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Home › Forums › Gear Forums › Gear (General) › Bug Out Bag / Prepper Setup / Survival-based UL kit and philosophy
Oct 4, 2013 at 6:53 pm #1308367
Ed BarkowskiBPL Member
Disclosure: In the interest of max exposure and feedback, I'm intentionally posting the following under 'gear' – not 'chaff' – expecting some may not agree. Before filing this away as propaganda, paranoia or political, first THINK and please know that I have loved and counted on this community for going on 8 years. It is based purely in our mutual adoration and study of all things backpacking. No zombies, for goodness sake. So, with respect to all and absolutely no agenda or premise of fear or fringe theory:
Assuming you have any remote interest or knowledge of the Prepper Mindset…
1. What, in your opinion, is the very BEST PACK for use in a "Bug Out Bag" setup?
(Are materials like Dyneema or 'Trishield Grid'* a must – for long term durability – or not?)
2. What is the optimal volume for venturing into the unknown?
(Pack for at 'overnight', 'extended weekend' or 'thru hike' experience?)
3. What [lightweight / ultralight] items would you choose as essentials if you thought there was a chance your 1, 2 or 3-day setup may turn into a long-term gear and survival kit? (Clean water, ability to hunt + gather, traditional crossovers from frontier ways?)
4. What else??? (I've read thousands of pages on BPL and hundreds on 'Prepper' sites, but I've never seen any good examples of folks bringing the two together in interesting or comprehensive ways. We lightweight lovers surely get a few kicks edging on that survival instinct now and then. Resourcefulness seems critical to hiking with less, and it is undoubtedly needed to keep one's life [or that of loved ones] afloat if options of relative luxury dwindle.)
* Trishield Grid = Seems to be proprietary to Lowe Alpine and a very legitimate contender for the best strength : weight. Tests conducted by L.A. yielded results more impressive than Dyneema's. Comments? I don't own any Lowe Alpine packs, so I can't say. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of this material's tenacity?Oct 4, 2013 at 9:58 pm #2030955
Hi Ed, this is a topic and issue that i have given a good amount of thought to. I've come to the conclusion that long term survival and UL while not opposite are somewhat exclusive of each other. I think, relatively light, is the best that most could realistically hope for. Now, if you're Wim Hoff, a long time Tibetan Monk, Yeshua, Cody Lundin, or the like, then you probably could get away with UL and being comfortable.
I will answer more specifically later, but alas, i have to wake up early for work tomorrow.
I will just somewhat briefly add, that besides my and my wife's 70 Liter Jam backpacks, we also have a somewhat light weight bicycle trailer, which is what i would put the heavier essentials in, like a shovel, my fiskars wood splitting axe, extra insulation (wool/alpaca throws), extra food/water, etc. This trailer can be both pushed and pulled at the same time, because i have a harness i can hook up to it, and if we're going up a hill or what not, my wife could either push while i pull or vice versa.
I will also generally add, i'm not the typical "prepper" as far as i can tell. I'm not stocking up on guns, ammo, etc, and i don't live my life in fear whatsoever and while i think about this topic some i mostly live in the present. Yet, i've always been keenly intuitive and for a long time aware of the bigger pictures, and knowing from experience that the law of like attracts and begets like is a fundamental universal law built into all levels of reality physical and nonphysical, i know the US is due for a collapse for she has continually put out that which is destructive and limiting in nature in relation to others and self, and eventually this will come back around in concentrated form.
It's interesting how a percentage of NDE accounts involve people being given or shown info about major collapse and short term major challenges, testing, and intense suffering, but also of rebuilding and of golden era of universal compassion, respect for each other and nature, and a society free of all the various ills and imbalances and immense emotional and spiritual suffering that is so common place now. A truly happy and at peace humanity. I've been given glimpses of that in various ways also, and i really, really, really look forward to that.
When i was a little kid of 4, and asked what i wanted to be when i grew up, i told my parents quite insistently that i wanted to be, and would be, a doctor to everyone, everywhere and that i would always be there for anyone. I did not literally want to be a "doctor" but rather, i was *VERY* aware of and sensitive to the suffering of those around me and of the world in general, and all i could think about was alleviating that in some way because it quite literally hurt. My dad, a musician, was very touched by the spirit of compassion in this message, and wrote a song about it called "Dr. Everywhere"
"I had a talk with my son, i asked him when you grow up… what is that you wanna do, you wanna be?
I see you draw pretty fine, straighter than mine, you sing the songs that you hear, you got a good ear, tell me what's on your mind?
He said, 'Dad, i wanna be a doctor, doctor to everyone, i'll always be there, i'll be everywhere..'
Dr. Everywhere, Dr. Everywhere, Dr. Everywhere., Dr. Everywhere..
He talked of pain in this world, all the people that hurt, 'Daddy.. whose gonna care, show some concern..'
And it brought tears to my eyes, to see this 4 year old try to understand that we all, have so much to learn.. and it's time we begin.
Chorus again/then ends."
Red sky lullabies.Oct 4, 2013 at 11:10 pm #2030963
Steven DiogenesMember
Thanks for sharing that, Justin :)Oct 4, 2013 at 11:53 pm #2030965
Daniel PittmanSpectator
@pitsyLocale: Central Texas
Nah, it's legit to post this in Gear.
Primarily, you will need to consider more durable items, and nothing that runs out. You will be able to resupply, but I think you'll want to avoid most population centers because shit's gonna hit the fan when the grid goes down.
One thing you know you'll need is clean water to drink. Sawyer filters are the best. Nothing to replace, easy to clean, very long life. Just don't let them freeze.
Food. You need dense calories, and easy-cook or no-cook is best. You'll need to know how to hunt and trap, and forage.
Shelter. Stealth is key. Need to be able to move quickly.
All this is pointing my opinion in the direction of thru-hiking gear. You'll be travelling for a while to get to your hunker-down spot. Travel light and fast. Once you get there, you can reassess the situation and transition to long term survival.
The details of your kit might be dictated by where you're bugging out from, and where you plan to hunker down.Oct 5, 2013 at 5:15 am #2030986
John S.BPL Member
What they said, thru-hiker gear plus some more.
1. Golite jam
2. 3000 cubic inches
3 and 4.
1. Medical- long term kit
2. Shelter- car you can sleep in, tarp/bug netting
3. Fire- lighter, matches, flint/striker
4. Hydration- filter, containers, chlorine bleach drops, aqua mira drops
5. Communication- HAM radio, PLB, cell phone, am/fm radio
6. Navigation- compass, gps, maps of area, headlamp and extra batteries
7. Nutrition- no cook foods, simple cook foods on woodstove, multivitamin
8. Insulation- for expected lows over long term
9. Sun Protection- use clothing and shelter
10. Tools- bigger knife, compact saw, hunting equipment, solar charger
P.S. the car won't fit in the pack.Oct 5, 2013 at 8:00 am #2030999
spelt with a tBPL Member
@speltLocale: SW/C PA
I think this depends a LOT on your location and what disaster you are preparing for. Bug-out/prepper stuff seems always aimed at, like, total collapse of civilization kinda scenarios. Personally I feel like it's much more practical to look at the potential for natural disasters where you live and tailor your emergency kit (note the wording) accordingly. This is less fun than imagining yourself fleeing to Canada or Mexico on foot, but probably more likely to be useful.Oct 5, 2013 at 8:12 am #2031000
Ken T.BPL Member
I keep enough in the car so that I can walk home the 18 miles if needed. Spending one night out. I'm only concerned about natural disasters. Earthquakes and Tsunamis being the big two with wildfire right behind. Makes a good use for that bomber, heavyweight gear we have around.Oct 5, 2013 at 8:23 am #2031004
IanBPL Member
1. I'm not saying that a ULA pack is the "best" but if they can survive a triple-crown, then it's good enough for bug out purposes. My Ohm 2.0 is pretty large and even when I'm geared up for 20* weather, I have room to spare. If I were to get a pack specifically for this purpose, I'd probably look at a circuit or catalyst so I could haul a lot of water and food.
2. To me this is like asking "what's the optimal volume for UL backpacking?" I'd gather all of the gear you intend to carry and then make a pack decision based on that.
3. .22lr rifle, an ESSE-5 or comparable knife, a lightweight saw, and a lightweight hatchet. Surviving off the land is a very short term solution as millions of other Americans will try to do the same thing; deer and other natural resources will be hunted to near extinction within a year. I'm not going to go too far into the weeds as far as firearms for personal safety but if you're traveling with a group, variety is the spice of life; mix it up with shotguns, 9mm's, 5.56 rifles, and again, .22lr because you can carry 1000s of rounds very easily. If I could only carry one gun from my arsenal, it'd be a .22lr.
4. A multitude of tarps. I'd rely on insulation first and fire/stoves as a distant second for warmth. Synthetic insulation would probably be worth the weight penalty in this scenario. +1 Sawyer but you'll be SOL in the winter. I'd pack a ti pot which is at least 1.3 liters for boiling/sterilizing water. I'd pack several bottles of Aqua Mira. Multiple fire sources. Quality compass. Few electronics and of those, ones which will work with AA or AAA batteries. Multiple levels of FAK; keep a large one in your ruck and a smaller one on your person. A basic survival kit which is always in your pocket in case you are ever separated from your ruck.
I had to live through the January 1997 ice storm in NY, responded to WTC as a first responder, and was on deck to respond to Katrina. I think prepping has a stigma attached to it because there are some super-freaks who are spokesmen for it but if you study history, I think this is a good idea.Oct 5, 2013 at 9:14 am #2031012Oct 5, 2013 at 10:43 am #2031027
Tim ZenSpectator
@asdzxc57Locale: MI
What exactly are you bugging from and where do you propose to bug to?
Hypothetically, if you are alone walking away from an event and three people with guns see your gear, well then what?Oct 5, 2013 at 1:38 pm #2031050Oct 5, 2013 at 5:51 pm #2031102
Ed BarkowskiBPL Member
A big THANK YOU to all those who have posted. I appreciate your thoughts immensely and further appreciate there being no hard feelings about the subject being raised where and how it was.
As some background, my own scenario is this: Rural Colorado, about 2 hours from Denver (or much else I'd consider a population center). The job allows me to dress as I please and – if I so desired – bring a full pack to work with little or no difficulty or harassment.
Though I wouldn't necessarily feel the need or want to flee in the wake of any large scale disaster or domino collapse, I know that many of you would want or require that option. So, much of this thread is for those folks. But I can't help be intrigued by the opinions on specific gear pieces others would suggest and why. My SHTF kit may not be AS needed as that of those living in fragile or volatile places, but I'm still into the idea of reasonable [ultralight style] readiness. As someone who has felt the ease, reward and infatuation that accompanies packing light, I can't help but build my dream kit (first in mind, then in practice).
Some thoughts from you I'll echo:
Stealth existence would probably be imperative during the onset of anything involving violence or hysteria. For this, I immediately think bivy (camo, black, etc), little to no cooking or fire (again – dense calories that don't require heat), insulating layers (for dear life), solar charger accommodating AA [and maybe AAA] Eneloop batteries, a select few electronics that may need powering (Light: Zebralight – hands down! Radio: Kaito KA1103), Knife: Large Ka-Bar for batoning, Gun: [22] Marlin model 60, and so on.
If things were to settle down (or never escalate in the first place), mobility would be unnecessary and one's bug out kit could shrink, once again, to a fanny pack's worth of gear. Communal living would regain popularity, I'd guess, as it's 10x harder to strike out on one's own. Local farms may become the centerpieces to such communities.
And as for the pack: Jam is a good suggestion for its durability and affordability. Mountain Laurel and Gossamer Gear [and the like] are probably shoe-ins for their use of tough fabrics [and their outstanding customer service]. Longevity is everything – bugging out or not. Not many of us have money to throw at a new pack every season, so robustness is key.
I trailed off. So much to think about.
MANY THANKS for your words. Keep them coming!!Oct 5, 2013 at 5:55 pm #2031103
Some points before i go into specifics of preparations relating to gear etc.
Rodger Dodger, your list is good, but you really should add Solar events to that list. Much of the worlds electrical grid system, especially North America's, is pretty fragile. If we have another Carrington like event, say goodbye to electricity for many years, and once that electricity goes down, is when things are going to get very rough especially in populous areas.
We just had a fairly unusually strong Solar event a few days ago. Red Auroras were seen not that far from the equator (around 45 degree latitudes or so). Visible red auroras not close to the Poles are fairly rare and signify very intense charging of and reaction with the atmosphere due to strong Solar outbursts.
I'm not sure how much i should or should not talk about some of my experiences–especially on a forum with so many strongly and predominantly left brain types. I want to warn people, but i also don't want to create fear, and so i feel kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. A few brief summaries. I'm very much watching the Sun-especially during this Solar Maximum because though it has for the most part been unusually quiet for a Solar Maximum some of the info i've been given relates to the Sun and to unusual activity as being a possibility or probability.
I've been meditating for many years. Sometime during meditation, i receive information that i don't consciously generate. I've had numerous experiences were this information has been verified beyond coincidence, like for example, some future oriented stuff. I also have dreams like this occasionally. My wife has these kind of experiences too, and has experienced a lot of verification of information she couldn't have possibly known consciously. I've had multiple of these kinds of experiences over many years and i've learned to trust this more or less (i always try to keep a mindset of "open minded but skeptical").
When i was younger, i was shown "red skies". I had no idea what that meant (took me years to fully figure out). During a meditation one time, i asked about any future probable collapse and had like a waking dream (it was a very deep meditation) of a very active and explosive Sun. I eventually figured out the Red skies relates to the Sun and unusually intense Solar activity. Both my wife and i have had many dreams relating to this and to an unusually powerful Solar cycle. Right now, i kind of think we are experiencing the calm before the storm.
That recent Solar storm though, was just a small taste of what's to come. As to exactly when a Solar event will knock out much of the electrical grid, i don't know, i'm not even very sure it will even be this Solar Max, but if i was a betting man, i would probably say so. In any case, the future is somewhat fluid and one can only talk in terms of greater or lesser probabilities for different time frames. I do think and get the sense that this is a high probability, but again as to exact times, i've not been given that info except to be told, i will have some heads up when it's necessary.
I doubt most here will take any of the above seriously on a conscious level, but hopefully it plants some good subconscious seeds for when the time comes. The more of those of us with good hearts, good intentions, and good survival skills or awareness, the better off we all will be as a species in the rebuilding. There is no "end of the world" here, just another collapse as has happened to many societies recent and well recorded and those ancient and less well recorded.
There is nothing to fear, when you realize that you are much more than your physical body, and that you, the real you, cannot be killed or ended (though starving kind of sucks, and watching ones loved ones suffer sucks too). Even if that wasn't true, well we all die anyways, so, so what to exactly when and exactly how we go. Either way you cut it, death isn't a big deal. Those who get to go, in some ways will be the lucky ones. We who stay will have a challenging period ahead of us, but hopefully with the very real potential to finally create a truly civilized civilization out of the ashes of the old.
I know a lot of the above will sound very "new agey", and i can't fault that interpretation, but suffice it to say, if you knew me in person you would realize i'm a lot less new agey than the above seems to imply.Oct 5, 2013 at 6:40 pm #2031118Oct 5, 2013 at 6:41 pm #2031119
"What exactly are you bugging from and where do you propose to bug to?"
See above recent post of mine.
"Hypothetically, if you are alone walking away from an event and three people with guns see your gear, well then what?"
Chances are, most people right away are not going to be that aggressive and bestial in nature. Least not when something first happens. Hence, most of those of us with smarts, good gear and skill, will be able to make it to the woods and the woods and wild places will be our best friends.
It's when widespread starvation, freezing, severe thirst or the like kicks in, then one will have to worry more about the above type scenario. Hypothetically speaking, if a long term collapse happens, i think things will get pretty rough for awhile, especially in cities and the like, but ultimately i think there are a lot of good people on this Earth that will move more actively in leadership or exemplar roles, and really help people out, and i think small communities will build up faster than one may think, and i think these kind of intentional communities will be our saving grace.
I've been involved with current intentional communities some, and while they are a lot of work, they can and do work when the ideals are right and commonly shared. That's what the future will be about, common shared practical, collectively helpful ideals.
So, let's not sell humanity out too fast. Without the influence of mainstream media, corporations, international banking systems, corrupt government, standard currency/money, etc, etc, i think people have a real good shot of getting their acts together and rebuilding a much better civilization based on less materialistic and selfish ideals, but more on sharing, helping one another, and treating the earth and nature with a lot more respect.
Along those lines, check out some of Howard Storm's NDE accounts. The man was a hard core atheist and materialistic hedonist, and self professed unhappy ahole before his NDE. During his NDE, he was given future information and was shown some different collapse probabilities. He was very surprised to see a very enlightened and happy civilization arising fairly quickly after a collapse. There are other accounts similar to his. He like many others, was also told that the Creative Forces weren't particularly happy about the direction that America has taken.
Speaking of NDE's, and especially one with A LOT of credibility, check out "Proof of Heaven", awesome account of a hard core trained scientific professional type, whose brain was more or less mush during his experiences. Nothing to do with future collapse stuff, but if you're at all open minded as well as skeptical, quite convincing. Other than a book, the man isn't selling anything except positive messages about the importance of love, kindness, etc.
Ok, i promise to get to the gear and the more left brain stuff in the next post.Oct 5, 2013 at 6:53 pm #2031122Oct 5, 2013 at 7:27 pm #2031128
Roger, humor is always good and appreciated (when not at the hurtful expense of others). And yes, after the initial stress and challenges wear down, i suspect there will be a lot of baby making. But i also suspect that at some point, a conscious, collective decision to limit population by having very few children, will be agreed upon by most due to more concern with the environment and our impact on the Earth as a whole system.
Ok, gear stuff. Here are some of our supplies, well actually, a lot of the gear (or ideas related to same) that i've talked about here, is not just for backpacking, but also connected to collapse oriented stuff. I love backpacking, but it's also an opportunity for me to test my survival based gear and to refine things.
Oh, and while i said i'm not stocking up on guns and ammo like a lot of people who are "prepping", i do have some connection. My wife, after having some dreams about collapse type stuff and seeing herself carrying a rifle in a couple of these, thought it might be a good idea to buy a gun. She did a lot of research and came up with Ruger LR 22 rifle and some related ammo for self protection and hunting (yes, we who are mostly vegetarian now minus the occasional wild caught fish, realize we may have to hunt some if stuff like this happens).
Besides her rifle and ammo, i have a compound bow and she has a re curve bow. I like the idea of bows in a lot of ways, because it's easier to make your own arrows than to forage ammo from stores where strongly selfish type people will be setting traps and watching closely. Bows are also mostly silent, and the right bow with the right arrows are quite powerful, can easily take down even black bear.
We have a bunch of seeds of various kinds, especially drought resistant plants–this is more for long term stuff once things settle.
Multiple and different kinds of rain gear. I have Stoic Vaporshell, Paramo type stuff, poncho tarp, some Frogg Toggs and tyvek tape (emergency back up use only) etc.
Our main tent is a Seek Outside 3 person silnylon Tipi tent with corresponding titanium wood stove. Besides the titanium wood stove for the tent, i have a mini titanium cook stove. Alcohol, esbit, etc, are only short term options.
Lot's of lightweight, strong cord, and of different kinds. Some dyneema stuff, and some nylon stuff (for climbing).
Solar and hand crank chargers and rechargeable batteries for lighting options.
I mentioned earlier a better method of carrying more and heavier gear, the modded bicycle trailer than can be pushed and pulled simultaneously–small, lightweight, very maneuverable, and can run fast with it if necessary.
Another option along those lines are well made, jogging strollers.
Water filtration–having multiple stuff is key. Some filter straws (with carbon) and Sawyer squeeze. Very important, store Sawywer squeeze always in some high ethanol content liquid. Will keep it freezing, and constantly disinfect it.
Also have a more serious water filter gravity style, with ceramic, silver, carbon, etc than lasts a long time and can be cleaned. Not close to be UL, but water will be the new oil and gold in the future, especially during solar heats. If a water source is questionable, always dig a few feet down, a couple of yards away from it.
For animal protection, besides the bows and a gun, i have a hybrid Cold Steele Katana-machete type blade that has a tanto point. I've learned i can also throw this like a spear very well short distances.
Course a couple of knives. Another one i like is another Cold Steel one that is designed to be turned into a spear point–has a hollow handle with a small hole for a nail, screw, etc. Also a smaller knife that will always be kept on person.
Which relates to A VERY important piece of gear, more important than backpack, more important than down or Apex insulation, more important than a tent, a stove, etc, etc.
A rugged, long lasting fanny pack, which in my case i've chosen Zpacks Multi-pack. Essential beyond belief. This will have all the most important gear in it, a small lightweight but functional knife (like a Mora), fire starting, emergency blanket, extra windshirt, compass (though that will get very unreliable during strong solar activity because of how it screws with the magnetic field), some extra high calorie food, Sawyer filter, water container (Evernew), and a filter straw, etc.
One can run very fast with a fully loaded, right sized fanny pack. Try running very fast with a fully loaded, 70L Jam, or the like. The point is, do not get separated from your fanny pack, wear it almost always. It's much easier to get separated from a backpack under certain conditions.
There's definitely more, but i also want to point out that for me, this stuff is only for the transition period. I plan on becoming much more Native American like as i learn and adapt to living outside in nature. Eventually a lot of the above will be dropped and we will rely more on skill and certain mind sets. I've been working on this some as well, but probably not as much as i could be. I find mind sets/attitude is extremely important in any kind of difficulty or challenge.
God, an uber liberal "prepper", what is the world coming to, an end or something?
:)Oct 5, 2013 at 8:08 pm #2031135
Hi Steven, thanks, i appreciate the appreciation! I kind of expected to get lambasted by posting some of this kind of stuff here (perhaps i will more so just experience silent ostracization by the majority later). I'm not sure why i went into the personal stuff so much either, but it felt right at the time.Oct 5, 2013 at 8:19 pm #2031140
Hi Roger,
That's very commendable. My wife and i don't have any particularly close ties anywhere near us, but i know we will very much be involved with helping people further down the line if something like this happened. In fact, i plan to devote my life and all my energy to it. To some extent, my life is already devoted to it.
Also, remember, for a full collapse scenario, death will actually be much easier than trying to survive. There is nothing wrong with death, it's misnamed. Speaking as someone very close to their mother (we even had the same b-day), who watched her get sick with cancer at age 16, and later watched her die when age 20 (amidst many other simultaneous challenges).
It's "ok" to let go of people if you can't realistically help them survive (like an elderly person), because in reality, we're always connected to others, especially those those we share love bonds with. Try your best for those whom you can help, but expend your energy where it's most needed and most helpful in a long term sense.Oct 5, 2013 at 8:46 pm #2031150
Don MorrisMember
Given an urban context, if I felt I had to travel any significant distance, say twenty miles or more, I would seriously consider using my touring bike, with or without a trailer. For the same energy expenditure, I could easily travel three times as far in about half the time, and go nearly everywhere I could reach on foot with a backpacking load. If the bike breaks down, then start walking.
With experience in backpacking, one has an idea of personal capabilities, and one is likely to have appropriate gear. For many years, I actively participated in mountain SAR, keeping a basic backpack ready to go on very short notice. In effect, it was a bug out bag, tweaked at intervals for seasonal, local conditions (big difference in Arizona between winter and summer).
The variables in play for different disasters differ considerably,so planning ahead and playing "what if" games will be fruitful. In general, I prefer bugging in to bugging out, but that isn't always prudent or possible.Oct 5, 2013 at 9:09 pm #2031155
I earlier wrote, "Also, remember, for a full collapse scenario, death will actually be much easier than trying to survive. There is nothing wrong with death, it's misnamed."
Some might ask, then why are you trying to survive such a scenario, why the prepping, etc, etc?
It's a good question, if i was a more selfish type person but still knowing what i know via experiences, i would gladly take the option of checking out. See yah later on the other side! A lot of other dimensions/consciousness levels are quite nice vacation places. Far easier and more pleasant than the physical. My selfish side would love such a vacation or retirement at a younger age.
But, i have the ability, the desire, etc, to help others on various levels and that's the sole reason why i will be trying to survive. Sort of relates to those feelings and perceptions i had when very little. I've come close to death a couple of times, and can honestly say, i have no fear of it whatsoever.
@ Don, i don't even know why it's called a bug out bag.Oct 6, 2013 at 10:19 pm #2031421
Daniel PittmanSpectator
@pitsyLocale: Central Texas
"@ Don, i don't even know why it's called a bug out bag."
Because it keeps the bugs out, silly.Oct 6, 2013 at 10:46 pm #2031428
Bob GrossMember
@b-g-2-2Locale: Silicon Valley
"i don't even know why it's called a bug out bag."
It's hard to say for sure, but it has been a military term for at least sixty years, perhaps since the Korean War, 1950-1953. I was on the DMZ some years after the war, and we were in a delicate position on the DMZ. If we came under full scale attack from the north, we had approximately 15 minutes to "get the hell out of Dodge." The term in use then was that we would "bug out." Obviously, we could not move our total Army gear with us that quickly, so we were instructed to have a "bug out bag" ready to go in our barracks. That was to contain enough clothing and gear that it could be grabbed up and thrown onto the back of a truck for a very speedy ride across the river. We needed to have that to last us maybe for a couple of days. The bag was waterproof, in case we had to swim the river after the bridges were blown.
–B.G.–Oct 6, 2013 at 11:02 pm #2031431
Dale WambaughBPL Member
@dwambaughLocale: Pacific Northwest
Bugging out is an old military term for breaking camp in a hurry when the battle lines change.
I remember discussing this when hurricane Katrina struck. Anyone with a good multi-day hiking kit has all the things needed for a long trek once the initial disaster has struck. People walk the whole continent on through hikes, needing only more food and fuel and most UL shoes will go 600 miles. In the Katrina example, once the storm had passed, someone could have walked hundreds of miles from the stricken area, provided they found treatable water sources and could supplement whatever food they had on hand. Even the food factor wouldn't be life-threatening for some time— not much fun of course.
What is in my hiking kit that I wouldn't want in a survival kit? The whole idea of my gear list is to be self-sufficient in an environment that doesn't meet my needs to remain warm, dry, nourished, hydrated and "found."
Even my day hiking kit can cover these needs short-term and my multi-day kit can do it in good comfort for weeks or months. I might want to add a light folding saw for gathering firewood, which I normally wouldn't use for hiking.
Sleep system
Extra clothing
Rain gear
First aid kit
Fire starting items
Water purification and storage
Cook kit
No need for zombie scenarios, just the ability to be self-supporting and to move out of an affected area as needed. I could walk to Missoula, Montana in about three weeks, Portland, Oregon in a week or Vancouver, Canada in 6 days and I can be deep into the Cascades in 2 days. No need for military style gear and I think my UL kit will give me great versatility and mobility.Oct 6, 2013 at 11:16 pm #2031435
Thank you for the humor and the historical lessons folks.
Dale, but what about in a complete collapse scenario, like what would probably happen with a Carrington like Solar event/really powerful and Earth directed CME?
I don't think the UL kit would cut it unless the person had some honed and well practiced bush craft skills, and even then, you would want some kind of hunting equipment whether bow or gun.
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I have a mildly surprising confession to make: I was bullied as a child. I was held down and punched in the stomach. I had my bookbag torn from my back and thrown in the lake. This treatment started in primary school and lasted through my freshman year in high school. After that, there was attempted bullying but that didn't work out so well for them. That being said, I have another confession that is a bit more controversial: I don't put any stock into the anti-bullying movement.
I am not saying I am for bullying either. I don't like bullying, and can't imagine anyone does, even the bullies themselves. Bullying is the recourse of the weak and insecure, usually coming from children that have some sort of family, personal, or social situation they don't know how to deal with. Many bullies come from broken homes or are abused. Many (and most of mine) were simply privileged children with a chip on their shoulder and an imaginary social standing they felt they had to reinforce. I don't hold a grudge. I'm doing fantastic while many of them are working part time at a car wash.
This past week on South Park in the episode titled "Butterballs" the gang tackled the complex issue of bullying by bullying each other into a political stance on bullying. Stan created a video speaking out against bullying, saying that it should kill itself. The video Stan makes is actually called "Make Bullying Kill Itself." There are multiple references to the movie Bully as well as a "jack it in San Diego" reference, which is a direct dig on Kony 2012 creator Jason Russell.
Once again South Park was able to take a complex social issue and break it down in a 22 minute chunk of hilarity that we all should take a lesson from. Why is it that the most obvious lessons in life tend to come from cartoons? Because they are able to cross the lines that we are afraid to cross, and say the things that we can only think without fear of retribution. While I anticipate the backlash to this article will be hefty, it's worth it because of the end message.
Continue Reading "To Bully Bullying, We Need Continued Vigilance" »


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A man was seriously injured in a crash in Hawkes Bay last night.
The crash occurred on Swamp Rd in Ongaonga, south of Hastings, about 11pm.
An ambulance spokeswoman said it involved one vehicle.
A man was injured and taken to hospital in a serious condition.
The Lowe Corporation rescue helicopter said it flew a 22-year-old man with multiple injuries to Hawke's Bay Regional Hospital.


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Ilegal weapons were weapons that were legal at some point, as criminals will get the easiest weapon to get a hold on. If you have a large market and number of legal weapons you can e sure that some of them will get lost or stolen either from the owners themself or shops, heck even from the US factories themself. So in the current state you have legal weapons to thank for supplying the ilegal trade.
And even more since the registered ammount of guns owned is way lower (logic...) then the ammount of legal weapons on sale or produced. So on top of the sold and owned ones you have the unsold ones just sitting in shops.
Making it to be a neverending circle. If you proper regulate the legal ones and in time try to reduce it's number paired with methods to stop ilegal trafficking the whole ammount of guns will go down, it will make them harder to come by, more expensive and decress the number of shootings.
But by reducing the number of guns that goes against what NRA stands for today, as they stand for the weapon manufacturers more then for the gun owner.


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Run Run, Baby Ox Run to be held June 30
The 5K Fun Run/2K Walk will be Sunday, June 30, with registration from 8-8:45 a.m.
The run will start at 9 a.m. on the Paul Bunyan Trail at the Pine River Information Center.
Advance registration is full. Registration cost is $12 per participant and includes a free commemorative T-shirt.
Remaining T-shirts will be sold.
The Baby Ox Kid's Run will follow at approximately 9:45 a.m. There is no registration fee for the Baby Ox event. Registration forms and waivers can be picked up at the Information Center ahead of time or the day of the event.
For information, call 218-587-4000.


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New York, July 13, 2010—Six Cuban journalists who spent more than seven years in prison for their independent reporting and commentary arrived in Spain today in the first wave of what is expected to be an extensive release of political prisoners by the Cuban government.
New York, July 12, 2010—Imprisoned Cuban journalists are expected to be among a group of political prisoners to be released tonight and put on a flight to Spain, where they are due to arrive on Tuesday morning, according to international press reports and CPJ interviews. The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes news of their scheduled release and urged Cuban authorities today to free all journalists who remain in jail.
By Carlos Lauria, Monica Campbell, and María SalazarFive years after the Castro government cracked down on the independent press, more than 20 journalists remain behind bars for the crime of free expression.
Dangerous Assignments | Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, France, Gambia, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Singapore, Somalia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam
Do you believe the free flow of information must be protected? Sign the #RightToReport petition and demand that President Obama immediately:
1. Issue a presidential policy directive prohibiting the hacking and surveillance of journalists and media organizations.
2. Limit aggressive prosecutions that ensnare journalists and intimidate whistleblowers.
3. Prevent the harassment of journalists at the U.S. border.
Or click here to see the full petition, and join leading journalists like Christiane Amanpour, The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the AP Kathleen Carroll, and Arianna Huffington in signing on.


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Core Dump isn't all fun and games … just mostly. It turns out you can use your iPads and iPhones for some serious things, too. Here are a handful of apps you may find useful, if you can stop playing Avengers Initiative long enough. Continue Reading "Core Dump: It's Not All Fun & Games" »
All posts tagged 'Idea Flight'
Core Dump: It's Not All Fun & Games
- 12.06.12


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Oh, how precious is this! Thankyou for sharing it, you brightened my day!
Welcome to the Quilting Board!
Oh, how precious is this! Thankyou for sharing it, you brightened my day!
The next time I went to the grocery store, I bought Evian water just because I enjoyed this commercial so much and wanted to support the company in hopes they will make another so guess the commercial was successful for its purpose for me!
It was fabulous! I laughed as hard as I could. Thanks Tomodachi
I loved that.....now tell me how to send it on to everyone I love.....Jo Ann
Make every day count for something!
Love it! Why haven't I seen this on TV? It's one commercial I wouldn't mute!
thanks Ditter that put a smile on our faces !!
When Life brings big winds of change that almost blows you over.Hang on tight and Believe.
Words and hearts should be handled with care-for words when spoken and hearts when broken are the hardest things to repair. Author unknown to me
Do what you feel in your heart to be right; for you'll be criticized anyway-Eleanor Roosevelt
What a hoot.
Aloha Karen
Go Ditter. You always find the best
OK, that brought back a lot of moves I used to have!! LOl, not so much now a days!!
Better to do something imperfectly, than nothing perfectly.
Done is better than perfect.


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So I made my own tiles--.
Gutted our bathroom and put in a new cast Iron tub andstarted my first tile job.
One thing to mention is straight away I learned how heavy tile production was and I hurt my back dealing with it. I think the challenge is what got me into this as well as I knew I wanted something that was not commercially available back then.
The blessing of being inexperienced in ceramics at the timewas–
I under estimated the whole job and everything that wasinvolved
The learning curve was steep-I made the all the flat tile and piled them in stacks covered with weighted sheet rock for wicking moisture out-It was a slow process
I extruded the bull nose and custom made all the curved tile around sink. I made two complete sink surrounds in case I lost a piece in thefire.
I had a friend who made the cherry wood sink stand that freefloats from the wall. I traded a thrown sink for his wood boat he lived on at the time.
This tile all wanted to warp up during the glaze fire (cone10 reduction) the semi matt glaze was one of the reasons-and not scoring the backs was another.
This bathroom at that time was our only one and is verysmall. I had already done the floor with commercial one foot square high firetile.
I thought I'd save a few bucks making my own as well thiswas pure folly even back then as commercial tile is and was much cheaper tobuy.
The thing was it had my own glaze and was built by me
That is still holding true today as these photos taken show it'sstood up well (no chips) for 30 years now
This was because I took the time to research all the backing materials and waterproofing techniques from books-I also borrowed a mason's wet diamond saw for a teapot trade.
The sink has no overflow, which is fine for us with no kids
I did make overflows at that time but like the cleaner look of none.
I still like the bathroom and I suggest if you have the time to consider say a backsplash or other projects for your home-
Do not let inexperience keep you from trying
Edited by Mark C., 14 February 2012 - 04:38 PM.


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Stuart Shieber
THE MOST HUMAN HUMAN: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us about What It Means To Be Alive. Brian Christian. xiv + 303 pp. Doubleday, 2011. $27.95.
In his book The Most Human Human, Brian Christian extrapolates from his experiences at the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, a competition among chatbots (computer programs that engage in conversation with people) to see which is "most human." In doing so, he demonstrates once again that the human being may be the only animal that overinterprets.
You may not have heard of the Loebner competition, and for good reason. The annual event was inspired by the Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" as a method for determining in principle whether a computer possesses thought. Turing meant his test as a thought experiment to address a particular philosophical question, namely, how to define a sufficient condition for properly attributing intelligence, the capacity of thinking, to a computer. He proposed that a blind controlled test of verbal indistinguishability could serve that purpose. If a computer program were indistinguishable from people in a kind of open-ended typewritten back-and-forth, the program would have passed the test and, in Turing's view, would merit attribution of thinking.
The Loebner competition picks up on this idea; it charges a set of judges to engage in conversation with the chatbot entrants and several human confederates, and to determine which are the humans and which the computers. At the end, a prize is awarded to the "most human" chatbot—that is, the chatbot that is most highly ranked as human in paired tests against the human confederates. "Each year, the artificial intelligence (AI) community convenes for the field's most anticipated and controversial annual event," Christian says. Well, not so much. The AI community pretty much ignores this sideshow. It's the chatbot community that has taken up the Loebner competition. The Loebner prize has done little for AI beyond spreading confusions about Turing's test, some of which unfortunately find their way into Christian's (otherwise quite sound) book. For instance, Christian promulgates the common misunderstanding that Turing's test would be passed by a computer if it "fool[ed] 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation." (Although Turing makes a side comment about this more limited criterion, he understood the test to have no time limit and a threshold of statistical indistinguishability, which is the only philosophically sustainable stance.) And most important, Christian conflates the Turing test with the Loebner competition. But the two are different in many ways. In particular, on the Turing test, unlike in horseshoes and hand grenades, close doesn't count. Better performance on a Turing test is not a valid basis for concluding that a machine is "closer to thinking" or "more human."
As a kind of afterthought, the promoters of the Loebner competition have been naming, in addition to the "most human" chatbot, the "most human" human—the confederate who performs best according to the same criteria in the paired tests against the chatbots. The conceit of the book is that Christian takes on a kind of moral charge to win this dubious distinction on behalf of humanity. Of course, there's nothing "most human" about the person so named. Rather, the awardee is the person whose behavior is most distinguishable from the particular bag of tricks that the chatbots happen to use. If you're interested in winning this award, it behooves you to understand how the chatbots work, and how to distinguish yourself from them.
Certainly Christian's book is successful in providing this guidance. He points out that the chatbots tend to deal with each turn in the conversation independently; they have no memory. So a good confederate will tie multiple turns of dialogue together. The chatbots are light on factual knowledge, so they'll deflect questions rather than answering them. A good confederate will answer directly. This is all useful information for the confederates, but it is even more important for the judges. In reading the transcripts, you wish that the judges had read Turing's original paper, which does a great job of exemplifying a good judge's probing approach. Under that kind of attack, the chatbots would have no hope at all, which is why the Loebner competition is such thin gruel.
With so little substance, can the Loebner competition really shed any light on what makes us human? Early on, Christian talks about an only slightly tongue-in-cheek claim made by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert:
Gilbert says that every psychologist must, at some point in his or her career, write a version of "The Sentence." Specifically, The Sentence reads like this: "The human being is the only animal that __________."
When nonhumans rival humans in some area, we learn what can't fill that blank. But given the vast gulf in verbal performance between chatbots and people, they don't seem to illuminate the matter.
Why is it, then, that even with such poor performance the chatbots still hold people's interest? Why, after rehearsing all of the limitations of chatbot performance, does Christian still stick to the claim that even the primordial chatbot ELIZA's performance was "stunning, maybe even staggering"? It comes back to the issue of overinterpretation. Human cognition is geared toward finding patterns; that's what we do, and we do it well. As infants, we track the changing conditional probabilities of sounds in human speech, which allows us to learn where the boundaries are between words. As children we learn new words at a rate of several per day. We hear the patterns in music, see the objects in images, understand the logic of a story in a sequence of sentences. We can't help ourselves. We even do it when it isn't appropriate. Sure, we learn to recognize the faces of our family members and our friends. But we also see faces where there aren't any, in the moon, in clouds. We see causality where there is only coincidence—when a supplicant's prayer is answered, or when the rain dance is followed by rain. And we hear coherent language use where there are only snippets of canned text. Turing understood all this, which is why he left his Turing test wide open, unconstrained by time limit or style of questioning. Christian understands this too; the book's conceit is more honored in the breach than in the observance.
In the end, who cares about distinguishing oneself from the weak performances put on by even the best chatbots? I expect not even Christian, who admits the award is "disappointing, anticlimactic." The book is most successful when it roams farthest from its ostensible subject. Christian uses the hook of pursuing the "most human human" award as an opportunity to explore a wide range of matters related, more or less, to issues of language use by humans and computers, and it is here that the book is most rewarding and entertaining. He riffs from the statelessness of chatbot conversation to Markov chains to information theory to text compression to morality, from phonagnosia to speed dating to the coherence of personality to the television show The Office to the travails of customer service. The connections of these subjects to the hook and to one another are tangential at best, but that's okay in a popular science book. These are fascinating topics more or less related to cognitive science and its broad connections to the humanities. The "most human human" bit is the MacGuffin.
Stuart M. Shieber is James O. Welch, Jr., and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science and director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University. He is the editor of The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence (The MIT Press, 2004).
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Blokes: ever felt like you wanted somewhere to hide rather than face the hurly-burly of the pre-Christmas trading frenzy? Time to head for the man crèche.
The novel idea with the slightly condescending title is the brainchild of electronics maker Soniq, which is dipping a toe in the water by setting up a male-only enclosure at Melbourne's Northland shopping centre for a couple of days this week.
Soniq conducted a study of around 150 of its customers and that found almost half were likely to make up excuses to get out of Christmas shopping, while one in four had faked ill health or injury to avoid joining the annual frenzy of consumerism.
The man creche features a two-metre-wide video wall, video consoles, comfortable sofas and that staple of man caves everywhere, a pool table.
Soniq marketing manager Stathis Georgianos says the man crèche means men no longer need to lie their way out of the annual Christmas shopping trip. "The man crèche is like the ultimate playpen. We have all the gear and gadgets here that most blokes wish they had in their home," he says.
With disagreements between partners running as high as 44 per cent during the festive spending frenzy according to its research, the company recommends that partners "check in their guy, do their shopping and collect him at the end of the day and go home smiling".
"The man crèche takes the pain out of Christmas shopping by getting your man out from under your feet," Georgianos says.
The man crèche will operate at Northland until December 15.


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6" Keepsake Azalea Tree - Coral - 4 pk.
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These azalea trees feature a braided trunk and gorgeous, coral flowers.
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6" Keepsake Azalea Tree - Coral - 4 pk.
Enhance your home with this four-pack of azalea trees, or use them as the perfect gift for someone you know. Their dense foliage and gorgeous, coral flowers make them ideal for in-home décor or beautification of a patio area. They are not hardy outdoors at temperatures below 30° F.
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San Juan Capistrano Wedding at Serra Plaza from onelove photographyOn the corner of romance and vintage sits a happy little wedding captured by onelove photography. Romantic in all the blush colored florals by BB Blossom and smooches galore. Vintage in the crazy beautiful surroundings of Serra Plaza and many lovely nods to shabby
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This year at Star Wars Weekends, the 501st and Rebel Legion raised the bar.
Not only did we have our usually turnout of amazing costumes, but we also had some first time costumes. As one member put it, "We showed Disney that we can do more than robes and armor." As a proud member of both the 501st and Rebel Legion, I would like to show them off. I know these members worked really hard on their costumes and making it to Star Wars Weekends was a huge accomplishment for them.
This year I marched as Aayla Secura and it was an amazing journey from start to finish. The days I marched in my Jedi are by far my favorite of any this year. I'd been toying with the idea of building a female costume to give me a break from my clone for a while now. What attracted me to her the most was her look and attitude. She also appeared to be a pretty easy build (FYI, I was wrong…). The one thing I didn't expect was all the attention I received.
It wasn't until after we were at Star Wars Weekends that I found out not only was my costume a first for the event, but it was also the first time any member had attempted a body paint job like mine for the march. This costume took three months to go from idea to approval, and then several other people to help make it happen each time I marched. I felt like I had my own little pit crew following me around. It was a lot of work, but in the end I am really proud to say I am the first Aayla Secura to march in Star Wars Weekends.
Everybody loves Chewbacca, but how about we give some love to another wookiee: Tarfful! This full scale wookie is the work of Jason Rucci.
Continue Reading "Star Wars Weekends 2012 — Awesome Costume Firsts" »


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A beautiful design web 2.0 website/blog template which showcases all the entries/posts/articles as thumbs on the main page and therefore could also work very well as a small news blog/website. also included is a navigation bar up top & web 2.0 specific features such as Twitter posts, social links & RSS categorized feeds.
The fonts used are Arial, Georgia and sparingly Helvetica Neue. The template is highly customizable, the layers are named and put into folders accordingly.
Also, the design is based on the 960 grid system, for those familiar with it.
As a bonus i've also included:
• Social icons (layered and customizable)
• Folders, files & boxes icons (flattened layers)


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Homedics Jam Wireless Portable Speakers
We're sorry, but this particular item has sold out online, so you will not be able to add it to your shopping bag. Please try a different color or size, if applicable.
Jam out to your favorite tunes from anywhere in the room with these Jam Wireless Portable Speakers.
- Incredible sound quality in a small footprint
- Connects wirelessly up to 30-feet away
- Works with all Bluetooth-enabled devices: smart phones, tablets and more
- Rechargeable for up to 4 hours of wireless play
- Imported
Shipping & Returns
Shipping your purchase is easy on belk.com. Depending on the destination of your package, you can expect it to arrive within 4-7 business days. Shipping Information
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At HoMedics, we believe that nothing is more important than your health. Our revolutionary products and ideas have transformed the world of personal wellness for consumers worldwide. We continue to invest in the latest technological advances to provide you with the most innovative personal well-being products available.


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LOOK: Tom Brokaw's B.C. Ranch For Sale
The Huffington Post B.C. | Zi-Ann Lum | Posted 09.12.2012 | Canada British Columbia
Read More: Tom Brokaw Smithers, Tom Brokaw Home, Hat Rack Ranch, Tom Brokaw Nbc, Hall Hall Tom Brokaw, Tom Brokaw Ranch, Tom Brokaw, Tom Brokaw Ranch for Sale, Canada British Columbia News


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Bottle Service at Borgata
Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa • Atlantic City, NJ
Escape Kit
- VIP Entrance for up to Eight Guests at MIXX or mur.mur Nightclubs
- Two Bottles of Grey Goose Vodka with Table Service
- Available for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday Nights Beginning January 1, 2013
Party down in style at Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, the Italian-style 2,000-room hotel at Renaissance Pointe. Your VIP evening begins at your choice of either mur.mur or MIXX. The former delivers a sexy, subtle vibe with plush nooks, while the latter brings the heat and through-the-roof energy. Both come correct, showcasing some of the world's top DJs and state-of-the-art sound systems. Then it's all up to you, two bottles of Grey Goose, and seven of your closest friends to make the night a memorable one.
Need a place to stay after your evening at the club? Choose a hotel from our Atlantic City collection.
"Yes, that is a trapeze artist swinging from the rafters. The red-clad beauty's addition to the MIXX scene burnishes the club's stage-like feel."-- Press of Atlantic City
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- Limit 1 voucher per reservation; vouchers cannot be combined
- Valid for redemption January 1, 2013 – April 29, 2013
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- Not valid on previous reservations
- Merchant cancellation/re-scheduling policy of 1 week applies; voucher subject to forfeiture
- Blackout dates for MIXX are 1/20, 2/2, 2/17 and 3/17, blackout dates for mur.mur are 3/18, 3/25 and 4/22
- Available for Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday nights only; all dates are subject to availability
- Not valid on special events or holiday weekends
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- Parties of 8 or more will need to purchase 1 bottle for every 3 people in party
- Gratuity is not included in this package. 20% gratuity ($140) will be added to the bill based on the total value ($700)
- Entire party must be 21+ to redeem and a valid photo ID will be required toe enter
- Entire value must be used in a single visit
- Other conditions apply • PAID AND PROMOTIONAL VALUES EXPIRES ON April 29, 2013 • PAID VALUE DOES NOT EXPIRE • PAID VALUE EXPIRES ON April 29, 2018 • PROMOTIONAL VALUE EXPIRES ON April 29, 2013 • Enjoy By April 29, 2013
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New 'Friends and Family' Plan: Cut Them Out
Friends and family are getting the cold shoulder.
"Friends and family" stock-buying programs, a signature feature of the late '90s Internet boom, enable companies pursuing initial public offerings to let their employees, customers and others buy shares before their potential rise in the broader market.
They are seen as a way to build loyalty among employees and other share recipients, and can help bolster demand for an IPO if institutional investor interest proves weak.
But in recent years, a declining percentage of companies have offered friends-and-family shares, known as a directed-shares program, and this year has seen a sharp drop.
Bankers and company executives say factors behind the decline include legal headaches of such offerings, as well as rules under the newly enacted JOBS Act, a new law aimed at helping startup companies raise capital for expansion and hiring.
Another concern, they say: relatively poor performance of some IPOs makes insiders hesitant to put people close to them at risk. The average U. S-listed company IPO this year is up 18% in its first month of trading, compared with a one-month gain of 56% for IPOs in 2000, according to data firm Dealogic.
Nearly half of company IPOs listed in the U.S. in 2010 and 2011 included directed-share programs, and nearly two-thirds of deals a decade ago included them. So far this year, about 33% have used these programs, according to Ipreo, a capital markets data and advisory firm. That is the lowest percentage in at least a decade.
Several of this year's high-profile IPOs, including social network Facebook Inc. and Internet business software firms Palo Alto Networks Inc. and Splunk Inc., didn't have directed-shares programs for their deals.
However, software-maker Workday Inc. and Realogy Holdings Corp. , owner of Realtor brands such as Century 21, did offer such programs.
Workday, Realogy, Facebook and Palo Alto Networks declined to comment.
Tom Murphy, head of the securities and capital markets group at the law firm McDermott Will & Emery LLP, said he doesn't recommend directed-share programs to issuers because generally they are no longer worth the logistical and other hurdles they present.
"You offer [shares] to employees, they feel like they should buy them, but aren't happy if [the shares] don't go up," he said.
"Underwriters don't like them, it's less they can sell," he added. "There are more and more decisions about what to disclose. In most instances, they're not worth the headache."
Some executives point to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act as another reason for the decline.
A provision of the JOBS Act allows companies with revenues under $1 billion to have earlier discussions with potential investors about buying their stock before the IPO.
This helps them size up whether they need to rely on employees and friends to reach a fundraising target, executives and advisers say.
Richard Eisenstadt, chief financial officer of pharmaceutical company Tranzyme Inc., said his firm used a directed-share program in its $57 million IPO in 2011 to gain support seen as potentially necessary to help Tranzyme meet its money-raising target.
Before the IPO, "we didn't know where a single dollar was going to come from," said Mr. Eisenstadt.
But he said that if the company had done the IPO under the JOBS Act, it might not have enlisted the help of employees to raise money, as it later discovered there was sufficient investor interest.
These programs came under scrutiny after the dot-com bust in 2000. An industry panel in 2003 recommended limiting the size of offerings and increasing disclosure about them, to avoid such programs from being "misused or overused," which the panel said could "compromise the IPO process." For example, a company might underprice its IPO to get a bigger pop for insiders.
Yet there is some evidence these IPOs don't perform any differently than others. A study at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business of IPOs from 1999 to 2003 found there was no relationship between the use of directed-share programs and shares being offered at unusually low prices.
Even the companies that go ahead with directed-share programs appear to be curbing the offerings. In the late 1990s, deals that included directed-shares programs typically dedicated around 10% of the offering to the program, according to the 2003 industry panel. This year, the average was 5%, according to Ipreo.
Some companies still use the programs to reward individuals close to the business without having to incur the expense of giving options, said Dave Alberga, executive chairman of Active Network Inc., a Web-based platform for managing large events.
He said his company used a directed-shares program for employees in its 2011 IPO, though it limited participation to a percentage of their income.
"You don't want…friends or family buying shares based on a belief there will be a windfall," he said. "We struck a balance to let employees come in with a small amount, and hopefully that was perceived as a benefit."
Mr. Alberga said he declined advice to offer the stock to customers. "It sounded to me like it was logistically difficult, and I didn't want people rushing on something we thought would be speculative," he said.
Godfrey Sullivan, chief executive of Splunk Inc., which went public earlier this year, said that his company didn't use a directed-share program because it was too difficult to manage the process of deciding who got the shares and who didn't.
"Splunk decided that the DSP was not attractive from an image or a cost point of view," Mr. Sullivan said.
Write to Telis Demos at firstname.lastname@example.com


text:
Sunny Designs Santa Fe Queen Bed
Founded in 1980, Sunny Designs, Inc. has pursued diligently to provide our customers the very best value without compromising exceptional quality and service. Continuous efforts to develop new products, to create more value and to meet customer needs, make Sunny Designs a leading Manufacturer/Distributor in the home furnishing industry. We provide high quality products in
(as of May 25, 2017 10:16 am EDT - Details) + Add To Wish List


text:
Skillz Feb 07 Winning Entry - Technical
Gregory Fleischer
Congrats and well done,
1) What is the significance of various numbers in the story, including
the speech patterns of the goose and Templeton?
The various numbers represent different the first several digits of mathematical constants:
1,618.03: 1.61803 is the golden ratio
2,718.28: 2.71828 is e (the base of the natural log)
3141592: 3.141592 is pi
The speech patterns of the goose and Templeton are the beginning of well known mathematical sequences:
the goose's repetitions: the prime numbers (2,3,5,7,11)
the length of Templeton's words: Fibonacci numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8,13)
2) How had Charlotte and the Geography Ants fooled Lurvy's
integrity-checking script?
The integrity checking script was fooled because the two web-pages have the same MD5 sum. The web pages begin with sequences that differ but have the same calculated MD5 sum value; this is a collision in the hashing algorithm. Since the remainder of each web page is identical, the MD5 sum values are calculated the same for either page. Each page uses JavaScript to display a different web page based on the initial sequence on the page.
3) Why did Charlotte have to change the website before the
integrity-checking script ran for the first time? Why couldn't she
deface it later?
Charlotte had to change the web page first because the attack she is using is based on finding MD5 collisions. She is exploiting the fact that for MD5, if H(m) == H(n), then H(m + y) == H(n + y). It couldn't be defaced later because doing so would have required a pre-image attack, which hasn't yet been shown to be feasible.
4) How should Lurvy's script have functioned to improve its ability to
detect the kinds of alterations made by Charlotte?
Lurvy's script should have used additional hash functions to the response and compared those as well. For example, in addition to MD5, the script could also have calculated a hash using SHA1 (or RipeMD-160, Tiger, Haval, etc.). The probability of several hash functions being subverted simultaneously is slim.
5) What was Charlotte's proposal to Lurvy for saving Wilbur?
Charlotte's proposal is that she'll work as a web consultant for Lurvy at a customer rate of $150/hour but will only charge Lurvy $50. This would result in a profit for Lurvy of $100 per hour or $4000 per 40 hour week.
1) "Numberology"
Mathematical constants:
1.61803: http://www.google.com/search?q=the+golden+ratio
2.71828: http://www.google.com/search?q=e
3.141592: http://www.google.com/search?q=pi
"Lurvy-urvy is even using the phrases from Charlotte's old webs to
try to sell Wilbur,"
"Why, it's unseemly-eemly-eemly."
"We've got-ot-ot-ot-ot to come up with some way to save the
pig-ig-ig-ig-ig-ig-ig. But, how can we do it without
Lurvy-urvy = 2
unseemly-eemly-eemly = 3
got-ot-ot-ot-ot = 5
pig-ig-ig-ig-ig-ig-ig = 7
= 11
The prime numbers:
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/seque ... 2,3,5,7,11
"O, I do not enjoy starving progressively!"
do = 2
not = 3
enjoy = 5
starving = 8
progressively = 13
Fibonacci numbers:
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/seque ... 2,3,5,8,13
2) Charlotte's Web Pages
Charlotte created her web pages using the 'confoo' tool written by Dan Kaminsky (http://www.doxpara.com/research/md5/confoo.pl). This utility will retrieve two web pages and encode the respective contents to be built using JavaScript. Two new files are created: "t1.html" and "t2.html". Each begins with one of the two Wang MD5 collisions (http://eprint.iacr.org/2004/199.pdf). When either t1.html or t2.html is requested, the JavaScript will execute and determine which collision value is present at the beginning of the HTML and then decode and display the appropriate original page.
The original web pages can be retrieved be writing a script to decode the JavaScript values. The confoo tool stores the original web page URL values in a BASE tag so that images and other external resources are properly displayed, and these can be retrieved.
$ ./deconfoo.rb t1.html
original t1 url most likely
http://www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYu ... 0Pork.html
original t2 url most likely
http://www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilb ... ur%21.html
We'll mirror these web pages for good measure:
$ wget -q -m 'http://www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy%20Yummy%20Pork.html'
$ wget -q -m 'http://www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do%20Not%20Buy%20Wilbur%21.html'
$ find www.counterhack.net/ -type f -exec sha1sum {} \;
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork_files/terrific.jpg
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork_files/Buy Yummy Pork.css 34ecf71cbd64c89ca8384efb4875f04f5cbf0bbf
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork_files/somepig.jpg
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork_files/shapeimage_1.jpg 34e41f78ae373847cbd304192eb5ecf63eb1336c
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork_files/Buy Yummy Pork.js
www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy Yummy Pork.html 06a8cc83c642a677cdaad8b4c52217c54bf54ecc
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!_files/Do Not Buy Wilbur!.js
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!_files/shapeimage_1.jpg e7750d9655991f160e7bc75f7a077dfb9b13e0fa
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!_files/somebook.jpg 4c9c03ab613108d603ff31627f69a6c3d43f3a7d
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!_files/Do Not Buy Wilbur!.css
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!_files/counterhackreloadedsteg.png
www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do Not Buy Wilbur!.html
3) Charlotte's Hack
The differences are readily apparent:
$ elinks -dump http://counterhack.net/t0.html | md5sum
9e9fb7b5bab410c3aa9ce6efe7a55d88 -
$ elinks -dump http://counterhack.net/t1.html | md5sum
27e81c4f9ea99ace20dd53150f401473 -
$ elinks -dump http://counterhack.net/t2.html | md5sum 6ae0c7b50e96b7b35c2ed24768c41cff -
Visually, the pages differ as well.
$ elinks -dump 'http://counterhack.net/t0.html' | tr -c '[[:print:]\n]' '.'
Remember These Webs?
Last year, we discovered these mysterious webs, which described the
succulent flavor of Wilbur the pig. Now, you can buy this fine animal and
enjoy numerous feasts, such as Apple sausage, Asparagus pork chops,
Avocado pork rolls, Bacon, Edamame pork sandwiches, Eggplant pork loin,
Marinated pork roast, Ribs, and Wild rice pork soup. To make a bid on
Wilbur, please go to Meat-Bay, and bid on auction ID 3141592.
$ elinks -dump 'http://counterhack.net/t1.html' | tr -c '[[:print:]\n]' '.'
$ elinks -dump 'http://counterhack.net/t2.html' | tr -c '[[:print:]\n]' '.'
However, there have been significant advances in finding MD5 collisions since the confoo tool was written. In particular, it has been shown to be possible to create documents with chosen prefixes (http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/ChosenPrefixCollisions/).
Additionally, improvements in the differential attacks have allowed for vast speed-ups in finding collisions. What used to take super-computers can now be performed on laptops (see http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html).
With that in mind, it should be possible to construct two web pages that have the same MD5 sum both in source form as well as when the page is viewed without Javascript. Furthermore, it might be desirable to display the expected page as a default. To do this, we take some of the ideas from the original confoo tool and create a new confoo utility: "confoonu".
$ ./confoonu.rb \
'http://www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy%20Yummy%20Pork.html' \ 'http://www.counterhack.net/DoNotBuyWilbur/Do%20Not%20Buy%20Wilbur%21.html' \ 'http://www.counterhack.net/WilburPorkYumYum/Buy%20Yummy%20Pork.html'
Check the MD5 sums:
$ elinks -source http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/t1.html | md5sum a0ca42e12c31ee1cdd3c0e474f83244d -
$ elinks -source http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/t2.html | md5sum a0ca42e12c31ee1cdd3c0e474f83244d -
$ elinks -dump http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/t1.html | md5sum
9e9fb7b5bab410c3aa9ce6efe7a55d88 -
$ elinks -dump http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/t2.html | md5sum
9e9fb7b5bab410c3aa9ce6efe7a55d88 -
To compare to the original:
$ elinks -dump http://counterhack.net/t0.html | md5sum
9e9fb7b5bab410c3aa9ce6efe7a55d88 -
And visually, a much better match.
$ elinks -dump http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/t2.html | tr -c '[[:print:]\n]' '.'
Remember These Webs?
Last year, we discovered these mysterious webs, which described the
succulent flavor of Wilbur the pig. Now, you can buy this fine animal and
enjoy numerous feasts, such as Apple sausage, Asparagus pork chops,
Avocado pork rolls, Bacon, Edamame pork sandwiches, Eggplant pork loin,
Marinated pork roast, Ribs, and Wild rice pork soup. To make a bid on
Wilbur, please go to Meat-Bay, and bid on auction ID 3141592.
4) Lurvy's Script
There are weaknesses in several hash algorithms when taken in isolation. Again, the Wang results provide some examples of this.
By utilizing multiple hash functions at the same time, the probability that all of them have been subverted is greatly reduced.
For example, a simple shell script demonstrates this:
$ for page in 't1.html' 't2.html'; do
echo $page
for hash in md5 sha1 ripemd160; do
printf "%12s: " $hash
curl -s "http://counterhack.net/$page" | openssl dgst -$hash
echo ""
md5: e0dbee13c331b6deee2db071c85baf56
sha1: 8f8a1c9cdac611709b2d72b3433c83be52b1c399
ripemd160: ed160d7d3e33e351853f7d0b27fa693660dc9bc9
md5: e0dbee13c331b6deee2db071c85baf56
sha1: 3695509a6aab4fc1f9183748e4c779d8bb3653dd
ripemd160: b08acd2b072ddbbc7b5732860ece7de8c5781c9b
NIST has begun the process of searching for a new hash function by holding a public competition similar to the AES competition (see http://csrc.nist.gov/pki/HashWorkshop/timeline.html). I would assume some of the recently disclosed differential attacks will be taken into account when designing the new hash functions so that in maybe six years a secure hash function will be available.
5) Charlotte's Proposal
Using the hint given, download "Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit" from http://diit.sourceforge.net. Since this is a steganography tool, it is safe to assume that one of images on the website has something hidden in it. The "counterhackreloadedsteg.png" file is the likely candidate based on the file name.
Decoding the image requires a password, and an empty password doesn't seem to work. Going back to the web page, it is obvious that some words begin with letters in red:
A password of "BAARAMEWE" doesn't work but "baaramewe" does so we save off the file as "decoded".
(Aside: the phrase "baa-ram-ewe" is from the movie Babe but could also be a reference to the "Home" episode from The X-Files.)
But what kind of file have we decoded?
$ file decoded
decoded: Microsoft Office Document
$ mv decoded decoded.doc
Maybe a quick look at the file is in order. Generally, it isn't a good idea to fire up Microsoft Office and look at some random Word document. Instead, use 'strings' or some other text based method.
$ tr -cd '[:print:]' <decoded.doc | fmt
>*,)M Dbjbj=="WWDl$ VXXXXXX>XDrQ20CHCXCharlottes ProposalDear
Mr. Lurvy,Now that I have got your attention, I have a proposal for you. You are obviously a bright businessman, trying to make some money on the sale of Wilbur. But, surely you must recognize the fleeting nature of that one-time sale. I propose to you a better business model, one that can keep this farm profitable for years to come.Employ me, Charlotte the Spider, as a web site designer, contracting my services out for $150 per hour. I will charge you only $ 50 per hour. Thus, working only 40 hours per week, I can bring in more cash for you every single week than the one-time sale of Wilbur.
If you are interested in my offer, please send e-mail to HYPERLINK "mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com" email@example.com ,with the
subject: CHARLOTTES PROPOSAL.Yours truly,CharlotteD0JjUjU&'pq+,9:DD 1h/ =!"#$%firstname.lastname@example.com:firstname.lastname@example.com@8NormalCJ_HaJmHsHtH<A@<Default
Paragraph Font.U@.Hyperlink>*B*phD&'pq+,9:F00000000000DDDDX$FF3CF
bC:\Documents and Settings\skodo\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of Document3.asd 4Z:\Papers\Charlotte's Web Site\CharlotteProposal.doc@ggLGDg'D`@UnknownGz
Times New Roman5Symbol3&z Arial"qhymz!202Charlotte s Proposal Oh+'0t0<HT\dlCharlottes Proposal9har arararNormal.dot rm1rmMicrosoft Word 9.0l@e@6Q@WQ.+,D.+,@hp| oCharlottes ProposalTitle 8@_PID_HLINKSA|/!mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com "#$%&'(+Root EntryFDrQ-Data1TableWordDocument"SummaryInformation(DocumentSummaryInformation8!CompObjjObjectPoolDrQDrQFMicrosoft
Word DocumentMSWordDocWord.Document.89q
Besides the main text of the document, there are a couple of other interesting pieces of information displayed:
C:\Documents and Settings\skodo\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of Document3.asd
Z:\Papers\Charlotte's Web Site\CharlotteProposal.doc
These are stored in saved-by history section of the document and are typically not readily apparent, but the information can be extracted.
$ ./author-info.pl decoded.doc
---=== Author(s) Information ===---
1. (unknown) : C:\Documents and Settings\skodo\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\AutoRecovery save of Document3.asd 2. (unknown) : Z:\Papers\Charlotte's Web Site\CharlotteProposal.doc
The author's name isn't present, but one could assume that the original document name was CharlotteProposal.doc.
$ mv decoded.doc CharlotteProposal.doc
A formatted version of the document text can be retrieved by using one of the available conversion programs: antiword, catdoc, wvWare, etc.
$ antiword CharlotteProposal.doc
Charlotte's Proposal
Dear Mr. Lurvy,
Now that I have got your attention, I have a proposal for you. You are obviously a bright businessman, trying to make some money on the sale of Wilbur. But, surely you must recognize the fleeting nature of that one-time sale. I propose to you a better business model, one that can keep this farm profitable for years to come.
Employ me, Charlotte the Spider, as a web site designer, contracting my services out for $150 per hour. I will charge you only $ 50 per hour. Thus, working only 40 hours per week, I can bring in more cash for you every single week than the one-time sale of Wilbur. If you are interested in my offer, please send e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com ,with the subject: CHARLOTTE'S PROPOSAL.
Yours truly,
Essentially, this is a shakedown letter. This is similar to some so-called "security consultants" who exploit sites and then offer to fix the problems for a fee. It would be questionable for Lurvy to employ a known hacker such as Charlotte who appears to have no qualms about computer trespass or extortion.
* Scripts available from: http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/
deconfoo.rb : http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/deconfoo.rb
confoonu.rb : http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/confoonu.rb
author-info.pl : http://pseudo-flaw.net/cws/author-info.pl.txt
Congrats and well done,
CISSP, MCSE, CSTA, Security+ SME


text:
Those are cute Linda! Yep, we do need all the colors-just more than others!
Welcome to the Quilting Board!
Those are cute Linda! Yep, we do need all the colors-just more than others!
Be a blessing to others, as you may entertain angels unaware!
Those are both so cute Elisabrat! Super curvy stresses me out when I'm sewing.
I made my first FMQ attempt last night. I was going to just jump in with both feet and do it on this playmat I'm doing. Epic fail doesn't begin to describe it. I ripped it out and am putting a 6-1/2" wide diamond pattern on it instead that I can use a "normal" stitch for on my machine. My machine was pulling the top thread down to the bottom side and leaving big loops of it everywhere, then it hiccuped and I just got mad and tore it all out. I tried tension adjustments on my test piece, and never could get it where I was happy with it. I have a Kenmore 385 sewing machine that my mother bought me as a wedding gift in December 1991, and it was not made with FMQ in mind. At 21 years old, I hate to put a lot into buying new feet if I'm going to end up upgrading before long anyway, which I may do in the spring with my tax refund.
I didn't realize we should be giving clues.
Well here's a section of the rug mug for my partner.
I hope it fits the bill (request for young boy)
Here's mine for my partner will be going out next week. I hope that she likes it.
Ready to mail next week. My partner has 2 kitties, hope she likes it!
I love the mug rugs posted so far, hope we get to see them all
Last edited by Donna H-M; 01-19-2013 at 09:45 AM.
Love all the mr. Mine is done and will mail out on Tuesday. now to go and finish my dq so i can get it mailed out to lol
I love to collect roosters of any kind. I also love embroidery thread for my machine. My favorite color is purple and i am just a plain old country girl.lol
How fun to see all your wonderful Mug Rugs.
Become a Legend
Be an Organ Doner
ME I hope!!!
April's mom
Tara's mom
Brat, love them. Feel better...praying one is on the way.
Boom 17 Album of Blocks I Made for Others http://www.quiltingboard.com/members...bums19654.html
"The reward of a thing well done is having done it." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson


text:
St. Louis Cardinals minor league infielder Vance Albitz is doing something about it.
The 24-year-old Californian, who finished the 2012 season with Double-A Springfield, has launched an initiative he calls "Gloves 4 Troops." Speaking with a member of our armed services, Albitz learned that gloves and baseballs are needed for recreation purposes by our troops far away from home.
Baseballs, gloves and cash are accepted. The latter is used for mailing the boxes of equipment overseas. His stated goal is to collect and ship 1,000 gloves by the start of spring training.
As soon as I learned about Albitz' program, which he runs through his website, gloves4troops.com, I donated.
In the video clip that follows, Albitz explains in his own words how Gloves 4 Troops works and how we can help. This is an initiative baseball fans everywhere should be able to get behind.


text:
This Father's Day, we're running a number of features on the site dedicated to dear ol' dad. One of the them involves reaching out to you, our readers, and asking for tips and sayings from your father (or grandfathers) about the noble art of making things. We want to gather up the best of these "Tips My Dad Says" and run a feature piece on Father's Day (Sunday, June 18).
To say thanks for participating, our friends at Leatherman are giving away four of their SuperTool 300 multitools. As someone who's had a Leatherman tool on his belt, or close at hand, for at least the last 20 years, I can personally attest to the awesomeness of these tools. To be eligible for the drawing, all you have to do is leave a tip, saying, or story about the dads in your life, related to tools and making in the comments below. The eligible drawing period will be until midnight on Wednesday (June 15) and we'll announce the winners on Thursday morning. And then stay tuned for the feature piece on Sunday morning.
Update: And the winners ARE…
Christian Holton
Pat Fitzenberger
Wade Erickson
You each win a Leatherman SuperTool 300! Send me your smailing information ASAP. Thanks.
Kicking things off, we asked the MAKE team and some of our contributors to share some of their dad-ish tips. Here are a few (many more on Sunday).


text: Ha! The Rattler is back and better than ever! He can take this category for me by himself. Josh Smith would try and block his own mum if you gave him a chance. Unfortunately for him, he is grounded this week. Let's just have a look at the other cats shall we? Steals- Thankfully for you my steals machine Artest is out for the first 7 games otherwise you might not recover mentally from the beating thats about to happen in that category. 3's- Fuhgeddaboudddit!! Points- Do any of your guys even average over 13 a game? Rebounds- True blue Australian Warrior Bogut will get you some, but not enough to carry those other darko-ites who run away at any sign of contact. Assists- Hmm... West, Law and (Not so) Mighty Mouse versus Billups, Felton and Marbury. I DON'T THINK SO! The other ray-ray (Felton) is going to go off this year. See how many weapons he has got? He's gonna average 10 assists this year. The other categories won't matter because my main man Matrix is the revolution and he is reloaded and ready to be a 9 cat freak! Battier is the reduced fat (and skill) version of the Matrix or maybe i'll just call him the binary man. His lines look like this: 1-1-1-1-1-1 Also I hate to tell you that you have the all-time injury squad on your hands. Sure, they might last one week to feign giving my team some trouble, but come the playoffs they'll be resting their knee meniscus' on the sidelines and icing their icepack hands in the hopes of one more application. Oh yeah... Good luck!


text:
Binghamton University 2008 Law Conference to feature Freedom Rider
The Binghamton University Thurgood Marshall Pre-Law Society will hold its annual Law Conference and dinner at 6 p.m., Wednesday, September 24. The event, which is open to the public, will be held in the Susquehanna Room of the University Union.
This years conference has a theme of "social responsibility" and will feature George Bundy Smith, a former associate judge of the New York Court of Appeals; Judge Laura Safer Espinoza, of drug court in Bronx Criminal Court; and Shareema Gadson Shaw, a University alumna, and now an assistant district attorney in Bronx District Attorney's Office.
Smith, a partner at Chadbourne and Parke LLP in New York, served on the state's highest court until his retirement in 2006. His judicial service began in 1975 and he also was a justice on the Supreme Court of New York. Smith worked to advance the cause of civil rights in the early 1960s as a Freedom Rider in Alabama.
Also on September 24, the University will host a law fair and panel discussion for students. The fair will be held from 11:30 a.m.-2:45 p.m. in the Susquehanna Room. Representatives from 68 law schools will be in attendance. A panel discussion focusing on the law admissions process will follow at 3 p.m. in room 252 of the University Union.
The Thurgood Marshall Pre-Law Society was founded in 1992 as a support group for minority students hoping to pursue a career in law.
Tickets for the dinner, which cost $10 for non-University students, will be available at the door. For more information about Law Day, including the fair and panel discussion, call 646-236-3443.


text:
[The following is a guest post by New Relic Lead Developer of Cloud Services Adron Hall- KF]
Before diving straight into what NoOps, AppOps, and DevOps are let's first give platform-as-a-service (PaaS) some context. There are three general delineations that are commonly used in application hosting today: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Generally these acronyms are used to describe the three main differentiators in cloud computing, but they could be related to traditional hosting as well. Here are some simple definitions:
- SaaS – Software-as-a-Service is exemplified by things like Salesforce.com, Google Docs, Webtrends, Gmail and Hotmail. Basically, any Web application that end users interact with can generally be seen as SaaS. The most common scenario is SaaS that is hosted on top of some cloud provider's solution.
- PaaS – Platform-as-a-Service is best exemplified by Heroku, Google App Engine (GAE), Windows Azure, Cloud Foundry based providers like AppFog, Stackato, and others. These providers have APIs and a vast architecture built atop any infrastructure that abstracts the scaling, management of instances, and other things that routinely are needed for hosting an application. PaaS can dramatically reduce the complexities of deploying a hosted application.
- IaaS – Infrastructure-as-a-Service is provided by companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace, and others. This is what PaaS and SaaS Solutions are usually built on. IaaS gives you the most control over what you're building, with control and management responsibility of everything from the firewall, routing and individual instances.
These are the basic *aaS options. Each has specific advantages and disadvantages depending on the business need. How do NoOps, AppOps and DevOps fit into all of this? In many ways it's still up for debate and in other ways it's an outright argument.
PaaS and NoOps, or AppOps, or No… whatever!
NoOps is a term popularized by AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson as a term for hosted applications that are built entirely on a PaaS. This removes the need for developers to actually manage the instances, storage or other aspects that traditionally need to be managed. Many argue against this term, instead preferring a term like AppOps, which is more descriptive of where the operations actually are. In a PaaS deployed solution, a team needs only manage the application itself and maybe some development of the software. A PaaS solution provides an extremely fast way to deploy, build, and manage a hosted application. This could be a custom built application or something as easy and familiar as WordPress. Because of the focus on applications and high velocity application software development and deployment, PaaS is often referred to as AppOps because the staff handling operations ends up managing applications rather than there being no operations at all. However, rarely will you see anyone referred to as the Operations Team in a PaaS enabled company. Often the developers, application administrators or other people within the company will handle the operations because it requires so little time. One more slight point of confusion is that AppOps or NoOps could easily be associated with SaaS based applications as well. However, since the terms run counter to the term DevOps, they're generally used in reference to PaaS solutions.
The Core Principles of PaaS
The core principles of PaaS based administration and development are the antithesis of the multiple-step process of traditional hosted application development and management. Traditional Development
- Get a machine to run the application on. You might have to order it, and in a traditional environment it could take hours or months depending on the processes involved.
- Load the operating system and configure it as needed.
- Setup the network and prepare it for the environment where it will live.
- Setup the hosting Web server or services files and folders in preparation for deployment.
- Build or setup the application autonomously from the system itself. Preferably on a development machine or in a development environment.
- Verify that the deployment of the configuration can be moved from one environment to the next. Such as from development to test or test to production.
- Push the code base and application dependencies into source control.
- In some way, get the application from source control to the server that was previously created: move, x-copy, use an msi installer, bash script or deploy.
Ouch, that's 8 steps. Some of them extremely time consuming and painful. Let's take a look at what we'd have to do to get the same application into a PaaS Solution.
- Tell the PaaS the domain name you want.
- Push the code base and application dependencies into source control. Github is always a good place to work from.
- Push your code live (see picture) by clicking Create or using a simple command line tool: af push
The Hard Core, The Power Users, The DevOps
PaaS Solutions aren't for everyone. Sometimes a business needs access to the core instances, storage, networking, routing or other features of an IaaS offering like AWS. This is very common for legacy applications. When a major enterprise has several hundred applications that run on Windows Server or Linux and want to make the move into the cloud, these servers, databases and other vertically built solutions are moved into an IaaS solution. New greenfield applications are built using a PaaS. This provides the best of both worlds, with everything in a scalable, powerful, automated and managed environment.
So what exactly is DevOps?
As NoOps or AppOps basically manage applications. They also may do minor administration or development of applications in a PaaS Solution. A DevOps professional could tread into any of those realms in addition to running an IaaS environment. DevOps is really the apex of what the modern software developer (and operations/network/system administration) is becoming and needs to become. They provide the greatest horizontal and vertical ability to build, implement, deploy and scale hosted applications. One of the best quotes I've seen in regard to DevOps is from the devops.com blog: "Helping Finish What Agile Development Started." The quote really holds the spirit and idea of DevOps. Cloud computing is one of the things that enables DevOps because on the cloud, everything can be controlled through code. The only place, really, that this is true is in IaaS or PaaS. DevOps also create systems that are self-healing, auto-scaling and setup for continuous integration and deployment. This set of key characteristics are what really drive the power and value of cloud computing. Without DevOps and this set of capabilities, cloud computing wouldn't provide much that wasn't already available. Cloud computing and DevOps are truly leading the industry into the future.