This. This this this and then THIS. I've been working as a field engineer for a cisco partner since last september and i just *love* the kind of interaction and diverse working experience i'm picking up.
I got my CCNA in May and there is just no end to the amount of fuckeduppery you get to meet on a daily basis. If you like puzzles and you feel a hint of pride when you solve a high pressure situation, its the job for you. (I recently got back online a leased line that , when offline, halted 400 industrial workers from doing their job. It took the 40 longest minutes of my life with both the facility director and the IT supervisor on my neck from start to finish. It was hell while i was there but after that it felt awesome).
I don't understand how can this subject be brought up without talking about CALEA-compliant hardware?
The compliance to this wiretapping law may be usually implemented at a much-higher and easier-to-circument level but in spirit it very much achieves the same.
All Network hardware *is* backdoored, regardless of the manufacturer's country and that's a FACT. The only thing we can do is improve awareness of this so we system engineers, developers, system integrators can design, code and implement around that, as much as humanly possible.
The related news about cellphones as trackers helps drawing the bigger picture just as well.
My 2c.
These are not facts, just my educated opinion (I run a small network with roughly 100 unsavvy users that NEED historical emails and they're stuck on POP3. Maintaining the system costs their company thousands of euros every year that they could save by migrating to an IMAP solution, i'm pushing for it but they're making opposition)
I don't know about you, but i work with people that learn new things and innovate all the time, even on clients way smaller than this.
There are several options to solve a problem like this. Selling them an average, more-or-less working solution at the market price is daily work.
Nailing a tailored solution at the right price is the brilliance is was referring to
Serving the amount of content we are talking about is a massive feat. At this time there might just not be enough push for it. And yes, we _are_ going to lose very invaluable things. In the history of this civilization, the 20 years around 2010 will be a huge black hole in the records of the information age.
We have no widespread, easily replicable, established way of preserving data and we're generating more and more every day, without knowing how to practice safekeeping on the important stuff.
You all are completely missing a key part of the picture. Regardless of the environmental issues around nuclear waste disposal and all the arguments against coal power generation, Italy has one crucial difference with the rest of the world: Mafia. Mafia is in every aspect of the public life, especially public investment programmes and subsidies.
We have buildings crumbling and killing dozen of people, chemical plants exploding, all because of negligence tied to assigning public funds to mafia-owned companies that drain public money knowingly saving on safety measures because they are above the law and they will never pay if someone dies because of it.
Can you imagine what would happen in a power plant built using mafia contractors in the south of italy, close to rivers and farming fields? No thanks. We have far more pressing issues to solve before we can venture in something so volatile and risky.
We have a chemical chernobyl in the countryside region outside naples, lymphatic and bone cancers skyrocketing because of the widespread, systematic illegal disposal of wastes from the whole europe. Endemic corruption.
Even if i was in favor of nuclear power (which i am not, except for research), i cannot see how this technology can even be remotely safe in Italy. Italian scientists, traditionally supporting nuclear power, agree with me (cfr: Margherita Hack's claims about the vote).
This vote is not against nuclear power per se. It's against nuclear power *in Italy*, because we know we don't have the social, economical stability to tackle such a venture. The same reasons led to very harsh protests against building a massive bridge between mainland Italy and sicily. We can't really face modernization unless we get rid of this plague, and a lot of Italian people know this and voted accordingly.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan