When an organization is focused on providing a corridor to augment human technology it is a service to humanity in the sense that often great and profound things come from these services. As soon as it focuses on making money, and generating revenue, the deeper mission statement is lost, and it becomes just another business concerned about the lowest common denominator to minimize overhead and maximize profit. This is what sucks most of what could be great and interesting about us, and contributes to our deterioration. You have to ignore a great deal of actuality when you buy into smaller realities, like monetary systems.

In order to create a stable and productive environment, it's necessary to control the network. Every device connected to it becomes a part of that network. If the device is connected to an internal port not controlled by a highly restrictive firewall or gateway, the network becomes exposed and possibly compromised to any malware, exploit, or virus on this device. Any IT manager who is required to provide a secure stable network infrastructure can't do this without policy and procedure. Of course, some managers out of laziness or ignorance implement broad sweeping policies from templates because they see 'High Security in the label' and probably don't get that more security=less accessibility. You may not get, and are probably not responsible for maintaining a secure stable network. If a virus infects the network it probably isn't your problem. If you take a balanced approach to the issue, you may agree in the final analysis that the people responsible for the network have a good reason for denying unfettered, uncontrolled access to the infrastructure that many organizations can't make money without. It would be like giving you a set of keys and alarm codes to the building and saying, "Hey make a copy for your friends if ya wanna." This analogy, of course, hangs on the sensitivity of the data, and the importance of IT in your organization.

I've taken COBOL and RPG, but I don't believe there is enough money to intice me to program in these languages professionally. Even when my dignity and self esteem are at an ebb, some things I just refuse to do to myself.

...short but=short bus...

Only the police are allowed a free ticket to humiliate and abuse American Citizens with no more than some ethereal justification (Of which there now exist a multitude.) How dare they emulate the status quo. To adress the real issue is difficult. I think the basic problem is that these people (TSA, and too many Police Officers) are not chosen for their good judgement, intelligence, and common sense. They are not allowed to use their intuition and common sense, because they might be wrong. The resulting paradigm is so much worse. It just misses all of the bases. I get that you need thugs sometimes, but can't they be a special division driven in on a short but in very limited situations as opposed to representing the norm?

The best approach is to define your systems, break them down into modules, and replace them in a systematic fashion. Eventually you'll be working in an infrastructure of your own design while avoiding disruptions.

I've done this in the past for ISP's and organizations. I explained that I didn't modify or download any information I thought might have been confidential, but could have. The security holes were patched, but I never recieved any sort of recognition or response from the organizations. This was probably 13 years ago. I could now be prosecuted for this...so...be careful. Even if you're cool and trustworthy, some people are jerks and take this as a slight to their ability. I don't know exactly why, but some people are jerks. If I were to do this in todays climate, I would remain anonymous but report the issue only to them. Don't expect kudos or a job offer though.

If you step on a grasshopper and destroy it, accidentally or otherwise, no amount of money can rebuild him. For clarification please replace the word grasshopper with ecosystem.

I went the same way with my career. I taught BASIC in high school. I didn't get my first computer related gig until I was 19. I worked very hard to gain and demonstrate my knowledge to my prospective employer. It took a great deal of work to get my foot wedged into that first door. I've since found that real world experience is cherished as much as certifications and degrees with many employers. If you have demonstrable knowledge and a good work ethic you can build a career. Having examples of you work, a portfolio, as suggested previously is a good thing. Industry certification is also a great way to show you know what you're talking about. You really need to get and keep that first job for at least two years and walk away with a good reference. Demonstrating a good work ethic is just as important to most employers. An unproductive genius is no good to them.

Police have been trying to encrypt or scramble their transmissions since piezoic crystal-based scanners. I guess in the 80's they assumed most criminals were either stupid or poor, which might have provided an effective filter at the time. Now we know the best criminals are quite bright in important ways, and as a result, quite wealthy... I think that if there were something in place so that they couldn't control the local police, that might be a shortcut to reason. In the US, police would then have to be very bright switched on individuals, and this would be a distinct paradigm shift. These things take time.

This is another example of some organization selling off what belongs to everybody. It would be a different proposition if we were to decide who would get this bandwidth, at no charge. I posit that this would resolve a great many issues.

This is a fantastic example of the power of onions...umn...unions influence. In order to justify their existence, they often tilt the balance of power which invariably results in a waste of resources. I am an advocate of unions, and am certain they do have a place...but as they take on business models they become cumbersome, and more troublesome than positive influences in the workplace for everyone but their direct benefactors. You can debate the first sentence all day, but the second sentence is obvious in most cases. This always happens when a community service becomes a business...invariably.

Please travel down the slippery slope with me...isn't it possible that since replications invariably have some degree of error, that eventually this cloning of meat will lead us into a situation where we can no longer eat the cloned meat due to the lack of ability to reconcile global deleterious mutations in humans with those that might occur but can't possibly be accounted for in bovine populations? I don't know. I'm just asking.

Didn't realize I was not logged in....Coment by Neurosine...and I don't know why it might matter...I mean, I am certainly a coward when the situation calls for it, but this simply isn't one of those situations....:)

My current lab consists of an old HP DC7700 with a Core 2 Duo CPU running SVR 2K8 Enterprise, 6GBRAM 5TB HDD, PERC6 card, (2) 1GBNICS, I use this as my ISO repository, File Server, and Domain controller, I have a Quad Core Core 2 Duo in another white box PC with 6GBRAM, 3TBHDD, and (3) 1GB NICS running Xenserver. My Exchange is virtualized here, and I'm labbing out Xendesktop currently. My 3Rd is an older Xeon server with a 200GB LTO3 tape backup (2) 1GB NICS, Svr 2K8 standard and Symantec Backup Exec. I use this as a backup server. This combination of enterprise and home software and hardware works well. I can lab out almost anything, including iSCSI NAS. I get ~80 to 110 MB/s across the network, which is surprising considering many of my NICS cost 10.00$. My partnerships with Microsoft, Symantec, and Citrix go a long way. I'm able to lab out complicated scenarios before planning client infrastructure. Good luck. Just remember to buy solid workstations which are capable of virtualization and have at least 4 memory slots, and go Gigabit all the way. It's inexpensive these days. You can choose VMWare or Citrix for virtualization, it depends on your preference and requirements.