ndespres

I might have the answer for you- the security question on some of my unimportant shared accounts where a question was required is "what color is my VGA cable?"

I'm halfway through a similar transition to farming. It's funny how sometimes a new task can be an excuse to buy more tools. I'd be interested in reading more from you about your new work!

Attitudes like the one you express here, at once critical of women who raise issues of inequality and misogyny, and skeptical that a woman who wants camaraderie with others in their cohort is For Real, are exactly the reason that would drive a woman to seek out that type of environment.

If you'd be interested in learning more about the importance of empowering and accepting spaces for women in tech, and the reality of the misogyny they experience, I'd be happy to discuss further or share some links.

In the DR services my company provides, failover testing is baked in to the cost, and is _mandatory_ annually. It is hard and complicated and expensive, but not as hard as explaining to the customer that "we have your backups, we just can't use them because we never tested whether the software would run on the DR hardware" or "don't worry, the replica of the file server is secure in the datacenter, you just can't log in now because the Active Directory server is tombstoned and won't process your logon." When someone needs their data, what's the difference? Can I see my files or not?

It's more than a cliché that without restore tests, you don't really have a backup-- if the customer won't commit to testing the DR, we won't provide the service anymore. Anyone who pretends anything else is acceptable is kidding themselves.

In my experience it's good to have a few different restore attempts running in parallel, so long as they won't conflict with one another. For example, the restores may be to different hardware, from a different point-in-time, in a different datacenter, or from a unique backup system (image-based, file-based, transaction logs only, etc). One of their "restore" attempts could even be a scan of the original disk for recoverable data, though that seems unlikely.

In a critical outage like the one Gliffy is experiencing, I take the same approach. Outline all your restore options, estimate time for each restore, drawbacks of each approach, etc and take every available angle.

If you want to know how the database was deleted, read through some of the horror stories posted in the comments here and assume it was probably one of those!

In my town, after the landfill filled up, they built an incinerator. The town dump was turned into a "transfer station" where residents could bring their trash and recyclables. Trash would get "transferred" into trucks and hauled off to the incinerator, where it was converted into ash and electricity. The recyclables which we dutifully sorted into glass, plastics, newspaper, cardboard, metal.. were also hauled off to that same incinerator.

As a condition of building the incinerator in the town, the builder granted us a yearly quota of so many tons of garbage we could dump in there for free. Since our garbage was under that quota, they just brought the recycling there too! Why pay for it to be properly processed when we could burn it for free?

That addition seems unnecessarily pedantic, as carrying a Newton in 2011 is no less novel than in 2016.

I'm an IT consultant in NYC, and no fewer than 5 of my clients have been targeted by such scams. Information on the structure of their company is gathered from their website and an email will be fabricated appearing to be a conversation between company president, controller, CFO, etc all with their real names and email addresses, sent to a company accountant or something requesting a wire transfer.

The final email will be sent from a very similar email domain: the scammers register a domain with a simple letter/number substitution that is VERY difficult to visually detect if you aren't looking. Many were registered with VistaPrint, who offer free registration of domains on a trial plan, or something. You can see a list of their recently-registered domains here http://vistaprinta.tk/, if you scan through it you'll see some misspellings and l/1 switcheroos. (I spoke with someone at Vistaprint who indicated that they are actively working on this problem, and they have taken quick action when requested).

When my clients ask me to take a technology approach on these matters, I encourage them to treat it as a process issue instead. Having adequate controls for issues like this (phone call required, second approver for large wire transfers, etc) is better than any futile spam-blocking action we could take.

I think you're responding to an anti-government troll who is being deliberately obtuse about the difference between civil asset forfeiture vs tax collection. Unfortunately statements like theirs muddy the waters between something that most sane people find acceptable (government tax collection) vs something that most sane people find abhorrent once they know about it.

You set yourself up to miss a fair bit of email that way. Most mail servers I work with use "opportunistic TLS": attempt TLS for outgoing mail; accept if offered for incoming mail; selectively enforce TLS on a per-domain basis for confidential communication to partner banks, law firms, financial firms.

Enforce TLS on your mail server and you're siloing yourself from a large part of the internet, and unless you're Gmail and your actions carry weight, others will simply stop emailing you after their mail keeps bouncing.

I don't know whether small, local, organic farms are a model for feeding the planet but the premise of the article is flawed in the opposite direction.

My produce doesn't beat Walmart prices but then, we don't have the luxury of govt subsidies, scale, and undocumented underpaid labor. Once you start paying people what they deserve, and charging people what it actually costs, the prices are more truthful.

This type of food only seems like a luxury product because the scales are tipped so unfairly towards cheap/bad food.

As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families.

Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.

In a similar case here in NJ, a local town was working to effectively block access to its beaches by non-residents by enacting an onerous parking restriction (no out-of-towners may park for more than 2 hours on any street near the beach).

http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf/2015/10/deal_reportedly...

The real insult here is that the town had recently accepted federal funds ($40mm) to widen and improve the beach, so blocking access seemed a little unfair if not illegal. Additionally most of the houses near the beach are only occupied in the summer season. So really, who is a "resident" when many are really only there in the summer?

My goats are a Nubian/Alpine mix. They produce a fair amount of milk, are good browsers (they're part of our crop rotation plan) and a few shakes of a bucket of grain is all it takes to get them to come in. We have perimeter fencing as there are some things in the garden that would be poisonous for them to eat, and I don't want their snacking to cut in to our floral arrangement sales profit.

With a small herd of just 4 milkers (last springs' kids were given to another farm business who make money leasing goats as natural weed trimmers) they are incredibly friendly, like a strange type of dog. They respond to their names and love a good back scratch from their people!

Now if only the laws in my state (NJ, USA) weren't criminally restrictive when it came to selling raw milk products.. well, more chevre for me!

Worry not, the dogs get plenty of goats' milk and scrambled eggs that their charges produce for them!

I keep 2 maremmas on my small farm to guard my livestock against predation. They are magnificent at what they do, chasing off ground predators as well as aerial ones. They immerse themselves in their flock and guard fiercely, working as a team to keep my chickens from getting eaten. I love how independent they are in their work, though in my case they aren't alone for more than a day at a time: one thing the maremmas can't do is milk my goats for me!

"Similarly, as much as I like to criticize our New York Police Department, upon having my bag searched on the subway they understood that an electronics project is not a bomb. Unfortunately - there is one variable that I did not account for - I am white and have religious beliefs in accordance with that of the general population. What if I wasn’t?"

Well, you've got your answer. I've had Arduino kits pulled out of my bag and seriously questioned. Part of white privilege is that we are usually believed when we claim it's just a science project.

1. Career Tools and Manager Tools podcasts. Career advice, interviewing help, resume-building, team interactions, navigating office life/culture, salary negotiation, having your voice heard, and many other topics discussed in a friendly and approachable way. I listen every week. https://www.manager-tools.com/

2. "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk" isn't just for talking to children. Some good advice in here that applies to talking with adults also. http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/145166388...

With Outlook 2011 for Mac being little more than a rebranded Entourage, long recognized even by Microsoft as not equivalent to Outlook for Windows, it's no wonder your folks are having problems. I've pushed my Mac users to use Apple's Mail.app instead- much less friction than using a program that is Outlook in name only.

We should not define people in terms of what they are "not" or lump them into a group of who they are different from ("minority"). So no, if you are white you can be just that.

Maybe it doesn't have as much play outside the U.S. but the term PoC seems to work well here. For the whole semantic argument I'll point to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color .

Please don't do a dismissive handwave over what's really an important element to this story. That the victim is a person of color is absolutely relevant to this story; it demonstrates a bias on behalf of the DEA agent, or perhaps simply a cynicism: they know what they can get away with in the eyes of the public.

Of COURSE race is an important element of how law enforcement interacts with citizens. Race is part of these issues. The very term "race card" is offensive and marginalizing, even if you didn't mean it that way.

I'm sure many would.

In modern cars where nearly everything is computer-controlled and un-serviceable by the end user, safety is pretty much guaranteed, and fuel economy is average.. what other choices are there? It's just as plausible that someone would choose a car based on built-in entertainment options as that they'd do so based on color scheme.

Like many statistics, that number can mean what you want it to mean. I would venture to guess that the percentage of food grown on family farms, vs mega farms, is under 10%.

One very interesting paragraph from the article:

"Managed access systems can cost more than a million dollars apiece to install. But some prisons have found a way to lower the cost by partnering with outside vendors. In California, for example, Global TelLink – a private company that operates phone systems at many state and federal prisons – installed managed access systems in correctional facilities at no cost to the state, as part of a five-year exclusive contract. (Which makes sense: Global TelLink believes it will make more money from pay-phone fees if inmates’ wireless access is cut off.)"

Fascinating that one of the companies involved in helping to cut off inmate cell phone use stands to make a profit from their activities. I have many gripes with the American institutional prison system, and this is just one small slice of the corruption that drives it.

You might think this until you read the 1-star reviews written by people running developer/preview builds of iOS. Think "App crashes on iOS 9 alpha 6, this is a HUGE inconvenience!"

My partner and I run a small diversified farm. The goats are part of a small dairy for our personal consumption (dang restrictive raw dairy laws) as well as contributing to our production of goats' milk soap. Plus they make great fertilizer, which is really important for our field didn't have great nutrient content when we started.

I believe it to be cultural and economical. Beef, pork, and chicken are well-established as easy to mass-produce on a large scale, with outlets for all the "extra bits" (hot dogs, Chicken McNuggets, etc) which would cut into the producer's bottom line and make a cut of goat meat seem more expensive than the equivalent pork chop.

Secondly, these aren't necessarily "acceptable" meats. Much like rabbits, which I raise for meat occasionally, eyebrows get raised and judgements get passed. Perhaps producers and consumers both find it easiest to stick with what's deemed acceptable and common, easy to homogenize and turn into processed food.

Among those who know better.. goat, yum.

I've got my hands full with my current flock, but I would love to have pigs for this reason (among others). Would be great to have them root around in some scrub land as Seymour describes, then use its new fertility to grow grains to feed myself and the goats, continuing the cycle! Just not enough time in the day :)

When my coworkers see news like this they start telling me that I ought to bring my fleet of Nubian goats out on jobs like this. They do great work, easily digesting poison ivy (and destroying its seeds so it can't regrow from their droppings).

Goats are a big component of a project I'm working on now, where they will graze on fallow land, eating weeds and grasses, depositing fertilizer and tilling the land with their hooves in the process.

In a small farming operation where the negatives to using many chemicals (to fertilize crops, and to kill weeds) isn't even always safety or environmental, but simply cost-related: the work that grazing animals like goats can provide is a game-changer. Plus, they are super fun animals to be around. I used to think that having a few backyard chickens for eggs would always be a no-brainer decision, but now I am sure that I'll always keep a couple goats around too.

Can you share a link to your service? One of my new clients (I provide managed IT services) is in this exact market with 10 locations and more coming.