Why is it that you can't see a difference between internally investigating and correcting something as a routine review process and publicly declaring an entire industry to be rife with major safety issues and destined for disaster?
I am. Nobody is saying that we should ignore even a single case where safety systems came in to play. All should be investigated and we should understand what, if anything, should be done differently.
That said, humans make mistakes. Parts fail. Random chance bring strange circumstances together. I'm a firefighter, trained in hazmat, confined space rescue, extrication, rope rescue, ice water rescue, Rapid Intervention, and half a dozen other kinds of emergency response. I'm quite used to working both with multiple safety systems in place and occasionally in situations which simply cannot be made safe. Sometimes, I am responsible for the safety of the general public in places.
Here's the thing - we have safety plans in place which overlap and provide wide margins whenever possible. We do this because stuff happens. You can't always predict or plan for which stuff will happen. Fires do not happen only in poorly maintained homes with inattentive owners. They can happen nearly anywhere, and at any time.
When safety systems work, we don't see that as a sign of danger, we see it as a confirmation that the safety systems were necessary. We still review each incident to see what could or should have been done better -- but that doesn't mean we stop taking any action because we declare things as unsafe.
...each incident where safety systems had to come in to play to figure out why, and what could have been done better. I just object to declaring the system unsafe while we do so.
Two aircraft close to within 4.5 miles of one another when the safety zone is 5 miles. It gets logged as a near miss. The planes divert because secondary safety systems send alerts to pilots and traffic controllers who take appropriate action.
Is this proof that that the system is unsafe? Seems to me that something went wrong, safety systems kicked in, people took action as trained, and a problem was mitigated. So, the safety zone being 5 miles paid off. All went well. That's why we have a 5 mile safety zone and not a 4 mile one (or two, or whatever).
Congratulations to the safety engineers, the pilots, and traffic controllers. Through their training, planning, and risk assessment the practices and procedures were in place to handle a mishap and not result in a tragedy.
I recall the last few years of service of the Maine Yankee power plant not far from here. One day there was some kind of problem. Safety systems came in to play. The plant was shut down. Nobody was hurt. Nothing dangerous was released. All was well. Some people screamed at the danger of having the plant around. To me, this made no sense. I say the engineers and operators should have been celebrated for having built something that continued to be safe even as its lifespan was drawing to and end. All the safety systems still worked and everyone went home that night to their families.
Does the system need overhaul? Surely it does. I happen to know a few people who work for the FAA. One is a controller and the other some kind of inspector who flies around a lot and is in charge of some things. I hear stories from them -- though nothing specific -- and I know the stress they're under. We all know the stories off the equipment in use in those towers being insanely antiquated.
Still and all, these things only prove that to keep thing safe, we're losing efficiency. There is no evidence that we're sacrificing safety. Thousands of these massive things scream down runways at hundreds of miles and hour then leap into the sky propelled by unimaginable forces --all in close quarters to one another -- day in and day out. What a marvel of safety and a triumph of engineering.
I'm looking forward to my next flights -- all but the stupid TSA part anyway.
I've created something new. It isn't earth shattering, but it is a new use of technology created by combining several different kinds of existing technologies. Several of these technologies are open source. In fact, without the open source software I'm using, I could not have gotten to the point of having a new thing under the sun. The cost and complexity were just too prohibitive for the solution to be viable.
Linux & Asterisk as software, and MANY open protocol stacks (TCPIP, IAX2, SMTP, DNS, ASCII, SSH, FTP, HTTP, mu-LAW, GSM, -- etc, etc, etc) are all directly tied to the open source community and are all key parts of a solution I've come up with that is helping save lives.
I'm making a business out of what I've built, but I'm also adding back to the open source pool by releasing any changes or additions I've needed to make back to those projects. Some are useful, some are not. Who can say which?
..if you're talking about trying to stop (and/or discourage to the point of retreat) your basic home robber, being shot with anything that does more than sting is likely to do it. If you're trying to hole up against the Guh-mint, you're probably going to need more than this. Otherwise, this should do fine and has the benefit of not going through your walls and killing your (or your neighbor's) children.
If I were inclined to have a ready weapon for home defense (and I'm not), my choice would a pump action shotgun -- probably 12 gage but possibly smaller -- loaded with the closest thing to a stable, non-lethal round I could find. Rock salt is rather appealing to me in that regard.
I am also a firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of common thugs is likely to find somewhere else to be very quickly at just the sound of a shell being jacked into place in a pump action shotgun.
I don't choose to have a home defense weapon at the ready simply because I have enough experience with firearms to know that at 3am, without planning or time to aim the combination of muddled thinking, fear, and surprise it is much more likely to result in the injury of someone I do not want being shot rather than someone I do.
In answer to the questions for both sides of this endless debate:
1. Yes, I am a gun owner. I own a very cheap.22 rifle which I've used to rid my wife's garden of woodchuckery. It lives in my office with a cable lock threaded from the breach through the barrel such that it is impossible to load or fire.
2. Yes, I am (or was 20 years ago) proficient with handguns, shutguns, and rifles. I did at one time have some recognition in the various aspects of target sports.
3. No, I do not believe "The Right to Bear Arms" by nature must be extended to either automatic weapons or tactical nuclear warheads or be considered meaningless any more than I believe only white men who own land should be allowed to vote.
...or stored them on an external drive, or installed the dvd burner himself, or encrypted everything and hidden the files three layers deep. Etc. Etc.
Look. They guy brought his PC to a tech guy for a simple dvd drive installation. Clearly he's not a technology guy. He was fool enough to think a tech guy wouldn't look at what was on the machine. Clearly he's no rocket scientist. He had a drive full of naked children being molested by adults. Clearly he is a sick deviant freak.
It's been almost 20 years since I've had to touch a computer belonging to a customer, but I still occasionally fix things for friends and family. Routinely, if I'm fixing a computer -- even doing an upgrade -- I check the system out to make sure its in good shape.
...would develop a sense of humor. Its the same logic. Lots of sit-coms, but people aren't any more funny. If anything, as a culture we're losing our sense of humor pretty quickly.
To have a tentacle or two, particularly forward facing and prehensile would be an excellent optional add on to the current human model. Imagine the advantage of being able to grab a straw or napkin while using both "standard" grasping appendages to carry your tray of food and drink? Imagine being able to unlock and open your car door, your apartment door, or frankly your zipper while carrying baggage? Slashdot types in particular would be able to use a mouse or touch screen without repositioning the hands away from the home row keys.
I'm in favor of this additional appendage. Bring on the radiation. We'll deal with the giant killer roaches and occasional city-wrecking prehistoric monster-lizard as unfortunate by-products.
If you found any server or intelligent network device anywhere with a default password, you could snoop on the things it handled. That doesn't make this VoIP hack any more likely to be a problem, does it?
Most networks now are switched, not using open hubs. In a switched network, you can't just stick a network card in promiscuous mode and hear all the traffic. The switch connects two two ends that are talking, (e.g. your phone and pbx) and excludes that traffic from anyone else on that switch.
The vulnerable points come after the switch, for example if all the phones use a switch, and that switch has a connection to the PBX, than if you could insert a hub between the pbx and the switch you could use this hack there. If your pbx uses VIOP to upstream the link to a VOIP provider, than someone could get on the WAN link between your PBX and provider.
Both of these require way more access -- and likely physical access -- than this article makes out.
..I'm all for making money on what you do. The question is, where do you (as a consumer) draw the line in terms of what you'll put up with in exchange for amusing content.
This site, to me, crosses that line into ad-banner whoring by deliberately adding clicks and thus page impressions from what would be one, to ten or more.
Write good content, toss some banner ads and make some money -- good for you. Purposely ad-whore -- then you've wasted my time and I won't come back (or recommend the site).
I'm sure they're quaking in fear at my lack of recommendation, but there you go.
Write a cute/clever/fun/geeky article with a top-ten list and maybe some pictures, then put each part of the article on its own page, with "" link. That way, instead of getting 1 page of ad banner revenue, you get ten -- all for the same article and user.
1. Write a marginally cute top ten list. 2. Divide List into 10 pages 3. Put ad-revenue generating banners on each page 4. Get/. or digg to link to your article 5. Profit from all the people not using banner ad blockers.
How much does it have to be worth?
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
We don't really fund it to any great degree on the scale of national budgetary items. It may not generate useful contact in its entire lifetime, but it has pushed the bounds of several scientific and engineering fronts. It has also brought us SETI@Home which pushed the concepts and boundaries of open group computing. Certainly other projects, more highly funded, have produced less in the way of tangible results.
It is definitely worth what we pay for it. Is it worth a huge budget increase? Probably not.
Serverbeach is 30 to 50% less expensive, but the support isn't anywhere near as good. Getting through to a human is painfully difficult. They DO have excellent reliability and they have easily accessed web based "reboot" tools and in the case of Linux they'll auto-recover from a web site, but booting in a way that mounts your linux drive to a known good system so if you know your stuff you can ssh in and fix your drive config the reboot your machine. If you actually need a person, it will take time and their service is to essentially reformat for you.
In other words, if you KNOW what you're doing and you don't need or want support, Serverbeach is cheap and fast.
I'm VERY happy with Serverbeach, and they're very friendly and so on -- but they're clearly NOT in the support business. As long as you know what you're buying, you'll be fine.
Rackspace, on the other hand, is REALLY good at holding your hand if you need it. They're more expensive but they're top of the line from a support and reliability perspective. As my site grows, the cost difference won't mean as much and I will be going to Rackspace for a key server.
I'm in Maine, a very long way out at the end of a long line of potential failure points on almost any network you want to get access to. A T1 from a top level company was costing me $1500 a month. Dedicated bandwidth from the cable company was $1000 a month. Neither was 100% reliable (surprisingly, the cable company was no less reliable in my case than was my T1 provider as it turned out).
I had (still do actually) 12kw generator fired on LP gas with a 250 gallon LP tank burried in the back yard. Line conditioned UPS gear decent routers and switches, and that T1 -- total cost was pretty big.
Now that colo and rented servers are so cheap, it makes NO sense for me at all. I've got a couple of boxes at ServerBeach locations instead for all my public facing stuff. I still have my home gear, but it only serves me. For that, a cable modem and consumer account is fine.
For less than 300 dollars a month now, I have better power redundancy, way better network performance, way better network redundancy, 24 hour on-staff hardware or reboot support, and I don't have to buy the hardware. When I want to upgrade, I just start paying for a different machine.
Renting the servers ends up being way cheaper, way faster, way more reliable, and way more supportable.
Lets take a potentially subjective subject, assign a bunch of 20 year old kids who care enough about it to want a grade and little more, and get them to parrot back whatever garbage they've seen on the after school movie of the week.
Then, lets criticize the editors for trying to put some sense of reality back into the drivel.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that you can't see a difference between internally investigating and correcting something as a routine review process and publicly declaring an entire industry to be rife with major safety issues and destined for disaster?
Clearly they are two different things.
..for anything with a human safety associated?
I am. Nobody is saying that we should ignore even a single case where safety systems came in to play. All should be investigated and we should understand what, if anything, should be done differently.
That said, humans make mistakes. Parts fail. Random chance bring strange circumstances together. I'm a firefighter, trained in hazmat, confined space rescue, extrication, rope rescue, ice water rescue, Rapid Intervention, and half a dozen other kinds of emergency response. I'm quite used to working both with multiple safety systems in place and occasionally in situations which simply cannot be made safe. Sometimes, I am responsible for the safety of the general public in places.
Here's the thing - we have safety plans in place which overlap and provide wide margins whenever possible. We do this because stuff happens. You can't always predict or plan for which stuff will happen. Fires do not happen only in poorly maintained homes with inattentive owners. They can happen nearly anywhere, and at any time.
When safety systems work, we don't see that as a sign of danger, we see it as a confirmation that the safety systems were necessary. We still review each incident to see what could or should have been done better -- but that doesn't mean we stop taking any action because we declare things as unsafe.
...each incident where safety systems had to come in to play to figure out why, and what could have been done better. I just object to declaring the system unsafe while we do so.
Two aircraft close to within 4.5 miles of one another when the safety zone is 5 miles. It gets logged as a near miss. The planes divert because secondary safety systems send alerts to pilots and traffic controllers who take appropriate action.
Is this proof that that the system is unsafe? Seems to me that something went wrong, safety systems kicked in, people took action as trained, and a problem was mitigated. So, the safety zone being 5 miles paid off. All went well. That's why we have a 5 mile safety zone and not a 4 mile one (or two, or whatever).
Congratulations to the safety engineers, the pilots, and traffic controllers. Through their training, planning, and risk assessment the practices and procedures were in place to handle a mishap and not result in a tragedy.
I recall the last few years of service of the Maine Yankee power plant not far from here. One day there was some kind of problem. Safety systems came in to play. The plant was shut down. Nobody was hurt. Nothing dangerous was released. All was well. Some people screamed at the danger of having the plant around. To me, this made no sense. I say the engineers and operators should have been celebrated for having built something that continued to be safe even as its lifespan was drawing to and end. All the safety systems still worked and everyone went home that night to their families.
Does the system need overhaul? Surely it does. I happen to know a few people who work for the FAA. One is a controller and the other some kind of inspector who flies around a lot and is in charge of some things. I hear stories from them -- though nothing specific -- and I know the stress they're under. We all know the stories off the equipment in use in those towers being insanely antiquated.
Still and all, these things only prove that to keep thing safe, we're losing efficiency. There is no evidence that we're sacrificing safety. Thousands of these massive things scream down runways at hundreds of miles and hour then leap into the sky propelled by unimaginable forces --all in close quarters to one another -- day in and day out. What a marvel of safety and a triumph of engineering.
I'm looking forward to my next flights -- all but the stupid TSA part anyway.
I've created something new. It isn't earth shattering, but it is a new use of technology created by combining several different kinds of existing technologies. Several of these technologies are open source. In fact, without the open source software I'm using, I could not have gotten to the point of having a new thing under the sun. The cost and complexity were just too prohibitive for the solution to be viable.
Linux & Asterisk as software, and MANY open protocol stacks (TCPIP, IAX2, SMTP, DNS, ASCII, SSH, FTP, HTTP, mu-LAW, GSM, -- etc, etc, etc) are all directly tied to the open source community and are all key parts of a solution I've come up with that is helping save lives.
I'm making a business out of what I've built, but I'm also adding back to the open source pool by releasing any changes or additions I've needed to make back to those projects. Some are useful, some are not. Who can say which?
..if you're talking about trying to stop (and/or discourage to the point of retreat) your basic home robber, being shot with anything that does more than sting is likely to do it. If you're trying to hole up against the Guh-mint, you're probably going to need more than this. Otherwise, this should do fine and has the benefit of not going through your walls and killing your (or your neighbor's) children.
.22 rifle which I've used to rid my wife's garden of woodchuckery. It lives in my office with a cable lock threaded from the breach through the barrel such that it is impossible to load or fire.
If I were inclined to have a ready weapon for home defense (and I'm not), my choice would a pump action shotgun -- probably 12 gage but possibly smaller -- loaded with the closest thing to a stable, non-lethal round I could find. Rock salt is rather appealing to me in that regard.
I am also a firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of common thugs is likely to find somewhere else to be very quickly at just the sound of a shell being jacked into place in a pump action shotgun.
I don't choose to have a home defense weapon at the ready simply because I have enough experience with firearms to know that at 3am, without planning or time to aim the combination of muddled thinking, fear, and surprise it is much more likely to result in the injury of someone I do not want being shot rather than someone I do.
In answer to the questions for both sides of this endless debate:
1. Yes, I am a gun owner. I own a very cheap
2. Yes, I am (or was 20 years ago) proficient with handguns, shutguns, and rifles. I did at one time have some recognition in the various aspects of target sports.
3. No, I do not believe "The Right to Bear Arms" by nature must be extended to either automatic weapons or tactical nuclear warheads or be considered meaningless any more than I believe only white men who own land should be allowed to vote.
In Soviet Russia, You give GPS directions!
...or stored them on an external drive, or installed the dvd burner himself, or encrypted everything and hidden the files three layers deep. Etc. Etc.
Look. They guy brought his PC to a tech guy for a simple dvd drive installation. Clearly he's not a technology guy. He was fool enough to think a tech guy wouldn't look at what was on the machine. Clearly he's no rocket scientist. He had a drive full of naked children being molested by adults. Clearly he is a sick deviant freak.
It's been almost 20 years since I've had to touch a computer belonging to a customer, but I still occasionally fix things for friends and family. Routinely, if I'm fixing a computer -- even doing an upgrade -- I check the system out to make sure its in good shape.
These techs did the right thing here.
Seems to me they're just opening the market for secure proxy server services. https to your proxy, and out from there.
1 LOC == Negative Square Root of knots traveled times the volts of energy in one cubic ounce of free hydrogen.
Further, LOCs decrease in both mass and energy as square of the distance from any funding source.
And is it more or less of a heat-distance-volume-power-mass measurement if the LOC is in English vs. Esperanto?
I'd imagine that the number of "Probable Hits" will be heavily weighted toward pr0n sites if anyone from around here gets mapped.
...would develop a sense of humor. Its the same logic. Lots of sit-coms, but people aren't any more funny. If anything, as a culture we're losing our sense of humor pretty quickly.
To have a tentacle or two, particularly forward facing and prehensile would be an excellent optional add on to the current human model. Imagine the advantage of being able to grab a straw or napkin while using both "standard" grasping appendages to carry your tray of food and drink? Imagine being able to unlock and open your car door, your apartment door, or frankly your zipper while carrying baggage? Slashdot types in particular would be able to use a mouse or touch screen without repositioning the hands away from the home row keys.
I'm in favor of this additional appendage. Bring on the radiation. We'll deal with the giant killer roaches and occasional city-wrecking prehistoric monster-lizard as unfortunate by-products.
If you found any server or intelligent network device anywhere with a default password, you could snoop on the things it handled. That doesn't make this VoIP hack any more likely to be a problem, does it?
Most networks now are switched, not using open hubs. In a switched network, you can't just stick a network card in promiscuous mode and hear all the traffic. The switch connects two two ends that are talking, (e.g. your phone and pbx) and excludes that traffic from anyone else on that switch.
The vulnerable points come after the switch, for example if all the phones use a switch, and that switch has a connection to the PBX, than if you could insert a hub between the pbx and the switch you could use this hack there. If your pbx uses VIOP to upstream the link to a VOIP provider, than someone could get on the WAN link between your PBX and provider.
Both of these require way more access -- and likely physical access -- than this article makes out.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic insectoid swarm controlling overlords.
..I'm all for making money on what you do. The question is, where do you (as a consumer) draw the line in terms of what you'll put up with in exchange for amusing content.
This site, to me, crosses that line into ad-banner whoring by deliberately adding clicks and thus page impressions from what would be one, to ten or more.
Write good content, toss some banner ads and make some money -- good for you. Purposely ad-whore -- then you've wasted my time and I won't come back (or recommend the site).
I'm sure they're quaking in fear at my lack of recommendation, but there you go.
Here's number one on my list:
/. or digg to link to your article
Write a cute/clever/fun/geeky article with a top-ten list and maybe some pictures, then put each part of the article on its own page, with "" link. That way, instead of getting 1 page of ad banner revenue, you get ten -- all for the same article and user.
1. Write a marginally cute top ten list.
2. Divide List into 10 pages
3. Put ad-revenue generating banners on each page
4. Get
5. Profit from all the people not using banner ad blockers.
We don't really fund it to any great degree on the scale of national budgetary items. It may not generate useful contact in its entire lifetime, but it has pushed the bounds of several scientific and engineering fronts. It has also brought us SETI@Home which pushed the concepts and boundaries of open group computing. Certainly other projects, more highly funded, have produced less in the way of tangible results.
It is definitely worth what we pay for it. Is it worth a huge budget increase? Probably not.
That web site is.....well.....It should be called "The Glorious People's Revolutionary Website for Network Neutrality".
Serverbeach is 30 to 50% less expensive, but the support isn't anywhere near as good. Getting through to a human is painfully difficult. They DO have excellent reliability and they have easily accessed web based "reboot" tools and in the case of Linux they'll auto-recover from a web site, but booting in a way that mounts your linux drive to a known good system so if you know your stuff you can ssh in and fix your drive config the reboot your machine. If you actually need a person, it will take time and their service is to essentially reformat for you.
In other words, if you KNOW what you're doing and you don't need or want support, Serverbeach is cheap and fast.
I'm VERY happy with Serverbeach, and they're very friendly and so on -- but they're clearly NOT in the support business. As long as you know what you're buying, you'll be fine.
Rackspace, on the other hand, is REALLY good at holding your hand if you need it. They're more expensive but they're top of the line from a support and reliability perspective. As my site grows, the cost difference won't mean as much and I will be going to Rackspace for a key server.
Hope this helps.
I ended up dropping that configuration.
I'm in Maine, a very long way out at the end of a long line of potential failure points on almost any network you want to get access to. A T1 from a top level company was costing me $1500 a month. Dedicated bandwidth from the cable company was $1000 a month. Neither was 100% reliable (surprisingly, the cable company was no less reliable in my case than was my T1 provider as it turned out).
I had (still do actually) 12kw generator fired on LP gas with a 250 gallon LP tank burried in the back yard. Line conditioned UPS gear decent routers and switches, and that T1 -- total cost was pretty big.
Now that colo and rented servers are so cheap, it makes NO sense for me at all. I've got a couple of boxes at ServerBeach locations instead for all my public facing stuff. I still have my home gear, but it only serves me. For that, a cable modem and consumer account is fine.
For less than 300 dollars a month now, I have better power redundancy, way better network performance, way better network redundancy, 24 hour on-staff hardware or reboot support, and I don't have to buy the hardware. When I want to upgrade, I just start paying for a different machine.
Renting the servers ends up being way cheaper, way faster, way more reliable, and way more supportable.
That's what I was thinking.
Lets take a potentially subjective subject, assign a bunch of 20 year old kids who care enough about it to want a grade and little more, and get them to parrot back whatever garbage they've seen on the after school movie of the week.
Then, lets criticize the editors for trying to put some sense of reality back into the drivel.
The never stop. Always the drums, the drums...