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Northeast Railway Failure Shows Power Grid's Vulnerability
Written by: Tara Dodrill Grid Threats 0
image credit bloomberg.com
A major Northeast railway power failure and the vandalism of a portion of the power grid in Arkansas illustrate once again the vulnerabilities of key pieces of America's infrastructure.
The second busiest railroad in the United States suffered a major power failure which disrupted the transportation needs of tens of thousands of individuals in late September. The railway runs between New Haven, Connecticut, and New York City's Grand Central Terminal and garners electricity via two high-voltage "feeder cables." One of the cables was removed from service a few weeks ago for a scheduled upgrade, and it is not currently known why the second feeder cable failed to do its job. It took more than a week to restore full service.
Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said the region – if it is be part of a growing economy — cannot have power failures of that magnitude. He called for an investigation.
"To grow jobs and strengthen our economy, safe and reliable rail service must be a top priority, and it is simply intolerable for a single cable failure to imperil that progress," he said.
According to Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) officials, one 138,000-volt cable should have been able to carry the electricity needed to maintain railway function.
The railroad power outage caused a multitude of traffic issues on roadways, and local officials urged commuters to remain home until the line at least became partially functional, if at all possible. The outage underscores one of the major and potentially deadly obstacles urban dwellers will face during a disaster scenario – a loss of transportation.
The Arkansas power grid vandalism incident prompted the FBI to issue a $20,000 reward for information about the culprits. Although initial news reports deemed the electric grid vandalism a random act, investigators no longer appear to agree with such an assessment. Since the line is integral to relaying power to the area during peak usage times, the attack does not appear coincidental. A high-tension power transmission line was downed near the town of Cabot, Ark., during the vandalism to the grid.
Harness the power of the sun when the power goes out…
And official statement said "the person(s) responsible attached a cable to the framework of the 100-foot tower and placed the cable across the railroad track in an apparent attempt to utilize a moving train to bring down the tower."
According to comments made by FBI investigators, the likely power grid vandalism suspect boasts an "above-average knowledge or skill in electrical matters" and is at least familiar with the area. Law enforcement investigators also believe that the power grid attack was most likely designed to prompt power outages in the region.
In 2010, Entergy informed the Arkansas Public Service Commission that a "single contingency" loss of transmission on the line would cause an overload on other lines relaying power to the area and potentially cause a widespread loss of power. The power grid attack occurred during the longest hot weather spell that the region had experienced during the past year. If the electrical grid vandalism had been as successful as the attackers had hoped, hundreds of thousands of Arkansas residents would have not been able to cool themselves and lost all their food which required refrigeration.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey has said America's power grid is extremely vulnerable, calling it "the security equivalent of a house left with the door unlocked, the windows open, and millions of dollars of jewelry and home entertainment equipment strewn about for the taking."
The National Academy of Science supported Woolsey's statements about the power grid, stating in a report that terrorists could "cripple the national economy" by destroying or damaging "hard-to-replace" components of the electrical grid. Many of the necessary components are no longer made in the United States.
As previously reported by Off The Grid News, the congressional SHIELD Act is designed to address the vulnerabilities of the power grid but has not passed either body.
Additionally, the GridEX II nationwide power grid down drill is scheduled to take place in November. The federal government appears finally to be taking the advice of a host of their own experts and addressing the needs of the overly taxed and extremely vulnerable electrical grid. The drill will be held on November 13-14 and also include governmental agencies from Mexico and Canada. The preparedness drill is also enlisting the skills of more than 150 private power-related companies. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staffers and other anti-terrorism agents will reportedly work alongside utility workers to test for security weaknesses in the power grid.
Tara Dodrill
© Copyright Off The Grid News
Arkansas power grid Connecticut Department of Homeland Security GridEX II New York Northeast power failure power grid railroad railway Richard Blumenthal
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text:
namespace Itinero.Profiles.Lua
{
	/// <summary>
	/// A Delegate type which can wrap a script function
	/// </summary>
	/// <param name="args">The arguments.</param>
	/// <returns>The return value of the script function</returns>
	public delegate object ScriptFunctionDelegate(params object[] args);
	/// <summary>
	/// A Delegate type which can wrap a script function with a generic typed return value
	/// </summary>
	/// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
	/// <param name="args">The arguments.</param>
	/// <returns>The return value of the script function</returns>
	public delegate T ScriptFunctionDelegate<T>(params object[] args);
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Data structure for two way mapping Now, before you scold me, I know there's a very similar question:
Best data structure for two way mapping?
In fact, I am looking for a data structure that will accomplish the same thing. Specifically, I have a string that should be mapped to another string, and that other string should also be mapped to the original string.
For instance:
".jpg" -> "image/jpeg"
"image/jpeg" -> ".jpg"

The linked question suggest the use of some kind of hashmap or Dictionary<string,string> to accomplish this.
One would have a custom data type that will hold two dictionaries, each dictionary being one way of mapping. This will provide with O(1), but i find it not scalable at all.
Considering that I have a Dictionary with all the mappings from 200 MIME types to the associated file extension, I would need to create a similar one, with the same content but inversed. This is very prone to typos, or missing keys, and is a lot of duplicated code.
Although the linked question aims for a solution in Java, I am looking for a solution in C#.
Is there a .NET data structure that supports these kind of two way mapping between objects?
If there is not, how can I accomplish this without replicating code (as in the two dictionaries solution)?

A: Why wouldn't a custom type with two dictionaries work? Although it will use double the memory, it allows for O(1) lookup and should work as you want.
However, when it comes to the generic parameters, it can get a bit hairy. If you specify the same type it's not a problem, however if you specify a different type the indexer breaks because you can only get a value out one way. If you overload the indexer and have two, i.e.:
public K this[T value]
public T this[K value]

It will break if you have the same arguments because it won't be able to resolve. In that case, I would suggest having two different classes:
public class TwoWayDictionary<T>
{
    private Dictionary<T, T> _first;
    private Dictionary<T, T> _second;

    public TwoWayDictionary()
    {
        _first = new Dictionary<T, T>();
        _second = new Dictionary<T, T>();
    }

    public void Add(T first, T second)
    {
        _first.Add(first, second);
        _second.Add(second, first);
    }

    public T this[T value]
    {
        get
        {
            if(_first.ContainsKey(value))
            {
                return _first[value];
            }
            if(_second.ContainsKey(value))
            {
                return _second[value];
            }

            throw new ArgumentException(nameof(value));
        }
    }
}

and
public class TwoWayDictionary<T, K>
{
    private readonly Dictionary<T, K> _first;
    private readonly Dictionary<K, T> _second;

    public TwoWayDictionary()
    {
        _first = new Dictionary<T, K>();
        _second = new Dictionary<K, T>();
    }

    public void Add(T first, K second)
    {
        _first.Add(first, second);
        _second.Add(second, first);
    }

    public K this[T value]
    {
        get
        {
            if (_first.ContainsKey(value))
            {
                return _first[value];
            }

            throw new ArgumentException(nameof(value));
        }
    }

    public T this[K value]
    {
        get
        {
            if (_second.ContainsKey(value))
            {
                return _second[value];
            }

            throw new ArgumentException(nameof(value));
        }
    }
}

This will allow you to use it like mentioned in the comments:
var dict = new TwoWayDictionary<string>();
dict.Add(".jpg", "image/jpg");
var mime = dict[".jpg"];
var ext = dict["image/jpg"];

and specify 2 different types if you want:
var dict = new TwoWayDictionary<string, int>();
dict.Add(".jpg", 100);
var number = dict[".jpg"];
var ext = dict[100];

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I don't think the guests should have to pay for parking. I don't know what etiquette dictates but I have never been to a Canadian wedding where the bride and groom pays for parking. I don't think it's unreasonable, if you're getting married in a large city, downtown, it's to be expected. I don't think anybody would expect that you would pay for parking. I could use some insight, because I don't know if I'm looking at this rationally or being completely unrealistic. Maybe it's because I live in a city and paying for parking is just the norm but I wouldn't pay for my guests parking. I wonder if the reason I don't know about parking is that I usually just find a free lot and walk from there.
I am not sure, but I think most people will assume reasonable travel expenses and that includes parking. Great for getting home/back to the hotel safe There are no free places to park at/near our wedding venue. I've been to weddings where you had to pay for parking either in the lot or at meters near by. For guests that didn't do this, I heard lots of rumblings about how they were upset about the situation. I don't want my guests to incur any unnecessary costs related to my wedding, but there is no easy way to cover this parking for them. I went to a wedding recently where we had to pay for garage parking in a large city. I don't think you should be required to offer parking. I would worry, just make sure you leg people know there is a charge for parking on your wedding website. It's not like the TTC shuts down at night, so no matter how late the party went, I know I wouldn't be stranded downtown. At our venue, guests had to park at one if a few nearby lots and walk to the restaurant. The building offers prepaid parking passes, but I have no way of knowing how many people plan on driving vs.
I also have no way of getting a stack of pre-paid parking vouchers to people prior to the wedding. We paid for ten spots at the venue for vendors , but we told guests who are staying nearby to take cabs. I've been to a number of weddings where I had to pay for parking, sometimes quite a bit. If there are any other parking lots/garages that are cheaper near your venue, I would also list those. However an email letting people know that parking is either hard to find or has to be paid for might be nice. The building owns the parking facility, and the restaurant venue has no pull in getting us parking passes. I think it's considerate of you to pay for parking. If you were a guest, would it ruin your overall experience if you had to pay a hefty fee to park? We will definitely follow through re: suggestions to put details about the cost and alternative transportation options on the wedding website. I spoke to my venue about the parking lot within the building that we are getting married.
So long as you tell your guests about the parking situation, you definitely don't need to pay for parking. Let your guests worry about the parking, I live in NYC and whenever I'm invited to a party in Manhattan I pay/search for my own parking. If I were going to a wedding in the heart of downtown I would take transit. I for one would never approach a groomsmen for a 20 bill of the bride and grooms money. I guess what I am wondering is this: is this something I should be stressing about? Your guests are all grown ups and for every other event in their lives they will have to pay for parking. I'm getting married in Boston and I think we're going to pay for a few spots, but I think the majority of people are staying at the hotel. Anyone from a large city knows that parking downtown, no matter the day, can be unreasonably pricey. Since the venue is almost sitting on top of Union Station, I hope that many opt to take public transit. ETA: Though if someone is like driving your great-grandmother in because she can't get around easily or something like that. We are having our wedding in downtown NYC.
I'd probably have to budget another $2k if I was going to pay for parking! At our venue you have to pay for parking, because it is in a city. I'd just have something on your website or let everyone know what the different parking options are.
Furthermore it is first find a place to park, then you have to pay, then get to the venue. I would feel weird walking up to the emcee and asking for a $20 bill to cover my parking. I would assume that most people won't be driving as its a wedding and those that do drive already know the cost of parking in Toronto. It is so much easier if you can tell guests park in this garage and the parking will be paid for. The parking thing is usually for out of town guests, and it's usually covered by the bride and groom. This is one of those details that really nice when it's covered, but people don't really care if it's not.
Honestly if you have a wedding website, tell people their options for getting there and leave it at that.
I think the most I ever paid was $5 for a whole day. I think anyone familiar with Toronto knows they will be paying for parking. You could also give some decent public transportation instructions that will allow guests to bypass the parking situation. Paying for parking is just standard practice in any city. It would be way better for you to give them taxi chits than to provide free parking.
As someone who has apparently been confused, I'd appreciate a heads up on the cost of parking in the building's garage. But lets be honest, this wedding has already cost enough and the idea of maybe another $200-$300 for parking is making me feel dizzy. We're right near the big subway hub, so hopefully most of them opt to find alternatives to driving. My venue only has valet parking and we are paying for the guests. That's what I did - drove in from the suburbs and parked at a commuter rail station , then took the train Goodness.


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text:
1BlueHorizon Group
"The airplane takes off against the wind, not with it...."
Leonard Favre
The First Class future...
(Editorial published in Aviation Business ME Magazine - Issue December 2014) www.aviationbusinessme.com
Is the First Class future an exclusive step above it to take premium flying 'to the next level' or a way to project an image of the airline brand excellence?
The airline industry has traditionally lagged behind other tourism sectors when it comes to creating customer profiles to anticipate their needs, but in the recent past the airlines have increasingly benchmark against trends in the hotel sector in order to meet customer expectations. They learn to tailor their offerings to take account of passenger preferences and tastes much like the hotel industry does efficiently since a decade. Soon a text message will tell you what gate you're departing from, and another one later will tell you when that gate is open, allowing you more time for some last-minute shopping, reflection in the think pod or a few extra exercises in the gym, depending on your mood. During your flight, you'll stream movies on your tablet and use the same device to do some online supermarket shopping so that when you arrive home from your two-week holiday you'll have a bag of fresh groceries waiting for you. What looks unlikely to change is airline policy on the use of mobile phones. It's been proven they're perfectly safe, but the ban will be maintained on them on privacy and comfort grounds. We may not be on our phones but we'll spend a lot of our time online. Superfast broadband connectivity will be standard on all airlines, allowing passengers to download content directly on their mobile devices. Those screens on the back of the seats will disappear as airlines work to create lighter seats, which will significantly reduce the weight of the plane and the fuel burn that accounts for 40 per cent of an airline's total costs.
Even there's a lot of competition in the back of the airplane, the fares are so dramatically higher in the front of the plane that they have incredible margins for carriage. The carriers make a lot of money on people who pay premium fares and the biggest changes will definitely take place in the front-end seats as the world's airlines scramble for position in the intensifying race for loyalty. In recent years, the airlines have become wiser in adjusting their cabin mix depending on the route they fly. The top operators worldwide are all offering an experience comparable to that available in First for almost two decades and more generally raising the question related to the need for First-Class cabins as flat-bed seats becoming the norm including finer dining, high-end toiletries; amenity kits; free pyjamas and fancier limousine to the airport, cradle corporate customers in once-unimaginable comfort, making the premium on front-row seats harder to justify. The upgrading of the Business Class isn't presenting a fairly faithful mirror of what's happening in the larger economy: the disappearance of the middle class?
If the line between business and first class is fading, also the gap between that new 'front-row seats' flying which appears to be absolutely stunning and flying private is starting to close. Private jets are more and more competitively priced. What's more, business travelers, the main clientele for 'Upper' Class', might opt for the private jet route because of the time savings as you don't have the hassle of checking in, you decide when you want to fly, and when you land you literally walk right out of the airport. For sure and it is not a surprise, the 'Middle East Big Three' Award winning airlines are leading the battle to design the most appealing, most comfortable Business- and First-class seating arrangements to take premium flying 'to the next level'. You never see airlines featuring the last row of seats in their ads and that opulence may be as much about projecting an image of their home state (a gateway that helps visitors form an impression about the country before they land), as selling seats to passengers willing to spend $20,000 on a one-way ticket vs. say, $40,000 to fly private with the schedule flexibility and related privacy of a business jet. It's a select group of people who are willing to pay for the luxury, the ultimate attention, for the total privacy and business jet operators are competing on that segment too and MEBA the ideal event to feel the pulse of that booming sector…
You may contact us by e-mail to info@1bluehorizon.com
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Ms. Representation
An objection to Strong Female Characters reveals how well-intentioned discussions of gender politics invariably become divisive and unproductive.
On one of the NewStatesman blogs, Sophia McDougall wrote an excellent essay titled "I Hate Strong Female Characters." The basic premise: in an attempt to counteract decades' worth of depicting women as weak or submissive, popular media has just replaced one stereotype with another. Male characters are allowed to be multifaceted, flawed, or neurotic, while female characters all have to be strong.
McDougall's essay has some fantastic passages — my favorite is "…the film industry believes the world is more ready for a film featuring a superhero who is a raccoon than it is for a film led by a superhero who is a woman." But really, each of her main arguments, on its own, is pretty self-evident.
On the topic of "strong female characters," Greg Rucka wrote a post for io9 in 2011 that goes into more depth about his process and why it's important to write realistic characters, some of whom are women. And McDougall's other assertion, that we need to have more roles for women and more diverse roles for women in popular media, is something that many of us already accept as trivially true. At least, those of us who are in the audience for a blog post about "strong female characters."
I think the reason McDougall's essay is genuinely insightful is that she doesn't simply say, "be aware of the problem." She offers a suggestion as to why the problem exists and how to fix it. She takes two ideas that we'd otherwise just take for granted, and she explains how they feed into each other and how they result in a larger, more nuanced problem.
That, I believe, is what it's going to take to get genuine acknowledgement that a problem exists and earnest attempts to try and address it.
Ten Shocking Reasons Internet Lists Are A Bad Idea
I feel obliged to point out that I don't agree with all of McDougall's essay. I think that much of it veers dangerously close to the level of shallow, divisive list-making that qualifies as "pop feminism" on the internet.
When talking about Captain America, she laments that the character of Peggy Carter is one of the best in any of Marvel's comic book movies, but is still only one of exactly two women with speaking parts in the entire movie. That's fine, but then for some reason McDougall feels the need to argue against a straw-man suggesting that there were no women fighting in WWII. Would anyone really ever make that claim, anyone worth listening to, anyway? The more reasonable counter-argument is that of course there were women in WWII, but few women in WWII comic books, which had little if anything to do with reality. And Captain America was obviously, shamelessly an homage to the feel of pulp WWII comics.
McDougall also complains that the character is depicted as over-the-top and cartoonish for shooting at Captain America out of jealousy. Again, though: comic book. Unlike, for example, X-Men or Iron Man or even The Avengers, I never once got the sense that Captain America was going for anything other than over-the-top and cartoonish.
She acknowledges that the two problems are related, though. And while I don't agree with either of her observations, I think her conclusion is dead-on: any problems with Carter's character are magnified because Carter is having to represent her entire gender.
Later on, I think McDougall falls into the trap of feminism-as-listicle, which treats quantity and quality as interchangeable. She shows three movie posters (and two movie trailers) of male-dominated casts with a lone female character, and concludes that the ladies are there to provide just enough of a feminine presence that we don't think to object.
The problem is that the way each of those female characters is actually portrayed in each movie varies wildly. In fact, it's exactly the kind of variety that she spends the rest of the essay claiming should be our goal. I've seen more trailers for Elysium than the one McDougall links to, and they all have Jodie Foster delivering lines, although they're the same two-dimensional, mustache-twirling lines of any action movie villain. In Pacific Rim, Mako's silence isn't a stereotype of the deferential woman, but a stereotype of the reserved Japanese soldier — the idea that there's a tumult of emotions roiling under her quiet exterior is key to her entire storyline, such as it is. In Inception, Ellen Page's character doesn't represent femininity so much as youth; it's Marion Cotillard doing all the lifting as the movie's Lone Female Presence. (Which isn't to defend Inception as not being guilty of the problem, just that the poster is a terrible example of it).
Most dramatically, the same list includes The Avengers and The Smurfs. In The Avengers, Black Widow is given as much screen time as any of the "powered" characters, and she's given several scenes dedicated to depicting her as strong, sexy, smart, and human. In The Smurfs, Smurfette is quite literally the prototypical example of "The Girl One."
You could say a lot about the depiction of women in general and Black Widow in particular in The Avengers and its marketing. But to include it in a list with The Smurfs — or any of the other movies listed, for that matter — is easily dismissible, and it threatens to derail the entire argument. It reduces an argument about the quality of female characters to one simply of quantity.
Babies, Bathwater, and "THIS."
The reason I'm pointing out my objections to the essay is because of all the times I've been forwarded a link to an article, and been left wondering how much of it I'm supposed to agree with, exactly. It seems like it's impossible for any progressive issue, particularly feminism, to make it through the internet without having something objectionable attached to it.
The formula, as far as I can make out, is to start with a premise that's so trivially true that your audience couldn't possibly disagree. And then include as much offensive stuff in the rest of the piece as you can get away with.
So you end up with a blog post that asserts that we should never make assumptions about a woman's capabilities, and then says that my white male privilege means I didn't have to work very hard to get what I have. Or one that asserts how harmful it is when we trivialize sexual assault, and then goes on to say that all men think like rapists. Or one that decries the misogynistic excesses of a TV series, then speculates that it could be because one of the series creators is gay, and a lot of gay men hate women. Or one that talks about how comedians need to demonstrate respect for and sensitivity to their audiences, and then makes a sophomoric interpretation of human interaction as being about people coming from differing "positions of power." Or one that purports to be about equality but reveals itself to actually be about reparations.
Every one is a case of a good idea buried under a bunch of bullshit. Fighting sexism with more sexism, racism with more racism, and doing everything possible to keep the discussion in terms of Us vs Them instead of basic human empathy. It's polarizing, because it's not designed to actually encourage discussion. It's designed to encourage page views. You're not supposed to say, "I agree with the premise but disagree with these points." You're supposed to just link to the article and say "THIS."
And it's self-perpetuating. Because writers are too eager to address the low-hanging fruit — the morons and troglodytes who spew out bile, harassment, and dismissive condescension — wasting time talking to the ones who've already demonstrated that they're unwilling to listen, and ignoring those of us who are engaged. I'm not asking for preaching to the choir, but maybe at least opening the discussion to the choir. As it is, it's a lot of preaching to the atheists while reminding the choir to check their privilege.
As a chubby guy who remained closeted until his early 30s largely because he could never identify with any of the gay men depicted in popular media, I've been told that I don't understand what it's like to have negative body image, or how important it is to have a diverse representation in the media. After seeing the same thing over and over again, getting more scattershot and offensive with each go-round, I've pretty much completely removed myself from caring about discussions of gender politics on the internet. There are too many people willingly behaving like characters in a John Irving novel, who were supposed to be over-the-top caricatures 40 years ago.
For the past six or seven years, at least once a year, I've read another piece from a writer lamenting that discussions of feminism and equality are invariably cyclical. Years ago — far too long ago for me to be able to find a link — I saw a cartoon that was meant to show "What Discussions of Women's Rights on the Internet Are Like." And it was one panel with a woman making some vague but reasonable argument, followed by a panel with a bunch of male idiots saying easily-dismissible bullshit. Kind of like Plato's Dialogues, if one of the participants was a drooling moron.
Of course you're going to keep making the same arguments, as long as you keep arguing to the lowest common denominator instead of addressing the more reasonable counter-points.
I'm sometimesoften dense about these things; in the past I've objected to the idea that characters be arbitrarily made female. And I still object to that idea. But then, it's all in the wording: who's to say what's "arbitrary?" As was pointed out to me in the comments, the flaw was that I was still assuming that characters are male by default.
If you start with the assumption that characters in games are typically male, and that the way you get female characters is by removing a rib, adding a beauty mark and a bow, and removing half her costume, then it's always going to seem as if making female characters is some arbitrary requirement to fulfill some quota. It was never conscious on my part; that's how institutionalized sexism works.
That's why I think McDougall's essay is so interesting: she doesn't just sermonize about two ideas that most of us would accept as trivially true, "Invariably 'strong' female characters are unrealistic" and "Women are under-represented in media", and present them as separate concepts, that we should just accept as dogma. She explains how one feeds into the other. Maybe it's obvious to other people, but it was kind of a new concept to me.
If you've got a male-dominated cast with only one woman, that woman has to be strong. She's got to represent her entire gender on her own. None of your male characters are going to be interpreted as representative of all men, because their gender isn't the aspect that distinguishes them.
McDougall says that she wants to see the ratio of male to female characters in film to go from its current level of 3:1 down to a more realistic level of 1:1. I still say that numbers don't tell the whole story; one Black Widow is worth at least three Hawkeyes, and to me, Maria Hill was much more interesting than Nick Fury was.
But if anybody complains that it's a case of instituting a quota, you can ask why their characters are so fragile that the whole story falls apart if the demographics are the same as that of the real world. Seeing as how women are over 50% of the population, it seems that you have to present a good argument to justify their exclusion, not their inclusion.
And if anybody complains that making a demand over something as arbitrary as gender is violating the creative process, you can remind them about the Strong Female Character. And point out that there's nothing creative about spending years spitting out minor variations on Emma Peel that still aren't as good as the original.
I still don't believe that doing a simple gender-swap accomplishes much of anything — but then, look at Ripley in Alien. I said before that her character in Aliens was a lot stronger because they incorporated her being a woman into the story. I still think that's true, but it doesn't diminish the significance of Alien, having a female character who's taking command of the situation instead of just being a victim.
And if anybody still doesn't get how all these things are inter-related, and why better representation for women in the media is important, ask him to imagine a world in which every single male character in every movie and TV show is Tom Cruise's character from Mission: Impossible. If he claims he's not horrified by the thought, he's not being honest.
Author ChuckPosted on August 19, 2013 Categories Arts & Entertainment, The Internet
2 thoughts on "Ms. Representation"
Matthew Dessem says:
I really liked her distinction between "strong" characters and characters with agency, which is a real problem (and for what it's worth, is more of a problem in movies than in games, because whatever else you can say about Lara Croft, she's always had agency.) Also hadn't thought much about the ways tokenism makes it nearly impossible to have your one female character be interesting.
As far as quantity vs. quality goes, one thing that occurs to me is that if you fix the quantity problem, the quality problem will start to take care of itself. At least in the case of ensembles and genre films–the lack of female protagonists is more complicated (although as you noted, making Ripley female undoubtedly improved Alien, even if she's a Strong Female Character). Make half of your superhero team female, and guess what: your story isn't going to work if half of the team are SFCs with nothing else interesting about them. Superhero films are maybe not the best example, because they're also full of Strong Male Characters, but, I don't know, think about putting a quota on, say, a heist film. Or really any ensemble cast–didn't the relationship between Bond and M become more interesting when they arbitrarily gave the role to Judi Dench? (Imagine Skyfall with Bernard Lee.)
Chuck Jordan says:
Yeah, I'm assuming that she was talking about genre movies & blockbusters, because romantic comedies and Tyler Perry's movies are closer to a balanced ratio. (Even with Perry playing a woman).
That's actually a good point that I forgot to make: Superhero movies are both male-heavy and tend to have shallow characterizations. Even if you did get a 1:1 ratio of men to women, they're not going to be super interesting female characters.
The other thing about that blog post, but not the essay itself, is that they used a photo of Buffy, who's become pretty much shorthand for "Strong Female Character." But while the movie was all about just taking that premise and subverting it, the TV series did everything it could to avoid the Strong Female Character syndrome.
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text:
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date = "2020-04-29T18:26:19+01:00"
title = "Capture The Flag"
summary = "Capture The Flag notes"
+++

# 1. Enumerate for services

1. Get open ports.
```
nmap -F <target>
```
  * If http server, find php files `gobuster -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirbuster/directory-list-2.3-medium.txt -u http://<target> -x php`

2. Use `searchsploit` to find known exploits.