It's about America not being a computer program where all subroutines relate to each other by passing money as the only call parameter; it's a community of human beings that relate to each other on more complex levels than money most of the time.
It's about a guy seeing a phenomenon driven by poverty - you think they're breaking the law to be radical teen rebels or something? They're desperate. So he sees this phenomenon driven by poverty and his sole concern is himself and his comfort...in this case, his psychological comfort of knowing they aren't there...please note he wasn't complaining about noise or interference with his activities; he just hated the existence of poor people on his block.
And that's STILL absolutely OK, free country, he can have that opinion - hey, they're breaking the law and he's in the right to complain. The problem is that he's a CEO of a corporation, very much a representative of it, not just a private citizen. So he's basically saying, in the first person, PLURAL:
"In my company, we care only for ourselves and will use very ugly, unsociable bullying against those weaker than ourselves if they inconvenience us. Now please do business with us".
This is a news story not because he's an unpleasant neighbour and bad citizen, it's because he's a stupid CEO who just cost his company serious coin for no good reason at all.
Citations requested. Seriously, I'm scratching my head, here. Alarmists loved the hair-trigger image, that if one bomb had gone off, every single bomber and missile would have been launched at once. In reality, neither leaders, nor generals nor the guys who actually have to punch the button were all that hair-trigger.
During the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union *could* *not* have destroyed our side of the world; they just didn't have that many bombs. Our military exaggerated the number hilariously.
By the time the Soviets had a lot of bombs and missiles to deliver them in less than many hours of flight over Canada, communications had improved to the point where both militaries knew perfectly well the other side would not attack; both went on puffing about the dangers and giving Tom Clancy interviews about how ready they were for Red Storm Rising while completely relaxed about the sheer ridiculousness of the notion of a Soviet attack by the 70s.
I recently read the memoirs of an officer from the first troop of the RCMP (then NWMP) to go out to the West to quell the abuses of the whiskey trade. (Cecil Denny.) Sitting Bull was encamped across the Canadian border, safe for the moment from the US Army after Little Big Horn. Just four years later, he was starved out. The Canadians wouldn't let the Americans across the border, but they also wouldn't feed him...and he could no longer feed his people. The bison disappeared THAT fast.
Really, really weird to bless an animal as the special national symbol when it was exterminated in just a couple of years, as soon as we could possibly get enough guns to bear upon the task.
...than reading comments from those who are loud and proud in their support for 12 carrier groups, 2300 fighter jets, bases in a hundred countries, guns in every home, safety through armament, gigantic standing army their founders were terrified of...all sounding off on how inherently, congenitally violent another culture is.
As to the STEM jihadis, not remotely surprising. We're taught to think our way logically and critically through technical problems, but that doesn't automatically transfer to how you think through personal decisions. If it did, STEM students would also be mentally healthier in general, less depressed and anxious, more successful in romance...and oh, man, is THAT not that case...
The "lighting circuits at 12V DC" sounds like a terrific idea. Outside the entertainment unit and the kitchen, there isn't a whole lot of business for 110V throughout most of a house these days. Lighting would be *better* with 12V plugs, as you note. What else do bedrooms and so forth need? Alarm clocks and radios? 12V is fine.
I can see a possibility coming where houses still have 110V, but a more limited number of plugs, maybe one per room...but a couple of 12V/USB plugs on every wall that would be low-level device power and a smart network for controlling them.
I just turned into a Bernie supporter. He must become the new official Most Popular Political Wing....strictly so that we can read yet ANOTHER tearful confessional from David Brock about how wrong he was, how deluded by groupthink, and immersed in the cult...but NOW, finally NOW, he sees the light, This Time For Sure.
Man, David Brock changed his political stripes, but then went straight back to the same basic process of supporting something by crapping on the opposition.
Yeah, he confused "g" with "m/s/s". Of course,.0001 m/s/s times 31 million seconds a year is still 3 km/s per year. In interplanetary travel for decades-patient robots, anything but useless.
Also, that 500W is what they happened to need to power their stuff, not the most power they could have packed into a probe.
If you could actually turn electricity into thrust, you're going to see some alarming amounts of plutonium fired up there; they'll be wanting 30km/s/year, *that* probe could really get around...
Sorry, a little too much Star Trek there - you can only "slingshot" around something that you are travelling below the "escape velocity" of, otherwise you just whistle right by.
Toss a marble into an empty bowl slowly and it circles round inside, but fire it from a rifle and it just zips in one side and out the other. Even if you fire it from a slingshot. Sorry.
What if everybody had the attitude of "well, this is a screwed-up world we live in, what can you do, (nothing), let's turn to the sports" about everything?
"King George wants us to suffer taxation without representation, surprise, surprise, well, duh." - there'd be no America.
"Big deal, this stuff happens, no need for major efforts to change" was the attitude of all those Bishops and Cardinals to kids getting buggered.
We SHOULD react with shock and disgust to lying and fraud in the financial industry, to corruption in oil, to military vendors promoting war; we should tell our politicians they're unemployed unless they act and can have all the money they need to sic 10,000 FBI agents on them.
The S&L crisis in the 80's prompted the assignment of 1000 FBI agents to the case. They brought in about one conviction each: 1000 convictions, a 90% success rate, after winnowing down 30,000 referrals to 1100-odd trials. It brought about real results.
By contrast, the 2008 crisis prompted no such effort despite being 70X as large a set of frauds.
We can tackle these large problems; you just put out the same effort you'd put into a new highway interchange or skyscraper: $100M budget per year and a few thousand people working on it. The US Justice System has nearly one million employees; only 2300 on white-collar crime.
The same issues apply to the mining of *everything*, of course, and society will always use a zillion times more iron and copper than uranium and thorium. Not to mention *lead* mining, and mercury. Radiation has a half-life, heavy-metal poisoning is forever.
Exactly. My engineering job was taking care of 10,000 miles of pipes and related water infrastructure. My core skills were understanding pipes and corrosion and water flow. The IT component was designing the database that held them all - and had a structure that met the needs of the guys who abstract out the pure network for simulation, the guys I worked with who pulled out the pipe records for comparison and writing work orders, and the guys who had to work on those maps day-to-day. Then there was more IT to develop the custom GIS maps and the reports that popped up when you clicked on a pipe. I could have worked with the IT department more on all of that, relied more on their skills - but I would have got half the system at twice the price. The ability to know what you want without IT leading you by the hand (often a place more convenient for them than for you) and speed development towards it (either by yourself or by IT) is the biggest IT skill of all.
Sorry, not clear. I got my Civil Engineering degree first and practiced as a licensed professional engineer at all times. Dang! I thought the entire point I was getting across is that I was an *Engineer* who could program; I was inciting one and all to add "programming" to their skills of accountant, technician, salesman, etc...
I keep reading everything here commenting on the paradigm that your job becomes coding; that you're just in competition with generic coders in India or the IT department for that matter. It's all about "coding" as a specialty, as a job in itself.
That's the problem. That has to stop. It's hurting corporations terribly, keeping them from realizing the full benefits of personal computing.
We acquired personal computing technology, but corporations remained in a paradigm of corporate computing development, where the corporation develops all applications as a body corporate, using specialists to do all the coding. It was actually an *offense* in my old employer for non-programmers to program. People had tools taken away, accounts cancelled.
You don't learn to code so that you can become a coder; you learn to code so that you become an accountant, technician, engineer, salesman, secretary...who can code and script their job. How much more productive is an engineer who can do Excel VBA from one who only knows your basic spreadsheet formulas? How many more documents can a secretary manage who can put together a small, three-table database? She becomes the *key* secretary everybody goes to, the one who gets things done, the one who gets the promotion, is the last one fired.
It worked for me; I actually got a CompSci degree but only ever called myself an engineer; I was just an engineer who knew EXACTLY what he wanted from IT and could insist on it...or do it myself if they weren't agreeable (which tends to make them more agreeable). I only ever wrote bash, Perl, and SQL scripts, but automated vast amounts of my job with just that. Oh, yeah, and Excel VBA, of course, which probably doubled my engineering productivity. I taught every engineer who worked for me to do SQL and basic scripts and sent them off all able to automate basic tasks. I believe they all see themselves as more productive and employable for it.
Amen. I feel lucky (OK, I also feel smart and smug) to have bought a plasma right near the end - but just before I had to get a "Smart TV". (I noticed a TV in a hotel the other week took about 20 seconds just to "boot"....about the same time the tubes took to warm up in the 19" B&W I watched Roy Rogers on in 1964...apparently, some things really don't change...)
At a friend's insistence, I took his "New TV burn in" DVD and wore out an old DVD player; it just cycled through screens of solid colour for the next 100 hours...then I started using it but would leave that DVD on all night until it had 200 hours in.
And I've been careful about static images. It hits age 5 this year and I think I'll get another 5 out of it...which I will need before the whole OLED/4K/HDR/whatever mess settles down into one protocol and one winning technology...
Bingo. Air gap AND the machines that are on that network should have the USB ports filled with epoxy. When updates are needed, the vendor plugs in a special laptop for the purpose. It's extremely useful for SCADA to use Wi-Fi, of course; nothing beats being able to haul a tablet right down under the floor where you've just unstuck a valve and then cycle the valve without running up to the console. But the Wi-Fi of course needs to be locked down to a specific set of MAC addresses, not just with passwords. SCADA has to have a whole different approach to security than general-purpose computing. Big and distributed as it is, the SCADA system has to be an appliance, like a Blu-Ray player, only able to run the system programs and no others. But all the OS-level protection against that doesn't touch Air Gap; no-connectivity has to be sacred no matter how tempting.
There's only one security that counts with a SCADA system: air gap. Plant-controlling systems must not talk to any other network. I recently retired from a much-larger utility and we did struggle with the human factor. The plant guys heard all the lectures from their design consultants that put in the system and the IT people who checked the design over. They understand that they must not interconnect....and then a year or two later you find them trying to quietly slip two network cards into the same machine so they don't have to change chairs to go from corporate-network-with-Internet-access to SCADA. Emotionally, it's hard to believe anybody would *want* to break in; it's not like there's money to be made. Hollywood-movie scenarios where "hackers take over" are ludicrous; every device in the plant has an "On/Off/Auto" switch where only "Auto" leaves SCADA in control at all; the most junior operator could run around the plant hitting those switches in five minutes, restoring manual control. (Then we'd have to bring in a dozen folks with cell phones to run the plant manually; no sweat). And as I posted above, it's not like you can kill anybody with a water treatment plant: the worst water you could put out would either be untreated (please boil water) or absolute max chlorine the system could insert (still less than a swimming pool). It's going to be the same as "safety"; you can pound safety lectures into people's heads all day, but it seems to take a generation or two for the message to really sink in; hard hats and visibility vests were strenuously avoided as well. We're just going to have to make it a standard, like safety standards: firing for disobedience, regardless of whether anything went wrong.
You're being silly. Water treatment plants are incapable of producing water that would kill, well, anybody, probably.
Yes, there's enough chlorine (or other disinfectants) in the plant to kill people; but you could open the valves to their greatest extent without jumping the chlorine content up from the usual part-per-million to more than a couple of parts per million...that is, still way less chlorine than your average municipal pool needs to combat all those filthy kids.
I suppose there's somebody so allergic and frail of health that such water could kill them, but I don't think killing one person out of a million is the kind of genocide you have in mind.
It costs millions, not to *kill* each of the ISIS soldiers, but simply to confront them at all.
Do the math: about 20,000 ISIS. And the US military complex, which is already getting about $1T from the taxpayers every year (when you add all defense-related costs), was asked to attack them. They explained that for one thousand billion dollars per year, all they can do is sit at home, eat, and train. No fighting is affordable.
The additional bill for attacking ISIS is about $100B per year. For 20,000 men. That's $5M per ISIS member attacked for one year. With luck, a good many of them will be killed but probably barely 10% of them, and having spent $50M each to kill a few thousand...at least 2000 young boys will turn 17 or 18 and sign up with them during the year, leaving you in about the same strategic position.
Probably ISIS can be beaten - they are so little and weak and have so many enemies in the area besides the West. But that's why nothing ever got better in Afghanistan - it cost $100B a year to kill a few thousand Taliban who were easily replaced.
...is that all the jobs they compare to are not professions. I keep coming back to this point on slashdot, across multiple topics - H1B competition? Wouldn't be as easy to displace you if you were a profession. Women also jumped big into accounting in the 70s, medicine and law in the 80's and now engineering in the 21st century; wages in exactly none of those professions went down. Professional organizations like the AMA act a little bit like unions, if not exactly like them - they don't negotiate money or conditions, but they do negotiate required education and skill levels, which prevents employers from constantly undercutting wages by threatening to switch to employees that are a little cheaper, then a little cheaper again.
Women entering a mere "job category" lower salary expectations because they've been discriminated against, and are hungrier, the way H1B immigrants are hungrier. But in a profession, there's a basement put on how much effect that has.
IT badly needs to be a profession like accounting, medicine, law, engineering. On a societal basis, I don't think it would even cost anything. Sure, programming would get more expensive - but how much money is wasted right now by bad programming?
...it's impossible to see the banking community as part of the solution, for online safety or anything else.
The book on the bailout by Neil Barofsky writes about how he was told - after the Crash - that he didn't need to check every figure in the bank's applications for bailouts because "These are *bankers*, their sacred word is their whole identity", etc, to which Barofsky could only sputter, "Have you been under a rock the last year??"
I go through periods of calming down about it, but seeing "The Big Short" this week reminded me of the overwhelming, ground-shifts-underfoot megachange that has occurred in our culture without enough comment: that "bankers" are no longer trustworthy people. Bringing them in on a problem is no longer a positive reassurance. It's as if we'd migrated from one of those countries where you want a cop to one where you avoid them if possible, because they're just criminals in uniform who will shake you down.
Instead of standing for open, fair dealings, transparency and reliability, they now stand as icons of fraud and lies. I can hardly think of anybody I would want less involved in cybersecurity than bankers. They'd be thinking about how to manipulate the solution to enhance profits and bonuses, not about me.
Here's the 2004 story on it: http://www.itworldcanada.com/a......basically, they found that Intel+Linux processed Oracle as well as their Solaris boxes, at a fraction of the price-point. They remain the Oracle workhorses.
But not much else; they aren't application servers as a rule. File service is a huge NAT that provides for Windows, Linux and any other file space. And they have a pile of Windows servers, of course.
No Linux desktop, sorry, though a few Macs have made tentative re-appearances in graphic artists shops after a 20-year absence.
I just retired from the City of Calgary, and damn, I thought we were having trouble keeping up. We, too, imagined that IE was your only tolerable browser -- up to a few years ago when they threw up their hands and started backing Chrome installs because people were installing it anyway in their home directories. Now it's taking over everything except a few apps that demand IE...and apps that do that are no longer considered for new purchases. Calgary went all-Linux about 2004, making some waves in the trade journals at the time: we were getting (way) better performance with HP intel chips and RedHat than we had been with Solaris machines, for a fifth the cost(!) All proprietary Unixes were gone within a few years. And mainframes, I thought we were never going to ditch the mainframe, the whole IT department was built around it and they clung bitterly to that thing well into the 21st century...but it, too, has been gone for nearly 10 years now. The notion that the Feds still have all that stuff so long after a slow-changing conservative municipal government ditched it is sobering, almost shocking. They're really leaving a lot of money on the table! FOSS is just one ingredient in the changes needed, and this MP needs to pick it as his signature topic and go after some of that "waste" that politicians are always promising to pay for new programs with - we've actually found some!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but he posted on FaceBook. You have the decency to confine your hostile spew to Slashdot, where nobody will read it.
No, this isn't about zoning laws.
It's about America not being a computer program where all subroutines relate to each other by passing money as the only call parameter; it's a community of human beings that relate to each other on more complex levels than money most of the time.
It's about a guy seeing a phenomenon driven by poverty - you think they're breaking the law to be radical teen rebels or something? They're desperate. So he sees this phenomenon driven by poverty and his sole concern is himself and his comfort...in this case, his psychological comfort of knowing they aren't there...please note he wasn't complaining about noise or interference with his activities; he just hated the existence of poor people on his block.
And that's STILL absolutely OK, free country, he can have that opinion - hey, they're breaking the law and he's in the right to complain. The problem is that he's a CEO of a corporation, very much a representative of it, not just a private citizen. So he's basically saying, in the first person, PLURAL:
"In my company, we care only for ourselves and will use very ugly, unsociable bullying against those weaker than ourselves if they inconvenience us. Now please do business with us".
This is a news story not because he's an unpleasant neighbour and bad citizen, it's because he's a stupid CEO who just cost his company serious coin for no good reason at all.
Citations requested.
Seriously, I'm scratching my head, here. Alarmists loved the hair-trigger image, that if one bomb had gone off, every single bomber and missile would have been launched at once. In reality, neither leaders, nor generals nor the guys who actually have to punch the button were all that hair-trigger.
During the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union *could* *not* have destroyed our side of the world; they just didn't have that many bombs. Our military exaggerated the number hilariously.
By the time the Soviets had a lot of bombs and missiles to deliver them in less than many hours of flight over Canada, communications had improved to the point where both militaries knew perfectly well the other side would not attack; both went on puffing about the dangers and giving Tom Clancy interviews about how ready they were for Red Storm Rising while completely relaxed about the sheer ridiculousness of the notion of a Soviet attack by the 70s.
I recently read the memoirs of an officer from the first troop of the RCMP (then NWMP) to go out to the West to quell the abuses of the whiskey trade. (Cecil Denny.) Sitting Bull was encamped across the Canadian border, safe for the moment from the US Army after Little Big Horn.
Just four years later, he was starved out. The Canadians wouldn't let the Americans across the border, but they also wouldn't feed him...and he could no longer feed his people. The bison disappeared THAT fast.
Really, really weird to bless an animal as the special national symbol when it was exterminated in just a couple of years, as soon as we could possibly get enough guns to bear upon the task.
...than reading comments from those who are loud and proud in their support for 12 carrier groups, 2300 fighter jets, bases in a hundred countries, guns in every home, safety through armament, gigantic standing army their founders were terrified of...all sounding off on how inherently, congenitally violent another culture is.
As to the STEM jihadis, not remotely surprising. We're taught to think our way logically and critically through technical problems, but that doesn't automatically transfer to how you think through personal decisions. If it did, STEM students would also be mentally healthier in general, less depressed and anxious, more successful in romance...and oh, man, is THAT not that case...
The "lighting circuits at 12V DC" sounds like a terrific idea. Outside the entertainment unit and the kitchen, there isn't a whole lot of business for 110V throughout most of a house these days. Lighting would be *better* with 12V plugs, as you note. What else do bedrooms and so forth need? Alarm clocks and radios? 12V is fine.
I can see a possibility coming where houses still have 110V, but a more limited number of plugs, maybe one per room...but a couple of 12V/USB plugs on every wall that would be low-level device power and a smart network for controlling them.
I just turned into a Bernie supporter. He must become the new official Most Popular Political Wing....strictly so that we can read yet ANOTHER tearful confessional from David Brock about how wrong he was, how deluded by groupthink, and immersed in the cult...but NOW, finally NOW, he sees the light, This Time For Sure.
Man, David Brock changed his political stripes, but then went straight back to the same basic process of supporting something by crapping on the opposition.
Yeah, he confused "g" with "m/s/s". Of course, .0001 m/s/s times 31 million seconds a year is still 3 km/s per year. In interplanetary travel for decades-patient robots, anything but useless.
Also, that 500W is what they happened to need to power their stuff, not the most power they could have packed into a probe.
If you could actually turn electricity into thrust, you're going to see some alarming amounts of plutonium fired up there; they'll be wanting 30km/s/year, *that* probe could really get around...
Sorry, a little too much Star Trek there - you can only "slingshot" around something that you are travelling below the "escape velocity" of, otherwise you just whistle right by.
Toss a marble into an empty bowl slowly and it circles round inside, but fire it from a rifle and it just zips in one side and out the other. Even if you fire it from a slingshot. Sorry.
What if everybody had the attitude of "well, this is a screwed-up world we live in, what can you do, (nothing), let's turn to the sports" about everything?
"King George wants us to suffer taxation without representation, surprise, surprise, well, duh." - there'd be no America.
"Big deal, this stuff happens, no need for major efforts to change" was the attitude of all those Bishops and Cardinals to kids getting buggered.
We SHOULD react with shock and disgust to lying and fraud in the financial industry, to corruption in oil, to military vendors promoting war; we should tell our politicians they're unemployed unless they act and can have all the money they need to sic 10,000 FBI agents on them.
The S&L crisis in the 80's prompted the assignment of 1000 FBI agents to the case. They brought in about one conviction each: 1000 convictions, a 90% success rate, after winnowing down 30,000 referrals to 1100-odd trials. It brought about real results.
By contrast, the 2008 crisis prompted no such effort despite being 70X as large a set of frauds.
We can tackle these large problems; you just put out the same effort you'd put into a new highway interchange or skyscraper: $100M budget per year and a few thousand people working on it. The US Justice System has nearly one million employees; only 2300 on white-collar crime.
The same issues apply to the mining of *everything*, of course, and society will always use a zillion times more iron and copper than uranium and thorium. Not to mention *lead* mining, and mercury. Radiation has a half-life, heavy-metal poisoning is forever.
Exactly. My engineering job was taking care of 10,000 miles of pipes and related water infrastructure. My core skills were understanding pipes and corrosion and water flow. The IT component was designing the database that held them all - and had a structure that met the needs of the guys who abstract out the pure network for simulation, the guys I worked with who pulled out the pipe records for comparison and writing work orders, and the guys who had to work on those maps day-to-day. Then there was more IT to develop the custom GIS maps and the reports that popped up when you clicked on a pipe. I could have worked with the IT department more on all of that, relied more on their skills - but I would have got half the system at twice the price. The ability to know what you want without IT leading you by the hand (often a place more convenient for them than for you) and speed development towards it (either by yourself or by IT) is the biggest IT skill of all.
Sorry, not clear. I got my Civil Engineering degree first and practiced as a licensed professional engineer at all times. Dang! I thought the entire point I was getting across is that I was an *Engineer* who could program; I was inciting one and all to add "programming" to their skills of accountant, technician, salesman, etc...
I keep reading everything here commenting on the paradigm that your job becomes coding; that you're just in competition with generic coders in India or the IT department for that matter. It's all about "coding" as a specialty, as a job in itself.
That's the problem. That has to stop. It's hurting corporations terribly, keeping them from realizing the full benefits of personal computing.
We acquired personal computing technology, but corporations remained in a paradigm of corporate computing development, where the corporation develops all applications as a body corporate, using specialists to do all the coding. It was actually an *offense* in my old employer for non-programmers to program. People had tools taken away, accounts cancelled.
You don't learn to code so that you can become a coder; you learn to code so that you become an accountant, technician, engineer, salesman, secretary...who can code and script their job. How much more productive is an engineer who can do Excel VBA from one who only knows your basic spreadsheet formulas? How many more documents can a secretary manage who can put together a small, three-table database? She becomes the *key* secretary everybody goes to, the one who gets things done, the one who gets the promotion, is the last one fired.
It worked for me; I actually got a CompSci degree but only ever called myself an engineer; I was just an engineer who knew EXACTLY what he wanted from IT and could insist on it...or do it myself if they weren't agreeable (which tends to make them more agreeable). I only ever wrote bash, Perl, and SQL scripts, but automated vast amounts of my job with just that. Oh, yeah, and Excel VBA, of course, which probably doubled my engineering productivity. I taught every engineer who worked for me to do SQL and basic scripts and sent them off all able to automate basic tasks. I believe they all see themselves as more productive and employable for it.
Amen. I feel lucky (OK, I also feel smart and smug) to have bought a plasma right near the end - but just before I had to get a "Smart TV". (I noticed a TV in a hotel the other week took about 20 seconds just to "boot"....about the same time the tubes took to warm up in the 19" B&W I watched Roy Rogers on in 1964...apparently, some things really don't change...)
At a friend's insistence, I took his "New TV burn in" DVD and wore out an old DVD player; it just cycled through screens of solid colour for the next 100 hours...then I started using it but would leave that DVD on all night until it had 200 hours in.
And I've been careful about static images. It hits age 5 this year and I think I'll get another 5 out of it...which I will need before the whole OLED/4K/HDR/whatever mess settles down into one protocol and one winning technology...
Bingo. Air gap AND the machines that are on that network should have the USB ports filled with epoxy. When updates are needed, the vendor plugs in a special laptop for the purpose.
It's extremely useful for SCADA to use Wi-Fi, of course; nothing beats being able to haul a tablet right down under the floor where you've just unstuck a valve and then cycle the valve without running up to the console.
But the Wi-Fi of course needs to be locked down to a specific set of MAC addresses, not just with passwords. SCADA has to have a whole different approach to security than general-purpose computing. Big and distributed as it is, the SCADA system has to be an appliance, like a Blu-Ray player, only able to run the system programs and no others. But all the OS-level protection against that doesn't touch Air Gap; no-connectivity has to be sacred no matter how tempting.
Nope, looks like that was an accident with manual chlorination, not computerized at all.
There's only one security that counts with a SCADA system: air gap. Plant-controlling systems must not talk to any other network. ...and then a year or two later you find them trying to quietly slip two network cards into the same machine so they don't have to change chairs to go from corporate-network-with-Internet-access to SCADA.
I recently retired from a much-larger utility and we did struggle with the human factor. The plant guys heard all the lectures from their design consultants that put in the system and the IT people who checked the design over. They understand that they must not interconnect.
Emotionally, it's hard to believe anybody would *want* to break in; it's not like there's money to be made. Hollywood-movie scenarios where "hackers take over" are ludicrous; every device in the plant has an "On/Off/Auto" switch where only "Auto" leaves SCADA in control at all; the most junior operator could run around the plant hitting those switches in five minutes, restoring manual control. (Then we'd have to bring in a dozen folks with cell phones to run the plant manually; no sweat).
And as I posted above, it's not like you can kill anybody with a water treatment plant: the worst water you could put out would either be untreated (please boil water) or absolute max chlorine the system could insert (still less than a swimming pool).
It's going to be the same as "safety"; you can pound safety lectures into people's heads all day, but it seems to take a generation or two for the message to really sink in; hard hats and visibility vests were strenuously avoided as well. We're just going to have to make it a standard, like safety standards: firing for disobedience, regardless of whether anything went wrong.
You're being silly. Water treatment plants are incapable of producing water that would kill, well, anybody, probably.
Yes, there's enough chlorine (or other disinfectants) in the plant to kill people; but you could open the valves to their greatest extent without jumping the chlorine content up from the usual part-per-million to more than a couple of parts per million...that is, still way less chlorine than your average municipal pool needs to combat all those filthy kids.
I suppose there's somebody so allergic and frail of health that such water could kill them, but I don't think killing one person out of a million is the kind of genocide you have in mind.
If only it were that cheap.
It costs millions, not to *kill* each of the ISIS soldiers, but simply to confront them at all.
Do the math: about 20,000 ISIS. And the US military complex, which is already getting about $1T from the taxpayers every year (when you add all defense-related costs), was asked to attack them. They explained that for one thousand billion dollars per year, all they can do is sit at home, eat, and train. No fighting is affordable.
The additional bill for attacking ISIS is about $100B per year. For 20,000 men. That's $5M per ISIS member attacked for one year. With luck, a good many of them will be killed but probably barely 10% of them, and having spent $50M each to kill a few thousand...at least 2000 young boys will turn 17 or 18 and sign up with them during the year, leaving you in about the same strategic position.
Probably ISIS can be beaten - they are so little and weak and have so many enemies in the area besides the West. But that's why nothing ever got better in Afghanistan - it cost $100B a year to kill a few thousand Taliban who were easily replaced.
...is that all the jobs they compare to are not professions.
I keep coming back to this point on slashdot, across multiple topics - H1B competition? Wouldn't be as easy to displace you if you were a profession.
Women also jumped big into accounting in the 70s, medicine and law in the 80's and now engineering in the 21st century; wages in exactly none of those professions went down.
Professional organizations like the AMA act a little bit like unions, if not exactly like them - they don't negotiate money or conditions, but they do negotiate required education and skill levels, which prevents employers from constantly undercutting wages by threatening to switch to employees that are a little cheaper, then a little cheaper again.
Women entering a mere "job category" lower salary expectations because they've been discriminated against, and are hungrier, the way H1B immigrants are hungrier. But in a profession, there's a basement put on how much effect that has.
IT badly needs to be a profession like accounting, medicine, law, engineering. On a societal basis, I don't think it would even cost anything. Sure, programming would get more expensive - but how much money is wasted right now by bad programming?
...it's impossible to see the banking community as part of the solution, for online safety or anything else.
The book on the bailout by Neil Barofsky writes about how he was told - after the Crash - that he didn't need to check every figure in the bank's applications for bailouts because "These are *bankers*, their sacred word is their whole identity", etc, to which Barofsky could only sputter, "Have you been under a rock the last year??"
I go through periods of calming down about it, but seeing "The Big Short" this week reminded me of the overwhelming, ground-shifts-underfoot megachange that has occurred in our culture without enough comment: that "bankers" are no longer trustworthy people. Bringing them in on a problem is no longer a positive reassurance. It's as if we'd migrated from one of those countries where you want a cop to one where you avoid them if possible, because they're just criminals in uniform who will shake you down.
Instead of standing for open, fair dealings, transparency and reliability, they now stand as icons of fraud and lies. I can hardly think of anybody I would want less involved in cybersecurity than bankers. They'd be thinking about how to manipulate the solution to enhance profits and bonuses, not about me.
And the sea will be held back with a wall, and THE SEA WILL BE FORCED TO PAY FOR IT!!!
Here's the 2004 story on it: http://www.itworldcanada.com/a... ...basically, they found that Intel+Linux processed Oracle as well as their Solaris boxes, at a fraction of the price-point. They remain the Oracle workhorses.
But not much else; they aren't application servers as a rule. File service is a huge NAT that provides for Windows, Linux and any other file space. And they have a pile of Windows servers, of course.
No Linux desktop, sorry, though a few Macs have made tentative re-appearances in graphic artists shops after a 20-year absence.
I just retired from the City of Calgary, and damn, I thought we were having trouble keeping up. We, too, imagined that IE was your only tolerable browser -- up to a few years ago when they threw up their hands and started backing Chrome installs because people were installing it anyway in their home directories. Now it's taking over everything except a few apps that demand IE...and apps that do that are no longer considered for new purchases.
Calgary went all-Linux about 2004, making some waves in the trade journals at the time: we were getting (way) better performance with HP intel chips and RedHat than we had been with Solaris machines, for a fifth the cost(!) All proprietary Unixes were gone within a few years. And mainframes, I thought we were never going to ditch the mainframe, the whole IT department was built around it and they clung bitterly to that thing well into the 21st century...but it, too, has been gone for nearly 10 years now.
The notion that the Feds still have all that stuff so long after a slow-changing conservative municipal government ditched it is sobering, almost shocking.
They're really leaving a lot of money on the table!
FOSS is just one ingredient in the changes needed, and this MP needs to pick it as his signature topic and go after some of that "waste" that politicians are always promising to pay for new programs with - we've actually found some!