There are a number of US states that have moved off Microsoft (mostly to G-Suite) and a number more that are considering it. And yes it won't be EVERYone (you can pry excel out of accountants cold dead hands) or everyTHING (obviously mainly Windows) but it's at least a blow against the pricing and quality issues from MSFT
The explanation given is that cartel air drones entered US airspace.
I guess my question is, doesn't this happen all the time? I would think drones would be an easy way to fly a Kilo over the border to whatever dropspot you wanted. I wonder what the new wrinkle is?
I think it's worth correcting the record here because drone warfare is pretty different from what actually happened. What they identified and shot down was a mylar party balloon.
Will be interesting when/if more information is released. I am not sure why folks are so surprised or think it’s shocking. While definitely out of the norm, my mind was immediately thinking 10 days seems like an even number where you are trying to find or do something, not sure how long it’s going to take so you just stick it. Certainly odd that it’s only a few hours but for all I know there is some written government procedure for whoever is doing that sets it at 10 days.
I got zeros votes amongst the mass speculation over lost nuclear weapons or military experiments but I was pretty close to correct with my guess. Just picked the wrong people.
If you shut it down for too long and there is a lapse in reopening it, planes are grounded for an extra bit of time.
If you shut it down for too short and there is a lapse in extending the grounding, planes are getting shot out of the sky (or whatever threat it was).
edit: I would add that maybe there are forms for shutting down airspace of various specific time lengths and a convenient time for something of unknown duration would be 10 days. 10 days might also be enough time to be sure whatever resources need to be brought to bear on this are available where an hour or day might not be. Shut it down basically indefinitely, or at least long enough that the crew who handles this extraordinary situation will be on hand to turn it off.
NYT reports they're claiming it was about testing anti-drone tech at Fort Bliss.
> The brief shutdown was related to a test of new counter-drone technology by the military at nearby Fort Bliss Army base, according to a person briefed on the matter.
This is ridiculous and patently false. The US is equipped with many bases with permanent air space restrictions where they could perform such tests. It makes less than zero sense to test anti-drone tech in a crowded civilian space. I fully blame incompetence.
> According to a social media post by the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, Mexican cartel drones breached U.S. airspace, prompting temporary closure of airspace over El Paso. The Defense Department took action to disable the drones, Mr. Duffy said. Another person familiar with the situation had described the cause of the shutdown as a test of anti-drone technology. It is unclear if the brief airport closure was directly related to the presence of drones or how the technology was deployed.
It does not seem implausible or unreasonable to me that an anti-drone system would trigger airspace restrictions when activated. Whether system activation is intended to put out a 10 days block is probably a different issue, but probably related to SOP for an event of unknown duration.
I'm not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but starting a 240 hours closure, ending it after 4, and claiming it was a test? What sort of testing are they doing that they were off by two orders of magnitude about the duration?
Who knows. Maybe the system was malfunctioning and they didn't know how long it would take to shut it down. More likely the admin is just blabbing the first thing they think will shut everyone up.
Hoping it slips under other news like "Woah someone else should pay for this wall/bridge/investigation" so no one really notices it. To be fair, seems most things are about trying to direct the news somewhere else, most of the times being successful at that too.
You don't screw up something this major, it doesn't happen by accident nor by incompetence.
They had plans to bomb something south of that airport, they had to postpone those plans now that the info is public enough that whatever their target was is definitely aware of those plans.
This is exactly what happened and not to be immodest but it was my first guess before it was confirmed. The closure was a miscommunication between the FAA and Pentagon set off by a balloon. This was pure incompetence and arrogance. This HN thread is almost unbelievable how many wild guesses were made.
They have confirmed it was for testing a counter-drone weapon. They did not say why they set it to expire in 10 days, that part seems like it was probably a mistake.
They gave you a plausible-enough reason and you took their word for it. That's completely fine, you are well within your rights to decide for yourself whether you believe them or not.
I don't, and since neither of us can know for sure given the info we've been given, it's useless for us to argue about our opinions.
I am curious, what explanation would justify a full closure of the airspace over a major us city for 10 days, in your opinion? That is the real screwup here. Whatever justification they are giving is entirely beside the point. Closing the airspace, even to emergency medevac flights, is negligence.
Miss me with your jUsT cUrIoUs, I have no need to make up hypothetical scenarios under which this would be justifiable. The burden of proof is not on me.
If there was ever a time when the old Soviet Union could have won the Cold War... Fortunately for us, the window of top-down incompetence came far too late.
WTF? The FAA announces a ban on all flights at an international airport and then withdraws the ban within a few hours of the announcement? What kind of insane police state would try a stunt like that? Even for the Trump administration, that is setting the bar at a new low.
You should have been here a month ago. The FAA halted all air traffic to and from the Caribbean region with no explanation (well, duh) and no announcement of a resume date. Then it was lifted 24 hours later with no notice.
What kind of government would use their statutory authority to shut down an airport when there is a risk to the planes?
Why do you think the FAA doesn't have this authority? Or, why do you think the FAA shouldn't have this authority?
In other words: This may have been needed but poorly executed; this may have been incompetent planning and response. But I wouldn't call the FAA shutting down an airport "police state".
>> What kind of government would use their statutory authority to shut down an airport when there is a risk to the planes?
It could be either an incompetent government or an authoritarian government that is trying to militarize certain institutions of civilian life.
>> Why do you think the FAA doesn't have this authority? Or, why do you think the FAA shouldn't have this authority?
The FAA does indeed have the authority. The question is simply: why did the FAA choose to exercise its authority in this case? If there was a real danger to the public, then the FAA should be honest with the people and tell them what is the danger. That is what citizens should expect from a democratic government.
>> This may have been needed but poorly executed; this may have been incompetent planning and response. But I wouldn't call the FAA shutting down an airport "police state".
The reason why I ask if this is an example of police state behavior is because in this case the government apparently took drastic measures without explaining to the people why it was doing so.
The whole approach of virus scanning is reactive and incomplete. This is because, except for some uncertain guesswork using "heuristics", it depends upon vendor analysis of submitted malware infection samples after it's already happened to determine specific malware file/process signatures. This doesn't and cannot catch all possible malware that has ever happened, especially if it's new, not widespread, or evaded analysis from ever being noticed. Thus, a fraction of malware will always slip and will always remain undetectable.
After a machine is compromised by malware, there's rarely-to-never a trustworthy way to ever fix it with 100% certainty. And especially worrisome is "repair" from the host itself which maybe infected with a rootkit that hides and repairs the malware. Thus, the only correct solution is to completely reimage/reinstall from trusted sources. Deviate from this path at one's own extreme cost/risk.
There also exist a tiny amount of even worse, specialized malware, usually deployed by state actors, that infect hardware in such a way that makes them difficult and sometimes uneconomical to repair.
PSA: Never run untrustworthy shit on any machine that matters. This also includes FOSS projects that don't have their shit together.
Most edr has a “this program is doing something bad” detector. But the number of folks running security on their build process is still not ubiquitous.
Try Smart Cat. It's grass-based, not wheat-based. It controls odor far better than clay-based cat litter.
Only problem I've had with it was when my dog decided that it smelled good enough to eat. Of course, it pulled all the moisture out of the dog's mouth and left it with a stuck-on clump that it couldn't get rid of.
"..for all of Trump’s ills, I see him as a sign of the underlying dynamism of the US. Who else would have elected so whimsical a leader to this high office?"
There was another great satirical take on FizzBuzz which had something to do with runes and incantation and magical spells...? I sort of remember that the same author maybe even wrote a follow up? to this extremely experienced developer solving FizzBuzz in the most arcane way possible.
I definitely wouldn't want to work on your team, if that's how you interpret such an answer. Perfect interview then -- we've both eliminated the other as a viable employee/employer, so that's a win and we got there from just 1 trivial coding question. There's so much more to say here, but this is no longer timely, plus this isn't great forum for such discussion.
FWIW I have never been asked this question or similar, but since it's so famous I do have my own answer at the ready, which is just slightly more complex than the naive solution, but still well within the realm of production-worthy (maintainable, testable, readable) code. We don't really ever see any discussion of such because of course it isn't "interesting".
> me: It's more of a "I can't believe you're asking me that."
> interviewer: Great, we find that candidates who can't get this right don't do well here.
> me: ...
Shit attitude from that candidate, considering the interviewer is completely correct. I wouldn't hire them since they are obviously a problem employee.
For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test. That's why this candidate failed and didn't get the job.
> Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test
The amount of (highly credentialed) interviewees that can't 0-shot a correct and fully functional fizzbuzz is also way higher than a lot of people would think. That's where the attitude part also comes in.
> For those that don't know, Fizz Buzz is less an aptitude test and more of an attitude test.
The articles which popularised FizzBuzz as an interview question stated as a categorical fact that most computer science graduates or programmer candidates (one article even said 199/200!![2]) cannot do FizzBuzz[1,2,3] and were absolutely recommending it as an aptitude test.
I personally think this whole thing was simply untrue back in 2007 (or at the very least incredibly overstated) and we are paying the price for it with ridiculous 15-stage interviews as a paranoid response to some urban legend from ~20 years ago.
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