,200 solar systems (not counting wormhole/unknown/uncharted systems), each of which can currently support about 1,500 players. That's a maximum theoretical limit of 9.3 million players. Of course, nobody would be able to move. Assuming 10% total system capacity, that's still 930,000 players. That can be done right now, with nearly no motivation for CCP to push it further due to current player distribution patterns.
Right now, Eve has large areas of essentially empty systems. You can sit there for days with nothing but a handfull of people passing through once in a while on their way to somewhere else. That's rather convenient when you want to be relatively left alone. Adding new systems would be incredibly easy since things like planets, moons, etc are all procedurally created. If it ever became an issue, they could simply buy up some more blade servers, connect them as nodes within Tranquility, and double, triple, or quadruple the total number of systems. The only crunch would be within empire, and that too could be readily expanded.
Eve scales exponentially within a single instance because the things they didn't do right from the start get re-written to be right later.
Eve Online just introduced a new graphical problem (which actually results in a CPU spike too) in the latest expansion (Dominion) that's causing problems with a lot of ATI cards.
This is why I go with nVidia: my card may be slower than your ATI and I may have paid more for it, but I'll have driver updates twice a week that almost universally work flawlessly. Never had any luck at all with ATI's drivers for any product.
With Eve Online's new in-game browser upgrade, he could talk to friends on Facebook and post here without ever leaving the game.
But you can't "win" Eve Online no matter how many quests/missions you complete, how many hours you play, or anything else. Best of all, a gang of noobs could walk right up and gank him at will anyway.
The Chinese have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the US as well. I don't think they're too worried we're going to nuke them.
Besides, they have something better. Go ask an economics professor what happens to the United States if China dumps their $1 Trillion in US debt for $10 Billion.
Existing CANDU plants can already use Thorium.
The infrastructure already exists for those bright enough to use an awesome design like CANDU.
http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm
That depends a lot on the sales staff. In some places I've been to, it's more likely he'd come home with a USB extender cable and a package of AAs.
It's also worth noting that your second example may not be entirely bad. If he went in looking for a simple, basic power strip for sensitive and power-hungry computer equipment ("Hey, I need a power strip for my $2,000 laptop, my desktop, and my wife's desktop and laptop"), a perfectly competent and honest salesman may end up convincing him on the merits of having battery backup power. And seeing as he's making a lot of off-the-cuff estimates on power draw under varying and unknown circumstances, if "dad" is looking for how long this battery thing will keep his equipment running in a blackout, the APC rackmount battery backup may only be slight overkill.
In my living room, I have a 1500VA APC unit providing backup power to a router, switch, cable modem, and HTPC. Why so much? Because it was on a ridiculous sale (model was being replaced) and I had gift cards to that store. In the end, I only paid about $60 for it. I'll probably swap it to the home servers whenever I get around to building them, but for now, I could probably run all my networking and internet equipment for several hours in a blackout.
It's not as though it's a huge issue on XP. Not only is there no remote exploit vulnerability on XP, but XP isn't even vulnerable to the denial of service by default. You must specifically configure XP to be vulnerable to this attack before it's vulnerable to this attack.
So yeah, if you specifically modify XP's default settings in such a way as to be vulnerable to this attack, and if you don't run any sort of firewall or other connection filtering software, and if you don't have any kind of hardware firewall or NAT router between you and your internet connection, then someone can hang up your Windows XP computer.
It'd be nice if they fixed the problem, but frankly, this one shouldn't have any effect whatsoever on 99.999% of the people running XP, especially since many DSL and cable internet providers are now shipping modems which have simple NAT routers built into them.
In the areas where this is taking place, if private citizens spot a police car that's unlocked, they can remove everything from inside there to prevent it from being stolen?
The first item is direct from Slashdot postings. The other isn't actually my opinion and is likely the result of a bad Google summary. In other words, you simply did a Google search on my Slashdot username and came up with a couple tidbits of info based on the results.
If you actually have my name, feel free to post my initials and kudos to you. I have roughly 8 different pseudonyms used across various parts of the internet. I don't believe any one of them is directly connected with my real name or has my picture associated with them in any way.
"There is also legislation in the works that would require states to impose a ban on text messaging while driving or lose a significant portion of their federal highway funding."
This is the same crap the Fedgov pulled when their attempts to force a minimum drinking age on states got shot down in court. It's time 34 states got together for a constitutional convention and crammed an Amendment down the Feds' throats to put an end to stuff like this. It can be narrow in scope to just cover the highway funds, but the effect will be that the Fedgov will be put back in its place and will have to think twice before trying to push the states around again.
Why on God's green Earth would you post anything of any substance to any online account that can be traced back to real you without massive court involvement? These social networking sites are prime candidates for one-stop shopping sprees of information about individuals. We've got people posting everything from offensive tirades to nude pictures of themselves where anyone with a search engine and a free, anonymous account can find them.
Do people seriously think that they exist in a bubble so long as they have a keyboard in front of them? Or are their brains trapped in a bubble of ignorance and short-sightedness?
Separate YOU from online YOU, and if possible, separate online YOU into several different online YOUs such that an individual profile can't be established via common username, cross-linkage, etc. For Christ sakes, people, it's 2009. It's long, long past the point where anyone should be doing stuff this stupid. Every spot where a user can post something on the internet is an enormous billboard so high and large that everyone on Earth can see it for the rest of time. Learn to treat it as such.
That's where you get into router-based anti-virus/anti-malware, IPsec on individual machines (protects you from the rest of the network and the rest of the network from you), VLANs, etc. You can really go to extremes with a lot of other stuff, but you start killing usability once you go too far. That said, attempting to restrict the CFO's actions on the machines he's using and is responsible for probably isn't a great approach. He'll simple bypass whatever restrictions are put in place (which he did in your example) and open up new attack vectors to the network (which he also did). So long as his machine is locked down with solid and up-to-date antivirus, he's VLAN'd off from anything he doesn't need, his server access is as isolated and permissionless as possible, and you've got recent images of the machines he's using regularly, let him blow the thing up as much as he wants.
If he's doing it regularly enough, start filing weekly or monthly reports on areas where IT's time is spent handling preventable issues and keep track (as much as possible) of how much time is being spent poorly along with suggestions to reduce that waste. If the leading "preventable maintenance" (or whatever workplace politics sensitive term you want to use) is the CFO's own stupidity, perhaps it will spur some realizations and/or change. It not, at least you're covering your own arse when the CFO is complaining to the rest of the upper management about how his computer is always down.
Another way to approach it from a design/prevention standpoint is to sit and ponder on how much damage any given person could do (outside the IT administration) if they went nuts and wanted to do as much harm as possible. Ponder how much trouble you could cause if you sat at their computer(s) and did everything bad you possibly could using only their access/permissions. At that point you can really start seeing areas where they have access to stuff they'd never need in a million years. Does the receptionist whose entire job is to answer phones and make coffee have access to the financial database? Why? Do the sales guys have access to support docs? Why? Maybe there's a good reason they do in either or both cases, but ask the questions (to yourself if you know). When users only have the access they actually need to do their jobs (and 99 times out of 100 in every company I've ever seen, everyone has vastly more access than they need) and are locked out of everything else, the chances of a major problem from things like viruses/spyware/malware/trojans/rogue employees/etc are reduced by orders of magnitude.
And if things aren't set up right at a company where you're working, but you're tasked with fixing the chaos which invariably ensues, make it a point to reform the little stuff first (access/configuration for those lowest on the totum pole) since management won't care and then work through a plan that fixes problems in ascending order of impact for the managers who are most likely to kick up a fuss. Look at where you are, come up with a realistic ideal design, and then plot a course that takes you there. Free time to work on that is tightest at the start when you're stuck sorting through the disasters of poor IT infrastructure design, but every step toward the ideal will help with that. For the secretaries who can't help but spyware up the machines every day with flash games and such, SteadyState will solve 90% of their self-inflicted problems with a simple reboot. Train them to do that before calling you and you'll already be leaps ahead of where you began.
Doing consulting for a lot of different companies and institutions, I've turned a lot of regular customers into customers who virtually never call up with a problem that requires much effort. They'll add new things, update things, and occassionally break something minor, but they just don't have the "omgomgwe'retotallydownpleasepleasehelpusrightthissecondorwe'lldie!" panic attack inspiring support requests anymore. I've found that whatever platform you choose to use, sane infras
This is not a hidden cost of Windows, but a hidden cost of having ignorant admins and/or management. If you're spending $2.5 Million cleaning up a virus infection, you've done something terribly wrong along the way. Most machines in most places of business maintain the same software day-in and day-out. Those machines should either be booting via write-protected remote images or using something like SteadyState to keep everything running perfectly. The servers should have correctly created permissions and security which make viral infections nearly impossible. The rest of the machines should be locked down with policies, limited privilege accounts, and software providing protection from infections. They should also be regularly imaged (as in nightly to a SAN/NAS/etc).
That's just the common sense little stuff. There's plenty more that could be done as well, but just the above will all but guarantee you never see a multi-million dollar cleanup bill regardless of your choice of OS.
It's built in and it works. You can get something that's theoretically more efficient with a lot of work, but this is quick, cheap, and simple. Best of all, it actually works.
The client and server each run a checksum against what's on either end after a "successful" transfer. If the xcrc fails, delete and re-send. It's really that easy. If efficiency is an issue, just enable resuming on the client end.
What a simple question. Your problem is solved with about 20 minutes of work/setup/testing and a budget equal to whatever you get paid for 20 minutes worth of work.
By the way, you're of course absolutely correct. Sure a 13 year old boy who had spent time with Michael Jackson was able to nearly perfectly describe Michael Jackson's genitalia and gave graphic descriptions of sex acts virtually no 13 year old would have known existed at the time (as this was pre-internet boom).
But you're right, I don't have a 35mm home video in which Michael Jackson shows his birth certificate while molesting boys also holding up state-certified age verification. Just a bunch of children who say a man sexually abused them, described the abuse in detail, and whose parents stopped cooperating with police investigations once they were paid tens of millions of dollars by said man.
And if you believe everything was perfectly legitimate with all of that, please contact me about some funds that my uncle (the former king of Nigeria) left to me that I need transferred out of the country right away.
See subsequent comments. The large cash settlements between Michael Jackson and the parents of young boys who spent time at his ranch are pretty well documented. Or are you taking the line that $20 Million was paid merely for time and company, and anything that happened was between consenting mental children...?
If the settlements were small in number and in monetary size, that would make a lot of sense. In this case, there were several such settlements amounting into the tens of millions of dollars. If the guy did nothing wrong, it's not going to cost him tens of millions of dollars to show that. You pay a settlement when your risk of losing court cases, assuming a certain level of penalties associated therewith, exceeds what the other party is willing to take. In other words, if I have a strong chance of losing a hundred million in suits or spending an untenable amount of time in prison, losing ten million in a settlement to make it all disappear starts looking good. But why would I stand such a strong chance of losing so much and having it stick past appeals? And how does paying out hush money (merely defined as money paid to keep people quiet) over and over again for tens of millions of dollars not cause incredible amounts of damage?
I don't hate Michael Jackson, I simply hate what he did to young boys. The guy might have been perfectly likable in person; I wouldn't know as I never met him in person. I'm sure there are plenty of likable pedophiles in the world. It doesn't mean I can't hate actions that destroy the lives of children.
And as for the parents, I'll rail against them every day of the week and twice on Sunday. What kind of negligent idiot sends their young child to go sleep in bed with a strange man? Or any man for that matter? Aside from a parent comforting a frightened child, why would any adult want a child in bed with them at all? Regardless of the answer to that question, one has to question the suitability of any parent who allows their child to stay unattended with a strange adult in such a situation. That wasn't someone's kids having a sleepover, it was an adult man inviting young boys to come sleep in his bed and negligent or malicious parents going right along with it.
As for the ones who settled, they're even worse. The first few who allowed it were probably starstruck, naive little fools who sent their kids to that disgusting predator without a second thought. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if all the others (following the initial accusations of molestation and payouts) were looking for a check. And no, it wouldn't surprise me if some later cases were simple blackmail. The one case actually brought to criminal court strikes me as one where Michael Jackson's people couldn't come up with a number to satisfy that nutcase, sociopathic mother.
So no, I don't at all agree with what the parents did. The only reason they had escaped my ire in posts until now comes down to the simple fact that I haven't been watching and hearing everyone glorify them all day long today. That honor has been reserved to the sexual deviant who liked sleeping with little boys.
Like I said, you sing and dance well enough, you can do whatever you want. We used to bestow such immunities on supreme leaders. Now we tend to do it with superstars. People have been treating this as every bit as terrible as when Princess Diana died. It isn't. This is a sick pervert being glorified because he released some great albums 20 years ago. Nevermind that the revenue he gained from those albums was later used to lure children to his bed and keep them and their parents from testifying against him about it after the fact.
You're either missing or ignoring about 3/4 of everything I type.
First, he openly admitted sharing his bed with young boys (not as a parent thereof). In most modern societies, it's considered inappropriate for a grown man to sleep with young boys.
Second, he's paid off multiple families of boys who accused him of molesting them. Payoffs have been reported in the tens of millions after which the accusations suddenly vanished.
Thirdly, the one and only case that was ever brought to criminal court was pretty obviously absurd from the beginning and driven by a sociopathic mother who made the kids call Michael Jackson "daddy" for a long while until she decided he was a bad man. Her inconsistent stories and the puppeteering of her kids killed any credibility to any of the accusations made in that particular case. It's notable that it's the only case Michael Jackson actually fought in court. The rest of the time, families were quietly paid off to go away under strict non-disclosure agreements which quickly ended any potential prosecutions arising from them.
Numerous accusations of sexual molestation of young boys and the only one he ever contested was a farce from the start.
Multiple accusations followed by multiple payouts and a televised admission from a grown man that he shares his bed with young boys.
You don't pay out $20 Million in hush money to just one family (in addition to all the others paid off) unless there's something to hush.
And another thing, this isn't about pedophilia. I don't care what's in someone's head; I care about what they do. If Michael Jackson were just a pedophile who never acted on his impulses, then good for him for overcoming biological screwups to maintain human decency. But regardless of what was going through his head, it's pretty damned obvious what he was up to with those boys. We can debate all day about the extent of his inappropriate relationships with boys, but he admitted some level of inappropriateness on television and paid tens of millions of dollars to families to keep information related to those inappropriate relationships from reaching public ears.
So while you can accuse me of anything you want, you cannot accurately state that I've admitted to inappropriate relationships with young boys on television and you cannot accurately state that I've paid tens of millions in hush money to families of young boys that stayed overnight with me at my secluded residence. All of those things can be accurately stated when speaking about Michael Jackson.
And thus we see the true colors of our society. So long as you can sing, dance, and entertain the world, molesting children and then paying off their parents to make criminal cases go away is just fine with us. You can even come right out and proclaim in televised interviews that you're carrying on inappropriate relationships with children; we'll still either deny or ignore it.
I see all this outpouring of sympathy all over the web for a pedophile who molested children with impunity for years on end and all I can think is that all those Catholic priests should have taken some classes at an art school before doing what they did as it probably would have saved the church some money. I don't care how well you sing or dance. I don't care if you cure Cancer. The moment you start molesting children, society should throw you to the wolves.
That 2-3% loss is probably over a given line of distance X. You're not accounting for all the transformers, stations, substations, etc that the power is needlessly going through because California (more specifically, the citizens of California) won't allow much local power generation at all.
Besides, even if it were only 2-3% of the total imported power for California, it would still amount to 1,530GWh - 2,300GWh in 2008. With that in mind, there's always this: "California also used to have another nuclear power plant, the Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station, which produced more than 900 MW. However, it was shut down, and replaced with a solar power plant that produces less than 4 MW." (http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_2_californias_environmentalism.html)
Your parent is right. There does exist a set of clueless people who straight filter based on RBL's like SORBS. Sure, filter your home mail server any way you want, but the *second* you have third-party people using your system (or the second you run the mail server for a business), you should be outright fired for filtering based solely on something like SORBS.
That is because I dont waste my time calling you. I call your boss and your sales department. If you really are running a business mail server and filtering based on SORBS, you are basically clueless and I'll gain nothing talking to you Your sales staff though, I'm sure they'd be happy to know you are blocking my customers inquiries into your companies products. And I'm probably also sure that if you are the type who filters like that, they probably have a bunch of other issues with the way you run their systems and this just might be the straw that broke the camels back.
I think you're misreading things a bit. First of all, nearly all modern RBLs are absolutely nothing like SORBS. They work on multiple reports, expire quickly, and narrowly target IPs being used to send spam. Once in a long while you might catch a Comcast or AOL mail server in there, but not very often anymore. Great care and research should be done before implementing any new filtering to ensure it won't create an unacceptably high number of false positives. That's common sense. What isn't common sense is that there are plenty of IP and content URL blacklists which are plenty reliable enough for virtually anyone to confidently use as concrete walls in their filtering scheme.
I admin mail servers which have a total of about 1,200 mailboxes spread over around 100 domains. As they're all small to medium size businesses, there are two simple facts I have to keep in mind: 1) that every piece of spam making it into their employees' inboxes reduced productivity and costs them money and 2) that every false positive has the potential to lose us that customer (assuming it were to create enough of a problem). Well over a million messages a day hit the mail servers I admin, and roughly 96% of those messages never reach my customers because they're filtered as spam. So how do you reliably make all of it work? It's a combination of multi-tiered filters (some of which include blacklists of various sorts) and whitelists, tailored to each customers' individual needs.
For instance, if you're a local ice cream shop who doesn't want or care for any contact outside the country, I'm going to block IP ranges tentatively identified as being from regions high in spam production for your domain. That means China, Russia, and a whole host of others are being cut off right from the start. That's fine for the ice cream shop because they don't care about anyone who isn't local and if a message or two gets dropped here and there due to geo-location issues, then they're just fine with that. But what of the electronic parts manufacturer with regional offices all over the world (including a plant in China)? Well, you can't do country filtering for them at all. Missing email from a potential customer in Moscow could mean thousands of dollars or more of profits out the window in a flash. What you do is let the other filters carry more of a burden and lower their expectations for how much spam is going to end up being filtered. Finding each company's balance between avoiding spam and avoiding false positives is important. The vast majority of my users see less than three spam emails a day in their inbox and probably average a false positive once every three months or so. The ones who are hyper-sensitive about false positives see a bit more of their spam and never have false positives (so far as I'm aware).
What are the two biggest tricks to making it work? 1) Whitelists created specifically for your customers and 2) k
Any mail admin who's depending in any significant way on the anti-spam wasteland of SORBS should be on their way to apply for jobs at local fast food restaurants as soon as possible. Even if someone handling spam control for a decent size business actually believed in SORBS' accuracy or effectiveness, the only effect of SORBS disappearing from the face of the Earth should have is a slight uptick in spam being caught by filters slightly further down the path to their users' mailboxes.
Seriously, is there anyone out there who isn't use a multi-tiered, inter-connected array of spam filtering methods at this stage of the game? ~96% of the mail going to my users is spam. My worst offender has some ~5300 messages a day of spam being filtered prior to reaching their inbox. If my best filter were rendered worthless tomorrow, I wouldn't expect to hear any complaints from users. (of course, I'd be pretty unhappy.)
I think honeypots are probably my best weapon again spammers at the moment, followed by my keyword blacklists.
It's called "we want electricity but we're going to protest any time someone wants to build something that produces electricity in our state because we're so super environmentally friendly that we'd rather drag power from halfway across the country from an ancient, smog and carbon spewing coal plant losing tons of power to transfer loss rather than build clean energy production in our own back yard".
Californomics - not for the feint of heart, the light of wallet, or the comprehending of basic math.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that a liberal state legislature like Washington state's would look to taxation as the solution to any and all problems. Spending more money than you have? Raise taxes. Underestimate costs of various state functions? Taxes. Kids drinking too much alcohol? Tax it to the tune of >50% of the total cost between local, state, and Federal taxes. Kids downloading music? Hit them with tax evasion.
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, regulate it.
If it stops moving, subsidize it.