The USSR 'paid' for its military production by sacrificing investment in it's people, education and consumer goods in order to maintain expenditures in it's military. Where the resources are allocated matters. It also did so using a very inefficient (though theoretically nonprofit) model. The corrupt officials didn't need profits to move most of the remaining production into their pockets.
To have any impact on the rest of production, there would have to be insufficient number of people in civilian industry (everything is nonprofit, so only people actually matter). That was clearly not the case.
When Perestroika kicked in and let people see what they were missing things started to fall apart and when they didn't quickly and oppressively use the military it came totally apart.
No. Just no. Gorbachev was surprised to see that Eastern part of the country (that he visited on a rather unusual trip) did not live up to rosy pictures that Communist Party expected to see. That, and similar reality vs. expectations "revelations" in the top Communist Party officials triggered some idiotic overreaction that allowed local version of Libertarians to steer the country toward economic suicide.
Population at the same time was fed ridiculous lies about how perfect Libertarian society works in US -- that is, everyone lives in a brick house (USSR had no concept of dry wall as a construction material), stores never have checkout lines, only lazy people have any hardships, and similar crap, along with promises to build exactly the same society in Russia and other then-USSR-member countries. That caused a wave of outrage against Communists supposedly mismanaging the economy, and Perestroika, originally a political system reform, was derailed into dismantling the foundations of economic system. USSR was dissolved in the middle of this process, allowing more extremist Linertarians (Russia) and Nationalists (all other USSR members) to take power. It was, as I described before, an economic suicide after seven decades of working economy.
The USSR wasn't destroyed militarily, it collapsed under the effort of paying for all the military dick waving.
Nope. As I have mentioned many times before, USSR "paid" for its military production to itself, because the whole production was government-owned and ran as a nonprofit. The only real "payments" were salaries -- consistent with the rest of the industry, and with full-employment policy those were unavoidable with or without military production. US propaganda projects the "expenses" sucked from the US government and society by military-industrial complex onto other countries, in an attempt to present them as normal, acceptable and justified. They are not.
This is getting repeated WAY too often, I smell a Republican propaganda campaign.
Don't change the subject. Xbox as a project is still in the red, and will be for the foreseeable future due to massive initial costs. This is true regardless of any other projects being lumped with it for the purpose of creative accounting.
So, to answer the question, which was, "Or are you just a hypocrite, sucking off the bountiful, corn-fed teat of the US economy while crying about the people and government that provide your comfortable middle class lifestyle here, thousands of miles away from your former fascist totalitarian homeland, you ignorant, trolling cunt?" - your answer would be "Yes"?
No, because participation in a society does not impose any obligation to love its other members, its ideology or its rulers. Same idiotic question could be asked to any person oppressed in any society, because no matter how oppressed, a person uses infrastructure of the society to support his life. The answer is always the same.
Ah yes, because those employers you work for, who pay your salary - they contribute NOTHING.
I don't see the problem -- my employers certainly do not do my work because I do it. What they do, is their work.
They are worthless scumbags. I wish I lived in your world, you thick cunt, where successful businesses grow on trees and jobs can be had just by wishing. It sounds magical.
I do not work for businesses that are "successful" to the extent of being monopolistic oppressors of everyone except their own top executives, and I find it disgusting that this kind of "success" is possible, or desirable in your economic system.
And yet, you're still living in the US, enjoying gainful employment while spitting on the people providing it for you.
No one "provides" for me, I do my own work, and do more to improve the lives of Americans (including Americans I despise) than any American who claims to love them. I didn't even gain any benefit usually available to Americans when they grew up because I arrived here after I have obtained excellent education in USSR, the education that would not be available to me if I was born here. If anything, I am in a weird position of being unable to benefit the society where I was raised, because at the point when I became capable of doing so, society lost the ability to benefit from my work (the aforementioned USSR dissolution and economic crisis). If anything, US got the benefit of my work and my presence in its society as a windfall.
I'd think you'd be absolutely tripping over yourself to move back to a better life in Russia.
If USSR was not dissolved, I would have no need to come to US in the first place. In reality, for half of the time I lived here, all ex-USSR countries were in a horrible condition, and could not benefit from anything I could do regardless of my efforts. American propaganda played a significant role in reaching that condition, so if anything, I am in a position to throw accusations. By the time any recovery started there, no benefit, to anyone, from me moving half across the globe again, would justify the trouble of doing so, so I stay in US and do things that benefit everyone. None of this in any way imposes on me an obligation lick anyone's boots, your government and businesses included.
I find it amusing that you bloviate about the evils of the US government while moving to the US to live and work. I guess you're either a whore, willing to sacrifice your principles as long as you can make a buck, or a hypocrite, biting the hand that's feeding you. Either way, thanks for letting us know!
I have moved from a country in a deep economic crisis, where my presence would be worthless, to a country where I can do something useful. This does not in any way contradict my principles, or imposes any obligations on me, other than doing productive work. If I came here to oppress you, you would have a valid complaint, however this is one thing that I never did. It's true that I hate some of you, and see most of the rest as deluded idiots, however this is hardly an uncommon position, both inside and outside US.
If I was an American and had any emotional attachment to
All those are patched, and only became known BECAUSE they were patched.
lol wut? Blame the user. Nice OSS strategy. linux only works if its locked down.. like on android.. or you are forced to hire a person to administer it.. like on servers. for general use case.. linux is a complete failure.
There is nothing that can be done to provide any kind of security if the user writes software that actively undermines security and runs it on his system.
Windows "advocates" like yourself are trying to conflate it with "don't go to suspicious web sites and pray that there are no exploits on legitimate ones" and other pseudo-common-sense recommendations given to Windows users to somehow decrease the exposure to attacks. In reality, on a secure OS, developer has to write software in a secure manner, AND IT WILL WORK. When a moron with PHP writes something that executes a string submitted in a form, it's his and only his fault.
When the user clicks on a URL -- any URL -- and a piece of malware immediately takes over the system, it's the problem with software being insecure, and any "safe" behavior that is supposed to avoid it, merely delays the inevitable. It may be still stupid of user to click on every link, but the security problem is with the software, not the user.
I live in US since 1993 -- currently in San Francisco Bay Area.
Or are you just a hypocrite, sucking off the bountiful, corn-fed teat of the US economy while crying about the people and government that provide
I contribute to your society far more than I ever taken from it, and far less than I would if your country was not built as a playground for the rich who take everything and contribute nothing.
your comfortable middle class lifestyle here,
In definitions that I know, I am not "middle class" because I work for an employer. Social classes are not income ranges, though it's understandable how your ideologues are trying to conflate the two.
thousands of miles away from your former fascist totalitarian homeland, you ignorant, trolling cunt?
I left in response to dissolution of USSR and massive economic clusterfuck that followed right in time for my graduation from a university. I have no beef with current governments of Russia and Belarus (where I also lived), however consequences of idiocy linger long after the idiots are out of power.
I am mot a psychiatrist, but I think, it would be closer to reality to say that behavior of US businesses, especially abroad, is antisocial personality disorder (unable and unwilling to form any kind of honest, healthy relationships within the society, brazenly acts in exploitative, deceptive and manipulative manner), but US military is paranoid (perceives threats from everywhere without any rational foundation, attempts to defend itself from those imaginary threats by starting real conflicts).
It doesn't help that military usually ends up acting as a tool in the hands of businesses -- I believe, the result is not very far from a combination of people with those mental illnesses, so the metaphor holds.
Although I'm not particularly a fan of Test Driven Development, you could have created some sort of 'debug flag disabled in release build' test the moment you decided to log passwords in clear text. You can even create a general rule like "Everytime you decided to weaken security for debugging purposes you should create a test that confirms this code will not be included in the release build".
No.
There should be no tests. There should be a rule that disables all debugging output in production builds. And, of course, all debugging output should use the mechanism that disables output with aforementioned rule.
Once that is implemented, testing is absolutely irrelevant, unless you are trying to test gcc.
Testing is for finding out if you have screwed up. Quality comes not from testing but from not screwing up.
The next bug is the next bug. We are not talking about a bug here, at least not a direct bug. In this case somebody did something on purpose, which was to help during development but is definitely not ok in production.
It was one of millions things that happen in development. There is no way to count them all -- if developers had to record every instance of enabling or disabling various kinds of output, they would never have time for actual development.
This particular problem would not happen if there was a predefined way of producing debugging output, that is guaranteed to be never enabled in production builds. That would work even if no one ever tested anything. Because it's a matter of development infrastructure, not testing.
When it happens to people, it's called paranoia, and those people are placed into a mental clinic. When it happens to countries, everyone else stocks up on nukes. And now you know why your stupid "non-proliferation" is dead.
That's a myth created to justify US military-industrial complex. USSR had all its industry, including military one, running as a giant nonprofit. There was nothing to "spend" as government would end up paying to itself.
In US, on the other hand, everything runs on pseudo-debt -- government basically undermines its currency by printing it, giving it to military industry and not expecting anything back that it can sell, so it dilutes currency with no useful effect. That can "bankrupt" the country if currency will be damaged enough for other countries to stop using it.
Oh, and those "money" you "owe" to China. They know, you will never pay that back. They humor you while your market is useful for their own economy development. Once your economy will go downhill, your debt will be written off as expense of building Chinese economy. They know it. Russia knows it. EU knows it. Even I know it. You are the only people delusional enough to believe otherwise.
Wherever anyone else is thinking about causing trouble, US with its sycophants club (NATO) jumps in and causes more death and destruction than the original ashole could ever hope to achieve. On sides that make no sense. Seriously, supporting Kosovo separatists (muslim terrorists)? Shia in Iraq (more muslim religious nuts)? Muslim coup in Libya? Oh, I see the pattern...
So maybe there are worse aggressors, maybe there are not, but it's not visible behind all the destruction US causes.
Please explain how you are going to find enough people with sufficient skills to go through source code of millions of piece of software and determine that it contains no Trojan or other security vulnerability (after every single source code checkin).
Simple. Unless someone else is volunteering, developer company has to be the maintainer, and software is built on the distribution's build servers. If they produced malware, there are buoild logs, sources, full paper trail pointing to the people responsible, and their agreement with distribution when they became the maintainers.
Also if you found a vulnerability in some software, if the repository does not have the ability to 'remote kill' then all the people who installed the software are screwed.
But it does. Auto-update procedure does exactly that with the old version.
Actually open source has worse enemies than that. It includes the million+ companies developing closed source software.
Had. Now there are none left -- market got monopolized by Microsoft, Adobe and their few close "friends", so commercial distribution "binaries for money" is already dead for everyone else. No one has a glimmer of hope for breaking into that market, ever. Even games switched to pseudo-service model with subscriptions and DLC.
Microsoft will continue to be a billion dollar company for at-least next 50 years.
Wishful thinking.
All the mid to small companies can easily be killed by 100 or so engineers cloning their proprietary product and giving it away for free.
All mid to small proprietary software companies that make their money on licensing fees, died in 80's. Along with almost all big and giant ones. There is nobody there but few remnants clutching pieces of the market they managed ot once monopolize -- Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Altium. No one will ever enter their market as a replacement, they will die, and then there will be none of them.
Nobody atMicrosoft gives a shit about comments on Slashdot. These days it simply is irrelevant.
Sure, they do. They want to present their opinions as relevant, intimidate developer, bury them under bogus complaints to misdirect future development, create an impression that Microsoft is winning.
The actual influential blogs are filled with ms fanboys and I don't think microsoft is going to waste money when they get it for free.
What "influential blogs"? Who reads "blogs" anyway?
But if you want to engage in paranoid theories, its your choice.
There is nothing paranoid about pointing out things that Microsoft was multiple times caught doing.
No. *Now* it can be avoided. Tests are for known (and therefore fixed) security problems, so they are only good for checking if the same bug is back. What happens in software development disturbingly often.
Of course, it can. If there are ruins of a city somewhere, it is very much scientific conclusion that city was at some point founded and at some point destroyed. One does not have to build and destroy a city to "reproduce" it -- it's sufficient that anyone can look at the same ruins.
Now, a question if the rulers of the city were insufferable assholes, mostly result in knowledge of opinions that are in no way scientific, even though most likely answer is yes.
What OS? Xbox product line was started (and deep in the red, beyond any hope of making a profit for years) before anyone opened his mouth to pronounce "Windows Phone". The revenue isn't covering the costs, so saying that it's used to support something else is pure bullshit, that revenue for many years will do nothing but offset the initial investment.
Most boxes use some shitty open source database that allows attackers to get local user access, and from then with the dozens of working linux priviledge escalation bugs you can get root. It is too simple.
This is the only thing that deserves being responded to.
Databases are fine. There are PHP (and only PHP for some reason) scripts written by incompetent "programmers" that allow to write local files. Occasionally it's even possible to write an executable file, and, with more luck, cause it to run as a web server user. Where usually the "exploit" ends because there are no "dozens of working linux priviledge escalation bugs" anywhere outside of your imagination. Most Linux boxes that are broken into, are abandoned or maintained by people who can't run anything on any OS without messing up. When anything happens with any system that is supposed to be maintained by sane and competent people, it's news at the scale of at least minor war, usually stolen passwords are involved, and everything is up and running, clean and patched, before anyone can notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wow, hairyfeet broken his pattern of nonstop karma whoring and Microsoft astroturfing to do some copypasta of refuted claims just for me.
I am honored.
The USSR 'paid' for its military production by sacrificing investment in it's people, education and consumer goods in order to maintain expenditures in it's military. Where the resources are allocated matters. It also did so using a very inefficient (though theoretically nonprofit) model. The corrupt officials didn't need profits to move most of the remaining production into their pockets.
To have any impact on the rest of production, there would have to be insufficient number of people in civilian industry (everything is nonprofit, so only people actually matter). That was clearly not the case.
When Perestroika kicked in and let people see what they were missing things started to fall apart and when they didn't quickly and oppressively use the military it came totally apart.
No. Just no. Gorbachev was surprised to see that Eastern part of the country (that he visited on a rather unusual trip) did not live up to rosy pictures that Communist Party expected to see. That, and similar reality vs. expectations "revelations" in the top Communist Party officials triggered some idiotic overreaction that allowed local version of Libertarians to steer the country toward economic suicide.
Population at the same time was fed ridiculous lies about how perfect Libertarian society works in US -- that is, everyone lives in a brick house (USSR had no concept of dry wall as a construction material), stores never have checkout lines, only lazy people have any hardships, and similar crap, along with promises to build exactly the same society in Russia and other then-USSR-member countries. That caused a wave of outrage against Communists supposedly mismanaging the economy, and Perestroika, originally a political system reform, was derailed into dismantling the foundations of economic system. USSR was dissolved in the middle of this process, allowing more extremist Linertarians (Russia) and Nationalists (all other USSR members) to take power. It was, as I described before, an economic suicide after seven decades of working economy.
ENDANGER GAS PIPELINES
(picture of a dog)
CATCH SOME BORED IDIOT
The USSR wasn't destroyed militarily, it collapsed under the effort of paying for all the military dick waving.
Nope. As I have mentioned many times before, USSR "paid" for its military production to itself, because the whole production was government-owned and ran as a nonprofit. The only real "payments" were salaries -- consistent with the rest of the industry, and with full-employment policy those were unavoidable with or without military production. US propaganda projects the "expenses" sucked from the US government and society by military-industrial complex onto other countries, in an attempt to present them as normal, acceptable and justified. They are not.
This is getting repeated WAY too often, I smell a Republican propaganda campaign.
Refute what? Microsoft's soundbites? hairyfeet frothing at the mouth about how he dislikes things and people? There is no discussion happening here.
Don't change the subject. Xbox as a project is still in the red, and will be for the foreseeable future due to massive initial costs. This is true regardless of any other projects being lumped with it for the purpose of creative accounting.
So, to answer the question, which was, "Or are you just a hypocrite, sucking off the bountiful, corn-fed teat of the US economy while crying about the people and government that provide your comfortable middle class lifestyle here, thousands of miles away from your former fascist totalitarian homeland, you ignorant, trolling cunt?" - your answer would be "Yes"?
No, because participation in a society does not impose any obligation to love its other members, its ideology or its rulers. Same idiotic question could be asked to any person oppressed in any society, because no matter how oppressed, a person uses infrastructure of the society to support his life. The answer is always the same.
Ah yes, because those employers you work for, who pay your salary - they contribute NOTHING.
I don't see the problem -- my employers certainly do not do my work because I do it. What they do, is their work.
They are worthless scumbags. I wish I lived in your world, you thick cunt, where successful businesses grow on trees and jobs can be had just by wishing. It sounds magical.
I do not work for businesses that are "successful" to the extent of being monopolistic oppressors of everyone except their own top executives, and I find it disgusting that this kind of "success" is possible, or desirable in your economic system.
And yet, you're still living in the US, enjoying gainful employment while spitting on the people providing it for you.
No one "provides" for me, I do my own work, and do more to improve the lives of Americans (including Americans I despise) than any American who claims to love them. I didn't even gain any benefit usually available to Americans when they grew up because I arrived here after I have obtained excellent education in USSR, the education that would not be available to me if I was born here. If anything, I am in a weird position of being unable to benefit the society where I was raised, because at the point when I became capable of doing so, society lost the ability to benefit from my work (the aforementioned USSR dissolution and economic crisis). If anything, US got the benefit of my work and my presence in its society as a windfall.
I'd think you'd be absolutely tripping over yourself to move back to a better life in Russia.
If USSR was not dissolved, I would have no need to come to US in the first place. In reality, for half of the time I lived here, all ex-USSR countries were in a horrible condition, and could not benefit from anything I could do regardless of my efforts. American propaganda played a significant role in reaching that condition, so if anything, I am in a position to throw accusations. By the time any recovery started there, no benefit, to anyone, from me moving half across the globe again, would justify the trouble of doing so, so I stay in US and do things that benefit everyone. None of this in any way imposes on me an obligation lick anyone's boots, your government and businesses included.
I find it amusing that you bloviate about the evils of the US government while moving to the US to live and work. I guess you're either a whore, willing to sacrifice your principles as long as you can make a buck, or a hypocrite, biting the hand that's feeding you. Either way, thanks for letting us know!
I have moved from a country in a deep economic crisis, where my presence would be worthless, to a country where I can do something useful. This does not in any way contradict my principles, or imposes any obligations on me, other than doing productive work. If I came here to oppress you, you would have a valid complaint, however this is one thing that I never did. It's true that I hate some of you, and see most of the rest as deluded idiots, however this is hardly an uncommon position, both inside and outside US.
If I was an American and had any emotional attachment to
All those are patched, and only became known BECAUSE they were patched.
lol wut? Blame the user. Nice OSS strategy. linux only works if its locked down.. like on android.. or you are forced to hire a person to administer it .. like on servers. for general use case.. linux is a complete failure.
There is nothing that can be done to provide any kind of security if the user writes software that actively undermines security and runs it on his system.
Windows "advocates" like yourself are trying to conflate it with "don't go to suspicious web sites and pray that there are no exploits on legitimate ones" and other pseudo-common-sense recommendations given to Windows users to somehow decrease the exposure to attacks. In reality, on a secure OS, developer has to write software in a secure manner, AND IT WILL WORK. When a moron with PHP writes something that executes a string submitted in a form, it's his and only his fault.
When the user clicks on a URL -- any URL -- and a piece of malware immediately takes over the system, it's the problem with software being insecure, and any "safe" behavior that is supposed to avoid it, merely delays the inevitable. It may be still stupid of user to click on every link, but the security problem is with the software, not the user.
I live in US since 1993 -- currently in San Francisco Bay Area.
Or are you just a hypocrite, sucking off the bountiful, corn-fed teat of the US economy while crying about the people and government that provide
I contribute to your society far more than I ever taken from it, and far less than I would if your country was not built as a playground for the rich who take everything and contribute nothing.
your comfortable middle class lifestyle here,
In definitions that I know, I am not "middle class" because I work for an employer. Social classes are not income ranges, though it's understandable how your ideologues are trying to conflate the two.
thousands of miles away from your former fascist totalitarian homeland, you ignorant, trolling cunt?
I left in response to dissolution of USSR and massive economic clusterfuck that followed right in time for my graduation from a university. I have no beef with current governments of Russia and Belarus (where I also lived), however consequences of idiocy linger long after the idiots are out of power.
I am mot a psychiatrist, but I think, it would be closer to reality to say that behavior of US businesses, especially abroad, is antisocial personality disorder (unable and unwilling to form any kind of honest, healthy relationships within the society, brazenly acts in exploitative, deceptive and manipulative manner), but US military is paranoid (perceives threats from everywhere without any rational foundation, attempts to defend itself from those imaginary threats by starting real conflicts).
It doesn't help that military usually ends up acting as a tool in the hands of businesses -- I believe, the result is not very far from a combination of people with those mental illnesses, so the metaphor holds.
Although I'm not particularly a fan of Test Driven Development, you could have created some sort of 'debug flag disabled in release build' test the moment you decided to log passwords in clear text. You can even create a general rule like "Everytime you decided to weaken security for debugging purposes you should create a test that confirms this code will not be included in the release build".
No.
There should be no tests. There should be a rule that disables all debugging output in production builds. And, of course, all debugging output should use the mechanism that disables output with aforementioned rule.
Once that is implemented, testing is absolutely irrelevant, unless you are trying to test gcc.
Testing is for finding out if you have screwed up. Quality comes not from testing but from not screwing up.
The next bug is the next bug. We are not talking about a bug here, at least not a direct bug. In this case somebody did something on purpose, which was to help during development but is definitely not ok in production.
It was one of millions things that happen in development. There is no way to count them all -- if developers had to record every instance of enabling or disabling various kinds of output, they would never have time for actual development.
This particular problem would not happen if there was a predefined way of producing debugging output, that is guaranteed to be never enabled in production builds. That would work even if no one ever tested anything. Because it's a matter of development infrastructure, not testing.
What if the next bug leaks pasword backwards? In BASE64? Only on Mondays?
You can't test quality into the system. Tests can merely show that something is terribly, terribly wrong, and likely you have deeper problems.
When it happens to people, it's called paranoia, and those people are placed into a mental clinic.
When it happens to countries, everyone else stocks up on nukes.
And now you know why your stupid "non-proliferation" is dead.
No. But if it makes any difference for you, I am Russian, so it would be strange if I loved your government and its ideology.
My guess would be, they decided to build it from scratch based on what sounded like a great and revolutionary idea.
That's a myth created to justify US military-industrial complex. USSR had all its industry, including military one, running as a giant nonprofit. There was nothing to "spend" as government would end up paying to itself.
In US, on the other hand, everything runs on pseudo-debt -- government basically undermines its currency by printing it, giving it to military industry and not expecting anything back that it can sell, so it dilutes currency with no useful effect. That can "bankrupt" the country if currency will be damaged enough for other countries to stop using it.
Oh, and those "money" you "owe" to China. They know, you will never pay that back. They humor you while your market is useful for their own economy development. Once your economy will go downhill, your debt will be written off as expense of building Chinese economy. They know it. Russia knows it. EU knows it. Even I know it. You are the only people delusional enough to believe otherwise.
Actually yes.
Wherever anyone else is thinking about causing trouble, US with its sycophants club (NATO) jumps in and causes more death and destruction than the original ashole could ever hope to achieve. On sides that make no sense. Seriously, supporting Kosovo separatists (muslim terrorists)? Shia in Iraq (more muslim religious nuts)? Muslim coup in Libya? Oh, I see the pattern...
So maybe there are worse aggressors, maybe there are not, but it's not visible behind all the destruction US causes.
Please explain how you are going to find enough people with sufficient skills to go through source code of millions of piece of software and determine that it contains no Trojan or other security vulnerability (after every single source code checkin).
Simple. Unless someone else is volunteering, developer company has to be the maintainer, and software is built on the distribution's build servers. If they produced malware, there are buoild logs, sources, full paper trail pointing to the people responsible, and their agreement with distribution when they became the maintainers.
Also if you found a vulnerability in some software, if the repository does not have the ability to 'remote kill' then all the people who installed the software are screwed.
But it does. Auto-update procedure does exactly that with the old version.
Actually open source has worse enemies than that. It includes the million+ companies developing closed source software.
Had. Now there are none left -- market got monopolized by Microsoft, Adobe and their few close "friends", so commercial distribution "binaries for money" is already dead for everyone else. No one has a glimmer of hope for breaking into that market, ever. Even games switched to pseudo-service model with subscriptions and DLC.
Microsoft will continue to be a billion dollar company for at-least next 50 years.
Wishful thinking.
All the mid to small companies can easily be killed by 100 or so engineers cloning their proprietary product and giving it away for free.
All mid to small proprietary software companies that make their money on licensing fees, died in 80's. Along with almost all big and giant ones. There is nobody there but few remnants clutching pieces of the market they managed ot once monopolize -- Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Altium. No one will ever enter their market as a replacement, they will die, and then there will be none of them.
Nobody atMicrosoft gives a shit about comments on Slashdot. These days it simply is irrelevant.
Sure, they do. They want to present their opinions as relevant, intimidate developer, bury them under bogus complaints to misdirect future development, create an impression that Microsoft is winning.
The actual influential blogs are filled with ms fanboys and I don't think microsoft is going to waste money when they get it for free.
What "influential blogs"? Who reads "blogs" anyway?
But if you want to engage in paranoid theories, its your choice.
There is nothing paranoid about pointing out things that Microsoft was multiple times caught doing.
All classes of tests are extremely limited in their usefulness. Some are just peddled better.
No. *Now* it can be avoided. Tests are for known (and therefore fixed) security problems, so they are only good for checking if the same bug is back. What happens in software development disturbingly often.
Of course, it can. If there are ruins of a city somewhere, it is very much scientific conclusion that city was at some point founded and at some point destroyed. One does not have to build and destroy a city to "reproduce" it -- it's sufficient that anyone can look at the same ruins.
Now, a question if the rulers of the city were insufferable assholes, mostly result in knowledge of opinions that are in no way scientific, even though most likely answer is yes.
What OS? Xbox product line was started (and deep in the red, beyond any hope of making a profit for years) before anyone opened his mouth to pronounce "Windows Phone". The revenue isn't covering the costs, so saying that it's used to support something else is pure bullshit, that revenue for many years will do nothing but offset the initial investment.
Most boxes use some shitty open source database that allows attackers to get local user access, and from then with the dozens of working linux priviledge escalation bugs you can get root. It is too simple.
This is the only thing that deserves being responded to.
Databases are fine. There are PHP (and only PHP for some reason) scripts written by incompetent "programmers" that allow to write local files. Occasionally it's even possible to write an executable file, and, with more luck, cause it to run as a web server user. Where usually the "exploit" ends because there are no "dozens of working linux priviledge escalation bugs" anywhere outside of your imagination. Most Linux boxes that are broken into, are abandoned or maintained by people who can't run anything on any OS without messing up. When anything happens with any system that is supposed to be maintained by sane and competent people, it's news at the scale of at least minor war, usually stolen passwords are involved, and everything is up and running, clean and patched, before anyone can notice.
How is this copypasta in any way relevant to anything being discussed?