The one and only time my old POTS line winked out was around 4:30 PM on 9/11/2001, and that's because I lived below 14th St. in Manhattan. It took that long for the fires in and around the WTC to partially shut down lower Manhattan phone service. (I still have photos of the temporary repair facilities set up by NYNEX/Verizon on the west side, and the rather huge fiber cables they pulled up to splice, in the weeks afterward.)
The several VOIP setups I used, over the years, have let me down countless times. Even my cell providers have been more reliable.
That's a nice thought, but for the under-prepared business owner, they're just as likely to be shit-outta-luck. Especially if they don't possess the technical chops to piece it all back together. They'll have to go find the freelance programmer / sysadmin who set up all their customized shiznitz, to get it up-and-running again -- even with a backup.
The desktop machine-based website is good enough for a "Sorry, we're closed online until further notice" site. Especially if their website relied on any amount of costly-to-reproduce custom programming.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been rung up by old friends whose website suddenly disappeared when their colo|rental machine's hard drive crashed. (Sorry, buds, no backup, no restore.)
You are conflating acts of legislation with moral beliefs. One's beliefs about right and wrong have no bearing upon whether a law is right or wrong. That's one reason we have courts, to balance what's right or wrong in the laws of a jurisdiction. Bad laws get struck down, sometimes.
Would you think a law "right" if it permits what you consider to be immoral acts? Let's say you believe prostitution to be immoral, wrong. Are Nevada's prostitution laws "right" to you, just because they're the law?
What's "right," and therefore moral, is up to the individual. A group of elected individuals collectively decide what's "right" (to them) for a given jurisdiction's citizens. But the law may be dead "wrong."
Consider the Jim Crow laws of the 20th and 19th centuries. Were they "right," just because they were enacted pieces of legislation? Nope, they were wrong, and ultimately many were struck down, or were legislated out of existence.
Politicians love power, and what President would want to limit his own? Look for Obama to amend such laws late in his first term, when it looks better, if that even comes.
But don't you think it's a bit early in his term, one encumbered from the start with heavy baggage, to begin dealing with the myriad problem laws that have been passed during the last half century?
FWIW, RICO was passed in 1970, and the Feds love its vagueness to death. Easy prediction: Obama will receive no recommendations from his cabinet or federal appointments to crimp or change it. Between RICO and Patriot, we're not going to see the end of fracked-up warrantless situations like Core IP, not until a President alters the makeup of the Supremes, and subsequent legal challenges bring down the over-broad aspects of those laws.
From what I've read (nothing recent), there haven't been advances in the technology's use beyond industrial applications for cooling. There has been research into larger-scale implementations, such as the vortex engine.
I made no claims about war crimes. War is hell... period. Anyone who's ain't ever been a working soldier, and glorifies war, is an idiot.
You're right about strength... that's the other half of "asymmetric warfare," modern firepower vs. guerilla fighters... damage will be done.
In terms of war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, two points:
1) Do you know what it means to dead check?
2) Using whiskey pete over a densely populated urban area (Gaza) will get you civilian casualties nearly every time, regardless if IDF claims to be using it for Channukah lights or whatever. Most MSM photos I've seen of its use over Gaza were taken during daytime... kinda puts an end to the lighting argument right there.
The little guy acted badly, the big guy kicked his ass. But the big guy has been keeping the little guy in a locked box for many years... trouble comes of that.
With "the correct tools," flying my harem to the moon and back without incident is trivial.
Where I work, 0.5% uptime would get you a "promoted" to a window office, complete with an endless stream of paper files for you to sort. Strike that -- it'd get you fired.
As for 20 million users, you'll want to have better a better notion about scaling than "trivial," unless you're serving a static HTML page via Akamai, with the text "Hello, world."
10 million uniques, tens of millions of database-driven pageviews per day, and hundreds of millions of user-created content records is Twitter's current situation. I'm mildly curious what qualifies you to judge that as "trivial."
Any new technology, especially one undergoing tremendous growth, is going to hit road bumps. Gmail strands users for hours at a time. Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook have all had their share of tech difficulties. Nothing trivial about any of those operations, not now, nor in the past when their user numbers were more like Twitter's.
They benefit from a headphone amplifier, if that's what you mean. They don't require one, unless you're plugged into a portable device. (They come with 1/4" adapter.)
$250 for very good quality listening is nothing, believe me. Beyerdynamic are used in recording studios around the planet, and for good reason.
*Yes, they could have used spies, but that wouldn't have been worth the risk or cost just to check that the maps were right
Hey, risk your gold and blood however you like. If it were my hypothetical campaign, I'd take advantage of any and all reconnaissance techniques available at that point in history, you know? Spooks, planes, balloons, scouts,...
Maybe what's missing from my trite statement is acknowledgment of the hubris of the Nazi regime, that they planned a massive invasion of a massive country without deep scouting - all in, in poker terms. I'd want to see the cards first.
... The Germans planned one axis of their invasion around that highway... Shame that that highway never actually existed.
Huh. How very strange that the Germans were unaware of the concept of reconnaissance.
The road existed, but was basically a country road, not the highway it was marked on maps to be. And at that time, much of the land between the frontier and Moscow was undeveloped, not suitable for mechanized infantry.
Companies no longer give references in many cases. All they do is record years of service and pay. They have enormous legal exposure for doing otherwise.
Companies don't, but individuals working for those companies still do. I work for a mega media corp, and have gotten three calls in the last month for a reference. All of them were for former contractors... maybe they're handled differently.
If you had read the take down letter, you'd know it asked for six things:
1. Stop using the Canon logo.
2. Remove references to violence.
3. Remove references to Chuck's family.
4. Changes to the look and feel of the blog so it would not be confused with actual Canon corporate sites.
"Accordingly, we hereby demand that you immediately remove the above-mentioned objectionable and harmful content from your website, as well as (5) terminate the Blog author's account. We further demand that you (6) provide us with the name and current contact information... for the author of the blog."
It was a totally unreasonable blanket take-down demand, and as such Fake Chuck will have to pick another corporate target in order to be able to fully comply and continue as a source of free speech, satire and humor.
There, fixed that for you. Corporate censorship, in all its ways, is totally reasonable.
Not at all. There are multiple problems and choices faced by the poster's organization, it shouldn't simply be "Do we encrypt all data on all local and shared hard drives?"
First question is, whether the poster is indeed the one responsible for encrypting data on the thousands of computers. The IT organization for such a large institution doesn't usually rely on a solo admin to tackle such a huge problem.
Defending data in a datacenter is a completely different problem that data-at-rest encryption really doesn't help you with.
Usually there's overlap... large institutions don't always have their data needs well-planned, particularly if there's a lot of ad-hoc data laying around, such being the case with lots of individual computers, usually.
Therefore, it's an excellent opportunity to *plan* a migration towards shared and non-shared encrypted data storage. That's what appears to be lacking here... it's the "Thousands of computers" with the "Let's go make thousands of individual Truecrypt installations" - truly an admin's nightmare.
Therefore, I wonder what the OP's role in this is - queen-bee, questionable; worker-bee, likely.
This is all well and good, Truecrypt that is, for individual desktop solutions, but the OP said-
"My institution has thousands of computers..."
For thousands of computers, the OP should be checking out encrypted SAN systems. In her/his shoes, I would research the fairly vast SAN marketplace, learn your specs, then put out an RFP. A decent SAN installation buys you things that Truecrypt doesn't address, like centralization, redundancy (RAID), backups (performed globally), rapid failover. Or, if you're ambitious and know Linux, OP, you could build your own fileserver farm, running Truecrypt.
Truecrypt is fine for individualized solutions, and most definitely for portables, but for the stays-in-place part of the institution-of-thousands-of-computers, a shared SAN system is the way to go. I mean, imagine having to admin Truecrypt, individually, on thousands of desktop computers... No way.
We lose out on the global economy, which is largely responsible for the last 20/30 years of growth, everyone pays higher prices and things are no longer done best or cheapest, they're done in isolation.
The benefits of growth accrue to business owners and shareholders, not to workers... use "we" carefully in such context.
Real wage growth has stalled since the 1970s, after CPI/inflation, and wages have been in decline for most of the decade. Since the 1970s, wage growth has been stalled relative to CPI. Your current paycheck may have a bigger number on it than last decade's, but that increase has been wiped out by the growth in prices you're touting.
Slashdot readers may disagree with this, but that's probably because tech workers earn higher wages on average... but that doesn't change the macroeconomics.
Where are we going to store these prisoners now? American prisions are overcrowed now.
Excuses, excuses. We've built bases and facilities, including prisons, all over the planet, and in the fifty. We have an embarassment of riches when it comes to government real estate - we've got more bases than we can afford to operate, and we keep closing them. We'll reopen one for the Guantanamo prisoners, or worst-case stash them in a military prison.
Although I do agree that these people need to be getting some sort of trial before they are held indefinitely. However, if they are not American citizens, they are not subject to the bill of rights.
That's a false assertion, right there. IANAL, but I do know that the Constitution, Bill of Rights and amendments don't define citizens rights directly, although they're construed that way. They define the limits and responsibilities of government, such as the classes of laws the government may not enact.
They apply to "people" within the United States (for the most part), they are not limited to *only* citizens. Say a non-citizen residing in the U.S. commits a crime and is charged. What other legal system do you believe the government would follow for them? Guess what, it's the same as for you.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Notice it says "person," not "citizen." The Supremes have noticed this also, and even if the perp is an illegal immigrant, because they're *inside* the U.S., the laws applied are the same. Of course, other laws may come into play due to the perp's illegal status, such as deportation, but what do they all have in common? The same process, and many parts of the Bill of Rights and all, applies to them.
The net set of "rights" for non-citizens is not the same as for citizen, but that distinction is made in the founding documents, and the applicability of our legal system to non-citizens' has been clarified many times over time by SCOTUS.
As for the detainees, the courts have ruled that even if they were captured off U.S. soil, there are still basic legal procedures that apply, including habeus corpus.
You're probably worried these people will get off on a technicality, get deported and set up shop as terrorists again. That has already happened.
But you know what, it's all the same. Because after more than seven years of war over there, after countless kills, after destroying cities and states, we've got a much angrier set of people to worry about in the coming years.
The most disturbing case, however, is that of Jose Padilla [wikipedia.org], who was never held in Guantanamo, to our knowledge, but is an American citizen arrested in the United States and declared an enemy combatant.
You left out the part where he eventually got his day in court and was convicted by a jury.
And convicted of charges that were almost completely unrelated to the original reason for his detention, for conspiring to detonate a "dirty bomb." That later changed into conspiring to blow up buildings with natural gas. He was finally convicted of, essentially, conspiring to conspire to commit murder.
Padilla's was test case by the Bush administration to see how far it could extend its claims of executive power, imo.
There's no doubt in my mind that Padilla was up to something, but he hadn't done it, or even conspired on a specific plan.
He will soon become a politician who has actually done something in life.
What's more, he's replacing a typical D.C. corporate revolving-door appointment, Samuel Bodman. The man sat on his thumbs while energy prices trebled during Bush's time. He came from Wall Street ferchrisakes, and he'll probably head back to the corporate world, where I'm sure he'll be heartily welcomed for taking up the business agenda while at DOE.
With Chu, there's a pretty good chance he'll point DOE in a new direction, towards funded research for actual energy alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
The one and only time my old POTS line winked out was around 4:30 PM on 9/11/2001, and that's because I lived below 14th St. in Manhattan. It took that long for the fires in and around the WTC to partially shut down lower Manhattan phone service. (I still have photos of the temporary repair facilities set up by NYNEX/Verizon on the west side, and the rather huge fiber cables they pulled up to splice, in the weeks afterward.)
The several VOIP setups I used, over the years, have let me down countless times. Even my cell providers have been more reliable.
Don't even get me started on Skype.
That's a nice thought, but for the under-prepared business owner, they're just as likely to be shit-outta-luck. Especially if they don't possess the technical chops to piece it all back together. They'll have to go find the freelance programmer / sysadmin who set up all their customized shiznitz, to get it up-and-running again -- even with a backup.
The desktop machine-based website is good enough for a "Sorry, we're closed online until further notice" site. Especially if their website relied on any amount of costly-to-reproduce custom programming.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been rung up by old friends whose website suddenly disappeared when their colo|rental machine's hard drive crashed. (Sorry, buds, no backup, no restore.)
You are conflating acts of legislation with moral beliefs. One's beliefs about right and wrong have no bearing upon whether a law is right or wrong. That's one reason we have courts, to balance what's right or wrong in the laws of a jurisdiction. Bad laws get struck down, sometimes.
Would you think a law "right" if it permits what you consider to be immoral acts? Let's say you believe prostitution to be immoral, wrong. Are Nevada's prostitution laws "right" to you, just because they're the law?
What's "right," and therefore moral, is up to the individual. A group of elected individuals collectively decide what's "right" (to them) for a given jurisdiction's citizens. But the law may be dead "wrong."
Consider the Jim Crow laws of the 20th and 19th centuries. Were they "right," just because they were enacted pieces of legislation? Nope, they were wrong, and ultimately many were struck down, or were legislated out of existence.
Politicians love power, and what President would want to limit his own? Look for Obama to amend such laws late in his first term, when it looks better, if that even comes.
But don't you think it's a bit early in his term, one encumbered from the start with heavy baggage, to begin dealing with the myriad problem laws that have been passed during the last half century?
FWIW, RICO was passed in 1970, and the Feds love its vagueness to death. Easy prediction: Obama will receive no recommendations from his cabinet or federal appointments to crimp or change it. Between RICO and Patriot, we're not going to see the end of fracked-up warrantless situations like Core IP, not until a President alters the makeup of the Supremes, and subsequent legal challenges bring down the over-broad aspects of those laws.
Yes, indeed. Have you checked out geothermal heat pumps?
There is a technology related to the stirling engine, compressed air vortex tubes.
From what I've read (nothing recent), there haven't been advances in the technology's use beyond industrial applications for cooling. There has been research into larger-scale implementations, such as the vortex engine.
I made no claims about war crimes. War is hell... period. Anyone who's ain't ever been a working soldier, and glorifies war, is an idiot.
You're right about strength... that's the other half of "asymmetric warfare," modern firepower vs. guerilla fighters... damage will be done.
In terms of war crimes in Iraq or Afghanistan, two points:
1) Do you know what it means to dead check?
2) Using whiskey pete over a densely populated urban area (Gaza) will get you civilian casualties nearly every time, regardless if IDF claims to be using it for Channukah lights or whatever. Most MSM photos I've seen of its use over Gaza were taken during daytime ... kinda puts an end to the lighting argument right there.
The little guy acted badly, the big guy kicked his ass. But the big guy has been keeping the little guy in a locked box for many years... trouble comes of that.
With "the correct tools," flying my harem to the moon and back without incident is trivial.
Where I work, 0.5% uptime would get you a "promoted" to a window office, complete with an endless stream of paper files for you to sort. Strike that -- it'd get you fired.
As for 20 million users, you'll want to have better a better notion about scaling than "trivial," unless you're serving a static HTML page via Akamai, with the text "Hello, world."
10 million uniques, tens of millions of database-driven pageviews per day, and hundreds of millions of user-created content records is Twitter's current situation. I'm mildly curious what qualifies you to judge that as "trivial."
Any new technology, especially one undergoing tremendous growth, is going to hit road bumps. Gmail strands users for hours at a time. Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, and Facebook have all had their share of tech difficulties. Nothing trivial about any of those operations, not now, nor in the past when their user numbers were more like Twitter's.
Nope, it doesn't. The Israelis do far better... in fact the kill ratio is 100-to-1 in their favor. During the Gaza adventure, IDF killed 1,434 Palestinians, while 13 Israelis were killed (3 by rockets fired.) 5,303 Palestinians injured.
No wonder the Americans invest in Israel, they're the winning horse...
They benefit from a headphone amplifier, if that's what you mean. They don't require one, unless you're plugged into a portable device. (They come with 1/4" adapter.)
$250 for very good quality listening is nothing, believe me. Beyerdynamic are used in recording studios around the planet, and for good reason.
Hey, risk your gold and blood however you like. If it were my hypothetical campaign, I'd take advantage of any and all reconnaissance techniques available at that point in history, you know? Spooks, planes, balloons, scouts, ...
Maybe what's missing from my trite statement is acknowledgment of the hubris of the Nazi regime, that they planned a massive invasion of a massive country without deep scouting - all in, in poker terms. I'd want to see the cards first.
Huh. How very strange that the Germans were unaware of the concept of reconnaissance.
The road existed, but was basically a country road, not the highway it was marked on maps to be. And at that time, much of the land between the frontier and Moscow was undeveloped, not suitable for mechanized infantry.
Companies don't, but individuals working for those companies still do. I work for a mega media corp, and have gotten three calls in the last month for a reference. All of them were for former contractors... maybe they're handled differently.
LMFAO!
#20178 wrote:
There, fixed that for you. Corporate censorship, in all its ways, is totally reasonable.
Not at all. There are multiple problems and choices faced by the poster's organization, it shouldn't simply be "Do we encrypt all data on all local and shared hard drives?"
First question is, whether the poster is indeed the one responsible for encrypting data on the thousands of computers. The IT organization for such a large institution doesn't usually rely on a solo admin to tackle such a huge problem.
Usually there's overlap ... large institutions don't always have their data needs well-planned, particularly if there's a lot of ad-hoc data laying around, such being the case with lots of individual computers, usually.
Therefore, it's an excellent opportunity to *plan* a migration towards shared and non-shared encrypted data storage. That's what appears to be lacking here... it's the "Thousands of computers" with the "Let's go make thousands of individual Truecrypt installations" - truly an admin's nightmare.
Therefore, I wonder what the OP's role in this is - queen-bee, questionable; worker-bee, likely.
This is all well and good, Truecrypt that is, for individual desktop solutions, but the OP said-
For thousands of computers, the OP should be checking out encrypted SAN systems. In her/his shoes, I would research the fairly vast SAN marketplace, learn your specs, then put out an RFP. A decent SAN installation buys you things that Truecrypt doesn't address, like centralization, redundancy (RAID), backups (performed globally), rapid failover. Or, if you're ambitious and know Linux, OP, you could build your own fileserver farm, running Truecrypt.
Truecrypt is fine for individualized solutions, and most definitely for portables, but for the stays-in-place part of the institution-of-thousands-of-computers, a shared SAN system is the way to go. I mean, imagine having to admin Truecrypt, individually, on thousands of desktop computers... No way.
The benefits of growth accrue to business owners and shareholders, not to workers... use "we" carefully in such context.
Real wage growth has stalled since the 1970s, after CPI/inflation, and wages have been in decline for most of the decade. Since the 1970s, wage growth has been stalled relative to CPI. Your current paycheck may have a bigger number on it than last decade's, but that increase has been wiped out by the growth in prices you're touting.
Slashdot readers may disagree with this, but that's probably because tech workers earn higher wages on average ... but that doesn't change the macroeconomics.
Excuses, excuses. We've built bases and facilities, including prisons, all over the planet, and in the fifty. We have an embarassment of riches when it comes to government real estate - we've got more bases than we can afford to operate, and we keep closing them. We'll reopen one for the Guantanamo prisoners, or worst-case stash them in a military prison.
That's a false assertion, right there. IANAL, but I do know that the Constitution, Bill of Rights and amendments don't define citizens rights directly, although they're construed that way. They define the limits and responsibilities of government, such as the classes of laws the government may not enact.
They apply to "people" within the United States (for the most part), they are not limited to *only* citizens. Say a non-citizen residing in the U.S. commits a crime and is charged. What other legal system do you believe the government would follow for them? Guess what, it's the same as for you.
For example, the Fifth Amendment:
Notice it says "person," not "citizen." The Supremes have noticed this also, and even if the perp is an illegal immigrant, because they're *inside* the U.S., the laws applied are the same. Of course, other laws may come into play due to the perp's illegal status, such as deportation, but what do they all have in common? The same process, and many parts of the Bill of Rights and all, applies to them.
The net set of "rights" for non-citizens is not the same as for citizen, but that distinction is made in the founding documents, and the applicability of our legal system to non-citizens' has been clarified many times over time by SCOTUS.
As for the detainees, the courts have ruled that even if they were captured off U.S. soil, there are still basic legal procedures that apply, including habeus corpus.
You're probably worried these people will get off on a technicality, get deported and set up shop as terrorists again. That has already happened.
But you know what, it's all the same. Because after more than seven years of war over there, after countless kills, after destroying cities and states, we've got a much angrier set of people to worry about in the coming years.
Jurisdiction's a funny word when it comes to three-letter agencies. NSA certainly has had a pErCeHsEeLnOcNe in Australia...
And convicted of charges that were almost completely unrelated to the original reason for his detention, for conspiring to detonate a "dirty bomb." That later changed into conspiring to blow up buildings with natural gas. He was finally convicted of, essentially, conspiring to conspire to commit murder.
Padilla's was test case by the Bush administration to see how far it could extend its claims of executive power, imo.
There's no doubt in my mind that Padilla was up to something, but he hadn't done it, or even conspired on a specific plan.
What's more, he's replacing a typical D.C. corporate revolving-door appointment, Samuel Bodman. The man sat on his thumbs while energy prices trebled during Bush's time. He came from Wall Street ferchrisakes, and he'll probably head back to the corporate world, where I'm sure he'll be heartily welcomed for taking up the business agenda while at DOE.
With Chu, there's a pretty good chance he'll point DOE in a new direction, towards funded research for actual energy alternatives.
Good riddance to the Bush robber barons.
There, fixed that for you.
Ernie Cline's "Nerd Porn Auteur".
More Brains!
Oh, and check out the zombie pinup calendar for 2009.
Another list of Guantanamo detainess, compiled by NYTimes.