1. That's neither here nor there. We could decrease "stockpiles" by 1,000% and still have enough to bring about "doomsday." ALL nukes will go away AFTER doomsday, no earlier. ANY use of nukes can bring about doomsday. Even if we each only have 1, their use would bring about WWIII and no doubt more would be rebuilt and used as soon as they could in a large scale conflict like that.
The important part of the equation is how close people are to actually using nukes. That is the useful thing to track. People are constantly saying how the nuclear standoff is so dangerous, but don't seem to think about all the wars it has prevented from ever starting due to the mutual deterrence. A little education on strategy and past warfare goes a long way to helping to understand how important this has been. It would be nice if we could uninvent them, but what's done is done.
3. All very true, but has nothing to do with a doomsday clock. The doomsday clock carries with it an implicit "imminence" (hello! clock? minutes to midnight???) to the issues it is measuring. Climate change doesn't fit that at all. Furthermore, the constant hyperbole and "the sky is falling" coming from people who are fighting for climate change awareness is sounding ridiculous to reasonable people.
Instead of educating people on how CO2 affects the atmosphere, and how this could turn our planet uninhabitable over time if we don't curb our emissions quickly, people falsify reports to make up effects and data that supports their arguments, and talk like the world could end tomorrow. These things get disproven and seem absurd and they get called on the lies, and then perfectly reasonable people turn their noses at ALL the climate change evidence. It has gotten to the point where they want to change "skeptic" to "denier" so they have license to point and laugh at how stupid all the "deniers" are, when the deniers are being created by the very people that insist they are crazy.
STOP the hyperbole and the outright lying about climate change, and maybe people will start believing the truth, and we can all "row in the same direction" on solutions.
I would guess that the solar panels are supposed to charge the batteries. Batteries can fail pretty easily at very low temperatures, and a lot of spacecraft need energy to keep warm in addition to running the electronics. In all likelihood it has been without sufficient power long enough for the onboard "perishables" like batteries to be useless.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with this. The people supporting the PCs still have control of the software running on them. If you don't want to have to support XP, then you just use all software that is Windows 7 compatible. If something you absolutely need isn't compatible, then you still have to run XP one way or another.
This simply provides more options to admins, and there's nothing bad about that.
I think the bigger danger here for MS, is that no one will buy their latest and greatest OS release when it comes out. The same people you mentioned that have a resistance to switching to Linux or Apple also have a resistance to upgrading for the same reasons.
MS Needs to convince them that their new products are worth it.
You obviously have no idea how IT is run these days. Every support position I have ever had, or seen, has had more work to do than can realistically be accomplished on the desired timetable.
IT is not a "wait around until there is a problem" profession, it is very much about prioritization. Quite frankly, individual users using non-standard and unapproved software is NOT a priority when you have other issues to resolve.
An IT person's job and time can be far more valuable than a 200K/year exec, because they are keeping those exec's up and running, as well as systems of MANY users. If an IT worker can help get 3-4 people's systems back up and running again in the same time it takes them to fix one person's nonstandard software, then the priority here is clear. Not only is this logic, but it is also POLICY with many companies. Many CEOs even insist on this as policy to save $$ on IT, up until THEY are the ones making the request. Then they are the exception.
There may be a very few IT jobs out there where the techs sit on their hands 80% of the time, but I haven't seen them. IT staff, particularly at the larger companies, are understaffed, underfunded, and the top-level execs will quickly trade in competent and knowledgeable IT people for a handful of barely paid automatons to save a buck.
Supporting random tools that different users have means that the IT department needs to be filled with people that are knowledgable about not just the standard set of software that the company uses, but other software as well. They need to be higher quality IT staff.
The way the industry is moving, is towards offshoring all the IT they can, and hiring miserably inadequate IT people at low wages, to follow cookie-cutter troubleshooting.
The industry CANNOT move towards this, AND move towards supporting everything the user whims to install on their workstations at the same time!
In the end, *everybody* loses. The end user, the IT professionals, and the ticket monkeys.
This could go a long way towards allowing us to harness the power of lightning!
We could build lightning farms in areas where lightning often forms, and find a way to store the power.
This actually looks like a form of something a lot of Cisco equipment already does to prevent "synchronization."
Let's say you have 500 hosts sharing a "fat pipe." If During peak times, the combined throughput used by TCP applications cause all available bandwidth on the link to be consumed. The result is, at that instant that all available bandwith is consumed, packets get dropped suddenly and indiscriminately. This means that 500 hosts all lose a slew of packets.
Per TCP specifications, when packets aren't acknowledged, all 500 hosts back off for a moment, and then retransmit at approximately the same time, causing another sudden burst in bandwidth usage, and more dropped packets.
This problem compounds until all hosts are simply busting packets, dropping packets, backing off, and repeating. The solution to this was a technique called "RED (Random Early Detection).
What this does is essentially detect when bandwidth is almost completely utilized, and then starts selectively and "fairly" dropping packets from the TCP streams. This causes the hosts to gradually back off, until bandwidth consumption is back in check. The result is that the whole "synchronization" issue is avoided, and the link is better utilized, as throughput is constant and reliable.
There is a variation called WRED or "Weighted Random Early Detection", in which certain types of packets get cut before others. This would allow the router to avoid dropping VoIP traffic, while implementing RED on non-realtime streams instead.
PBX's can send caller ID ANI, but it is up to the end location to decide whether to report the one that was sent by the PBX, or the REAL one. Billing Telephone Number (BTN) is always sent with the signaling along with the ANI on the call. A lot of providers will pass the ANI and not the BTN, but I am sure 911 centers would ensure they are getting BTN instead.
"The ground under New Orleans continues to sink. Sea levels continue to rise. One day the city is going to suffer an even more direct hit. The only rational thing to do is leave. Now."
Naw, a waterproof dome over the entire city will do just fine!
"Cruise at mach 3+ for HOURS? Not burst - CRUISE."
This "Cruise" is using something called "continuous bleed afterburner", which means you are sucking down an incredible amount of fuel no matter what. Basically, this plane doesn't have a conventional "cruise" speed. It is designed to go fast and high, and that is it.
"Calling the MiG-25 and "engineering achievement" when compared to what other contemporary planes could do is like calling a Yugo an engineering improvement over a Volkswagen because the Yugo is cheaper."
The MiG-25 used vacuum tubes in a lot of places where US planes used transistors. Russia did not have some of the same "high-tech" stuff that we did, but they were amazing at what they could do with what they had. Vacuum tubes stand a much better chance of surviving EMP from a nuclear strike that would knock out the transistors used in US planes. That made these things more survivable in the nuclear war scenario it was designed for.
"And hell, didn't the SR-71 predate the MiG-25 by a decade or so?"
Nope
"Either one has the same effect: one less mission-capable airplane."
But you can still complete your mission. That is what it is all about. These were not designed for dogfights, but for long range standoff strikes on bombers (the definition of an "interceptor"). All it needed to do was get in range of the bombers, and launch its long range Air to Air missiles before the bomber could approach its target. After this, nothing else mattered. Even if the plan fell apart on the way back, it has still prevented a nuclear strike.
"Hell, that's an easy way to take out a MiG-25 - just put the pilot in a position where he's really motivate to go FAST. You don't even need to shoot it down, or even really shoot at it, for that matter."
Again, these things were not designed for dogfights. They were designed to be fast, and carry large long-ranged Air to Air missiles. As most fighters of the time could not accompany bombers along for the nuclear missule drop due to limited range, they did not need to worry about this. What is a bomber going to do? Threaten to drop his nuke on your plane?
"Then look at some posters here saying the Mig 25 sucks because it has short range. While that "short range" might make it hard for a country like the USA to attack another country (naturally to defend itself from that evil country), that's not such a big problem if you're only using it to intercept stuff that's entered YOUR country."
The Mig-25 Foxbat was built as a bomber-interceptor, true, but so was the F-14 Tomcat on our side. We had B-52s that were offensive, and they had Tu-22M Backfire bombers, Bears, and Badgers for offensive work.
There are not a lot of dual-use (offensive and defensive) weapons systems out there, and most countries have both. It doesn't mean they are posturing for a defensive war just because they are creating defensive weapons...
Honestly, I do not see why anyone should worry about this. That bomb is not very useful, and is not much of a threat.
The thing that makes Nuclear weapons more dangerous is the amount of destructive power considering their size. They can be delivered by smaller, stealthier aircraft, or ballistic missiles.
Large bombs like this one and MOAB need large, slower bombers which are easy marks for any air defenses these days.
We can start worrying when they find a way to put these on ballistic missiles (they are probably far too large and heavy).
The problem here is that longer passwords will not help at all.
A complete rainbow table contains an example of EVERY possible hash for the given hash length. Therefore if you are using MD5 hashes that are 32 hex chars long, the size of your hashtable is going to be whatever is required to store every possible hash.
Then all that is needed is to look up *A* string that results in said hash. This may not give you their password at all, but rather *A* password that will hash to the same result, therefore allowing you entry anyway.
Now, usually the collisions of a text string end up being something unprintable or something totally off the wall, so the actual password is typically found first when brute forcing. But this is not brute forcing, this is a rainbow table!
"Should the government be allowed to plant a bug in my hearing aid? Should they be allowed to tap the signals coming from my artificial eyes? Should they be allowed to monitor the same brain activity patterns that my seizure mitigating device monitors?"
I used to use Exchange 2000, then Exchange 2003. You know what? I dropped it for hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com).
Exchange has a lot of interesting and possibly even useful features, but it is VERY unstable compared to *nix counterparts, or even open source Windows software. It requires frequent restarts of the services to keep it routing mail, the message store service likes to crash, and it is pretty slow and bloated.
I decided to switch after I had a HDD crash. I had backups that had been generated via the windows backup utility. However, when I tried to restore from it, it actually refused, as I had taken the opportunity to update to a newer service pack when I reinstalled the OS.
Now, I understand Active Directory changing between releases. What I do NOT understand is why it would not at least allow me to extract the files that were back up, and restore them. For something as critical as a system backup, MS sure blew it there.
When I moved to hMailServer, it was faster, MUCH less bloated, and even the Betas were more stable than Exchange had proved to be. Most importantly, I could backup the entire mail store just by zipping up a folder. This was completely version independent.
Now, I am using Courier/Exim under Gentoo Linux. A tarball of/var backs up pretty much every important piece of data on my system.
One more example is the company I work for. We had been using courier/sendmail running under Redhat, but after a large corporation bought us out a couple of years ago, we have been moved onto MS Exchange servers. Some of the features are nice, but the servers go down, and have various problems several times a week. The previous linux server needed a reboot maybe once every 6 months if that. It virtually never had the same types of problems. (There was also a single Linux server, versus 2 separate Exchange servers that can't handle the load).
I can say from experience: Exchange makes a fairly poor mail server. The calendar is nice though:)
Poor diet and lack of exercise can lead to diabetes and high cholesterol, but there are those for which this is genetic.
My father is actually quite fit for his age (63), yet he has both VERY high cholesterol, and diabetes. The High cholesterol has followed him all his life. Diet did not help it at all, and he had to go on various medicines to lower it (most of them didn't work).
Already being on a very strict diet and exercise regimen, he then developed diabetes in his late 50s, which basically means there isn't a lot he can eat anymore.
Most of his children (including me) inherited high cholesterol from him (as he did from his mother) in varying degrees.
While obesity, lack of exercise, and poor diet can all lead to these conditions, there are people that can get help from a "cure" such as the possible cure from the article.
I used Google Maps to plan a route the other day. It allowed me to find the easiest entry point through fencing around a "site", encountering the least amount of resistance. Additionally, it was much easier to find the perfect place to park my vehicle, to minimize exertion on return, and ensure a quick getaway.
Once inside, I was able to use the detailed satellite imagery to find the items on my itinerary of highest value. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I was after was outdoors, in the open. It also ensured a quick and safe exit when I was all through.
As a result, this trip to the Zoo (what did you think I was talking about?) was a lot easier than it could have been without Google Maps.
As far as nefarious uses of Google Maps and things like it? I just don't see it.
I run Apache as the apache user. Typically you want your web server to run as nobody, httpd, or apache, or some other unprivileged account. (HTTP servers are some of the most insecure server apps you can run!)
Then I set any web accessible folders to root:apache with mode 0640.
I admit that I tend to spend 90% of my time logged in as root on the systems I admim, but the reason is just that -- I am administering them when logged in. The systems in question are all servers, so whenever I am logged in (via SSH), I typically need root access for what I am doing. And no, root is not allowed to log in via SSH. I su.
I would assume you would still need to swipe your card. While your fingerprint may match someone else's the chance of someone stealing your card, and having the same print as you at the same time is almost nil.
Please tell me you are joking... Do you know what kind of precedant this would set?
Along the very same rules, if I learned French, and then wanted to write a book in French, I would have to get the permission of the French government.
Why is this language any different from any other? It is not like they have been treated unfairly. They got the same considerations as every other people who's language appears in office.
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1. That's neither here nor there. We could decrease "stockpiles" by 1,000% and still have enough to bring about "doomsday." ALL nukes will go away AFTER doomsday, no earlier. ANY use of nukes can bring about doomsday. Even if we each only have 1, their use would bring about WWIII and no doubt more would be rebuilt and used as soon as they could in a large scale conflict like that.
The important part of the equation is how close people are to actually using nukes. That is the useful thing to track. People are constantly saying how the nuclear standoff is so dangerous, but don't seem to think about all the wars it has prevented from ever starting due to the mutual deterrence. A little education on strategy and past warfare goes a long way to helping to understand how important this has been. It would be nice if we could uninvent them, but what's done is done.
3. All very true, but has nothing to do with a doomsday clock. The doomsday clock carries with it an implicit "imminence" (hello! clock? minutes to midnight???) to the issues it is measuring. Climate change doesn't fit that at all. Furthermore, the constant hyperbole and "the sky is falling" coming from people who are fighting for climate change awareness is sounding ridiculous to reasonable people.
Instead of educating people on how CO2 affects the atmosphere, and how this could turn our planet uninhabitable over time if we don't curb our emissions quickly, people falsify reports to make up effects and data that supports their arguments, and talk like the world could end tomorrow. These things get disproven and seem absurd and they get called on the lies, and then perfectly reasonable people turn their noses at ALL the climate change evidence. It has gotten to the point where they want to change "skeptic" to "denier" so they have license to point and laugh at how stupid all the "deniers" are, when the deniers are being created by the very people that insist they are crazy.
STOP the hyperbole and the outright lying about climate change, and maybe people will start believing the truth, and we can all "row in the same direction" on solutions.
I would guess that the solar panels are supposed to charge the batteries. Batteries can fail pretty easily at very low temperatures, and a lot of spacecraft need energy to keep warm in addition to running the electronics. In all likelihood it has been without sufficient power long enough for the onboard "perishables" like batteries to be useless.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with this. The people supporting the PCs still have control of the software running on them. If you don't want to have to support XP, then you just use all software that is Windows 7 compatible. If something you absolutely need isn't compatible, then you still have to run XP one way or another.
This simply provides more options to admins, and there's nothing bad about that.
I think the bigger danger here for MS, is that no one will buy their latest and greatest OS release when it comes out. The same people you mentioned that have a resistance to switching to Linux or Apple also have a resistance to upgrading for the same reasons.
MS Needs to convince them that their new products are worth it.
You obviously have no idea how IT is run these days. Every support position I have ever had, or seen, has had more work to do than can realistically be accomplished on the desired timetable.
IT is not a "wait around until there is a problem" profession, it is very much about prioritization. Quite frankly, individual users using non-standard and unapproved software is NOT a priority when you have other issues to resolve.
An IT person's job and time can be far more valuable than a 200K/year exec, because they are keeping those exec's up and running, as well as systems of MANY users. If an IT worker can help get 3-4 people's systems back up and running again in the same time it takes them to fix one person's nonstandard software, then the priority here is clear. Not only is this logic, but it is also POLICY with many companies. Many CEOs even insist on this as policy to save $$ on IT, up until THEY are the ones making the request. Then they are the exception.
There may be a very few IT jobs out there where the techs sit on their hands 80% of the time, but I haven't seen them. IT staff, particularly at the larger companies, are understaffed, underfunded, and the top-level execs will quickly trade in competent and knowledgeable IT people for a handful of barely paid automatons to save a buck.
These is something you seem to be missing.
Supporting random tools that different users have means that the IT department needs to be filled with people that are knowledgable about not just the standard set of software that the company uses, but other software as well. They need to be higher quality IT staff.
The way the industry is moving, is towards offshoring all the IT they can, and hiring miserably inadequate IT people at low wages, to follow cookie-cutter troubleshooting.
The industry CANNOT move towards this, AND move towards supporting everything the user whims to install on their workstations at the same time!
In the end, *everybody* loses. The end user, the IT professionals, and the ticket monkeys.
This could go a long way towards allowing us to harness the power of lightning! We could build lightning farms in areas where lightning often forms, and find a way to store the power.
This actually looks like a form of something a lot of Cisco equipment already does to prevent "synchronization."
Let's say you have 500 hosts sharing a "fat pipe." If During peak times, the combined throughput used by TCP applications cause all available bandwidth on the link to be consumed. The result is, at that instant that all available bandwith is consumed, packets get dropped suddenly and indiscriminately. This means that 500 hosts all lose a slew of packets.
Per TCP specifications, when packets aren't acknowledged, all 500 hosts back off for a moment, and then retransmit at approximately the same time, causing another sudden burst in bandwidth usage, and more dropped packets.
This problem compounds until all hosts are simply busting packets, dropping packets, backing off, and repeating. The solution to this was a technique called "RED (Random Early Detection).
What this does is essentially detect when bandwidth is almost completely utilized, and then starts selectively and "fairly" dropping packets from the TCP streams. This causes the hosts to gradually back off, until bandwidth consumption is back in check. The result is that the whole "synchronization" issue is avoided, and the link is better utilized, as throughput is constant and reliable.
There is a variation called WRED or "Weighted Random Early Detection", in which certain types of packets get cut before others. This would allow the router to avoid dropping VoIP traffic, while implementing RED on non-realtime streams instead.
You can read more about this technique here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_0/qos/configuration/guide/qcconavd.html
PBX's can send caller ID ANI, but it is up to the end location to decide whether to report the one that was sent by the PBX, or the REAL one. Billing Telephone Number (BTN) is always sent with the signaling along with the ANI on the call. A lot of providers will pass the ANI and not the BTN, but I am sure 911 centers would ensure they are getting BTN instead.
"The ground under New Orleans continues to sink. Sea levels continue to rise. One day the city is going to suffer an even more direct hit. The only rational thing to do is leave. Now."
Naw, a waterproof dome over the entire city will do just fine!
"Cruise at mach 3+ for HOURS? Not burst - CRUISE."
This "Cruise" is using something called "continuous bleed afterburner", which means you are sucking down an incredible amount of fuel no matter what. Basically, this plane doesn't have a conventional "cruise" speed. It is designed to go fast and high, and that is it.
"Calling the MiG-25 and "engineering achievement" when compared to what other contemporary planes could do is like calling a Yugo an engineering improvement over a Volkswagen because the Yugo is cheaper."
The MiG-25 used vacuum tubes in a lot of places where US planes used transistors. Russia did not have some of the same "high-tech" stuff that we did, but they were amazing at what they could do with what they had. Vacuum tubes stand a much better chance of surviving EMP from a nuclear strike that would knock out the transistors used in US planes. That made these things more survivable in the nuclear war scenario it was designed for.
"And hell, didn't the SR-71 predate the MiG-25 by a decade or so?"
Nope
"Either one has the same effect: one less mission-capable airplane."
But you can still complete your mission. That is what it is all about. These were not designed for dogfights, but for long range standoff strikes on bombers (the definition of an "interceptor"). All it needed to do was get in range of the bombers, and launch its long range Air to Air missiles before the bomber could approach its target. After this, nothing else mattered. Even if the plan fell apart on the way back, it has still prevented a nuclear strike.
"Hell, that's an easy way to take out a MiG-25 - just put the pilot in a position where he's really motivate to go FAST. You don't even need to shoot it down, or even really shoot at it, for that matter."
Again, these things were not designed for dogfights. They were designed to be fast, and carry large long-ranged Air to Air missiles. As most fighters of the time could not accompany bombers along for the nuclear missule drop due to limited range, they did not need to worry about this. What is a bomber going to do? Threaten to drop his nuke on your plane?
"Then look at some posters here saying the Mig 25 sucks because it has short range. While that "short range" might make it hard for a country like the USA to attack another country (naturally to defend itself from that evil country), that's not such a big problem if you're only using it to intercept stuff that's entered YOUR country."
The Mig-25 Foxbat was built as a bomber-interceptor, true, but so was the F-14 Tomcat on our side. We had B-52s that were offensive, and they had Tu-22M Backfire bombers, Bears, and Badgers for offensive work.
There are not a lot of dual-use (offensive and defensive) weapons systems out there, and most countries have both. It doesn't mean they are posturing for a defensive war just because they are creating defensive weapons...
Honestly, I do not see why anyone should worry about this. That bomb is not very useful, and is not much of a threat.
The thing that makes Nuclear weapons more dangerous is the amount of destructive power considering their size. They can be delivered by smaller, stealthier aircraft, or ballistic missiles.
Large bombs like this one and MOAB need large, slower bombers which are easy marks for any air defenses these days.
We can start worrying when they find a way to put these on ballistic missiles (they are probably far too large and heavy).
If I am understanding the wikipedia article correctly, this only covers "Full Warranties" and not "Limited Warranties."
Isn't just about anything these days using Limited Warranties?
The problem here is that longer passwords will not help at all.
A complete rainbow table contains an example of EVERY possible hash for the given hash length. Therefore if you are using MD5 hashes that are 32 hex chars long, the size of your hashtable is going to be whatever is required to store every possible hash.
Then all that is needed is to look up *A* string that results in said hash. This may not give you their password at all, but rather *A* password that will hash to the same result, therefore allowing you entry anyway.
Now, usually the collisions of a text string end up being something unprintable or something totally off the wall, so the actual password is typically found first when brute forcing. But this is not brute forcing, this is a rainbow table!
"Should the government be allowed to plant a bug in my hearing aid? Should they be allowed to tap the signals coming from my artificial eyes? Should they be allowed to monitor the same brain activity patterns that my seizure mitigating device monitors?"
Man, they gave you the full package didn't they?
I used to use Exchange 2000, then Exchange 2003. You know what? I dropped it for hMailServer (http://www.hmailserver.com).
/var backs up pretty much every important piece of data on my system.
:)
Exchange has a lot of interesting and possibly even useful features, but it is VERY unstable compared to *nix counterparts, or even open source Windows software. It requires frequent restarts of the services to keep it routing mail, the message store service likes to crash, and it is pretty slow and bloated.
I decided to switch after I had a HDD crash. I had backups that had been generated via the windows backup utility. However, when I tried to restore from it, it actually refused, as I had taken the opportunity to update to a newer service pack when I reinstalled the OS.
Now, I understand Active Directory changing between releases. What I do NOT understand is why it would not at least allow me to extract the files that were back up, and restore them. For something as critical as a system backup, MS sure blew it there.
When I moved to hMailServer, it was faster, MUCH less bloated, and even the Betas were more stable than Exchange had proved to be. Most importantly, I could backup the entire mail store just by zipping up a folder. This was completely version independent.
Now, I am using Courier/Exim under Gentoo Linux. A tarball of
One more example is the company I work for. We had been using courier/sendmail running under Redhat, but after a large corporation bought us out a couple of years ago, we have been moved onto MS Exchange servers. Some of the features are nice, but the servers go down, and have various problems several times a week. The previous linux server needed a reboot maybe once every 6 months if that. It virtually never had the same types of problems. (There was also a single Linux server, versus 2 separate Exchange servers that can't handle the load).
I can say from experience: Exchange makes a fairly poor mail server. The calendar is nice though
Poor diet and lack of exercise can lead to diabetes and high cholesterol, but there are those for which this is genetic.
My father is actually quite fit for his age (63), yet he has both VERY high cholesterol, and diabetes. The High cholesterol has followed him all his life. Diet did not help it at all, and he had to go on various medicines to lower it (most of them didn't work).
Already being on a very strict diet and exercise regimen, he then developed diabetes in his late 50s, which basically means there isn't a lot he can eat anymore.
Most of his children (including me) inherited high cholesterol from him (as he did from his mother) in varying degrees.
While obesity, lack of exercise, and poor diet can all lead to these conditions, there are people that can get help from a "cure" such as the possible cure from the article.
I look forward to further news on this.
Dodecahedron? I don't think so. We all know that the universe is a tiny glass sphere that higher beings use in marbles competitions.
"...Microsoft suggests that users 'not open or save Word files,' even from trusted sources."
Phew! I almost clicked the save button on my 25 page term paper before I read that! Thank God for Slashdot!
I used Google Maps to plan a route the other day. It allowed me to find the easiest entry point through fencing around a "site", encountering the least amount of resistance. Additionally, it was much easier to find the perfect place to park my vehicle, to minimize exertion on return, and ensure a quick getaway.
Once inside, I was able to use the detailed satellite imagery to find the items on my itinerary of highest value. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I was after was outdoors, in the open. It also ensured a quick and safe exit when I was all through.
As a result, this trip to the Zoo (what did you think I was talking about?) was a lot easier than it could have been without Google Maps.
As far as nefarious uses of Google Maps and things like it? I just don't see it.
I run Apache as the apache user. Typically you want your web server to run as nobody, httpd, or apache, or some other unprivileged account. (HTTP servers are some of the most insecure server apps you can run!)
Then I set any web accessible folders to root:apache with mode 0640.
I admit that I tend to spend 90% of my time logged in as root on the systems I admim, but the reason is just that -- I am administering them when logged in. The systems in question are all servers, so whenever I am logged in (via SSH), I typically need root access for what I am doing. And no, root is not allowed to log in via SSH. I su.
I would assume you would still need to swipe your card. While your fingerprint may match someone else's the chance of someone stealing your card, and having the same print as you at the same time is almost nil.
So, who wants to build a really big garage door opener and point it at the base?
Please tell me you are joking... Do you know what kind of precedant this would set?
Along the very same rules, if I learned French, and then wanted to write a book in French, I would have to get the permission of the French government.
Why is this language any different from any other? It is not like they have been treated unfairly. They got the same considerations as every other people who's language appears in office.