Fair enough. However, don't forget the boobytrap failsafe self-destruct device in the old-woman-handcuff-briefcase combo.
That way, the next time Diebold finds itself short 16,000-odd votes, they can
hijack the internet vote-transmission session
re-route the vote-reporting calls (a la Las Vegas escort service phone scam)
use coat hangers to fish vote CDs out of mailboxes ...all without serious risk of detection.
However, where it gets really interesting is when you start seeing a wave of exploding or spontaneously-combusting little old lady vote couriers all over town (a la Worms 2) because some idiot tried to grab their handbag stuffed full of vote audit trail receipts.
I remeber how hot the Twin Towers burned from the Jet Fuel of the airplanes. Wouldn't it be the same if a Taero get's in an accident on the ground?
Yeah, but would you really mind this happening to the average SUV driver? Every time some inconsiderate sonofabitch in his Grand Suburban TransCountryExplorer pieceashit cuts in front of me, I wish that those NBC flammability trials with bottle rockets strapped to a truck's fuel tanks hadn't been rigged...
I can do this during work. It's great working in a large investment bank in a city known for beautiful (albeit cold) women who like to dress attractively. Especially if the company has loads and loads of open meeting areas and cafeterias and windows to offices, and the local culture doesn't frown so much on looking at pretty girls as back home in California:-)
Here's a thought; I'm a huge fan of BF1942 (it's a bit slower-paced than most FPS, and I like the "real" weapons.) EA Games have brought out a number of pretty cool add-ons for it (Secret Weapons, Road to Rome, etc.) as well as a number of really neat maps with new weapons and whatnot.
Does this count, or are people religiously opposed to something being called a "mod" if it comes out of the same shop that brought out the game in the first place?
No, it's probably all that runoff toxic shit, or raw sewage/brown goldfish, or residual heat from floating mafiosi that's been keeping it from melting.
Quite probable that there's a lack of understanding.
However, here (Switzerland) we've noticed a _massive_ recession of glaciers over the last 50 years. Like as in >100 meters for a few. Several inhabited areas are pretty seriously threatened, because the build-up of melted glacier water is being held back by the masses of rocks and other crap that glaciers tend to accumulate; a lot of geologists think that there's a pretty heavy danger of huge rockslides when water pressure exceeds the buildup's ability to hold it back. We've had several of these in recent years.
There have also been a number of rock avalances in the alps, when the ice that's been holding large chunks of stuff in place for centuries has melted.
Personally, I tend to believe panicky reports that a lot of lower-lying ski resorts won't have snow by 2030; I've noticed a pretty constant reduction in snow each year since as far back as I can recall (~1980) and that's only about 20 years.
Maybe it's not understood, but _something_ is happening, and it's not all those cows farting.
Let me give a counterpoint to this. I'm putting together an incident response team for a major bank here--we deal with vulnerabilities, security-related system outages, and investigations. I also have a fairly wide background in architecture design and implementation, and systems engineering and administration. So, having gotten that out of the way, a few statements. Flame away, but these are generalizations, based on opinion and experience:
Windows boxes are usually a lot more straightforward up front. This is a fact. No amount of whingeing about webmin, apt-get/ports and whatnot will change this (although FreeBSD ports just rock.) To install, you put a CD into a drive and click some buttons.
The real problems are twofold. First, as complexity rises (we're talking 30,000+ workstations here plus god-knows-how-many Windows servers) your ability to keep an overview of things like patch deployment, user rights, software versions, etc. becomes a nightmarish time-sucker. MS have made some steps in the right direction with things like SUS; nonetheless, I've always found software update implementations as well as user rights tracking, among many things, to be horrendously kludgey in pure Windows environments. I realize that a lot of this is usually due to crappy procedures; nonetheless, the common answer to something like a fucked-up desktop PC is to have it collected and re-installed. Great.
The second is, and I'm sorry to say this, security. It is absolutely true that I cannot just "jump in" and fix code in, say, a Linux kernel, when a hole is discovered. Just based on experience, though, I have yet to see a single worm hit a Solaris (yes yes I know, open source) or Linux environment with anything approaching the ferocity of what we've seen in the Windows world.
The last point I keep making is one that everyone knows, but management do an ostrich (stick yer head in the sand, pretend nothing's happening) anyway; that is, in a complicated IT environment (managers, listen up) you simply do not get around hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money. It is illusory to assume that simply because your software installs at the push of a button, your IT is stable and reliable.
So, while the population is starving due to castrophic economic policies, corrupt leadership and an idiotic foreign policy, they will no longer have to play games with the rest of the world, trading nuclear weapons for food.
I'd love to have a look at what pops up in their mail logs:
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp) To: president@whitehouse.gov (George) CC: vice-president@whitehouse.gov (Dick) Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:50 Subject: North Korea Secure Email!!!11 ------------ Dear Capitalist stooge George:
Invincible North Korean Peoples' Electronic Industry allow secure email discourse with running-dog American lackey. Welcome to glorious socialist revolution communication network! Great Korean Peoples' Hacker Team crush you Network like grape. All you base are belong to us! Hahahaha!
Love,
-Dear Leader
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp) To: orders@pizzahut.com Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:53 Subject: our order ------------ We take 50,000,000 super-size meat-lover special. Hold anchovy. Deliver President Palace, Pyongyang, Illustrious Democratic Peoples Republic North Korea.
Regard,
-Dear Leader
PS: Send Britney.
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp) To: tracy1827@hotmail.com (Peter Green Kabila Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:58 Subject: Re: YOUR STRICT CONFIDENCE REQUESTE ------------ Dear Mr. Kabila Great Democratic People Republic of North Korea very interest in confidential transact. Please send more info.
Regard,
-Dear Leader
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp) To: president@whitehouse.gov Date: Dec. 2, 2003 19:05 Subject: You Warheads
Well, Alan Greenspan says that copying treasure leads to too much treasure, which results in treasure inflation, which means treasure is worth a lot less, putting all the nice people working in the treasure hoarding industry out of business!
Music is exactly the same. When you keep duplicating it, it no longer has the precious value of a unique piece of art, leading to lack of appreciation for it. And this, kids, is exactly the reason why I want to KICK THE SHIT OUT OF THE NEXT F)_@*$!# DEPARTMENT STORE ELEVATOR PLAYING *!@#!ING BOY BAND CRAP.
So remember kids. Don't duplicate that Britney Spears CD. Instead, lock it up in the cellar, where it'll be safe from the pirates.
Total Annihilation from Cavedog took a fairly cool approach to the whole resources thing--making them inexhaustible. It also nicely let you not just put units on hold, but actually slow down production depending on how many you built at the same time.
It didn't fix the problem with harvest-build-attack being sort of rote-ish, but for those of us who like a quick murderous game, it's a nice approach. Even when I got crushed online (always), it at least took my opponents several minutes of gradually rolling carnage through the solid curtain of fire from my defense guns to get through to my base and wipe me out.
The major problem I have with these games is the impression I have that they put too much emphasis on 1v1 combat. There doesn't seem to be enough incentive for everyone to go after everyone; all the online games I've played have resulted in the two strongest players eliminating everyone else, and then going at it for a few minutes. Call me obsessive, but I rather enjoy having either teams or some way for weaker players to survive. But then again, I enjoy the actual battle rather than the resolution of the game.
To be honest, I also think that a lot of the weaknesses in gameplay in FPS, unlike with many-multiplayer battle games like BF1942, is that they are best played among friends.
Great. It's fricken neoliberals like you who want nothing more than to see good ole American beverage manufacturing jobs disappear, outsourced to some cheap soulless outer-space assembly line mega-breweries.
At least now I start understanding why everyone and their mom is so keen on sending people into orbit these days.
No telling the sort of danger we'll face, with a bunch of hammered austronauts tear-assing around the space lanes. "Welcome aboard the USS Bob & Doug McKenzie"...
Here's a throughly convoluted but informative unix timeline.
Here is Microsoft's history of Windows; 1983 seems a bit suspect as the year of Windows' announcement. However, if you take the dates when either system first became fairly usable to actually work on, the picture becomes a bit clearer. And as for at least semi-reliably handling load-intensive server tasks, well, let's not even go there...
The UNIX operating system was built with security in mind and has one advantage--there are far, far more experienced users, programmers and administrators who seek to better and strengthen the OS from malicious attacks than there are crackers experienced enough to attempt to compromise it.
Not to nitpick, but it wasn't built with security in mind at all--it evolved that way. Remember that Unix has had a pretty ambivalent, colored history, and has almost 15 years head-start on Windows. And the Morris worm proved pretty conclusively that Unix needed a lot of work before being considered "secure":)
That said, your point about the administrators and users mainly holds.
This is true, as with any tool. Frankly, I've encountered far more blubbering and failure to GET TO THE POINT on the phone than I have in real life, far more evasion and equivocation on email than in IRC. What was unique about my situation is that this was a "core" work application; each user had it installed (ca. 80,000) and most used it regularly. This is extremely conducive to learning how to communicate effectively.
First, you assume that there _was_ a law. This is pre-Sarbanes/Oxley and friends, which established extremely strict logging criteria for any company listed on a US exchange. Additionally, I worked one of this company's Swiss offices; don't assume that all countries have similar reporting laws to the US (although since Sarbanes-Oxley, most international firms are compelled to meet US requirements.)
Second, note that I didn't say "there was no paper trail." Rather, there was less fear of leaving one--IRC messages can be logged just as easily as mail if the situation demands. It's purely psychological; if you use IM at work, compare the format of info you give to people via mail to that you send via IM.
I had an 18 month project at a major international investment bank, helping them put together their firewall/network security team.
They had a purely internal IRC backbone; officially, the company used Interchange chat (piece of crap), but at the time, all IRC clients could connect. I found this to be the most amazing productivity tool I've ever seen.
A web page allowed "registration" of channels and bots, although generally all the usual IRC flexibility was kept (dynamic channel creation, 1-1 chat, etc.) Users' workstation logins were automatically used as chat logins by the IC clients; their only other real additional use was quick file uploads, which generated a link from the channel bot (assuming there was one) that was posted to the whole channel.
Loads of people got in touch with us that way, to ask us about architecture or production question; it was great, as it took away the slowness, asynchronous nature ("me too!") and fear of leaving a paper trail (hence formality) of email, and allowed far better conferencing with larger groups of people than the phone. I've noticed that people also tend to be more succinct and able to express themselves in quick bursts of text--if there was any problem, you could always pick up the phone on the side.
The thing was also good for quickly sending (DCC) files around, production and support teams scripted massive numbers of bots to reply to a wide number of queries (phone, dns, system/application status), and it allowed people to keep an eye on technical issues that arose which might affect them, without having to bother with the inflexibility of regular lines of reporting (clueless helpdesk people.)
The system was slated to die, to be replaced by a "proprietary" chat network, which makes me sad. I've never seen anything so eminently usable for technical work in a large organization.
It's the tourists, dammit! The nasal-voiced, chubby-kneed, bermuda-shorted, fanny-pack (yeah, ha ha.) wearing Ma & Pa Jones from Wichita and their screaming spoiled offspring.
Then again, it is equally fun to judge the English on the average Brit lager-tourist in Prague, or ze Chermans abroad who do EVERYZING BETTER AT HOME!
I don't recall seeing any training materials on how to utilize my Combat Lifesaver (CLS) bag as a weapon
I'll ask my grandma to offer training courses for the military; you're obviously unfamiliar with the kind of carnage a ladies' handbag can cause when used to beat a mugger over the head.
I've yet to see a laptop equipped with any kind of firearm
Colt.45. Duct Tape. 'Nuf said. Careful about RSI, though.
...would hold up to the recoil of a Ma Deuce.50 cal
No, but you could recoup some of the costs by selling advertising space on them. Let's face it, no amount of camouflage is going to do a lot of good when a rolling trash can comes clanking around your position.
I believe the paedophile hysteria has been going on in the UK for just as long, whipped up by various Murdoch paper.
A few years ago, the Sun (I seem to recall) published photos of a number of "known" paedophiles; at the same general time, a paediatrician had her life threatened several times.
When will people understand that stupidity is not an American monopoly...
That's not uncommon at all (although yes, I agree with your likely reaction, that it is questionable.) A lot of banks have client advisors who visit customers, roaming users, etc. In fact, although this doesn't really apply to Wells Fargo, a lot of international private banks maintain some extremely sensitive information on laptops.
The logic behind this is that, if Mr. Rockefeller wants to look at his accounts, Mr. Rockefeller does not stand in line at a counter; he is either picked up at the airport and given whiskey and cigars in your plush office while your assistant takes his wife shopping on Bahnhofstrasse, or you fly to Mr. Rockefeller's mountain ranch to discuss his finances with him and his accountants.
A lot of the tech you see for securing and obfuscating data on laptops (biometric ID, chipcards, boot sector HD encryption, etc.) comes out of this sort of requirement--it's a big reason why the UK's plan to install 'data suckers' at airport customs, which would vacuum all info off your hard drive to look for things like kiddie porn, died a very silent and quick death when it was proposed.
So, note that it's not mentioned what additional security mechanisms actually exist on their machines, although given Wells Fargo's typical customer demographic (not many Mr. Rockefellers, I assume) I wouldn't bet too much money on them having put too much thought into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. However, don't forget the boobytrap failsafe self-destruct device in the old-woman-handcuff-briefcase combo.
That way, the next time Diebold finds itself short 16,000-odd votes, they can
hijack the internet vote-transmission session
re-route the vote-reporting calls (a la Las Vegas escort service phone scam)
use coat hangers to fish vote CDs out of mailboxes
...all without serious risk of detection.
However, where it gets really interesting is when you start seeing a wave of exploding or spontaneously-combusting little old lady vote couriers all over town (a la Worms 2) because some idiot tried to grab their handbag stuffed full of vote audit trail receipts.
Yeah, but would you really mind this happening to the average SUV driver? Every time some inconsiderate sonofabitch in his Grand Suburban TransCountryExplorer pieceashit cuts in front of me, I wish that those NBC flammability trials with bottle rockets strapped to a truck's fuel tanks hadn't been rigged...
I can do this during work. It's great working in a large investment bank in a city known for beautiful (albeit cold) women who like to dress attractively. Especially if the company has loads and loads of open meeting areas and cafeterias and windows to offices, and the local culture doesn't frown so much on looking at pretty girls as back home in California
Here's a thought; I'm a huge fan of BF1942 (it's a bit slower-paced than most FPS, and I like the "real" weapons.) EA Games have brought out a number of pretty cool add-ons for it (Secret Weapons, Road to Rome, etc.) as well as a number of really neat maps with new weapons and whatnot.
Does this count, or are people religiously opposed to something being called a "mod" if it comes out of the same shop that brought out the game in the first place?
No, it's probably all that runoff toxic shit, or raw sewage/brown goldfish, or residual heat from floating mafiosi that's been keeping it from melting.
Quite probable that there's a lack of understanding.
However, here (Switzerland) we've noticed a _massive_ recession of glaciers over the last 50 years. Like as in >100 meters for a few. Several inhabited areas are pretty seriously threatened, because the build-up of melted glacier water is being held back by the masses of rocks and other crap that glaciers tend to accumulate; a lot of geologists think that there's a pretty heavy danger of huge rockslides when water pressure exceeds the buildup's ability to hold it back. We've had several of these in recent years.
There have also been a number of rock avalances in the alps, when the ice that's been holding large chunks of stuff in place for centuries has melted.
Personally, I tend to believe panicky reports that a lot of lower-lying ski resorts won't have snow by 2030; I've noticed a pretty constant reduction in snow each year since as far back as I can recall (~1980) and that's only about 20 years.
Maybe it's not understood, but _something_ is happening, and it's not all those cows farting.
My girlfriend's done one better, not being blonde--affecting their positions by _not_ looking at them. It's a great skirt, too.
Good points, well stated, mod parent up pls.
Let me give a counterpoint to this. I'm putting together an incident response team for a major bank here--we deal with vulnerabilities, security-related system outages, and investigations. I also have a fairly wide background in architecture design and implementation, and systems engineering and administration. So, having gotten that out of the way, a few statements. Flame away, but these are generalizations, based on opinion and experience:
Windows boxes are usually a lot more straightforward up front. This is a fact. No amount of whingeing about webmin, apt-get/ports and whatnot will change this (although FreeBSD ports just rock.) To install, you put a CD into a drive and click some buttons.
The real problems are twofold. First, as complexity rises (we're talking 30,000+ workstations here plus god-knows-how-many Windows servers) your ability to keep an overview of things like patch deployment, user rights, software versions, etc. becomes a nightmarish time-sucker. MS have made some steps in the right direction with things like SUS; nonetheless, I've always found software update implementations as well as user rights tracking, among many things, to be horrendously kludgey in pure Windows environments. I realize that a lot of this is usually due to crappy procedures; nonetheless, the common answer to something like a fucked-up desktop PC is to have it collected and re-installed. Great.
The second is, and I'm sorry to say this, security. It is absolutely true that I cannot just "jump in" and fix code in, say, a Linux kernel, when a hole is discovered. Just based on experience, though, I have yet to see a single worm hit a Solaris (yes yes I know, open source) or Linux environment with anything approaching the ferocity of what we've seen in the Windows world.
The last point I keep making is one that everyone knows, but management do an ostrich (stick yer head in the sand, pretend nothing's happening) anyway; that is, in a complicated IT environment (managers, listen up) you simply do not get around hiring a bunch of really smart people and paying them a lot of money. It is illusory to assume that simply because your software installs at the push of a button, your IT is stable and reliable.
So, while the population is starving due to castrophic economic policies, corrupt leadership and an idiotic foreign policy, they will no longer have to play games with the rest of the world, trading nuclear weapons for food.
I'd love to have a look at what pops up in their mail logs:
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp)
To: president@whitehouse.gov (George)
CC: vice-president@whitehouse.gov (Dick)
Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:50
Subject: North Korea Secure Email!!!11
------------
Dear Capitalist stooge George:
Invincible North Korean Peoples' Electronic Industry allow secure email discourse with running-dog American lackey. Welcome to glorious socialist revolution communication network! Great Korean Peoples' Hacker Team crush you Network like grape. All you base are belong to us! Hahahaha!
Love,
-Dear Leader
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp)
To: orders@pizzahut.com
Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:53
Subject: our order
------------
We take 50,000,000 super-size meat-lover special. Hold anchovy. Deliver President Palace, Pyongyang, Illustrious Democratic Peoples Republic North Korea.
Regard,
-Dear Leader
PS: Send Britney.
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp)
To: tracy1827@hotmail.com (Peter Green Kabila
Date: Dec. 2, 2003 18:58
Subject: Re: YOUR STRICT CONFIDENCE REQUESTE
------------
Dear Mr. Kabila
Great Democratic People Republic of North Korea very interest in confidential transact. Please send more info.
Regard,
-Dear Leader
From: Dear Leader (Kim.Jong-Il@securemail.gov.kp)
To: president@whitehouse.gov
Date: Dec. 2, 2003 19:05
Subject: You Warheads
------------
Dear Ali,
Yuo nuklear weapon warhead ready. Freighter leave for Pakistan tomorrow. Please expediting payment expeditiously.
Cheers,
-Dear Leader
^D^C^C^C cancel
To: ali@alqaida.org
SHIT WRONG ADDRESSING
Well, Alan Greenspan says that copying treasure leads to too much treasure, which results in treasure inflation, which means treasure is worth a lot less, putting all the nice people working in the treasure hoarding industry out of business!
Music is exactly the same. When you keep duplicating it, it no longer has the precious value of a unique piece of art, leading to lack of appreciation for it. And this, kids, is exactly the reason why I want to KICK THE SHIT OUT OF THE NEXT F)_@*$!# DEPARTMENT STORE ELEVATOR PLAYING *!@#!ING BOY BAND CRAP.
So remember kids. Don't duplicate that Britney Spears CD. Instead, lock it up in the cellar, where it'll be safe from the pirates.
Won't somebody think of the pirates?
Total Annihilation from Cavedog took a fairly cool approach to the whole resources thing--making them inexhaustible. It also nicely let you not just put units on hold, but actually slow down production depending on how many you built at the same time.
It didn't fix the problem with harvest-build-attack being sort of rote-ish, but for those of us who like a quick murderous game, it's a nice approach. Even when I got crushed online (always), it at least took my opponents several minutes of gradually rolling carnage through the solid curtain of fire from my defense guns to get through to my base and wipe me out.
The major problem I have with these games is the impression I have that they put too much emphasis on 1v1 combat. There doesn't seem to be enough incentive for everyone to go after everyone; all the online games I've played have resulted in the two strongest players eliminating everyone else, and then going at it for a few minutes. Call me obsessive, but I rather enjoy having either teams or some way for weaker players to survive. But then again, I enjoy the actual battle rather than the resolution of the game.
To be honest, I also think that a lot of the weaknesses in gameplay in FPS, unlike with many-multiplayer battle games like BF1942, is that they are best played among friends.
Great. It's fricken neoliberals like you who want nothing more than to see good ole American beverage manufacturing jobs disappear, outsourced to some cheap soulless outer-space assembly line mega-breweries.
At least now I start understanding why everyone and their mom is so keen on sending people into orbit these days.
No telling the sort of danger we'll face, with a bunch of hammered austronauts tear-assing around the space lanes. "Welcome aboard the USS Bob & Doug McKenzie"...
Thoroughly offtopic, but in response to above:
Here's a throughly convoluted but informative unix timeline.
Here is Microsoft's history of Windows; 1983 seems a bit suspect as the year of Windows' announcement. However, if you take the dates when either system first became fairly usable to actually work on, the picture becomes a bit clearer. And as for at least semi-reliably handling load-intensive server tasks, well, let's not even go there...
Not to nitpick, but it wasn't built with security in mind at all--it evolved that way. Remember that Unix has had a pretty ambivalent, colored history, and has almost 15 years head-start on Windows. And the Morris worm proved pretty conclusively that Unix needed a lot of work before being considered "secure"
That said, your point about the administrators and users mainly holds.
This is true, as with any tool. Frankly, I've encountered far more blubbering and failure to GET TO THE POINT on the phone than I have in real life, far more evasion and equivocation on email than in IRC. What was unique about my situation is that this was a "core" work application; each user had it installed (ca. 80,000) and most used it regularly. This is extremely conducive to learning how to communicate effectively.
First, you assume that there _was_ a law. This is pre-Sarbanes/Oxley and friends, which established extremely strict logging criteria for any company listed on a US exchange. Additionally, I worked one of this company's Swiss offices; don't assume that all countries have similar reporting laws to the US (although since Sarbanes-Oxley, most international firms are compelled to meet US requirements.)
Second, note that I didn't say "there was no paper trail." Rather, there was less fear of leaving one--IRC messages can be logged just as easily as mail if the situation demands. It's purely psychological; if you use IM at work, compare the format of info you give to people via mail to that you send via IM.
Third, not to nitpick, but "paper trail"?
Think before you send.
I had an 18 month project at a major international investment bank, helping them put together their firewall/network security team.
They had a purely internal IRC backbone; officially, the company used Interchange chat (piece of crap), but at the time, all IRC clients could connect. I found this to be the most amazing productivity tool I've ever seen.
A web page allowed "registration" of channels and bots, although generally all the usual IRC flexibility was kept (dynamic channel creation, 1-1 chat, etc.) Users' workstation logins were automatically used as chat logins by the IC clients; their only other real additional use was quick file uploads, which generated a link from the channel bot (assuming there was one) that was posted to the whole channel.
Loads of people got in touch with us that way, to ask us about architecture or production question; it was great, as it took away the slowness, asynchronous nature ("me too!") and fear of leaving a paper trail (hence formality) of email, and allowed far better conferencing with larger groups of people than the phone. I've noticed that people also tend to be more succinct and able to express themselves in quick bursts of text--if there was any problem, you could always pick up the phone on the side.
The thing was also good for quickly sending (DCC) files around, production and support teams scripted massive numbers of bots to reply to a wide number of queries (phone, dns, system/application status), and it allowed people to keep an eye on technical issues that arose which might affect them, without having to bother with the inflexibility of regular lines of reporting (clueless helpdesk people.)
The system was slated to die, to be replaced by a "proprietary" chat network, which makes me sad. I've never seen anything so eminently usable for technical work in a large organization.
Not really. Cuba has a pretty hefty record of suppressing free speech, executing political dissidents, stifling democracy, and exporting civil war.
And just because the US (and other democracies) sometimes do these (albeit to lesser degrees) doesn't make Cuba any less worse.
It's the tourists, dammit! The nasal-voiced, chubby-kneed, bermuda-shorted, fanny-pack (yeah, ha ha.) wearing Ma & Pa Jones from Wichita and their screaming spoiled offspring.
Then again, it is equally fun to judge the English on the average Brit lager-tourist in Prague, or ze Chermans abroad who do EVERYZING BETTER AT HOME!
Sigh.
I'll ask my grandma to offer training courses for the military; you're obviously unfamiliar with the kind of carnage a ladies' handbag can cause when used to beat a mugger over the head.
Colt
Have a look at this.
I will defend my country against these clanking monstrosities the same way I protected earth from the Daleks;
stairs.
No, but you could recoup some of the costs by selling advertising space on them. Let's face it, no amount of camouflage is going to do a lot of good when a rolling trash can comes clanking around your position.
Hey, it keeps the kids out of trouble...
I believe the paedophile hysteria has been going on in the UK for just as long, whipped up by various Murdoch paper.
A few years ago, the Sun (I seem to recall) published photos of a number of "known" paedophiles; at the same general time, a paediatrician had her life threatened several times.
When will people understand that stupidity is not an American monopoly...
That's not uncommon at all (although yes, I agree with your likely reaction, that it is questionable.) A lot of banks have client advisors who visit customers, roaming users, etc. In fact, although this doesn't really apply to Wells Fargo, a lot of international private banks maintain some extremely sensitive information on laptops.
The logic behind this is that, if Mr. Rockefeller wants to look at his accounts, Mr. Rockefeller does not stand in line at a counter; he is either picked up at the airport and given whiskey and cigars in your plush office while your assistant takes his wife shopping on Bahnhofstrasse, or you fly to Mr. Rockefeller's mountain ranch to discuss his finances with him and his accountants.
A lot of the tech you see for securing and obfuscating data on laptops (biometric ID, chipcards, boot sector HD encryption, etc.) comes out of this sort of requirement--it's a big reason why the UK's plan to install 'data suckers' at airport customs, which would vacuum all info off your hard drive to look for things like kiddie porn, died a very silent and quick death when it was proposed.
So, note that it's not mentioned what additional security mechanisms actually exist on their machines, although given Wells Fargo's typical customer demographic (not many Mr. Rockefellers, I assume) I wouldn't bet too much money on them having put too much thought into it.