RLG_RLG

Dear OP, you are asking the wrong question -- a person with 1 mil or even 100k has access to different investment vehicles than a person with 10k or 100 bucks to invest.

TL;DR: save at least 10% of your gross earnings and earn compound interest with savings. Split your money between 4 ETFs like RSP, DIA, QQQQ, and VEU.

1. Get on a budget. Save 10% of what you earn or pay off your credit cards first by saving 15%. Read "The Richest Man in Babylon"

2. Mutual funds suck. One out of 10 years will be terrible and they only spend a few years on top. How can you get consistent returns? They have high fees. Instead invest in equity traded funds or ETFs. Read "The Big Secret for the Small Investor" by J. Greenblatt and "One up on Wall Street" by Peter Lynch. Be a value investor not a trader! Plan to let your investments sit and grow for years. If you want to buy individual stocks, pick for the list of "dividend aristocrats". These are safe bluechips and you can re-invest the dividends for a compounding effect!

3. The fees and limited investment choices make 401ks a bad deal, even with matching. A self directed Roth IRA will tax shelter your growth, but you have to invest with money you paid income tax on (unlike a 401k).

4. Bank account interest rates are a joke! For savings you get 00.05% CD 00.35% Over 500k in money market 00.3% Inflation is around 3%!

5. For small investment amounts, a US Treasury savings bond is not bad. There is no charge to buy or sell them and you do not have to pay taxes until you cash them in. I Bonds pay the rate of inflation and possibly a bit more. There are some penalties if you cash these bonds in before 12 months pass.

Be aware of things like how much it will cost to buy and sell an investment and when you will have to pay taxes on your earnings.

For me it was very hard to save until I created separate accounts to keep my funds in. I have been value investing in stocks and my portfolio has earned 8 - 10 % growth plus 3% in dividends. The dividends get reinvested so my holdings grow like a savings account.

Read "How to Invest $50-$5,000" by Nancy Dunnan

This is a horrible situation for your business. I hope you get everything worked out soon.

I won't explain the details, but I have extensive experience with bureaucracies and base my advice below on this experience.

1. Adopt the Socratic method. Answer questions with questions. Do not commit to any description of reality made by others (as much as possible).

2. Understand that the highest levels of leadership are political appointments and they promote their patron's interests. eg: Does your brother-in-law know the dept. mayor's wife? Explore your network of friends and family for political influence.

3. When you write: "Now, I do not know about the titles and hierarchies involved in the county organizational chart," I very much feel you need to hire a lawyer that specializes in these kinds of disputes to advise you. Not necessarily take legal action, but to explain your options. The bureaucrats will know the rules well. You need an expert on your side.

4. Use these words, "What would you do if you were me?", when you find yourself at a road block. Also ask questions like "has your office ever issued a waiver for [problem]?" and "who has authority to issue the waiver?"; naturally followed by, "may I speak with this person of power?" The answer will be no, so you should ask questions like "whom does the person of power report to?" You won't get instant solution, but things will start moving behind the scenes.

The bureaucrat's goal is to get you to accept their 'no' or 'wait and see', so you will go away. Your goal has to be acting nice and reasonable, but persistently questioning the management of the process. It will become easier for them to get you in compliance than continue to deny you.

Sadly, this adds much delay and expense.

Best of luck to you.

Sounds like this is going to be $99 by the time it is de-bugged (on manufacturing side) and certified.

I am angry and frustrated because I want one ;-)

Thanks for this! I was finally fed up with goCIAoglNSAe.cFBIom

As a voting American let me say this is a disgrace. human rights are inalienable -- and we are close to the line in the USA. We can do better.

We are talking about live servers. Monitoring should detect server going down, raising suspicion of a physical attack.

The evil maid attack would be useful against the system admin's workstation. Securing NOCs is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it is not difficult.

Use BIOS & boot loader passwords. Encrypt the file systems. This will not stop 3 letter agencies, foreign governments, or aliens.

Set low level passwords and use filesystem encryption. eg: passwords on all networking devices, boot loaders, and BIOS.

Three letter agencies and foreign governments could attack your data if they took it off line, but you monitoring should detect that.

> but at what point is it safe to assume that if you get hacked, it's not going to be because your ISP got hacked

If you co-locate your hardware at a data center and your staff competently secures your systems.

I advise you seek the services of a professional sys admin to secure systems.

Inside job is usually the answer for targeted attacks against inside systems. Inside collusion at a minimum.

I wonder how anyone can trust their linode systems after an admin account being compromised.

It would likely ruin their business to re-install everything, but that is the only way to know root kits have not been installed.

By using your public key.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/152

You can also require a password AND a cert.

I am pretty sure this is OP's first experience with ISP contracts. I guarantee it is not Linode's first legal dispute over their TOS with a noob.

You obviously have never worked for a retail ISP.

Written on a scrap of paper in your wallet. only the password and no other info should be on the scrap.

If you can memorize it, it is a bad password.

Please people (not corporations w/ staffs), do not run critical systems in the cloud.

Get a dedicated server (not cheapest you can find) and secure it with:

(install in this order)

APF - http://www.rfxn.com/projects/advanced-policy-firewall/

BFD - http://www.rfxn.com/projects/brute-force-detection/

rkhunter

Ideally, install rkhunter on fresh system, right after updates, APF, & BFD. Then update the binary check-sums with this command, if you know server is secure:

Update file properties: # rkhunter --propupd --sk

Run a system check to make sure it is known clean: # rkhunter --check --sk

Lastly, sign up for the security alert mailing list for your version of linux on your server.

If you want maximum security, be sure to password protect your boot loader and use an encrypted file system. This will make it very difficult for ISP to work on your server however!

predictions about the future are always uncertain

They underestimate what it takes to audit 10,000 orders for fraud (breaking their business rules, not laws).

I'm sure they will be on ebay -- for $300