Management that actually has a clue would be good, agreed.
I got sucked into a project that is, in effect (and IMHO:) downgrading our ability to monitor some of the systems we host for other companies. The *only* reason is to bring us in line with the rest of the company. In fact, according to one of the instigators, if we took on board a client who was using absolutely the best monitoring tools ever built, yep, we'd downgrade them too...
My point? The project manager seems to be a whiz at using MS Project and associated tools, but he knows absolutely nothing about any of the monitoring tools. In the 5 months or so since we started, he hadn't even seen the monitor displays until last week... I suppose that's what you get when you have a group who's only function is project management - their only expertise lies in being project managers, and they don't have to be too bright for that.
When I first came across named pipes I set up a program that would run '/usr/games/fortune' and send the output to the pipe. Anyone fingering me was pretty much guaranteed to get something different every time.
All good points. However, you're assuming that our hypothetical terrorist isn't capable of hanging one or more stages on the receiver. For example, a filter that passes a particular audio frequency coupled to a timer that fires the detonator after the signal has been received continuously for a certain length of time.
And as several other people pointed out, any radio trigger wouldn't have to be limited to cellphone frequencies.
When he visits the UK, it costs the British taxpayer $8.5 million for security (meanwhile, UK visitors to the US can look forward to such fun as photographing and fingerprinting, but that's another story)
A better comparison would be an estimate of how much the US would spend if Queen Elizabeth were to make a state visit to the US. But then, I expect the Queen's own security people have a better idea about minimising terrorists threats. They've been dealing with IRA terrorists for a lot longer than than the US has.
The police have this nifty gadget called a radio..
Which raises an interesting point - is this a broad spectrum jammer, or just cellphones?? You can get:
1) low power walkie-talkies in Walmart for a few bucks. Range is maybe 100 yards, which would be enough. 2) radio control for model aircraft. Range is 1/2 mile or more and it would be really easy to make a servo operate a switch. 3) it really isn't very difficult to make a spark-gap transmitter, with a wide-spectrum frequency range.
Any of those would be sufficient to remotely trigger an explosive device. And over at Scitoys.com there's a very simple design for a laser communicator made from a laser pointer and a solar cell...
I wonder if the author of Sasser can sue the author of Dabber
I'd imagine that the author of Sasser would have to provide convincing proof that he wrote Sasser before any judge award damages. Of course, he'd then have any number of anti-terrorist agencies fighting for a slice of his hide and he'd be lucky if he ever got to spend the money...
From a cube-mate who recently bought a boat: Watercraft are also taxed in this manner (here in VA).
I guess anything for which you need to get a state license could be liable for tax in the same way. Never mind that you may have bartered three cows and a goat for your neighbours raft, if the state requires you to license it before it hits the water, they've got you cold.
...so how you'd levy a custom duty on, say, a product that was coded by Indian employees of a company based in California would be interesting.
And if those Indian programmers were developing that software on servers physically located in California, it would be much more difficult to figure customs duty...
He's trying to erase the distinction between software that is sold and that which is licensed and is proposing to tax the licensing fees.
So that's going to be on everything, then? Just about all software sold has a EULA (End User License Agreement), so you buy the media and a license to use whatever is on it.
I think you'll find that the "sale" you pay tax on is when you buy the right to sole usage of the vehicle for a set period of time. What Illinois is considering is the equivalent of making you pay tax on the value of the car...
And, I believe that diesels can produce up into the 40 MPG range (e.g. VW Passat).
Better than that, I think. I remember reading an article in a motoring magazine about 14 years ago about a road test they ran on a Citroen AX diesel engine car. They fitted it out with all the latest fuel efficiency parts and drove it around. They were getting something like 120mpg (yep, one hundred twenty miles per gallon). I'm not sure if that was highway or city...:)
The article was posted on the wall at Lucas Powertrain Systems in Cirencester, where they were developing a high-pressure diesel pump to push the fuel into the engine, as well as sensors and electronics to monitor each cylinder and meter fuel according to the efficiency of the cylinder. I guess they posted the article for our reading pleasure because the car was loaded with Lucas parts...
Alternatively, my work desktop has just been replaced by a laptop with a standard software load that includes XP and Office. The laptop has builtin 10/100/1000 ethernet, wireless, 1Gb memory, DVD+RW and widescreen LCD. Furthermore, company policy is that employees with laptops *must* take them home (or chain them to the desk). Sad, really...:)
Sure, I'm effectively oncall 24x7, but I work 3rd shift, so I'm awake and in the office between midnight to 8am anyway, and nobody *ever* calls during the day, because there's a bunch of day time folks on hand... In the unlikely event that the office building gets trashed, us techies can provide "distributed" support from all over town. Most of our servers are safe in their underground bunkers with redundant power and net connections, so we don't really need to be in the building at all.
Unless the price of XP came down recently (yeah, that'll happen, uh huh...:) I'd think a firewall/router would be cheaper. It doesn't really matter what I'm running at home, the only ports touchable by the outside world are several high numbers that map to SSH internally, and those only connect when the systems they point to are booted to Linux instead of Windows.
I haven't yet had a problem that wasn't attributable to some third party software installed off a legit CD... The Sims, for example, seems to steal the file extension used in Win98 by the "Show Desktop" button on the taskbar.
Microsoft should set the updates to automatically remove the operating system from anyone who is not a legit user.
So, just how long d'you think it would be before a worm came along that surreptitiously patched legit copies of Windows with a pirated key?? No obvious immediate effect, but sudden death next time it was updated...
That might or might not reduce the number of pirated copies, but it would sure as hell piss off a vast percentage of the mom-and-pop type users, who'd be faced with taking the PC back to Walmart/Best Buy/Curcuit City/Gateway, or be talked through a reinstall by a call center after waiting on the phone for several hours.
still leaves plenty of infected machines elsewhere, in countries that such legal measures don't reach
Does the Great Firewall of China work both ways? I mean, we've all heard about China trying to regulate what its citizens are allowed to see via the Internet, but what about the opposite direction? Can the telcos that provide network pipes into China just cut them off, or maybe just lock down the ports being used by worms, so that the rest of the world isn't affected by all those pirated copies of Windows?
That definitely should be taken into account. Not everyone has extensive contacts they can call at any time for random information. Not every library is close-by, and they're certainly not usually open 24x7x365.
According to the article, from now on if the RIAA loses track of an artist, the royalty money goes into a state bank account. The theory is that once the artist (or artist's family) are located, New York forks over their share without them having to fight the RIAA for it.
Prior to this, the money presumably sat in the RIAA's bank accounts and accrued lots of interest. I didn't notice anything in the article saying if the artists get a slice of the interest as well, or just their overdue payments.
While this will be great for a lot of artists I question the motive. I doubt that Eliot Spitzer is doing this for artists. I'm sure New York state will benefit from the interest revenue from "hold[ing] these monies.
Well, somebody is going to benefit from having the royalty money salted away in the bank, and ya know, on the whole I think I'd prefer it to be New York State. Or d'you think the RIAA is handing over the interest revenue along with the overdue payments??
Luckily, I'm not one of the poor bastards supporting Wintel boxes. I didn't see it, but apparently all our monitoring systems were constantly rebooting, except for the one running RedHat. I'll be putting a couple more like that into use Real Soon.:)
Where I work, the policy is that old desktops are upgraded to new laptops, and you are required to take the damn thing home... Mmmm, Dell M60 - poor me...:) Policy also mandates a virus checker and personal firewall software, which are also supplied and enabled by default. I think the plan is that if some maniac manages to "anthrax" the office building, we all dial in from home.
There is a threat of dire consequences for anyone NOT using the supplied firewall and virus checker.
I think that trend started at least as far back as the
Morris worm in 1988. Several teams of researchers began converting the worm code back into compilable source form. They found a number of bugs and, IIRC, even posted bug fixes.
Yep, that's fer sure. Last round of updates broke all our CA Unicenter infrastructure, which forced us to update to a newer version of Unicenter before we were really ready for it.
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I got sucked into a project that is, in effect (and IMHO :) downgrading our ability to monitor some of the systems we host for other companies. The *only* reason is to bring us in line with the rest of the company. In fact, according to one of the instigators, if we took on board a client who was using absolutely the best monitoring tools ever built, yep, we'd downgrade them too...
My point? The project manager seems to be a whiz at using MS Project and associated tools, but he knows absolutely nothing about any of the monitoring tools. In the 5 months or so since we started, he hadn't even seen the monitor displays until last week... I suppose that's what you get when you have a group who's only function is project management - their only expertise lies in being project managers, and they don't have to be too bright for that.
When I first came across named pipes I set up a program that would run '/usr/games/fortune' and send the output to the pipe. Anyone fingering me was pretty much guaranteed to get something different every time.
And as several other people pointed out, any radio trigger wouldn't have to be limited to cellphone frequencies.
Standard terrorist kit would then include a rocket launcher to take out the jammer. Better to mount the thing on a vehicle in the convoy.
A better comparison would be an estimate of how much the US would spend if Queen Elizabeth were to make a state visit to the US. But then, I expect the Queen's own security people have a better idea about minimising terrorists threats. They've been dealing with IRA terrorists for a lot longer than than the US has.
1) low power walkie-talkies in Walmart for a few bucks. Range is maybe 100 yards, which would be enough.
2) radio control for model aircraft. Range is 1/2 mile or more and it would be really easy to make a servo operate a switch.
3) it really isn't very difficult to make a spark-gap transmitter, with a wide-spectrum frequency range.
Any of those would be sufficient to remotely trigger an explosive device. And over at Scitoys.com there's a very simple design for a laser communicator made from a laser pointer and a solar cell...
I'd imagine that the author of Sasser would have to provide convincing proof that he wrote Sasser before any judge award damages. Of course, he'd then have any number of anti-terrorist agencies fighting for a slice of his hide and he'd be lucky if he ever got to spend the money...
And if those Indian programmers were developing that software on servers physically located in California, it would be much more difficult to figure customs duty...
So that's going to be on everything, then? Just about all software sold has a EULA (End User License Agreement), so you buy the media and a license to use whatever is on it.
I think you'll find that the "sale" you pay tax on is when you buy the right to sole usage of the vehicle for a set period of time. What Illinois is considering is the equivalent of making you pay tax on the value of the car...
Better than that, I think. I remember reading an article in a motoring magazine about 14 years ago about a road test they ran on a Citroen AX diesel engine car. They fitted it out with all the latest fuel efficiency parts and drove it around. They were getting something like 120mpg (yep, one hundred twenty miles per gallon). I'm not sure if that was highway or city... :)
The article was posted on the wall at Lucas Powertrain Systems in Cirencester, where they were developing a high-pressure diesel pump to push the fuel into the engine, as well as sensors and electronics to monitor each cylinder and meter fuel according to the efficiency of the cylinder. I guess they posted the article for our reading pleasure because the car was loaded with Lucas parts...
Sure, I'm effectively oncall 24x7, but I work 3rd shift, so I'm awake and in the office between midnight to 8am anyway, and nobody *ever* calls during the day, because there's a bunch of day time folks on hand... In the unlikely event that the office building gets trashed, us techies can provide "distributed" support from all over town. Most of our servers are safe in their underground bunkers with redundant power and net connections, so we don't really need to be in the building at all.
I haven't yet had a problem that wasn't attributable to some third party software installed off a legit CD... The Sims, for example, seems to steal the file extension used in Win98 by the "Show Desktop" button on the taskbar.
So, just how long d'you think it would be before a worm came along that surreptitiously patched legit copies of Windows with a pirated key?? No obvious immediate effect, but sudden death next time it was updated...
That might or might not reduce the number of pirated copies, but it would sure as hell piss off a vast percentage of the mom-and-pop type users, who'd be faced with taking the PC back to Walmart/Best Buy/Curcuit City/Gateway, or be talked through a reinstall by a call center after waiting on the phone for several hours.
Does the Great Firewall of China work both ways? I mean, we've all heard about China trying to regulate what its citizens are allowed to see via the Internet, but what about the opposite direction? Can the telcos that provide network pipes into China just cut them off, or maybe just lock down the ports being used by worms, so that the rest of the world isn't affected by all those pirated copies of Windows?
That definitely should be taken into account. Not everyone has extensive contacts they can call at any time for random information. Not every library is close-by, and they're certainly not usually open 24x7x365.
Prior to this, the money presumably sat in the RIAA's bank accounts and accrued lots of interest. I didn't notice anything in the article saying if the artists get a slice of the interest as well, or just their overdue payments.
Well, somebody is going to benefit from having the royalty money salted away in the bank, and ya know, on the whole I think I'd prefer it to be New York State. Or d'you think the RIAA is handing over the interest revenue along with the overdue payments??
Luckily, I'm not one of the poor bastards supporting Wintel boxes. I didn't see it, but apparently all our monitoring systems were constantly rebooting, except for the one running RedHat. I'll be putting a couple more like that into use Real Soon. :)
There is a threat of dire consequences for anyone NOT using the supplied firewall and virus checker.
I think that trend started at least as far back as the Morris worm in 1988. Several teams of researchers began converting the worm code back into compilable source form. They found a number of bugs and, IIRC, even posted bug fixes.
Chances are, if it breaks one machine it'll break a whole department, if not the whole company. That'll look really swell on your resume...
Yeah, but if the precint network is fucked by the same vulnerability, they still don't get the data they need...