Mahone

My grandmother grew up in the immediate aftermath of WWII, so her family were poor. As an adult, she made a small fortune through business and is now pretty wealthy. Yet she still re-purposes almost everything. For example, old towels that are worn get cut up into cloths for the dishes. Very few things ever get thrown out. Her habits have passed down to me for the most part, but I've moved house/location enough times recently that I've not been able to keep anything but the necessites.

He was talking about Centos. I've used Centos for servers, but never tried to use it for a workstation.

I'd like to see the source for this information. Bearing in mind two factors:- The animal in question is a rat, which is generally classified as vermin - There is no evidence that there was intent to cause unnecessary suffering. The fact that it may have suffered as a result of her naivety and being unable to come up with a better solution is irrelevant legally. She clearly states she was trying to figure out how to dispatch it - there is no mention of intent to torture it. As someone who lived in the UK up until recently, I struggle to believe she falls foul of any UK laws, and don't believe any court in the UK would prosecute her in these circumstances.

I doubt they'll remove it as they regularly allow a fair amount of gore on their site, content that is much worse than on this girls blog. I suspect if they do take any action, it'll be to slap a mature content warning that people see before viewing the blog. The content is also not illegal in most jurisdictions to my knowledge - the context in which the animal is killed is important, and this context doesn't fall foul of the law. Good luck.

You know it’s love when you memorize her IP number to skip DNS overhead.

If your company is using a windows domain, many of these issues can be resolved or more importantly, -caused- by using group policy. If group policy is configured correctly, you can resolve most problems with IE. If configured badly, it can cause immeasurable issues. IE is not as bad as it used to be, but microsoft have certainly ruined it's reputation from their past antics in trying to dominate the market. The European Union ruled against Microsoft a few years ago regarding their monopoly over the browser market, and forced them to send out an update to all windows machines across the entire EU, creating a popup telling their users about other browsers and giving them the option to download another one of their choice. Considering the EU is probably Microsofts largest customer base, this action most definitely had an effect on the browser markets and contributed to the falling of IE. That said, slamjet is correct. IE is highly integrated into windows, and is required for so many different features of windows. It isn't going anywhere any time soon.

I fall into your above specified category. We have pets, taken from a pet shelter. I personally consider the alternative for these animals to be worse than adopting them, but by all means we have them in our house for personal enjoyment too. I have also criticized a subset of hunters in my previous post.I am well aware of all that you said above and have considered it many times before. I do not consider myself to be in serious conflict with reality.

I don't oppose hunting per se, as I believe it's an important survival skill. What I don't agree with is the many people that classify it as a sport, and actively enjoy the activity. They are killing a sentient animal, there should be nothing fun about it. I remember attending church camps where animals were killed to the amusement and enthusiasm of all the young men. I walked away, disgusted. I couldnt watch them killing it with such glee.

I doubt he knew it was going on. Back then, he was a fairly low level employee working in the MSN tech support dept on their helpdesk. I know he has moved around multiple times since then, but certainly 10 years ago it's unlikely he would have known anything sensitive.

I've heard of them, but never come across any of their equipment in any company I've worked for in the UK. Doubt that will change now that I'm in the USA either. Talk of espionage reminds me of a conversation I was having on a long since defunct forum around 10 years ago, while I was still in school. I was promoting linux over windows, but getting a lot of opposition from the forum owner who was a Microsoft employee. As one of my arguments, I suggested that with the windows OS being closed source, it enabled Microsoft to potentially work with the US govenment, and intentionally put backdoors into their code to allow remote access. The Microsoft employee laughed that suggestion off as ridiculous and silly, and that Microsoft would never do such things. With all the information that has been leaked and discovered since, I do wonder if that employee still feels the same way.

Nope. I've been fascinated by the subject since the discovery of the stuxnet malware.It's interesting to note that China and several other countries generally won't allow any software or firmware on their government networks made by an American company or organization. That includes the popular client and server operating system Microsoft Windows, corporate networking equipment and firewalls/IPS from Cisco and HP etc. They just can't trust these companies not to be complicit in digital espionage with the US government. It's the same vice versa as well.

As a Brit that grew up in the midlands, I've always pronounced it sherr-berrt. Brits in different areas may pronounce it differently.

Let me guess, IT will set the new server up in exactly the same way as the old one, and no lessons will be learnt from this incident. Or the plan will be to modify the setup at some point in the future, which never happens due to lack of budget...

Correct, although unfortunately it's part of our job to convince the relevant people of the importance of what we are asking. Some people are better at this than others - in a previous position I probably wasn't as good at doing this as I should have been, and I won't make that mistake again. At least I'll try not to. All we can do after than is ensure we minute and document all of our conversations where our requests for additional budget are denied due to "not having any money". All systems at some point will fail. It's not a case of if, it's merely a case of when. When a system fails, and critical services fall offline for unacceptable periods of time as a result, the next step is producing the documents where these denied budget requests are minuted and showing them to management. It's interesting how quickly this non-existent money suddenly materializes at that point.

It's swearing.

First question, what does your IT disaster recovery policy/document state regarding that particular system, and how long it can realistically be offline for in the event of a disaster before company operations are seriously affected? It sounds to me like whatever period of time is specified, it's clearly too long. Either that, or the person who set this up didn't pay any attention to it. From what you have said, it sounds to me like the company as a whole was very seriously affected by this event. When a system is initially implemented and configured, disaster recovery policies and procedures should always be taken into account, and the questions of how long it should take to get this system back online in the event of any disaster, and how that process will occur should be asked. Desktop walkthroughs and real life simulations should be performed. In other words, someone in the IT department should be going through the steps that would be required to re-build such a system from scratch, or get it back online in the event that it was obliterated, and making sure that it can happen in a timely manner. This applies for both small and large companies. Where are the failover systems located? Surely such a critical system isn't located on a single physical server in a cupboard? Someone in the IT department needs to be re-thinking this setup.

I'm aware of the supposed existence of unit 121, but I'm still skeptical of their abilities. Many of the attacks attributed to them were either basic brute force such as DDOS, or little evidence was provided to prove their involvement. Incidentally, unit 121 largely operates inside of China and other countries, because North Korea simply doesn't have the the technology and infrastructure to provide for their needs.

I agree that North Korea didn't do it themselves. Heck, North Korea early have only been assigned 4 IP ranges of 254 usable public IP addresses each for the entire country. Up until recently, all four of those public IP ranges actually routed to another country entirely, I think it was China, who took responsibility for North Koreas public IP addresses on behalf the North Korea, because they didn't have the skills or equipment to do it themselves. That means that up until quite recently, North Korea had no access to the public internet at all - all their IP addresses routed to China. Now, some of their IP ranges do route into North Korea, but most of these IP addresses rarely show any kind of activity. Considering the above, it's likely that very few people in North Korea possess the skills and knowledge required to perform a cyber attack like this. As for whether they asked China to do it on their behalf.. who knows.

I too am the foreign man in this scenario! Our case is much like that of funkytown, and the differences between English US and English UK has caused some amusement and annoyance at times, such as a slight mishap at our wedding, where I requested a specific food product to be available for guests, only to find out after it had been purchased that the product name I asked for means something very different in the states, which is where our wedding was held. I admit that I may have muttered a few four letter words that day. Cultural and language differences aside, another issue to be aware of, that I certainly wasnt expecting at the time, is reactions of family members and friends on both sides. Marrying a foreigner seems to come with its own unique set of accusations and criticisms that can be difficult to handle unless you have a very thick skin. I can't tell you hown many times I was shamelessly accused of being a fraud by people very close to my wife, and marrying my wife only to get a US green card. Certain close members of my family caused a lot of pain for my wife as well, which wouldn't have happened had she been British and not American. They are a big part of the reason that we moved to the states after living for the first almost three years of our marriage in the UK.

Edit. Scrap that, Just rechecked the headers and it's not what I thought it was.

Good advice to backup the files, but I personally would do more than just backup to an external drive.There is quite a lot of malware that will encrypt or otherwise destroy personal files installed on any computers that it infects. In these situations, the average user upon realizing their files are inaccessible will usually do the very thing they shouldn't... plug in the external storage drive in an attempt to recover their backed up files that are located on it. As soon as they connect it, the malware destroys the files on that too, leaving the user with two sets of corrupt or otherwise irrecoverable files. Therefore I'd recommend cloud storage as a tertiary backup. Many free cloud storage providers offer the ability to revert files back to previous versions and recovery of deleted files.

The point I took away from his response is that an opinion of a single author in a single book should in no way be taken as reflective of the opinions of the population as a whole. Such emotive disaster stories from individuals can be found on both sides of the pond by a simple google search, but do nothing to support any arguments. I would personally agree however, in my experience, that the window dressing on hospitals is lacking somewhat, and it's more common to end up on a shared ward than a private room. NHS coffers tend to be focused more on the actual medical care as opposed to the physical hospital buildings themselves.

Can you provide any strong evidence that difference in population figures makes it impossible to compare? I don't think anyone has suggested public health care is free, neither is that one of the motivators for it. This PWC report suggests medical innovation is more closely related to population size and GDP than private or public healthcare: http://www.pwc.com/us/en/health-industries/health-research-institute/innovation-scorecard/

The World Heath Organisation produced a report back in 2000 that rated the quality of health care in each country and placed them into ranking order from highest to lowest. The UK was placed at 18, higher than the USA's 37. That said, the WHO no longer do the report, because a lot of people complained that the report was unfair and they decided it was actually far too complex to fairly create a report like this. I lived in the UK for the first 28 years of my life. I know public health care - I've lived with it for a long time, and I trust it immensely. Most people living in the UK would fight to keep it. But now I live in the USA, where a lot of people would fight to keep public health care away. I can't help but think in both cases, many of those people just want what they are used to and know works, being scared of change in case it goes wrong. However once I've lived here for an equally substantial period of time and therefore personally will have experienced both, I'll feel I'm actually able to give a valid opinion.

Something that I think is implied in your post but not explicitly mentioned is also checking for signs of your own children bullying other kids. Many parents check for signs of their children being bullied, but rarely check for signs that their children ARE the bullies. I do think this should be emphasized more.