I presently work in an Air Operations Center responsible for both military operations, disaster recovery, and search and rescue in the continental United States. This system is integral to the search and rescue portion of that mission; specifically, it is used to track civilian transponders such as those used on civilian aircraft, watercraft, and as rented by many national parks to hikers.

You can't get more clean and air conditioned than the server room(s) which this system sits in, nor an operations floor that the clients which connect to it sit in.

And Yet: We are lucky to get a single 9 out of the thing.

You ever here the saying that if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years you will get the collected works of Shakespeare eventually? Well, the common joke among us is that this system, was 5 monkeys on emacs terminals for about 5 minutes. It's that bad.

and I know that almost no-one will read this, a week after the story was posted, c'est la vie

1. IT personnel are rarely armed, with the exception of Mobile Comm in the field, in a hot warzone.

2. Find me a "downright evil" military individual and I will do my damnedest to get him/her out from "among" us, as will my entire chain of command.

a. I want name and rank. "Some guy I heard about" and "This email forwarded to me says" don't count.

3. The term is "Unlawful order". It doesn't matter who tells you to, shooting someone that is not shooting back is most definitely one of them.

I do have to agree, I can't stand the people that retire and yet don't clean out their desk because they are back the next week in civvies. No matter how much I may like the individual, I cannot stand the practice, as it encourages the most inefficient "downsizing" imaginable.

True, The Civilian is probably not making $120,000.

However, the Defense Contractor that hired him for $80,000 is getting $120,000 for doing so (and providing his health insurance and, well, that's about it.)

Do Programmers HAVE to sign and swear in order to program? no.

However, considering the quality of some of the software that the military has to use, it would be VERY useful to have trained programmers rotating into and out of positions where they are using it in the field, and than updating and maintaining the software. We are presently forced to maintain a piece of Search and Rescue software for tracking downed (civilian) pilots that, if every piece of network infrastructure works perfectly, manages to stay stable and usable less than 90% of the time. In an industry where four 9s is considered standard, a piece of lifesaving software with only one is unacceptable - and they can't even open bidding for it's replacement for another year.

And as a Air Force Network Administrator who continually has to struggle to pass his Physical Readiness Test, I have no pity about your preference for coding in your shorts and flip-flops

Yes, but because the $120,000 civilian is paid out of a different pot of money than the $14,000 corporal, The US Government is actually SAVING Money!

Don't you love how Washington thinks?

Actually the problem was the autoplay on USB keys re-infecting machines every time the virus was wiped out.

Autoplay is supposed to be disabled on all Military machines but it appears that some unit's IT departments were. . . Lax.

The problem you are both referring to is called "The Lowest Bidder

it goes like this:

1)Open call for Bids- the Lowest bid that claims to solve the problem/provide the required wins.

2)Everyone underbids, in order to win the contract

3)When they have the contract in hand, they feel no compunction about going over-budget, because the US Government will happily pay.

By the way, When they bid on the contract, they are bidding on "this is how much we think it will cost and this is how much profit we are willing to take." Even if the cost goes runaway, the contract states that they still get their profit.

Don't you wish all contracts we like that?

No?

You are just having a bad day.

Militia (National Guard) = Homeland defense, disaster recovery & relief, Search & Rescue.

Military = Protection of US interests abroad (Projection of Power, Police actions, and Trade Route Protection)

As an aside, the rise of Piracy in the South China Sea and Indian Oceans came about when the Soviet Union Collapsed (thus removing their ships from trade route protection) and the US Navy began downsizing in response (Remove a large portion of the US Navy from Trade Route Protection).

Piracy will always be a problem unless there is someone willing to expend the resources to protect the trade routes. In the 19th Century it was Britain, and in the 20th, it was the USA.

NIPR isn't any more secure than your home PC: and it doesn't have to be.

The only security considerations done on NIPR is Virus control so that the users can get their work done, and attack analysis, to see what the enemy/troublemakers are up to.

Nothing important is put on the unclassified military network, NIPR.

If you WERE putting something important on it, I suggest you go run and hide now.

Yes, it is a lot.

- however, primarily these are client machines, and the forms of attack that military systems endure are, if not OS-independent (ddos, etc), then perpetrated by individuals who will adapt for whichever OS is being run (espionage, etc).

Moving from Windows to another OS would provide relatively little additional security for client machines while incurring a HUGE cost in user re-training.

Servers, on the other hand, are, ummmm. . . Let's just say the server world is a LITTLE different from the client world.

I think it's less trolling, and just a reasonable expectation taking into account past history (from the past 3 weeks) that she will either a) have a Tax issue or b) have lobbying (or lobby-like) ties to the industry she will be regulating. As Cyber-Security Czar is unlikely to regulate an industry, that leaves us with a).

That would require a Justice Department which is not on the RIAA's Payroll.

Don't ya love that CHANGE?

Except for the fact that CO2 is a very poor Greenhouse gas (how's the weather by the way? Love that Global warming, don't you?). A far, far superior greenhouse gas is even more common, and when CO2 gets filtered out, it get's replaced with this gas.

Noone mentions it though. Why? Because the Gas which is four to eight times more efficient at reflecting sunlight out into space is O2.

Oxygen

Here's an idea - Let's ban the release of Oxygen into the atmosphere! Maybe get some of the green-peacers out of there boats and start them on burning down forests! /sarcasm

1) Off topic, completely.

2) Seek counseling.

Fixed it for you.