Between laptops, tablets and AIOs the ratio of custom to standard motherboards has been going more and more in the direction of custom boards, while Intel is moving more and more of the functionality onto the chip itself. If the leaks are correct both the lowest power versions of Haswell (ULT and ULX) will be system-on-a-chip. More importantly, since Intel is now the only supplier of chipsets to Intel CPUs they effectively control the features and prices of motherboards anyway, while giving the illusion of competition. I'm quite sure Intel is the one with the best information on where Intel is going in the near future and why this division isn't worth keeping.
Guaranteed, within 15 minutes of the first download you will be able to get this stuff for free
Which was also true 15 minutes before the first download. If you don't want to distribute the eWay, only pirates will distribute the eWay. I'm still waiting for HBO Nordic to get their head out of their ass and deliver something better than SD quality with stereo sound, unless you own a Samsung product in which case you can get HD with surround sound. I'll get my shows where I'm a first class citizen, thank you very much.
Considering they stopped for several years, I'm more thinking they adopted the strategy from War Games: The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately for WotC it doesn't work quite as well for AD&D as for global thermonuclear war.
Unless they have a hidden kill switch (not a backdoor)
Or a hidden activation switch, I mean you don't think the Chinese are so stupid that it calls home by default? It'll work 100% to spec until it gets either some magic payload or a magic port knock and goes "live". If you make the activation key sufficiently long (128 or 256 bits) then there's no way to brute force prove that it's not there short of ripping it apart and analyzing each transistor.
Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.
To some it's a religion... quote related:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips
Apart from that some people whine about everything, they're just filled with this soul-sapping pessimism and aura of negativity that everything is wrong and hopeless and you should just give up before you've even tried and that this is worthless and a waste of effort and they told you so. You go to a restaurant and they either complain about the queue or the location or the seating or the decoration or the waiting time or the service or that the food is lukewarm or flavored too much or too little or cooked too much or too little or prices or whatever... even when it's a normal, popular experience they get hung up on the 10% that they don't like and spends half their meal jammering on and on about it. If you run a public project you're going to meet a few of those that act like they were forced under duress to torture themselves by using your product.
For comparison, in Phil's book "Death from the Skies" he discusses what would happen as a result of a GRB from 100 ly away, and the result is Very Bad(tm).
Of course for all the preppers out there it should also be said that the closest confirmed GRB is 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, the observation period isn't very long but it's hardly a common occurrence. Which is also why I'm a little sceptic that we've had one right on our doorstep only a few thousand light years away.
No, you should scan yourself. Running a hacking tool against someone else's site is like claiming you were just testing the store's anti-shoplifting measure and would totally tell them about the hole and return the goods if you succeeded. So why wait until he is a seasoned hacker coming from a rooted machine in.cn? Petty shoplifters aren't much of a threat to civilized society either but I'd rather they get a good lesson early than wait until they do something "big enough", by which it's usually too late.
Which achieves one goal at the cost of memorability. Particularly if you want a password that can survive an offline brute force cracking attempt as opposed to guessing over the network it should be 20+ characters long because each character only adds 8 bits of entropy - in practice more like 6 bits. Looking at it the other way from the would-be cracker's perspective, what do you have? Brute force attacks and dictionary attacks. The easiest way to avoid both is to take a long, easy to memorize phrase and fuck with it, not bad grammar/typos just go wild. Like
How many permutations of that one phrase can I make? Millions. And of course first you'd have to guess which of the millions of possible phrases you picked. No dictionary attack is ever going to find it, and it's surprisingly easy to remember. The hard part is not typing it into a hardware/software keylogger or if someone decides to "brute force" your password with a wrench. Oh yeah and if they have access to a running machine there are ways to dump your entire memory contents via either firewire, expresscard or thunderbolt so better have a tripwire to the off button/circuit breaker so they don't get a running system. Or just realize that the fucker who took it probably doesn't give a shit and just want to sell the hardware on ebay at the first hint of resistance.
2. Other uses it because their company forces them
I think "force" is too strong a word, at home I haven't used IE since before Firefox 1.0 (Opera before that) but at work I don't much care. If I have the rights to install something else with no fuss I will, if not then whatever I'll use IE - it's not my security problem and it's not my time and money wasted. To date I've not yet been at a company - and I've been consulting and been to a fair bunch - that didn't have IE as their default browser. Some places you could install your own, some places Firefox was an officially supported alternative, some places you couldn't do anything but if you didn't take an active choice to use anything else it was IE. As long as IE ships with Windows, it will always have a significant market share because of companies that simply do nothing.
If you don't have the bandwidth to stream, you don't have the bandwidth to instantly watch a video unless you want to proactively keep an archive of everything you could possibly want to watch. And if you do have the bandwidth, who cares? Most the effort is in laying down fat enough pipes on the last mile, sure you add a little more traffic to the aggregate at your ISP's central but really that's pretty marginal. They still have to maintain the line and all the other tools no matter how much data flows through it. Besides, is it actually less? In all honesty, if I compare the amount of video downloaded because I thought I was going to watch compared to the amount of video I actually ended up watching, I think the savings are bigger than the repeat downloads.
Typical examples: 1. Download episode 1, looks kinda interesting 2. Put rest of season on download 3. See episode 2 and 3, realize they used all the good material already and it's rather dull 4. Delete entire season
1. Download low quality version of something 2. Life gets busy, a better version (e.g. BluRay, BRrip) available 3. Download again in better quality and watch that 4. Delete low quality version without ever watching
1. See some interesting screencaps 2. Download a siterip because what the hey 3. See a few clips, find maybe 10% interesting 4. Delete the other 90%
The vast majority of movies and TV series I have I've only seen once. If they were really good, maybe twice. And three times is roughly my absolute limit, because by then I remember pretty much everything and I'm just aching "get oooooooooooon with it". That said, without copyright we could do this much more efficiently with a hierarchy of caches, like a CDN but generic and open using hash keys. You'd just as for the hashes like those in the torrent file, and the closest cache would provide that block. The biggest waste of bandwidth today is not downloads vs streaming, it's that you're downloading from a peer in Australia instead of the other guy on the same block watching the same show.
You're trying to solve the problem of electronic patient journals, very good luck with that. But the grandparent is right in one thing - it'd be a helluva start to get "electronic paper journals" off the ground. Sure it *would* be nice if it existed in plain text or a structured format that could be parsed electronically as well, but currently a lot is done by printer/scanner/photocopier that didn't have to go via physical paper.
Yes. Our biggest ISP tried that when Netflix launched, that they should pay the ISP for all the traffic they were sending. Netflix's reply was (paraphrased) "How about I give you the finger and if you want to keep your customers, deliver our videos." From what I understood it was rather effective, wasn't the first time they've tried and I'm sure it won't be the last but they've been shot down in flames every time.
How do they do they encryption before upload? If the file goes to the unencrypted initially, then surely they'd have a record of it.
Well, there are AES implementations for JavaScript.... not if I know that's what they're using or what the performance is like, but it's certainly possible to do it client side...
That's the part I don't understand. How do you get the American company to show profit, and yet claim that the taxes for those profits need to be paid in Ireland. That's the part I suspect is breaking some laws.
Ah, but they're not. They're not moving the money to the parent company, they're saying we own 100% of an Irish company that last year made profits in Ireland. It is the consolidated financial statement people are looking at, which in short means "pretend all our holdings were the same entity", it is not for tax purposes but a mere aggregation for telling the market how you did in total across all countries and sub-sub-subsidiaries. It's not actual financial transactions, it is mere aggregation.
Of course there's no guarantee that getting boots on Mars will prove or disprove that there was or possibly is life there. Neither is it a necessary condition, we keep sending bigger and better rovers with more equipment that can do more. With Opportunity still running and Curiosity now operational we've had eyes on the ground uninterrupted since 2004 while I suspect a human mission would be a one-time stunt not to be repeated for decades.
Not even the craziest of creationists denies the inheritance of genetic traits, since it's obvious to anyone that children tend to look like their parents. What they do deny is the evolution of species, sure humans can breed but the result will always be a human, chickens breed chickens and horses breed horses. This is proven by the "absurdity" of two chimps breeding a human or a blind creature suddenly having an eye, which ignores that these changes happen gradually as a result of evolutionary advantages or different evolutionary pressures and accumulate over millions of years - it's not surprising many ignore fact too, which is trashing many other sciences like geology and archaeology. There's plenty proof of the formation of species and evolution of complex organisms too, but not the kind you can obviously and indisputably show a creationist in 30 seconds or less.
No, it actually is one of the worse but Turkey is an even more extreme example, here's a quote from WP:
A study published in Science compared attitudes about evolution in the United States, 32 European countries (including Turkey) and Japan. The only country where acceptance of evolution was lower than in the United States was Turkey (25%).
Only the Abrahamic world religions in general and Protestant Christianity in particular has a big issue with evolution, this graph shows how in the US Buddhists and Hindus are the most accepting. The national figures for India are also very strong and in line with western Europe. Sure a lot other countries have other vices, but creationism is usually not one of them.
We're still working on that eternal (after)life, even though modern medicine has made some progress you could live to 80 in ancient Rome too and we still consider that a fairly good run. But it's nice with a stretch goal;)
Yeah, because if they get the plaintext password from one crappily protected forum and it is 12345[site], no way they'll try 12345facebook on facebook or 12345gmail and 12345email on gmail. It'd be the second most obvious after just trying to the email/password combo.
There is no PRIVACY violation here. Also, privacy is an illusion. If you want privacy, go live off the grid in some cave all by yourself.
If you give someone private information on the premise that it can't be tied to your person and that turns out to be false, of course that is a violation of your privacy even if it's nobody's fault. Personally I like some of the benefits of privacy like democracy, can't have that without private voting. Privacy is no more an illusion than free speech or due process, it exists if you make it so. But just like countries where you have no free speech and no due process, you can have no privacy too. But I wouldn't exactly call it a goal. P.S. It's always rich to hear "privacy is an illusion" from someone using a nick to avoid linking their posts to their identity.
How many of those were by firearm? How many were done by Police Officers?
A few murder stats from Norway, since you ask: Knife: Around 40% Guns: Around 20% Suffocation: Around 15% Blunt trauma: Around 15% Other: Around 10%
Murders by police officers isn't in the statistics, but if you count people shot and killed by the police then in the last decade the answer is 2, one in 2005 and one in 2006. Though I would argue that they should have been on the scene earlier and shot Breivik. Some other stats:
Around 85% of the victims had a relation to the murderer, around 45% friends, 25% intimate relations and 20% family. Around 50% affected by alcohol or drugs, around 50% unemployed, 25% working, 20% on benefits. Around 75% of the murders happens in either the perp's or victim's home, 5% other private place and 20% in public. Of causes the big ones are arguments with 45%, jealousy 20%, mental problems 20%. revenge 10%. Murder as a result of burglary/robbery etc. is very rare.
But would you really want to reduce the element of chance? People like to play poker because although you will lose to a poker pro over time, you can sit down with the world's best poker player and win some hands, while with chess you'll lose to Magnus Carlsen 100 out of 100 times. Making it a pure skills-based game is only fun for the one with the best skill, assuming fun should have anything to do with games.
If we ignore any issues with security it's really hard to fault the guy. The point as an employee is to do your job and do it well. The code he (had) produced was apparently commendable. He did his job well though not by the traditional solution (working hard and doing it yourself). Does that make it the wrong solution?
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not. I've been both a consultant and an employee and there are far more differences than just security. Contractors are external, employees are internal so doing it this way you end up as a mole on the inside. There's no right or wrong to it, as an employer I can chose to hire an employee or a contractor with different pros and cons, but if I hire one and get the other then you're fundamentally misrepresenting yourself.
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Between laptops, tablets and AIOs the ratio of custom to standard motherboards has been going more and more in the direction of custom boards, while Intel is moving more and more of the functionality onto the chip itself. If the leaks are correct both the lowest power versions of Haswell (ULT and ULX) will be system-on-a-chip. More importantly, since Intel is now the only supplier of chipsets to Intel CPUs they effectively control the features and prices of motherboards anyway, while giving the illusion of competition. I'm quite sure Intel is the one with the best information on where Intel is going in the near future and why this division isn't worth keeping.
There are plenty of non-strange Linux people around.
Personally, I consider myself quite charming.
I suppose it all depends on the spin you put on things.
And what direction you're looking from.
Guaranteed, within 15 minutes of the first download you will be able to get this stuff for free
Which was also true 15 minutes before the first download. If you don't want to distribute the eWay, only pirates will distribute the eWay. I'm still waiting for HBO Nordic to get their head out of their ass and deliver something better than SD quality with stereo sound, unless you own a Samsung product in which case you can get HD with surround sound. I'll get my shows where I'm a first class citizen, thank you very much.
Considering they stopped for several years, I'm more thinking they adopted the strategy from War Games: The only winning move is not to play. Unfortunately for WotC it doesn't work quite as well for AD&D as for global thermonuclear war.
Unless they have a hidden kill switch (not a backdoor)
Or a hidden activation switch, I mean you don't think the Chinese are so stupid that it calls home by default? It'll work 100% to spec until it gets either some magic payload or a magic port knock and goes "live". If you make the activation key sufficiently long (128 or 256 bits) then there's no way to brute force prove that it's not there short of ripping it apart and analyzing each transistor.
Not just the developers but OTHER USERS in particular treat people as the enemy because they don't agree with them. Why the fuck? Linux users are the minority species in the first place - the last thing we need is needless fighting amongst ourselves.
To some it's a religion... quote related:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips
Apart from that some people whine about everything, they're just filled with this soul-sapping pessimism and aura of negativity that everything is wrong and hopeless and you should just give up before you've even tried and that this is worthless and a waste of effort and they told you so. You go to a restaurant and they either complain about the queue or the location or the seating or the decoration or the waiting time or the service or that the food is lukewarm or flavored too much or too little or cooked too much or too little or prices or whatever... even when it's a normal, popular experience they get hung up on the 10% that they don't like and spends half their meal jammering on and on about it. If you run a public project you're going to meet a few of those that act like they were forced under duress to torture themselves by using your product.
For comparison, in Phil's book "Death from the Skies" he discusses what would happen as a result of a GRB from 100 ly away, and the result is Very Bad(tm).
Of course for all the preppers out there it should also be said that the closest confirmed GRB is 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, the observation period isn't very long but it's hardly a common occurrence. Which is also why I'm a little sceptic that we've had one right on our doorstep only a few thousand light years away.
No, you should scan yourself. Running a hacking tool against someone else's site is like claiming you were just testing the store's anti-shoplifting measure and would totally tell them about the hole and return the goods if you succeeded. So why wait until he is a seasoned hacker coming from a rooted machine in .cn? Petty shoplifters aren't much of a threat to civilized society either but I'd rather they get a good lesson early than wait until they do something "big enough", by which it's usually too late.
"The uploader has not made this video available in your country."
I'm so glad there's a Pirate Party running this election...
Which achieves one goal at the cost of memorability. Particularly if you want a password that can survive an offline brute force cracking attempt as opposed to guessing over the network it should be 20+ characters long because each character only adds 8 bits of entropy - in practice more like 6 bits. Looking at it the other way from the would-be cracker's perspective, what do you have? Brute force attacks and dictionary attacks. The easiest way to avoid both is to take a long, easy to memorize phrase and fuck with it, not bad grammar/typos just go wild. Like
"maryhadalittlelamb" => "marXyhadal2ittlela!mb"
"maryhadalittlelamb" => "ma8ryha#dalitZtlelamb"
"maryhadalittlelamb" => "m*aryhadaliNttlela4mb"
How many permutations of that one phrase can I make? Millions. And of course first you'd have to guess which of the millions of possible phrases you picked. No dictionary attack is ever going to find it, and it's surprisingly easy to remember. The hard part is not typing it into a hardware/software keylogger or if someone decides to "brute force" your password with a wrench. Oh yeah and if they have access to a running machine there are ways to dump your entire memory contents via either firewire, expresscard or thunderbolt so better have a tripwire to the off button/circuit breaker so they don't get a running system. Or just realize that the fucker who took it probably doesn't give a shit and just want to sell the hardware on ebay at the first hint of resistance.
2. Other uses it because their company forces them
I think "force" is too strong a word, at home I haven't used IE since before Firefox 1.0 (Opera before that) but at work I don't much care. If I have the rights to install something else with no fuss I will, if not then whatever I'll use IE - it's not my security problem and it's not my time and money wasted. To date I've not yet been at a company - and I've been consulting and been to a fair bunch - that didn't have IE as their default browser. Some places you could install your own, some places Firefox was an officially supported alternative, some places you couldn't do anything but if you didn't take an active choice to use anything else it was IE. As long as IE ships with Windows, it will always have a significant market share because of companies that simply do nothing.
If you don't have the bandwidth to stream, you don't have the bandwidth to instantly watch a video unless you want to proactively keep an archive of everything you could possibly want to watch. And if you do have the bandwidth, who cares? Most the effort is in laying down fat enough pipes on the last mile, sure you add a little more traffic to the aggregate at your ISP's central but really that's pretty marginal. They still have to maintain the line and all the other tools no matter how much data flows through it. Besides, is it actually less? In all honesty, if I compare the amount of video downloaded because I thought I was going to watch compared to the amount of video I actually ended up watching, I think the savings are bigger than the repeat downloads.
Typical examples:
1. Download episode 1, looks kinda interesting
2. Put rest of season on download
3. See episode 2 and 3, realize they used all the good material already and it's rather dull
4. Delete entire season
1. Download low quality version of something
2. Life gets busy, a better version (e.g. BluRay, BRrip) available
3. Download again in better quality and watch that
4. Delete low quality version without ever watching
1. See some interesting screencaps
2. Download a siterip because what the hey
3. See a few clips, find maybe 10% interesting
4. Delete the other 90%
The vast majority of movies and TV series I have I've only seen once. If they were really good, maybe twice. And three times is roughly my absolute limit, because by then I remember pretty much everything and I'm just aching "get oooooooooooon with it". That said, without copyright we could do this much more efficiently with a hierarchy of caches, like a CDN but generic and open using hash keys. You'd just as for the hashes like those in the torrent file, and the closest cache would provide that block. The biggest waste of bandwidth today is not downloads vs streaming, it's that you're downloading from a peer in Australia instead of the other guy on the same block watching the same show.
You're trying to solve the problem of electronic patient journals, very good luck with that. But the grandparent is right in one thing - it'd be a helluva start to get "electronic paper journals" off the ground. Sure it *would* be nice if it existed in plain text or a structured format that could be parsed electronically as well, but currently a lot is done by printer/scanner/photocopier that didn't have to go via physical paper.
Yes. Our biggest ISP tried that when Netflix launched, that they should pay the ISP for all the traffic they were sending. Netflix's reply was (paraphrased) "How about I give you the finger and if you want to keep your customers, deliver our videos." From what I understood it was rather effective, wasn't the first time they've tried and I'm sure it won't be the last but they've been shot down in flames every time.
How do they do they encryption before upload? If the file goes to the unencrypted initially, then surely they'd have a record of it.
Well, there are AES implementations for JavaScript.... not if I know that's what they're using or what the performance is like, but it's certainly possible to do it client side...
That's the part I don't understand. How do you get the American company to show profit, and yet claim that the taxes for those profits need to be paid in Ireland. That's the part I suspect is breaking some laws.
Ah, but they're not. They're not moving the money to the parent company, they're saying we own 100% of an Irish company that last year made profits in Ireland. It is the consolidated financial statement people are looking at, which in short means "pretend all our holdings were the same entity", it is not for tax purposes but a mere aggregation for telling the market how you did in total across all countries and sub-sub-subsidiaries. It's not actual financial transactions, it is mere aggregation.
Of course there's no guarantee that getting boots on Mars will prove or disprove that there was or possibly is life there. Neither is it a necessary condition, we keep sending bigger and better rovers with more equipment that can do more. With Opportunity still running and Curiosity now operational we've had eyes on the ground uninterrupted since 2004 while I suspect a human mission would be a one-time stunt not to be repeated for decades.
Not even the craziest of creationists denies the inheritance of genetic traits, since it's obvious to anyone that children tend to look like their parents. What they do deny is the evolution of species, sure humans can breed but the result will always be a human, chickens breed chickens and horses breed horses. This is proven by the "absurdity" of two chimps breeding a human or a blind creature suddenly having an eye, which ignores that these changes happen gradually as a result of evolutionary advantages or different evolutionary pressures and accumulate over millions of years - it's not surprising many ignore fact too, which is trashing many other sciences like geology and archaeology. There's plenty proof of the formation of species and evolution of complex organisms too, but not the kind you can obviously and indisputably show a creationist in 30 seconds or less.
No, it actually is one of the worse but Turkey is an even more extreme example, here's a quote from WP:
A study published in Science compared attitudes about evolution in the United States, 32 European countries (including Turkey) and Japan. The only country where acceptance of evolution was lower than in the United States was Turkey (25%).
Only the Abrahamic world religions in general and Protestant Christianity in particular has a big issue with evolution, this graph shows how in the US Buddhists and Hindus are the most accepting. The national figures for India are also very strong and in line with western Europe. Sure a lot other countries have other vices, but creationism is usually not one of them.
We're still working on that eternal (after)life, even though modern medicine has made some progress you could live to 80 in ancient Rome too and we still consider that a fairly good run. But it's nice with a stretch goal ;)
Yeah, because if they get the plaintext password from one crappily protected forum and it is 12345[site], no way they'll try 12345facebook on facebook or 12345gmail and 12345email on gmail. It'd be the second most obvious after just trying to the email/password combo.
There is no PRIVACY violation here. Also, privacy is an illusion. If you want privacy, go live off the grid in some cave all by yourself.
If you give someone private information on the premise that it can't be tied to your person and that turns out to be false, of course that is a violation of your privacy even if it's nobody's fault. Personally I like some of the benefits of privacy like democracy, can't have that without private voting. Privacy is no more an illusion than free speech or due process, it exists if you make it so. But just like countries where you have no free speech and no due process, you can have no privacy too. But I wouldn't exactly call it a goal. P.S. It's always rich to hear "privacy is an illusion" from someone using a nick to avoid linking their posts to their identity.
How many of those were by firearm? How many were done by Police Officers?
A few murder stats from Norway, since you ask:
Knife: Around 40%
Guns: Around 20%
Suffocation: Around 15%
Blunt trauma: Around 15%
Other: Around 10%
Murders by police officers isn't in the statistics, but if you count people shot and killed by the police then in the last decade the answer is 2, one in 2005 and one in 2006. Though I would argue that they should have been on the scene earlier and shot Breivik. Some other stats:
Around 85% of the victims had a relation to the murderer, around 45% friends, 25% intimate relations and 20% family. Around 50% affected by alcohol or drugs, around 50% unemployed, 25% working, 20% on benefits. Around 75% of the murders happens in either the perp's or victim's home, 5% other private place and 20% in public. Of causes the big ones are arguments with 45%, jealousy 20%, mental problems 20%. revenge 10%. Murder as a result of burglary/robbery etc. is very rare.
But would you really want to reduce the element of chance? People like to play poker because although you will lose to a poker pro over time, you can sit down with the world's best poker player and win some hands, while with chess you'll lose to Magnus Carlsen 100 out of 100 times. Making it a pure skills-based game is only fun for the one with the best skill, assuming fun should have anything to do with games.
If we ignore any issues with security it's really hard to fault the guy. The point as an employee is to do your job and do it well. The code he (had) produced was apparently commendable. He did his job well though not by the traditional solution (working hard and doing it yourself). Does that make it the wrong solution?
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not. I've been both a consultant and an employee and there are far more differences than just security. Contractors are external, employees are internal so doing it this way you end up as a mole on the inside. There's no right or wrong to it, as an employer I can chose to hire an employee or a contractor with different pros and cons, but if I hire one and get the other then you're fundamentally misrepresenting yourself.