I stand against the Fairness Doctrine because I see it as an adjustment to free speech. I'm not claiming it blocks free speech but I see it as detrimental because it partially instructs broadcasters what to present. On top of that, I think it's a little shortsighted and subjective in how it aims to enforce each broadcaster to pose all sides of the issue.
Mainstream television & media companies aren't individuals, they're multinational conglomerates with vested interests and the ability to manipulate opinion to favour those interests. I see nothing wrong with holding them accountable to some standard of ethics and fairness. Britain has broadcasting standards for television & radio (but not newspapers) and it results in a higher quality of news and less partisan reporting. Even the virulently right wing Newscorp is relatively impartial with Sky News. That should be seen for what it is - a good thing. It doesn't stop news outlets having opinion pieces or interviewing politicians but generally it is done in a manner which is neutral or offers equal time for an opposing view. It also means politicians of all persuasions get a grilling from heavyweights like Paxman, Boulton etc. who'll put the boot in regardless of the person they're interviewing.
Depends on what you mean by bad. Colloidal silver is considered a "health drink" by some, however, imbibing too much or taking it too frequently causes your skin to turn a very noticeable grey. It is called argyria.
And the funny part is there is no evidence that it promotes health either. All it does is increase your effectiveness at blending in at zombie themed parties.
Even with the privacy statement update that means DB aren't technically lying anymore, it's still a very small and innocent-looking part, and they're still plastering terms like "secure", "SSL" and "AES 256 encrypted" all over the place. Misleading much? Yeah.
Well at the end of the day all my transactions to my bank are secure, encrypted etc. If I worked in the bank I can still look up someone's accounts and it's probably trivial to empty their account if I wished to. Of course if I did that I'd get sacked and then sent to jail. The punishment for looking at files in dropbox is likely less severe under law but I'd still get sacked and possibly sued if I harmed the company's reputation.
I think at a minimum Dropbox should encrypt their data on the backend and split out the roles so they're balanced and with oversight so that no one person gets to know enough to do serious harm to the service. That's the usual way to make a secure system.
Ideally however they should encrypt data stored in the backend with a key unique to the person. The only exception might be public content. It means someone in their db or production group can't idly snoop the files looking for porno pics, financial statements or anything else of personal value. Better yet would be to allow the user to control the key if they wished (but at the expense of inconvenience) so it's not even stored on the Dropbox servers.
The problem with Dropbox is the user id and password used to log into the service are also the credentials for obtaining the data. It's hard to see how they could implement server side encryption with the current model. After all, all they need to do is reset the password on the login id or extract whatever key is used to store the data on their servers.
It's a security tradeoff - convenience over encryption. Anyway if they publicly said it was impossible to see the data they need to get a bit of a slap. I hope what they meant is their employee's roles are separated in a way which means it's difficult for any one person to obtain all the pieces they need to view the data and even if they did they'd be detected by numerous database / network triggers and thrown out the door. Even so I think most technically or criminally minded people could just implement their own security on top, e.g. a very simple way is to store stuff in an encrypted zip or 7-zip file. I reckon most people don't bother though and that's where the problem lies.
Perhaps the answer for Dropbox is to implement a second level security where users can generate their own keys to secure certain folders. The keys remain in the user's possession on the client side. Data including file names & folder structure would be seamlessly scrambled / descrambled on the fly. It might preclude that folder from being accessible over the web interface and the user would be responsible for figuring out how to get the key onto every device they use, but it would allow Dropbox to say they support fully encrypted data that their staff really cannot see.
Nah, once you do something on the scale of the PSN hack, it doesn't matter if the service provider caves too easily or not, because everyone gives up information when they get served a warrant. And there will be warrants. They just had to make sure Amazon has no way to trace it back to them, and it seems very unlikely the perpetrators accessed Amazon's servers from anything other than a laptop bought at a yard sale with a fake MAC address on a public wi-fi hotspot.
You'd like to think so but hackers can do stupid things, or fail to cover their tracks sufficiently, e.g. can't wipe logs. It's also possible that if anonymous were responsibles that internal ructions over the attack could lead to the person being identified via an informant which in turn leads to a raid which in turn leads to information being found that way.
That should be pretty obvious. Qt Quick / QML are an abstraction over Qt. It's kind of hard to write an development suite that generates, compiles, edits UIs for Qt and Qt Quick when you deny yourself access to the APIs you need to do that. A development environment is atypical, and not representative of what most apps require. I'd add that change for change's sake is bad. Why rewrite a tool when it works already?
You may as well demand Oracle write Netbeans in JavaFX, or Microsoft write DevStudio in XAML.
QML is in QT 4.7. What QT 5 requires by way of graphics support is irrelevant. As for less programmer error - declarative code and minimal code within a proper garbage collected environment means less errors like point errors, memory leaks, casting errors etc.
It's not about buzzwords. Declarative UIs with bindings are a pattern proven to work elsewhere and it will be proven to work in QT. It doesn't mean it is right for every application but it will do for a lot of apps either in full or partially.
I'd rather having nothing. I'm using Qt to write C++ code not to be a Javascript monkey. Looks like the Qt are trying to make themselves irrelevant with statements like:
Actually QML is there to try to make it easier to develop apps by allowing people to declaratively define their UI and use minimal inline or external language for the binding. It's a perfectly sound practice, variants of which one can be found in various other GUIs, both in thick clients and web development. e.g. Flex,. XUL, XAML, JavaFX etc. For starters it means doing away with a vast amount of boilerplate, faster application prototyping, faster development build cycles, greater portability, less bugs caused by programmer error which ultimately leads to faster time to market and a higher quality product.
I realise if you're too set in your ways to adapt that it might be easier to denigrate such efforts than appreciate their uses, but that's your problem not the platform's.
Isn't this something you'd have to be using IE to catch?
Yes in this case however there is nothing inherently safe about NPAPI plugins. People scream and shout about ActiveX but the reality is if you allow a website to run any 3rd party native executable that you are putting yourself at additional risk. Plugins of all shades can be fed duff data, plugins have scriptable interfaces which may not be checking their values correctly and so on.
More important than the technology (ActiveX or NPAPI) is how the browser protects you from damage, first by limiting what plugins auto install, and by implementing a killswitch for plugins that can be exploited, and hopefully also zone based black and whitelists.
If Google opened up their search engine wouldn't it just allow developers to make clones?
Worse it would allow SEO's, spammers, keyword squatters, religious cults and assorted other scumbags to completely topload and ruin the search results rendering them useless. Google is in a constant battle with these people.
Besides, who wants a bunch of search engines which return the same (and now polluted) set of results. Shouldn't each search engine take it's own approach to the problem? Bing manages to return pretty good results.
I think it's more the case that the stack is likely to be broken / untested rather than non-existent. 3G tablets still need to do things like SMS, handover, signal strength and so forth so some measure of functionality is required and shared with phone handsets. It is easy to see how the phone specific functionality such as voice and all the gui, phone books etc. may have been completely broken though because for tablets it is dead code and therefore not the focus of development or bug fixing.
I think your remark about Nook is not too far off the mark but it's more likely they're worried about Amazon. Amazon has an app store (which is clearly in preparation for their own tablet), it has music, video and ebooks. It's easy to see how Google might imagine Amazon producing an Android tablet centred around Amazon services possibly with Bing or some other lesser engine filling out the rest. They might delay open sourcing Android 3.0 for a variety of contrived reasons to confound Amazon and hopefully get them to the negotiating table.
If Microsoft have been fairer with exchange rates (and I'll take your word for it), that is in spite of using points. Points are just another layer of opacity that is intended to confuse users and break the association between a purchase and how much it would cost in real world money.
It's easier to figure out if you're being ripped off if the price a service charges is in real world money. You can draw comparison to the price on Amazon, or even compare prices to another region. It's not easy at all to do when everything is in points. I expect the exchange rate can also be altered at any time without prior warning so your points are suddenly worth less in real terms. I also suspect that by buying points or some other scrip be it disney dollars, smurf berries, dubloons or any other kind of "fun" token that you are putting yourself in a worse situation from a legal standpoint if you did need to take things to the court for a refund.
Oh, Unity... I thought you were referring to OSX.:oP
OS X got a right slagging when it was released for dumping many of the spatial cues that were so carefully built into classic MacOS. Apple actually fixed many of the issues, but it's a wonder that Unity and Gnome 3 chose to put themselves in an even worse position than OS X when it released. It's all very well to introduce a new workflow, but some people are comfortable the way they were. If you don't provide a migration path to those people, you just make them angry and frustrated.
Unity and Gnome 3 are perfectly sound from a design standpoint, but they're lacking in their implementation. A task oriented desktop is a good thing, but it has to be introduced in a way that doesn't alienate existing users.
The stupid part is UIs have already been down this road when OS X launched and was panned for dumping many of the paradigms in MacOS classic. Apple listened to the criticism and reinstated many of them or produced analogs. It's too bad that Unity / Gnome 3 did think to learn and have done the same damned thing but to an even more extreme level. Of the two I'd say Unity is closest to the old way but things like the sometimes-unified-global-menu are frankly infuriating. Gnome 3 is radical and very pretty but seems to have forgotten about the entire spatial experience entirely.
Hopefully they WILL learn from their rough launches and work them out in an iteration or two.
I would also like to see the proof that has disproved creationism.
You can't prove a negative. One can no more disprove creationism than they can disprove the fairies living at the bottom of the garden.
Creationism is not a theory, it's an assertion. It does not attempt to predict anything. And it is not falsifiable. It's just a lame assertion. A cop out.
I'd add that evolution does not deal with how life started. That topic is known as abiogenisis.
Oh there have been plenty of examples of observed speciation. So many that talkorigins makes an entire FAQ about it. I'm not even sure what you mean independently verified except as some lame cop out.
For train travel between the UK & Ireland people can go from Rosslare to Fishguard / Holyhead. There are train stations next to the ferry terminals on either side so it's usually a matter of getting off the boat, walking several hundred yards onto the waiting train. I'm sure they could transport the entire train, but it's probably not worth it, gauge or not, to stick an entire train on a boat when they could be using the same space to haul 5 or 6 lorries.
Other routes don't have rail connections but usually you can travel by coach, e.g. Eurolines. You probably get turfed off the coach on one side and there is another waiting on the other side.
I realise there is inconvenience to getting unauthorized transactions on your card. I'm just putting it in perspective that it's a hassle not the end of the world. I realise that a million cards could be billed a dollar, but even if you don't report the fraud, there would be 999,999 others who potentially could. I think thieves who rip off credit card databases would be better off to break them down into bunches of 1000 and sell them on to other criminals for use.
If your credit card is used fraudulently you are not liable for the losses assuming you diligently alert the bank to them. But it does hilight that Visa / Mastercard could really help the situation here by prohibiting merchants from holding the credit card number in the first place.
When a person adds a new cc number to Amazon (for example), Amazon should submit it to Visa / Mastercard for validation and receive a signed hash in return. The hash is unique to the merchant and to the card and is used for transactions. If Amazon got hacked, all the hashes would be revoked and it wouldn't affect the credit card being used on other systems which would have different hashes. Amazon might still store the last 4 digits to print out on invoices, and maybe the cardname & expiration date, but not the number itself.
Second to that I wish Visa & Mastercard would make it simple for any card holder regardless of country or issuer to setup virtual numbers either 1-shot or limited in some way (e.g. max balance, expiration). Perhaps it could be done in a way similar to Paypal where you create a relationship between your card and a vendor. At checkout for the first time you are taken to the Visa / MC site to create the relationship and at any time thereafect you can disconnect. If the virtual number is stolen it's little use to thieves and it can be terminated too.
You deserve a refund if you are on PSN+, you deserve an apology and some form of compensation as goodwill for the time you lost playing online. You absolutely do not deserve a refund on the price of your console or your games. With the exception of purely online games, all the rest work perfectly well in offline mode until the service returns given that PSN is not mandatory for most games except for the likes of MAG.
Running up-to-date software would probably be a good start. The rest isn't rocket science either. Creating secure networks is not some esoteric art. I mean, plenty companies out there run their servers for years without having issues like that. Some even do it on *gasp* Windows servers! Maybe Sony needs to hire some of people who manage that?
I think it's reasonable to ask how the hell they got themselves into this mess, but it's not reasonable to suggest security is trivial or straightforward or anything else.
Your hypothetical company might be running for years without attack because no one has seriously bothered to attack them. They might be attacked because of some bad press, or a disgruntled employee, or for the lulz, or a day-0 exploit appears, or because some idiot leaves their laptop on a train, or because they add wifi or VPN to their network and don't lock it down properly, or they buy new hardware and don't secure it properly or because someone clicked on an attachment they shouldn't have.
What is it about PSN that warrants such a long downtime? Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up. It doesn't take two weeks!
Are you serious? There are 60 million PS3s that implicitly trust PSN. If the service is hacked then it's not hard to imagine the damage that could be done. Someone could remotely brick boxes, wipe trophies, spam users with messages, clear accounts or otherwise maliciously interfere with the service.
As for the time frame I suggest if you drew a network plan of PSN or a similarly sized service that you're probably looking at hundreds of servers for login, downloads, streaming downloads, web, messaging, databases, credit card processing, Home and so forth. Reviewing the security around each, and the code they run and ensuring appropriate changes and hardening the perimeter and setting up a DMZ and so forth is time consuming. Apparently they're even moving datacentres and doing a few other things on their existing roadmap.
Two weeks is ambitious to say the least. I expect when it does come back up it will be a skeleton service with services coming back on line after that.
there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Holy crap, of course there are experiments that demonstrate evolutionary theory. FFS just buy in some fruitflies or mice or feeder fish some other fast reproducing species and selectively breed them according to some observable trait. e.g. white and black mice, large & small fish etc. Split the animals into 3 groups - one where you select FOR the trait, one where you select AGAINST the trait, and a control group where you randomly select with no bias. After a few generations observe the results.
Evolution is eminently demonstrable in the lab, and in the wild, and in the fossil and in DNA. Suggesting that some "god/aliens/magic pixies did it" hypothesis is utterly ridiculous.
There is no doubt that taxes are intended to raise money and if the money dwindles it will be raised in other ways. It does not mean that in the course of raising tax it shouldn't be designed in a manner that punishes the undesirable behaviour (e.g. driving heavy, gas guzzling trucks) and rewards desirable behaviour (e.g. driving hybrids or smaller vehicles).
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I stand against the Fairness Doctrine because I see it as an adjustment to free speech. I'm not claiming it blocks free speech but I see it as detrimental because it partially instructs broadcasters what to present. On top of that, I think it's a little shortsighted and subjective in how it aims to enforce each broadcaster to pose all sides of the issue.
Mainstream television & media companies aren't individuals, they're multinational conglomerates with vested interests and the ability to manipulate opinion to favour those interests. I see nothing wrong with holding them accountable to some standard of ethics and fairness. Britain has broadcasting standards for television & radio (but not newspapers) and it results in a higher quality of news and less partisan reporting. Even the virulently right wing Newscorp is relatively impartial with Sky News. That should be seen for what it is - a good thing. It doesn't stop news outlets having opinion pieces or interviewing politicians but generally it is done in a manner which is neutral or offers equal time for an opposing view. It also means politicians of all persuasions get a grilling from heavyweights like Paxman, Boulton etc. who'll put the boot in regardless of the person they're interviewing.
Depends on what you mean by bad. Colloidal silver is considered a "health drink" by some, however, imbibing too much or taking it too frequently causes your skin to turn a very noticeable grey. It is called argyria.
And the funny part is there is no evidence that it promotes health either. All it does is increase your effectiveness at blending in at zombie themed parties.
Even with the privacy statement update that means DB aren't technically lying anymore, it's still a very small and innocent-looking part, and they're still plastering terms like "secure", "SSL" and "AES 256 encrypted" all over the place. Misleading much? Yeah.
Well at the end of the day all my transactions to my bank are secure, encrypted etc. If I worked in the bank I can still look up someone's accounts and it's probably trivial to empty their account if I wished to. Of course if I did that I'd get sacked and then sent to jail. The punishment for looking at files in dropbox is likely less severe under law but I'd still get sacked and possibly sued if I harmed the company's reputation.
I think at a minimum Dropbox should encrypt their data on the backend and split out the roles so they're balanced and with oversight so that no one person gets to know enough to do serious harm to the service. That's the usual way to make a secure system.
Ideally however they should encrypt data stored in the backend with a key unique to the person. The only exception might be public content. It means someone in their db or production group can't idly snoop the files looking for porno pics, financial statements or anything else of personal value. Better yet would be to allow the user to control the key if they wished (but at the expense of inconvenience) so it's not even stored on the Dropbox servers.
It's a security tradeoff - convenience over encryption. Anyway if they publicly said it was impossible to see the data they need to get a bit of a slap. I hope what they meant is their employee's roles are separated in a way which means it's difficult for any one person to obtain all the pieces they need to view the data and even if they did they'd be detected by numerous database / network triggers and thrown out the door. Even so I think most technically or criminally minded people could just implement their own security on top, e.g. a very simple way is to store stuff in an encrypted zip or 7-zip file. I reckon most people don't bother though and that's where the problem lies.
Perhaps the answer for Dropbox is to implement a second level security where users can generate their own keys to secure certain folders. The keys remain in the user's possession on the client side. Data including file names & folder structure would be seamlessly scrambled / descrambled on the fly. It might preclude that folder from being accessible over the web interface and the user would be responsible for figuring out how to get the key onto every device they use, but it would allow Dropbox to say they support fully encrypted data that their staff really cannot see.
Nah, once you do something on the scale of the PSN hack, it doesn't matter if the service provider caves too easily or not, because everyone gives up information when they get served a warrant. And there will be warrants. They just had to make sure Amazon has no way to trace it back to them, and it seems very unlikely the perpetrators accessed Amazon's servers from anything other than a laptop bought at a yard sale with a fake MAC address on a public wi-fi hotspot.
You'd like to think so but hackers can do stupid things, or fail to cover their tracks sufficiently, e.g. can't wipe logs. It's also possible that if anonymous were responsibles that internal ructions over the attack could lead to the person being identified via an informant which in turn leads to a raid which in turn leads to information being found that way.
You may as well demand Oracle write Netbeans in JavaFX, or Microsoft write DevStudio in XAML.
It's not about buzzwords. Declarative UIs with bindings are a pattern proven to work elsewhere and it will be proven to work in QT. It doesn't mean it is right for every application but it will do for a lot of apps either in full or partially.
I'd rather having nothing. I'm using Qt to write C++ code not to be a Javascript monkey. Looks like the Qt are trying to make themselves irrelevant with statements like:
Actually QML is there to try to make it easier to develop apps by allowing people to declaratively define their UI and use minimal inline or external language for the binding. It's a perfectly sound practice, variants of which one can be found in various other GUIs, both in thick clients and web development. e.g. Flex,. XUL, XAML, JavaFX etc. For starters it means doing away with a vast amount of boilerplate, faster application prototyping, faster development build cycles, greater portability, less bugs caused by programmer error which ultimately leads to faster time to market and a higher quality product.
I realise if you're too set in your ways to adapt that it might be easier to denigrate such efforts than appreciate their uses, but that's your problem not the platform's.
Isn't this something you'd have to be using IE to catch?
Yes in this case however there is nothing inherently safe about NPAPI plugins. People scream and shout about ActiveX but the reality is if you allow a website to run any 3rd party native executable that you are putting yourself at additional risk. Plugins of all shades can be fed duff data, plugins have scriptable interfaces which may not be checking their values correctly and so on.
More important than the technology (ActiveX or NPAPI) is how the browser protects you from damage, first by limiting what plugins auto install, and by implementing a killswitch for plugins that can be exploited, and hopefully also zone based black and whitelists.
If Google opened up their search engine wouldn't it just allow developers to make clones?
Worse it would allow SEO's, spammers, keyword squatters, religious cults and assorted other scumbags to completely topload and ruin the search results rendering them useless. Google is in a constant battle with these people.
Besides, who wants a bunch of search engines which return the same (and now polluted) set of results. Shouldn't each search engine take it's own approach to the problem? Bing manages to return pretty good results.
I think your remark about Nook is not too far off the mark but it's more likely they're worried about Amazon. Amazon has an app store (which is clearly in preparation for their own tablet), it has music, video and ebooks. It's easy to see how Google might imagine Amazon producing an Android tablet centred around Amazon services possibly with Bing or some other lesser engine filling out the rest. They might delay open sourcing Android 3.0 for a variety of contrived reasons to confound Amazon and hopefully get them to the negotiating table.
It's easier to figure out if you're being ripped off if the price a service charges is in real world money. You can draw comparison to the price on Amazon, or even compare prices to another region. It's not easy at all to do when everything is in points. I expect the exchange rate can also be altered at any time without prior warning so your points are suddenly worth less in real terms. I also suspect that by buying points or some other scrip be it disney dollars, smurf berries, dubloons or any other kind of "fun" token that you are putting yourself in a worse situation from a legal standpoint if you did need to take things to the court for a refund.
Oh, Unity... I thought you were referring to OSX. :oP
OS X got a right slagging when it was released for dumping many of the spatial cues that were so carefully built into classic MacOS. Apple actually fixed many of the issues, but it's a wonder that Unity and Gnome 3 chose to put themselves in an even worse position than OS X when it released. It's all very well to introduce a new workflow, but some people are comfortable the way they were. If you don't provide a migration path to those people, you just make them angry and frustrated.
You can count me out, with Unity/Gnome3.
Also I prefer Arch anyway :3
Unity and Gnome 3 are perfectly sound from a design standpoint, but they're lacking in their implementation. A task oriented desktop is a good thing, but it has to be introduced in a way that doesn't alienate existing users.
The stupid part is UIs have already been down this road when OS X launched and was panned for dumping many of the paradigms in MacOS classic. Apple listened to the criticism and reinstated many of them or produced analogs. It's too bad that Unity / Gnome 3 did think to learn and have done the same damned thing but to an even more extreme level. Of the two I'd say Unity is closest to the old way but things like the sometimes-unified-global-menu are frankly infuriating. Gnome 3 is radical and very pretty but seems to have forgotten about the entire spatial experience entirely.
Hopefully they WILL learn from their rough launches and work them out in an iteration or two.
I would also like to see the proof that has disproved creationism.
You can't prove a negative. One can no more disprove creationism than they can disprove the fairies living at the bottom of the garden.
Creationism is not a theory, it's an assertion. It does not attempt to predict anything. And it is not falsifiable. It's just a lame assertion. A cop out.
I'd add that evolution does not deal with how life started. That topic is known as abiogenisis.
Oh there have been plenty of examples of observed speciation. So many that talkorigins makes an entire FAQ about it. I'm not even sure what you mean independently verified except as some lame cop out.
Other routes don't have rail connections but usually you can travel by coach, e.g. Eurolines. You probably get turfed off the coach on one side and there is another waiting on the other side.
I realise there is inconvenience to getting unauthorized transactions on your card. I'm just putting it in perspective that it's a hassle not the end of the world. I realise that a million cards could be billed a dollar, but even if you don't report the fraud, there would be 999,999 others who potentially could. I think thieves who rip off credit card databases would be better off to break them down into bunches of 1000 and sell them on to other criminals for use.
When a person adds a new cc number to Amazon (for example), Amazon should submit it to Visa / Mastercard for validation and receive a signed hash in return. The hash is unique to the merchant and to the card and is used for transactions. If Amazon got hacked, all the hashes would be revoked and it wouldn't affect the credit card being used on other systems which would have different hashes. Amazon might still store the last 4 digits to print out on invoices, and maybe the cardname & expiration date, but not the number itself.
Second to that I wish Visa & Mastercard would make it simple for any card holder regardless of country or issuer to setup virtual numbers either 1-shot or limited in some way (e.g. max balance, expiration). Perhaps it could be done in a way similar to Paypal where you create a relationship between your card and a vendor. At checkout for the first time you are taken to the Visa / MC site to create the relationship and at any time thereafect you can disconnect. If the virtual number is stolen it's little use to thieves and it can be terminated too.
You deserve a refund if you are on PSN+, you deserve an apology and some form of compensation as goodwill for the time you lost playing online. You absolutely do not deserve a refund on the price of your console or your games. With the exception of purely online games, all the rest work perfectly well in offline mode until the service returns given that PSN is not mandatory for most games except for the likes of MAG.
Running up-to-date software would probably be a good start. The rest isn't rocket science either. Creating secure networks is not some esoteric art. I mean, plenty companies out there run their servers for years without having issues like that. Some even do it on *gasp* Windows servers! Maybe Sony needs to hire some of people who manage that?
I think it's reasonable to ask how the hell they got themselves into this mess, but it's not reasonable to suggest security is trivial or straightforward or anything else.
Your hypothetical company might be running for years without attack because no one has seriously bothered to attack them. They might be attacked because of some bad press, or a disgruntled employee, or for the lulz, or a day-0 exploit appears, or because some idiot leaves their laptop on a train, or because they add wifi or VPN to their network and don't lock it down properly, or they buy new hardware and don't secure it properly or because someone clicked on an attachment they shouldn't have.
What is it about PSN that warrants such a long downtime? Just re-image all servers running the thing, one by one, to ensure no backdoors remain, and bring it all back up. It doesn't take two weeks!
Are you serious? There are 60 million PS3s that implicitly trust PSN. If the service is hacked then it's not hard to imagine the damage that could be done. Someone could remotely brick boxes, wipe trophies, spam users with messages, clear accounts or otherwise maliciously interfere with the service.
As for the time frame I suggest if you drew a network plan of PSN or a similarly sized service that you're probably looking at hundreds of servers for login, downloads, streaming downloads, web, messaging, databases, credit card processing, Home and so forth. Reviewing the security around each, and the code they run and ensuring appropriate changes and hardening the perimeter and setting up a DMZ and so forth is time consuming. Apparently they're even moving datacentres and doing a few other things on their existing roadmap.
Two weeks is ambitious to say the least. I expect when it does come back up it will be a skeleton service with services coming back on line after that.
Size and colours are traits are they not? So an experiment that applies pressure that selects for / against a trait is demonstrating evolution.
there aren't any experiments you can do to demonstrate evolutionary theory.
Holy crap, of course there are experiments that demonstrate evolutionary theory. FFS just buy in some fruitflies or mice or feeder fish some other fast reproducing species and selectively breed them according to some observable trait. e.g. white and black mice, large & small fish etc. Split the animals into 3 groups - one where you select FOR the trait, one where you select AGAINST the trait, and a control group where you randomly select with no bias. After a few generations observe the results.
Evolution is eminently demonstrable in the lab, and in the wild, and in the fossil and in DNA. Suggesting that some "god/aliens/magic pixies did it" hypothesis is utterly ridiculous.
There is no doubt that taxes are intended to raise money and if the money dwindles it will be raised in other ways. It does not mean that in the course of raising tax it shouldn't be designed in a manner that punishes the undesirable behaviour (e.g. driving heavy, gas guzzling trucks) and rewards desirable behaviour (e.g. driving hybrids or smaller vehicles).