I find it hard to believe that they school was stopping you from reading ahead in your textbooks --surely if you had really truely wanted to go at your won pace you could have.
Not my school. I was actually punished for reading ahead textbooks in 5th grade, because it was "unfair to the other students." My crime? Reading ahead in the science book. We were supposed to gather up "properties of minerals," and I already knew their names because I read ahead. I also "confused" students by claiming that pencils did not contain lead, but graphite. When the textbook later agreed with me, saying "see?" got me sent to the principal. I recall getting an exasperated lecture by the principal on this topic which boiled down to, "You won't understand what you read, and so when the teacher eventually comes to it, you'll be all messed up, think your own thoughts, and not get the right answer out of it." I didn't believe him then, either. To this day I still read textbooks with a slightly naughty thrill to it.
My best friend Neal was even braver in 6th grade. They divided us into math groups (for reasons I never understood), and our group leader was a teacher who always gave the same exercises to do for homework. "Do all the exercises, odd numbered only." Shortly after Neal realized this never changed, he started going ahead. By Christmas break, he completed the whole math book, and when it was time to turn in homework, he'd just pull out the page he had done from his notebook and handed it in. He wasn't "caught" until about three weeks before the end of the school year when the teacher ran short on the lesson, and said we could do homework in class that day. Neal read a book instead. The teacher said he was being impudent, and Neal said he already did the homework. She called him a liar, and he then proceeded to hand it to her. She became angry, and demanded to know how he did it so fast. Neal explained that he had already done it back in December, and showed her the rest of the homework for the year. The teacher was outraged, took it as a personal insult for some reason, and demanded Neal hand in all the homework at once, where she tore it up in front of the class (she wasn't normally such a mean control freak, so this scared a lot of us). She called in his parents for a conference and everything (this is one of their family legends). In the end, Neal just did the homework, and only brought one paper a day to school.
Neal was my hero. Now he's married with two kids, teaching linguistics, still just as brave and smart.
Yeah, security all right. I'm sure 99% of the 14 year old skript kiddiez making and downloading these things are "security" minded.
And thus, I want a copy. As others have joked, by the very definition of a "skript kiddie" (unskilled cracker dependent on the tools of others), something like this is way out of their league. But I assume you might have meant, "People who do illegal things to computers who could use such a convenient CD where all the free tools online are in one place."
Well, they are going to do use it, whether it's wrong or not, and if LAS doesn't do it, someone else will (and has). And I want the same tools to test my firewalls and stuff to make SURE that it's hard to break into my network. Nothing will ever be hack-proof, but if you can make it hard for illegal entry, the crook will look elsewhere for something easier. And tools like these give me the same tools the crooks have, and the advantage I have is that I don't need time to "sniff" for anything to deduce which items to crack, since I already know what machines are senistive. I can just use an Ethereal capture pointed at an IP or MAC and see what it's sending out. Try and hack my own wireless connection with Kismet. And so on.
It's all in intent, and how you use it. I use tools like thse to trace stray DHCP servers, look for illegal Kazaa use, or find out who's trying to hack my firewall.
A prybar is not illegal. Forcing open a loose door on property you don't own or beating someone to death with it is illegal. But you don't see people banning prybars at Home Depot.
... and I liked it. So did a coworker, who then stole it. There's irony in there somewhere...
Some other good Security LiveCD distros are Knoppix STD and P.H.L.A.K. But I mainly use Knoppix (which also has kismet and nmap), and when I want speed, SLAX is very good.
...which itself is an homage to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
THANK YOU! Man, for the last day I have been wondering where the original quote came from. I knew it was in Blazing Saddles, but knew even in that film it was a reference to something else.
.......
Buddy Bizarre: Cut! Cut! Cut!
Taggart: Fuck You! I work for Mel Brooks!
I was 21, at the Bessel machine at the University of Maryland, when I got my shell account. It was a Sun System V, I think, and I had a version of csh. My job was to check for core dumps, and do network testing for the admin. Real basic stuff. I browsed ftp and gopherspace with ARCHIE and VERONICA. Anyone remember WAIS? Panda?
Before that, BBSs. Mostly WWIV, Nightline, and a few other types of software. I helped set up a Fidonet once, which had a crossover into the 'Net, and another time, was a tech guy for Caffnet, a POD-like network a friend of mine set up.
Back when I did contract work, I always told my employers, via public e-mail, to change the system passwords, and then listen which systems I had access to. This way, if they ever got hacked, I could always say, "Well, I *told* you to change them..."
I'm not sure anymore if that would help, but I know at least one company never changed their passwords because their vendors kept paging me, up to a year later, to "go into the system and make these changes." One of the vendor contacts and I had became good friends, and one day he begged, "We can't get in, and those bozos won't answer our pages." So I told them the last password I had, stating it probably wouldn't work. Nope, he got right in. Root access to a major gateway.
And the password was easy too, like abc123 "That's the combo on my luggage" easy. Considering this gateway controlled 48 T1 lines to a large call center, I shudder to think how it could be used if phreaked.
This has nothing to do with outsourcing to India, but a retail company where I worked back in 1991, during the previous Bush recession...
Our company, which sold kitchen gadgets, had actually been doing well into the recession, and it surprised a lot of us. Stores in the mall all around us were closing down, and we were doing okay. Then, suddenly, we weren't. Our company tried franchising, and it was a DISASTER, and the owners lost a lot of money. We opened up two "mega-stores" which both flopped.
We had this guy, called a "district manager," which was weird because we only had one district. He was this gung-ho, send-'em-to-seminars kind of guy who was used to his big bonuses every year. Around when things got bad is when he taught himself spreadsheet software, and started whacking away at all costs the spreadsheet told him to without reguard to whther it was actually a good idea or not. He cut staff drastically. The management (including me) protested, and proved how this made a bad problem worse, but this only seemed to make him more determined, and he got sneaky.
He sent this "new guy" to my store, and asked me to train him to become an manager like myself. This guy was just awful. He was arrogant, didn't bathe, and right off the bat told me outright he would have my job. At first I thought, "Yeah, you won't last a week here." I was one of the top three salespeople in the chain as well as assistant manager. Two weeks later, I wrote him up because of some serious infraction, with the intent of letting him go, being the worst employee I had ever trained, but for some reason upper management wouldn't let me fire him. Even though a background check showed he was wanted in a nearby county for theft and appraisal fraud. You guys can see where this was going. Yeah, he WAS my replacement. Later I found out he was going to do my job for minimum wage, which was about half of what I made.
Then the company sent me to a "penalty store," which is a store that is in a terrible spot, doesn't do well, has serious building problems, etc... basically, it was an attempt to make me quit. But I was too stupid to see the writing on the wall, so I got "changed to hourly," which meant a pay cut, no commission, and suddenly my pay was determined by upper management. My hour allotment got smaller and smaller, until "they didn't have hours for me" for a whole month. So I filed unemployement.
The company denied I was laid off, and said I was only a contractor. The deputy who handled the case had them on speakerphone, and at some point they were stalling, she said, "Mr. Walrus, you'll get unemployment. I see this happen all the time, they just don't want to pay the taxes or unemployment." So I got my unemployment and a hard, stinging lesson.
Afterwards, they decided I made it too hard, so they fired all the rest of the staff one by one for the weirdest stuff. Like the top salesman in the chain was fired because a "surprise secret audit" showed the register was missing $10, and so they threatened to put him in jail if he ever tried to claim unemployment. He sued and won.
And the guy who replaced me? Tried to rob them blind. He stole account numbers from all the company's vendors, and made HUGE orders shipped to a Mailbox Etc address. Luckily for the company, one of the vendors tipped them off, and because of the amount of money involved, the police got involved, and set up a sting. He must have gotten wind of it, because before the shipments were sent, he fled town and was never seen again.
At another company, years later, I was at the receiving end. The first day of work was the day the girl I was replacing was told she was being fired in 2 weeks. That was pretty stressful.
I have seen stuff like this in the tech industry when I started in the mid 1990's, too. My second job I was at a QA company where they asked us to document everything we did when testing software. We did, and then they outsourced our jobs to Tucson, where people th
No kidding, you can get away with anything by using salary as a defense. I used to work for a company that was based on "Good Ol' Boy" rules from Texas (Cargo Furniture, division of Tandycrafts, who put tiny crate-style furniture showrooms in malls). That was work 48hours, six days a week. Of course, we had a staff of three to run a whole store, so this was broken up by two full timers (a manager and assistant manager) and one part timer. Luckily (or unluckily) the stores were usually empty (and thus, no longer around), so crowds were not a problem. The part timer was only there so no one, in theory, had to work a full 12-hour day.
The salary went like this: they said it was hourly, but they paid you overtime. I can't recall why they paid you hourly, but there was some odd tax thing of salary vs. hourly. So, as a manager I got paid:
(40hrs x 1.0 x $7.00 = $280 for "normal time") + (8hrs x 1.5 x $7.00 = $ 84 for "overtime") = $364/week = $18,928 a year as "salary"
Now, it was never explained why we were paid hourly, because if you worked 50, 60, or 80 hours in one week (like your assistant was on vacation), you didn't get overtime. But on your paycheck was your hourly wage. But it was salary. You had to clock in, too, but you weren't allowed to report the real hours and so the timecards never matched anything in reality.
Now, tell someone you want hire, "We'll pay you less than what people around here are getting paid for assistants, but you have to work six days a week, 48 hours a day." Then tell a part timer he or she's getting minimum wage and can only work no more than 10 hours a week. I never got many applicants, and many managers were totally starved for staff. 80 hour weeks were common. Those who had a staff often worked other stores that didn't have staff just so the only employee could get a day off. For nothing. My record was 2 months of 12-hour days with no time off, and I wasn't even close to the record holder. It was insane.
Confused? Yeah, those who questioned the legality of it got fired. This was back during Bush Sr's recession of the early 90s, so I was happy to have a job at all (previously, I had been unemployed for 2 years, and was living in the projects - I could NOT afford to be choosy about my employer).
Wall-Mart uses the same tactics. They hire people for low wages, and those that agree they know are too stupid, have no self-confidence, or otherwise unable to get a job elsewhere, either because of local economies, or previous employer problems. In fact, if you DO sue a company for defrauding you, good luck getting a job elsewhere! Maybe that's not legal, or even true in some states, but try telling that to your average Wall-Mart employee, who wasn't able to get a better job in the first place. They may bitch about having rights, but they can't afford to go to court if they want to also put food on their table.
1. US Customs demands ID and fingerprints for all vistors to our country 2. ??? 3. Aliens demand anal probing for all visitors on their spaceship
I sense a connection... I can't... quite... make... the ends... meet.... but I feel it in the air!
Where's George Carlin when you need him?
God damn you Bush. God damn your inept cowardace, God damn you for making a national tragedy even worse, and God damn me for not being able to do anything. We got to take this country back, everyone. This is what happens when we don't vote, and the candiate's "gene pool" waters down through lack of better selection each election. I am so humiliated and embarrassed by my country leadership, like that fat uncle at family reunions who gets drunk and restarts fights that were settled back in 1972. "All I wanted was $50 to get a lousy bus ticket back from Vegas! But nooooo!"
A friend of mine and I talked about this once, because he wanted to quit smoking. I referred him to Snopes and Straight Dope, and that make him go towards the Nicotine patch, and that worked really well, and he's been smoke-free now for 4 years.
But while researching this, I found other links that described various methods to learning foreign languages, and some of them, not surprisingly, suggested that you should use subliminal methods to "boost" your active learning. Many of these CDs were bogus, IMHO. But one of them didn't claim to be subliminal per se, and simply played music over a repeated series of conversations that were not subliminal (you could definitely hear them), but contained various base vocabulary words. Each conversation was about 4-5 minutes long, and they would be repeated by people at various speeds and regional accents, and used phrases one might need to hold a conversation at a shop, restaurant, business meeting, and so on. Another site had a guy who said he did a "fake immersion" scenario, by listening to the foreign language (usually news) on shortwave radio as he slept. Even though he didn't know most of the words spoken, he picked up a correct accent and got "the tone and pentameter" of the language which make his transition to a new language much easier.
I have never tried any of these methods myself, so I don't know if they work.
I'm a network programmer/analyst by trade, and I love my job. I didn't get into IT for the money, I got it before the big bubble started, but that was because the retail situation in the early 90s sucked ass, and I wanted a real job. The only way the dot.com bubble helped is that when it started, I was already entrenched, rode the wave, and was smart enough to sell off most of my tech shares before 2000 and buy a house, which has increased almost 40% in equity since then.
I love problem solving. Always have. Programming and analyzing data lets me do that. Maybe I'll burn out someday, but by then, I'll be doing something else. My biggest fear is not losing my job for the money, but for losing job satisfaction. Believe it or not, I used to have that in retail. I loved making customers happy. I was usually a top salesman, big-time manager, and so on, but the company I left was so poorly managed, it reminds me of what a lot of Slashdot posters mention about their jobs. They got this "fuck the long-term customer, go for short-term profit!" and I felt dirty and cheap, and the thrill was gone. Then when my district manager told me that for the first time, she made more than the 1040EZ tax form would allow (which was $26,000 at the time), I realized I was in the wrong business to support a family. I started out as a call center rep (solving problems and doing customer service, w00t!), and in less than a year, I made more than she did. My salary has tripled since then.
My attitude has kept me employed, too. I have seen all the burnouts get laid off. The biggest problem with the dot.com boom was that our job environment got flooded with money-grubbing people who hated tech. Like people who become doctors for the money, but hate patients ("Sick, again? How dare that patient die on me!").
When I was growing up, there were a lot of "ESP Kits" that had crude monitors that supposedly measured brain waves for a new-age fad called "Biofeedback." Mostly they were for helping you get into a medictate trance, but one of them claimed to run a race car slot track based on Alpha Waves (state of relaxed brain activity in mediation), so the the excitiment of winning made you go slower, and not giving a crap whether you won or not made you win. Seemed like a pretty odd balance. That might have been good to learn "the ultimate poker face."
Having never owned one of those biofeedback devices, I can't say if they ever worked, but I saw lots of ads for them in the mid-late 1970s in magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics.
Not all hunt-n-peck typers are slow ones. I HnP at 60-65 wpm, for instance. Fast touchty pers often make mistakes with ddouble letters ands pacees (well, if they don't go back and correct them). Misordered spelling, if not consistent, is usually a sign of a HnP (which is how my typing teacher knew I was cheating).
See, and this is a good case of how just a few posts can throw me off balance. This reply alone was not what I expected, but then again, I didn't try very hard.
I guessed you hated the USA very incorrectly, for instance, because of several posts you had made about the US privacy intrusion (which is why I agree with much of what you say). In fact, the only reason I said you visited the US more than twice was I recalled a survey of people who live in Toronto who visit the US a lot. That's what "psychics" and psychologists do all the time. "I see you recently have had a struggle within yourself you cannot solve..." Well, DUH! Why would you go see a tarot reader and a psychologist, otherwise? But you'd be surprised (okay, maybe not you) how many people would go, "Yeah... that's right! You're good!" Anyway, I guessed you lived in Toronto because of a post you made about people trashing hotels with fraudulent names, where you dropped a comment about Homer Simpson ruining Hojos in Toronto. I figured you were either a person who worked for a credit card company, or for the hotel itself, but I didn't think someone who worked for a hotel would post on Slashdot at the hours you do unless they didn't sleep. I was partially on the mark about technical support for POS, but partially is still mostly wrong.:)
I don't think people always say the opposite of what they really mean. I'd be curious to hear why you think that. I mean, I'll agree, it's true for some people, not for all people, but that's a case-by-case sort of thing.
And now if I do a profile based on you, it would be pointless for two reasons: one, I see some places where I already was wrong, and two, you have already stated you cover your tracks and "fall into the other 1%". But then again, you're not a jerk. Jerks by nature are much, much easier to figure out because they are predictable, and don't have a grip on social civility.
And for the record, no, I don't work for any Dollar Store HQ. I work for a major QA Systems lab, where I test network connectivity for many major vendors, which is why I can't reveal where I work, or suddenly... I might get gift baskets, free hardware, and other bribes. "Please accept this HP Laptop... oh, no no, no strings attached! In fact, do you have children? I bet they'd love free tickets to..."
Hmmm... well, an A for effort. A quick search around the web would show I live in Virginia, but based on that post, that is a good start.:) You have the right idea. I do like OpenBSD, for instance.
As an example, I believe, based on a short search, there's a good chance that you're a Canadian, living and working in Toronto. You also work with a hotel company, probably in management or accounting. You have visited the US more than twice, but you don't like us very much (and, really, based on what you post about, I can't disagree). I could find out more, but I have no reason to violate your privacy, and anyway, I'm lazy.:)
I have also done a rough psychological profile on you, but the results indicate that posting such a profile might cause you to react defensively, so I won't (Don't worry, most people react that way, it's hard not to). But it's interesting how much detail people give about themselves when the post a lot on public boards (myself included).
For a (fake) example, suppose someone said on a board, "Treated differently? Your telling me! When I was in Washington State, my stuipd older sister has AGIAN fooled my parents into giving her more money." I could tell from that sentence that the person's relationship with their parents is strained, probably has authority distrust issues, probably has a negative opinion of women (especially in authority), and is insecure about money (most likely not having enough). I can also guess that they are a "hunt-n-peck"-typer, and while very well educated, probably did better in math/science than they did in English.
Of course, none of that is certain, and I'd have to collect various posts over a year or so to get a better picture. I have also found people online are VERY different in real life. Usually the biggest jerks online are quiet and shy in person. Arrogant people are usually ignorant, and so on.
Why collect this info? It's very easy to trace "double logins" this way, like users on a board who have two logins, and use them to start trouble, like "drumming up support" among their aliases. It's also easy to compare people across boards or various interactions, like, "That guy posting in your comments section of your journal sounds a LOT like the jerk we have been getting in IRC lately. What's his IP? Yeah. It's him." Moderators in various venues compare notes a lot.
... given time and persistence. I do network node testing for my company, and even phone calls can be traced if you know what switches are in use, and even so, you can go back through logs these days and make a connection. Data's even easier. The only way to truly protect yourself is make things harder than it's worth it to trace.
What people often forget is that social networking can corroborate what IP tracing already has shown.
For example, you post some comment on a web board. Your IP is logged. The Board moderator does a simple trace, and finds out within seconds what kind of connection you have, even if you signed off. Is it from an AOL modem pool? A DSL account? Those sorts of things are easy to find out.
So some hacker-wannabe uses some online modem pool with DHCP, so he's truly anonymous, no? No. See, the most COMMON mistake is that people who do these sorts of things are people you already know. Ex-boyfriend, some guy you pissed off at an anime con, and so on. If you work backwards by assuming that, ("Hmmm... call traced from DSL connection in Camden, NJ... we have a guy who we booted off the board last year from Camden...") and then compare it to other connections he makes, Usenet postings, referral logs, and so on... you can stack up a HUGE amount of evidence, even if it all might be declared "amazingly circumstantial" in court. Now it's up to the people who he's pissed off how much time and effort they want to put into getting back at the jerk.
I have also found that people who are jerks online are REALLY easy to trace, because if they were truly paranoid and intelligent, they'd keep a low profile and say nothing, never start flame wars, etc... Those who are good at computing, for instance, rarely get involved in computer flame wars because they know they don't have anything to prove. "Let this guy say Macs suck," they'll say. "Their loss!" A guy who is insecure about how little he knows about his FreeBSD box will often try and cover this up with being an ass, patronzining newbies, and so on. That's when the people in the IRC chat room trace his IP, hack his FreeBSD "firewall," find out he hasn't logged in since last year and wouldn't know a hacked box looks like if he saw one, and do whatever they think is appropriate.:)
Of course, I have always felt that the really good hackers are like black holes: we know scientifically they exist, and we see evidence of them, but due to their very nature, you can't actually SEE one in action.
What ever happened to these games? I d/l them both, and they not only booted up, and played the games, but played them well on several computers I ran them on.
I think in order for this to work, we need the following steps:
1. Release Linux like a Game CD you'd put in a Playstation or XBox. I often have to reboot to play a lot of games on my PC anyway, because of Window's poor memory management. Things still work better after a reboot, even in XP.
2. Have it save game files to floppy/USB flash card, or a partition on the hard drive. That way, the Gamer can carry the CD with him, or use a friends, but the game saves will be stored in his USB or floppy, just like a memory stick in a Gabecube, for instance.
3. On boot, just like Knoppix, configure the setup, then goes right to the GUI.
4. The GUI has a menu, maybe like:
a. Play game
b. Run GAIM/XMMS
c. Tweak settings
d. Redetect USB/Floppy saves
e. Advanced configuration
f. Really advanced (aka Linux with some GUI)
g. l33t 4dv4nd0rz (aka XTerm)
x. Shut down, eject CD, reboot
See, things like "f" and "g" will introduce kids to Linux like the command cheat codes and easter eggs in games now.
5. We're Open Source. All we need is for people to start thinking like gamers who can program, and we can turn stuff from Egoboo and bzflag (some of the native choices) into some really sweet FPS. Stop trying to copy what's popular, innovate!
6. Since Open Source is not a great marketing engine (at least yet), we'll have to go by word of mouth. The best way to do that is to make something so unique, that big name companies who worry about stuff like parental ratings and market share couldn't compete. Maybe have a FPS with incredible gore and violence, and maybe nudity. A very addicitve strategy or simulation game, like Civilization, Sim City, or something... but something that hasn't been done before, like My First Brothel.
Even better, start a secret campaign banning the game. Get it blacklisted by a church group. That will put it into the limelight real quick. Well, okay... maybe that's too far. The Republicans might denounce Linux as "spreading immorality to the youth." Forget I said that.
But you have to think like a marketing person. You have to:
1. Create need 2. Fulfill need 3. Sustain need
And I agree, games for Linux would really drive it. I mean, come on, who needs an ATI Radeon 9200 for MSOffice? Games have DRIVEN industries, and Linux should not be counted out.
But, and here's the clincher: is the Linux community ready to be popular? Remember when AOL let users onto Usenet? Think hard about this path.
The flexible circuits, built by using gold springs...
Wow. Just what we needed. Yet another use for Gold. You know, it being so damn plentiful and all. I was just saying to myself, as I threw away another gold can of soda, "I sure how they find a use for this stuff, because if not, Gold doesn't oxidize or break down very easily, and it will burst our landfills if we don't start a recycling program!" Maybe all those out-of-work gold miners can finally feel useful again, and not be he butt of environmentalist hate.
Why don't they ever find a great new way to use garbage?
I found OpenBSD so easy, it was virtually painless.
1. Burn floppy 2. Insert floppy into old hardware (in this case, a 486 DX4 100), reboot machine 3. OpenBSD boots from floppy. Asked me if I want to Install, upgrade, or cancel. I chose (I)nstall 4. Asked me which hard drive. 5. Gave me fdisk like partition manager. Listed whole drive as c with one bit "a" FAT16 partition. I deleted "a," entered in the partitions I needed, with "b" being my swap by default. Did w,q to write and quit. 6. Asked me to set up network interface, root password, etc... 7. Asked me which install type, I set up ftp, I selected the mirror closest to me, selected the packages I wanted, and then waited for install to complete (20 min on cable modem). 8. I took out the floppy, rebooted, and got a login prompt. 9. Signed in as root, and heeded "afterboot" security warning.
Then I installed bash with a simple add_pkg command, added non-root user, set up pf, found apache was installed and set up by default, changed forwarding to "1", slapped pfctl and apachectl to run, and wala! Working router/NAT/webserver in less than an hour.
No, I assure you that is an Indian problem [....] no level 1 American tech would be so stupid as to keep insisting that you insert a CD into a computer with a dead power supply.
Your faith is inspiring, but my experience differs, and I used to train people on the phones for an ISP. I had one guy, for instance, who blamed all modem outages with, "Was there a lightning storm in your area in the last month, sir? Well, your modem is fried..." He was from Virginia, not India, so I still don't know how that example could be an "Indian problem." Now, if he said, "Have you had any monsoon weather?" or "Did you ask her holiness, Sri Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, what she thought?" Now THAT would be more related to an Indian cultural miscommunication.
Go ahead -- keep outsourcing all the middle-class American jobs.
You can't look at it that way. Read the article. You can't outsource everything. Until they build really good remote controlled robots, they still need lots of hardware people, designers, and so on. All the grunt, back-end work is being done outside the US. Our goal is not to make sure everyone stays dumb and doing the same thing, but to educate people so they can get better jobs. Bettering yourself is the American way. Keeping everything the same and safe is more of a socialist way, and it's not doing France very much good.
All of these companies will screw themselves when there is nobody left to buy their products.
Then they will go out of business, and the outsourcing problem is moot. But in reality, those who outsource will save a TON of money. Pay a programmer $75,000 plus expenses, or pay three programmers $8,000 a piece and let another company worry about the free coffee? Dude, business wise, it's a no-brainer, and whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. Those companies that stay domestic will not be able to compete. Take the computer you are typing on right now. Who made it? Some US factory worker getting paid Union wages, or some factory worker in Taiwan, getting paid less a day than you paid for your lunch today? Say WidgetCo tried to make all their computers in the US. It would cost about $5000 to make one, once you factor in wages and changing the current supply line to the US (with tariffs, shipping, containment, storage, EPA, etc.). Get some people to do it in the Philippines, and that cost drops dramatically.
Like it or not, global labor is a commodity, like rice or orange juice. And no matter how tight we close our eyes, or shut other countries out with laws and trade discrimination, they are coming, and we can't stop being global if we're going to survive. Just look at China, as an example of not only the hypocrisy of xenophobia, but how it's hurting them as well.
If you want to stay the same, Sweden might be a great place to move, if you don't mind the huge tax rate such a "cradle to grave" policy must endure. But they do have a lot of great historical "living factories" and so on. I have been there, I know, and those who work at such places are as enthusiastic about things like centuries-old linen mills as you are now about IT jobs. Where did all the Swedish people go when linen production and distribution moved to another country? Just whither and die? No. They got other jobs, and I would never call Sweden a country of piss-poor unemployed people. They have a very high standard of well-educated living.
I know, you're scared. I'm scared. The IT industry is scared. But we will survive. Have faith in America, as well as your own ability to adapt. Don't waste your time with clutching your knowledge like handfuls of sand, but spend time figuring out what to do next.
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Not my school. I was actually punished for reading ahead textbooks in 5th grade, because it was "unfair to the other students." My crime? Reading ahead in the science book. We were supposed to gather up "properties of minerals," and I already knew their names because I read ahead. I also "confused" students by claiming that pencils did not contain lead, but graphite. When the textbook later agreed with me, saying "see?" got me sent to the principal. I recall getting an exasperated lecture by the principal on this topic which boiled down to, "You won't understand what you read, and so when the teacher eventually comes to it, you'll be all messed up, think your own thoughts, and not get the right answer out of it." I didn't believe him then, either. To this day I still read textbooks with a slightly naughty thrill to it.
My best friend Neal was even braver in 6th grade. They divided us into math groups (for reasons I never understood), and our group leader was a teacher who always gave the same exercises to do for homework. "Do all the exercises, odd numbered only." Shortly after Neal realized this never changed, he started going ahead. By Christmas break, he completed the whole math book, and when it was time to turn in homework, he'd just pull out the page he had done from his notebook and handed it in. He wasn't "caught" until about three weeks before the end of the school year when the teacher ran short on the lesson, and said we could do homework in class that day. Neal read a book instead. The teacher said he was being impudent, and Neal said he already did the homework. She called him a liar, and he then proceeded to hand it to her. She became angry, and demanded to know how he did it so fast. Neal explained that he had already done it back in December, and showed her the rest of the homework for the year. The teacher was outraged, took it as a personal insult for some reason, and demanded Neal hand in all the homework at once, where she tore it up in front of the class (she wasn't normally such a mean control freak, so this scared a lot of us). She called in his parents for a conference and everything (this is one of their family legends). In the end, Neal just did the homework, and only brought one paper a day to school.
Neal was my hero. Now he's married with two kids, teaching linguistics, still just as brave and smart.
And thus, I want a copy. As others have joked, by the very definition of a "skript kiddie" (unskilled cracker dependent on the tools of others), something like this is way out of their league. But I assume you might have meant, "People who do illegal things to computers who could use such a convenient CD where all the free tools online are in one place."
Well, they are going to do use it, whether it's wrong or not, and if LAS doesn't do it, someone else will (and has). And I want the same tools to test my firewalls and stuff to make SURE that it's hard to break into my network. Nothing will ever be hack-proof, but if you can make it hard for illegal entry, the crook will look elsewhere for something easier. And tools like these give me the same tools the crooks have, and the advantage I have is that I don't need time to "sniff" for anything to deduce which items to crack, since I already know what machines are senistive. I can just use an Ethereal capture pointed at an IP or MAC and see what it's sending out. Try and hack my own wireless connection with Kismet. And so on.
It's all in intent, and how you use it. I use tools like thse to trace stray DHCP servers, look for illegal Kazaa use, or find out who's trying to hack my firewall.
A prybar is not illegal. Forcing open a loose door on property you don't own or beating someone to death with it is illegal. But you don't see people banning prybars at Home Depot.
http://www.phlak.org/
Seems to be down currently, tho...
Some other good Security LiveCD distros are Knoppix STD and P.H.L.A.K. But I mainly use Knoppix (which also has kismet and nmap), and when I want speed, SLAX is very good.
THANK YOU! Man, for the last day I have been wondering where the original quote came from. I knew it was in Blazing Saddles, but knew even in that film it was a reference to something else.
Buddy Bizarre: Cut! Cut! Cut!
Taggart: Fuck You! I work for Mel Brooks!
Before that, BBSs. Mostly WWIV, Nightline, and a few other types of software. I helped set up a Fidonet once, which had a crossover into the 'Net, and another time, was a tech guy for Caffnet, a POD-like network a friend of mine set up.
Heh... good times.
More on topic, my favorite RFC's:
Etymology of "Foo"
The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)
And who can forget A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers
? Packet by pigeon...
I'm not sure anymore if that would help, but I know at least one company never changed their passwords because their vendors kept paging me, up to a year later, to "go into the system and make these changes." One of the vendor contacts and I had became good friends, and one day he begged, "We can't get in, and those bozos won't answer our pages." So I told them the last password I had, stating it probably wouldn't work. Nope, he got right in. Root access to a major gateway.
And the password was easy too, like abc123 "That's the combo on my luggage" easy. Considering this gateway controlled 48 T1 lines to a large call center, I shudder to think how it could be used if phreaked.
... we don't need to stinkin' badgers!
(obvious)
Our company, which sold kitchen gadgets, had actually been doing well into the recession, and it surprised a lot of us. Stores in the mall all around us were closing down, and we were doing okay. Then, suddenly, we weren't. Our company tried franchising, and it was a DISASTER, and the owners lost a lot of money. We opened up two "mega-stores" which both flopped.
We had this guy, called a "district manager," which was weird because we only had one district. He was this gung-ho, send-'em-to-seminars kind of guy who was used to his big bonuses every year. Around when things got bad is when he taught himself spreadsheet software, and started whacking away at all costs the spreadsheet told him to without reguard to whther it was actually a good idea or not. He cut staff drastically. The management (including me) protested, and proved how this made a bad problem worse, but this only seemed to make him more determined, and he got sneaky.
He sent this "new guy" to my store, and asked me to train him to become an manager like myself. This guy was just awful. He was arrogant, didn't bathe, and right off the bat told me outright he would have my job. At first I thought, "Yeah, you won't last a week here." I was one of the top three salespeople in the chain as well as assistant manager. Two weeks later, I wrote him up because of some serious infraction, with the intent of letting him go, being the worst employee I had ever trained, but for some reason upper management wouldn't let me fire him. Even though a background check showed he was wanted in a nearby county for theft and appraisal fraud. You guys can see where this was going. Yeah, he WAS my replacement. Later I found out he was going to do my job for minimum wage, which was about half of what I made.
Then the company sent me to a "penalty store," which is a store that is in a terrible spot, doesn't do well, has serious building problems, etc... basically, it was an attempt to make me quit. But I was too stupid to see the writing on the wall, so I got "changed to hourly," which meant a pay cut, no commission, and suddenly my pay was determined by upper management. My hour allotment got smaller and smaller, until "they didn't have hours for me" for a whole month. So I filed unemployement.
The company denied I was laid off, and said I was only a contractor. The deputy who handled the case had them on speakerphone, and at some point they were stalling, she said, "Mr. Walrus, you'll get unemployment. I see this happen all the time, they just don't want to pay the taxes or unemployment." So I got my unemployment and a hard, stinging lesson.
Afterwards, they decided I made it too hard, so they fired all the rest of the staff one by one for the weirdest stuff. Like the top salesman in the chain was fired because a "surprise secret audit" showed the register was missing $10, and so they threatened to put him in jail if he ever tried to claim unemployment. He sued and won.
And the guy who replaced me? Tried to rob them blind. He stole account numbers from all the company's vendors, and made HUGE orders shipped to a Mailbox Etc address. Luckily for the company, one of the vendors tipped them off, and because of the amount of money involved, the police got involved, and set up a sting. He must have gotten wind of it, because before the shipments were sent, he fled town and was never seen again.
At another company, years later, I was at the receiving end. The first day of work was the day the girl I was replacing was told she was being fired in 2 weeks. That was pretty stressful.
I have seen stuff like this in the tech industry when I started in the mid 1990's, too. My second job I was at a QA company where they asked us to document everything we did when testing software. We did, and then they outsourced our jobs to Tucson, where people th
... salary!
No kidding, you can get away with anything by using salary as a defense. I used to work for a company that was based on "Good Ol' Boy" rules from Texas (Cargo Furniture, division of Tandycrafts, who put tiny crate-style furniture showrooms in malls). That was work 48hours, six days a week. Of course, we had a staff of three to run a whole store, so this was broken up by two full timers (a manager and assistant manager) and one part timer. Luckily (or unluckily) the stores were usually empty (and thus, no longer around), so crowds were not a problem. The part timer was only there so no one, in theory, had to work a full 12-hour day.
The salary went like this: they said it was hourly, but they paid you overtime. I can't recall why they paid you hourly, but there was some odd tax thing of salary vs. hourly. So, as a manager I got paid:
(40hrs x 1.0 x $7.00 = $280 for "normal time") + (8hrs x 1.5 x $7.00 = $ 84 for "overtime") = $364/week = $18,928 a year as "salary"
Now, it was never explained why we were paid hourly, because if you worked 50, 60, or 80 hours in one week (like your assistant was on vacation), you didn't get overtime. But on your paycheck was your hourly wage. But it was salary. You had to clock in, too, but you weren't allowed to report the real hours and so the timecards never matched anything in reality.
Now, tell someone you want hire, "We'll pay you less than what people around here are getting paid for assistants, but you have to work six days a week, 48 hours a day." Then tell a part timer he or she's getting minimum wage and can only work no more than 10 hours a week. I never got many applicants, and many managers were totally starved for staff. 80 hour weeks were common. Those who had a staff often worked other stores that didn't have staff just so the only employee could get a day off. For nothing. My record was 2 months of 12-hour days with no time off, and I wasn't even close to the record holder. It was insane.
Confused? Yeah, those who questioned the legality of it got fired. This was back during Bush Sr's recession of the early 90s, so I was happy to have a job at all (previously, I had been unemployed for 2 years, and was living in the projects - I could NOT afford to be choosy about my employer).
Wall-Mart uses the same tactics. They hire people for low wages, and those that agree they know are too stupid, have no self-confidence, or otherwise unable to get a job elsewhere, either because of local economies, or previous employer problems. In fact, if you DO sue a company for defrauding you, good luck getting a job elsewhere! Maybe that's not legal, or even true in some states, but try telling that to your average Wall-Mart employee, who wasn't able to get a better job in the first place. They may bitch about having rights, but they can't afford to go to court if they want to also put food on their table.
1. US Customs demands ID and fingerprints for all vistors to our country
2. ???
3. Aliens demand anal probing for all visitors on their spaceship
I sense a connection... I can't... quite... make... the ends... meet.... but I feel it in the air!
Where's George Carlin when you need him?
God damn you Bush. God damn your inept cowardace, God damn you for making a national tragedy even worse, and God damn me for not being able to do anything. We got to take this country back, everyone. This is what happens when we don't vote, and the candiate's "gene pool" waters down through lack of better selection each election. I am so humiliated and embarrassed by my country leadership, like that fat uncle at family reunions who gets drunk and restarts fights that were settled back in 1972. "All I wanted was $50 to get a lousy bus ticket back from Vegas! But nooooo!"
Say NO to Loud Fat Uncle in 04!
But while researching this, I found other links that described various methods to learning foreign languages, and some of them, not surprisingly, suggested that you should use subliminal methods to "boost" your active learning. Many of these CDs were bogus, IMHO. But one of them didn't claim to be subliminal per se, and simply played music over a repeated series of conversations that were not subliminal (you could definitely hear them), but contained various base vocabulary words. Each conversation was about 4-5 minutes long, and they would be repeated by people at various speeds and regional accents, and used phrases one might need to hold a conversation at a shop, restaurant, business meeting, and so on. Another site had a guy who said he did a "fake immersion" scenario, by listening to the foreign language (usually news) on shortwave radio as he slept. Even though he didn't know most of the words spoken, he picked up a correct accent and got "the tone and pentameter" of the language which make his transition to a new language much easier.
I have never tried any of these methods myself, so I don't know if they work.
Under what, look-and-feel? No, wait, that's altar boys. Never mind.
I love problem solving. Always have. Programming and analyzing data lets me do that. Maybe I'll burn out someday, but by then, I'll be doing something else. My biggest fear is not losing my job for the money, but for losing job satisfaction. Believe it or not, I used to have that in retail. I loved making customers happy. I was usually a top salesman, big-time manager, and so on, but the company I left was so poorly managed, it reminds me of what a lot of Slashdot posters mention about their jobs. They got this "fuck the long-term customer, go for short-term profit!" and I felt dirty and cheap, and the thrill was gone. Then when my district manager told me that for the first time, she made more than the 1040EZ tax form would allow (which was $26,000 at the time), I realized I was in the wrong business to support a family. I started out as a call center rep (solving problems and doing customer service, w00t!), and in less than a year, I made more than she did. My salary has tripled since then.
My attitude has kept me employed, too. I have seen all the burnouts get laid off. The biggest problem with the dot.com boom was that our job environment got flooded with money-grubbing people who hated tech. Like people who become doctors for the money, but hate patients ("Sick, again? How dare that patient die on me!").
Having never owned one of those biofeedback devices, I can't say if they ever worked, but I saw lots of ads for them in the mid-late 1970s in magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics.
Not all hunt-n-peck typers are slow ones. I HnP at 60-65 wpm, for instance. Fast touchty pers often make mistakes with ddouble letters ands pacees (well, if they don't go back and correct them). Misordered spelling, if not consistent, is usually a sign of a HnP (which is how my typing teacher knew I was cheating).
I guessed you hated the USA very incorrectly, for instance, because of several posts you had made about the US privacy intrusion (which is why I agree with much of what you say). In fact, the only reason I said you visited the US more than twice was I recalled a survey of people who live in Toronto who visit the US a lot. That's what "psychics" and psychologists do all the time. "I see you recently have had a struggle within yourself you cannot solve..." Well, DUH! Why would you go see a tarot reader and a psychologist, otherwise? But you'd be surprised (okay, maybe not you) how many people would go, "Yeah... that's right! You're good!" Anyway, I guessed you lived in Toronto because of a post you made about people trashing hotels with fraudulent names, where you dropped a comment about Homer Simpson ruining Hojos in Toronto. I figured you were either a person who worked for a credit card company, or for the hotel itself, but I didn't think someone who worked for a hotel would post on Slashdot at the hours you do unless they didn't sleep. I was partially on the mark about technical support for POS, but partially is still mostly wrong. :)
I don't think people always say the opposite of what they really mean. I'd be curious to hear why you think that. I mean, I'll agree, it's true for some people, not for all people, but that's a case-by-case sort of thing.
And now if I do a profile based on you, it would be pointless for two reasons: one, I see some places where I already was wrong, and two, you have already stated you cover your tracks and "fall into the other 1%". But then again, you're not a jerk. Jerks by nature are much, much easier to figure out because they are predictable, and don't have a grip on social civility.
And for the record, no, I don't work for any Dollar Store HQ. I work for a major QA Systems lab, where I test network connectivity for many major vendors, which is why I can't reveal where I work, or suddenly... I might get gift baskets, free hardware, and other bribes. "Please accept this HP Laptop... oh, no no, no strings attached! In fact, do you have children? I bet they'd love free tickets to..."
You get the idea.
As an example, I believe, based on a short search, there's a good chance that you're a Canadian, living and working in Toronto. You also work with a hotel company, probably in management or accounting. You have visited the US more than twice, but you don't like us very much (and, really, based on what you post about, I can't disagree). I could find out more, but I have no reason to violate your privacy, and anyway, I'm lazy. :)
I have also done a rough psychological profile on you, but the results indicate that posting such a profile might cause you to react defensively, so I won't (Don't worry, most people react that way, it's hard not to). But it's interesting how much detail people give about themselves when the post a lot on public boards (myself included).
For a (fake) example, suppose someone said on a board, "Treated differently? Your telling me! When I was in Washington State, my stuipd older sister has AGIAN fooled my parents into giving her more money." I could tell from that sentence that the person's relationship with their parents is strained, probably has authority distrust issues, probably has a negative opinion of women (especially in authority), and is insecure about money (most likely not having enough). I can also guess that they are a "hunt-n-peck"-typer, and while very well educated, probably did better in math/science than they did in English.
Of course, none of that is certain, and I'd have to collect various posts over a year or so to get a better picture. I have also found people online are VERY different in real life. Usually the biggest jerks online are quiet and shy in person. Arrogant people are usually ignorant, and so on.
Why collect this info? It's very easy to trace "double logins" this way, like users on a board who have two logins, and use them to start trouble, like "drumming up support" among their aliases. It's also easy to compare people across boards or various interactions, like, "That guy posting in your comments section of your journal sounds a LOT like the jerk we have been getting in IRC lately. What's his IP? Yeah. It's him." Moderators in various venues compare notes a lot.
What people often forget is that social networking can corroborate what IP tracing already has shown.
For example, you post some comment on a web board. Your IP is logged. The Board moderator does a simple trace, and finds out within seconds what kind of connection you have, even if you signed off. Is it from an AOL modem pool? A DSL account? Those sorts of things are easy to find out.
So some hacker-wannabe uses some online modem pool with DHCP, so he's truly anonymous, no? No. See, the most COMMON mistake is that people who do these sorts of things are people you already know. Ex-boyfriend, some guy you pissed off at an anime con, and so on. If you work backwards by assuming that, ("Hmmm... call traced from DSL connection in Camden, NJ... we have a guy who we booted off the board last year from Camden...") and then compare it to other connections he makes, Usenet postings, referral logs, and so on ... you can stack up a HUGE amount of evidence, even if it all might be declared "amazingly circumstantial" in court. Now it's up to the people who he's pissed off how much time and effort they want to put into getting back at the jerk.
I have also found that people who are jerks online are REALLY easy to trace, because if they were truly paranoid and intelligent, they'd keep a low profile and say nothing, never start flame wars, etc... Those who are good at computing, for instance, rarely get involved in computer flame wars because they know they don't have anything to prove. "Let this guy say Macs suck," they'll say. "Their loss!" A guy who is insecure about how little he knows about his FreeBSD box will often try and cover this up with being an ass, patronzining newbies, and so on. That's when the people in the IRC chat room trace his IP, hack his FreeBSD "firewall," find out he hasn't logged in since last year and wouldn't know a hacked box looks like if he saw one, and do whatever they think is appropriate. :)
Of course, I have always felt that the really good hackers are like black holes: we know scientifically they exist, and we see evidence of them, but due to their very nature, you can't actually SEE one in action.
What ever happened to these games? I d/l them both, and they not only booted up, and played the games, but played them well on several computers I ran them on.
I think in order for this to work, we need the following steps:
1. Release Linux like a Game CD you'd put in a Playstation or XBox. I often have to reboot to play a lot of games on my PC anyway, because of Window's poor memory management. Things still work better after a reboot, even in XP.
2. Have it save game files to floppy/USB flash card, or a partition on the hard drive. That way, the Gamer can carry the CD with him, or use a friends, but the game saves will be stored in his USB or floppy, just like a memory stick in a Gabecube, for instance.
3. On boot, just like Knoppix, configure the setup, then goes right to the GUI.
4. The GUI has a menu, maybe like:
a. Play game
b. Run GAIM/XMMS
c. Tweak settings
d. Redetect USB/Floppy saves
e. Advanced configuration
f. Really advanced (aka Linux with some GUI)
g. l33t 4dv4nd0rz (aka XTerm)
x. Shut down, eject CD, reboot
See, things like "f" and "g" will introduce kids to Linux like the command cheat codes and easter eggs in games now.
5. We're Open Source. All we need is for people to start thinking like gamers who can program, and we can turn stuff from Egoboo and bzflag (some of the native choices) into some really sweet FPS. Stop trying to copy what's popular, innovate!
6. Since Open Source is not a great marketing engine (at least yet), we'll have to go by word of mouth. The best way to do that is to make something so unique, that big name companies who worry about stuff like parental ratings and market share couldn't compete. Maybe have a FPS with incredible gore and violence, and maybe nudity. A very addicitve strategy or simulation game, like Civilization, Sim City, or something... but something that hasn't been done before, like My First Brothel.
Even better, start a secret campaign banning the game. Get it blacklisted by a church group. That will put it into the limelight real quick. Well, okay... maybe that's too far. The Republicans might denounce Linux as "spreading immorality to the youth." Forget I said that.
But you have to think like a marketing person. You have to:
1. Create need
2. Fulfill need
3. Sustain need
And I agree, games for Linux would really drive it. I mean, come on, who needs an ATI Radeon 9200 for MSOffice? Games have DRIVEN industries, and Linux should not be counted out.
But, and here's the clincher: is the Linux community ready to be popular? Remember when AOL let users onto Usenet? Think hard about this path.
Wow. Just what we needed. Yet another use for Gold. You know, it being so damn plentiful and all. I was just saying to myself, as I threw away another gold can of soda, "I sure how they find a use for this stuff, because if not, Gold doesn't oxidize or break down very easily, and it will burst our landfills if we don't start a recycling program!" Maybe all those out-of-work gold miners can finally feel useful again, and not be he butt of environmentalist hate.
Why don't they ever find a great new way to use garbage?
Before I get mail...
I found OpenBSD so easy, it was virtually painless.
1. Burn floppy
2. Insert floppy into old hardware (in this case, a 486 DX4 100), reboot machine
3. OpenBSD boots from floppy. Asked me if I want to Install, upgrade, or cancel. I chose (I)nstall
4. Asked me which hard drive.
5. Gave me fdisk like partition manager. Listed whole drive as c with one bit "a" FAT16 partition. I deleted "a," entered in the partitions I needed, with "b" being my swap by default. Did w,q to write and quit.
6. Asked me to set up network interface, root password, etc...
7. Asked me which install type, I set up ftp, I selected the mirror closest to me, selected the packages I wanted, and then waited for install to complete (20 min on cable modem).
8. I took out the floppy, rebooted, and got a login prompt.
9. Signed in as root, and heeded "afterboot" security warning.
Then I installed bash with a simple add_pkg command, added non-root user, set up pf, found apache was installed and set up by default, changed forwarding to "1", slapped pfctl and apachectl to run, and wala! Working router/NAT/webserver in less than an hour.
"... because no can leave!"
"... two men enter, one man leave... the Passion of THUNDERDOME!" ... sorry, Mel.
Your faith is inspiring, but my experience differs, and I used to train people on the phones for an ISP. I had one guy, for instance, who blamed all modem outages with, "Was there a lightning storm in your area in the last month, sir? Well, your modem is fried..." He was from Virginia, not India, so I still don't know how that example could be an "Indian problem." Now, if he said, "Have you had any monsoon weather?" or "Did you ask her holiness, Sri Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, what she thought?" Now THAT would be more related to an Indian cultural miscommunication.
Go ahead -- keep outsourcing all the middle-class American jobs.
You can't look at it that way. Read the article. You can't outsource everything. Until they build really good remote controlled robots, they still need lots of hardware people, designers, and so on. All the grunt, back-end work is being done outside the US. Our goal is not to make sure everyone stays dumb and doing the same thing, but to educate people so they can get better jobs. Bettering yourself is the American way. Keeping everything the same and safe is more of a socialist way, and it's not doing France very much good.
All of these companies will screw themselves when there is nobody left to buy their products.
Then they will go out of business, and the outsourcing problem is moot. But in reality, those who outsource will save a TON of money. Pay a programmer $75,000 plus expenses, or pay three programmers $8,000 a piece and let another company worry about the free coffee? Dude, business wise, it's a no-brainer, and whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. Those companies that stay domestic will not be able to compete. Take the computer you are typing on right now. Who made it? Some US factory worker getting paid Union wages, or some factory worker in Taiwan, getting paid less a day than you paid for your lunch today? Say WidgetCo tried to make all their computers in the US. It would cost about $5000 to make one, once you factor in wages and changing the current supply line to the US (with tariffs, shipping, containment, storage, EPA, etc.). Get some people to do it in the Philippines, and that cost drops dramatically.
Like it or not, global labor is a commodity, like rice or orange juice. And no matter how tight we close our eyes, or shut other countries out with laws and trade discrimination, they are coming, and we can't stop being global if we're going to survive. Just look at China, as an example of not only the hypocrisy of xenophobia, but how it's hurting them as well.
If you want to stay the same, Sweden might be a great place to move, if you don't mind the huge tax rate such a "cradle to grave" policy must endure. But they do have a lot of great historical "living factories" and so on. I have been there, I know, and those who work at such places are as enthusiastic about things like centuries-old linen mills as you are now about IT jobs. Where did all the Swedish people go when linen production and distribution moved to another country? Just whither and die? No. They got other jobs, and I would never call Sweden a country of piss-poor unemployed people. They have a very high standard of well-educated living.
I know, you're scared. I'm scared. The IT industry is scared. But we will survive. Have faith in America, as well as your own ability to adapt. Don't waste your time with clutching your knowledge like handfuls of sand, but spend time figuring out what to do next.
Change, as they say, is inevitable.