Whistleblowers....Do or Do Not...There is no Try...

Sorry I haven't kept up as much lately been a little too busy at work.....

Here's one that I came across this week:

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11520

An employee of TJMaxx has ratted them out over sloppy IT practices at work. He apparently was found about and canned by the company for revealing internal computers matters.

I'm kind of torn in how I feel about this, there is obviously a serious problem in the workplace about proper security in the IT infrastructure of just about any company or government entity these days.

I guess I wouldn't be happy if I owned a company and I was ratted out by an employee to the public about my own crappy security on my computers. (But then again this is me, and I would not allow that to happen in the first place.)

I feel sorry the guy lost his job over this, but if I ever shop at TJMaxx, I probably would pay for my purchases only in cash.

There past lack of security practices (such as allowing their systems to be hacked and have millions of customers credit card numbers stolen) is completely unacceptable.

Make no mistake.....Security is Managements responsibility......they too often ignore what needs to be done, recommended, spend money on for proper security, employee education, and other items.

Its very easy to blame the IT employee geek for all these problems (and Management loves to do so, believe me!), when the employee can only recommend and has no control over the checkbook....he cant fix when he doesn't have tools, education, and proper equipment to do the job and counter the ever evolving threats that continue out on the Net.....

And another thing to future whistleblowers......be careful what you say and pay attention, you could get into trouble. If things are that bad in the workplace, consider leaving and if you do talk, consider some legal advice before doing so. If there is a great danger that people are going to get hurt, do the right thing but be careful......

The Birds and the....wait...where are they?????

I wanted to blog on a daily basis, but this past Monday and Tuesday have been literal hell at work, and I just couldn't come up with an idea to write on until today....

Most people today seem quite bent out of shape about Global Warming, Global Cooling, Ice Age, Climate Change, Asteriod Collision, Comet Strike, Nuclear War, Terrorism, Radical Religious Fundamentalism and gosh knows what else that to continue the trend I've decided to give you one more that doesnt get much press (whether the press is interested in reporting is probably another question unless it creates sensationalism or dirty laundry)

I would like to talk about colonies (since being an alien, Im quite familiar on the subject, and most have seen our handywork)

The colony I am referring to is of course, the bee. Literally thousands of workers and drones support a single queen, create a hive and live in harmony. (plus all that yummy honey you like to eat, which in all reality is nothing more than bee barf....)

Now there has become a problem.

Of course if you remember from school, bees of course in the process of gathering nectar from plants do a lot of pollination. Pollination is important because bees are so efficient, they do a lot as well for crops and trees and other plants you humans and animals depend on for food.

The bees are dying now, from disease, from parasites, and from CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder) that last year alone the percentage of lost bees from commercialy run hives throughout the United States was at a staggering 36%. (And this is just in the US, does not include the rest of the world, nor bees that are in the wild)

CCD is an unknown, basically the adult bees for no reason are leaving the hive, and the hive dies. If it is disease, it is not known what is causing it.

Could you imagine losing 1 out of 3 cows or chickens or pigs?

Some are more concerned when the next shipment of Wii's will be in stock because of shortages...

I've known about this for the past year, the did a short 15 minute thing on 60 Minutes last year on CBS.

Here was a short diddy from the FoxNews website on whats being done:

On Tuesday, Pennsylvania's Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.

The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honey bees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.

Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Daazs' varieties flavor depend on honey bees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.

Whatever happens, got to make sure we have ice cream above all else.....

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354384,00.html

Spam turns 30....

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 [PDP-10] COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM. THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

Yes this was the first "spam" email sent over the old ARPAnet (for those of you who need a history brush up, ARPAnet was what the US Government use to run its computers on, its the predesssor for today's Internet.)

It started like this:

It was 3 May, 1978. Gary Thuerk, sales rep at the Digital Equipment, corp. (DEC), was hard at work promoting the company's latest computers, which were installed in open houses in Los Angeles and San Mateo, on the Pacific coast of the United States. Thuerk wanted to promote the computers among the scientists on the ARPAnet, the predecessor of today's internet, as the new machines in the DECSYSTEM-20 line (the machines in question) and the TOPS-20 operating system had support for ARPAnet built-in. Thuerk, however, did not feel like sending 600 individual email messages to all the people on the ARPAnet, so he had a brainwave: why not send the same message to all of them? At once?

And thanks to that, there are now an estimated 100 billion spam emails sent out on a daily basis world wide.....

Helps in some way, it keeps me employed to make sure our network at work is never saturated by them.....

The Oil Fraud.....

For the longest time school children have been taught that oil comes from the principal of "fossil fuel" the all decomposed dinosaurs and plants are the reason why we drive our cars around today.

They have also been taught that this source will not last forever, that it will eventually run out.

Actually there are two theories about the creation of the hydrocarbons:

"Unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been for quite some time now two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma."

If the second theory is proven to be correct, then it is complete garbage for the price we are paying to fill up our cars, buy food, pay for products based on hydrocarbons, a barrel of oil.

Dr. Thomas Gold, author of the book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuel, explains that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas, but rather generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth.

A few excerpts from Dr. Gold:

Dr. Gold: "Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?"

"Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed. Coal was formed millions of years ago. However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils."

"The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved; with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened."

"Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it."

Now what does the oil and gas industrires think of Dr. Gold's work/theories?

"In many other countries they are listening to me: in Russia on a very large scale, and in China also. It is just Western Europe and the United States that are so stuck in the mud that they can’t look at anything else."

Now is that surprising?

If our main energy source is not based on fossil fuels, that certainly makes the oil and gas companies all over this planet the biggest frauds anyone has ever seen.

We in reality should not be paying 118.00 dollars a barrel, let alone even 1 dollar.

The link to the story is below, even if you have doubts it doesnt hurt to read.

Not to mention to think about when you fill up your tank today (or you barely have enough money to fill it up 1/4 of the way.)

And nothing left for a soda either....

http://www.321energy.com/editorials/bainerman/bainerman083105.html

Polygamy....what the.....

Just recently the state of Texas raided a compound near ElDorado belonging to the FLDS church (some might call it sect, others may call it a cult, others may call it something that I wont post here.)

Well over 400 children were removed from the compound along with their mothers, some of which are barely legal to be having kids anyway. This stemmed from a complaint that supposedly originated from young girl sixteen years old who was reporting abuse to herself from her supposed husband of 50 plus years of age. It may be that now was made up by a woman in Colorado who called authorities and made the whole thing up.

It didnt seem to matter, the state of Texas and Child Services have likely been watching this place for some time. Since the church leader, Warren Jeffs, who ended up on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI for child abuse and arranging child marriages was captured a couple of years, they have been waiting for an opportunity to pounce.

I am imagine there will be a complaint that the reason to search the compound with a warrant wasnt justified, but likely higher courts wont see it this way.

The FLDS has a strong belief system that polygamy leads to ascension to heaven. In some ways, the FLDS is the original Mormon church, the current is the one that was forced to renonunce it so Utah could acheive statehood. (Sometimes I wonder what level of ties really occur between the two.)

I could understand the FLDS if there was no polygamy, it would be probably just like any other Christian sect or denomination (the Amish come to mind) and while their belief practices might seem different than mainstream Christanity, they would just have carved their odd little spot out there in the big world.

What I do believe anymore about the FLDS is, it is nothing more then brainwashing that has gone on for generations. While I will not deny that polygamy has occured within the Bible (Jacob, David, and Solomon come to mind) their is nothing to indicate that this was the plan the Creator had in mind.

Some might argue its okay for a culture of people to have the right to do these things, but not at the expense of abuse, whether it is mental, physical, or sexual.

Since the church members didnt seem to want to cooperate with the authorites as to the lineage is of these children (as to who really are the biological parents) DNA testing was ordered for all. I sometimes wonder what level of genetic damage has occured in this tight knit community.

What is quite clear is, that in the end these children in a lot of cases will not see their mothers again. (How much they ever saw there fathers is questionable at best)

Somedays I can barely handle one wife, and thats enough for me.....