--that was the point of my post, to show that commonly held beliefs have oft times been proven to be quite wrong after a large amount of time has passed, effectively neutralising what effects the real data might have cuased had said data been available at the time. "thinking and knowing"-two different things. Like my reference to pearl harbor, I'd say well over 99.999% of the US people thought we had "no warning" and it was a "sneak attack" so we had to "go to war" based on that. Now that that "data" and "thinking" can be shown to be mostly false, you have to wonder what would have changed.
Similar to what is "terrorism" and who is responsible for what. You won't really know with more certainty until perhaps decades from now who was telling the truth and who wasn't, and how events really came about. You and I may "think" something now, or that event A is not in any way related to event B, or it is, no matter, but we won't KNOW for perhaps a long, long time.
When you are talking about global geopolitics,control over billions of people and trillions of dollars, merely telling lies and backing them up "officially" is the smallest act "governments" and large institutions do. The smallest. Obfuscations and linkages might not be evident at first, maybe only very small clues or hints.
I take a very broad and large view of history and politics and the continuuing struggle of humans and their domination over one another. I tend to think we are all a lot more "predatory" and "not good" then what people are comfortable admiting to, from a personal scale to a global scale.
History shows me that's a safe bet and viewpoint to take, it's so safe you can almost call it the default house odds.
..and your quote from shakespeare is apropos to today's political reality. There's about zero accountability within the US government, it's grown so entrenched with career bureaucracy, cronyism, neoptism, bribes, corruption and scandal that I see no easy way to "fix" any of it. I forget right now which one of the new "patriot" laws it is, but one of them effectively guts "whistle blowing" for government employees who are at least honest and just want to do a righteous job and uncover malfeasance. And "Voting" has been reduced (more or less) to voting in criminal gang A or B and back and forth. I can't remember the last time anyone I voted for actually got in office, the herd mentality rules (and still drools). On some local levels, yes, constructive change and honesty can be achieved, but above small local levels, well, to say I am pessimistic is an understatement, I think it's close to impossible the way things are now. Thanks for your reply.
...that's what's suspicious to me as well, their failure to inspect from the ground, despite knowing that chunk 0 crap blew off and smacked into the wing. I don't think it was an oversight. Granted, I have a suspicious nature as well. The whole thing smells to me.
And I have zero confidence in any government "investigation", not after the OKC blast, the TWA 800 dog and pony show CIA cartoon "science", and especially the WTC 9-11 attacks. Especially those.
I originally started questioning government "reality" after kennedy (JFK) got whacked and the warren commission report. I was a teen then and it just stank, it was dismal, no idea why most adults back then swallowed that fairy tale tripe. Since then, I take government official pronouncements (tonkin gulf attack is another biggee) with several large handfuls of salt. For a lot of historical reality, it takes decades for any sort of "true facts" to come out, by then, it's on to new stuff, no one cares that much. The Pearl Harbor "sneak attack" is another one that if the reality of the situation was known back then, would have greatly changed history.
--so, are there any replacements for x11? Serious question. I've only used redhat and mandrake canned installs, and I tried a knoppix run from the CD version, is there anything "better" for linux gui and how would one go about it?
--thanks for the replay, what I was looking for. Like after 9-11, all the phone traffic increased, but the available lines decreased, a lot of calls couldn't get through. That was sort of a slashdot/dos effect. I am *thinking* that somehow there must be a way to do something "worse". Like you pointed out speed dialers aren't it exactly, and maybe too easy to trace. I was thinking more of a sort of virus or worm or technique that would cause all the switches and relays to malfunction, route their connections incorrectly , or get zombified to direct their traffic to overload critical points of interest, & etc. I've just never read any speculation on it, but it seems just as critical (in retrospect, being net-centric) as anything that would take down the net, as a general-threat disaster type scenario.
Frankly, I worry a LOT more about water and food supplies, but given the nature of our electronic connected world, even the net and/or the telco systems poofing could be almost as critically bad within a few days if it was persistant, as so much of "reality" revolves around those two systems.
Thanks again, hope some more knowledgable folks want to discuss this as well
--I have a really lame question, but I really want to know. Was wondering about it last weekend during the slammer whammy. Do reular ole phones have any sort of vulnerability to a worm or virus style attack? I know less than zip about them, besides just using them, never got into that phreaking stuff. I know there's the analog/digital differences, just wondering if the phone networks themselves would be vulnerable to something catastrophic.
..how does your statement jibe with this, about their intranet, the NMCI:
http://www.gcn.com/22_2/mgmt_edition/20910-1.htm l
--partial paste from article---
By comparison, NMCI officials and EDS are dealing with a filing cabinet full of used carbon paper. When they opened the drawer on the Navy's IT infrastructure, they encountered a veritable junkyard of ancient networks (about 1,000) and legacy systems (about 100,000)--a situation that has caused major delays in the rollout.
Both Navy officials and EDS managers agree that it would have been better to have had a handle on the scope of the department's legacy IT assets much earlier, but it still might have been impossible to do a thorough inventory.
"I don't know that anybody could have ever visualized all of that until you actually dug in, especially in an organization that is as diverse as the Navy," said Bill Richard, NMCI program executive for EDS.
The Navy's Ehrler concurred. "The message we got from industry was when you get into these types of contracts nobody has a clear handle on what exactly they own," he said. "That's just part of the pain you've got to go through in deploying a [managed-services] contract like this."
"In hindsight it would have been nice to have had a better enterprise, corporate-level view [of the IT environment]," added Rear Adm. Charles L. Munns, NMCI director for the Navy. "I think we got a snapshot of it during year 2000. That was our first real effort to understand what we have. That's what made us understand that we really needed an intranet."
100,000 legacy applications
"You can look back at where the hurdles have been and talk about what might have been done differently but I don't know that we could have done it any other way," he said. "We needed a rallying point and that was the intranet. That's what got us to start to think corporatively."
The department's tangle of 100,000 legacy applications have been the biggest hairball. "I don't think we recognized the magnitude of the change we were embarking on," said Rear Adm. Charles L. Munns, the Navy's NMCI director To get control of the situation, Munns last summer created a group of 24 functional application managers to make decisions about legacy applications. They quickly began killing apps that wouldn't work in a Microsoft Windows 2000 environment, were redundant or didn't meet NMCI security standards. Richard said this was a crucial step toward getting NMCI back on track.
--, I see them wanting to intergrate and streamline, that actually makes sense, but it looks to me like a microsoft based across the board move. What am I not reading correctly here?
--sorry about the step throat. The new wild oregano-based over the counter capsules are supposed to be great on boosting the ole immune system.
--perhaps I was wrong on saying the bulk, but they dual use a lot of "civvie" satellites that get put up by the shuttle. Latest I found in a quick googling was in 2000, some low earth orbit radar birds, but I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it. I know they didn't totally bail on it.
--I've noticed most posts here are predicting if they mention it a long slow review process for the remaining shuttles. I disagree and am of the opinion they will keep using them as fast as possible. The bulk of the shuttle's missions are military, and with the state of the world and imminent widespread warfare that *might* be in more places than just iraq, they will just use them right now. They will probably scrub any civvie missions/experiments/astronauts though.
...on a personal scale you can live without credit, and/or over extending it to a ridiculous level, rather easily. On a national scale when two for-profit criminal gangs hijack the government and run it as a perpetual jobs and graft bank, with their hands out to international pirates, it's almost impossible to keep your nation fiscally sound.
Saturday, February 01, 2003 Shvat 29, 5763 Israel Time: 19:18 (GMT+2) Back Home Israel's first astronaut - Ilan Ramon By Ha'aretz Service Israel's first spaceman, Ilan Ramon. (Photo: AP)
Ilan Ramon, a former fighter pilot and weapons specialist, fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in the 1982 war in Lebanon. In 1981, he was a member of the mission to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor before it became online.
In 1997, he was selected to be Israel's first astronaut, and began training at NASA a year later. He was promised a launch as early as 1999, but for several reasons, his flight - and the flight of an atmospheric dust-measuring experiment sponsored by Israel - was delayed.
The son of an Auschwitz death camp survivor, Ramon planned a tribute to those who endured the Holocaust - he carried up a small pencil drawing titled "Moon Landscape" by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy who was killed at Auschwitz.
He also packed a credit-card sized microfiche of the Bible given to him by President Moshe Katsav and some mezuzahs - cases containing excerpts from the Bible that are affixed to the door in Jewish houses.
A large Israeli contingent was on hand to watch the country's first astronaut head into space. Among the dignitaries were former Israel Air Force commanders in chief Eitan Ben-Eliyahu and Avihu Ben-Nun.
Ramon indicated that his flight would provide a welcome diversion for fellow Israelis. "I think people are very happy to be distracted by my flight," he told a news conference.
On the Tuesday before take-off, the seven flight members had a pre-flight party at one of the NASA installations. Each astronaut-to-be was allowed to invite five guests, and Ramon selected his wife Rona, his father, brother, brother-in-law, and his close friend Roni Shalein from Nahalal. Shalein later said: "For me, this was really exciting - to come from the cow shed at Nahalal and spend time with seven astronauts on their way into space."
Ramon's immediate family, who had spent the past four years with him in the U.S., confessed to being tense and nervous. Rona Ramon said: "This is definitely exciting, and we're approaching the big moment. It seems like a dream." At the bon voyage party Tuesday, Rona gave her husband four poems and some personal effects to take with him.
For his part, Ramon stressed that his years of training in the U.S. were enhanced by the close friendship he has cultivated with the other flight members. The other astronauts also mentioned their close relationship with Ramon at Houston training center.
Ramon's father, Eliezer Wolferman, 79, who was also on hand for his son's flight into space, said the media blitz in Israel about the Columbia mission is excessive. Ramon's father called for "a little more modesty" about an Israeli's first space mission.
Ilan's brother Gadi left a sealed letter aboard the Columbia - his brother would only be able to read it after the space shuttle went into space. The astronaut's 15-year-old son Assaf, also left his father a note to be opened only in space. Assaf had said that he would also like to be a pilot or astronaut and said he misses life in Israel.
The crew that flew into space on January 16, whose code name is STS-107, was the first one in three years to concentrate exclusively on research and did not work on the space station.
.... I duno, reverse it. Cars have to be able to withstand at least a small crash and keep their occupants safe. They must meet minimum mileage standards. They come with a drive train and body warranty, at least for a few years. And if it breaks during that time or it takes more than three fixes to correct a defect, you are allowed a full refund under a lot of states lemon laws.
Ain't no software like that sold that I am aware of. Brand new software gets a full skate on most things and is sold "as-is" like a used car, not like a new one. It's usually not even warrantied to even get off the lot.
..here's another. Israel has never confirmed they have nukes. Do you doubt they have them?
There's a world "official" list of nuke kaboom owners, then there's reality. I imagine there's at least a few more nations possess them then what let on publically and officially.
Obviously I can't *prove* japan has nukes, but I'd wager a significant sum on it without hesitation. The closest I've seen them come to admitting it was a statement by one of their defense guys a few months ago (sorry no link handy) about how fast and how hard they could respond to an attack. The expertise is more than there, they possess the plutonium now some large amount is "lost", and they were working on their own bomb in the 40's and might have made it had they started sooner.
--actually, rounded off, the costs of massive and mostly illegal immigration into the US is a net loss to the tune of around 55 grand (IIRC) a head. The only time it paid was way back when there was free homesteading land, we pumped all our own oil, etc, during ourt expansion times. I forget now (have to look it up) but it crossed from a net gain to a net loss around ten years ago.
ok, to be fair I went and searched, here's one url, google will find you many:
--your examples, 2 out of the 3 "backup employment" examples-- mcdonalds is posting it's first ever loses and is closing restuarants, and kmart filed for bankruptcy. A lost job is a lost paycheck is NO CONSUMING so no service jobs are needed for that person. Now magnify that by the millions, add in the peripheral and collateral effects. It ain't pretty.
--You have it exactly, and that's why it will destroy the US middle class, and do it within this decade we are in. example-china. China does NOT generally speaking buy mass quantities of american goods EXCEPT for tool making machines and similar. They are buying tools to make tools to make-EVERYTHING. They buy the stuff needed to work at, to actually produce, to aquire wealth. Like we used to work, that was successful and bbuilt a diverse robusrt economy. We were sold "globalization" as the "two billion armpit" theory, that if helped china along they would continue to "buy all our stuff" in ever increasing amounts. This hasn't happened, all that's happened is a HUGE balance of trade and short term profits for *some* people and massive loss of jobs. Our balance of trade deficit is simply staggering, we have gone from the world's largest creditor nation the world's largest debtor nation in 20 years, with the bulk of that within the last ten years, and it's growing increasily worse. THAT's all the proof required.
After (china primarily) have their full vertically integrated industries setup,(close now) they not only won't need to buy our stuff, there's no way any of our stuff would be cheap enough for them to bother with, because they will have a large enough internal market. all they will need to trade with then is for oil and other raw materials. And this goes from agricultural products all the way to high tech and everything in between, they won't need us, not a nickles worth. They will continue to export as much as possible, but only to places that have actual hard currency of value or have the materials they need. Our dollar is dropping in relative value. although till used widely, it is and will continue to be devalued, especially if gold backed currencies become required for international balance of trade payments. The current balance of trade numbers prove this with no shadow of a doubt. Other numbers I have seen have china as potentially surpassing the US around 2015 or so, although I personally believed that mass global warfare will occur before that time, basically over resources and who controls the planet. In fact I would maintain world war 3 is already in progress.
The US is living on credit and inertia and a severe case of the denials right now, we are en-screwed. As will be pointed out around the thread, people take a cavalier attitude and say theoretically it's a 'good thing" - until they lose their jobs and start the cycle that millions are on now, lose job, hunt for job, get job paying less, lather rinse repeat until you hit a brick wall with NO job.
The job loss stats are SO bad, they stopped reporting them, claiming they ran out of funding, which is a political dodge. this was a major story that didn't get much coverage, but is important for everyone to take a look at.
url to my last statement
http://www.bls.gov/bls/mlsdiscontinued.htm
text, short and to the point and anyone should be able to read between the lines here
What is the status of the Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program?
The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program has been discontinued. Since 1994, the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration funded the MLS program. That funding ended on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been unable to acquire funding from any alternative sources and had to discontinue the MLS program as of that date. Limited historical data and documentation will continue to be available on the BLS Internet, at http://www.bls.gov/mls/.
Last Modified Date: January 2, 2003
Jobs in the US are NOT being replaced by the numbers, nor are wages going up, speaking in general terms, we are dropping, and fast. It's being manipulated to appear like theyare going up slightly, and even that is a scam, theypulled food and fuel from the consumer price index for example. They are lying, avoiding real numbers, basically pulling an enron accounting modal on an across the board obfuscation to this system to not panic the herd. They are doing the same things with the major market indices, in particular they remove tanked corps as fast as possible to keep those numbers artificially inflated. If you were to do (now timeframe) an historical records match, and keep the tanked companies over the past few year period and reconfigure the indices those charts would look a lot worse than they are now.
IMO
This is an extremely involved subject but the gestalt is we got shafted by literal traitors. Internationalists who are loyal to no one beyond their own power and greed and to whichever global cartel constitutes their gang. This was done on purpose to further a heinous (ultimate) agenda of a global two class fascist society, which I term technofeudalism. It is akin to wolfpacks fighting themselves, but all united in staying wolves over the herds.
I had these same arguments on forums years ago, I was saying the same thing then as I am now. I have personally since heard from people who vigorously disagreed with me then, conveniently when they were sitting fatcity on their dotbomb poker chip improbable beyond belief stock portfolios and a great paycheck. Now, a lot of them have changed their viewpoints 180 degrees, because they got bit, and bit hard. their stock profits turned out to be mostly vaporware and so were their jobs, and not even new jobs then, old jobs they had. Industry after industry has been destroyed or reduced to ridiculous levels. And not buggywheips, critical strategic infrastructure.
That is almost the only way for some people to get from casual ho hum academic styled discussion to back down on the ground in the real world, to just have it shoved in their face up close and personal. THEN they understand better the full ramifications of what's going on..
..this is exactly one of the tenets of a good personal survival/preparedness plan. You exchange with a friend or relative in another geographical area a set of "basics". Basics as in long term stored food, extra clothing, various gear, copies of important legal documents, etc, etc. whatever you consider to be important, and that is a personal variable. Then in case one of the two homes is destroyed in some manner,or you are forced to evacuate, you still have something to start over with and live on rather than losing ALL your day to day tangible wealth.
Makes sense to do it with data as well. On a personal level with computing, it could be as simple as snail mailing burned cd's to each other, along with sending it over the net, but you can't beat that snail mail price and effectiveness for mass quantities, especially if all you have is dialup speed access. The important part is it should be "more" than just one building over, it really needs to be at least in another city as a minimum distance.
--I think you are misinterpreting what I wrote. I was making a list to address the historical perspective about how art first comes about. I sincerely doubt the first artists decided to create art because they got paid to do it. And just noting that doesn't imply that the list-now to 4 reasons-has to be kept in that order for any person, any artist is more than free to choose which method they want to adopt, or combination thereof, I was just adding to it to more accurrately reflect past reality.
--that was my original idea further up. Perhaps not via a pci card, but maybe over ethernet, not only additional ram, but ram that could be shared, like this NUMA allows for the various cpu's on the same board, but with cpus in different machines. distributed & expandable RAM.
--OK, got a noob ram question then. Does this NUMA allow for upgrading total RAM beyond the original specs? Any sort of add-ons? I ask this from noticing it's used because of the physical distances it can access (among others).
--Your list leaves out the real #1, I think you list needs to be bumped down-it's accurate as far as it goes and is currently correct, but not totally.
Here's my corrected list--> insert
1-A real artist, dedicated to his art,no matter what else, makes his own work, because it's just cool, and does it on his own time and on his own nickle.
--thanks for your extensive and informative reply to this noob. It helped me visualize some things better in setting up systems and how a professional effort is addressed. I also am surprised my idea was already being done in some manner, well, that means I'm surprised it had any merit at all!
The tar utility, guess I only thought about it for individual packages, didn't realise you could do the entire drive with it. Have to give it a whack on the funsie machine here, I trash it regularly enough......
As to the audit after getting owned, yes, that's why I mentioned it, seemed logical before allowing the compromised machine back online with the older but secure image. Just with the virtual system it might be faster to recover, as perhaps an identical one could be running simultaneously parallel to the "active" one.
I was just looking at knoppix updates, seems like a system like that might be nice for a semi- no brainer small scale server that is fairly secure(no write access by default install), especially if you took the concept and made it bigger, added your server and custom database apps, etc, and ran it-started it- from a custom burned dvd to a large enough ram bank. Maybe anyway.....I know that would be quite expensive....
Too bad about the "uptime" being more important in most places, you'd think data integrity would be paramount.
Yet again another car analogy, maybe for the bean counters benefit. It's faster and you have more driving "uptime" by just occassionaly topping off the crankcase oil as needed, but the engine's integrity is a lot better and the TCO is better with periodic "down times" and really changing the oil.
--I AGREE with you. the point I was making is that putting all your "trust" into fiat currencies and banks and politics to ensure your basic human needs is very short sighted. I've been following ther argentine situation a lot, because I can see parallels with other nations, especially after the IMF blows the economies out. My recommendations to people who are *smart* and can think outside of the herd-level is to thoroughly understand the profounddifferences between stored theoretical forms of wealth, and true tangible wealth, and to make SURE at a minimum that your first accumulated wealth is in the form of a practical tangible like a paid off piece of ground, with a garden and a well for instance. Even if you don't live there all the time, get a small country place to serve as your backup place during rough times, and pay that thing off first before anything else. Skip the new car, keep the old clunker running, get that property and even if all you can do is put a trailer on it or a small cabin, then at least you have something that's real and "in the bank" so to speak.. You might not be as good off during real bad times like you might be in the good times having a fat bank account and an open supermarket, but when the banks close, and the currency gets inflated, and the shelves are bare at the store, and when your job poofs,(all that stuff you can see happening now in argentina) you still got that garden, and well water, and a modest roof over your head. You can't do it for your entire nation yourself, but anyone can do it for themselves and their immediate family. THAT's the big difference.
I write a lot on survival/preparedness topics, I categorize human being carbon based life form priorities in this fashion...
water-food-shelter-security
And in that eaxct order of importance. These are necessities that if all the wealth you have is represented, that these should be top of the list, and not a thoeretical "I have enough money in the bank to cover that". They should be as independent of outside influence as practical, ie, 'water' isn't magically made in the city dwellers kitchen faucet, "food" doesn't grow on grocery store shelves automagically overnight, and etc. That's dangerous and naieve if not outright arrogant thinking, and way too many people assume that's how it is, and don't care---until one morning they wake up and that stuff is gone, their money worthless to aquire basic human necessities, their retirement 'accounts" and 'portfolios" vaporware. As I'm sure you can see now in your nation where so many peoples life savings buy nothing now, and there's widespread hardship and hunger. And the sheer speed in how it happened. People's realities can be turned upside down, comfortable to desperate in a few steps that you don't have any control over. You can't eliminate bad things happening, but you can plan in advance to have more tangible forms of "insurance" than just a piece of paper in the file cabinet.
By following common sense and differentiating between theoretical forms of money (stocks, paper, digits in a database at a fractional reserve bank, various health "plans", etc, etc) as opposed to in-your-possession true "wealth", at least for the necessities, you can eliminate a lot of potential problems that *might* arise.
During the great depression here in the US, I heard about it a lot when I was younger talking to people who went through it. People who lost their jobs in the city were really hurting, no money, couldn't get food, hunger. People in the country with wells and gardens and chickens still might not have had any "money", but they had food and water and firewood for fuel. This was my direct relatives I'm talking about now, so poor "money wise" eventually duyring those lean years they didn't have two dollars, but they still had food and water and shelter and heat in the winter. We tend to lose track of that in high tech society, but those necessities remain the same for everyone, no matter their station in life.
There true tangible wealth wasn't inflated away like some theoretical digitially stored nonsense in a "bank". They owned "real wealth" as opposed to all that perceived theoretical wealth such as the "stocks" in the portfolios at that time. No soup kitchen lines, no scrambling for scraps at the dump-which I know is going on in argentina now. Maybe they didn't live real "urban" fancy, but what they had, and were able to hang on to, was certainly better than nothing!
And good luck to you folks and to brazil, you have the potential to learn from your mistakes in the past and get more independent and more wealthy, especially as soon as you tell the IMF and the world bank con-men thieves to take a hike.
--correct me if my understanding is incorrect, regardings the major distro vendors and GPL code. They sell cd media, printed dead trees manuals and custom support options, but the code itsef is not sold, it's freely given away. Now they could charge a reasonable fee, if they chose to, for downloading as well, but that's a delivery/bandwith/infrastructure fee for still *free* code.
--the only thing I've done along these lines is to have a "spare" old hard drive with a basic system installed, that isn't plugged in to anything, but it's mounted in the drive bay. If I get a bad fubar, I'll more or less know what the last thing that happened was, so with the spare drive installed I can avoid that problem whatever it was before going online. But ya, it would sucketh to lose all the data and updates. I don't trust my level of expertise to make a backup dump or raid system all that valuable, as more or less I am as likely to just "backup" the virus or trojan should it become installed. I'm just a casual home user, not having to defend expensive server farms, etc, so the requirements aren't as great, but it still would be nice to have an easier to use method that what's available now, which is to become a security guru in your spare time. A virtual system that ran completely in a jail would be a good idea. I tried knoppix but it has some features I don't like (primarily I'm a gnome not a kde guy) and I couldn't make it dial out), but still, it's a step in the right direction and it ran surprisingly fast, much faster than I thought it would.
To get back to the subject, YES, an additional layer of "permissions" to access the system. Two stage isn't enough, you should be able to do an instant "create on demand" full system, use it for a session then trash it, thereby eliminating anything nasty that might have occurred to you, and that temporary system could be an additional step-->out away from the actual root or user level. There should be a "this is vulnerable being online so it can't do much and nothing permanent without jumping through hoops" temp-user level. A temporary trip wire action would help, and then the system would force you to go offline and compare audits before anything was 'saved' to the disk in either a users directory or at root level. It would be saved in the virtual OSs ram cache or on swap (a "virtual swap" inside the real swap as well?), examined, if it passes, THEN it can slide downhill into normal user-space. And the box needs it's own built in battery to keep ram cache intact in case of catstrophic outside failure, so that very important but still unexamined data is not lost. I've had UPSs fail, but when a laptop was plugged in, it didn't matter, I didn't lose anything or suffer file system damage, the built in battery concept is ideal for this, and I have no idea why it isn't just common on desktops as well. They are already big and heavy, a small battery is not that much more weight or space.
Slashdot Mirror
--that was the point of my post, to show that commonly held beliefs have oft times been proven to be quite wrong after a large amount of time has passed, effectively neutralising what effects the real data might have cuased had said data been available at the time. "thinking and knowing"-two different things. Like my reference to pearl harbor, I'd say well over 99.999% of the US people thought we had "no warning" and it was a "sneak attack" so we had to "go to war" based on that. Now that that "data" and "thinking" can be shown to be mostly false, you have to wonder what would have changed.
Similar to what is "terrorism" and who is responsible for what. You won't really know with more certainty until perhaps decades from now who was telling the truth and who wasn't, and how events really came about. You and I may "think" something now, or that event A is not in any way related to event B, or it is, no matter, but we won't KNOW for perhaps a long, long time.
When you are talking about global geopolitics,control over billions of people and trillions of dollars, merely telling lies and backing them up "officially" is the smallest act "governments" and large institutions do. The smallest. Obfuscations and linkages might not be evident at first, maybe only very small clues or hints.
I take a very broad and large view of history and politics and the continuuing struggle of humans and their domination over one another. I tend to think we are all a lot more "predatory" and "not good" then what people are comfortable admiting to, from a personal scale to a global scale.
History shows me that's a safe bet and viewpoint to take, it's so safe you can almost call it the default house odds.
..and your quote from shakespeare is apropos to today's political reality. There's about zero accountability within the US government, it's grown so entrenched with career bureaucracy, cronyism, neoptism, bribes, corruption and scandal that I see no easy way to "fix" any of it. I forget right now which one of the new "patriot" laws it is, but one of them effectively guts "whistle blowing" for government employees who are at least honest and just want to do a righteous job and uncover malfeasance. And "Voting" has been reduced (more or less) to voting in criminal gang A or B and back and forth. I can't remember the last time anyone I voted for actually got in office, the herd mentality rules (and still drools). On some local levels, yes, constructive change and honesty can be achieved, but above small local levels, well, to say I am pessimistic is an understatement, I think it's close to impossible the way things are now. Thanks for your reply.
...that's what's suspicious to me as well, their failure to inspect from the ground, despite knowing that chunk 0 crap blew off and smacked into the wing. I don't think it was an oversight. Granted, I have a suspicious nature as well. The whole thing smells to me.
And I have zero confidence in any government "investigation", not after the OKC blast, the TWA 800 dog and pony show CIA cartoon "science", and especially the WTC 9-11 attacks. Especially those.
I originally started questioning government "reality" after kennedy (JFK) got whacked and the warren commission report. I was a teen then and it just stank, it was dismal, no idea why most adults back then swallowed that fairy tale tripe. Since then, I take government official pronouncements (tonkin gulf attack is another biggee) with several large handfuls of salt. For a lot of historical reality, it takes decades for any sort of "true facts" to come out, by then, it's on to new stuff, no one cares that much. The Pearl Harbor "sneak attack" is another one that if the reality of the situation was known back then, would have greatly changed history.
Anyone's MMV of course.
--so, are there any replacements for x11? Serious question. I've only used redhat and mandrake canned installs, and I tried a knoppix run from the CD version, is there anything "better" for linux gui and how would one go about it?
--thanks for the replay, what I was looking for. Like after 9-11, all the phone traffic increased, but the available lines decreased, a lot of calls couldn't get through. That was sort of a slashdot/dos effect. I am *thinking* that somehow there must be a way to do something "worse". Like you pointed out speed dialers aren't it exactly, and maybe too easy to trace. I was thinking more of a sort of virus or worm or technique that would cause all the switches and relays to malfunction, route their connections incorrectly , or get zombified to direct their traffic to overload critical points of interest, & etc. I've just never read any speculation on it, but it seems just as critical (in retrospect, being net-centric) as anything that would take down the net, as a general-threat disaster type scenario.
Frankly, I worry a LOT more about water and food supplies, but given the nature of our electronic connected world, even the net and/or the telco systems poofing could be almost as critically bad within a few days if it was persistant, as so much of "reality" revolves around those two systems.
Thanks again, hope some more knowledgable folks want to discuss this as well
--I have a really lame question, but I really want to know. Was wondering about it last weekend during the slammer whammy. Do reular ole phones have any sort of vulnerability to a worm or virus style attack? I know less than zip about them, besides just using them, never got into that phreaking stuff. I know there's the analog/digital differences, just wondering if the phone networks themselves would be vulnerable to something catastrophic.
..how does your statement jibe with this, about their intranet, the NMCI:
m l
http://www.gcn.com/22_2/mgmt_edition/20910-1.ht
--partial paste from article---
By comparison, NMCI officials and EDS are dealing with a filing cabinet full of used carbon paper. When they opened the drawer on the Navy's IT infrastructure, they encountered a veritable junkyard of ancient networks (about 1,000) and legacy systems (about 100,000)--a situation that has caused major delays in the rollout.
Both Navy officials and EDS managers agree that it would have been better to have had a handle on the scope of the department's legacy IT assets much earlier, but it still might have been impossible to do a thorough inventory.
"I don't know that anybody could have ever visualized all of that until you actually dug in, especially in an organization that is as diverse as the Navy," said Bill Richard, NMCI program executive for EDS.
The Navy's Ehrler concurred. "The message we got from industry was when you get into these types of contracts nobody has a clear handle on what exactly they own," he said. "That's just part of the pain you've got to go through in deploying a [managed-services] contract like this."
"In hindsight it would have been nice to have had a better enterprise, corporate-level view [of the IT environment]," added Rear Adm. Charles L. Munns, NMCI director for the Navy. "I think we got a snapshot of it during year 2000. That was our first real effort to understand what we have. That's what made us understand that we really needed an intranet."
100,000 legacy applications
"You can look back at where the hurdles have been and talk about what might have been done differently but I don't know that we could have done it any other way," he said. "We needed a rallying point and that was the intranet. That's what got us to start to think corporatively."
The department's tangle of 100,000 legacy applications have been the biggest hairball.
"I don't think we recognized the magnitude of the change we were embarking on," said Rear Adm. Charles L. Munns, the Navy's NMCI director
To get control of the situation, Munns last summer created a group of 24 functional application managers to make decisions about legacy applications. They quickly began killing apps that wouldn't work in a Microsoft Windows 2000 environment, were redundant or didn't meet NMCI security standards. Richard said this was a crucial step toward getting NMCI back on track.
--, I see them wanting to intergrate and streamline, that actually makes sense, but it looks to me like a microsoft based across the board move. What am I not reading correctly here?
--sorry about the step throat. The new wild oregano-based over the counter capsules are supposed to be great on boosting the ole immune system.
--perhaps I was wrong on saying the bulk, but they dual use a lot of "civvie" satellites that get put up by the shuttle. Latest I found in a quick googling was in 2000, some low earth orbit radar birds, but I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on it. I know they didn't totally bail on it.
--I've noticed most posts here are predicting if they mention it a long slow review process for the remaining shuttles. I disagree and am of the opinion they will keep using them as fast as possible. The bulk of the shuttle's missions are military, and with the state of the world and imminent widespread warfare that *might* be in more places than just iraq, they will just use them right now. They will probably scrub any civvie missions/experiments/astronauts though.
...on a personal scale you can live without credit, and/or over extending it to a ridiculous level, rather easily. On a national scale when two for-profit criminal gangs hijack the government and run it as a perpetual jobs and graft bank, with their hands out to international pirates, it's almost impossible to keep your nation fiscally sound.
--he was, I found this bio of him on ha-aretz just now:
Israeli astronaut
Saturday, February 01, 2003 Shvat 29, 5763 Israel Time: 19:18 (GMT+2)
Back Home
Israel's first astronaut - Ilan Ramon
By Ha'aretz Service
Israel's first spaceman, Ilan Ramon.
(Photo: AP)
Ilan Ramon, a former fighter pilot and weapons specialist, fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and in the 1982 war in Lebanon. In 1981, he was a member of the mission to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor before it became online.
In 1997, he was selected to be Israel's first astronaut, and began training at NASA a year later. He was promised a launch as early as 1999, but for several reasons, his flight - and the flight of an atmospheric dust-measuring experiment sponsored by Israel - was delayed.
The son of an Auschwitz death camp survivor, Ramon planned a tribute to those who endured the Holocaust - he carried up a small pencil drawing titled "Moon Landscape" by Peter Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy who was killed at Auschwitz.
He also packed a credit-card sized microfiche of the Bible given to him by President Moshe Katsav and some mezuzahs - cases containing excerpts from the Bible that are affixed to the door in Jewish houses.
A large Israeli contingent was on hand to watch the country's first astronaut head into space. Among the dignitaries were former Israel Air Force commanders in chief Eitan Ben-Eliyahu and Avihu Ben-Nun.
Ramon indicated that his flight would provide a welcome diversion for fellow Israelis. "I think people are very happy to be distracted by my flight," he told a news conference.
On the Tuesday before take-off, the seven flight members had a pre-flight party at one of the NASA installations. Each astronaut-to-be was allowed to invite five guests, and Ramon selected his wife Rona, his father, brother, brother-in-law, and his close friend Roni Shalein from Nahalal. Shalein later said: "For me, this was really exciting - to come from the cow shed at Nahalal and spend time with seven astronauts on their way into space."
Ramon's immediate family, who had spent the past four years with him in the U.S., confessed to being tense and nervous. Rona Ramon said: "This is definitely exciting, and we're approaching the big moment. It seems like a dream." At the bon voyage party Tuesday, Rona gave her husband four poems and some personal effects to take with him.
For his part, Ramon stressed that his years of training in the U.S. were enhanced by the close friendship he has cultivated with the other flight members. The other astronauts also mentioned their close relationship with Ramon at Houston training center.
Ramon's father, Eliezer Wolferman, 79, who was also on hand for his son's flight into space, said the media blitz in Israel about the Columbia mission is excessive. Ramon's father called for "a little more modesty" about an Israeli's first space mission.
Ilan's brother Gadi left a sealed letter aboard the Columbia - his brother would only be able to read it after the space shuttle went into space. The astronaut's 15-year-old son Assaf, also left his father a note to be opened only in space. Assaf had said that he would also like to be a pilot or astronaut and said he misses life in Israel.
The crew that flew into space on January 16, whose code name is STS-107, was the first one in three years to concentrate exclusively on research and did not work on the space station.
.... I duno, reverse it. Cars have to be able to withstand at least a small crash and keep their occupants safe. They must meet minimum mileage standards. They come with a drive train and body warranty, at least for a few years. And if it breaks during that time or it takes more than three fixes to correct a defect, you are allowed a full refund under a lot of states lemon laws.
Ain't no software like that sold that I am aware of. Brand new software gets a full skate on most things and is sold "as-is" like a used car, not like a new one. It's usually not even warrantied to even get off the lot.
..here's another. Israel has never confirmed they have nukes. Do you doubt they have them?
There's a world "official" list of nuke kaboom owners, then there's reality. I imagine there's at least a few more nations possess them then what let on publically and officially.
Obviously I can't *prove* japan has nukes, but I'd wager a significant sum on it without hesitation. The closest I've seen them come to admitting it was a statement by one of their defense guys a few months ago (sorry no link handy) about how fast and how hard they could respond to an attack. The expertise is more than there, they possess the plutonium now some large amount is "lost", and they were working on their own bomb in the 40's and might have made it had they started sooner.
--actually, rounded off, the costs of massive and mostly illegal immigration into the US is a net loss to the tune of around 55 grand (IIRC) a head. The only time it paid was way back when there was free homesteading land, we pumped all our own oil, etc, during ourt expansion times. I forget now (have to look it up) but it crossed from a net gain to a net loss around ten years ago.
ok, to be fair I went and searched, here's one url, google will find you many:
http://www.fairus.org/html/04165904.htm
--your examples, 2 out of the 3 "backup employment" examples-- mcdonalds is posting it's first ever loses and is closing restuarants, and kmart filed for bankruptcy. A lost job is a lost paycheck is NO CONSUMING so no service jobs are needed for that person. Now magnify that by the millions, add in the peripheral and collateral effects. It ain't pretty.
--You have it exactly, and that's why it will destroy the US middle class, and do it within this decade we are in. example-china. China does NOT generally speaking buy mass quantities of american goods EXCEPT for tool making machines and similar. They are buying tools to make tools to make-EVERYTHING. They buy the stuff needed to work at, to actually produce, to aquire wealth. Like we used to work, that was successful and bbuilt a diverse robusrt economy. We were sold "globalization" as the "two billion armpit" theory, that if helped china along they would continue to "buy all our stuff" in ever increasing amounts. This hasn't happened, all that's happened is a HUGE balance of trade and short term profits for *some* people and massive loss of jobs. Our balance of trade deficit is simply staggering, we have gone from the world's largest creditor nation the world's largest debtor nation in 20 years, with the bulk of that within the last ten years, and it's growing increasily worse. THAT's all the proof required.
After (china primarily) have their full vertically integrated industries setup,(close now) they not only won't need to buy our stuff, there's no way any of our stuff would be cheap enough for them to bother with, because they will have a large enough internal market. all they will need to trade with then is for oil and other raw materials. And this goes from agricultural products all the way to high tech and everything in between, they won't need us, not a nickles worth. They will continue to export as much as possible, but only to places that have actual hard currency of value or have the materials they need. Our dollar is dropping in relative value. although till used widely, it is and will continue to be devalued, especially if gold backed currencies become required for international balance of trade payments. The current balance of trade numbers prove this with no shadow of a doubt. Other numbers I have seen have china as potentially surpassing the US around 2015 or so, although I personally believed that mass global warfare will occur before that time, basically over resources and who controls the planet. In fact I would maintain world war 3 is already in progress.
The US is living on credit and inertia and a severe case of the denials right now, we are en-screwed. As will be pointed out around the thread, people take a cavalier attitude and say theoretically it's a 'good thing" - until they lose their jobs and start the cycle that millions are on now, lose job, hunt for job, get job paying less, lather rinse repeat until you hit a brick wall with NO job.
The job loss stats are SO bad, they stopped reporting them, claiming they ran out of funding, which is a political dodge. this was a major story that didn't get much coverage, but is important for everyone to take a look at.
url to my last statement
http://www.bls.gov/bls/mlsdiscontinued.htm
text, short and to the point and anyone should be able to read between the lines here
What is the status of the Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program?
The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program has been discontinued. Since 1994, the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration funded the MLS program. That funding ended on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been unable to acquire funding from any alternative sources and had to discontinue the MLS program as of that date. Limited historical data and documentation will continue to be available on the BLS Internet, at http://www.bls.gov/mls/.
Last Modified Date: January 2, 2003
Jobs in the US are NOT being replaced by the numbers, nor are wages going up, speaking in general terms, we are dropping, and fast. It's being manipulated to appear like theyare going up slightly, and even that is a scam, theypulled food and fuel from the consumer price index for example. They are lying, avoiding real numbers, basically pulling an enron accounting modal on an across the board obfuscation to this system to not panic the herd. They are doing the same things with the major market indices, in particular they remove tanked corps as fast as possible to keep those numbers artificially inflated. If you were to do (now timeframe) an historical records match, and keep the tanked companies over the past few year period and reconfigure the indices those charts would look a lot worse than they are now.
IMO
This is an extremely involved subject but the gestalt is we got shafted by literal traitors. Internationalists who are loyal to no one beyond their own power and greed and to whichever global cartel constitutes their gang. This was done on purpose to further a heinous (ultimate) agenda of a global two class fascist society, which I term technofeudalism. It is akin to wolfpacks fighting themselves, but all united in staying wolves over the herds.
I had these same arguments on forums years ago, I was saying the same thing then as I am now. I have personally since heard from people who vigorously disagreed with me then, conveniently when they were sitting fatcity on their dotbomb poker chip improbable beyond belief stock portfolios and a great paycheck. Now, a lot of them have changed their viewpoints 180 degrees, because they got bit, and bit hard. their stock profits turned out to be mostly vaporware and so were their jobs, and not even new jobs then, old jobs they had. Industry after industry has been destroyed or reduced to ridiculous levels. And not buggywheips, critical strategic infrastructure.
That is almost the only way for some people to get from casual ho hum academic styled discussion to back down on the ground in the real world, to just have it shoved in their face up close and personal. THEN they understand better the full ramifications of what's going on..
..this is exactly one of the tenets of a good personal survival/preparedness plan. You exchange with a friend or relative in another geographical area a set of "basics". Basics as in long term stored food, extra clothing, various gear, copies of important legal documents, etc, etc. whatever you consider to be important, and that is a personal variable. Then in case one of the two homes is destroyed in some manner,or you are forced to evacuate, you still have something to start over with and live on rather than losing ALL your day to day tangible wealth.
Makes sense to do it with data as well. On a personal level with computing, it could be as simple as snail mailing burned cd's to each other, along with sending it over the net, but you can't beat that snail mail price and effectiveness for mass quantities, especially if all you have is dialup speed access. The important part is it should be "more" than just one building over, it really needs to be at least in another city as a minimum distance.
--I think you are misinterpreting what I wrote. I was making a list to address the historical perspective about how art first comes about. I sincerely doubt the first artists decided to create art because they got paid to do it. And just noting that doesn't imply that the list-now to 4 reasons-has to be kept in that order for any person, any artist is more than free to choose which method they want to adopt, or combination thereof, I was just adding to it to more accurrately reflect past reality.
--that was my original idea further up. Perhaps not via a pci card, but maybe over ethernet, not only additional ram, but ram that could be shared, like this NUMA allows for the various cpu's on the same board, but with cpus in different machines. distributed & expandable RAM.
--OK, got a noob ram question then. Does this NUMA allow for upgrading total RAM beyond the original specs? Any sort of add-ons? I ask this from noticing it's used because of the physical distances it can access (among others).
thanks in advance to yon knowledgeable ones
--Your list leaves out the real #1, I think you list needs to be bumped down-it's accurate as far as it goes and is currently correct, but not totally.
Here's my corrected list--> insert
1-A real artist, dedicated to his art,no matter what else, makes his own work, because it's just cool, and does it on his own time and on his own nickle.
--thanks for your extensive and informative reply to this noob. It helped me visualize some things better in setting up systems and how a professional effort is addressed. I also am surprised my idea was already being done in some manner, well, that means I'm surprised it had any merit at all!
The tar utility, guess I only thought about it for individual packages, didn't realise you could do the entire drive with it. Have to give it a whack on the funsie machine here, I trash it regularly enough......
As to the audit after getting owned, yes, that's why I mentioned it, seemed logical before allowing the compromised machine back online with the older but secure image. Just with the virtual system it might be faster to recover, as perhaps an identical one could be running simultaneously parallel to the "active" one.
I was just looking at knoppix updates, seems like a system like that might be nice for a semi- no brainer small scale server that is fairly secure(no write access by default install), especially if you took the concept and made it bigger, added your server and custom database apps, etc, and ran it-started it- from a custom burned dvd to a large enough ram bank. Maybe anyway.....I know that would be quite expensive....
Too bad about the "uptime" being more important in most places, you'd think data integrity would be paramount.
Yet again another car analogy, maybe for the bean counters benefit. It's faster and you have more driving "uptime" by just occassionaly topping off the crankcase oil as needed, but the engine's integrity is a lot better and the TCO is better with periodic "down times" and really changing the oil.
--I AGREE with you. the point I was making is that putting all your "trust" into fiat currencies and banks and politics to ensure your basic human needs is very short sighted. I've been following ther argentine situation a lot, because I can see parallels with other nations, especially after the IMF blows the economies out. My recommendations to people who are *smart* and can think outside of the herd-level is to thoroughly understand the profounddifferences between stored theoretical forms of wealth, and true tangible wealth, and to make SURE at a minimum that your first accumulated wealth is in the form of a practical tangible like a paid off piece of ground, with a garden and a well for instance. Even if you don't live there all the time, get a small country place to serve as your backup place during rough times, and pay that thing off first before anything else. Skip the new car, keep the old clunker running, get that property and even if all you can do is put a trailer on it or a small cabin, then at least you have something that's real and "in the bank" so to speak.. You might not be as good off during real bad times like you might be in the good times having a fat bank account and an open supermarket, but when the banks close, and the currency gets inflated, and the shelves are bare at the store, and when your job poofs,(all that stuff you can see happening now in argentina) you still got that garden, and well water, and a modest roof over your head. You can't do it for your entire nation yourself, but anyone can do it for themselves and their immediate family. THAT's the big difference.
I write a lot on survival/preparedness topics, I categorize human being carbon based life form priorities in this fashion...
water-food-shelter-security
And in that eaxct order of importance. These are necessities that if all the wealth you have is represented, that these should be top of the list, and not a thoeretical "I have enough money in the bank to cover that". They should be as independent of outside influence as practical, ie, 'water' isn't magically made in the city dwellers kitchen faucet, "food" doesn't grow on grocery store shelves automagically overnight, and etc. That's dangerous and naieve if not outright arrogant thinking, and way too many people assume that's how it is, and don't care---until one morning they wake up and that stuff is gone, their money worthless to aquire basic human necessities, their retirement 'accounts" and 'portfolios" vaporware. As I'm sure you can see now in your nation where so many peoples life savings buy nothing now, and there's widespread hardship and hunger. And the sheer speed in how it happened. People's realities can be turned upside down, comfortable to desperate in a few steps that you don't have any control over. You can't eliminate bad things happening, but you can plan in advance to have more tangible forms of "insurance" than just a piece of paper in the file cabinet.
By following common sense and differentiating between theoretical forms of money (stocks, paper, digits in a database at a fractional reserve bank, various health "plans", etc, etc) as opposed to in-your-possession true "wealth", at least for the necessities, you can eliminate a lot of potential problems that *might* arise.
During the great depression here in the US, I heard about it a lot when I was younger talking to people who went through it. People who lost their jobs in the city were really hurting, no money, couldn't get food, hunger. People in the country with wells and gardens and chickens still might not have had any "money", but they had food and water and firewood for fuel. This was my direct relatives I'm talking about now, so poor "money wise" eventually duyring those lean years they didn't have two dollars, but they still had food and water and shelter and heat in the winter. We tend to lose track of that in high tech society, but those necessities remain the same for everyone, no matter their station in life.
There true tangible wealth wasn't inflated away like some theoretical digitially stored nonsense in a "bank". They owned "real wealth" as opposed to all that perceived theoretical wealth such as the "stocks" in the portfolios at that time. No soup kitchen lines, no scrambling for scraps at the dump-which I know is going on in argentina now. Maybe they didn't live real "urban" fancy, but what they had, and were able to hang on to, was certainly better than nothing!
And good luck to you folks and to brazil, you have the potential to learn from your mistakes in the past and get more independent and more wealthy, especially as soon as you tell the IMF and the world bank con-men thieves to take a hike.
--correct me if my understanding is incorrect, regardings the major distro vendors and GPL code. They sell cd media, printed dead trees manuals and custom support options, but the code itsef is not sold, it's freely given away. Now they could charge a reasonable fee, if they chose to, for downloading as well, but that's a delivery/bandwith/infrastructure fee for still *free* code.
--the only thing I've done along these lines is to have a "spare" old hard drive with a basic system installed, that isn't plugged in to anything, but it's mounted in the drive bay. If I get a bad fubar, I'll more or less know what the last thing that happened was, so with the spare drive installed I can avoid that problem whatever it was before going online. But ya, it would sucketh to lose all the data and updates. I don't trust my level of expertise to make a backup dump or raid system all that valuable, as more or less I am as likely to just "backup" the virus or trojan should it become installed. I'm just a casual home user, not having to defend expensive server farms, etc, so the requirements aren't as great, but it still would be nice to have an easier to use method that what's available now, which is to become a security guru in your spare time. A virtual system that ran completely in a jail would be a good idea. I tried knoppix but it has some features I don't like (primarily I'm a gnome not a kde guy) and I couldn't make it dial out), but still, it's a step in the right direction and it ran surprisingly fast, much faster than I thought it would.
To get back to the subject, YES, an additional layer of "permissions" to access the system. Two stage isn't enough, you should be able to do an instant "create on demand" full system, use it for a session then trash it, thereby eliminating anything nasty that might have occurred to you, and that temporary system could be an additional step-->out away from the actual root or user level. There should be a "this is vulnerable being online so it can't do much and nothing permanent without jumping through hoops" temp-user level. A temporary trip wire action would help, and then the system would force you to go offline and compare audits before anything was 'saved' to the disk in either a users directory or at root level. It would be saved in the virtual OSs ram cache or on swap (a "virtual swap" inside the real swap as well?), examined, if it passes, THEN it can slide downhill into normal user-space. And the box needs it's own built in battery to keep ram cache intact in case of catstrophic outside failure, so that very important but still unexamined data is not lost. I've had UPSs fail, but when a laptop was plugged in, it didn't matter, I didn't lose anything or suffer file system damage, the built in battery concept is ideal for this, and I have no idea why it isn't just common on desktops as well. They are already big and heavy, a small battery is not that much more weight or space.