Similar dilemma. A regular bicycle is unfeasible due to distance. Hopping a bus with a bike is iffish, since there are only two bike spaces in the rack per bus that shows up every hour... and assuming a slot got made free, it would be a battle of speed with others. Which leaves folding bikes and having to lug a Brompton into and out of a building.

Even if you find a space, the parking meters are kiosks on every block, and you -will- get a ticket between the time you walk to the kiosk, get the ticket printed out, and come back to the vehicle to put it on.

So, the easiest thing to do is hail a taxi and go from there.

The ironic thing, most of the places were private companies without a government contract. They wanted the security clearance because someone else did the vetting for them.

It isn't how I like to be, but just what narrow piece I saw after graduating college. Without the alphabet soup, you never had a chance of passing the first rounds.

In my experience, you won't get an HR person's attention unless you have the alphabet soup after your name. A bachelor's gets the resume out of the round file. A MCSE/CCIE/RHCE gets it scheduled. A CISSP or TS-SCI clearance gets it to the tech guys to be interviewed. In fact, when I got out of college, most interviews went like this:

Interviewer: "Do you have a CISSP or TS-SCI? No? Next in line, please."

It really didn't matter about experience... one could be clueless in IT but have a MCSE, and be further along than someone who had many years in the field, but didn't have the cert.

I'm wondering if they got results without a choke, or at full choke. This might be statistically significant.

You can count me in that category. I signed up way back in 2008 because after getting out of college, prospective employers would demand if I had a FB/MySpace/Twitter account, and if not, the interview was up, as the HR rep felt that it was mandatory for anyone in IT to have social networking accounts to be considered up to date in skills.

So, I created a Twitter account, followed EMC and a few other names, and called it done... it did make the bean counters happy because they thought I was "with it".

+1.

We have 50-60 years of technology advancements. Look how cars have advanced. Had there not been such a strong oil/coal lobby, there would be advancements that would be impossible in today's political climate:

1: Thermal depolymerization -- turn waste products back into crude ready for use again.

2: Droughts would be mitigated as issue with desalination plants combined with the infrastructure to pump it inland.

3: More technologies would be possible to reclaim used components. Waste can be recycled cleanly.

4: More expensive (expensive as in energy) chemical processes can be used to reclaim toxic sites.

I think future generations will think we are dolts as not to have moved to nuclear sooner, because more energy available per person can mean a lot more advances and a better quality of life.

Here is the ironic thing: Both the hippies and the Tea Party people I know are all over solar, wind, and other alternative energy.

I just wonder when the tipping point happens where people and businesses stop wanting to be beholden to Middle Eastern oil and dirty coal, and move onto nuclear [1]. With more energy than what we have now, we can easily use thermal depolymerization to toss waste plastic and usable crude oil.

[1]: Thorium reactors show great promise.

Depends. A website's SSL key may be slurped up. However, a root CA key should be either kept on an offline machine or kept in a hardware security module where the key won't be divulged, ever... the module will sign a key, and that's it.

I'm sure some places will have their root CA on an externally connected machine, then try to place blame, likely saying how insecure UNIX is (when it isn't any particular flavor of UNIX that is at fault.)

Don't forget Splunk, so the servers that you are managing have a place to dump logs, and where you can do syslog searches from one place. Splunk isn't a magic bullet, but it does a lot of useful functions and can scale up, and it is a very useful troubleshooting tool.

Democracy is showing its cracks here in the US. I've wondered about moving to a different system so we don't keep the same people in office for decades:

I'd propose it be done like jury duty: Come every four years, every citizen's name is tossed in a hat, names are drawn, and those people are sworn into office. No, this isn't perfect, and statistically, there is a chance of getting some real crazies... but is that worse than politicians bought and paid for by campaign donations? Statistically, it will give a true cross-section of the population. It will also get rid of gerrymandering and other crap.

This can be combined with a "no confidence" vote mechanism for further checks/balances.

A secure home server only makes sense. If you get a machine with hardware RAID, mirror the OS drive, then use RAID-Z2 [1] or RAID-Z3 for the data. If using Windows, then you get a choice between bit rot resilience with Storage Spaces + ReFS or deduplication with Storage Spaces + NTFS.

[1]: RAID-Z will find bit rot on a zfs scrub, but won't be able to fix it. RAID-Z2, RAID-Z3 and RAID-1... even ditto blocks can both find and fix it.

The ironic thing is that "real" security is pushed to the side. Old fashioned things like gpg, PGP, proper backups [1][2], sandboxing, and other basic items tend to fall into disuse while "lets just stash it in the cloud and take their word for it, as they use 'encryption' and 'firewalls'" seems to be the mode of operation of the day.

For example, I've seen some "cloud encryption" systems that require one to set up an account... and where the actual encryption key is stored can be anyone's guess (the websites on some of those sites sure do not give any details other than logged in == file access, not logged in == no access.) For remote storage, I rather use a secure archiver (PGPZip, BCArchive, even WinRAR on occassion) for file archives and TrueCrypt or similar for disks. I just prefer to pack my own parachute when it comes to encryption.

[1]: People make fun of tape, but even a relatively older tape format like LTO-4 still can provide a lot of use. It would be nice to see a "consumer grade" format that can hold a couple TB native and can handle USB at multiple speeds so shoe-shining is minimized. Maybe even add a SSD as a buffer to further minimize issues with buffer underruns.

[2]: Copying documents to a cloud drive is not a proper backup. One delete command issued by malware, and that data is gone. This also applies to copying data to external hard disks or USB flash media... all it takes is something to run through all devices, run a blkdiscard on the device, and if that doesn't work, a dd if=/dev/zero of=whatever, and everything is gone. Using BD-R/DVD+R/CD-R media is closer to a better backup because if the disk is finalized, barring something on the burner's ROM, malware won't be able to tamper with that media. Proper backups are where media is offline, preferably with media sent to at least one offsite location. However, not many places do this right these days.

Another item is that a lot of enterprises have a data recovery agent. That way, if EFS is used, one just cracks open that key, decrypts everything, calls it done.

I'm sure this will be fixed in the next version of the software. Malware is the most well written and meticulously supported software being created in the computer industry these days.

I'm reminded of fractal encryption done about 10-20 years ago. Everyone pushing it said it was 100% secure and unbreakable by mortal men. This encryption system seems to be a lot like fractals.

BitCoins are tracable forever. Those block chains never disappear. However, if one possesses a bunch of tainted coins in a wallet, and hands the wallet to someone else, in exchange for some other commodity, that can effectively hide where the coins came from.