Until some part of the Federal Government takes responsibility for stopping this crap it will continue, and even get worse. No individual, non-profit or trade organization has the clout to stop this bad behavior. (Sorry libertards, this is where the real world intrudes and crushes your anti-government delusional thinking.)
So why hasn't this happened already? Because of the famous step 3: Profit! If some one at the federal level takes this seriously enough to intervene, then it sets a precedent that companies involved with the internet are responsible for security failures. This won't be limited to companies in China making internet gear, but it will necessarily include US businesses that get hacked. So banks (Hi Bank of America), retailers (Hi Target!), information services (Hi Facebook!), entertainment companies (Hi Sony!), and federal agencies (Hi OPM!), along with everyone else, will face real legal responsibility. Since legal responsibility is the enemy of Profit! no one wants meaningful security standards for the internet. (Except the people who get screwed, who are mostly not Big Corporate America.)
This is why there are no federal standards for security on the internet. Midway through his Presidency Obama tried to get legislation passed, but it was a nonstarter. The US Chamber of Commerce shot it down. The best the administration could accomplish was create some administrative guidelines, which counts for almost nothing. Now there is a government/business joint panel studying what to do, which is the equivalent of having a pretend friend doing your homework.
So the internet will be much more dangerous because corporate greed takes precedence over responsibility. Time for a car analogy! It looks like VW is going to face a $15 billion cost for cheating the EPA. Until some big name US business faces a similar economic hit nothing will change. (Although it is puzzling that Ford, after committing mass murder by killing over 125 people with a bad ignition switch, did not suffer anywhere near the economic hit. Due to arbitration they were able to pay off most of the claims for $1 million a piece. Peanuts compared to billions. I guess it makes a difference if your based in Detroit vs Germany.)
The two trends that might upset the current apple cart are the rise in ransomware and attacks on medical facilities and equipment. If 10 million random people suddenly have to pay a ransom to get their computer running, or a noticeable number of hospitals get shut down then there will be serious repercussions. Also, if people start dying because of any kind of medical hack it will be panic button time. Suddenly Congress will be shocked, shocked, that this happened. All the collusion fueled by corporate donations will suddenly be forgotten, and somehow the "government" will be blamed. Forgetting, of course, the Congress is "the government".
By the same "logic", the UK is undemocratic because of the Queen and the House of Lords. Even if you argue that the monarch has very little actual power, the House of Lords, which has only appointed and hereditary members still has a fair amount of clout. So if the English were actually interested in democracy, the next obvious step would be to formally end the monarchy and write a constitution.
Some how I doubt that is going to happen. Because leaving the EU is primarily about racism, not bureaucracy.
Personally I expect to experience a great amount of schadenfreude watching the consequences of this circular firing squad. Now the UK's economic and political situation is in complete chaos, and that will inevitably lead to an economic downturn. Markets are allergenic to uncertainty. It's not going to work itself out quickly, so the economic mess will linger.
In terms of mass stupidity, I also suggest that they drop the metric units system and join the US in using imperial units. As long as they want to deny the relevancy of the rest of the world, it's another way to be out of step with (almost) everyone else.
If you read the two page technical paper you will see that there is much less here then the hype suggests.
Each CPU supplies an amount of computation less then a single instruction on a regular CPU. Think of it as a grid of instructions not a grid of computers. A processor has a Harvard architecture with 128 instructions of 40 bit size and a separate data memory with two banks of 128 16 bit data values (256 16 bit data words total). It says nothing about register files or stacks or subroutine calls. It's likely that the two data banks are in effect the register set. The paper implies that a CPU can compute a single floating point operation in software.
Compiling means mapping code fragments to a set of connected CPUs and routing resources, and then feeding the data into the compute array. After some circuitous path through the grid the answer emerges somewhere. There are also 12 independent memory banks each with a 64KB of SRAM that are available to all CPUs.
History has not been kind to this kind of grid architecture with lots of CPUs and very little memory. Almost none of them ever made it out of the lab. It's symptomatic of hardware engineers who are clueless about software and design unprogrammable computers. They confuse aggregate theoretical throughput with useful compute resources.
Debugging code on this would be a nightmare. It's completely asynchronous, there is no hardware to segregate different sets of CPUs doing different computing tasks and so few resources per CPU that software debugging aids would crowd out the working code. The people listed on the paper should be punished by being force to make it do useful work for at least a year. They would be scarred for life.
Considering that everyone on Slashdot agrees with this deep insight, it must be the case that we all took economic advantage of the situation and are now all exceedingly rich.
I know that I am fabulously wealthy and have multiple houses in expensive locations and can go anywhere and do anything I want, which is why I spend time on Slashdot instead of going to incredibly trendy locations with the other beautiful people.
No, it's different the cold fusion. The people who discovered this do not claim any magic sauce. No information is being withheld.
This is proceeding the way that scientific progress normally works. An experimenter found an effect that did not fit in the current paradigm. Other experimenters found similar results. Now theoreticians are coming up with hypothesis that may explain the result. Other theoretical types will either agree or disagree. Other experiments will be done to test the hypothesis. Eventually a general consensus will emerge. It's all completely normal.
Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
RTFA. They ran Matlab (or some equivalent) code to verify the distribution of the EM radiation in the microwave chamber. It's likely that this guy worked on that part. There are the resultant images in the technical paper.
Do you think that your primary care doctor invented all the drugs and tests you get? Do architects design and build the entire building by themselves? Does the CEO of a cable company personally bring the fiber or cable to your door?
Sometimes stupid can be cute. This does not apply to you.
A forbidden phrase in the US: Christian Terrorists.
So it's not terrorism when anti-abortion activists assassinate doctors or firebomb clinics. Really?
Or when a bunch of armed militants occupy a federal facility and threaten the lives of local and federal law enforcement officers. None of those involved had any terrorism related charges brought against them. They face weapons charges, felony conspiracy, and destroying government property. No terrorism charges at all.
What if the armed occupiers had been Muslims or radical environmentalist or native American militants, or anybody who wasn't a right wing Christian? It would be called terrorism from the first report and there would have been no kid gloves. Nobody would be wandering into town for a hot meal and a warm bed in a motel, which happened during the first week or so. The siege would not have lasted over a month. The authorities would have come in with guns blazing and there would have been many fatalities. And anyone who wasn't killed on the spot would have been charged with terrorism and murder for any deaths that occurred. (When criminals commit violent felonies and one of them dies at the hand of the police, the remaining perps can be charged with murder. Why did these perps avoid that charge?)
So who is getting a free pass because of their religion? Someone who is a lot like you.
This guy is not a US citizen, so it can't be treason.
If you are a Trump supporter it would not be a surprise. That's the kind of illiterate non-reasoning that Trump and his ignorant hoard specialize in.
By the way, we are not at war with China (are you aware of this?) so it is very unlikely that any spying a Chinese citizen could do would be a death penalty case.
You realize that IBM used to be notorious for doing the same thing. They would partner with a company that had developed new technology, hardware and/or software, and bring a produce to market with the IBM logo. Meanwhile they would have a team building a second generation and when time came to roll out the nextgen version it would be all IBM. The original developers would be screwed, because they had effectively left the market place because of the IBM branding and they were in direct competition with IBM.
I think it's the exact opposite. If the Republican House, (which is overtly a part of the Republican Party, as opposed to a part of the US government) is freaking out over Hillary Clinton's emails, why aren't they raising hell over this? It wouldn't have anything to do what a partisan witch hunt, would it?
Maj. Bradley Podliska, an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserve who describes himself as a conservative Republican, told CNN that the committee trained its sights almost exclusively on Clinton after the revelation last March that she used a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state. That new focus flipped a broad-based probe of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, into what Podliska described as "a partisan investigation."
Podliska, who was fired after nearly 10 months as an investigator for the Republican majority, is now preparing to file a lawsuit against the select committee next month, alleging that he lost his job in part because he resisted pressure to focus his investigative efforts solely on the State Department and Clinton's role surrounding the Benghazi attack.
And it would be really really nice if we ever had a congressional investigation into why we invaded the wrong country. You know, Iraq. Have you forgotten that? No involvement in the 9/11 attacks, no weapons of mass destruction (except the left over ones from when Regan and Cheney were best buds with Saddam Husein).
There has never been a official accounting for why the US invaded Iraq. There lots of hearings about "faulty intelligence", which were grand political theater to lay blame on the CIA, FBI, NSA, FCC, FAA, NBC, CNN, CBS, ASPCA, FFA (Future Farmers of America), Girl Scouts, etc. But the decision was made in the White House, not by intelligence agencies or the Congress or the judiciary.
There was the Iraq Study Group, which was just about as useful as it sounds. It was not done by a government entity, it was just funded by Congress. It had no subpoena power, so no one could be compelled to testify, and nobody with any direct involvement showed up. Not a surprise. It was designed to produce no useful result, and it succeeded brilliantly.
The one other official investigation was about Chaney leaking Valery Plame's covert position at the CIA, which lead to the conviction of Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice. Libby took a bullet for Chaney, and then got his sentence committed by Bush. You want to see how a real successful government coverup works, that's how it's done. Democrats aren't anywhere in that leage, but then the Republicans get so much more practice.
If Windows was a car and Microsoft was the driver, it would be like someone who is senile and keeps running into the same tree over and over and over again. In both the real world and the analogy they always loose their memory of past failures, and the result is inevitable.
This is rooted in Microsoft culture. Security is never a primary concern. Imagine someone with a whiny voice saying "It's too hard, I don't wanna do it, it makes things no fun" etc, etc. From the outside that seems like how they behave.
And there is the little matter of loss of institutional memory, which is the senility part. That is because they consciously exclude people of long experience. They don't hire them, and if anyone is too long on the job they get flushed out. It's cheaper and keeps the workforce docile. But the long term result is making the same mistake over and over again. Not that Microsoft is a whole lot worse then any other big software organization, but they appear to do it even more then other big outfits.
You are dumber then a box of rocks. Wake up, it's not the 18th century any more. You and your musket are powerless against what this represents. When the government can electronically seize you assets, track you real time, listen in on your conversations, read your email, and knows everyone that you know, having a gun is about as important as having a pile of stones to throw. Your stash of guns is about as useful in this context as stones are against a remote drone strike.
Prepper ideology and gun ownership just make it easier for the government to go about it's business of trashing the constitution. First, you have already identified who you are, and they can generate a list with you name on it in milliseconds. They know because of metadata: where and when you use your credit card, your phone records, license plate scanners, etc. Second, thinking that your gun will save you means that you are wasting time solving the wrong problem. It's a legal, law enforcement, information, and telecommunications threat, so sitting around counting your bullets and cleaning you gun means that you are a non-combatant.
You want to do something? Don't use software that requires signing a EULA. Tell your congress critter not to support the TPP. Join the EFF and the ACLU, use encryption and run Linux. That's where the conflict is occurring. Although it's a big stroke for your ego to assume that Manly Men with Guns Will Save the Day, that's just the fantasy of a little boy thinking he is Iron Man. The end of constitutional government is a bureaucratic conflict involving business and government, not a reenactment of the Revolutionary War.
Now replace "32 Million Twitter Accounts" with "32 Million Automobile Access Codes". Since you car talks to your cellphone, all your personal data will be at risk, including payment system info, bank access, email, contacts, etc.
Eventual headline: "Compromised Auto Password Database used to Loot Credit Accounts, Over $400 Million Missing".
That's a lie. He never said that. He was on the Senate committee (I don't remember if was Commerce or Technology or something to do with Telcos) that set up the funding that lead to internet development. It would just take you a few seconds to find out the truth on Wikipedia, but you are obviously the kind of moron who prefers lies and slander. For you the internet is a way to stay in your right wing echo chamber and maintain delusional fantasies.
So the Supreme Court of the Republican Party (not even close to the Supreme Court of the USA) appointed Bush, even though Gore won the vote. Do you think that Gore would have invaded the wrong county after the 9/11 attacks?
Dimwit "My Pet Goat" Bush and Darth Chaney went after Saddam Hussein even though he had nothing to do with 9/11 and they consciously lied their teeth out about weapons of mass destruction. No one can say what would have happened, but it is a 100% certainty that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Iraq.
So why don't you STFU. Anything you say is useless until you and your equally moronic cohorts come back to reality and stop spouting crap that is just not true.
And by the way Bush was AWOL. He didn't show up for required medical exams. It's in the public record. He got away with it because of his Daddy and Republican duplicity, the same way he was appointed president.
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means.
You're absolutely right. Just like every Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Fascist, Techocrat (the political party), Islamic State warrior, Spanish Inquisitor, etc. is right. If everybody would read the book and follow the rules then the outcome would be perfect. The problem is the people who are too stupid or foolish to obey the rules who screw if up for everyone. If we could only remove them and their influence then the ends would justify the means...
In all the posts, which go all over the map, no one is asking the most important question: why is Microsoft desperately forcing Windows 10 down everyone's throat?
Obviously the answer is revenue. There are lots of savings to be had. It's much cheaper to maintain one OS rather them multiple versions of the OS. (BTW, expect big layoffs at MS real soon now. Anyone who mostly works on OS code that is not tied to 10 should have their resume all polished up. Blood will flow in Redmond.)
But that part is not enough to explain the ridiculous methods that are being used. When the only way to insure that 10 is not installed on your computer is to never attach it to the internet, there is something else going on. And it must be revenue driven.
The likely answer is that Microsoft is planning on going to a de facto subscription model. Users will have to pay every year to keep their copy of the OS working. Same for Office, Excel, etc. Individual users will end up paying the full purchase cost every year for each piece of software, or maybe half the full price. Of course there will be "bundled" discounts like the phone companies offer, but that won't do much for your elderly relatives. And there will be student rates, but the vast majority will be paying through the nose.
Microsoft lost the revenue war to Apple.They missed out on the iPhone and iWatch. They were late to the cloud as well. Android has driven all the nails into the coffin for the phone/tablet market, which is where the growth will be.Their only play is to fully exploit their monopolist power and embrace extortionist capitalism.
The EU will scream like a stuck pig, but MS already has a strategy in place to deal with them. It will be delay by a series of holding actions, and then eventually have data centers in Europe to satisfy privacy conditions. They might even agree to pay more taxes, which will be less painful given the profits they rake in.
The big growth will be in China, Russia and India, where MS will help the government track everyone. They will do for these countries what the NSA has done to the US. Every computer will be a full time spy. Local data centers with 100% access to the contents of all computers. It is possible that the US will take advantage of this as well. Not that anyone will ever hear about it.
Go out and buy a can of beans. Any kind: kidney, garbanzo, white, pinto, etc. Open the can and look at the amount of packing liquid vs the amount of beans. You will be lucky if the beans are 75% of the listed weight. Typically it's more like 66%, or even less.
So much for looking to the "free market" for fair value. Your claim that the market empowers consumers is delusional. Without government oversight that can of beans would have a reasonable chance of killing you, either through bacterial infection or chemical poisoning. This is what is happening in China right now, where there is no meaningful government regulation.
Given the disproportionate influence of big business on government right now, trusting corporate America is like trusting meth freaks. The free market is a tremendous piece of propaganda. What really runs the economic system are factions of monopolists and cartels that have eliminated almost all competition. This is enabled and maintained by a corrupt government.
The only way this will change is if voters use their democratic power to take back control of the government. We need a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", not a government run solely for corporate interests.
I know it's troll bait, but in point of fact Republicans should be held accountable. Republicans are so obsessed by "small government" and cutting budgets that horrible outcomes are inevitable. It's the public sector version of slum landlords with infested housing where infants get bitten by rats.
Do I even have to mention Flint? State intervention and cost cutting by appointed ideological "commissars" were the direct cause of mass lead poisoning. Just because you can find some low level chump who signed off because they were "just following orders" does not change where the responsibility lies.
So the State takes over, usurps all local power and renders local democratically elected officials impotent. They have no say in how their city is run. In Flint there was no functioning local democracy, it was directly run by a Republican governor and legislature. There is only one political faction to blame.
So your whine about being unfairly accused sounds a lot like a combination of a guilty conscience and a feeble attempt to counter attack to deflect criticism.
Another interesting point: why was this reported by a British news organization, not by anyone in the US? It's not very logical that this would be missed by journalists in the US and uncovered by people in England. Any chance that the press is so corrupt and self centered they won't look into massive failure at home? I guess that it's too easy and too much fun to report about Trump rather then stir up trouble at home. That might cause someone to complain and interfere with their cosy relationships with politicians.
So who is allowed to sell electronics in India? Do Korean, Japanese and Chinese electronics companies have facilities in India? Are there many locally made cell phones or TVs? Are there wafer fab lines? How does this work exactly? Has this problem occurred for other international manufacturers?
If the Feds gave local police military helicopters with Hellfire missiles they would routinely be used on jaywalkers and drivers who didn't use turn signals. If it was nukes they would be used on speeders. One of the perks of being a cop is the right to use unjustifiable force any time you can get away with it.
This is a major motivation for going after young coders and avoiding people with experience. People with experience know about the burnout bullshit, but people earlier in their careers assume that is the way to get things done. Managers know who they can easily manipulate for the death march on an ill-conceived schedule. Someone who has been there before is going to raise meaningful objections and might alert the younger people that it's a pack of lies. Upper management can't make vast amounts of money unless the workforce remains ignorant about the real cost/reward equation.
Every time someone in the nuclear establishment says that a particular kind of horrible worse case accident can't happen, there is a one word answer: Fukushima.
The one country in the world that had experienced nuclear devastation, with one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world, couldn't get it right. This was not the bureaucratically hide bound Soviet Union, where technical expertise coexisted with a struggling backwards economic system, this was the home of the bullet train that always ran on time and they still couldn't get it right.
So when a bunch of really smart people point out a serious problem that the nuclear establishment (called the "nuclear village" in Japan) say is impossible, it's time to take it seriously. That is exactly what happened in Japan when it was pointed out that a much larger tsunami could over run the Fukushima power station. The industry made a decision based on their pocketbooks, the pretend regulators agreed, and the time bomb started ticking. So this class of failure has happened before.
Arguing that the article is tainted because it is somehow associated with the solar power field is a paranoid delusion. If you can't criticize the findings on their technical merits then you are the ones engaged in propaganda arguments. As the Russians and Japanese have already found out, nuclear materials go critical based on laws of physics and do not respond to overly optimistic planning documents. When things go bad because of an unplanned critical mass it gets very ugly very fast and there is little to be done to stop it.
You can only say "Clinton is worse" because you are a white male. For anyone else, a Trump presidency would look a lot like the what happened to the Jews in Germany right after Hitler took power. Every violent racist in the country would take it as a signal to attack "those people". That's why racists are flocking to Trump in droves.
It was an attack on a homeless man that gained extra media attention when authorities said the accused assailants were heard saying, "Donald Trump was right," as they beat the man with a metal pipe and then urinated on him.
"All these illegals need to be deported," they allegedly said, as they beat the man as he slept near the JFK/UMass MBTA subway station about 12:30 a.m.
Trump sloughed off any responsibility for the attack and said "the people that are following me are very passionate". The man who was beaten was a legalized immigrant from Latin America.
When Trump claims that Mexicans are rapists and criminals you can't pretend that it didn't encourage his followers to act violently. This is what happened during the civil rights era when blacks were attacked with impunity by angry white people. It still goes on today: Trevor Martin/George Zimmerman. There are a whole lot of people out there who are looking for an excuse, and Trump's political platform is to legitimatize their anger. You can't pretend to be surprised when violence is the result.
When you say that Trump and Clinton are the same you might as well join a white racist organization, because those people take Trump at his word.
Slashdot Mirror
So why hasn't this happened already? Because of the famous step 3: Profit! If some one at the federal level takes this seriously enough to intervene, then it sets a precedent that companies involved with the internet are responsible for security failures. This won't be limited to companies in China making internet gear, but it will necessarily include US businesses that get hacked. So banks (Hi Bank of America), retailers (Hi Target!), information services (Hi Facebook!), entertainment companies (Hi Sony!), and federal agencies (Hi OPM!), along with everyone else, will face real legal responsibility. Since legal responsibility is the enemy of Profit! no one wants meaningful security standards for the internet. (Except the people who get screwed, who are mostly not Big Corporate America.)
This is why there are no federal standards for security on the internet. Midway through his Presidency Obama tried to get legislation passed, but it was a nonstarter. The US Chamber of Commerce shot it down. The best the administration could accomplish was create some administrative guidelines, which counts for almost nothing. Now there is a government/business joint panel studying what to do, which is the equivalent of having a pretend friend doing your homework.
So the internet will be much more dangerous because corporate greed takes precedence over responsibility. Time for a car analogy! It looks like VW is going to face a $15 billion cost for cheating the EPA. Until some big name US business faces a similar economic hit nothing will change. (Although it is puzzling that Ford, after committing mass murder by killing over 125 people with a bad ignition switch, did not suffer anywhere near the economic hit. Due to arbitration they were able to pay off most of the claims for $1 million a piece. Peanuts compared to billions. I guess it makes a difference if your based in Detroit vs Germany.)
The two trends that might upset the current apple cart are the rise in ransomware and attacks on medical facilities and equipment. If 10 million random people suddenly have to pay a ransom to get their computer running, or a noticeable number of hospitals get shut down then there will be serious repercussions. Also, if people start dying because of any kind of medical hack it will be panic button time. Suddenly Congress will be shocked, shocked, that this happened. All the collusion fueled by corporate donations will suddenly be forgotten, and somehow the "government" will be blamed. Forgetting, of course, the Congress is "the government".
Some how I doubt that is going to happen. Because leaving the EU is primarily about racism, not bureaucracy.
Personally I expect to experience a great amount of schadenfreude watching the consequences of this circular firing squad. Now the UK's economic and political situation is in complete chaos, and that will inevitably lead to an economic downturn. Markets are allergenic to uncertainty. It's not going to work itself out quickly, so the economic mess will linger.
In terms of mass stupidity, I also suggest that they drop the metric units system and join the US in using imperial units. As long as they want to deny the relevancy of the rest of the world, it's another way to be out of step with (almost) everyone else.
At a minimum they are being more honest the the US.
Each CPU supplies an amount of computation less then a single instruction on a regular CPU. Think of it as a grid of instructions not a grid of computers. A processor has a Harvard architecture with 128 instructions of 40 bit size and a separate data memory with two banks of 128 16 bit data values (256 16 bit data words total). It says nothing about register files or stacks or subroutine calls. It's likely that the two data banks are in effect the register set. The paper implies that a CPU can compute a single floating point operation in software.
Compiling means mapping code fragments to a set of connected CPUs and routing resources, and then feeding the data into the compute array. After some circuitous path through the grid the answer emerges somewhere. There are also 12 independent memory banks each with a 64KB of SRAM that are available to all CPUs.
History has not been kind to this kind of grid architecture with lots of CPUs and very little memory. Almost none of them ever made it out of the lab. It's symptomatic of hardware engineers who are clueless about software and design unprogrammable computers. They confuse aggregate theoretical throughput with useful compute resources.
Debugging code on this would be a nightmare. It's completely asynchronous, there is no hardware to segregate different sets of CPUs doing different computing tasks and so few resources per CPU that software debugging aids would crowd out the working code. The people listed on the paper should be punished by being force to make it do useful work for at least a year. They would be scarred for life.
I know that I am fabulously wealthy and have multiple houses in expensive locations and can go anywhere and do anything I want, which is why I spend time on Slashdot instead of going to incredibly trendy locations with the other beautiful people.
This is proceeding the way that scientific progress normally works. An experimenter found an effect that did not fit in the current paradigm. Other experimenters found similar results. Now theoreticians are coming up with hypothesis that may explain the result. Other theoretical types will either agree or disagree. Other experiments will be done to test the hypothesis. Eventually a general consensus will emerge. It's all completely normal.
Remember it was 100 years ago that Einstein predicted gravity waves, and they were just detected. Eventually can be a long time.
Do you think that your primary care doctor invented all the drugs and tests you get? Do architects design and build the entire building by themselves? Does the CEO of a cable company personally bring the fiber or cable to your door?
Sometimes stupid can be cute. This does not apply to you.
So it's not terrorism when anti-abortion activists assassinate doctors or firebomb clinics. Really?
Or when a bunch of armed militants occupy a federal facility and threaten the lives of local and federal law enforcement officers. None of those involved had any terrorism related charges brought against them. They face weapons charges, felony conspiracy, and destroying government property. No terrorism charges at all.
What if the armed occupiers had been Muslims or radical environmentalist or native American militants, or anybody who wasn't a right wing Christian? It would be called terrorism from the first report and there would have been no kid gloves. Nobody would be wandering into town for a hot meal and a warm bed in a motel, which happened during the first week or so. The siege would not have lasted over a month. The authorities would have come in with guns blazing and there would have been many fatalities. And anyone who wasn't killed on the spot would have been charged with terrorism and murder for any deaths that occurred. (When criminals commit violent felonies and one of them dies at the hand of the police, the remaining perps can be charged with murder. Why did these perps avoid that charge?)
So who is getting a free pass because of their religion? Someone who is a lot like you.
If you are a Trump supporter it would not be a surprise. That's the kind of illiterate non-reasoning that Trump and his ignorant hoard specialize in.
By the way, we are not at war with China (are you aware of this?) so it is very unlikely that any spying a Chinese citizen could do would be a death penalty case.
So you could view this a karmic payback.
And it would be really really nice if we ever had a congressional investigation into why we invaded the wrong country. You know, Iraq. Have you forgotten that? No involvement in the 9/11 attacks, no weapons of mass destruction (except the left over ones from when Regan and Cheney were best buds with Saddam Husein).
There has never been a official accounting for why the US invaded Iraq. There lots of hearings about "faulty intelligence", which were grand political theater to lay blame on the CIA, FBI, NSA, FCC, FAA, NBC, CNN, CBS, ASPCA, FFA (Future Farmers of America), Girl Scouts, etc. But the decision was made in the White House, not by intelligence agencies or the Congress or the judiciary.
There was the Iraq Study Group, which was just about as useful as it sounds. It was not done by a government entity, it was just funded by Congress. It had no subpoena power, so no one could be compelled to testify, and nobody with any direct involvement showed up. Not a surprise. It was designed to produce no useful result, and it succeeded brilliantly.
The one other official investigation was about Chaney leaking Valery Plame's covert position at the CIA, which lead to the conviction of Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice. Libby took a bullet for Chaney, and then got his sentence committed by Bush. You want to see how a real successful government coverup works, that's how it's done. Democrats aren't anywhere in that leage, but then the Republicans get so much more practice.
This is rooted in Microsoft culture. Security is never a primary concern. Imagine someone with a whiny voice saying "It's too hard, I don't wanna do it, it makes things no fun" etc, etc. From the outside that seems like how they behave.
And there is the little matter of loss of institutional memory, which is the senility part. That is because they consciously exclude people of long experience. They don't hire them, and if anyone is too long on the job they get flushed out. It's cheaper and keeps the workforce docile. But the long term result is making the same mistake over and over again. Not that Microsoft is a whole lot worse then any other big software organization, but they appear to do it even more then other big outfits.
Expect them to resurrect the BSOD any day now...
Prepper ideology and gun ownership just make it easier for the government to go about it's business of trashing the constitution. First, you have already identified who you are, and they can generate a list with you name on it in milliseconds. They know because of metadata: where and when you use your credit card, your phone records, license plate scanners, etc. Second, thinking that your gun will save you means that you are wasting time solving the wrong problem. It's a legal, law enforcement, information, and telecommunications threat, so sitting around counting your bullets and cleaning you gun means that you are a non-combatant.
You want to do something? Don't use software that requires signing a EULA. Tell your congress critter not to support the TPP. Join the EFF and the ACLU, use encryption and run Linux. That's where the conflict is occurring. Although it's a big stroke for your ego to assume that Manly Men with Guns Will Save the Day, that's just the fantasy of a little boy thinking he is Iron Man. The end of constitutional government is a bureaucratic conflict involving business and government, not a reenactment of the Revolutionary War.
Now replace "32 Million Twitter Accounts" with "32 Million Automobile Access Codes". Since you car talks to your cellphone, all your personal data will be at risk, including payment system info, bank access, email, contacts, etc.
Eventual headline: "Compromised Auto Password Database used to Loot Credit Accounts, Over $400 Million Missing".
So the Supreme Court of the Republican Party (not even close to the Supreme Court of the USA) appointed Bush, even though Gore won the vote. Do you think that Gore would have invaded the wrong county after the 9/11 attacks?
Dimwit "My Pet Goat" Bush and Darth Chaney went after Saddam Hussein even though he had nothing to do with 9/11 and they consciously lied their teeth out about weapons of mass destruction. No one can say what would have happened, but it is a 100% certainty that if Gore had been president we would not have invaded Iraq.
So why don't you STFU. Anything you say is useless until you and your equally moronic cohorts come back to reality and stop spouting crap that is just not true.
And by the way Bush was AWOL. He didn't show up for required medical exams. It's in the public record. He got away with it because of his Daddy and Republican duplicity, the same way he was appointed president.
It isn't a myth, people just didn't read their Adam Smith and they have no idea what it means.
You're absolutely right. Just like every Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Fascist, Techocrat (the political party), Islamic State warrior, Spanish Inquisitor, etc. is right. If everybody would read the book and follow the rules then the outcome would be perfect. The problem is the people who are too stupid or foolish to obey the rules who screw if up for everyone. If we could only remove them and their influence then the ends would justify the means...
Obviously the answer is revenue. There are lots of savings to be had. It's much cheaper to maintain one OS rather them multiple versions of the OS. (BTW, expect big layoffs at MS real soon now. Anyone who mostly works on OS code that is not tied to 10 should have their resume all polished up. Blood will flow in Redmond.)
But that part is not enough to explain the ridiculous methods that are being used. When the only way to insure that 10 is not installed on your computer is to never attach it to the internet, there is something else going on. And it must be revenue driven.
The likely answer is that Microsoft is planning on going to a de facto subscription model. Users will have to pay every year to keep their copy of the OS working. Same for Office, Excel, etc. Individual users will end up paying the full purchase cost every year for each piece of software, or maybe half the full price. Of course there will be "bundled" discounts like the phone companies offer, but that won't do much for your elderly relatives. And there will be student rates, but the vast majority will be paying through the nose.
Microsoft lost the revenue war to Apple.They missed out on the iPhone and iWatch. They were late to the cloud as well. Android has driven all the nails into the coffin for the phone/tablet market, which is where the growth will be.Their only play is to fully exploit their monopolist power and embrace extortionist capitalism.
The EU will scream like a stuck pig, but MS already has a strategy in place to deal with them. It will be delay by a series of holding actions, and then eventually have data centers in Europe to satisfy privacy conditions. They might even agree to pay more taxes, which will be less painful given the profits they rake in.
The big growth will be in China, Russia and India, where MS will help the government track everyone. They will do for these countries what the NSA has done to the US. Every computer will be a full time spy. Local data centers with 100% access to the contents of all computers. It is possible that the US will take advantage of this as well. Not that anyone will ever hear about it.
So much for looking to the "free market" for fair value. Your claim that the market empowers consumers is delusional. Without government oversight that can of beans would have a reasonable chance of killing you, either through bacterial infection or chemical poisoning. This is what is happening in China right now, where there is no meaningful government regulation.
Given the disproportionate influence of big business on government right now, trusting corporate America is like trusting meth freaks. The free market is a tremendous piece of propaganda. What really runs the economic system are factions of monopolists and cartels that have eliminated almost all competition. This is enabled and maintained by a corrupt government.
The only way this will change is if voters use their democratic power to take back control of the government. We need a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", not a government run solely for corporate interests.
Do I even have to mention Flint? State intervention and cost cutting by appointed ideological "commissars" were the direct cause of mass lead poisoning. Just because you can find some low level chump who signed off because they were "just following orders" does not change where the responsibility lies.
So the State takes over, usurps all local power and renders local democratically elected officials impotent. They have no say in how their city is run. In Flint there was no functioning local democracy, it was directly run by a Republican governor and legislature. There is only one political faction to blame.
So your whine about being unfairly accused sounds a lot like a combination of a guilty conscience and a feeble attempt to counter attack to deflect criticism.
Another interesting point: why was this reported by a British news organization, not by anyone in the US? It's not very logical that this would be missed by journalists in the US and uncovered by people in England. Any chance that the press is so corrupt and self centered they won't look into massive failure at home? I guess that it's too easy and too much fun to report about Trump rather then stir up trouble at home. That might cause someone to complain and interfere with their cosy relationships with politicians.
Department of Homeland Pork.
So who is allowed to sell electronics in India? Do Korean, Japanese and Chinese electronics companies have facilities in India? Are there many locally made cell phones or TVs? Are there wafer fab lines? How does this work exactly? Has this problem occurred for other international manufacturers?
If the Feds gave local police military helicopters with Hellfire missiles they would routinely be used on jaywalkers and drivers who didn't use turn signals. If it was nukes they would be used on speeders. One of the perks of being a cop is the right to use unjustifiable force any time you can get away with it.
This is a major motivation for going after young coders and avoiding people with experience. People with experience know about the burnout bullshit, but people earlier in their careers assume that is the way to get things done. Managers know who they can easily manipulate for the death march on an ill-conceived schedule. Someone who has been there before is going to raise meaningful objections and might alert the younger people that it's a pack of lies. Upper management can't make vast amounts of money unless the workforce remains ignorant about the real cost/reward equation.
The one country in the world that had experienced nuclear devastation, with one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world, couldn't get it right. This was not the bureaucratically hide bound Soviet Union, where technical expertise coexisted with a struggling backwards economic system, this was the home of the bullet train that always ran on time and they still couldn't get it right.
So when a bunch of really smart people point out a serious problem that the nuclear establishment (called the "nuclear village" in Japan) say is impossible, it's time to take it seriously. That is exactly what happened in Japan when it was pointed out that a much larger tsunami could over run the Fukushima power station. The industry made a decision based on their pocketbooks, the pretend regulators agreed, and the time bomb started ticking. So this class of failure has happened before.
Arguing that the article is tainted because it is somehow associated with the solar power field is a paranoid delusion. If you can't criticize the findings on their technical merits then you are the ones engaged in propaganda arguments. As the Russians and Japanese have already found out, nuclear materials go critical based on laws of physics and do not respond to overly optimistic planning documents. When things go bad because of an unplanned critical mass it gets very ugly very fast and there is little to be done to stop it.
Doubt this could happen? It already has.
Trump sloughed off any responsibility for the attack and said "the people that are following me are very passionate". The man who was beaten was a legalized immigrant from Latin America.
When Trump claims that Mexicans are rapists and criminals you can't pretend that it didn't encourage his followers to act violently. This is what happened during the civil rights era when blacks were attacked with impunity by angry white people. It still goes on today: Trevor Martin/George Zimmerman. There are a whole lot of people out there who are looking for an excuse, and Trump's political platform is to legitimatize their anger. You can't pretend to be surprised when violence is the result.
When you say that Trump and Clinton are the same you might as well join a white racist organization, because those people take Trump at his word.