Speaking as someone who has lived, worked, and been imprisoned in Orleans Parish (that's New Orleans for anyone who hasn't lived in the only state that is more or less the same as when it was French, at least in terms of government), I could give a fuck about that city. The best thing they could have done is just blockade the place and require three references from people who aren't named Shaniquefa and have a job in order to be let out, and then leave the rest of those bastards to kill each other for bread crumbs and wide-screen TVs that they couldn't use anyways. As soon as it was all over (meaning all the scum that have since poisoned my city (seriously, I was living w/ my ex-wife in some apartments after Katrina, and all the "refugees" moved in and started stealing everything that wasn't bolted down - my neighbor put some frozen hamburger on a plate on his porch to defrost and it was gone 5 minutes later...they even took the paper plate!) and all the surrounding states would have been dead), just bulldoze some levees, let the bodies drain out into the gulf, and then start the cleanup. Bye-bye Chocolate City! Hello to a cleaner and safer New Orleans!

Don't speak on that place until you've eaten grits three times a day (with a lump of cold cheese in it if you were lucky), had to carry a shank everywhere you went, and all the White prisoners pooled their blankets to tie their cells shut at night (because most of the cells wouldn't shut and you can't stay awake all the time, and you can't fight back when someone holds a wet towel around your head while five of his homies beat the shit out of you and take your food or whatever else they feel like (remember, Louisiana is under the Napoleonic code, so some poor schmuck who got drunk and pissed off a cop is in there with guys who raped and killed little old ladies). I felt sorry as hell for the middle-class Whites in there. The rest of us Whites had to practically hold their hands and explain to them that they weren't going to see a judge for at least three days, they'd be lucky if they just got a fine (I got 10 days just because I was standing there while the cops jacked up my friends and searched them...to this day, I have no clue what I was charged with, I just know that not only did I have to sit out bullshit time in a hellhole [and I've done real time in Texas prisons, which are supposed to be some of the worst in the country], I also had to pay a fine or sit another 20 days just because I asked the judge what I was being charged with), there was no way they could get a bond before they saw a judge, and crying on the phone to their wife was just going to make them a mark.

Fuck that city and fuck that state.

Can you provide a referral or contact address?

We do some pretty wild shit down here, boy!

I've signed marriage certificates (in Texas) for myself and my ex-wife, a lesbian couple (no shit - they actually claimed some benefits and didn't get challenged...I suppose that because the amount of benefits they received was very small, the IRS decided that it wasn't worth challenging or finding out what state they were married in; as a side note, the marriage certificates here [at least at the time I performed the wedding] don't even ask the sex of the people getting married, though you have to show ID when filing certificates, I don't know how they filed the certificate, so they might have done something when they filed it, so YMMV), as well as more traditional marriages. None of these have been challenged by the government, and have been accepted in all cases as legally binding/valid.

So yes, while I'm helping destroy the "sacred institution" of marriage, I could give a fuck. I'm generally a gun-toting freedom nut, which people associate w/ right-wing, but really I'm just pro-freedom and pro-responsibility (which makes me very anti-big-government and anti-socialist in general), but to me I'm okay w/ gay people as long as they respect me. Plus, after seeing what my parents and their generation did w/ marriage, I don't think there's anything inherently sacred in the institution. In love and commitment, yes. In marriage by itself? No.

Though it might work in some of the city and county jails. But the state prisons here are all run off gear that is non-networked. Sure, some of the newer facilities might have VOIP phones or IP-based cameras in some areas, but you're still not going anywhere or getting much done in a TX state prison without a ring of keys. About the best you could hope for might be to shut off a camera. Which might work if you're coordinating a hit, but you're better off doing that during a medical transfer or something similar anyways. It'd be easier to bribe a guard to look the other way than any electronic attack.

That's all I can really speak from experience, because the only Federal facility I've been in was just a detainment center that was run by the local cops anyways, so it had the same methodology. The Harris County jail has a lot of unpatched, unprotected Windows PCs, but even the ones that are networked only go to the LAN and have no Internet access (I should know, I've gotten disciplinary action for getting a local sheriff's login [via shoulder-surfing] and using it while I was doing time in 1200 Baker Street, Houston, TX). And all movements and release are coordinated via an armband system that has a hard-copy of your picture (which almost all cops check, especially on prisoners like myself who are deemed "security threats" and "aggravated" - they're pretty serious about that shit, since apparently they've had some escapes by other high-security prisoners who managed to get ahold of another prisoner's armband and get released under that name; if you don't know one bit of information [like who bailed you out, or what all of your charges are - I kid you not, they quiz you fairly extensively on that before buzzing you into the steel cage that surrounds the magnetically-locked steel door that leads downstairs ATW exit - then they'll detain you and run all kinds of checks before letting you out...between that and their general laziness, it's no wonder that it takes up to 48 hours from when your bond or other release papers go through and when you actually walk onto the city street). You're not getting out of Harris County without inside help, period. You're far more likely to be able to escape from a state prison than a county jail in Texas, at least without some sort of serious injury or illness (and who wants to be on the run with a Hep C attack or after stabbing yourself? That kind of defeats the purpose of the word "run", eh?). Other than Harris County, all of the other city and county jails I've been in both in Texas and other states were dirt-primitive compared to modern technology. And the only state prison system I've been in has been in Texas, and I wasn't in that many units since my stay was only a few years and I was in administrative segregation for most of that time. And of course my time as a juvenile doesn't count, since that was back in the days when BBSes were high-tech communications and modems were almost priceless.

Anyways, I just thought I'd share some first-hand experience with computer systems and penology. Oh, though it is pretty funny that the county I live in right now (Fort Bend, which is right outside of Houston and much more pleasant, not to mention much more affordable as long as you don't mind getting up early to make the commute, but since I work long hours anyways that would happen regardless) uses their network closet (which is seriously stone-age) as temporary storage for prisoners getting visits (at least on the 2nd and 6th floors, which are the only ones I've been on since they're the high-security floors). I've been left alone before in the network closet (since my visit was relatively brief - I'm not one of those people that likes a lot of contact with the outside world when I'm doing time, plus that go-round I wasn't in for very long), where I was sitting there thinking about rewiring their LAN and their video system, but finally decided that they'd figure it out eventually and just add more time so it wasn't worth the short-term laughs. If I'd been in there for months or years instead of just a few weeks, I'd have decided differently, but I wasn't.

I'm going to the bar to get laid and stop discussing people that are vain idiots...

Maybe the people complaining about cybercrime just need to get laid.

Yeah, and to top it off that chick I had the torch for is about to get her PhD in Psychology. When we attempted to get back together after all those years, she immediately said "You're just like every other vet/prisoner/whatever I counsel - you have PTSD". I don't care what anyone calls it, I just cope. What else can I do?

I once walked into an acupuncture clinic, for my back and insomnia. They told me to go to a regular doctor. I dunno...

But I've actually been through a lot or relationships. Everything from one-night stands to one-week stands to three-month torrid affairs to engagement to even one marriage. And I've had a lot of injuries (two shootings, about a dozen stab wounds, gone face-first through 2 windshields, caught on fire twice, etc. ; I've been in a lot of fights [including the knife fights, whether I had a knife or not...and, yes, I came out on top in all of those or I'd be dead], not all of which I won [but the majority of them I did, but when I lost, I lost pretty badly...most real fights are over in less than 10 seconds, regardless of what Hollywood would have you believe], combat, you name it).

And while a one-night or one-week stand going bad isn't a big deal, finding out that the women that you've fallen in love with over the past 3 months to 3 years is either (a) leaving or (b) done something so off-the-reservation that you can't stand to have her around anymore, love or no love, is more painful than any injury I've ever sustained. Hell, I carried a torch for 12 years for one woman (and even got back together with her when we met up again after about 11 or those years), and it almost drove me insane when I broke up with her for the second time. Something that no amount of physical pain has ever driven me to, that experience almost did. It took me about 10 months to get to the point where I realized that everything bad I saw coming out in her (self-centered, inconsiderate, unwillingness to concede that she might be wrong no matter what evidence was stacked against her, unreasonable demands, etc.) that caused me to break up with her 12 years ago had changed from simple flaws to dominant personality traits in the intervening time. Until I realized that, I dreamed about her, wrote about her (one of my hobbies is writing), and she was never far from my thoughts (except for the rare times that I was with someone else who ensnared my heart the way she had, and none of those lasted longer than a few years).

I would most definitely say that (and other similar events) that is far more painful to me than getting shot, stabbed, or caught on fire. Physical pain is nothing compared to the hell that one's emotions and attachments can put one through. Think about it - when torturing someone, it's often far more effective to work on their emotions and mind than it is to cause them physical injury. Ask any vet whether waiting for something bad to happen (pre-battle jitters, being in a precarious position, walking into a potential ambush) is worse than anything that happens to you when the shoe drops. Everyone I know (and I can't think of a single man in my family that I know of that hasn't served in the military at one time or another, and in every single war of the past 100 years in many cases) that's been in those situations will tell you that your mind can do worse things to you than anything else.

I have no problem with this...it just means less 419 scammers in the future (and since I get bombarded w/ "I'm a loving, God-fearing woman...blah-blah...stuck in Nigeria due...some bullshit" whenever I get on a dating site, I say kill them all, harvest their organs, and get some use out of the motherfuckers; of course, it's debatable whether the organs would work, since they are from Nigerians).

It comes already pickled.

That would be one of the first steps towards actual justice that could be handled on the net. The first one that sprung to mind for me was live feeds of the holding tanks at your local county jail, or the interrogation rooms. Of course, the cops will still keep a room where there's no cameras and no witnesses except them, just like the many that I've had chickenshits with badges beat on me while I'm in full restraints. It's amazing how pissed off they get when you beg for mercy, catch your breath, and then start laughing and calling them sons of cocksucking whores. It generally takes only a few hours of that before they get tired of it and just throw you back in a cell and there goes their case...

True, but it's more the mental structures you form than what you actually learn. Kind of like how it's more important to be able to learn than what you actually know. That always pisses me off when I interview somewhere, and they expect me to know the exact details of some obscure closed-source vendor's application. "Tell me step by step how you would go about configuring the multipathing on a vendor X fibrechannel controller" - are you out of your fucking mind? I seriously had a technical interview end (or at least they stop asking me questions or answering any of mine, and that was only the second question the fucker had asked me) because of that. I got a little pissed and asked him how he'd do it. The answer? "Well, I pull up this menu X, select option Y, select N number of LUNs...". People are stupid. It's really a shame that you have to deal with people in order to work with computers.

Not always true. I've worked with and gone to school with many people that applied themselves to the best of their ability, and they still failed at almost every task they were given (sometimes disastrously so - I've had entire networks brought to a grinding halt when someone did something stupid, like when a secondary blade in a router failed, and despite telling the guy on call which blade had failed [which should be pretty obvious because all the blinking lights are off, right? At least on a blade that was completely dead, as in the example I'm giving] and needed to be replaced in order to restore full network throughput [since said blade was there to support the back-end network for certain clusters that used separate interfaces for certain traffic], but wasn't actually mission-critical, just something that would speed up production if it were dealt with a 3AM or whatever rather than 8 or 9AM; anyways, despite telling him which one it was, how it was labeled, and the fact that none of the lights on the dead blade were active, whereas all of the ones on the fully populated, functional blade an inch or two to it's left were, this moron still pulled out the primary blade and replaced it with our spare [which meant that my remote login to that router - as well as a large part of the rest of the entire production network - was terminated and I couldn't get to it in order, and due to all the collateral damage he'd caused with that fuck-up I had to come in to fix it anyways; so it was pointless to spend another 20 minutes working with the idiot in hopes that he might be able to (a) put in the functional primary blade w/ it's NVRAM-stored configuration and (b) put all the Ethernet cables back into the appropriate locations, plus (c) fix any of the damage he'd caused I just pulled on my shoes and drove the 30-odd minutes in to work to do it all myself]. Some people just aren't worth dealing with because you can't fix stupid, and beating it until it stops doing it is frowned on by HR...). Seriously, I've seen this shit so many times. Hell, the last time I took a class at college (in order to gradually work my way towards actually finishing my degree), I recall one of my first class sessions, the professor explained that we'd have to continue our discussion the next class since he couldn't access the UNIX server that he insisted we do all our work on (I was happy that he wanted us to use a UNIX system to do our programming assignments on, even if it was an ancient Tru64 box) and it must be down, so he'd have to have IT fix it. I noticed that he'd opened his Windows-based Telnet/Rlogin/SSH client (I'm having a tired-but-wired-on-coffee brain fart so I can't remember the name right now) and was attempting to SSH into the machine. Since the box was truly ancient, I asked him if he'd tried telnet, or even pinging the server. He told me (in a smarmy, self-assured tone) that he was trying to telnet into the system and it was down. Since his laptop was hooked up to the projection uni