I would say that the cause flows the other way. If you are excommunicated, you are likely on the path to Hell, not because of the excommunication, but it's a sign of what's on the way.
In other words, they're correlated. I never said one caused the other, but they might as well be equivalent qualifications.
Like I said, not all people who take those vows follow them completely. In my opinion, having things isn't bad, it's the reason for having them that can be malicious. If your goal is to accumulate as many material goods as possible, then that's materialism to the extreme. If your goal is to reach out to others, and you happen to use material goods, then that's totally different. Also, the Church building is there for the people, not the clergy. If it saves souls, then it's worth it.
That's the rationalization for virtually every atrocity the Church has ever committed. "If it saves souls, then torturing Jews into conversion is worth it."
In any case, Jesus didn't seem to have a problem saving souls without a huge building to help him out. According to your own scriptures, such a thing isn't necessary.
My wording in the previous comment was bad, I apologize for that. What I mean is that evangelization should be done in a way that does not excessively intrude. It should be aimed at helping, not annoying. There's a lot of it going on that isn't that way, and it burns people so much that they refuse to participate in rational dialog. I've been pleasantly surprised with how rational people are being in not flaming me for my beliefs, and I'd like to thank not only you, but the others who are responding rationally.
In that spirit, I'll tell you why people get annoyed at even "minimally intrusive" evangelism. It's because people don't like to be told they're leading their lives wrong. And it's not like you can even show that a non-Christian is leading his life incorrectly. You just kind of proclaim it. When someone tells a smoker "You should cut back or quit", it's actually good advice, and that's been shown that there is a direct causal link between smoking and cancer. There is no way to show such a connection between "Christianity" and "being happy".
So was Christianity not a religion during the time of plenary indulgance? Did the Catholicism cease to be a "real religion" and then pop back in? A religion is a set of beliefs. How those beliefs are practiced by a given organization or whether that organization charges money is irrelevant.
True, but it should be exactly the opposite. The state should take no particular position on the issue as long as all parties are consenting adults. One man, one woman. Two men. Three of one and two of the other. Whatever. You don't have to like it, I don't have to like it, but as long as they are all happy with it, it ain't none of my business. Or yours. Or the state's. And I don't expect any particular church to condone it.
It's not that simple. Two men getting married isn't anything I'm concerned about. But legal polygamy opens up a whole slew of tax issues. Some guy marrying 3 women could get a disproportionate amount of tax breaks, especially if some of his wives don't work. It's a system just begging to be abused unless, for tax purposes, you are only allowed to declare one spouse. And really, a polygamy system would invariably require the specification of "primaries" for the purposes of inheritance and legal rights over whether to pull the plug if one person is in a vegetable, etc... So if you're going to specify a primary for that, why not for your taxes too?
Quite simply, the conjoining of incomes for tax purposes and the assignment of benefits should be an automatic, simple, and painless event. It is not the state's place to say "Ewww", or "But God says...". It is the state's place to serve its citizens.
I don't disagree. But the government would have to have a very strict set of checks in place to make sure polygamy isn't abused.
Excommunication is not a damnation to Hell. It's a public statement that what they are saying is not what the Catholic Doctrine is saying. There's a difference. It's still supposed to be an invitation to correct. An excommunication can be reversed.
It's the equivalent. In other words, if you get excommunicated, you might as well be damned to Hell.
For your second point, there are some organizations that use religion as an excuse to make money. Probably not a shocker to most people. I don't agree with that at all. Tithing is between a person and God, not for people to use as extortion. There is a cost to running any facility, including a church, so there is a good reason for it. Many Priests, Pastors, Preachers, etc. could be making more money in the real world. As a Catholic, I know that each ordained religious person takes vows of Celibacy, Poverty, and Obedience. I'm not so naive as to think that all vows are taken like that all the time, but they are still there.
Any religion whose leaders preach about how terrible materialism is from gigantic churches filled with priceless art doesn't get to claim they're not in it for the money. Some Christians actually take those teachings seriously, but the larger churches obviously do not, especially the Catholic Church. I don't buy this "We build giant churches to glorify God" nonsense for one second. They do it to glorify themselves and skim a little off the top of the donations.
The thing that bothers me most is that the ones who evangelize in a non-intrusive way get lumped in with those who are complete jerks. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, if I remember the expression correctly. In the same way that many people go around leading fairly normal lives, but those who do something extreme are the ones who hit the paper. Whether it's extremely good, or extremely bad, that's who you hear about.
Evangelism by its very nature is intrusive. It requires that the target make a conscious effort to ignore you.
How is this different from the Catholic Church, which extorts money out of its followers through tithing ("Be a shame if someone were to damn you to hell... if only you gave more money"), encourages them to "spread the word" and gets everyone together once a week to sing off-key, dreary music and recite a creed? Christians have some of the most effective brain-washing techniques I've ever seen. Before the kid can even speak, he's inducted into the cult through baptism and then pressured to "renew" his faith "by his own choice" in a joke called "confirmation" a few years later. The difference between the Christian cult and other cults is that teenagers don't join Christianity to be rebellious; they join Christianity because they don't know any better.
You can marry a person of the same sex all you want in a religious ceremony. The state will just not recognize it as a real marriage, and you won't get tax breaks or spousal benefits. There is a distinction between civil and religious marriage; one does not imply the other. Of course, the radical right has gone to great pains to keep that little snippet secret, since they want everyone to think that Them There Evil Liberals will force priests and preachers to marry couples of the same sex and therefore violate their freedom of delusion. I mean religion.
I see the point you are trying to make, but Christians don't have the power to damn someone to Hell.
Some do, depending on how you read the Bible. Jesus, after all, told Peter that whatever he said on Earth goes in Heaven. So if the Pope excommunicates someone, he's basically damned the person to Hell. If you believe that the Pope really is the successor to the apostle of the son of God and not just some delusional lunatic in a funny hat, that is.
As for their message not being a threat, it's not a threat in the sense that the law requires. But it's still a threat. They basically come to your door and say, "Gee, that's a nice eternal soul you've got there. It'd be a real shame if something were to happen to it" and imply that unless you pay them protection money (i.e. tithing) and worship their thug of a deity, said thug will send you to Hell for all eternity.
My understanding of "banned from the internet" essentially means no IRC, no e-mail, no IM, no social networking, no WWW, no online games, no gopher, no browsing the internet at the library, no internet anything over the cellphone, etc etc etc, unless it is in the course of his job.
The guy obviously knows what he's doing with respect to computing, so I doubt he'd have problems hiding traces of his browsing activity from his probation officer. Hell, there's a feature in Safari (Private Browsing) designed exactly to hide all traces of your browsing activity.
And let's face it, cops aren't exactly computer geniuses either. If he just used Internet Explorer for his legitimate stuff and Firefox for the illegal stuff, he'd probably effectively hide his activity. Since, you know, Internet Explorer is "the Internet".
Over, as in the "unspecified remote kernel fun" vulnerability that appeared on the MoAB site with a PoC yet to be released? Doh!
"Over" as in "the month in which the Month of Apple Bugs was taking place is now over".
Ahh yes, all those who are clueless about heap overflows or remote arbitrary code execution are unimpressed. It's telling that there have been over 20 apple vulns released and only a single patch from apple thus far. Ignorance must be bliss.
By the second day, they were already targeting third-party applications for vulnerabilities. A full third of their bugs were non-Apple applications. And their very first vulnerability was far from universally reproducible; many users testing the vulnerability reported that while QuickTime Player crashed, no actual code execution took place. Their second to last bug was a rehash of previously reported vulnerabilities in AppKit. They basically said one day, "We found this vulnerability in AppKit", then a few days later, they said "These applications which use AppKit are vulnerable too" as a separate vulnerability.
As for Apple's fix releases, well what do you expect? They were never informed of the damn vulnerabilities beforehand, now were they? Do you really think Apple can just roll out security fixes on a whim? This is commercial software, and it must be thoroughly tested before released. And the MoAB people's justification that they were afraid Apple would muzzle them is total nonsense based on what some hack researcher told Brian Krebbs about a vulnerability which he never demonstrated to exist.
They've shown they can clearly find bugs. See MoAB, MoKB, WoOB, if you need evidence. Security firms could give a crap about whether researchers make end-users feel all happy-joy-joy with their OS. They want to be able to say to firm X, "We can find and protect your company from bugs in X, that our competitor can't". It's the same reason why the same people who get busted for writing viruses/worms end up getting hired by security and antivirus firms.
Yes, and then that firm will see that they don't believe in responsible disclosure and can't be trusted to keep information confidential. Finding and dealing with vulnerabilities involves more than technical skill; it involves being responsible about disclosing your findings. These clowns did a great job of showing that they can't be trusted to keep confidential information.
Tell that to anyone who's been running an OS9-based G4, who then upgrades to the latest version of OSX.
Modern drawing engines require more horsepower. Deal with it.
You're comparing OSX to itself. It's like saying Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows XP SP1. That's not what we're talking about; we're talking about major OS upgrades. The Mac OS existed before OSX, and it wasn't very long ago in the grand scheme of things. The last version of OS9 was released in December of 2001. I don't know about you, but I've got two separate PC's that were originally built long before 2002, and my wife's laptop dates to about that period also.
That's a load of bullshit. The differences between point releases of OS X vastly outstrip the differences between Windows XP service packs. Furthermore, you can't classify OS 9 and OS X as related in the same sense that Windows 98 and Windows XP/2000 are related. Windows 98/2000/XP all had an implementation of the Win32 API, so you could compile software on a Windows 98 box and still have it run on Windows 2000 or XP, even though the latter are built on top of a completely different kernel. With Mac OS X and OS 9, that relationship is strictly one-way. OS X implemented the Classic APIs on top of CoreFoundation so that OS 9 developers could recompile their software with very few (or no) required changes to source. They'd just have to link against Carbon.
Even then, Mac OS X cannot run OS 9 binaries natively; it must boot up the Classic environment to do so. Even then, CFM (the component responsible for loading former Classic applications re-compiled for OS X) applications are not Mach-0 binaries. This is because OS X inherits from NeXT, not Mac OS 9. In many ways, Mac OS X is NeXTStep 6.0. It's a successor to the Mac OS name and brand, not an upgrade from its predecessor.
The two operating systems are almost nothing alike, except for some user interface design decisions. Everything else under the hood is vastly different. And by the way, Vista and XP have far more in common than OS 9 and OS X. They share a kernel and some level of binary compatibility.
I think the point made was valid - Apple themselves seem to be assuming that all of their customers bought OSX-based Macs, which means they either tossed out their old Macs or they're n00bs. Otherwise, they couldn't *possibly* expect anyone to update from OS9 to OSX without at least a RAM upgrade, probably a video card upgrade and probably a hard drive upgrade. So it's a little disingenuous of them to suggest that this is unique to the PC world.
Why? They're not selling or supporting OS 9 anymore. It's dead. Steve Jobs had a funeral for it and everything. Your assertion that, because going from OS 9 to OS X is painful, it's equivalent to going from XP to Vista, is complete and utter nonsense. The OS X transition is over. The majority of Apple users are on OS X. All developer interest in the Mac platform is interest in Mac OS X, not Mac OS 9. All the Big Apps from OS 9 are now running natively on OS X. Users switching to the Mac are doing so because os OS X. OS X drives the iPhone. Apple's living and breathing OS X. No one cares about OS 9 anymore. The same cannot be said of XP.
No, it was going on last month. It's over now, and hardly anyone was impressed with their findings, and certainly no one was impressed with their attitudes. It's a good thing these guys maintained anonymity. No respectable security firm would want to hire them after such a blatant show of irresponsibility and venom toward one platform's userbase.
Re:Apple "forces" hardware upgrades to keep music?
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Norway Outlaws iTunes
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You can still listen to those tracks in iTunes. You haven't lost the ability to listen to them. Hell you can authorize 4 of your friends to listen to them as well. And those tracks will work on any iPod.
How hard would it be for a recording company to copyright all of the hash values for every common LAME/Nero/WinAMP encoding option set? Maybe a week's work?
For every possible hashing algorithm? Very. Pretty hard.
Read the NYTimes interview again. This is what Jobs said.
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
Pay attention to the last sentence and calm down. Jobs isn't out to "spit on each and every one of us". His statement was ambiguous. First he says one thing, then he says another. So we really don't know much more than we did when the iPhone was announced. All we know is that the iPhone platform will be very controlled. This doesn't mean that there won't be an SDK for it at some point, but it could mean that the SDK won't allow you to interact with the Cingular bits of the software, for example.
And really, let's be honest. Even if there is no SDK planned, you know some 16 year-old Japanese kid is going to get a hold of one of these things and start hacking. If there's enough interest to generate this much outrage over such ambiguous statements, then there's enough interest to spawn a black market of developer hacks for the iPhone. If the iPhone gets big and third-party hacks and SDKs become popular, Apple will probably cave to the pressure and release an official SDK eventually. Really, I think that it's a matter of how and when, not if, in this case.
Does this person not know how to read? The source has to be made available if someone else modifies or sells it. Darwin is Apple's operating system. If they made a version for ARM processors, they're under absolutely no obligation to open source it. Furthermore, Jobs said the iPhone has Cocoa, CoreAnimation and the whole lot of the Mac OS X APIs. So I'd say that it definitely runs OS X "in a meaningful sense".
You've pretty much got it. Not only do Unicode strings require more memory, but they also require more time to step through. For an 1-byte character, a compare routine has to step through 8 bits in the worst case. For a 2-byte character (such as a Unicode-16 character), you need to step through 16 bits in the worst case. Now, if you're dealing largely with just English-language characters, compares won't be that big a problem since, as you say, the higher-order bits will remain largely unused. It'll be reading the strings and writing them to memory that'll catch you.
Your test assumes that the guilty party is in your sample set. This is an unsupported assumption, especially if you're choosing people at random, which is a requirement if you want to make any kind of statistical argument.
The primary flaw you're making is that you're over-simplifying the statistics of the situation. Talking about null hypotheses is all well and good when you've got only 2 possible outcomes, but that's not the case here. In the case of a polygraph, you can have a spiked reaction due to various causes. So you have to account for reactions due to all the other possibilities, like I mentioned before. While a response may be a predictor for whether a person has seen the shotgun before, that is not the only thing it is a predictor for. For all you know, the person in question may have murdered someone else with a very similar shotgun and is thus having that reaction. Look up Bayesian networks for ways to approximate all the various statistical scenarios while avoiding an exponential computational growth using directed graphs.
No, there is no demonstrable correlation between nervousness and deception. No psychologist worth a damn will tell you otherwise. Even if there is such a correlation, deception is not the sole cause of nervousness, so again, a polygraph tells you nothing useful, much less anything admissible in a court.
No, polygraphs are just bullshit, period. There is no scientific way to employ them because they make a fatally flawed assumption: that lying causes increases in vital measurements. There is absolutely no evidence at all to support this assumption. Increases in vitals like body temperature, perspiration and heart rate correlate with nervousness, not deception. Furthermore, a suspect reacting to the word "shotgun" is not informative in the slightest. The shotgun from Doom might've just been his favorite weapon in that game. Or he might have some other past traumatic experience with a shotgun. It means nothing.
Polygraphs are just another interrogation tool to make the suspect feel more powerless and make the interrogator look more powerful. If the suspect believes that the interrogator is omniscient or the only person who can help him, he'll be more honest. Polygraphs are just another deception that actually works on street punks who don't know shit, but won't fool anyone with basic scientific knowledge.
I can live with the stupid UIs in movies. I can deal with hackers working in some weird 3-D world where you can gain access to a system by basically playing Doom. I can deal with the ridiculous login prompts that don't shut out the user and raise an alarm after 3 failed login attempts.
What I can't deal with is the stupid fucking bullshit about how any image can be easily scaled and enhanced to the point where you can easily make out a face from shitty VHS security camera footage. You'd think graphics artists who've worked in Photoshop before would know that it's not that easy. Sure, it's mathematically possible to scale an image and maintain nearly-full resolution, but it's absurdly expensive. The CSI team would have to wait a good week before the image scaling algorithm was done. Even more if they were actually equipped with the kind of computers the government gives their employees. (Read: garbage from 5 years ago.)
Marketshare numbers take into account when offices buy PCs from Dell in lots of 50, 100, 150, etc... That's a severe slant in the numbers that makes it seem like ordinary consumers only choose to buy a Mac 4% of the time. This really isn't true. I don't know what the actual number is for personal computer purchases, but it's almost certainly higher. With regards to the platform being worthwhile for malware authors, that's very significant. Corporate PCs are more likely to be hardened and secured against attack than your out-of-the-box Windows PC. So Macs are probably plenty worthwhile for malware authors. But the big vector for propagation, Internet Explorer 6, is not available for OS X.
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In any case, Jesus didn't seem to have a problem saving souls without a huge building to help him out. According to your own scriptures, such a thing isn't necessary. In that spirit, I'll tell you why people get annoyed at even "minimally intrusive" evangelism. It's because people don't like to be told they're leading their lives wrong. And it's not like you can even show that a non-Christian is leading his life incorrectly. You just kind of proclaim it. When someone tells a smoker "You should cut back or quit", it's actually good advice, and that's been shown that there is a direct causal link between smoking and cancer. There is no way to show such a connection between "Christianity" and "being happy".
So was Christianity not a religion during the time of plenary indulgance? Did the Catholicism cease to be a "real religion" and then pop back in? A religion is a set of beliefs. How those beliefs are practiced by a given organization or whether that organization charges money is irrelevant.
How is this different from the Catholic Church, which extorts money out of its followers through tithing ("Be a shame if someone were to damn you to hell ... if only you gave more money"), encourages them to "spread the word" and gets everyone together once a week to sing off-key, dreary music and recite a creed? Christians have some of the most effective brain-washing techniques I've ever seen. Before the kid can even speak, he's inducted into the cult through baptism and then pressured to "renew" his faith "by his own choice" in a joke called "confirmation" a few years later. The difference between the Christian cult and other cults is that teenagers don't join Christianity to be rebellious; they join Christianity because they don't know any better.
You can marry a person of the same sex all you want in a religious ceremony. The state will just not recognize it as a real marriage, and you won't get tax breaks or spousal benefits. There is a distinction between civil and religious marriage; one does not imply the other. Of course, the radical right has gone to great pains to keep that little snippet secret, since they want everyone to think that Them There Evil Liberals will force priests and preachers to marry couples of the same sex and therefore violate their freedom of delusion. I mean religion.
As for their message not being a threat, it's not a threat in the sense that the law requires. But it's still a threat. They basically come to your door and say, "Gee, that's a nice eternal soul you've got there. It'd be a real shame if something were to happen to it" and imply that unless you pay them protection money (i.e. tithing) and worship their thug of a deity, said thug will send you to Hell for all eternity.
The guy obviously knows what he's doing with respect to computing, so I doubt he'd have problems hiding traces of his browsing activity from his probation officer. Hell, there's a feature in Safari (Private Browsing) designed exactly to hide all traces of your browsing activity.
And let's face it, cops aren't exactly computer geniuses either. If he just used Internet Explorer for his legitimate stuff and Firefox for the illegal stuff, he'd probably effectively hide his activity. Since, you know, Internet Explorer is "the Internet".
Fake Steve is, by far, the best fake blog ever.
As for Apple's fix releases, well what do you expect? They were never informed of the damn vulnerabilities beforehand, now were they? Do you really think Apple can just roll out security fixes on a whim? This is commercial software, and it must be thoroughly tested before released. And the MoAB people's justification that they were afraid Apple would muzzle them is total nonsense based on what some hack researcher told Brian Krebbs about a vulnerability which he never demonstrated to exist. Yes, and then that firm will see that they don't believe in responsible disclosure and can't be trusted to keep information confidential. Finding and dealing with vulnerabilities involves more than technical skill; it involves being responsible about disclosing your findings. These clowns did a great job of showing that they can't be trusted to keep confidential information.
Even then, Mac OS X cannot run OS 9 binaries natively; it must boot up the Classic environment to do so. Even then, CFM (the component responsible for loading former Classic applications re-compiled for OS X) applications are not Mach-0 binaries. This is because OS X inherits from NeXT, not Mac OS 9. In many ways, Mac OS X is NeXTStep 6.0. It's a successor to the Mac OS name and brand, not an upgrade from its predecessor.
The two operating systems are almost nothing alike, except for some user interface design decisions. Everything else under the hood is vastly different. And by the way, Vista and XP have far more in common than OS 9 and OS X. They share a kernel and some level of binary compatibility. Why? They're not selling or supporting OS 9 anymore. It's dead. Steve Jobs had a funeral for it and everything. Your assertion that, because going from OS 9 to OS X is painful, it's equivalent to going from XP to Vista, is complete and utter nonsense. The OS X transition is over. The majority of Apple users are on OS X. All developer interest in the Mac platform is interest in Mac OS X, not Mac OS 9. All the Big Apps from OS 9 are now running natively on OS X. Users switching to the Mac are doing so because os OS X. OS X drives the iPhone. Apple's living and breathing OS X. No one cares about OS 9 anymore. The same cannot be said of XP.
Your allegory interests me, and I'd like to subscribe to yours newsletter.
No, it was going on last month. It's over now, and hardly anyone was impressed with their findings, and certainly no one was impressed with their attitudes. It's a good thing these guys maintained anonymity. No respectable security firm would want to hire them after such a blatant show of irresponsibility and venom toward one platform's userbase.
You can still listen to those tracks in iTunes. You haven't lost the ability to listen to them. Hell you can authorize 4 of your friends to listen to them as well. And those tracks will work on any iPod.
How the hell do you know? Are you psychic?
And really, let's be honest. Even if there is no SDK planned, you know some 16 year-old Japanese kid is going to get a hold of one of these things and start hacking. If there's enough interest to generate this much outrage over such ambiguous statements, then there's enough interest to spawn a black market of developer hacks for the iPhone. If the iPhone gets big and third-party hacks and SDKs become popular, Apple will probably cave to the pressure and release an official SDK eventually. Really, I think that it's a matter of how and when, not if, in this case.
Does this person not know how to read? The source has to be made available if someone else modifies or sells it. Darwin is Apple's operating system. If they made a version for ARM processors, they're under absolutely no obligation to open source it. Furthermore, Jobs said the iPhone has Cocoa, CoreAnimation and the whole lot of the Mac OS X APIs. So I'd say that it definitely runs OS X "in a meaningful sense".
How did this tripe get posted?
You've pretty much got it. Not only do Unicode strings require more memory, but they also require more time to step through. For an 1-byte character, a compare routine has to step through 8 bits in the worst case. For a 2-byte character (such as a Unicode-16 character), you need to step through 16 bits in the worst case. Now, if you're dealing largely with just English-language characters, compares won't be that big a problem since, as you say, the higher-order bits will remain largely unused. It'll be reading the strings and writing them to memory that'll catch you.
Your test assumes that the guilty party is in your sample set. This is an unsupported assumption, especially if you're choosing people at random, which is a requirement if you want to make any kind of statistical argument.
The primary flaw you're making is that you're over-simplifying the statistics of the situation. Talking about null hypotheses is all well and good when you've got only 2 possible outcomes, but that's not the case here. In the case of a polygraph, you can have a spiked reaction due to various causes. So you have to account for reactions due to all the other possibilities, like I mentioned before. While a response may be a predictor for whether a person has seen the shotgun before, that is not the only thing it is a predictor for. For all you know, the person in question may have murdered someone else with a very similar shotgun and is thus having that reaction. Look up Bayesian networks for ways to approximate all the various statistical scenarios while avoiding an exponential computational growth using directed graphs.
No, there is no demonstrable correlation between nervousness and deception. No psychologist worth a damn will tell you otherwise. Even if there is such a correlation, deception is not the sole cause of nervousness, so again, a polygraph tells you nothing useful, much less anything admissible in a court.
No, polygraphs are just bullshit, period. There is no scientific way to employ them because they make a fatally flawed assumption: that lying causes increases in vital measurements. There is absolutely no evidence at all to support this assumption. Increases in vitals like body temperature, perspiration and heart rate correlate with nervousness, not deception. Furthermore, a suspect reacting to the word "shotgun" is not informative in the slightest. The shotgun from Doom might've just been his favorite weapon in that game. Or he might have some other past traumatic experience with a shotgun. It means nothing.
Polygraphs are just another interrogation tool to make the suspect feel more powerless and make the interrogator look more powerful. If the suspect believes that the interrogator is omniscient or the only person who can help him, he'll be more honest. Polygraphs are just another deception that actually works on street punks who don't know shit, but won't fool anyone with basic scientific knowledge.
I can live with the stupid UIs in movies. I can deal with hackers working in some weird 3-D world where you can gain access to a system by basically playing Doom. I can deal with the ridiculous login prompts that don't shut out the user and raise an alarm after 3 failed login attempts.
What I can't deal with is the stupid fucking bullshit about how any image can be easily scaled and enhanced to the point where you can easily make out a face from shitty VHS security camera footage. You'd think graphics artists who've worked in Photoshop before would know that it's not that easy. Sure, it's mathematically possible to scale an image and maintain nearly-full resolution, but it's absurdly expensive. The CSI team would have to wait a good week before the image scaling algorithm was done. Even more if they were actually equipped with the kind of computers the government gives their employees. (Read: garbage from 5 years ago.)
Marketshare numbers take into account when offices buy PCs from Dell in lots of 50, 100, 150, etc ... That's a severe slant in the numbers that makes it seem like ordinary consumers only choose to buy a Mac 4% of the time. This really isn't true. I don't know what the actual number is for personal computer purchases, but it's almost certainly higher. With regards to the platform being worthwhile for malware authors, that's very significant. Corporate PCs are more likely to be hardened and secured against attack than your out-of-the-box Windows PC. So Macs are probably plenty worthwhile for malware authors. But the big vector for propagation, Internet Explorer 6, is not available for OS X.