You are of course right in theory; But this is a typical case that "in theory theory is the same as practice; in practice things are different". HTML has somehow managed to get the right balance to be much better than other applications. Primarily, there are no viruses written in HTML and HTML+Java(ECMA)script has almost no practical viruses.
The key advantages of HTML / ECMAscript / HTTP include
not blocked at the corporate firewall
has a subset which is pure data and easy to be sure is safe
has a subset which is compatible across many different platforms for many different years
is not controlled directly by a company with criminal tendancies
Every other option has serious drawbacks
Java /.Net - too heavy; the minimal application requires loads of extra stuff
Java /.Net / C++ - non trivial to package.
C++ /.exe - too much history with trojans / too much incompatibility e.g. try developing one for Windows 200 working on Vista; compare with
Anything which doesn't go over ports 80 or 443 - blocked by the firewall
Anything containing executable content - blocked by the corporate mail filter
.Net stuff - doesn't run on out of the box Ubuntu or Macintosh / not cross platform.
Disclosure: I'm currently interning at MS.
your honesty is appreciated. When you are just starting in the job market, any good job seems like a good idea. Please remember you have years and years of work, ahead. Taking ethical choices is a seriously good idea. When your CEO is threatening your president with firing you then you seriously should consider if that's a company you want to work for.
That is indicative of a far larger problem on the schools part.
now; this is where I agree. If the school is regularly losing children and hasn't successfully done anything about it, this is a sign that something deep is wrong. They probably don't manage to fix problems with education either. Look into it deeply and if this seems to be true, try to find a way to get your kid into a different school. In the meantime, teach your kid how to get himself home; contact you; be safe etc. That's much more valuable long term anyway.
I'm glad you got insightful not funny. You are right. This is one of the case where experimentalism actually breaks down in the real world.
The problem is that the quant's model is in its self an input to the reality and the processes aren't statistical and stochastic. When I know (or even partly correctly guess) what model you are using for investing, then I can gain several benefits from altering my behavior. I can create false investment opportunities which match well with your model. I can predict when you will need to buy something and push up the price just before hand. I can guess when you will become over exposed to some asset and force you to sell too cheap.
The models are useful, but in the end lots of business stuff just has to come down to gut feelings and judgement. You also just have to do analysis which goes beyond the empirical (nobody has ever tricked us before) into risk control (what can we do to make sure nobody can do that in the future; how would we tell if they were trying to).
I used a medical analogy where I should have used a car analogy. An immediate correction is required:
If a car mechanic adds water to your car so that your cooling system works, that's legal. If he adds water to your car so that your brake fluid doesn't work that would be illegal. When Microsoft designed their system so that even when a third party browser was installed, you couldn't remove IE and still ended up using IE for functionality like help browsing, they added the water to the brake fluid. It's not just what you do; it's why you do it and how you do it.
When Microsoft first included IE, it was nothing like basic functionality. Furthermore, MS internal discussions which you can read in the relevant court cases make it clear that they didn't believe it was basic functionality either. If they had believed that then their actions would not have been illegal. They included IE specifically in order to destroy Netscape. That is what made it illegal / evil and unpleasant. In the same way as a doctor giving you morphine to relieve pain is not illegal whilst the same doctor giving you a morphine overdose to murder you is. It's not just what you do; it's why you do it and how you do it.
Why should Microsoft have to install anyone else's browser on their operating system?
For the same reason that when I steal your car I should be made to give it back. They stole the browser market using explicitly illegal tactics and with criminal intent. The fact that they then set fire to the car doesn't mean that they are now excused and no longer owe you a car.
This suggestion doesn't, in fact, go nearly far enough. Microsoft should be forced to give a choice of different browsers but IE should not be in the list. IE should only be available as a paid choice on physical CDs until such time as it's market share is less than any of the other major browsers. Offering IE online, pre-installed or bundled should be illegal.
It's like the powers of Queen Elizabeth II. Sure, she has a lot of powers but the second she would try to use them, all hell would break lose.
That sounds good, but the problem is that it's quite easy to go from this to a state where the queen is briefly the most trusted person whilst others are untrusted. She is "persuaded" that she must use her powers for good and you slide into dictatorship. This might happen if a bunch of bastard MPs suddenly started abusing their expenses process, allowing claims for all sorts of things which they would never allow normal working people. You migh even find that this almost completely discredited parliament and caused all sorts of problems. Of course such a thing would never actually happen in the UK because British MPs are paragons of virtue.
Reading the bug (yes; I know; but I'm the RTFA troll. I'm allowed to do that) it seems that the issue is that this would be better not in Wine core, but in a DLL. So it's not being accepted because it doesn't need to be. Did I misunderstand?
Ooohh that hurt. I'm just going to go back to mum's basement crying. God I'm so sorry I posted something that you didn't like or understand.
Laws should say things like "thou shalt not do actions X, Y and Z in circumstances ABC".
This is a standard misunderstanding in the Slashdot / nerd grouping (no I'm not descending to your level; this is "news for nerds", most of us are consenting adults). Laws generally deal with intent and not with action. Imagine I have a law "you may not shoot someone". Now imagine you are kidnapped and the policeman rescuing you unavoidably shoots you causing minor injury whilst shooting the kidnapper so he doesn't kill you. According to your system he should be imprisoned. In fact; since he was trying to rescue you and since he was doing his best to protect you, he isn't even guilty of negligence. On the other hand, if a kidnapper shoots at you and kills his friend when trying to kill you, he's still guilty of attempted murder. Exactly the same circumstance can be a crime or heroism depending on what's going on in your head.
Understood from this point of view, the anti-trust laws are perfectly clear. If you are in a dominiant position in a market, you may not set out to destroy your competition. It's okay to say "let's cut our prices so we sell more". It's not okay to say "let's cut our prices because we know we can put the competition out of business and then increase the prices later". The difference is in intent and circumstances and not action. Normally this is something that you get away with easily because standards of proof are very high but in the case of Microsoft they have done it so often and so gregariously that they get caught.
I fundamentally agree with Joel, and I still disagree with you. Had Netscape had money; still been in the position to sell their product for profit etc. they would have simply had two programming teams. Lou Montulli could have continued with the old base and the people who believed in XML could have gone on to do whatever they want. I've seen this in companies where I have worked, where the super, new, great going to take over the world product never actually catches up with the key features of the old product which is in minimal maintenance mode and is eventually phased out when nobody can sell it. However, I've also seen that a rebuild as a complete new product can end up completely overtaking the old. Rewrites are mostly wrong, but software development is very much statistics and sometimes they work. Had it not worked, Netscape had such a lead that they could have still been the main player in a wider market. Had the rewrite been better financed and worked quicker, it might have given them a lead. As it was, they were forced to gamble big time and lost.
Look; Netscape are the evil people who closed and effectively killed Mosaic. I don't want to post anything more defending them. The court documents and Microsoft's settlements are a clear enough statement of who is to blame that anyone who reads them can see that Microsoft was trying to kill Netscape. Shooting at someone and then saying "well, he would have died of a heart attack anyway; I didn't hit him anywhere fatal so you can't blame me" is hardly the best strategy to get a court to declare you innocent. We can never know for sure whether Netscape would have succeeded if they weren't interfered with. The company to blame for that is Microsoft.
If "sucked" killed companies, then windows 95, 98 and Vista would have killed MS dead. Netscape had the market volume and could easily have survived a few bad versions with their market share. However Microsoft made sure that didn't happen. The funny thing, however, is that we are even discussing this. There were clear US Antitrust decisions which say this much. If you read them it's clear that MS set out to kill competitors through illegal methods and did so and that that included Netscape. The lack of basic coverage of anthing critical in almost any media is the only possible way so many people could come to believe that Netscape died because they released bad software. Long term they might well have died; but it would be something other than (and better than) IE which would have replaced them.
They offered to find and pay for a location themselves as the meeting room wasn't available outside of the window,
If you are ever arrested and charged with a crime, I suggest that you request the chief of police attend the hearing because you don't think the investigating officer is important enough for your case. If they tell you he's not available then, you can always suggest that they can have the hearing back at your gang headquarters any time they like. I'm sure they will be most amenable to your request.
Mod parent insightful. If you steal a car and try to "lobby" the police, trust me you won't get a "fair hearing". That Microsoft goes around breaking the law and then expects to be able to get politicians to help them avoid their penalties is shocking. They are clearly unrepentant in any way and I wish the European courts would get it together to increase their penalties massively to send a clear message that such corruption should not be tolerated. Remember Microsofts crimes are not victimless. There were pensioners who invested in Netscape. There were people who would have been able to pay their medical bills with their Novell money. All the extra money in the Microsoft tax could have been paying for better Linux development. Your taxes could be paying for better bridges instead of a new office install.
If it's not true, Verizon will sue faster than a slashdot poster could follow a "naked Portman" link. Not knowing the facts will be the least of your worries.
And even powered down, your phone can receive a signal, telling it to power up completely, giving a firm lock on your location.
This is absolutely true. You just take a vodoo doll, and you look in the pocket for the cell phone. Then you press it chanting "umgo bungo pong ongo" (don't worry if you can't just press one button, it's the right spell that matters, not the right button).
This is why, by the way, a powered down phone uses its batter up just as fast as a phone which is in standby. In fact the only reason to ever turn your phone off is so that you can hear the tone it makes when it starts up.
if it's a cloning attack it's cloning a simcard *without* access to the Ki number.
How would that work ?
Typically by reading the RES (a hash of RAND which is sent across the network in plaintext and the Ki which is in the SIM) sent across the network, probably repeatedly. That's not easy but not impossible. If the encryption algorithm in the SIM is bad then it will gradually leak information about the Ki (or if it's really bad, quickly) and then you could work out what the Ki was.
Generally the answer is it shouldn't and mostly wouldn't work. Direct access to the SIM will help alot (you can make queries much faster) as would some other way of knowing the Ki.
The protocol does not. It has other flaws (lack of authenticaion of the network by the mobile; only the other way round), but none as basic as some people seem to be claiming.
Bullshit. Not on any properly run network. Apart from the IMEI (which is written on the back of the phone) and the IMSI (which you can get with a special code from some phones) there's also the Ki. This is a secret which is buried in the SIM card and _never_ sent out to the phone. Without the physical SIM card in your phone you do not have the number.
Now, there have been flaws in this; it has been possible to clone the SIM card because of implementation flaws, but properly made new SIMS should not have most of these. The authentication algorithms used originally were weak and could leak the key, but modern SIMs should be using stronger ones (e.g. AES). However none of these were magically to do with one particular model of a phone.
Something different is going on here. E.g. a security company marketing scam or that the mobile can work as a short range base station and do interception or something else. Definitely not the way that it seems to be explained in the article. And definitely not that the just "changed the IMEI and the IMSI and became the other subscriber"; apart from anything else, you have no need to change the IMEI to do that.
half the backup box problems can also be applied to the DVD (data corruption, police raid, BSA, theft etc).
not really; the advantage of the DVD solution is that the media is very cheap (at least relative to a second computer). That means that a) you have multiple recent backups a time - so even if one is corrupted it doesn't matter. I've already said in my original post that backups must be restored to be valid. b) you can have backups in multiple locations with different security considerations; this means that the police raid etc. is much less likely to take away all of them at the same time.
But you're also ignoring the fact that I said use both anyway.
actually you said
Certainly keep weekly/monthly off-site offline backups as well, just in case, but I think it's wrong to say you can't have a reasonable expectation for the reliability of an online backup box.
I read that (sorry if it's my misunderstanding; I just have my reading of what's on the page; at least two stages of loss of information) as saying two things that I strongly disagree with. Firstly that these offline backups are just "nice to have" when actually they are the key part of the backup process and much more important than the online box. Secondly that once a month is acceptable when my original post is specifically that for three quarters of the time, a once monthly off site backup will be too old for a small business to do disaster recovery from.
A robot is pretty much defined as a device with sensors which acts independently on them. The US Army predator drones are able to land on their own with no operator input and as such definitely count as robots. However, most do not kill automatically, but there seeem to even be some which do that.
However, I think you are right in a deeper way. None of these things are "intelligent" robots in the sense of Asimov stories. The story has a discussion about the possibility of designing these robots to make ethical decisions but one which ignores the fact that these are hard AI problems over which there has been practically no progress since the dawn of computing. These kind of discussions often end up with someone quoting the Asimovian three laws and this even happens on forums with relatively intelligent informed readers but, apart from the fact that laws designed to ensure safety can't really apply to a device designed for killing, that's totally irrelevant since the three laws are stated in English. The real problem is how to state them in actual program code.
I like your style. We pulled him up for drugs, but finding none, we'll do him for a breach of the model aeroplane storage regulations (1 year). Oh, and attempting to mislead an officer by seeming to have drugs in order to avoid his model aeroplane "mister-meaner" being noticed (12 years). You should apply a role as a "sexting" prosecutor of children.
If you had looked at fine article instead of just posting garbage you would see that the "bleeding heart liberals" are mostly US Military types. You'd also know that this isn't a developer but a publisher decision. It points out, for example, that the US military is the largest purchaser of video games and no publisher can afford to annoy them. Jeeesus don't you know that your Slashdot postings are read by thousands of the most important people in the world. The cost in lost productivity from postings like yours is astounding. Can you not just spend a few minutes to read the attached posting before you put up your commet? Show some consideration. Sheesh.
my last post before this one should give some good ideas, but two specific examples; a security flaw in rsync which lets the backup server be destroyed from the other server; a competitor who tips off the police to some piracy in your complany just before a tender (or whatever it is you do with these computers) is due and has both sets of computers taken away. You say these systems aren't mission-critical which is a statement I always have a problem with, but if it's true then you should probably concentrate on other systems with a worse condition first.
Slashdot Mirror
You are of course right in theory; But this is a typical case that "in theory theory is the same as practice; in practice things are different". HTML has somehow managed to get the right balance to be much better than other applications. Primarily, there are no viruses written in HTML and HTML+Java(ECMA)script has almost no practical viruses.
The key advantages of HTML / ECMAscript / HTTP include
Every other option has serious drawbacks
Disclosure: I'm currently interning at MS.
your honesty is appreciated. When you are just starting in the job market, any good job seems like a good idea. Please remember you have years and years of work, ahead. Taking ethical choices is a seriously good idea. When your CEO is threatening your president with firing you then you seriously should consider if that's a company you want to work for.
Well, maybe, just maybe the fact that he said "open sores" instead of "open source" hints that he's less than favourably disposed to it?
now; this is where I agree. If the school is regularly losing children and hasn't successfully done anything about it, this is a sign that something deep is wrong. They probably don't manage to fix problems with education either. Look into it deeply and if this seems to be true, try to find a way to get your kid into a different school. In the meantime, teach your kid how to get himself home; contact you; be safe etc. That's much more valuable long term anyway.
I'm glad you got insightful not funny. You are right. This is one of the case where experimentalism actually breaks down in the real world.
The problem is that the quant's model is in its self an input to the reality and the processes aren't statistical and stochastic. When I know (or even partly correctly guess) what model you are using for investing, then I can gain several benefits from altering my behavior. I can create false investment opportunities which match well with your model. I can predict when you will need to buy something and push up the price just before hand. I can guess when you will become over exposed to some asset and force you to sell too cheap.
The models are useful, but in the end lots of business stuff just has to come down to gut feelings and judgement. You also just have to do analysis which goes beyond the empirical (nobody has ever tricked us before) into risk control (what can we do to make sure nobody can do that in the future; how would we tell if they were trying to).
I used a medical analogy where I should have used a car analogy. An immediate correction is required:
If a car mechanic adds water to your car so that your cooling system works, that's legal. If he adds water to your car so that your brake fluid doesn't work that would be illegal. When Microsoft designed their system so that even when a third party browser was installed, you couldn't remove IE and still ended up using IE for functionality like help browsing, they added the water to the brake fluid. It's not just what you do; it's why you do it and how you do it.
When Microsoft first included IE, it was nothing like basic functionality. Furthermore, MS internal discussions which you can read in the relevant court cases make it clear that they didn't believe it was basic functionality either. If they had believed that then their actions would not have been illegal. They included IE specifically in order to destroy Netscape. That is what made it illegal / evil and unpleasant. In the same way as a doctor giving you morphine to relieve pain is not illegal whilst the same doctor giving you a morphine overdose to murder you is. It's not just what you do; it's why you do it and how you do it.
Why should Microsoft have to install anyone else's browser on their operating system?
For the same reason that when I steal your car I should be made to give it back. They stole the browser market using explicitly illegal tactics and with criminal intent. The fact that they then set fire to the car doesn't mean that they are now excused and no longer owe you a car.
This suggestion doesn't, in fact, go nearly far enough. Microsoft should be forced to give a choice of different browsers but IE should not be in the list. IE should only be available as a paid choice on physical CDs until such time as it's market share is less than any of the other major browsers. Offering IE online, pre-installed or bundled should be illegal.
That sounds good, but the problem is that it's quite easy to go from this to a state where the queen is briefly the most trusted person whilst others are untrusted. She is "persuaded" that she must use her powers for good and you slide into dictatorship. This might happen if a bunch of bastard MPs suddenly started abusing their expenses process, allowing claims for all sorts of things which they would never allow normal working people. You migh even find that this almost completely discredited parliament and caused all sorts of problems. Of course such a thing would never actually happen in the UK because British MPs are paragons of virtue.
Reading the bug (yes; I know; but I'm the RTFA troll. I'm allowed to do that) it seems that the issue is that this would be better not in Wine core, but in a DLL. So it's not being accepted because it doesn't need to be. Did I misunderstand?
Ooohh that hurt. I'm just going to go back to mum's basement crying. God I'm so sorry I posted something that you didn't like or understand.
This is a standard misunderstanding in the Slashdot / nerd grouping (no I'm not descending to your level; this is "news for nerds", most of us are consenting adults). Laws generally deal with intent and not with action. Imagine I have a law "you may not shoot someone". Now imagine you are kidnapped and the policeman rescuing you unavoidably shoots you causing minor injury whilst shooting the kidnapper so he doesn't kill you. According to your system he should be imprisoned. In fact; since he was trying to rescue you and since he was doing his best to protect you, he isn't even guilty of negligence. On the other hand, if a kidnapper shoots at you and kills his friend when trying to kill you, he's still guilty of attempted murder. Exactly the same circumstance can be a crime or heroism depending on what's going on in your head.
Understood from this point of view, the anti-trust laws are perfectly clear. If you are in a dominiant position in a market, you may not set out to destroy your competition. It's okay to say "let's cut our prices so we sell more". It's not okay to say "let's cut our prices because we know we can put the competition out of business and then increase the prices later". The difference is in intent and circumstances and not action. Normally this is something that you get away with easily because standards of proof are very high but in the case of Microsoft they have done it so often and so gregariously that they get caught.
I fundamentally agree with Joel, and I still disagree with you. Had Netscape had money; still been in the position to sell their product for profit etc. they would have simply had two programming teams. Lou Montulli could have continued with the old base and the people who believed in XML could have gone on to do whatever they want. I've seen this in companies where I have worked, where the super, new, great going to take over the world product never actually catches up with the key features of the old product which is in minimal maintenance mode and is eventually phased out when nobody can sell it. However, I've also seen that a rebuild as a complete new product can end up completely overtaking the old. Rewrites are mostly wrong, but software development is very much statistics and sometimes they work. Had it not worked, Netscape had such a lead that they could have still been the main player in a wider market. Had the rewrite been better financed and worked quicker, it might have given them a lead. As it was, they were forced to gamble big time and lost.
Look; Netscape are the evil people who closed and effectively killed Mosaic. I don't want to post anything more defending them. The court documents and Microsoft's settlements are a clear enough statement of who is to blame that anyone who reads them can see that Microsoft was trying to kill Netscape. Shooting at someone and then saying "well, he would have died of a heart attack anyway; I didn't hit him anywhere fatal so you can't blame me" is hardly the best strategy to get a court to declare you innocent. We can never know for sure whether Netscape would have succeeded if they weren't interfered with. The company to blame for that is Microsoft.
If "sucked" killed companies, then windows 95, 98 and Vista would have killed MS dead. Netscape had the market volume and could easily have survived a few bad versions with their market share. However Microsoft made sure that didn't happen. The funny thing, however, is that we are even discussing this. There were clear US Antitrust decisions which say this much. If you read them it's clear that MS set out to kill competitors through illegal methods and did so and that that included Netscape. The lack of basic coverage of anthing critical in almost any media is the only possible way so many people could come to believe that Netscape died because they released bad software. Long term they might well have died; but it would be something other than (and better than) IE which would have replaced them.
If you are ever arrested and charged with a crime, I suggest that you request the chief of police attend the hearing because you don't think the investigating officer is important enough for your case. If they tell you he's not available then, you can always suggest that they can have the hearing back at your gang headquarters any time they like. I'm sure they will be most amenable to your request.
Mod parent insightful. If you steal a car and try to "lobby" the police, trust me you won't get a "fair hearing". That Microsoft goes around breaking the law and then expects to be able to get politicians to help them avoid their penalties is shocking. They are clearly unrepentant in any way and I wish the European courts would get it together to increase their penalties massively to send a clear message that such corruption should not be tolerated. Remember Microsofts crimes are not victimless. There were pensioners who invested in Netscape. There were people who would have been able to pay their medical bills with their Novell money. All the extra money in the Microsoft tax could have been paying for better Linux development. Your taxes could be paying for better bridges instead of a new office install.
If it's not true, Verizon will sue faster than a slashdot poster could follow a "naked Portman" link. Not knowing the facts will be the least of your worries.
Hint: if you can turn it on, you can also turn it off again.
This is absolutely true. You just take a vodoo doll, and you look in the pocket for the cell phone. Then you press it chanting "umgo bungo pong ongo" (don't worry if you can't just press one button, it's the right spell that matters, not the right button).
This is why, by the way, a powered down phone uses its batter up just as fast as a phone which is in standby. In fact the only reason to ever turn your phone off is so that you can hear the tone it makes when it starts up.
Typically by reading the RES (a hash of RAND which is sent across the network in plaintext and the Ki which is in the SIM) sent across the network, probably repeatedly. That's not easy but not impossible. If the encryption algorithm in the SIM is bad then it will gradually leak information about the Ki (or if it's really bad, quickly) and then you could work out what the Ki was.
Generally the answer is it shouldn't and mostly wouldn't work. Direct access to the SIM will help alot (you can make queries much faster) as would some other way of knowing the Ki.
The protocol does not. It has other flaws (lack of authenticaion of the network by the mobile; only the other way round), but none as basic as some people seem to be claiming.
Bullshit. Not on any properly run network. Apart from the IMEI (which is written on the back of the phone) and the IMSI (which you can get with a special code from some phones) there's also the Ki. This is a secret which is buried in the SIM card and _never_ sent out to the phone. Without the physical SIM card in your phone you do not have the number.
Now, there have been flaws in this; it has been possible to clone the SIM card because of implementation flaws, but properly made new SIMS should not have most of these. The authentication algorithms used originally were weak and could leak the key, but modern SIMs should be using stronger ones (e.g. AES). However none of these were magically to do with one particular model of a phone.
Something different is going on here. E.g. a security company marketing scam or that the mobile can work as a short range base station and do interception or something else. Definitely not the way that it seems to be explained in the article. And definitely not that the just "changed the IMEI and the IMSI and became the other subscriber"; apart from anything else, you have no need to change the IMEI to do that.
not really; the advantage of the DVD solution is that the media is very cheap (at least relative to a second computer). That means that a) you have multiple recent backups a time - so even if one is corrupted it doesn't matter. I've already said in my original post that backups must be restored to be valid. b) you can have backups in multiple locations with different security considerations; this means that the police raid etc. is much less likely to take away all of them at the same time.
actually you said
I read that (sorry if it's my misunderstanding; I just have my reading of what's on the page; at least two stages of loss of information) as saying two things that I strongly disagree with. Firstly that these offline backups are just "nice to have" when actually they are the key part of the backup process and much more important than the online box. Secondly that once a month is acceptable when my original post is specifically that for three quarters of the time, a once monthly off site backup will be too old for a small business to do disaster recovery from.
A robot is pretty much defined as a device with sensors which acts independently on them. The US Army predator drones are able to land on their own with no operator input and as such definitely count as robots. However, most do not kill automatically, but there seeem to even be some which do that.
However, I think you are right in a deeper way. None of these things are "intelligent" robots in the sense of Asimov stories. The story has a discussion about the possibility of designing these robots to make ethical decisions but one which ignores the fact that these are hard AI problems over which there has been practically no progress since the dawn of computing. These kind of discussions often end up with someone quoting the Asimovian three laws and this even happens on forums with relatively intelligent informed readers but, apart from the fact that laws designed to ensure safety can't really apply to a device designed for killing, that's totally irrelevant since the three laws are stated in English. The real problem is how to state them in actual program code.
I like your style. We pulled him up for drugs, but finding none, we'll do him for a breach of the model aeroplane storage regulations (1 year). Oh, and attempting to mislead an officer by seeming to have drugs in order to avoid his model aeroplane "mister-meaner" being noticed (12 years). You should apply a role as a "sexting" prosecutor of children.
If you had looked at fine article instead of just posting garbage you would see that the "bleeding heart liberals" are mostly US Military types. You'd also know that this isn't a developer but a publisher decision. It points out, for example, that the US military is the largest purchaser of video games and no publisher can afford to annoy them. Jeeesus don't you know that your Slashdot postings are read by thousands of the most important people in the world. The cost in lost productivity from postings like yours is astounding. Can you not just spend a few minutes to read the attached posting before you put up your commet? Show some consideration. Sheesh.
(my emphasis)
my last post before this one should give some good ideas, but two specific examples; a security flaw in rsync which lets the backup server be destroyed from the other server; a competitor who tips off the police to some piracy in your complany just before a tender (or whatever it is you do with these computers) is due and has both sets of computers taken away. You say these systems aren't mission-critical which is a statement I always have a problem with, but if it's true then you should probably concentrate on other systems with a worse condition first.