The summary is pretty bad, but one of the more salient points is that modern pacemaker/debrillators have Wi-Fi in them. Yes, WiFi. According the the recording, someone at defcon has already managed to hack into an insulin pump equipped with WiFi and been abe to manipulate the delivery rate (which could kill the patient). So the security concerns aren't completely unwarranted.
Demanding the source code is a bit silly. How many people are really going to be able to review the source code for a pacemaker/debriliator? Very very few. Even if they do, there's a hell of a lot more to a pacemaer/debrillator than the software, so why is it just the software that's her concern?
A more sane approach would be demanding the software follow basic security rules like not allowing the wi-fi connection to ever change anything in the medical device. (It's supposed to be a reporting mechanism so the doctor can follow the progress of the patient). I can't believe she has anylegal grounds to demand source code, so this is a fight for the minds of the public rather than a legal one. Demanding source code is a bit silly since most of the public doesn't even understand that there is such a thing as source code. The public is by now very aware of security problems and hackers, so ensuring that the wi-fi is read-only would be an easier battle to win.
This was my first thought as well. Several years ago I did essentially the same thing as the OP is talking about. (Find all the points that meet a criteria within a certain radius of a given point). It took all of an hour or two to research and code.
If your developers are really complaining about lack of some simple calculations that are built into the Microsoft product, then it's time to either smack these guys hard, or fire them. For something this trivial it should take any good developer a few hours research to find a free solution rather than a paid one. Basically it sounds like these guys aren't willing to expand beyond what they already know, and are far too used to throwing money at problems rather than finding something inexpensive. Non-profits live and die by inexpensive solutions.
I'd agree with the general sentiment to ditch MySQL, and use a real database like PostgreSQL. MySQL might be OK for trivial websites to store some data here and there, but GIS requires a real database. PostgreSQL is free, works well, is feature rich, and will let you expand. So tell your devs to either adapt to low cost solutions, or leave. If you let them spend 20 grand every time they don't want to do a little work, you'll soon be bankrupt.
That's untrue. You can assume the worst and protect your application by following secure coding checklists, code reviews and static analysis. You don't need some sort of reformed hacker on your team in order to be effective.
The OP never claimed you needed a reformed hacker to be effective, merely that you need to think like an attacker. That's certainly not following a bunch of check lists, static analysis, some code review, and calling it a day. Those techniques are helpful, but they're only a piece of the puzzle (though I'd be willing to argue that a check list mentality is likely counter-productive).
To create effective security you need to understand the attack vectors, and what you're securing. Code is only part of security. Your own code can be completely secure, but you can get owned by a 3rd party library or framework. All that crap can be secure, but you get owned by someone tricking a secretary into opening up an Excel spreadsheet with a zero-day Flash exploit. Security is an entire discipline, and it shouldn't be swept away into a few simple rules and procedures to follow.
Generally speaking, code does not magically disappear when someone kicks the bucket. That's probably one of the more ridiculous blanket statements I've heard in a while.
I guess you haven't done much software development. Obviously if everything stayed the same, (the requirements, the environment, everything interacting with the system) you can continue to use a piece of software forever. We all know that none of this is the case. So yes, eventually without maintenance the application will die.
A lot of people think that "code" is worth something. With very few exceptions, the code itself is almost worthless. Code is only worth something when there's people around to support it and make it alive. Without those people, it dies.
Your college is unlikely to buy your code base from you. It's certainly possible they will, but you lack all the support structure a normal software vendor has since it's just you. If you decide to walk away all of a sudden, what the hell do they do since they don't have any kind of software development in house? What seems more likely is that the college might be interested in your code base if you gave them the code (GPL it if you think it's useful to anyone else). Then parlay this into a new job with higher pay where you continue to support and develop the infrastructure. If they're unwilling to do even this, then forget about it, and chalk it up to a learning experience.
The problem with your analogy is that we don't normally assign agency to inanimate objects like watches, so "the watch manages my time" is a ridiculous statement since watches can't do something as complex as manage. If you replace the watch with a human, then a human could obviously both manage your time, and enable you to manage your time.
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Snopes indeed has a very good, and well deserved reputation. But yet I still hear people relatively intelligent people repeating the Cruise Control in a Winnebago lawsuit myth, or the Stella McDonald's spilled hot coffee half-truth. Both of those claims are more than a decade old, and very easily shown to be completely wrong. Yet people STILL tell these stories as if they were true.
The problem isn't one of lack of accurate authorities, or the social proof of the accurate authority. The problem is that people are far too willing to accept a story, passed down umpteen times that generally came from their friend, family member or acquaintance. The friend offers the social proof, because the friend believes the story and you trust the friend. Scepticism, or asking for evidence doesn't come into it, since that would involve doubting the friend.
The truth about the myths travels much more slowly, primarily because there's little punch to be gained from telling a story about how something turned out to be wrong. The mythos stories have great explanatory, validation, or "gee whiz cool" embedded within them. I.e. "blame it on those damn lawyers!", or the egg standing up during the equinox myth. One of my favourites, (that many very well educated people will argue with me about openly) is that silica glass is actually a liquid that flows at room temperature, and that's why old windows are thicker at the bottom. In case you didn't know, window glass used to be made through a process that made it thicker at one end, which was usually installed thick end down. I've also read through umpteen scientific evidence about glass, and silica glass is defined as an amorphous solid, that doesn't observably flow at room temperature.
IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
I wasn't aware there was a difference between "making money" and "enabling to make money". Do the digits on a watch tell me the time, but the electronics merely enable the digits... or does the watch tell me what time it is? Do the digits even exist without the electronics?
It's always curious to me when people divide up wholes that depend on parts, but then expect the parts to operate independently of the whole.
I think you're exactly right. Who wants to stay on a team that's not valued, and is thought of as "not interested in trying to understand the business"? The mind creates what the mind sees. What he should do is integrate his teams, and not create two cultures. Ultimately it's just people, and if you want the new to learn from the old you need to put them together. Otherwise it's just a self reinforcing dichotomy.
I thought this would be Google's chance to kill Firefox.
Why in the world would Google want to kill Firefox? Google is an advertising company. They make money on people using the web. Google killing Firefox would be like NBC killing RCA. Sure, Google makes a browser that competes with Firefox, but that's only to encourage more web usage. It's in Google's best interests to drive the web forward, and that means browsers need to continue to evolve.
Microsoft can attempt to tie IE and Bing together and Google can tie Chrome and Google search.
And either one of them could pay Mozilla to change its default search provider to them. Do you think Bing wants to pull more search traffic away from Google? Of course they do.
It should be obvious to someone who posts here. Think about it.
I did think about it. My conclusion is that anecdotal evidence of one person who doesn't even mention numbers ("very good pension") is completely irrelevant when trying to get a handle on administrative costs vs program costs. During WWII, ARC would give away free coffee and doughnuts to officers, and that was well-publicized
Yes, and as someone else pointed out, ARC was asked to do this by the U.S. Army:
The request was made in a March 1942 letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to Norman H. Davis, chairman of the American Red Cross. Because American soldiers were fighting as part of the Allied Forces, matters had to be considered on a Force-wide rather than solely American basis. The Red Cross was asked to establish club facilities for U.S. servicemen overseas where Allied troops would be welcome. Because English and Australian soldiers were being charged for the use of such facilities, it was deemed unfair that Americans were to get similar benefits for free, especially in light of their pay already being higher than that of their Allied counterparts. For the good of the alliance, the American Red Cross was persuaded to exact nominal charges from American GIs for off-base food and lodging.
It takes time for donations to wind up as available cash to spend on disaster relief. Do you think when you make a credit card donation the money is instantly transferred to the charity? From what I've heard this can sometimes take months.
I'm no charitable donations expert, but I'd guess that donations don't all come in at once, but slowly over a period of weeks. If a major disaster occurs, do you think a charity should just wait around for the money to come in, or start acting right away? Acting right away requires having money on hand.
Excuse me, but what does one person retiring with "a very good pension" say about how high the administrative costs are vs program costs? Charity Navigator says ARC has a 3.9% administrative cost. The parent post claims 49% administrative cost (which is insanely high). If you believe Charity Navigator, he's only off by an order of magnitude.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how secure your browser is if you just go around clicking random links
WTF? This is the entire experience of the World Wide Web! Are you really suggesting that we're all supposed to "just know" which are the "good" links to click on, and which ones are the "bad" ones? Do you really think an attacker isn't clever enough to trick you into clicking on his malicious site? And no, I'm not talking about the "punch the monkey", or "take this IQ test" crap.
Teaser: The second and last browser to fall for the day was a 32-bit Internet Explorer 8 installed on 64-bit Windows 7 Service Pack 1.[23] Security researcher Stephen Fewer of Harmony Security was successful in exploiting IE. Just as with Safari, this was demonstrated by running Windows' calculator program and writing a file to the hard disk.
Day 3 No teams showed up for day three. Chrome and Firefox were not hacked.
Only IE8 was in the competition since IE9 wasn't even released until shortly afterward. We'll see how the new batch of browsers does next year.
So I have to ask: Why does "anyone who thinks IE is an insecure browser doesn't know what he is talking about"?
They don't - most of them target plug-ins and work in every browser. Now, both Chrome and IE sandbox them and have extra security layers for plug-ins just so that even if plug-in is vulnerable, you can't actually gain access to system.
I'd be far more interested in actual results, from actual attacks (by white or blackhats) rather than undemonstrated theories on how to protect the plugin from the OS. How many times has one party made a "super great security layer that's unbreakable", only to be thwarted very quickly by something they never thought of?
It could be fair that developers are barred from using real armies in games branded as realistic if they do not take into account the doctrine of these armies. That could be considered as slander.
Are you actually serious? Movies, books, and newspapers have been doing this exact thing for centuries. Of course it's free speech! A video game doing the same thing isn't any different. There's some very offensive books out their that denigrate entire groups of people and are designed to incite violence. The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf come to mind, and they seemed to escape being banned or sued for slander, at least in the US.
It's not a silly question, it's just a long decided one.
I'm developing an innovative synthesis program for the iPad. I wouldn't be doing this without the walled garden.
Baloney. You wouldn't be doing this without the ability to market and distribute your product, which the App Store provides. But that's the hook of the walled garden approach, not the full story.
Who do you think is behind the wall, just the users? You may just eventually learn that you're also behind the wall. That'll work out well for you, as long as your jailers find their interests align with your own. What happens when they don't, and you're stuck behind the wall and can't go anywhere else?
I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
Well, the walled garden approach instantly puts a hell of a lot of control over how you use your computer into the hands of the company you bought the thing from. Is that a good thing for consumers? If you think all the security problems of viruses and worms are just going to go away because people can only buy apps from the manufacturer, you're horribly naive. Attackers will just change strategy, and move away from the "fool the user into installing" approach, and do more drive-by attacks. So it's not really going to solve the big security problem. Even if it did, viruses and worms are only a small part of tech support problems, and there's really no reason why buying something in an "app store" would solve those problems either.
So the user gives up a lot of control over the apps they buy. The developer gives up a lot of control over the kinds of apps they can sell (Suddenly you now have to uphold an "app store brand, not your own". The developer also gives up a percentage of revenue for the app store, and is essentially locked into whatever the app store wants to charge. It sounds to me like a great deal for the app store, but a lousy one for everyone else.
You also have to consider that an "App Store" has completely different motives from the consumer. App Stores want to make profits. If I wanted to make a completely free version of Angry Birds and call it Upset Avians (no restrictions, added levels, better than the original) and put it in the App Store, there's a huge disincentive for the App Store owner to allow anyone to do that, since it cuts into the profits from Angry Birds. Since I can't distribute the thing anywhere else, I'm stuck. So the user essentially will only have access to applications that are in the best financial interests of the App Store. Tell me again how this benefits the user?
So this grand theory is all based on one persons experience, at one company, and some aggregate statistic grouping together age related unemployment over a vast category of people, during the worst economic conditions since the depression? It's some interesting anecdotes, but I sure as hell am not going to make any long term career plans based on this.
It's not only the most ethical, it's the only way this company will actually do anything. I'd also suggest to do this anonymously. Corporations have a habit of striking back blindly in random directions whenever they feel threatened, and this will most certainly threaten them. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they tried to smack you down with restraining orders, defamation suits, or whatever the lawyers think will hurt you the most. If you release the information anonymously (and be very careful how you go about this), then there's nobody to slap down with restraining orders.
Sounds like a lot of speculation based on a minimal amount of information. The less you know, the more you can make up. Rest assured, nobody is going to be injected with this stuff until we know more about it.
Your yard looks many times bigger than mine. The first year I bagged, and collected 20-30 bags, so it sounds like we're about on par as far as leaf coverage goes. I'm sure I could easily have twice the amount of leaves, and still mulch very easily. The point being, mulching can chew up a lot of leaves into almost nothing very quickly. It may take a couple passes with the mower, but it's a hell of a lot easier than raking. If you wait until the leaves are dry it works very well.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is pretty bad, but one of the more salient points is that modern pacemaker/debrillators have Wi-Fi in them. Yes, WiFi. According the the recording, someone at defcon has already managed to hack into an insulin pump equipped with WiFi and been abe to manipulate the delivery rate (which could kill the patient). So the security concerns aren't completely unwarranted.
Demanding the source code is a bit silly. How many people are really going to be able to review the source code for a pacemaker/debriliator? Very very few. Even if they do, there's a hell of a lot more to a pacemaer/debrillator than the software, so why is it just the software that's her concern?
A more sane approach would be demanding the software follow basic security rules like not allowing the wi-fi connection to ever change anything in the medical device. (It's supposed to be a reporting mechanism so the doctor can follow the progress of the patient). I can't believe she has anylegal grounds to demand source code, so this is a fight for the minds of the public rather than a legal one. Demanding source code is a bit silly since most of the public doesn't even understand that there is such a thing as source code. The public is by now very aware of security problems and hackers, so ensuring that the wi-fi is read-only would be an easier battle to win.
This was my first thought as well. Several years ago I did essentially the same thing as the OP is talking about. (Find all the points that meet a criteria within a certain radius of a given point). It took all of an hour or two to research and code.
If your developers are really complaining about lack of some simple calculations that are built into the Microsoft product, then it's time to either smack these guys hard, or fire them. For something this trivial it should take any good developer a few hours research to find a free solution rather than a paid one. Basically it sounds like these guys aren't willing to expand beyond what they already know, and are far too used to throwing money at problems rather than finding something inexpensive. Non-profits live and die by inexpensive solutions.
I'd agree with the general sentiment to ditch MySQL, and use a real database like PostgreSQL. MySQL might be OK for trivial websites to store some data here and there, but GIS requires a real database. PostgreSQL is free, works well, is feature rich, and will let you expand. So tell your devs to either adapt to low cost solutions, or leave. If you let them spend 20 grand every time they don't want to do a little work, you'll soon be bankrupt.
That's untrue. You can assume the worst and protect your application by following secure coding checklists, code reviews and static analysis. You don't need some sort of reformed hacker on your team in order to be effective.
The OP never claimed you needed a reformed hacker to be effective, merely that you need to think like an attacker. That's certainly not following a bunch of check lists, static analysis, some code review, and calling it a day. Those techniques are helpful, but they're only a piece of the puzzle (though I'd be willing to argue that a check list mentality is likely counter-productive).
To create effective security you need to understand the attack vectors, and what you're securing. Code is only part of security. Your own code can be completely secure, but you can get owned by a 3rd party library or framework. All that crap can be secure, but you get owned by someone tricking a secretary into opening up an Excel spreadsheet with a zero-day Flash exploit. Security is an entire discipline, and it shouldn't be swept away into a few simple rules and procedures to follow.
Actually, I do a lot of software development. Simply put, code doesn't just "vanish" because someone dies.
No, it just becomes useless if that someone is the only one who supports it, and nobody can be found to replace that someone.
Generally speaking, code does not magically disappear when someone kicks the bucket. That's probably one of the more ridiculous blanket statements I've heard in a while.
I guess you haven't done much software development. Obviously if everything stayed the same, (the requirements, the environment, everything interacting with the system) you can continue to use a piece of software forever. We all know that none of this is the case. So yes, eventually without maintenance the application will die.
A lot of people think that "code" is worth something. With very few exceptions, the code itself is almost worthless. Code is only worth something when there's people around to support it and make it alive. Without those people, it dies.
Your college is unlikely to buy your code base from you. It's certainly possible they will, but you lack all the support structure a normal software vendor has since it's just you. If you decide to walk away all of a sudden, what the hell do they do since they don't have any kind of software development in house? What seems more likely is that the college might be interested in your code base if you gave them the code (GPL it if you think it's useful to anyone else). Then parlay this into a new job with higher pay where you continue to support and develop the infrastructure. If they're unwilling to do even this, then forget about it, and chalk it up to a learning experience.
The problem with your analogy is that we don't normally assign agency to inanimate objects like watches, so "the watch manages my time" is a ridiculous statement since watches can't do something as complex as manage. If you replace the watch with a human, then a human could obviously both manage your time, and enable you to manage your time.
People who have been proven right time after time, such as Snopes or the Bad Astronomy guy, are frequently cited as rebuttals.
Snopes indeed has a very good, and well deserved reputation. But yet I still hear people relatively intelligent people repeating the Cruise Control in a Winnebago lawsuit myth, or the Stella McDonald's spilled hot coffee half-truth. Both of those claims are more than a decade old, and very easily shown to be completely wrong. Yet people STILL tell these stories as if they were true.
The problem isn't one of lack of accurate authorities, or the social proof of the accurate authority. The problem is that people are far too willing to accept a story, passed down umpteen times that generally came from their friend, family member or acquaintance. The friend offers the social proof, because the friend believes the story and you trust the friend. Scepticism, or asking for evidence doesn't come into it, since that would involve doubting the friend.
The truth about the myths travels much more slowly, primarily because there's little punch to be gained from telling a story about how something turned out to be wrong. The mythos stories have great explanatory, validation, or "gee whiz cool" embedded within them. I.e. "blame it on those damn lawyers!", or the egg standing up during the equinox myth. One of my favourites, (that many very well educated people will argue with me about openly) is that silica glass is actually a liquid that flows at room temperature, and that's why old windows are thicker at the bottom. In case you didn't know, window glass used to be made through a process that made it thicker at one end, which was usually installed thick end down. I've also read through umpteen scientific evidence about glass, and silica glass is defined as an amorphous solid, that doesn't observably flow at room temperature.
IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
I wasn't aware there was a difference between "making money" and "enabling to make money". Do the digits on a watch tell me the time, but the electronics merely enable the digits... or does the watch tell me what time it is? Do the digits even exist without the electronics?
It's always curious to me when people divide up wholes that depend on parts, but then expect the parts to operate independently of the whole.
I think you're exactly right. Who wants to stay on a team that's not valued, and is thought of as "not interested in trying to understand the business"? The mind creates what the mind sees. What he should do is integrate his teams, and not create two cultures. Ultimately it's just people, and if you want the new to learn from the old you need to put them together. Otherwise it's just a self reinforcing dichotomy.
I know it is counter-intuitive, but sometimes killing elephants for fun, actually helps the elephant population to survive.
WTF? This isn't about the elephant, it's about the person. There's something fucked up about people who want to kill something solely for fun.
I thought this would be Google's chance to kill Firefox.
Why in the world would Google want to kill Firefox? Google is an advertising company. They make money on people using the web. Google killing Firefox would be like NBC killing RCA. Sure, Google makes a browser that competes with Firefox, but that's only to encourage more web usage. It's in Google's best interests to drive the web forward, and that means browsers need to continue to evolve.
Microsoft can attempt to tie IE and Bing together and Google can tie Chrome and Google search.
And either one of them could pay Mozilla to change its default search provider to them. Do you think Bing wants to pull more search traffic away from Google? Of course they do.
It should be obvious to someone who posts here. Think about it.
I did think about it. My conclusion is that anecdotal evidence of one person who doesn't even mention numbers ("very good pension") is completely irrelevant when trying to get a handle on administrative costs vs program costs.
During WWII, ARC would give away free coffee and doughnuts to officers, and that was well-publicized
Yes, and as someone else pointed out, ARC was asked to do this by the U.S. Army:
So what's your evidence again?
It takes time for donations to wind up as available cash to spend on disaster relief. Do you think when you make a credit card donation the money is instantly transferred to the charity? From what I've heard this can sometimes take months.
I'm no charitable donations expert, but I'd guess that donations don't all come in at once, but slowly over a period of weeks. If a major disaster occurs, do you think a charity should just wait around for the money to come in, or start acting right away? Acting right away requires having money on hand.
Excuse me, but what does one person retiring with "a very good pension" say about how high the administrative costs are vs program costs? Charity Navigator says ARC has a 3.9% administrative cost. The parent post claims 49% administrative cost (which is insanely high). If you believe Charity Navigator, he's only off by an order of magnitude.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how secure your browser is if you just go around clicking random links
WTF? This is the entire experience of the World Wide Web! Are you really suggesting that we're all supposed to "just know" which are the "good" links to click on, and which ones are the "bad" ones? Do you really think an attacker isn't clever enough to trick you into clicking on his malicious site? And no, I'm not talking about the "punch the monkey", or "take this IQ test" crap.
Anyone who still says that IE is insecure browser just doesn't know what he is talking about.
Care to point to any actual data on breakins, rather than theoretical security models to demonstrate this point?
You might want to look at the pwn2Own contest results from this year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own
Teaser:
The second and last browser to fall for the day was a 32-bit Internet Explorer 8 installed on 64-bit Windows 7 Service Pack 1.[23] Security researcher Stephen Fewer of Harmony Security was successful in exploiting IE. Just as with Safari, this was demonstrated by running Windows' calculator program and writing a file to the hard disk.
Day 3
No teams showed up for day three. Chrome and Firefox were not hacked.
Only IE8 was in the competition since IE9 wasn't even released until shortly afterward. We'll see how the new batch of browsers does next year.
So I have to ask: Why does "anyone who thinks IE is an insecure browser doesn't know what he is talking about"?
They don't - most of them target plug-ins and work in every browser. Now, both Chrome and IE sandbox them and have extra security layers for plug-ins just so that even if plug-in is vulnerable, you can't actually gain access to system.
I'd be far more interested in actual results, from actual attacks (by white or blackhats) rather than undemonstrated theories on how to protect the plugin from the OS. How many times has one party made a "super great security layer that's unbreakable", only to be thwarted very quickly by something they never thought of?
It could be fair that developers are barred from using real armies in games branded as realistic if they do not take into account the doctrine of these armies. That could be considered as slander.
Are you actually serious? Movies, books, and newspapers have been doing this exact thing for centuries. Of course it's free speech! A video game doing the same thing isn't any different. There's some very offensive books out their that denigrate entire groups of people and are designed to incite violence. The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf come to mind, and they seemed to escape being banned or sued for slander, at least in the US.
It's not a silly question, it's just a long decided one.
I'm developing an innovative synthesis program for the iPad. I wouldn't be doing this without the walled garden.
Baloney. You wouldn't be doing this without the ability to market and distribute your product, which the App Store provides. But that's the hook of the walled garden approach, not the full story.
Who do you think is behind the wall, just the users? You may just eventually learn that you're also behind the wall. That'll work out well for you, as long as your jailers find their interests align with your own. What happens when they don't, and you're stuck behind the wall and can't go anywhere else?
I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
Well, the walled garden approach instantly puts a hell of a lot of control over how you use your computer into the hands of the company you bought the thing from. Is that a good thing for consumers? If you think all the security problems of viruses and worms are just going to go away because people can only buy apps from the manufacturer, you're horribly naive. Attackers will just change strategy, and move away from the "fool the user into installing" approach, and do more drive-by attacks. So it's not really going to solve the big security problem. Even if it did, viruses and worms are only a small part of tech support problems, and there's really no reason why buying something in an "app store" would solve those problems either.
So the user gives up a lot of control over the apps they buy. The developer gives up a lot of control over the kinds of apps they can sell (Suddenly you now have to uphold an "app store brand, not your own". The developer also gives up a percentage of revenue for the app store, and is essentially locked into whatever the app store wants to charge. It sounds to me like a great deal for the app store, but a lousy one for everyone else.
You also have to consider that an "App Store" has completely different motives from the consumer. App Stores want to make profits. If I wanted to make a completely free version of Angry Birds and call it Upset Avians (no restrictions, added levels, better than the original) and put it in the App Store, there's a huge disincentive for the App Store owner to allow anyone to do that, since it cuts into the profits from Angry Birds. Since I can't distribute the thing anywhere else, I'm stuck. So the user essentially will only have access to applications that are in the best financial interests of the App Store. Tell me again how this benefits the user?
So this grand theory is all based on one persons experience, at one company, and some aggregate statistic grouping together age related unemployment over a vast category of people, during the worst economic conditions since the depression? It's some interesting anecdotes, but I sure as hell am not going to make any long term career plans based on this.
It's not only the most ethical, it's the only way this company will actually do anything. I'd also suggest to do this anonymously. Corporations have a habit of striking back blindly in random directions whenever they feel threatened, and this will most certainly threaten them. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they tried to smack you down with restraining orders, defamation suits, or whatever the lawyers think will hurt you the most. If you release the information anonymously (and be very careful how you go about this), then there's nobody to slap down with restraining orders.
Sounds like a lot of speculation based on a minimal amount of information. The less you know, the more you can make up. Rest assured, nobody is going to be injected with this stuff until we know more about it.
Your yard looks many times bigger than mine. The first year I bagged, and collected 20-30 bags, so it sounds like we're about on par as far as leaf coverage goes. I'm sure I could easily have twice the amount of leaves, and still mulch very easily. The point being, mulching can chew up a lot of leaves into almost nothing very quickly. It may take a couple passes with the mower, but it's a hell of a lot easier than raking. If you wait until the leaves are dry it works very well.