OK I stand corrected but its still using NFC with a range of about 20 centimeters (7in) or so based upon the standard.
Its still a wireless technology and subject to interception. Still won't trust it...
"Its not whether I'm being paranoid but whether I'm being pranoid enough."
The very odd thing is that other intelligence services (France, Germany, UK) all had the same conclusions.
French Intel sources in Nigeria were the ones that confirmed the Iraqis attempting to buy yellowcake. Who do you think runs the mines????
Tests have proven that the weapons grade nuclear material samples taken from Iran came from the N. Korean processing facility. You now have the N. Koreans willing and able to export teh stuff. Doesn't take much to build a device once you have the materials preprocessed.
Scared yet?????
As someone who has worked in or for the govenment for my whole career, project failures can be tied directly to leadership.
The following are the primary reasons they fail:
1. Failure to define the problem.
2. Does what you're doing/proposing solve #1? Most times the answer is no.
3. Failure to fully document the scope of the project.
4. Failure to stay within the scope of the project.
5. Failure caused by not enforcing standards or processes.
6. Asuming that the latest and greatest technology, methodology or fad will be the solution to everything or conversly, ramining wedded to the old way of doing things.
"That's the way we've always done things."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" --Albert Einstein
Its interesting that Congress itself doesn't fall under SS. A huge chunk of the civil service doesn't fall under SS either. Galviston, TX city employees were able to opt out du to a (now closed ) loophole in the law.
If any corporate pension plan were run the way SS is they'd be doing the perp walk.
The other dirty little secret is that the money the gov't takes for SS is taxed before they grab it. Then, its taxable when you draw your SS check as income if you happen to be able to successfully save other resources for retirement. SO you're screwed on both ends.
The good thing about a personal savings account is that is is YOUR money. If you die two days after you start withdrawing money, the rest of it goes to your heirs. Not so with SS. You cork off and Uncle Sam takes the rest of the moeny you put in and keeps it.
The second reform is indexing the amount of money you receive based not upon wages but by inflation. Wages in general increase faster than inflation. That would save billions in the future with no loss of benefits. Benefits would still increase in the future but based upon the cost of living. The upshot is that you would maintain your standard of living.
Those that advocate taxing the corporations more will cause a drop in employment as the cost of each employee will increase. THis means that the corp can afford to hire only on person where they might have hired two or three. In addition, the cost of their products will be passed on to consumers. It will also reduce the return on investment for the stockholders in the form of reduced dividends, etc. It would have a huge drag on the economy. Look at the European economic growth in comparison to the US. Jobless rate is 5.4% here vice 9% over there. DIfference is that Europe with its socialistic govenrment with high taxation is stifling their economy.
One thing to note about MS Kerberos (and I'd hazard a guess this applies to all installs) is that you have to have a stable time source for your AD servers to access. All your other servers get their time from the AD server.
I found out the hard way about this one. If the time source gets flakey, or your servers can't reach it for a period of time Kerberos gets out of whack.
With a newly installed Linux box (Fedora Core 3) I specifically did not install the mail server as part of the initial anaconda build. Was rather surprised upon looking at the detailed startup that sendmail was turned on. Fixed that one in a hurry.
I didn't check the running processes to see what might have been installed by mistake.
My bad.
Made a CD of software for my 82 year old Dad's PC that included:
1. Zone Labs Zone Alarm Firewall.
2. Ultra VNC is a good windows equivalent to TightVNC
3. Firefox 1.0
4. Thunderbird 1.0
This is in addition to the myriad of patches and service packs for his machine. He uses it primarily for Juno mail.
Ever think that the earth moving closer to the sun during its orbit might have something to do with our climate getting warmer?
The ozone hole that was growing over antarcitca has closed. Guess what the major producer of ozone in the earths atmospher is? If you said the sun, you guessed right. Cause and effect? Earth closer to the sun, more ozone?
The earth has been freezing and thawing thoughout its history. Ie; Ice Age back quite a while ago. AWarming during the middle ages then the mini-ice age in the 1700's. The earth has been slowly warming for years. Weather has fluctuated in various places due to nature.
A year or so ago the rural part of VA was seeing increased "polution" in very rural areas of the Blue Ridge and sky line drive. Nope, not due to increased traffic but an overabundance of vegitative growth brought on by a very wet period.
Nature has a very huge say in what goes on around the globe. DOn't be so arrogant to think that only man can effect changes to the detriment of the environment.
I found the discussion of server uptime interesting. I know that for just about every Windows Security Patch the server must be rebooted. Given the release of critical security patches about once a month, the servers with 56 day uptimes haven't had the required patches applied and are vulnerable.
The expense of redundant equipment necessary to keep windows applications running with no down time is far greater than other OS's.
Several little items seemed to have been missed:
1. Reports of Saddam's WMD being moved out of country prior to the war. I do believe that the Russian advisors that were in the country up until the bombs started falling were telling Saddam to get rid of the stuff. Not hard to truck it out through Syria.
2. The media glossed over the three dump truck chemical truck bombs that were destined for Amman Jordan. The perps caught before they could be detonated. Trucks nabbed as well. They contained a deadly cocktail of chemicals that would make applying antidotes very hard as well as identification of what it was hard as well. The bombs were designed to go off and spread the cloud without the chemicals being destroyed in the blast. Estimated dead: 20,000+. Source of the trucks, Syria. The mix of chemicals were of a highly refined nature such that you needed specialized facilities to make.
3. Ever notice all those drums of chemicals found in Iraq in ammo dumps that "turned out to be insecticide." ? Odd that Iraq would have a bug problem in their ammo dumps. Guess what insecticide is, Nerver agent. Just in small doses to kill bugs and not people. Get enough of RIAD and you'll be harmed. Those were most likely precursors for nerve weapons waiting to be refined once the inspectors were out of the way.
4. New chemical suits provided to Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard troops. Plus there were new antidote kits for immediate use. The US has no bio or chemical weapons. Iraq had no reason to fear our use of chemical or Bio weapons. Why issue new suits? Self protection when they launched the chem attacks against coalitian troops and Iraqi civilians. Antidote for when somebody screwed up.
Chemical weapons are only of use against people that are unprotected. Saddam used it against the Kurds, unprotected. He also used it against the Iranians in that war to devestating effect against their poorly equipped and trained troops.
US troops are trained in how to deal with Chemical warfare. Yeah it slows things down for a bit. The unit hit can still operate until follow on units can bypass the affected area and the contaminated unit can pull back to a decon area. Once taken care of they're back in action.
Combat tanks have overpressure systems and integrated chemical protection systems so the crew is unaffected. (Trust me. Ya don't want to be an Iraqi unit on the wrong end of a pissed off tank unit)
Why didn't the Iraqis use the WMD?? Most Army units understood that to use them against us would be futile. The unit commanders would be put on trial (ala Nuremburg) as war criminals. Chances are they'd kill more of their own troops than ours. The retaliation against their unit would be devistating (can you say MOAB). All very good reasons why they would refuse to release WMD. Plus, they know they're going to lose.
They haven't even begun to get to the folks from the Iraqi prison abuse thing. Lindy England is next, facing 36 years in Ft Leavenworth prison. The first peripheral person got 3 years and a bad conduct discharge. Plus he has a federal crime on his record for life.
5.4% jobless rate. Economy growing at 3-4%. Jobs being created every day. All sectors of the economy are coming back nicely. Even the interest rates are starting to climb back up. A good sign that the economy is stronger. Stock market is back up, investments are growing. There's another indicator about jobs to. The household index which looks at people who have jobs by households instead of calling up employers and asking "How many people did you hire?". The houshold survey takes into account small businesses and self employed. That survey is through the roof. Very good as far as the economy. People are going out on their own for jobs (can you say consultant).
BTW, the emplyment rate is lower now than it was in 96.
Why the expense of computer voting systems that are less than acceptable for tallying votes? Our county here in Virginia uses scanners to tally paper ballots. Easy to handle. Voters just fill in the circle next to the person they're voting for. Scanner picks up the mark and the vote is cast. Recounts are easy and there is a permenant record of the vote.
Sometimes computers just may not be the best answer.
KISS
Cheers
Uhm, under the Patriot Act there is Judicial oversight on the Gov't. In some cases the restrictions within the Patriot Act are stronger than before it was passed. There is also congressional oversite on FBI. Guess how many times the provision allowing access to Library records was used. Never. This is part of congressional reports that the act requires.
Try looking at what is actually in the act rather than hyperventilating over perceptions by various groups.
Amen to that...
The problems are increased because I CAN'T remove unwanted software from servers that have no business running it. Can't even be sure that Outlook Express is removed. There's no way of figuring out if vulnerable components have been removed. If you install one of their roll-up patches, what got reinstalled that whouldn't be there.
Its also telling about the designs of their OS when 2003 has the same bugs as 2000 and XP.
Interesting that for Federal Government Dell Desktops you can order them with Red Hat Linux. Not an option on the Home versions. It mentions Red Hat for small business desktops but its not one of the web site configuration choices.
I wonder what the proce difference is for a machine with either Red Hat or no OS.
Kevin
Right now Quicken doesn't run on Linux. I've been using that for years and don't feel like changing to something that is less capable. Plus I don't want to have to port over years worth of data. In addition, the games for the kids only come with Windows versions. Also a must have. No Linux versions of educational games.
If this helps and works. More power to it.
Cheers
Doing a new install of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. No network connectivity yet so the 15 or so patches for the OS/programs have to be downloaded, burned on a CD and then installed one by one. And the list grows.
I hate not being able to uninstall some software. I hate trying to lock things down by disabling services only to find out that some necessary program uses the service and won't run without it.
Grrrr....
Perhaps their systems are soime of the ones that got trashed by applying the MS04-011 patch. Things like not being able to log onto the system or processor usage shoots up to 100%. We had a couple laptops that had the problem. Had to back out the patch. Luckily all our servers didn't have this problem.
Which is worse, Trashed by a virus/worm/trojan or get taken out by an MS patch?
Test and verify before patching.
Everyone is screaming, "Why didn't you prevent 9-11 and why didn't you connect the dots."
The Patriot Act is one tool to allow the US Gov't to accomplish this. I'll hazard a guess noone on here has even looked at the law. You're going by hyperventilating commentary.
Contrary to popular belief the provisions of the law are covered by the courts. FBI, et al have to get permission from the courts to do the searches. Its just the subject that is not informed of it until later.
Rediculous to say "Hey, Atta, we're going to come in and search your place." Not real affective at taking them down.
As one who lives outside of DC I'd prefer not to wait for the smoking hole before someone does something.
ANd, oh by the way WMD have been found. In chaches across Iraq. Its just the press aint covering it because its not a big huge stockpile in one place. Also, Amman Jordon just had a WMD delivery courtesy of Al Quaeda via Syria. Analysis should tell if it comes from Iraq. 20,000 dead is no laughing matter.
Lets work to keep that stuff "over there" rather than in our own backyard.
Its interesting that there are a number of civilizations that have stories of the "big flood" as part of their histories. These have been passed down for generations. Most of them are non judeo-christian. They have common themes among them about man being saved by a boat....
Some have theorized that the flood was the opening of the Dardenells between what is now the med and the black sea.
Bob Ballard has found what looks to be a campsite down in the black sea below where modern water levels would have dropped. Not sure of the research on that one.
I've also heard theories put forth that there used to be a great vapour cloud that encircled the earth. Something that allowed for the long lives of people in early history. Protection from UV rays, etc might have provided the 400+ year life spans that are mentioned in the early bible (ie, Genisis).
What you forget about is the cost of insurance of transporting flamable material in a hostile environment. In addition, the byzantine contracting rules that the Military asked for caused the very high cost of fuel delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
OK I stand corrected but its still using NFC with a range of about 20 centimeters (7in) or so based upon the standard. Its still a wireless technology and subject to interception. Still won't trust it... "Its not whether I'm being paranoid but whether I'm being pranoid enough."
There have been reports http://www.techworld.com/mobility/features/index.c fm?featureid=1178of Exxon's Speedpass being exploited by John's Hopkins http://www.rfidanalysis.org/ .
I'd have to agree that this sin't ready for prime time.
Bush said. We cannot wait until the threat is imminent we must act before it reaches such a state.
The very odd thing is that other intelligence services (France, Germany, UK) all had the same conclusions. French Intel sources in Nigeria were the ones that confirmed the Iraqis attempting to buy yellowcake. Who do you think runs the mines????
Tests have proven that the weapons grade nuclear material samples taken from Iran came from the N. Korean processing facility. You now have the N. Koreans willing and able to export teh stuff. Doesn't take much to build a device once you have the materials preprocessed. Scared yet?????
As someone who has worked in or for the govenment for my whole career, project failures can be tied directly to leadership. The following are the primary reasons they fail: 1. Failure to define the problem. 2. Does what you're doing/proposing solve #1? Most times the answer is no. 3. Failure to fully document the scope of the project. 4. Failure to stay within the scope of the project. 5. Failure caused by not enforcing standards or processes. 6. Asuming that the latest and greatest technology, methodology or fad will be the solution to everything or conversly, ramining wedded to the old way of doing things. "That's the way we've always done things." "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" --Albert Einstein
Its interesting that Congress itself doesn't fall under SS. A huge chunk of the civil service doesn't fall under SS either. Galviston, TX city employees were able to opt out du to a (now closed ) loophole in the law. If any corporate pension plan were run the way SS is they'd be doing the perp walk. The other dirty little secret is that the money the gov't takes for SS is taxed before they grab it. Then, its taxable when you draw your SS check as income if you happen to be able to successfully save other resources for retirement. SO you're screwed on both ends. The good thing about a personal savings account is that is is YOUR money. If you die two days after you start withdrawing money, the rest of it goes to your heirs. Not so with SS. You cork off and Uncle Sam takes the rest of the moeny you put in and keeps it. The second reform is indexing the amount of money you receive based not upon wages but by inflation. Wages in general increase faster than inflation. That would save billions in the future with no loss of benefits. Benefits would still increase in the future but based upon the cost of living. The upshot is that you would maintain your standard of living. Those that advocate taxing the corporations more will cause a drop in employment as the cost of each employee will increase. THis means that the corp can afford to hire only on person where they might have hired two or three. In addition, the cost of their products will be passed on to consumers. It will also reduce the return on investment for the stockholders in the form of reduced dividends, etc. It would have a huge drag on the economy. Look at the European economic growth in comparison to the US. Jobless rate is 5.4% here vice 9% over there. DIfference is that Europe with its socialistic govenrment with high taxation is stifling their economy.
One thing to note about MS Kerberos (and I'd hazard a guess this applies to all installs) is that you have to have a stable time source for your AD servers to access. All your other servers get their time from the AD server. I found out the hard way about this one. If the time source gets flakey, or your servers can't reach it for a period of time Kerberos gets out of whack.
With a newly installed Linux box (Fedora Core 3) I specifically did not install the mail server as part of the initial anaconda build. Was rather surprised upon looking at the detailed startup that sendmail was turned on. Fixed that one in a hurry. I didn't check the running processes to see what might have been installed by mistake. My bad.
Made a CD of software for my 82 year old Dad's PC that included: 1. Zone Labs Zone Alarm Firewall. 2. Ultra VNC is a good windows equivalent to TightVNC 3. Firefox 1.0 4. Thunderbird 1.0 This is in addition to the myriad of patches and service packs for his machine. He uses it primarily for Juno mail.
Ever think that the earth moving closer to the sun during its orbit might have something to do with our climate getting warmer? The ozone hole that was growing over antarcitca has closed. Guess what the major producer of ozone in the earths atmospher is? If you said the sun, you guessed right. Cause and effect? Earth closer to the sun, more ozone? The earth has been freezing and thawing thoughout its history. Ie; Ice Age back quite a while ago. AWarming during the middle ages then the mini-ice age in the 1700's. The earth has been slowly warming for years. Weather has fluctuated in various places due to nature. A year or so ago the rural part of VA was seeing increased "polution" in very rural areas of the Blue Ridge and sky line drive. Nope, not due to increased traffic but an overabundance of vegitative growth brought on by a very wet period. Nature has a very huge say in what goes on around the globe. DOn't be so arrogant to think that only man can effect changes to the detriment of the environment.
I found the discussion of server uptime interesting. I know that for just about every Windows Security Patch the server must be rebooted. Given the release of critical security patches about once a month, the servers with 56 day uptimes haven't had the required patches applied and are vulnerable. The expense of redundant equipment necessary to keep windows applications running with no down time is far greater than other OS's.
Several little items seemed to have been missed: 1. Reports of Saddam's WMD being moved out of country prior to the war. I do believe that the Russian advisors that were in the country up until the bombs started falling were telling Saddam to get rid of the stuff. Not hard to truck it out through Syria. 2. The media glossed over the three dump truck chemical truck bombs that were destined for Amman Jordan. The perps caught before they could be detonated. Trucks nabbed as well. They contained a deadly cocktail of chemicals that would make applying antidotes very hard as well as identification of what it was hard as well. The bombs were designed to go off and spread the cloud without the chemicals being destroyed in the blast. Estimated dead: 20,000+. Source of the trucks, Syria. The mix of chemicals were of a highly refined nature such that you needed specialized facilities to make. 3. Ever notice all those drums of chemicals found in Iraq in ammo dumps that "turned out to be insecticide." ? Odd that Iraq would have a bug problem in their ammo dumps. Guess what insecticide is, Nerver agent. Just in small doses to kill bugs and not people. Get enough of RIAD and you'll be harmed. Those were most likely precursors for nerve weapons waiting to be refined once the inspectors were out of the way. 4. New chemical suits provided to Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard troops. Plus there were new antidote kits for immediate use. The US has no bio or chemical weapons. Iraq had no reason to fear our use of chemical or Bio weapons. Why issue new suits? Self protection when they launched the chem attacks against coalitian troops and Iraqi civilians. Antidote for when somebody screwed up. Chemical weapons are only of use against people that are unprotected. Saddam used it against the Kurds, unprotected. He also used it against the Iranians in that war to devestating effect against their poorly equipped and trained troops. US troops are trained in how to deal with Chemical warfare. Yeah it slows things down for a bit. The unit hit can still operate until follow on units can bypass the affected area and the contaminated unit can pull back to a decon area. Once taken care of they're back in action. Combat tanks have overpressure systems and integrated chemical protection systems so the crew is unaffected. (Trust me. Ya don't want to be an Iraqi unit on the wrong end of a pissed off tank unit) Why didn't the Iraqis use the WMD?? Most Army units understood that to use them against us would be futile. The unit commanders would be put on trial (ala Nuremburg) as war criminals. Chances are they'd kill more of their own troops than ours. The retaliation against their unit would be devistating (can you say MOAB). All very good reasons why they would refuse to release WMD. Plus, they know they're going to lose.
They haven't even begun to get to the folks from the Iraqi prison abuse thing. Lindy England is next, facing 36 years in Ft Leavenworth prison. The first peripheral person got 3 years and a bad conduct discharge. Plus he has a federal crime on his record for life.
5.4% jobless rate. Economy growing at 3-4%. Jobs being created every day. All sectors of the economy are coming back nicely. Even the interest rates are starting to climb back up. A good sign that the economy is stronger. Stock market is back up, investments are growing. There's another indicator about jobs to. The household index which looks at people who have jobs by households instead of calling up employers and asking "How many people did you hire?". The houshold survey takes into account small businesses and self employed. That survey is through the roof. Very good as far as the economy. People are going out on their own for jobs (can you say consultant). BTW, the emplyment rate is lower now than it was in 96.
Why the expense of computer voting systems that are less than acceptable for tallying votes? Our county here in Virginia uses scanners to tally paper ballots. Easy to handle. Voters just fill in the circle next to the person they're voting for. Scanner picks up the mark and the vote is cast. Recounts are easy and there is a permenant record of the vote. Sometimes computers just may not be the best answer. KISS Cheers
Uhm, under the Patriot Act there is Judicial oversight on the Gov't. In some cases the restrictions within the Patriot Act are stronger than before it was passed. There is also congressional oversite on FBI. Guess how many times the provision allowing access to Library records was used. Never. This is part of congressional reports that the act requires. Try looking at what is actually in the act rather than hyperventilating over perceptions by various groups.
Amen to that... The problems are increased because I CAN'T remove unwanted software from servers that have no business running it. Can't even be sure that Outlook Express is removed. There's no way of figuring out if vulnerable components have been removed. If you install one of their roll-up patches, what got reinstalled that whouldn't be there. Its also telling about the designs of their OS when 2003 has the same bugs as 2000 and XP.
Interesting that for Federal Government Dell Desktops you can order them with Red Hat Linux. Not an option on the Home versions. It mentions Red Hat for small business desktops but its not one of the web site configuration choices. I wonder what the proce difference is for a machine with either Red Hat or no OS. Kevin
Right now Quicken doesn't run on Linux. I've been using that for years and don't feel like changing to something that is less capable. Plus I don't want to have to port over years worth of data. In addition, the games for the kids only come with Windows versions. Also a must have. No Linux versions of educational games. If this helps and works. More power to it. Cheers
Doing a new install of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. No network connectivity yet so the 15 or so patches for the OS/programs have to be downloaded, burned on a CD and then installed one by one. And the list grows. I hate not being able to uninstall some software. I hate trying to lock things down by disabling services only to find out that some necessary program uses the service and won't run without it. Grrrr....
Perhaps their systems are soime of the ones that got trashed by applying the MS04-011 patch. Things like not being able to log onto the system or processor usage shoots up to 100%. We had a couple laptops that had the problem. Had to back out the patch. Luckily all our servers didn't have this problem. Which is worse, Trashed by a virus/worm/trojan or get taken out by an MS patch? Test and verify before patching.
Everyone is screaming, "Why didn't you prevent 9-11 and why didn't you connect the dots." The Patriot Act is one tool to allow the US Gov't to accomplish this. I'll hazard a guess noone on here has even looked at the law. You're going by hyperventilating commentary. Contrary to popular belief the provisions of the law are covered by the courts. FBI, et al have to get permission from the courts to do the searches. Its just the subject that is not informed of it until later. Rediculous to say "Hey, Atta, we're going to come in and search your place." Not real affective at taking them down. As one who lives outside of DC I'd prefer not to wait for the smoking hole before someone does something. ANd, oh by the way WMD have been found. In chaches across Iraq. Its just the press aint covering it because its not a big huge stockpile in one place. Also, Amman Jordon just had a WMD delivery courtesy of Al Quaeda via Syria. Analysis should tell if it comes from Iraq. 20,000 dead is no laughing matter. Lets work to keep that stuff "over there" rather than in our own backyard.
Its interesting that there are a number of civilizations that have stories of the "big flood" as part of their histories. These have been passed down for generations. Most of them are non judeo-christian. They have common themes among them about man being saved by a boat.... Some have theorized that the flood was the opening of the Dardenells between what is now the med and the black sea. Bob Ballard has found what looks to be a campsite down in the black sea below where modern water levels would have dropped. Not sure of the research on that one. I've also heard theories put forth that there used to be a great vapour cloud that encircled the earth. Something that allowed for the long lives of people in early history. Protection from UV rays, etc might have provided the 400+ year life spans that are mentioned in the early bible (ie, Genisis).
What you forget about is the cost of insurance of transporting flamable material in a hostile environment. In addition, the byzantine contracting rules that the Military asked for caused the very high cost of fuel delivery.