An airplane can have hundreds of people on it. Suicide bombers with man portable bombs can take out tens of people, if lucky. Killing masses of people with people aware of suicide bombers can be pretty tough.
Yes and no. Sure, you can kill more people with the same amount of explosives if you bring down an airplane, but you forget that the attackers can change their tactics if they don't need to go through security, and large bags are common in an airport. Detonating two 50kg bags of explosives in a crowded airport can easily bring the death-toll into hundreds.
Terrorists are adaptive. Don't expect them to be stupid and play the game the way you want them to.
So, in an emergency situation you prefer the nurse/doctor to spend their time tracing and marking which tube goes where, using their private system, instead of concentrating on, say, delivering the right amount of the right drug?
How many good, experienced, sysadmins have not once or twice in their careers executed a dangerous command on the wrong computer?
In Sweden you can get an rape investigation on you for nothing. Its an well known fact and well used tactic in divorce cases, where the wifes charges the husband of rape, and thus the wife get soil custofy of the child
Screaming rape in a divorce case (in Sweden and most places of the world) without having some very good proof to back it up is a way to lose custody of the children. The courts are well aware of this strategy. Still, they will have to do an investigation, which might turn up dirt on your partner, which is why it's still done so often.
Sounds like you haven't ever visited a Swedish "häkte" (arrest).
First of all, there is no "bail" in Sweden. Either you are arrested, or you are free awaiting sentencing.
In the Swedish legal system the prosecutor can decide that you need to be arrested if any of the following is fulfilled:
1. There is a risk of additional criminality 2. There is a risk that the person hampers the criminal investigation 3. There is a risk that the person flees 4. There is a minimum sentence of 1 year and no reason not to arrest the person 5. The person does not have a residence in Sweden.
Additionally, the prosecutor can decide to add "restrictions". These can include no communication with the rest of the world. This is done if communication can be expected to hamper the criminal investigation. The prosecutor has to defend the decision to keep a person arrested every 14 days, but the court can decide to keep the person arrested, with restrictions, for a very long time (years), if the investigation goes slowly.
If you are sentenced to prison in Sweden you can end up in an "open" prison (typically for lesser, non-violent, crimes). There there are few restrictions. Or you can end up in a "closed" prison (violent crimes, longer time). In a closed prison the amount of communication with the rest of the world is very limited, and communication with the rest of the world is typically monitored. Don't expect to use an Internet connection (or even a computer!) there.
It's very simple. Most people lack the creativity and skill with the English language required to come up with a short, descriptive keyword that captures the essence of a scandal. This is one of those times when a classical education in English does matter.
For example, we have the Keating five, the Pentagon papers and Wedtech to mention some rather old and aptly named scandals.
However, those that lack a good education in the English language take the easy way out and create a pseudo-word with gate at the end instead of searching for something with more impact. That way they reinforce that it's a scandal, cutting away all the doubt.
Originally the -gate suffix was mostly used to decrease the perception of the watergate scandal and the crimes of Nixon, deploying guilt by association. Some writers called any minor scandal ***-gate to lessen the impact of the watergate scandal. Today you can be certain that when somebody screams ***-gate they lack the communication skills required to get their point across without resorting to the most basic of scat-flinging, or their scandal is so weak that they need to prop it up for it to have any impact. Typical modern examples are climategate, antennagate, pedalgate and bigotgate.
There is an interesting side of this "treason" business, and that is a legal precedent from back in 1945, and the Nümberg trials.
You are personally responsible for any crimes against humanity you commit. You are also personally responsible if you become aware of a crime against humanity and do not act to stop it. That you got orders is no defense, nor that the laws of the country considered it treason to stop the actions.
In other words, if you happen, as a soldier in the line of duty, to be exposed to information about crimes against humanity you are obliged to act to stop them, or you shall hang. Murder of civilians is a crime against humanity. As is committing a "war of aggression" (the definition of that is _very_ vague!).
It's a nice and nationalistic view that treason is the highest crime, but not true in any country that has signed the Geneva conventions, or any war fought in a country that has signed the convention.
No, it had nothing to do with incompetence. During the period we are speaking here (17th century to the middle of the 19th century) infantry was equipped with (smoothbore) muskets. They are powerful, short range and very inaccurate weapons... And takes a long while to reload, even for a skilled soldier. We are talking at most 4 shots a minute. Therefor you had two major groups of infantry:
* Light infantry/Skirmishers/Jägers Fights in lose formation, trying to harass the enemy. Typically you stick trustworthy soldiers here, as it requires a lot more initiative. Very vulnerable to cavalry, which can ride down the soldiers in a lose formation. Often tries to flank the enemy. Falls back if attacked by line infantry, as they can't create the concentrated fire required to fight back.
* Line infantry/Heavy infantry Fights in tight formation, relying on drills such as fire-and-advance to break the enemy formation and gain ground. Can form squares and protect themselves against cavalry, using their muskets with bayonettes as a sort of pike. Aims to take strategic positions on the battlefield.
What happened in the end was the invention of the rifle, and the cartridge, which improved reload times and accuracy. The riflemen then got a considerable advantage over the line infantry volleys of fire. The maxim gun then finally made the line infantry obsolete. Today all infantry is what would have been considered light infantry previously.
Line infantry played a vital roll for 200 years as the primary force on the battlefield, strong against all the enemies thanks to the concentrated fire they could bring. A musket might not be very accurate, but nobody wants to run or ride a horse into a salvo from 200... One of them is likely to hit.
What IS interesting is the idea of the fibre being shared by competing telcos. Has that been done before?
Yes, it has. Selling wavelengths in dark fiber is very common, and companies frequently buy part of lines from eachother. Submarine cables are frequently owned by several companies.
On a level closer to the customer there exists a (in Sweden) functional business model where a company owns the line to the customer and creates a market where different ISP's can provide services to the customer. OpenNet is one of more well known providers using this business model in Sweden.
As far as I can tell this is just a standard implementation of the well known technology known as wavelength-division multiplexing. And calling it "color coding" makes me, as an Engineer, cringe. I am sure it's nice for Ireland to get a new core network, but how this is news for Slashdot is way beyond me...
Network virtualization is just used as a buzzword here. There is good work being done in the network virtualization field (See for example http://www.geni.net/ and http://www.fp7-federica.eu/ but as far as I can tell these guys are not doing anything revolutionary.
While it might be good to hold commercial companies responsible for the software they sell it can place OSS developers in a very bad situation.
The main issue is that if commercial offered software has this kind of liabilities it will very quickly be extended to OSS software offered for free. And who wants to send in a patch to the Linux kernel if it means GM can sue you for 100 000 000 when their factory breaks down?
I would be very careful about rejoicing this move. It can be a very dangerous one.
Methane has indeed a high global warming potential compared to CO2, however that calculation misses one important fact. And that is that methane has a rather limited limited lifetime in the atmosphere, around 12 years. After that it breaks down and to a large degree it goes back into circulation, becoming new methane eventually.
When you burn oil you release CO2 that has a life cycle of (conservatively) tens of thousands of years.
This means that if you kill off all cows and other methane production today you will see the methane effect start to wean after about a decade. Stop burning coal today and the effects will last longer than civilization has existed. As we are speaking of additive effects on the climate you quickly realize that you probably should be much more worried about the gases with long lifetimes and/or high GWP (CO2, HFC-23, SF6 etc) and less about those gases with short lifetimes/low GWP.
Not a new idea. Google is working actively to stop this kind of abuse, which they do by forcing you to go through a captcha if you try to search for terms that are related to malware. I have taken apart a few "evil" programs that did google searches, and each time I found that the search terms had a captcha block.
State of the art for malware is to use a generator function (typically a hash) to generate random domain names. If it loses contact with the C&C servers it will use this generator to try domain names until it finds a new configuration file (propperly encrypted and signed). For the controller they only need to register one of the domain names generated by the hash and eventually the bots will all reconnect.
Loran is pretty similar in capabilities and techonology to DECCA, which was widely deployed in Europe. There are some differences in the implementation, but both gives roughly the same precision. The Decca system up here was turned off 1999/2000, as it wasn't considered cost efficient anymore compared to GPS. Decca as I remember it had a number of rather glaring flaws when using it for navigation:
1: Low precision (several hundreds of meters) 2: Varying precision (Depending on the distance and position compared to the masts) 3: Initialization problems (had to be started at a know position, entering the wrong starting location would give you incorrect data) 4: Unwieldy equipment 5: Energy consuming 6: General user-unfriendlyness (you had to be an engineer and take a 2 week course to figure out the equipment we carried on the ships)
Frankly I don't see the need for Decca anymore. If you are in a ship large enough to use Decca you have DGPS anyway. If GPS Is knocked out you go by Radar. If GPS and Radar are knocked out you most likely don't have any Decca system working.
On the navy side it's obviously nice with passive navigational aids (unlike Radar that makes you a neat target). However, a large antenna that has to be in a fixed position is not exactly a hard target for an ARM (Anti-Radiation Missile)... Which means the navy trains to navigate without such aids anyway.
Decca was an impressive system, but it's no longer competitive. Like analog TV we can use the wavelengths for better things. I am pretty sure the situation is the same with Loran.
I am not sure about that. Allergies to nuts have a nasty habit of being exceptionally strong and easily fatal. One of the students at my school died from an allergic shock after eating vanilla ice-cream that had been kept in the same storage space as ice-cream with nuts. If I remember correctly they ran some tests on the ice-cream and it was not even measurable, but still enough to kill her.
I don't see the need for serving nuts on enclosed places like air planes. Just like I don't see the need for letting people smoke there. Why not do our best to all get to the destination without killing each other instead, shall we? It's not like nuts are a critical part of the in-flight food anyway.
Pretty much all modern conflicts play out according to this pattern, even if the details and tools might differ a little. Balcan, Vietnam, Korea, Congo, Soviet invasion of Afganistan, US invasion of Afganistan, Operation Just Cause etc.
Conflicts where people line up and shoot each other in large groups in an area without civilians are more or less gone today.
I have yet to see any computer-game outside some adventure game that even loosely reflects what violence is like. And the war-games are probably the worst of the bunch. If a military simulator resembled what a soldier has to do in a real war it would play like this.
1: Get up, brush teeth, polish equipment. 2: Drive 10 km on a congested road looking out for bombs. 4: Walk to the observation post 5: Spend 8 hours looking out over a field with peasants, trying to figure out if any of them is a resistance fighter. 6: Walk back to the truck 7: Catch your buddy when the sniper shoots him in the hip 8: Spend 3 hours trying to keep pressure on the wound and wait for medivac 9: Listen to your buddy beg for his life while he is medivaced 10: Fire blindly at a few bushes where the sniper might still be 11: Get tinitus when they bomb the bushes and the nearby houses 12: Spend 4 hours sorting out the remains of the families in the houses, trying to figure out if any of them was the sniper 13: Go to truck again, looking out for snipers this time. 14: Drive home, looking out for road bombs. 15: Wash blood from cloths, eat dinner, go to bed. 16: Repeat...
War is not fun. War does not make a good game. Any "realistic" game still removes 99.95% of what it means to be in a war-zone. You don't get bored, watching a field for hours. You don't police bodies. You don't dig through bloody cloths looking for clues if the guy you just shoot was a resistance fighter or a civilian. You don't have to stop everything and arrange a medivac if anybody in your group is hit. You don't have to write letters home to the family, explaining what happened. You rarely have any rules of engagement. It's clear who is an enemy and who is not...
I wonder when we will see a game where the punishment for sticking your head out at the wrong time is 60 years in a wheelchair with no control over your body... If you are lucky.
It depends a lot on your environment and the complexity you are dealing with. Test labs are wonderful things, but typically you end up in a situation where your network is so limited that a lab won't help much, or your network simply too complex to create a sane lab environment without dedicated staff and a huge budget.
Building a full scale lab is a large undertaking. It takes time and effort. You will need taps (for routing information), traffic generators, topology management and more. In my experience it's usually better to have a smaller testbed that is used to test large changes before deployment and design your network so it's resilient to configuration mistakes.
Getting funding for a limited testbed is also much easier than a full lab, and you can do a lot of testing by simply stuffing a few routers in a rack and connecting it to the network management system. Virtualization is something a lot of people will mention. It's useful, but it's hard to build anything resembling a modern network on top of it. You want hardware that resembles what you use in the network. Sometimes you can scavenge such hardware during upgrades, which can provide you with a basic testbed to build from.
Why is the terrorist supposed to be afraid? Many of them have trained for years to do the hijacking, and fear is not what those who survived described. Besides, many of the terrorists here in Europe have been taking drugs to ensure top performance. So what you are looking for is not somebody scared out of his pants. You are looking for a calm professional on benzedrine.
So we fit all passengers with large collars containing big needles with sedatives. At the first smell of fear we inject a propper dose of sedatives in their necks. The problems with terrorism and fear of flying solved at the same time.
I really must run and patent this idea right now... And get the movie rights!
Funny. I know a network that ran just like that. In a hospital. Tightly controlled environment, mostly vendor approved windows NT4 and 2000 systems, no internet connection except for a very agressive proxy that filtered stuff. Heavy firewalling. Patching every half a year or so. Worked like a charm.
Until the day a contractor upgraded a server for the MRI system using his work laptop. The radiology department was offline for nearly a week while they sorted out the mess.:(
I can only agree, but notice that they are talking about a very small HPC (5.2 teraflops) and claim that they can significantly speed up data searches. There are certainly a few scenarios where you need to quickly and frequently search through a sparse, permanent dataset that is an order too large for your RAM and can benefit from the decreased delay in SSD storage.
However, for general purpose HPC systems the SSD is still a hard disk, and therefore way too slow for anything involving the computation. The extra factor 30x in the cost of storage will be very hard to motivate.
Slashdot Mirror
An airplane can have hundreds of people on it. Suicide bombers with man portable bombs can take out tens of people, if lucky. Killing masses of people with people aware of suicide bombers can be pretty tough.
Yes and no. Sure, you can kill more people with the same amount of explosives if you bring down an airplane, but you forget that the attackers can change their tactics if they don't need to go through security, and large bags are common in an airport. Detonating two 50kg bags of explosives in a crowded airport can easily bring the death-toll into hundreds.
Terrorists are adaptive. Don't expect them to be stupid and play the game the way you want them to.
So, in an emergency situation you prefer the nurse/doctor to spend their time tracing and marking which tube goes where, using their private system, instead of concentrating on, say, delivering the right amount of the right drug?
How many good, experienced, sysadmins have not once or twice in their careers executed a dangerous command on the wrong computer?
In Sweden you can get an rape investigation on you for nothing.
Its an well known fact and well used tactic in divorce cases, where the wifes charges the husband of rape, and thus the wife get soil custofy of the child
Screaming rape in a divorce case (in Sweden and most places of the world) without having some very good proof to back it up is a way to lose custody of the children. The courts are well aware of this strategy. Still, they will have to do an investigation, which might turn up dirt on your partner, which is why it's still done so often.
Sounds like you haven't ever visited a Swedish "häkte" (arrest).
First of all, there is no "bail" in Sweden. Either you are arrested, or you are free awaiting sentencing.
In the Swedish legal system the prosecutor can decide that you need to be arrested if any of the following is fulfilled:
1. There is a risk of additional criminality
2. There is a risk that the person hampers the criminal investigation
3. There is a risk that the person flees
4. There is a minimum sentence of 1 year and no reason not to arrest the person
5. The person does not have a residence in Sweden.
Additionally, the prosecutor can decide to add "restrictions". These can include no communication with the rest of the world. This is done if communication can be expected to hamper the criminal investigation. The prosecutor has to defend the decision to keep a person arrested every 14 days, but the court can decide to keep the person arrested, with restrictions, for a very long time (years), if the investigation goes slowly.
If you are sentenced to prison in Sweden you can end up in an "open" prison (typically for lesser, non-violent, crimes). There there are few restrictions. Or you can end up in a "closed" prison (violent crimes, longer time). In a closed prison the amount of communication with the rest of the world is very limited, and communication with the rest of the world is typically monitored. Don't expect to use an Internet connection (or even a computer!) there.
You go to school to buy a piece of paper to impress employers. Learning plays no factor in so-called modern education.
And I assume you visit your local witch doctor when you need medical care...?
It's very simple. Most people lack the creativity and skill with the English language required to come up with a short, descriptive keyword that captures the essence of a scandal. This is one of those times when a classical education in English does matter.
For example, we have the Keating five, the Pentagon papers and Wedtech to mention some rather old and aptly named scandals.
However, those that lack a good education in the English language take the easy way out and create a pseudo-word with gate at the end instead of searching for something with more impact. That way they reinforce that it's a scandal, cutting away all the doubt.
Originally the -gate suffix was mostly used to decrease the perception of the watergate scandal and the crimes of Nixon, deploying guilt by association. Some writers called any minor scandal ***-gate to lessen the impact of the watergate scandal. Today you can be certain that when somebody screams ***-gate they lack the communication skills required to get their point across without resorting to the most basic of scat-flinging, or their scandal is so weak that they need to prop it up for it to have any impact. Typical modern examples are climategate, antennagate, pedalgate and bigotgate.
There is an interesting side of this "treason" business, and that is a legal precedent from back in 1945, and the Nümberg trials.
You are personally responsible for any crimes against humanity you commit. You are also personally responsible if you become aware of a crime against humanity and do not act to stop it. That you got orders is no defense, nor that the laws of the country considered it treason to stop the actions.
In other words, if you happen, as a soldier in the line of duty, to be exposed to information about crimes against humanity you are obliged to act to stop them, or you shall hang. Murder of civilians is a crime against humanity. As is committing a "war of aggression" (the definition of that is _very_ vague!).
It's a nice and nationalistic view that treason is the highest crime, but not true in any country that has signed the Geneva conventions, or any war fought in a country that has signed the convention.
No, it had nothing to do with incompetence. During the period we are speaking here (17th century to the middle of the 19th century) infantry was equipped with (smoothbore) muskets. They are powerful, short range and very inaccurate weapons... And takes a long while to reload, even for a skilled soldier. We are talking at most 4 shots a minute. Therefor you had two major groups of infantry:
* Light infantry/Skirmishers/Jägers
Fights in lose formation, trying to harass the enemy. Typically you stick trustworthy soldiers here, as it requires a lot more initiative. Very vulnerable to cavalry, which can ride down the soldiers in a lose formation. Often tries to flank the enemy. Falls back if attacked by line infantry, as they can't create the concentrated fire required to fight back.
* Line infantry/Heavy infantry
Fights in tight formation, relying on drills such as fire-and-advance to break the enemy formation and gain ground. Can form squares and protect themselves against cavalry, using their muskets with bayonettes as a sort of pike. Aims to take strategic positions on the battlefield.
What happened in the end was the invention of the rifle, and the cartridge, which improved reload times and accuracy. The riflemen then got a considerable advantage over the line infantry volleys of fire. The maxim gun then finally made the line infantry obsolete. Today all infantry is what would have been considered light infantry previously.
Line infantry played a vital roll for 200 years as the primary force on the battlefield, strong against all the enemies thanks to the concentrated fire they could bring. A musket might not be very accurate, but nobody wants to run or ride a horse into a salvo from 200... One of them is likely to hit.
What IS interesting is the idea of the fibre being shared by competing telcos. Has that been done before?
Yes, it has. Selling wavelengths in dark fiber is very common, and companies frequently buy part of lines from eachother. Submarine cables are frequently owned by several companies.
On a level closer to the customer there exists a (in Sweden) functional business model where a company owns the line to the customer and creates a market where different ISP's can provide services to the customer. OpenNet is one of more well known providers using this business model in Sweden.
As far as I can tell this is just a standard implementation of the well known technology known as wavelength-division multiplexing. And calling it "color coding" makes me, as an Engineer, cringe. I am sure it's nice for Ireland to get a new core network, but how this is news for Slashdot is way beyond me...
Network virtualization is just used as a buzzword here. There is good work being done in the network virtualization field (See for example http://www.geni.net/ and http://www.fp7-federica.eu/ but as far as I can tell these guys are not doing anything revolutionary.
Unless cars where you live are built significantly different from cars here I am pretty sure you are wrong.
The cigarett lighter is an ISO 4165 plug, and is is 12v, 16Amp max. It may be underfused to 8 amp, but that is something I have never seen.
I regularly charge and use my macbook pro with an inverter when on roadtrips. I usually drive an old Chrysler Voyager.
Due to the crushing tax pressure of socialism it costs about $6 a month.
While it might be good to hold commercial companies responsible for the software they sell it can place OSS developers in a very bad situation.
The main issue is that if commercial offered software has this kind of liabilities it will very quickly be extended to OSS software offered for free. And who wants to send in a patch to the Linux kernel if it means GM can sue you for 100 000 000 when their factory breaks down?
I would be very careful about rejoicing this move. It can be a very dangerous one.
Methane has indeed a high global warming potential compared to CO2, however that calculation misses one important fact. And that is that methane has a rather limited limited lifetime in the atmosphere, around 12 years. After that it breaks down and to a large degree it goes back into circulation, becoming new methane eventually.
When you burn oil you release CO2 that has a life cycle of (conservatively) tens of thousands of years.
This means that if you kill off all cows and other methane production today you will see the methane effect start to wean after about a decade. Stop burning coal today and the effects will last longer than civilization has existed. As we are speaking of additive effects on the climate you quickly realize that you probably should be much more worried about the gases with long lifetimes and/or high GWP (CO2, HFC-23, SF6 etc) and less about those gases with short lifetimes/low GWP.
Not a new idea. Google is working actively to stop this kind of abuse, which they do by forcing you to go through a captcha if you try to search for terms that are related to malware. I have taken apart a few "evil" programs that did google searches, and each time I found that the search terms had a captcha block.
State of the art for malware is to use a generator function (typically a hash) to generate random domain names. If it loses contact with the C&C servers it will use this generator to try domain names until it finds a new configuration file (propperly encrypted and signed). For the controller they only need to register one of the domain names generated by the hash and eventually the bots will all reconnect.
Loran is pretty similar in capabilities and techonology to DECCA, which was widely deployed in Europe. There are some differences in the implementation, but both gives roughly the same precision. The Decca system up here was turned off 1999/2000, as it wasn't considered cost efficient anymore compared to GPS. Decca as I remember it had a number of rather glaring flaws when using it for navigation:
1: Low precision (several hundreds of meters)
2: Varying precision (Depending on the distance and position compared to the masts)
3: Initialization problems (had to be started at a know position, entering the wrong starting location would give you incorrect data)
4: Unwieldy equipment
5: Energy consuming
6: General user-unfriendlyness (you had to be an engineer and take a 2 week course to figure out the equipment we carried on the ships)
Frankly I don't see the need for Decca anymore. If you are in a ship large enough to use Decca you have DGPS anyway. If GPS Is knocked out you go by Radar. If GPS and Radar are knocked out you most likely don't have any Decca system working.
On the navy side it's obviously nice with passive navigational aids (unlike Radar that makes you a neat target). However, a large antenna that has to be in a fixed position is not exactly a hard target for an ARM (Anti-Radiation Missile)... Which means the navy trains to navigate without such aids anyway.
Decca was an impressive system, but it's no longer competitive. Like analog TV we can use the wavelengths for better things. I am pretty sure the situation is the same with Loran.
I am not sure about that. Allergies to nuts have a nasty habit of being exceptionally strong and easily fatal. One of the students at my school died from an allergic shock after eating vanilla ice-cream that had been kept in the same storage space as ice-cream with nuts. If I remember correctly they ran some tests on the ice-cream and it was not even measurable, but still enough to kill her.
I don't see the need for serving nuts on enclosed places like air planes. Just like I don't see the need for letting people smoke there. Why not do our best to all get to the destination without killing each other instead, shall we? It's not like nuts are a critical part of the in-flight food anyway.
Pretty much all modern conflicts play out according to this pattern, even if the details and tools might differ a little. Balcan, Vietnam, Korea, Congo, Soviet invasion of Afganistan, US invasion of Afganistan, Operation Just Cause etc.
Conflicts where people line up and shoot each other in large groups in an area without civilians are more or less gone today.
I have yet to see any computer-game outside some adventure game that even loosely reflects what violence is like. And the war-games are probably the worst of the bunch. If a military simulator resembled what a soldier has to do in a real war it would play like this.
1: Get up, brush teeth, polish equipment.
2: Drive 10 km on a congested road looking out for bombs.
4: Walk to the observation post
5: Spend 8 hours looking out over a field with peasants, trying to figure out if any of them is a resistance fighter.
6: Walk back to the truck
7: Catch your buddy when the sniper shoots him in the hip
8: Spend 3 hours trying to keep pressure on the wound and wait for medivac
9: Listen to your buddy beg for his life while he is medivaced
10: Fire blindly at a few bushes where the sniper might still be
11: Get tinitus when they bomb the bushes and the nearby houses
12: Spend 4 hours sorting out the remains of the families in the houses, trying to figure out if any of them was the sniper
13: Go to truck again, looking out for snipers this time.
14: Drive home, looking out for road bombs.
15: Wash blood from cloths, eat dinner, go to bed.
16: Repeat...
War is not fun. War does not make a good game. Any "realistic" game still removes 99.95% of what it means to be in a war-zone. You don't get bored, watching a field for hours. You don't police bodies. You don't dig through bloody cloths looking for clues if the guy you just shoot was a resistance fighter or a civilian. You don't have to stop everything and arrange a medivac if anybody in your group is hit. You don't have to write letters home to the family, explaining what happened. You rarely have any rules of engagement. It's clear who is an enemy and who is not...
I wonder when we will see a game where the punishment for sticking your head out at the wrong time is 60 years in a wheelchair with no control over your body... If you are lucky.
It depends a lot on your environment and the complexity you are dealing with. Test labs are wonderful things, but typically you end up in a situation where your network is so limited that a lab won't help much, or your network simply too complex to create a sane lab environment without dedicated staff and a huge budget.
Building a full scale lab is a large undertaking. It takes time and effort. You will need taps (for routing information), traffic generators, topology management and more. In my experience it's usually better to have a smaller testbed that is used to test large changes before deployment and design your network so it's resilient to configuration mistakes.
Getting funding for a limited testbed is also much easier than a full lab, and you can do a lot of testing by simply stuffing a few routers in a rack and connecting it to the network management system. Virtualization is something a lot of people will mention. It's useful, but it's hard to build anything resembling a modern network on top of it. You want hardware that resembles what you use in the network. Sometimes you can scavenge such hardware during upgrades, which can provide you with a basic testbed to build from.
Why is the terrorist supposed to be afraid? Many of them have trained for years to do the hijacking, and fear is not what those who survived described. Besides, many of the terrorists here in Europe have been taking drugs to ensure top performance. So what you are looking for is not somebody scared out of his pants. You are looking for a calm professional on benzedrine.
I really like the idea! Preferably it should be combined with US patent 6970105 (Passenger control system during a plane flying) http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6970105.html
So we fit all passengers with large collars containing big needles with sedatives. At the first smell of fear we inject a propper dose of sedatives in their necks. The problems with terrorism and fear of flying solved at the same time.
I really must run and patent this idea right now... And get the movie rights!
Funny. I know a network that ran just like that. In a hospital. Tightly controlled environment, mostly vendor approved windows NT4 and 2000 systems, no internet connection except for a very agressive proxy that filtered stuff. Heavy firewalling. Patching every half a year or so. Worked like a charm.
Until the day a contractor upgraded a server for the MRI system using his work laptop. The radiology department was offline for nearly a week while they sorted out the mess. :(
Why not take it all the way and reduce it to one level:
"Be afraid, be very afraid. There will soon be a terrorist attack. Support your masters in whatever they want to do."
For historical reasons I recommend a brownish-grey as the colour.
I can only agree, but notice that they are talking about a very small HPC (5.2 teraflops) and claim that they can significantly speed up data searches. There are certainly a few scenarios where you need to quickly and frequently search through a sparse, permanent dataset that is an order too large for your RAM and can benefit from the decreased delay in SSD storage.
However, for general purpose HPC systems the SSD is still a hard disk, and therefore way too slow for anything involving the computation. The extra factor 30x in the cost of storage will be very hard to motivate.