There may be significant reasons for this though: FDA approval - Siemens doesn't update some of our systems because the configuration is not FDA approved. So yes, we're still on XP SP1. DLL hell - Still a major problem and Microsoft is not shy of changing a metric ton of obscure API's in a Service Pack and medical software is all but well-written or stable. All of a sudden a build will fail for the only reason that MS started including.NET 2.0 components in one of the Service Packs. If you think Linux changes API's as kernel versions go up, be thankful that at least it's visible. It works - As I said, the medical software is classically broken, badly written and very unstable unless you stick to whatever the vendor released it on. The vendor usually goes out of business 30 minutes after the purchase has been completed and thus you're stuck with whatever you got. Also, middleware gets developed by another outside contractor who then leaves and nobody has anything but the compiled version of something that looks awful. I think some of the worst decisions get made by medical management, not because they're stupid but because they're smart in their respective fields and they think that because they're smart and have an MD, PhD that listening to the associates or bachelors in Computer Science is below their pay grade (and usually those people are 5 levels of management separated anyway).
I think it would be worse of an international incident if an object falls out of the sky into a school full of Iranian kids and blows up with some of the wreckage showing USAF (or CIA). Even though the spy drone could be considered an act of war (invasion of sovereign airspace) a practical bomb would definitely be considered a bad idea.
I say, fry the electronics (or have some sort of boot encryption) after it has "safely" crashed. But given the state of US Gov'ment contractors (especially Boeing and Lockheed) it wouldn't surprise me that this was way underspecced, underdeveloped and overpriced and the controls were encrypted with an RC4 encryption and any Iranian with a sufficient GPU (and radio electronics) in his laptop could control the thing.
I've seen some of those things, the ancient of days in those environments usually knows enough of radio controls to at least implement frequency hopping and other 'security through obscurity' but the younger generation in the same team usually ends up buying and rebranding a chipset from a chinese vendor which has the whole control circuit on a chip and uses a weak form of encryption.
Double edged sword. Censorship is the blocking of information someone (anywhere) does not agree with.
The US had their own war propaganda. Currently politicians are pushing their own propaganda so they'll get elected. I don't agree with any of it so should it be censored? Or should we just have a debate about it and see who wins?
There is NO reason WHATSOEVER to censor anything, anywhere. If you do, you'll only bolster the propaganda method of us vs. them which makes it even harder to track until it's too late.
Hitler was censored in a way too when his putsch failed, he was jailed and both him and his books were banned in that area. He practically became a martyr to the 'oppressed'.
The thing is that funding our 'terrestrial matters' (by which I think you mean the wars and bailouts) has been way more expensive than all the space programs put together.
Space research creates jobs and develops new technology which we can then use to further an economy. War simply destroys economies to profit a very limited set of people (those selling weapons and weapon systems) and although they also develop new technology, they do so by cannibalizing actual scientific research.
The terrestrial matters we know about and we can handle them, we just need people knowledgeable and honest enough to do so. The extra-terrestrial we don't know about but finding out about them is highly educational and progresses us much further than politicizing science and reverting back to teaching creation. That IS what will happen if we cancelled all space research a decade ago - the religious nut cases would say that we haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life or even planets like ours therefore $deity must have put us here. In the last decade we have found evidence of not only planets like ours but whole solar systems like ours and also "extraterrestrial" life in our own backyard (the arsenic-based life form and what seems like remnants of early seeds on passing meteors).
Server communications is all that needs to be encrypted really. The end-user shouldn't have to do much, I simply don't allow POP and standard IMAP on my mail server and even SMTP has to have at least TLS encryption if you're going for port 25. The server-to-server communication for SMTP is a bit hairier (my server makes a best effort to either use SSL or TLS) but XMPP can be forced to only accept SSL/TLS encrypted connections.
Off course if you decide to outsource management of any of those assets to 'the cloud' then you better have some guarantee that stuff gets encrypted.
That's a lot of money actually. $1.30/user is $13,000/month for what a simple server cluster (Postfix etc.) should be able to handle (~10,000 accounts). That's over $150,000/year.
I used to work for a hosting company and our server cluster (4 servers with a 10TB backend) handled well over 50,000 accounts about 5 years ago. Sure the load would be at 10 or so but that's not a big deal for a mail server.
In European countries the average drinking age comes to about 16 with many minors having drank alcohol under parental supervision well before that.
In 1830 the average 15 year old had also contracted syphillis and had a pretty laborious job either farming, ranching or building rails. If the average 15 year old survived to be 15 years old he was going to die within the next 20-25 years.
It's very common for ALL local officials to be corrupt and basically sit-ins for the drug gangs. This is not just confined to Mexico though, the US has the same problems although with us it's not drug lords, it's bank CEO's.
The big picture is really 7.7 trillion dollars altogether over 2 years. We're just waiting on the bubble to pop on the debt the westerner nations have now created. The debt is really not backed by anything, it's just a number in the computer. But 50% of GDP is a big number to give away.
Apple themselves make a really nice integrated packet of Postfix, Dovecot, CalDAV, CardDAV, Apache, OpenLDAP and a Policy Manager for iOS.
Zimbra and some of the others are indeed greedy but they just are because they take all the work out of your hands and make a single package but again, they rely on the same technologies as Apple.
Exchange integration in those packages is only done for backwards compatibility with Windows clients, it was never intended to be used progressively as iOS and Android has a nice device management system (using XML) that can push certain policies onto the device even fully automatic.
You never know when such research will pay off. The US and EU is scrapping programs now while China, India and a few others try to get into space, you can bet that a lot of cool research will be coming from that side of the globe in the next 30 years.
Imagine if we could launch a probe now with what we have available. We could cheaply launch 10's of much faster probes with incrementally better sensors for the price of the voyager program (~$3B in today's dollars).
You can also simply substitute your own binaries on the same platform. It's not because RH gives Syslog by default that you can't install Journal and vice versa. You can have them even running concurrently (where necessary). Most people and even sysadmins don't care what is running the logs as long as it's readable unless they're running a dedicated syslog server where any such changes will be monitored.
The standard daemon for mail used to be Sendmail later Postfix. Yet people still run either out of necessity or preference QMail, Sendmail and I use personally a very simple forwarding daemon that sends it to my GMail account.
THAT is the beauty of Open Source (and by extension GNU/Linux). If Windows slips in a new logger (or task bar, security center,.NET framework etc.) you can't replace it, in Linux you can take your bog-standard distro (Ubuntu, Red Hat) and replace piece by piece very simply.
I've lived under a similar system but what ended up happening is that the base cost that was always there (city taxes where I live now) remained the same and the special trash bags kept going up in price.
The problem is that implementing any such system in any local government is so encumbered with external project managers and contractors together with long-term union employees that the cost of simply implementing the system is as wasteful if not more expensive as simply covering the cost of the sorters at the dump site (yes, there are rudimentary sorting lines where the trash gets dumped) and local businesses lobbied for extensions and later for exemptions so there was really not much difference.
In the end, the project got scrapped and they went back to simply using the landfill and putting up a gas collection station on it which was in the end cheaper and probably produced something of value too.
The real joke is that the other superpowers never built that much nukes as the US once thought, they merely made the appearance that they had so many nukes and also had them in much better locations than the US would ever want to admit.
In the end, the things that really saved the world from destruction were spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers, the same people our societies would like to weed out and hang for treason in this age.
Reading the article, it seems it's also fairly simple to be done. Take a random sample, transfer it between a couple of hosts a few times until it's mutated far enough that it is spread through air and resistant to the hosts' immune system.
It also shows us that a dangerous outbreak of such virus is 'just' 5 mutations away (if we can believe the article) which may (or will) happen by naturally occurring natural selection or other forces.
The US keeps a lot of stuff in their labs (such as smallpox) - an organized, funded and motivated attacker will be able to obtain whatever they want and will have the resources to develop it as well.
I think the terrorist scenario is a little far fetched though. Terrorists are not planning to wipe the human population, they want to instill fear and have the opponent on their toes and destroy them from within by letting panic and paranoia drive the opponents actions (such as 9/11 did to the US). Maybe some anarchist groups may want this but probably those affected by it most are going to be the underprivileged, those with which such groups identify themselves or stand up for.
The fallacy is that job disappearing in a certain section means jobs evaporating altogether. There are still those needed to support end-users, IT people to implement the "buzzword of the day" solution on local machines. Sure it may mean less menial mid-level jobs are available in a specific geographical area but people have been calling to eliminate those anyway in order to save money.
So you have the really good people (the IT personnel that are qualified) still having a job, you have the cruft removed as the management and everything else is moved together with the servers to people more qualified to make such decisions and you still have your low-end (entry-level) IT personnel on the local level.
I've also noticed management tends to spend considerably more money on hosted solutions (in the vicinity of 1000% of local implementation cost) so eventually there will be a call to save money by implementing it locally so those jobs will once again be shifted in the next 5 years. There is no way that a sufficiently large organization can save money simply by shifting all it's necessary operations to another entity that wants to make profit on the same implementation. If they do there is considerable overhead, bad employees and mismanagement and the organization needs to look at all it's departments including administration, support, sales, marketing because most likely they have the same problem there but nobody has implemented cloud marketing or cloud HR yet.
Why would that go against the second law at all? The state of the Universe right before the big bang was not in equilibrium as proven by the Big Bang, the rest is just a result. If anything the second law proves that God cannot exist as since it is postulated such being has been around forever, it's energy should have reached an equilibrium by now. Nowhere do scientists postulate that the Universe has been around forever though so the equilibrium has not been reached (yet).
I'm a coder actually, not a designer so I would modify Drupal and similar CMS'es back when they were young (remember working with the first versions of Drupal). I never had any formal education either.
What I did was basically go up to a couple of local businesses (webshops and so on) and asked them if they needed any help. And lo-and-behold they needed someone for a small project that eventually grew into bigger projects. I eventually quit for a "stable" job but it was well-paying (the hourly wages) and granted me a lot of freedom since it wasn't full time but it was enough for me.
As far as some of the skills you should probably have besides your generic designer skills (these were my skills back then): PHP and Perl (especially if you're going to be modifying Drupal modules), other CMS'es, Linux/LAMP setup and maintenance, e-mail servers, site management tools (such as Ensim, Plesk etc.), networking (TCP/IP basics), how to secure an insecure system, basic understanding of firewalls and routers and knowing how to work on a Mac. Also have a recommendation letter, references and a portfolio.
These days you probably want to add virtual servers and hosted services (buzzword of the day: cloud, SaaS,...) as well as AJAX, JavaScript, HTML5 and other client-side goodness (which weren't as prevalent back then, we barely had Flash). Throw yourself out there, make sure you're visible on all kinds of sites. I got offers through the old sourceforge jobs section (don't know if it still exists) and through several other small, very directed sites while I never got anything through the generics like Monster.
Imagine the same scenario but you couldn't afford the lawyer or time off work to go to court.
That's exactly what I meant with "if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer, judge or lawmaker" you'll be on the good side, the rest (of us - depending on the severity) is going to be on the bad side.
It seems if you have money for someone to pour over enough tomes of law you will win or get a massively reduced sentence. These tomes are huge, some large lawyers offices have a small library (the size of a community library in some small towns) with only law text and interpretations on it.
Slashdot Mirror
you would be hard pressed to show me a belief in the Torah or Bible that actually encourages bad behavior
Ritual Human Sacrifice:
Judges 11:29-40
Joshua 7:15
Laws of rape:
Deuteronomy 22:28-29
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
God approving and encouraging rape:
Zechariah 14:1-2
Killing homosexuals:
Leviticus 20:13
Killing those of other religions:
Deuteronomy 13:7-12
etc. etc.
There is little to misunderstand about those verses, maybe you should read your bible (I did, I used to be a very extremist Christian)
There may be significant reasons for this though: .NET 2.0 components in one of the Service Packs. If you think Linux changes API's as kernel versions go up, be thankful that at least it's visible.
FDA approval - Siemens doesn't update some of our systems because the configuration is not FDA approved. So yes, we're still on XP SP1.
DLL hell - Still a major problem and Microsoft is not shy of changing a metric ton of obscure API's in a Service Pack and medical software is all but well-written or stable. All of a sudden a build will fail for the only reason that MS started including
It works - As I said, the medical software is classically broken, badly written and very unstable unless you stick to whatever the vendor released it on. The vendor usually goes out of business 30 minutes after the purchase has been completed and thus you're stuck with whatever you got. Also, middleware gets developed by another outside contractor who then leaves and nobody has anything but the compiled version of something that looks awful. I think some of the worst decisions get made by medical management, not because they're stupid but because they're smart in their respective fields and they think that because they're smart and have an MD, PhD that listening to the associates or bachelors in Computer Science is below their pay grade (and usually those people are 5 levels of management separated anyway).
I would like to sin with your cosine.
CON was also used in DOS (console or stdin/stdout)
I think it would be worse of an international incident if an object falls out of the sky into a school full of Iranian kids and blows up with some of the wreckage showing USAF (or CIA). Even though the spy drone could be considered an act of war (invasion of sovereign airspace) a practical bomb would definitely be considered a bad idea.
I say, fry the electronics (or have some sort of boot encryption) after it has "safely" crashed. But given the state of US Gov'ment contractors (especially Boeing and Lockheed) it wouldn't surprise me that this was way underspecced, underdeveloped and overpriced and the controls were encrypted with an RC4 encryption and any Iranian with a sufficient GPU (and radio electronics) in his laptop could control the thing.
I've seen some of those things, the ancient of days in those environments usually knows enough of radio controls to at least implement frequency hopping and other 'security through obscurity' but the younger generation in the same team usually ends up buying and rebranding a chipset from a chinese vendor which has the whole control circuit on a chip and uses a weak form of encryption.
Double edged sword. Censorship is the blocking of information someone (anywhere) does not agree with.
The US had their own war propaganda. Currently politicians are pushing their own propaganda so they'll get elected. I don't agree with any of it so should it be censored? Or should we just have a debate about it and see who wins?
There is NO reason WHATSOEVER to censor anything, anywhere. If you do, you'll only bolster the propaganda method of us vs. them which makes it even harder to track until it's too late.
Hitler was censored in a way too when his putsch failed, he was jailed and both him and his books were banned in that area. He practically became a martyr to the 'oppressed'.
The thing is that funding our 'terrestrial matters' (by which I think you mean the wars and bailouts) has been way more expensive than all the space programs put together.
Space research creates jobs and develops new technology which we can then use to further an economy. War simply destroys economies to profit a very limited set of people (those selling weapons and weapon systems) and although they also develop new technology, they do so by cannibalizing actual scientific research.
The terrestrial matters we know about and we can handle them, we just need people knowledgeable and honest enough to do so. The extra-terrestrial we don't know about but finding out about them is highly educational and progresses us much further than politicizing science and reverting back to teaching creation. That IS what will happen if we cancelled all space research a decade ago - the religious nut cases would say that we haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life or even planets like ours therefore $deity must have put us here. In the last decade we have found evidence of not only planets like ours but whole solar systems like ours and also "extraterrestrial" life in our own backyard (the arsenic-based life form and what seems like remnants of early seeds on passing meteors).
How about putty.be
Easy to remember and afaik always authentic
Server communications is all that needs to be encrypted really. The end-user shouldn't have to do much, I simply don't allow POP and standard IMAP on my mail server and even SMTP has to have at least TLS encryption if you're going for port 25. The server-to-server communication for SMTP is a bit hairier (my server makes a best effort to either use SSL or TLS) but XMPP can be forced to only accept SSL/TLS encrypted connections.
Off course if you decide to outsource management of any of those assets to 'the cloud' then you better have some guarantee that stuff gets encrypted.
That's a lot of money actually. $1.30/user is $13,000/month for what a simple server cluster (Postfix etc.) should be able to handle (~10,000 accounts). That's over $150,000/year.
I used to work for a hosting company and our server cluster (4 servers with a 10TB backend) handled well over 50,000 accounts about 5 years ago. Sure the load would be at 10 or so but that's not a big deal for a mail server.
In European countries the average drinking age comes to about 16 with many minors having drank alcohol under parental supervision well before that.
In 1830 the average 15 year old had also contracted syphillis and had a pretty laborious job either farming, ranching or building rails. If the average 15 year old survived to be 15 years old he was going to die within the next 20-25 years.
So was the US at one point. Different crooks, same problems.
It's very common for ALL local officials to be corrupt and basically sit-ins for the drug gangs. This is not just confined to Mexico though, the US has the same problems although with us it's not drug lords, it's bank CEO's.
The big picture is really 7.7 trillion dollars altogether over 2 years. We're just waiting on the bubble to pop on the debt the westerner nations have now created. The debt is really not backed by anything, it's just a number in the computer. But 50% of GDP is a big number to give away.
Apple themselves make a really nice integrated packet of Postfix, Dovecot, CalDAV, CardDAV, Apache, OpenLDAP and a Policy Manager for iOS.
Zimbra and some of the others are indeed greedy but they just are because they take all the work out of your hands and make a single package but again, they rely on the same technologies as Apple.
Exchange integration in those packages is only done for backwards compatibility with Windows clients, it was never intended to be used progressively as iOS and Android has a nice device management system (using XML) that can push certain policies onto the device even fully automatic.
You never know when such research will pay off. The US and EU is scrapping programs now while China, India and a few others try to get into space, you can bet that a lot of cool research will be coming from that side of the globe in the next 30 years.
Imagine if we could launch a probe now with what we have available. We could cheaply launch 10's of much faster probes with incrementally better sensors for the price of the voyager program (~$3B in today's dollars).
Get a second power supply though (12V 2A works well) as the standard supply burns out when (I suppose this is the cause) attaching USB devices.
You can also simply substitute your own binaries on the same platform. It's not because RH gives Syslog by default that you can't install Journal and vice versa. You can have them even running concurrently (where necessary). Most people and even sysadmins don't care what is running the logs as long as it's readable unless they're running a dedicated syslog server where any such changes will be monitored.
The standard daemon for mail used to be Sendmail later Postfix. Yet people still run either out of necessity or preference QMail, Sendmail and I use personally a very simple forwarding daemon that sends it to my GMail account.
THAT is the beauty of Open Source (and by extension GNU/Linux). If Windows slips in a new logger (or task bar, security center, .NET framework etc.) you can't replace it, in Linux you can take your bog-standard distro (Ubuntu, Red Hat) and replace piece by piece very simply.
I've lived under a similar system but what ended up happening is that the base cost that was always there (city taxes where I live now) remained the same and the special trash bags kept going up in price.
The problem is that implementing any such system in any local government is so encumbered with external project managers and contractors together with long-term union employees that the cost of simply implementing the system is as wasteful if not more expensive as simply covering the cost of the sorters at the dump site (yes, there are rudimentary sorting lines where the trash gets dumped) and local businesses lobbied for extensions and later for exemptions so there was really not much difference.
In the end, the project got scrapped and they went back to simply using the landfill and putting up a gas collection station on it which was in the end cheaper and probably produced something of value too.
The real joke is that the other superpowers never built that much nukes as the US once thought, they merely made the appearance that they had so many nukes and also had them in much better locations than the US would ever want to admit.
In the end, the things that really saved the world from destruction were spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers, the same people our societies would like to weed out and hang for treason in this age.
Reading the article, it seems it's also fairly simple to be done. Take a random sample, transfer it between a couple of hosts a few times until it's mutated far enough that it is spread through air and resistant to the hosts' immune system.
It also shows us that a dangerous outbreak of such virus is 'just' 5 mutations away (if we can believe the article) which may (or will) happen by naturally occurring natural selection or other forces.
The US keeps a lot of stuff in their labs (such as smallpox) - an organized, funded and motivated attacker will be able to obtain whatever they want and will have the resources to develop it as well.
I think the terrorist scenario is a little far fetched though. Terrorists are not planning to wipe the human population, they want to instill fear and have the opponent on their toes and destroy them from within by letting panic and paranoia drive the opponents actions (such as 9/11 did to the US). Maybe some anarchist groups may want this but probably those affected by it most are going to be the underprivileged, those with which such groups identify themselves or stand up for.
The fallacy is that job disappearing in a certain section means jobs evaporating altogether. There are still those needed to support end-users, IT people to implement the "buzzword of the day" solution on local machines. Sure it may mean less menial mid-level jobs are available in a specific geographical area but people have been calling to eliminate those anyway in order to save money.
So you have the really good people (the IT personnel that are qualified) still having a job, you have the cruft removed as the management and everything else is moved together with the servers to people more qualified to make such decisions and you still have your low-end (entry-level) IT personnel on the local level.
I've also noticed management tends to spend considerably more money on hosted solutions (in the vicinity of 1000% of local implementation cost) so eventually there will be a call to save money by implementing it locally so those jobs will once again be shifted in the next 5 years. There is no way that a sufficiently large organization can save money simply by shifting all it's necessary operations to another entity that wants to make profit on the same implementation. If they do there is considerable overhead, bad employees and mismanagement and the organization needs to look at all it's departments including administration, support, sales, marketing because most likely they have the same problem there but nobody has implemented cloud marketing or cloud HR yet.
Why would that go against the second law at all? The state of the Universe right before the big bang was not in equilibrium as proven by the Big Bang, the rest is just a result. If anything the second law proves that God cannot exist as since it is postulated such being has been around forever, it's energy should have reached an equilibrium by now. Nowhere do scientists postulate that the Universe has been around forever though so the equilibrium has not been reached (yet).
I'm a coder actually, not a designer so I would modify Drupal and similar CMS'es back when they were young (remember working with the first versions of Drupal). I never had any formal education either.
What I did was basically go up to a couple of local businesses (webshops and so on) and asked them if they needed any help. And lo-and-behold they needed someone for a small project that eventually grew into bigger projects. I eventually quit for a "stable" job but it was well-paying (the hourly wages) and granted me a lot of freedom since it wasn't full time but it was enough for me.
As far as some of the skills you should probably have besides your generic designer skills (these were my skills back then): PHP and Perl (especially if you're going to be modifying Drupal modules), other CMS'es, Linux/LAMP setup and maintenance, e-mail servers, site management tools (such as Ensim, Plesk etc.), networking (TCP/IP basics), how to secure an insecure system, basic understanding of firewalls and routers and knowing how to work on a Mac. Also have a recommendation letter, references and a portfolio.
These days you probably want to add virtual servers and hosted services (buzzword of the day: cloud, SaaS, ...) as well as AJAX, JavaScript, HTML5 and other client-side goodness (which weren't as prevalent back then, we barely had Flash). Throw yourself out there, make sure you're visible on all kinds of sites. I got offers through the old sourceforge jobs section (don't know if it still exists) and through several other small, very directed sites while I never got anything through the generics like Monster.
Imagine the same scenario but you couldn't afford the lawyer or time off work to go to court.
That's exactly what I meant with "if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer, judge or lawmaker" you'll be on the good side, the rest (of us - depending on the severity) is going to be on the bad side.
It seems if you have money for someone to pour over enough tomes of law you will win or get a massively reduced sentence. These tomes are huge, some large lawyers offices have a small library (the size of a community library in some small towns) with only law text and interpretations on it.