You've obviously never been to the hood. There are plenty of people in America who can't afford to pay the retail cost for the newest CDs but who do have the newest CDs. I can say this now because I'm no longer involved in it, but about five years ago I made a decent amount of money helping a guy in south central maintain his DVD production facility. He had three, 7-disc towers of DVD burners that were cranking out the latest movies. They also did standard audio and MP3 CDs filled with whatever people wanted. They had a long list of songs, people would check off the songs that they wanted and the next day they'd stop by with $5 and pick up their CD.
Yes, organized crime. Although they could go after YOU for copying a few CDs, they are really interested in the people who make a living selling pirated IP. The people who ride the train through the hood selling the latest movies and music. The people who setup sites on the internet where anyone can download whatever they want. The people in foreign countries who make software available for little more than the cost of the CD it is burned onto. In many cases those people are organized criminals.
You're obviously pretty bitter, but you make a good point. I had a conversation with my parents a couple of months ago. They are baby boomers, my dad was born in 1946 and my mom in 1950. They were right there when things were falling apart. They watched Kennedy stand up and get shot. They watched MLK stand up and get shot. They watched RFK stand up and get shot. I asked them why they didn't do anything about it. Their answer was the same answer about why you aren't doing anything about it, and why I'm not doing anything about it. We don't have the power to do anything about it. The system is so entrenched that all you can attempt to do is not take part in the system. But then you realize that our entire life is controlled, our access to food and shelter is predicated on taking part in the system.
Before you let your bitterness completely kill you, wake up to reality. The people who came before us were working with the tools given to them by the greatest generation. That generation didn't even realize that the government had been co-opted. They didn't have the internet and access to information at their fingertips. They looked around and saw prosperity and they took part in it and did their best to maintain the prosperity for future generations. It has only been the last 15-20 years that large numbers of people have REALLY started to see what is going on.
The reality of the situation is that if you don't like it, don't take part in it. If you don't want the country to fight wars then don't go fight. Educate people who might fight about how misguided our foreign policy is. Don't invest in the market or in companies that fight wars. Don't put your money in banks, keep it for yourself and spend it in your local community. If you don't want to eat poisons, shop at your local co-op and farmers markets and give economic incentives to those who are doing the right thing. If you don't want your country dependent on foreign oil then stop driving your car. If you aren't willing to take the steps RIGHT NOW to change things, you're part of the problem.
I did some research and you are correct that there isn't a law that says you have to carry an ID with you. There are numerous laws and realities that do state you have to identify yourself to the police if they are going to charge with you an arrestable offense. Here's a real life example from last week. I ride the Metro train to work. There are officers on the train who come through from time to time to make sure people have their tickets. A woman didn't have a ticket. The officer proceeded to write her a ticket but she didn't have ID to verify her identification. The officer detained her (put cuffs on her) and took her away to verify her identification at the station. So she didn't have ID and that was fine. She rode the train without paying for it and that was a misdemeanor. She was unable to identify herself to a law enforcement officer who had a legitimate reason to know who she was. At that point she was "obstructing" and was detained until she could prove who she was.
So technically you are 100% correct. You do not have to carry your ID with you in California. As long as you are behaving within the law the police are not allowed to stop you and ask to see your ID. However as soon as a police officer wants to cite you for any of the thousands of bullshit misdemeanors on the books in the peoples Republik of Kalifornia, you better have an ID or be prepared to be detained.
It is all wonderful. The powers that be are shoving the meme of, "If you don't have anything to hide..." down the throats of the Western world in order to justify all sorts of eavesdropping and invasions of privacy that are no less horrific than having your email account hacked. I'm glad that there are others who are putting the shoe on the other foot. Of course the irony will be lost on most people, but we need more of this to happen. Public servants need their dirty laundry aired in public as frequently as possible. The main stream media sure as hell isn't getting the job done.
Some readers are more sensative than others. I have two RFID cards in my badge holder at work. One of them operates the elevator and the other opens the door to the office. To make the elevator work I have to take the card out of the holder. If I try to swipe them together it doesn't work. To open the door I can swipe both of them together and the reader doesn't seem to care.
I hate to undo moderation, but the obviousness of this seems necessary to comment on. We're moving toward a police state and the infrastructure needs to be in place to facilitate it. Magstripes need to be passed through a reader and you can only scan people one at a time. If everyone has an RFID chip, you can scan a whole area at a time. Think holding pens and you're getting close. Think crowds at stadiums or other public venues. It's already illegal (at least in California) to not carry a drivers license with you. I imagine within ten years the police will have scanners on their cars so that during traffic stops they can more easily determine the occupants of a vehicle that they pull over.
Privacy is so long gone it's frightening. The "if you don't have anything to hide" meme has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by enough of the population that whole sale loss of privacy is the way forward from here. Once the system is in place its only a matter of time until it gets dragged into everything. Lets say you get into an accident but can't find any witnesses. I'm sure lawyers will be clamoring for access to the databases to subpeona potential witnesses. Too close to a murder scene? You'll be talking to detectives shortly. Living next door to a drug dealer? Oops, you were within 100 meters so you're a possible drug user according to the latest "proximity to potential criminality" algorithms.
When I first started playing WoW about two years ago I was very curious about why so many of my friends were hooked into the game. I knew a lot of people who had been playing since beta. I had avoided it because I knew my own inclinations to spending lots of time plugged into a game on the internet. When I took the plunge, my perception was tuned into what about the game would make it so addictive. After about thirty minutes it was completely obvious. The quests themselves were small enough to be completed in short amounts of time. There were numerous quests grouped around the same area so you get the sense of accomplishing more than one thing at once. Among the common quests were larger "thread" quests with multiple parts that introduced you to other areas of the game. In addition to the quests, the talent system hooks in new players because they can customize their characters. Many of the quests have item rewards to make the character slightly more powerful.
Then the big hit of crack comes in... groups. All of a sudden things start going faster. With another person you're able to complete the quests more easily. You can tackle quests above your level with someone else that you would have had to wait to handle on your own. At that point the whole game world opens up. It isn't just about you fighting some monsters. It is all about you and whoever else you can make friends with getting things done together. Questing solo gets boring and you start looking forward to doing it with others. That becomes the biggest reward. The social dynamic enters into the game. The team work aspect enters into the game. That is the best loot of all... especially for gamers who might not have strong social lives to begin with. All of a sudden they belong and they have a purpose. I see it quite frequently in WoW. There will a young guy (usually) who will farm materials all day to make potions for the guild to use while raiding. That person will farm materials so that other guildies can make better items for themselves. That person dervives pleasure and a sense of belonging by contributing to the efforts of the guild.
I understand where you are coming from. There will be people who want Linux on the desktop. It probably won't happen in the United States first. I don't understand why HP would develop their own flavor of desktop Linux instead of offering a product from RedHat, SuSE or whoever else. I realize that RedHat and SuSE are Linux tailored to the server environment. But if there is ever a real demand for desktop Linux in the enterprise, it seems like an already established Linux vendor will come up with a flavor tailored to that market.
I could see it happening on the thin-client front for specific jobs, like call center/tech support for example. As more and more apps are moved onto web servers, the time is approaching where it won't make sense for a company to spend money on Windows licenses when all their employees really need to get their specific job done is a web browser.
Why would HP get into the business of building their own operating system? They already make good servers that run every popular OS out there, including Linux. What's the point of throwing a whole bunch of R&D into making ANOTHER operating system?
What tool in Microsoft land decided to create a highly visible position that can't actually help people with the system? One of the most frequently asked questions directed toward me when I enter any retail establishment is, "How can I help you?" As consumers we are conditioned to expect that people who are employed at a store are there to help us. This is just a PR nightmare waiting to happen. I can see the PC vs Mac commercial already....
[Enter PC and Mac. Each of them has a friend.]
Mac, "Hey PC, who is your friend?"
PC, "This is my [Microsoft store tool]. She's here to tell everyone how great Vista is. I see you have a friend. What does he do?"
Mac, "This is my genius. He helps everyone USE their Apple and answers any technical questions that they may have. PC, does your friend answer technical questions? Does your friend do anything other than try to convince people to spend money on a product and then leave them out in the cold when they have questions about it? Huh? Does he? Or is he just another over paid, worthless, Microsoft marketing..."
If this is a joke, it went right over my head. If it's true, I can see some value in it. I was reading a lot about Daoism when the most recent series of movies came out. A lot of what Yoda had to say was in line with a lot of Daoist and Buddhist philosophy.
...if you don't. With regards to third parties, Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. They are the dominant operating system vendor. They can't exactly lock out third party developers or pull the kind of crap that Apple is doing with iPhone devs.
I'm not all that qualified to comment on the dynamics of off-shore oil rigs. If they are truly 100% unmanned then they are probably already remotely controlled. But remotely controlled is not the same as connected directly to the internet. They're probably running an IP VPN across a satellite link or something similar.
If the remote access computer gets compromised then they can remote into the historian. The historian is not the control system. For the longest time the owner of the company called all the time. He's such a control freak that he wanted to see things in real time. He wouldn't take no for an answer so we secured it as much as possible while mitigating the potential for disaster. Sure it would suck to have the historian go down but it is physically mirrored so it's not the end of the world.
They don't need to come down for patching. That is the point. Show me an unpatched Linux box that can live on the internet without getting owned. I think the important point is that if you have a critical control system, no matter what it is running, don't put it on the internet. At some point companies need to do a risk analysis and figure out if the "cost savings" of being able to remotely manage something outweigh the potential liabilities of having it compromised. There is a reason that banks use armored cars to move money around and not the US Postal Service, or even FedEx for that matter.
You download the data to a historian server and reference that. There is no reason to ever remotely connect to the actual hardware that is controlling the valves and actually running the plant. I'm not sure what kind of sites you'd need to fly an admin out to, but odds are that there are already people there. I don't know too many power plants, electrical generation facilities, or oil/gas operations that are 100% automated and don't have any people around.
I've done a little bit of work with control systems (Honeywell) that are used to run a power plant. The author of the article is a bit disconnected from reality. You can't exactly just take one of those systems offline to patch it. Shutting the powerplant down is a complex operation that takes time. Starting it back up takes time. Things need to get up to temperature. Pressures need to build up. Fuel needs to be loaded. It's not just as simple as, "Email is going to be down for 15 minutes while we reboot the Exchange server."
At the place I did the work for, the control systems were completely isolated from the internet. They sit on their own network and only talk to each other. They are all running Windows Server 2003 on HP Proliant ML370s with redundant everything (RAID drives, power supplies, UPSes, etc). The closest those things get to communicating with the outside world is when they download their data to a historian server on the other side of a DMZ link. It is a one way connection to the historian server. The historian is then referenced when people offsite need to know what is going on at the plant. The only way to connect to the historian is with VNC from one specific IP/MAC.
Enough of the security tangent. The point I was originally trying to make is that most industrial machinery doesn't need to be patched. It runs one or two software applications that do a specific thing. There is absolutely no reason to touch the box once it is up and running. Security in an industrial environment needs to be handled at the physical/network layer, not at the box. Why does the hardware running your valves need internet access? Why does a box running a CNC machine need internet access?
I was in a similar position to you. I bought a MacBook Pro and about a week later started reading all of these articles here on/. about the nVidia chips failing. I noticed that my laptop was running extremely hot. Figuring that the chip is going to fail sooner than later, I went back to Best Buy and spent an extra couple hundred dollars for a three year, no questions asked replacement warranty. When the laptop does fail I'm just going to go get a new one.
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You've obviously never been to the hood. There are plenty of people in America who can't afford to pay the retail cost for the newest CDs but who do have the newest CDs. I can say this now because I'm no longer involved in it, but about five years ago I made a decent amount of money helping a guy in south central maintain his DVD production facility. He had three, 7-disc towers of DVD burners that were cranking out the latest movies. They also did standard audio and MP3 CDs filled with whatever people wanted. They had a long list of songs, people would check off the songs that they wanted and the next day they'd stop by with $5 and pick up their CD.
Yes, organized crime. Although they could go after YOU for copying a few CDs, they are really interested in the people who make a living selling pirated IP. The people who ride the train through the hood selling the latest movies and music. The people who setup sites on the internet where anyone can download whatever they want. The people in foreign countries who make software available for little more than the cost of the CD it is burned onto. In many cases those people are organized criminals.
Before you let your bitterness completely kill you, wake up to reality. The people who came before us were working with the tools given to them by the greatest generation. That generation didn't even realize that the government had been co-opted. They didn't have the internet and access to information at their fingertips. They looked around and saw prosperity and they took part in it and did their best to maintain the prosperity for future generations. It has only been the last 15-20 years that large numbers of people have REALLY started to see what is going on.
The reality of the situation is that if you don't like it, don't take part in it. If you don't want the country to fight wars then don't go fight. Educate people who might fight about how misguided our foreign policy is. Don't invest in the market or in companies that fight wars. Don't put your money in banks, keep it for yourself and spend it in your local community. If you don't want to eat poisons, shop at your local co-op and farmers markets and give economic incentives to those who are doing the right thing. If you don't want your country dependent on foreign oil then stop driving your car. If you aren't willing to take the steps RIGHT NOW to change things, you're part of the problem.
So technically you are 100% correct. You do not have to carry your ID with you in California. As long as you are behaving within the law the police are not allowed to stop you and ask to see your ID. However as soon as a police officer wants to cite you for any of the thousands of bullshit misdemeanors on the books in the peoples Republik of Kalifornia, you better have an ID or be prepared to be detained.
It is all wonderful. The powers that be are shoving the meme of, "If you don't have anything to hide..." down the throats of the Western world in order to justify all sorts of eavesdropping and invasions of privacy that are no less horrific than having your email account hacked. I'm glad that there are others who are putting the shoe on the other foot. Of course the irony will be lost on most people, but we need more of this to happen. Public servants need their dirty laundry aired in public as frequently as possible. The main stream media sure as hell isn't getting the job done.
I see that you've bought into the charade where it seems like there are really two parties running against each other.
OR BY ELECTRONIC MEANS. Have you checked the magstrip on the back yet?
Some readers are more sensative than others. I have two RFID cards in my badge holder at work. One of them operates the elevator and the other opens the door to the office. To make the elevator work I have to take the card out of the holder. If I try to swipe them together it doesn't work. To open the door I can swipe both of them together and the reader doesn't seem to care.
Privacy is so long gone it's frightening. The "if you don't have anything to hide" meme has been swallowed hook, line and sinker by enough of the population that whole sale loss of privacy is the way forward from here. Once the system is in place its only a matter of time until it gets dragged into everything. Lets say you get into an accident but can't find any witnesses. I'm sure lawyers will be clamoring for access to the databases to subpeona potential witnesses. Too close to a murder scene? You'll be talking to detectives shortly. Living next door to a drug dealer? Oops, you were within 100 meters so you're a possible drug user according to the latest "proximity to potential criminality" algorithms.
There are always exceptions.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20080916-1935-ca-immigrationrallyclash.html
Then the big hit of crack comes in... groups. All of a sudden things start going faster. With another person you're able to complete the quests more easily. You can tackle quests above your level with someone else that you would have had to wait to handle on your own. At that point the whole game world opens up. It isn't just about you fighting some monsters. It is all about you and whoever else you can make friends with getting things done together. Questing solo gets boring and you start looking forward to doing it with others. That becomes the biggest reward. The social dynamic enters into the game. The team work aspect enters into the game. That is the best loot of all... especially for gamers who might not have strong social lives to begin with. All of a sudden they belong and they have a purpose. I see it quite frequently in WoW. There will a young guy (usually) who will farm materials all day to make potions for the guild to use while raiding. That person will farm materials so that other guildies can make better items for themselves. That person dervives pleasure and a sense of belonging by contributing to the efforts of the guild.
I could see it happening on the thin-client front for specific jobs, like call center/tech support for example. As more and more apps are moved onto web servers, the time is approaching where it won't make sense for a company to spend money on Windows licenses when all their employees really need to get their specific job done is a web browser.
This is my first and hopefully last grammar Nazi post. Repeat after me. Intents and purposes.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?prodNameId=3279719&lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=1121474&taskId=135
Why would HP get into the business of building their own operating system? They already make good servers that run every popular OS out there, including Linux. What's the point of throwing a whole bunch of R&D into making ANOTHER operating system?
[Enter PC and Mac. Each of them has a friend.]
Mac, "Hey PC, who is your friend?"
PC, "This is my [Microsoft store tool]. She's here to tell everyone how great Vista is. I see you have a friend. What does he do?"
Mac, "This is my genius. He helps everyone USE their Apple and answers any technical questions that they may have. PC, does your friend answer technical questions? Does your friend do anything other than try to convince people to spend money on a product and then leave them out in the cold when they have questions about it? Huh? Does he? Or is he just another over paid, worthless, Microsoft marketing..."
PC, "Shut up Mac!"
If this is a joke, it went right over my head. If it's true, I can see some value in it. I was reading a lot about Daoism when the most recent series of movies came out. A lot of what Yoda had to say was in line with a lot of Daoist and Buddhist philosophy.
...if you don't. With regards to third parties, Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. They are the dominant operating system vendor. They can't exactly lock out third party developers or pull the kind of crap that Apple is doing with iPhone devs.
I'm not all that qualified to comment on the dynamics of off-shore oil rigs. If they are truly 100% unmanned then they are probably already remotely controlled. But remotely controlled is not the same as connected directly to the internet. They're probably running an IP VPN across a satellite link or something similar.
If the remote access computer gets compromised then they can remote into the historian. The historian is not the control system. For the longest time the owner of the company called all the time. He's such a control freak that he wanted to see things in real time. He wouldn't take no for an answer so we secured it as much as possible while mitigating the potential for disaster. Sure it would suck to have the historian go down but it is physically mirrored so it's not the end of the world.
The servers themselves are physically mirrored. It takes two computers to run the plant and there are four of them.
They don't need to come down for patching. That is the point. Show me an unpatched Linux box that can live on the internet without getting owned. I think the important point is that if you have a critical control system, no matter what it is running, don't put it on the internet. At some point companies need to do a risk analysis and figure out if the "cost savings" of being able to remotely manage something outweigh the potential liabilities of having it compromised. There is a reason that banks use armored cars to move money around and not the US Postal Service, or even FedEx for that matter.
You download the data to a historian server and reference that. There is no reason to ever remotely connect to the actual hardware that is controlling the valves and actually running the plant. I'm not sure what kind of sites you'd need to fly an admin out to, but odds are that there are already people there. I don't know too many power plants, electrical generation facilities, or oil/gas operations that are 100% automated and don't have any people around.
At the place I did the work for, the control systems were completely isolated from the internet. They sit on their own network and only talk to each other. They are all running Windows Server 2003 on HP Proliant ML370s with redundant everything (RAID drives, power supplies, UPSes, etc). The closest those things get to communicating with the outside world is when they download their data to a historian server on the other side of a DMZ link. It is a one way connection to the historian server. The historian is then referenced when people offsite need to know what is going on at the plant. The only way to connect to the historian is with VNC from one specific IP/MAC.
Enough of the security tangent. The point I was originally trying to make is that most industrial machinery doesn't need to be patched. It runs one or two software applications that do a specific thing. There is absolutely no reason to touch the box once it is up and running. Security in an industrial environment needs to be handled at the physical/network layer, not at the box. Why does the hardware running your valves need internet access? Why does a box running a CNC machine need internet access?
I was in a similar position to you. I bought a MacBook Pro and about a week later started reading all of these articles here on /. about the nVidia chips failing. I noticed that my laptop was running extremely hot. Figuring that the chip is going to fail sooner than later, I went back to Best Buy and spent an extra couple hundred dollars for a three year, no questions asked replacement warranty. When the laptop does fail I'm just going to go get a new one.
What do you mean by "worry about"? I live in California and they test for both NOx and particulates when we get our vehicles smogged.