You get more with the carrot than with the stick, so unless you're employing a group of starving donkeys I suggest cold, hard cash.
While I agree with this sentiment up to a point, it goes far beyond just cold hard cash. I worked in IT for 15 years until I was black-balled by the Powers That Be for public criticism of the Bush regime post-9/11 (don't ask). Cash may be king, but it hardly begins to cover what makes for a productive, energetic IT work-force. I know, because I have been there. Let me elucidate: Respect: Respect is a 2-way street. Bosses that treat their employees with a modicum of respect for their prior knowledge and insights to problem resolution will get more effort out of their workers. Variety: Variety of job assignments, particularly time-sharing between multiple assignments, keep workers alert and fresh. Mentoring: Provide employees with at least quasi-confidential mentoring by more senior staff. Every job is a learning experience to some extent, and public ridicule for minor gaffes can ruin a career. Education: Employers that offer discounted or free courseware for continuing education will benefit both the employee and the company long-term. HR should invest the time to help employees keep their CVs up-to-date. Flex-Time: Unless you are running a Chinese Foxconn facility, flex-time provides for accommodating the individual needs of employees who might actually have a life outside the job. Vacations: Vacations should begin with a 2 week minimum, and increase with the time vested with the company. Not only does it help employees let off steam and recuperate away from the company, but it will also help the company to discover weaknesses in the overlap in employee skills. It will also serve to remind employees that they are not irreplaceable. No one in a corporation, from janitor to CEO is irreplaceable. Bonuses/Awards: Bonuses should be generous and tied to specific projects and project milestones. Awards, even tacky awards, that acknowledge the efforts of workers are appreciated. Profit-sharing: If your company isn't offering profit-sharing awarded quarterly, then you are insulating management rewards from those of your employees, which will create unnecessary divisions in team-based corporate goals. Activities: Outside activities that bring employees and families of employees together build corporate identity and unity. Even a semi-annual catered barbeque held in the corporate parking lot would do -- reservations at a theme park would be even better. Benefits: Companies that are not stingy with health, family health, and term life insurance will have happier, healthier employees. Companies that subscribe to quality daycare facilities for the young children of employees demonstrate an interest in the well-being of the employees families, and helps build loyalty. 401Ks: Companies must offer employees a decent selection of retirement investments, preferably with vested corporate contributions. A 401K that only invests in company stock isn't a retirement plan -- it's a scam.
Not every company can offer all of the things that I have listed above, particularly smaller companies. But those that do manage to offer many of these items will have a happy, loyal, and energetic workforce that will willingly go above and beyond to help the company when needed. Merely offering top dollar in wages to employees does not build loyalty, only a mercenary attitude that will hurt the company most when the company is vulnerable.
Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.
If you re-read my post, I never conflated a direct equivalence between analog film lens flare and digital moire patterns except that both are problematic to decent image quality. I also discussed the issue of using a picture from a print magazine, already converted from RGB > CMYK and screened for 4 or 6 color press, as a suitable image scanned in to test a high resolution printer. Did you really miss that bit?
However, analog film cameras have no provision for overcoming lens aberrations short of spending top dollar on top quality lenses. Modern digit cameras store information about compatible same-brand lens to make digital corrections to lens aberrations while processing the image to memory. I have never seen what could be characterized as moire patterns when converting from analog film to analog prints in a traditional darkroom, but even with top quality name brand digital cameras the included DSP(s) never can completely eliminate the possibility of moire patterns found in digital images.
You need to pick your nits a bit more carefully, lest you be mistaken for something a bit more anally retentive than nits.
The DTP / pre-press shop I worked in also sold the equipment we used. I remember seeing the 3M DyeSub printers at trade shows but never had any hands-on experience with them. IIRC, they were an option on some of the Genigraphics systems. The specs were quite good as I recall, and looked a bit like the Kodak DyeSub printer.
We also used Matrix Digital Film Recorders (8K 8x10 back) and Linotronic Typesetting Printers, did video out to VTRs and CDROM, graphics design, web page development, plus had our own professional photo lab. I was production assistant and hands-on technical support on all the equipment, plus the IT guy handling our administrative & production Novell file servers and rolled out our dial-in Linux FTP server. Never a dull moment, for 10 to 12 hours per day. My favorite computers were SGI Indigo2 and ChallengeXL machines used for video animation, just for the sublime user interface and rock solid stability.
I worked for years in the DTP and pre-press market back in the 1980's and 1990's. The best hardcopy printers (not pre-press) that we had available at the time were Tektronix dye-sublimation and Firey 2000 inkjet printers. Mere 300 LPI flatbed scanners with a gamma of 4.0 were supplanted by 400 LPI analog drum scanners with a gamma of 4.8+. Color matching became critical to the conversion from RGB to CMYK for pre-press. Quality printing began with 600 LPI 4 color mask process and advanced from there in LPI and color layers. Special monitors and calibration equipment were used to age-adjust old-fashioned phosphor monitors. Reliance upon SGI computers and then Apple computers spelled the death-knell for special purpose graphics systems such as Genigraphics, and then eventually with SGI. And PostScript, WTF is that?
Today, even pre-press is a dying industry, along with most print magazines. The only segment of the industry that appears to still be thriving is the soft porn men's magazines, from which the OP's test image originated. But I can assure the/. readers that a photo from a magazine is hardly an adequate test source for scanned images let alone high resolution print, since the image has already been massaged through the RGB > CMYK process and then the screening process (color separated dots, not pixels). OTOH, original analog photographs taken under controlled studio conditions, then printed in a computer-controlled darkroom is/was the standard. This printer may, or may not, be as good as advertised but the testing paradigm is highly dubious. Swapping analog film lens flare for digital moire patterns is not, IMHO, an advancement in print technology. And Kodak, WTF is that? No wonder that quality print industry has departed the USA, now done in Germany and to a lesser degree Japan.
Kids these days just don't know diddley squat... now, get the heck off my lawn !!
I worked for a time for a multinational company that offered free health insurance. The company was so cash-rich that they self-insured for that coverage, with an umbrella policy for outside insurance for catastrophic (major medical) coverage. The other nations that they had a corporate presence in had socialized medicine (Canada & Britain), and they wanted all their employees to share similar benefits. It made it rather simple accounting-wise to shift employees from one country to another for short & longish term projects. I rather doubt that they have the same benefit package today - that was nearly 20 years ago, and in the USA medical costs have skyrocketed by over 1,000 percent. Self-insurance saved this company a lot of money.
This is basically what Google is doing with term life insurance, except that the $20 per month they charge sounds rather stingy in comparison, actuarially speaking, considering the average age of Google's employees.
I will accept corporations as people when the state of Texas throws them into prison for 30 years hard time, or they actually execute one -- not before. They damn sure cannot vote.
Voters votes used to count, or recount, but that was in the olden times before actual voters were replaced with easily hacked electronic voting machines. Actual voters $10 or $20 campaign contributions used to count for something as well, before SCOTUS approved the Citizens United decision, now mountains of campaign cash from offshore banksters. Corporations, which cannot vote, can only buy advertising that promotes their candidate (or more recently both candidates). If we ignore the corporate media and investigate, support, and vote for candidates that will actually represent us when in office, we would be a lot better off.
That's not just Big Brother creepy, that's CREEPy.
(Archaic reference to criminal Nixon's "Committee to RE-Elect the President". Which reminds me, why haven't impeachment proceedings already begun 8 months ago to eject Obama & Holder from office?)
And speaking of the Z-80 processor: I lusted after the Commodore Portable for the ability to drop in a Z-80 board to run CPM, but never had enough cash to make it happen. But to me the Big Iron holy grail was the Altair, with a Z-80 processor & S-100 buss.
Instead, I had a Timex Sinclair with a 2k memory expansion module & tape drive storage. I used it's built-in BASIC to solve sparse matrix calculations for rudimentary circuit analysis. By the time I got out of community college, the Zenith Z-150 (IBM-PC clone) was available -- loved the built-in debugger.
"And if they wait long enough, the whole area may turn into a tropical paradise..."
You mean, like with a dramatic shift in the magnetic poles? Do you know something that the rest of us are not aware of, like perhaps being associated with the HAARP program?
BTW, IIRC Shell Oil has had a number of less-than-stellar environmental issues in regions like Nigeria and Brazil. BP also had a reasonable environmental record, but only so long as their operations were located off-shore of a country that actually gave a good GD, like the North Sea off the coast of Britain. The Arctic Ocean is a quite sensitive region ecologically, considering the recent discovery of major bloom fields of plankton under the ice.
Besides, it would be MUCH easier and cheaper to co-opt some hardware vendor's driver set and slip your stuff into that than risk doing the same at Microsoft.. Not that I'm saying it didn't happen, only that it seems easier other ways.....
I agree. And there have been documented cases of this being done. One of the most famous was the worm installed in firmware of a printer shipped to Iraq that incapacitated big chunks of Saddam's air defense system, courtesy of the NSA. And again regarding hardware: I wonder how many add-in PC cards like video or network that have back-doors built-in, or even hidden 'features' built into the firmware. I just threw out a serial/parallel ISA board so old that it was all TTL logic, no VLSI, no firmware.
Some wise-guy is going to install malware in a video card that 'steals' a miniscule number of clock cycles & memory that can compromise the entire contents of your fire-walled network. Almost anything that can be done with software can be done with 'solder', and a lot more difficult to deal with.
Even better solution is to "fix" the Monsanto corporate board, permanently, like a gelding.
Were you aware that the lunchrooms of Monsanto facilities explicitly prohibit GMO foods for their employees, and at the insistence of those employees? Why are Monsanto employees treated better than USA citizens? Could it be that if USA citizens were informed of the GMO origins of many of their foodstuffs, that they would knowingly & willfully boycott those products?
And in other totally unrelated news, Brazil just fell under the attention of the Department of Homeland Security as a state sponsor of terrorism. Bombing of Brazil by "death from above" UAV's has now been scheduled for Monday morning, once assets from Columbia have been re-tasked.
Re-educating the unwashed masses as to the many advantages of GMO food crops is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
Please, don't be shy Anonymous Coward. I believe that you are onto something there.
When conspiracy theories ultimately are discovered to be conspiracy fact, the mainstream media will dismiss it as 'common sense everyone knew', 'nothing to see here', and then put the sheeple back to sleep. Causality doesn't equate to coincidence. Anyway, I don't believe that any chain of statistically improbable events conflates to mere coincidence. Mere coincidence is highly over-rated. It is stated, with some degree of proof, that only six degrees of separation exist between any two otherwise seemingly unrelated events. Accidents do happen, but not usually by pure accident.
And it is no accident that linux has been effectively kept off the desktop. You could blame that on Microsoft moles, or you could blame it on linux developers, or you could blame it on Microsoft moles posing as linux developers. The actual cause might even lay elsewhere, but you have presented one theory. Who the fuck are you, AC, that I might properly honor your brilliance?
If I had mod points, I would definitely mod your post up a few notches...
Imagine a government with access to a complex OS source code. Then imagine that they get data on all manner of security holes as they are discovered. Imagine also that this government has access to OS security update certifications. Finally, imagine that this same government has the ability to hack into server DNS tables to route targeted users to their alternative 'security updates'.
The penetration of any software company by undercover government operatives would hardly be surprising, but entirely unnecessary. Microsoft would hardly be alone as a target of such espionage -- every software company would be vulnerable, including OSS. There is also the issue with 'backdoors' hard-wired into computer hardware, including especially telecom systems. IIRC, this became an issue recently with news of backdoors alleged to exist in VLSI circuits manufactured in China. Older news alleged that Israel also puts backdoors into the telecom hardware they sell & ship, including to the USA government.
If virtually every government does such spying, including upon their own citizens, and any number of software & hardware companies do the same with their customers, any cautious user of such technology should be aware of the potential security breaches they expose themselves to every time they connect to the internet, or open their front door for that matter. Redundancy & breadth of security beats security through obscurity any day.
The phrases of the day are, "Trust no one", "Security in depth", and "If it can't be accessed remotely, it's more secure & less vulnerable". At that point, physical security & Tempest-hardening secure your valuable data. The rhetorical question is, "How valuable is your data if you cannot readily access it?" I found it humorous that the USA government recently wanted reporters to write their news stories on government-supplied computers, if only to avoid unwanted data leaks & stop potential whistleblowers in their tracks.
Trust the USA government, or any government, or any corporation with an agenda? Why take that risk unmitigated? And who in Hades would put vulnerable sensitive SCADA systems in close proximity to the Internet except an idiot?
Microstamping would make no difference these days. That factoid would fall under 'national security' considerations, especially if the facts refute the theory. It also presumes that there would be a trial. Today, we have the Unitary Executive, with extrajudicial 'remedies' that preclude charges being filed, or with a public trial, or even a crime actually having been committed. We are in the age of indefinite preventive detention, government incitement & entrapment, and (coming soon) armed domestic UAVs for 'law enforcement' -- death from above.
The FBI criminal laboratory for many years fraudulently claimed that they could tell which box a bullet came from, based upon their 'expert' testimony. As it turns out, modern manufacturing methods are far too uniform for such a claim to be scientifically valid.
Wasn't it that globalist criminal William Jefferson Clinton that proposed putting microscopic taggards in smokeless powder used for reloading ammunition? That same President that created the Ruby Ridge massacre, the Waco / Branch Davidian massacre, and the OKC Bombing. (Yes, the OKC bombing was an inside job, just like both attacks on the NYC Twin Towers (1993 & 2001). Advancing a police state through legislation requires events that encourage such legislation.
Barely 2 months before the VPI shootings, the VA legislature was on the verge of making CCL (concealed carry licenses) valid for college campuses. The regents of VPI pressed the legislature to table changes to VA CCL laws. In another instance of liberal stupidity, the perpetrator of the VPI slayings was in and out of mental health treatment for many months before that tragic event. The liberals in charge of VPI Health Services did not want to disadvantage a student from future firearms ownership by registering this student with the Virginia State Police as being mentally unstable. If Cho had been registered thus, the Instant Background Check would have flagged him as legally unable to purchase a firearm. Liberalism, especially liberalism that strips citizens of their rights, was at the core of the VPI shootings and directly attributable to that crime.
BTW, CCL holders go through a similar vetting process that the private VPI security go through. I would trust a CCL-holder before I would trust a Law Enforcement Officer -- demographically, there is a far larger portion of LEOs that commit crimes than CCL-holders.
FWIW, when I went to VPI back in the early 1970's students were allowed to bring their legally owned firearms on campus, to be stored with their Resident Advisors. There is some great white-tail deer and black bear hunting in the rural areas around VPI. VPI used to have a fairly competent target shooting team, as well as ROTC.
Liberal gun-grabbers are nothing more than prostitutes working for the bankster criminal class, making the entire world safe for their criminal enterprises. It has been said that liberals are merely conservatives who have not yet been the victims of one criminal class or another, including especially the banksters.
You aren't trolling for someone of the criminal class who might be armed, in order to deal with a nasty ex-wife and her boyfriend divorce lawyer, are you? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
The only people in NYC who are allowed to protect themselves with firearms are that criminal class who steal from the common man. They're called banksters, lawyers, politicians, etcetera -- who belong in prison or under the prison.
You're the asshole, Asshole Coward. I bet you are either one of that criminal class yourself, or else work as security for that criminal class, like the NYPD. When the banksters are done raping & pillaging We The People, you will be next on their list of prospective victims. Watch out for your pension, AC, since it is "low-hanging fruit" to be stolen as well. Anyway, with enough torches & pitchforks, who needs a firearm to herd that criminal class into line for introductions to Madame Guillotine?
George Carlin (R.I.P.) had a special expression for the Congress-critters, the banksters (rhymes with gangsters), and others that rob We The People with legislation and a fountain pen. He stated that these people are tough on street crime, in order to make Wall Street criminals feel safer. I haven't seen anything that refutes that claim.
Well, we can always hope that some Chinese hacker will prove to be a kind soul and release them for everyone's benefit.
Exactly so. Just because Raytheon is likely using an off-the-shelf Linux release as the platform for their Ground Control Software, that doesn't specify which shelf it came off of. IIRC, 'Red Dragon' is the vetted official People's Republic of China release of Linux. That makes the jobs of the repo (re-possession) men contracted to the PRC to help settle the USA's massive sovereign & trade debts that much easier. (And don't think That Isn't Coming. If so, you're in denial.)
OTOH, I am familiar with another Defense Contractor's Ground Control Software of 10 years ago, and they were using a heavily customized version of Linux for a portion of their project (Java coding & Oracle Back-end). That didn't make their Ground Control Software any safer -- exactly the opposite considering how both the kernel & core system software have been repeatedly patched by the open source community. (Contractor-wise, can anyone say "Job Security"?)
Considering the nature of the UAVs they will be controlling, perhaps the better choice for that OS would be OpenBSD, widely advertised as only having had "2 remote holes since forever". Of course, that would represent a new challenge with a big "pay-off" for hackers everywhere.
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You get more with the carrot than with the stick, so unless you're employing a group of starving donkeys I suggest cold, hard cash.
While I agree with this sentiment up to a point, it goes far beyond just cold hard cash. I worked in IT for 15 years until I was black-balled by the Powers That Be for public criticism of the Bush regime post-9/11 (don't ask). Cash may be king, but it hardly begins to cover what makes for a productive, energetic IT work-force. I know, because I have been there. Let me elucidate:
Respect: Respect is a 2-way street. Bosses that treat their employees with a modicum of respect for their prior knowledge and insights to problem resolution will get more effort out of their workers.
Variety: Variety of job assignments, particularly time-sharing between multiple assignments, keep workers alert and fresh.
Mentoring: Provide employees with at least quasi-confidential mentoring by more senior staff. Every job is a learning experience to some extent, and public ridicule for minor gaffes can ruin a career.
Education: Employers that offer discounted or free courseware for continuing education will benefit both the employee and the company long-term. HR should invest the time to help employees keep their CVs up-to-date.
Flex-Time: Unless you are running a Chinese Foxconn facility, flex-time provides for accommodating the individual needs of employees who might actually have a life outside the job.
Vacations: Vacations should begin with a 2 week minimum, and increase with the time vested with the company. Not only does it help employees let off steam and recuperate away from the company, but it will also help the company to discover weaknesses in the overlap in employee skills. It will also serve to remind employees that they are not irreplaceable. No one in a corporation, from janitor to CEO is irreplaceable.
Bonuses/Awards: Bonuses should be generous and tied to specific projects and project milestones. Awards, even tacky awards, that acknowledge the efforts of workers are appreciated.
Profit-sharing: If your company isn't offering profit-sharing awarded quarterly, then you are insulating management rewards from those of your employees, which will create unnecessary divisions in team-based corporate goals.
Activities: Outside activities that bring employees and families of employees together build corporate identity and unity. Even a semi-annual catered barbeque held in the corporate parking lot would do -- reservations at a theme park would be even better.
Benefits: Companies that are not stingy with health, family health, and term life insurance will have happier, healthier employees. Companies that subscribe to quality daycare facilities for the young children of employees demonstrate an interest in the well-being of the employees families, and helps build loyalty.
401Ks: Companies must offer employees a decent selection of retirement investments, preferably with vested corporate contributions. A 401K that only invests in company stock isn't a retirement plan -- it's a scam.
Not every company can offer all of the things that I have listed above, particularly smaller companies. But those that do manage to offer many of these items will have a happy, loyal, and energetic workforce that will willingly go above and beyond to help the company when needed. Merely offering top dollar in wages to employees does not build loyalty, only a mercenary attitude that will hurt the company most when the company is vulnerable.
Anyway, that's my $00.02 worth.
Just to nitpick, lens flare has nothing to do with film vs. digital sensors: it's entirely due to the optics.
If you re-read my post, I never conflated a direct equivalence between analog film lens flare and digital moire patterns except that both are problematic to decent image quality. I also discussed the issue of using a picture from a print magazine, already converted from RGB > CMYK and screened for 4 or 6 color press, as a suitable image scanned in to test a high resolution printer. Did you really miss that bit?
However, analog film cameras have no provision for overcoming lens aberrations short of spending top dollar on top quality lenses. Modern digit cameras store information about compatible same-brand lens to make digital corrections to lens aberrations while processing the image to memory. I have never seen what could be characterized as moire patterns when converting from analog film to analog prints in a traditional darkroom, but even with top quality name brand digital cameras the included DSP(s) never can completely eliminate the possibility of moire patterns found in digital images.
You need to pick your nits a bit more carefully, lest you be mistaken for something a bit more anally retentive than nits.
The DTP / pre-press shop I worked in also sold the equipment we used. I remember seeing the 3M DyeSub printers at trade shows but never had any hands-on experience with them. IIRC, they were an option on some of the Genigraphics systems. The specs were quite good as I recall, and looked a bit like the Kodak DyeSub printer.
We also used Matrix Digital Film Recorders (8K 8x10 back) and Linotronic Typesetting Printers, did video out to VTRs and CDROM, graphics design, web page development, plus had our own professional photo lab. I was production assistant and hands-on technical support on all the equipment, plus the IT guy handling our administrative & production Novell file servers and rolled out our dial-in Linux FTP server. Never a dull moment, for 10 to 12 hours per day. My favorite computers were SGI Indigo2 and ChallengeXL machines used for video animation, just for the sublime user interface and rock solid stability.
Damn, I must be getting old ...
I worked for years in the DTP and pre-press market back in the 1980's and 1990's. The best hardcopy printers (not pre-press) that we had available at the time were Tektronix dye-sublimation and Firey 2000 inkjet printers. Mere 300 LPI flatbed scanners with a gamma of 4.0 were supplanted by 400 LPI analog drum scanners with a gamma of 4.8+. Color matching became critical to the conversion from RGB to CMYK for pre-press. Quality printing began with 600 LPI 4 color mask process and advanced from there in LPI and color layers. Special monitors and calibration equipment were used to age-adjust old-fashioned phosphor monitors. Reliance upon SGI computers and then Apple computers spelled the death-knell for special purpose graphics systems such as Genigraphics, and then eventually with SGI. And PostScript, WTF is that?
Today, even pre-press is a dying industry, along with most print magazines. The only segment of the industry that appears to still be thriving is the soft porn men's magazines, from which the OP's test image originated. But I can assure the /. readers that a photo from a magazine is hardly an adequate test source for scanned images let alone high resolution print, since the image has already been massaged through the RGB > CMYK process and then the screening process (color separated dots, not pixels). OTOH, original analog photographs taken under controlled studio conditions, then printed in a computer-controlled darkroom is/was the standard. This printer may, or may not, be as good as advertised but the testing paradigm is highly dubious. Swapping analog film lens flare for digital moire patterns is not, IMHO, an advancement in print technology. And Kodak, WTF is that? No wonder that quality print industry has departed the USA, now done in Germany and to a lesser degree Japan.
Kids these days just don't know diddley squat ... now, get the heck off my lawn !!
I worked for a time for a multinational company that offered free health insurance. The company was so cash-rich that they self-insured for that coverage, with an umbrella policy for outside insurance for catastrophic (major medical) coverage. The other nations that they had a corporate presence in had socialized medicine (Canada & Britain), and they wanted all their employees to share similar benefits. It made it rather simple accounting-wise to shift employees from one country to another for short & longish term projects. I rather doubt that they have the same benefit package today - that was nearly 20 years ago, and in the USA medical costs have skyrocketed by over 1,000 percent. Self-insurance saved this company a lot of money.
This is basically what Google is doing with term life insurance, except that the $20 per month they charge sounds rather stingy in comparison, actuarially speaking, considering the average age of Google's employees.
I will accept corporations as people when the state of Texas throws them into prison for 30 years hard time, or they actually execute one -- not before. They damn sure cannot vote.
Voters votes used to count, or recount, but that was in the olden times before actual voters were replaced with easily hacked electronic voting machines. Actual voters $10 or $20 campaign contributions used to count for something as well, before SCOTUS approved the Citizens United decision, now mountains of campaign cash from offshore banksters. Corporations, which cannot vote, can only buy advertising that promotes their candidate (or more recently both candidates). If we ignore the corporate media and investigate, support, and vote for candidates that will actually represent us when in office, we would be a lot better off.
That's not just Big Brother creepy, that's CREEPy.
(Archaic reference to criminal Nixon's "Committee to RE-Elect the President". Which reminds me, why haven't impeachment proceedings already begun 8 months ago to eject Obama & Holder from office?)
And speaking of the Z-80 processor: I lusted after the Commodore Portable for the ability to drop in a Z-80 board to run CPM, but never had enough cash to make it happen. But to me the Big Iron holy grail was the Altair, with a Z-80 processor & S-100 buss.
Instead, I had a Timex Sinclair with a 2k memory expansion module & tape drive storage. I used it's built-in BASIC to solve sparse matrix calculations for rudimentary circuit analysis. By the time I got out of community college, the Zenith Z-150 (IBM-PC clone) was available -- loved the built-in debugger.
"And if they wait long enough, the whole area may turn into a tropical paradise ..."
You mean, like with a dramatic shift in the magnetic poles? Do you know something that the rest of us are not aware of, like perhaps being associated with the HAARP program?
BTW, IIRC Shell Oil has had a number of less-than-stellar environmental issues in regions like Nigeria and Brazil. BP also had a reasonable environmental record, but only so long as their operations were located off-shore of a country that actually gave a good GD, like the North Sea off the coast of Britain. The Arctic Ocean is a quite sensitive region ecologically, considering the recent discovery of major bloom fields of plankton under the ice.
Besides, it would be MUCH easier and cheaper to co-opt some hardware vendor's driver set and slip your stuff into that than risk doing the same at Microsoft.. Not that I'm saying it didn't happen, only that it seems easier other ways.....
I agree. And there have been documented cases of this being done. One of the most famous was the worm installed in firmware of a printer shipped to Iraq that incapacitated big chunks of Saddam's air defense system, courtesy of the NSA.
And again regarding hardware: I wonder how many add-in PC cards like video or network that have back-doors built-in, or even hidden 'features' built into the firmware. I just threw out a serial/parallel ISA board so old that it was all TTL logic, no VLSI, no firmware.
Some wise-guy is going to install malware in a video card that 'steals' a miniscule number of clock cycles & memory that can compromise the entire contents of your fire-walled network. Almost anything that can be done with software can be done with 'solder', and a lot more difficult to deal with.
If I had a bunch of moderation points, I would give some to you. You don't deserve a "zero".
Stop bitching about Monsanto and fix the law.
Even better solution is to "fix" the Monsanto corporate board, permanently, like a gelding.
Were you aware that the lunchrooms of Monsanto facilities explicitly prohibit GMO foods for their employees, and at the insistence of those employees? Why are Monsanto employees treated better than USA citizens? Could it be that if USA citizens were informed of the GMO origins of many of their foodstuffs, that they would knowingly & willfully boycott those products?
And in other totally unrelated news, Brazil just fell under the attention of the Department of Homeland Security as a state sponsor of terrorism. Bombing of Brazil by "death from above" UAV's has now been scheduled for Monday morning, once assets from Columbia have been re-tasked.
Re-educating the unwashed masses as to the many advantages of GMO food crops is a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
And here I thought that tin foil hats, or tin foil hats with a lead liner were the proper head-gear for conspiracy theorists.
Either I missed the memo, or that memo was nefariously diverted. I'm betting on the latter in this case.
Please, don't be shy Anonymous Coward. I believe that you are onto something there.
When conspiracy theories ultimately are discovered to be conspiracy fact, the mainstream media will dismiss it as 'common sense everyone knew', 'nothing to see here', and then put the sheeple back to sleep. Causality doesn't equate to coincidence. Anyway, I don't believe that any chain of statistically improbable events conflates to mere coincidence. Mere coincidence is highly over-rated. It is stated, with some degree of proof, that only six degrees of separation exist between any two otherwise seemingly unrelated events. Accidents do happen, but not usually by pure accident.
And it is no accident that linux has been effectively kept off the desktop. You could blame that on Microsoft moles, or you could blame it on linux developers, or you could blame it on Microsoft moles posing as linux developers. The actual cause might even lay elsewhere, but you have presented one theory. Who the fuck are you, AC, that I might properly honor your brilliance?
If I had mod points, I would definitely mod your post up a few notches ...
Imagine a government with access to a complex OS source code. Then imagine that they get data on all manner of security holes as they are discovered. Imagine also that this government has access to OS security update certifications. Finally, imagine that this same government has the ability to hack into server DNS tables to route targeted users to their alternative 'security updates'.
The penetration of any software company by undercover government operatives would hardly be surprising, but entirely unnecessary. Microsoft would hardly be alone as a target of such espionage -- every software company would be vulnerable, including OSS. There is also the issue with 'backdoors' hard-wired into computer hardware, including especially telecom systems. IIRC, this became an issue recently with news of backdoors alleged to exist in VLSI circuits manufactured in China. Older news alleged that Israel also puts backdoors into the telecom hardware they sell & ship, including to the USA government.
If virtually every government does such spying, including upon their own citizens, and any number of software & hardware companies do the same with their customers, any cautious user of such technology should be aware of the potential security breaches they expose themselves to every time they connect to the internet, or open their front door for that matter. Redundancy & breadth of security beats security through obscurity any day.
The phrases of the day are, "Trust no one", "Security in depth", and "If it can't be accessed remotely, it's more secure & less vulnerable". At that point, physical security & Tempest-hardening secure your valuable data. The rhetorical question is, "How valuable is your data if you cannot readily access it?" I found it humorous that the USA government recently wanted reporters to write their news stories on government-supplied computers, if only to avoid unwanted data leaks & stop potential whistleblowers in their tracks.
Trust the USA government, or any government, or any corporation with an agenda? Why take that risk unmitigated? And who in Hades would put vulnerable sensitive SCADA systems in close proximity to the Internet except an idiot?
Microstamping would make no difference these days. That factoid would fall under 'national security' considerations, especially if the facts refute the theory. It also presumes that there would be a trial. Today, we have the Unitary Executive, with extrajudicial 'remedies' that preclude charges being filed, or with a public trial, or even a crime actually having been committed. We are in the age of indefinite preventive detention, government incitement & entrapment, and (coming soon) armed domestic UAVs for 'law enforcement' -- death from above.
The FBI criminal laboratory for many years fraudulently claimed that they could tell which box a bullet came from, based upon their 'expert' testimony. As it turns out, modern manufacturing methods are far too uniform for such a claim to be scientifically valid.
Wasn't it that globalist criminal William Jefferson Clinton that proposed putting microscopic taggards in smokeless powder used for reloading ammunition? That same President that created the Ruby Ridge massacre, the Waco / Branch Davidian massacre, and the OKC Bombing. (Yes, the OKC bombing was an inside job, just like both attacks on the NYC Twin Towers (1993 & 2001). Advancing a police state through legislation requires events that encourage such legislation.
Your tag-line says it all -- that you are full of shite.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You're full of shite.
Barely 2 months before the VPI shootings, the VA legislature was on the verge of making CCL (concealed carry licenses) valid for college campuses. The regents of VPI pressed the legislature to table changes to VA CCL laws. In another instance of liberal stupidity, the perpetrator of the VPI slayings was in and out of mental health treatment for many months before that tragic event. The liberals in charge of VPI Health Services did not want to disadvantage a student from future firearms ownership by registering this student with the Virginia State Police as being mentally unstable. If Cho had been registered thus, the Instant Background Check would have flagged him as legally unable to purchase a firearm. Liberalism, especially liberalism that strips citizens of their rights, was at the core of the VPI shootings and directly attributable to that crime.
BTW, CCL holders go through a similar vetting process that the private VPI security go through. I would trust a CCL-holder before I would trust a Law Enforcement Officer -- demographically, there is a far larger portion of LEOs that commit crimes than CCL-holders.
FWIW, when I went to VPI back in the early 1970's students were allowed to bring their legally owned firearms on campus, to be stored with their Resident Advisors. There is some great white-tail deer and black bear hunting in the rural areas around VPI. VPI used to have a fairly competent target shooting team, as well as ROTC.
Liberal gun-grabbers are nothing more than prostitutes working for the bankster criminal class, making the entire world safe for their criminal enterprises. It has been said that liberals are merely conservatives who have not yet been the victims of one criminal class or another, including especially the banksters.
You aren't trolling for someone of the criminal class who might be armed, in order to deal with a nasty ex-wife and her boyfriend divorce lawyer, are you? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best.
LOLZ
The only people in NYC who are allowed to protect themselves with firearms are that criminal class who steal from the common man. They're called banksters, lawyers, politicians, etcetera -- who belong in prison or under the prison.
You're the asshole, Asshole Coward. I bet you are either one of that criminal class yourself, or else work as security for that criminal class, like the NYPD. When the banksters are done raping & pillaging We The People, you will be next on their list of prospective victims. Watch out for your pension, AC, since it is "low-hanging fruit" to be stolen as well.
Anyway, with enough torches & pitchforks, who needs a firearm to herd that criminal class into line for introductions to Madame Guillotine?
George Carlin (R.I.P.) had a special expression for the Congress-critters, the banksters (rhymes with gangsters), and others that rob We The People with legislation and a fountain pen. He stated that these people are tough on street crime, in order to make Wall Street criminals feel safer. I haven't seen anything that refutes that claim.
Well, we can always hope that some Chinese hacker will prove to be a kind soul and release them for everyone's benefit.
Exactly so.
Just because Raytheon is likely using an off-the-shelf Linux release as the platform for their Ground Control Software, that doesn't specify which shelf it came off of. IIRC, 'Red Dragon' is the vetted official People's Republic of China release of Linux.
That makes the jobs of the repo (re-possession) men contracted to the PRC to help settle the USA's massive sovereign & trade debts that much easier. (And don't think That Isn't Coming. If so, you're in denial.)
OTOH, I am familiar with another Defense Contractor's Ground Control Software of 10 years ago, and they were using a heavily customized version of Linux for a portion of their project (Java coding & Oracle Back-end). That didn't make their Ground Control Software any safer -- exactly the opposite considering how both the kernel & core system software have been repeatedly patched by the open source community. (Contractor-wise, can anyone say "Job Security"?)
Considering the nature of the UAVs they will be controlling, perhaps the better choice for that OS would be OpenBSD, widely advertised as only having had "2 remote holes since forever". Of course, that would represent a new challenge with a big "pay-off" for hackers everywhere.