>> I think you overestimate the power of each citizen when given this kind of information. The people who can *actually* do something about anything are already getting that kind of information.
Sir, I'll tell you what. Name any two instances of such information, and I will name you matching sets of more dangerous information because it was kept concealed. I want the information revealed because its secrecy has far, far, far too frequently permitted abuse of the information, out of the sight of public, the voters, or those who provided the money and the manpower to commit criminal actions.
If their actions and policies are effective and just, trot them out for us to see them. Not doing so has contributed directly to torture camps in Guantanamo Bay which have not produced a _single case_ for the courts or any evidence of a single life saved, only torture and the death of three prisoners at "Camp No" in Guantanamo Bay.
The "lives on the ground" most at risk from such national security arrangements are not those of the agents: it those of the innocents they can, and in far too many cases have, injured and killed. We're lucky in the US that the separation of powers has helped control these risks, but the idea that the government knows better and should be trusted to handle the important decisions without having to show its data or its personnel who obtained it is straight out of the operating manual of every totalitarian state in history.
Governments, and the people in them, _lie_. The cloak of national security should not be permitted to keep these lies concealed: it's far too easy to say "national security" and hide a crime.
Bush should look bad, and the people who provided the information should be available for _questions_ and so that the information can be tested.
Knowing that Manuel Noriega was CIA funded, and what agreements he had with the US, could have exposed his sources of US funding and support and had Congress cut them off. We've had far too many failures with criminal, even terrorist US "partners".
Yes, it is. Revealing them can allow us to realize whom we've been trusting with our money, our information, and to set policies. For example, Manuel Noriegas's status as a recipient of CIA intelligence and funding and trainee of the "School of the Americas" contributed to his eventual takeover of Panama and control of its cocaine trade. Don't you think it would have been helpful to know exactly what money or support he got from the US, and useful to know what gangsters we're currently supporting and funding worldwide? And wouldn't it have been helpful to know, in advance of the war, that the claims about Iraq purchasing "yellowcake" uranium ore came from, so that they could be exposed before a war costing billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives, and which cost us any hope of lasting victory in Afghanistan?
And of course, you'll lose years of your career and maybe your house if you try this. The mobile application market is wildly overpopulated with "brilliant ideas" that founder on small but fatal flaws, ranging from poor user interfaces to being blocked by the apps stores for arbitrary and unpredictable policy reasons, to simple theft by a larger vendor who can undercut your price and merge their development work with other work and undercut you.
Get out of the "mobile device development" marketplace unless you're extraordinarily gifted: with decades of experience, get into infrastructure work to support the mobile device companies. And make sure you get paid cash, not stock.
No, I read it. My point is that what would be removed is not "negligible" in volume or mass, and whether valuable commercially or not, it ordinarily comes out of the topsoil. Even if not as high in trace nutrients as the fruit or, say, edible tubers, the losses in an ongoing process of sequestration will accumulate and need replenishment from some source.
Admittedly, the 50 foot comment was based on topsoil in undeveloped areas enriched by factors like river silting and beaver dams, centuries ago. It's been heavily farmed since then, and much, much thinner now. That's why I called it exceptional.
I don't know where you attend, but where I've worked, people always have shell access to at least one testing host environment and often have NFS access to home directories. Coupled with local root exploits, that leaves any no-password SSH keys and subversion or CVS stored passwords, and jabberd daemon stored passwords or poorly encrypted.htpasswd server files running on a server that they can reach out tol, quite accessible. Then there is VNC, which stores passwords in $HOME which are encrypted, but only DES encrypted and therefore often crackable, and which does not enforce password changing policies. And there are the continuing stream of fools who teach students "Just set 'xhost +' and set your X display to your local machine, and your remote X programs will work correctly". I continually have to educate sophisticated users about that one.
Students often have virtualized environments running on their desktops or laptops for access or access or running servers they care to test with, and those are often not under the management of IT sufficiently to enforce upgrades. It's a big security problem. So yes, local root exploits remain an ongoing issue.
Don't ignore water content: whether urine is "mostly water and salts", it counts as mass, and is included both in water or fluids we drink and as a significant part of most food.
I'm afraid it's naive. Every gram of plant material removed from the fields represents a gram of soil and water, removed from the local ecosystem. The field does not care where it is restored from, whether manure, river silt, or petrolum based fertilizers. But if the material is not replenished, the field will lose topsoil and productivity. Topsoil also isn't that thick: 50 foot thick topsoil is considered rare and extremely valuable. The layer in many "farm belts" is quite thin from over-use.
So just carting it away, or washing it away from badly eroded fields, is a big problem.
By the way, your definition of "expert" is very strange. From your attitudes towards groups like IT, I assume you use it to pretend that "experts" really aren't and that you can therefore safely ignore them?
You've selected an example that exactly proves _my_ point. An expecting mother is in one of those situations where some expert advice and preventive care is _most_ useful because the situation is under enormous and unusal stresses that can often be handled with informed caution. (Mecications to avoid, checking weight gain, treating morning sickness and testing for diabetes, educating the mother on breathing exercises and avoiding eclampsia, etc.) The consequences of ignoring the situation and saying "people die when they go to doctors, let's not see them!" is devastating, tet that is _precisely_ what you originally suggested.
You told people in your work situation with mission critical systems to avoid IT because IT imperils the systems. The parallel is with parents who refuse vaccines to avoid autism for their children: even after the claim has been demonstrated false, parents still do this.
As IT staff who've had to deal with the mess, I'm forced to say "you're not telling the whole story". I've been forced, in the past, to negotiate the security requirements to handle access to resources, and too often been told "we can't be bothered to learn how to use the secure tools, we'll just leave it wide open: after all, we have a firewall and a non-disclusure agreement". And then I've been blamed for the open access. Or "we daren't update that system, it's too critical", and then been blamed for the cost of the errors and failures in software that were fixed 3 years previously in published patches.
So let's not say "IT messes up our systems" any more than we say "vaccines cause autism", shall we? There are risks, but I'm still seeing far too many instances of misuse and abuse that IT is responsible to clean up when systems are run without any guidance by people more familiar with network and security principles than a paperwork handler or even most software developers can be expected to have.
And that "airgap" means the hardware can't report its state, such as temperature, power issues, time synchronization, automated shutdown procedures among multiple nodes in case of an upstream systems failure, empty materials bins, or usage reports. Having an airgap is like virginity. It's easy to pledge to, but turns out to create other losses.
> Yes, parent is correct. It is very difficult to protect employees with laws for this kind of thing, at least not without also protecting employees who are simply inept, have a rotten attitude, or are just plain old lazy.
Oh, my. I see you've worked with members of the teacher's union.
It's important in a long career to notice the signs of someone starting such a paper trail on you. It's occurred in my career: I was able to identify the manager responsible for it, who was actually in another department that I dealt with, and outlast him. But I was very fortunate. The fool had his secretary printing up all the notices to submit in my annual evaluation, and that secretary asked me for help with some printer issues, and I had the opportunity to read the documents in advance. I was quite surprised, and able to lay my own paper trail to trace his precise claims as quite false.
I was quite fortunate, and I've outlasted that manager. But he might have caused a lot more damage if I hadn't caught on.
If you show the same sort of attitude in the process that the above anonymous coward is advising, you will be fired within months if not days for wasting the company's time and money and not being a "team player". Like being fired for being smarter than your boss, or for not being willing to work 80 hour weeks, it will be subtly transformed into grounds on which you can be fired with little legal risk to any employer with an HR department with a clue. And many HR departments are trained to find ways to get people fired, or hired, outside the clear boundaries of the law. Given the description, this workplace is a place to get out of in any case, becase the original poster has already been judged guilty.
In a situation like this, I'd recommend laying a clear paper trail to protect your references. Getting fired for identity theft like this is nasty: it can be a "he said, she said" scenario that leaves people discouraged from hiring you just from hearing about it. And yes, you absolutely _do_ need a lawyer to help you stay abreast of the rules about wrongful termination, your contract, your NDA (which may restruct you from discussing your firing with your next employer if it would affect your current employer's reputation), unemployment benefit issues, etc. These vary tremendously from state to state and from country to country.
Oh, I'm not saying that they currently do digital storage. I'm saying that they should switch to digital storage, to make sample theft that much more difficult. I'm looking for references on replication of viruses from digital storage: they're small enough objects, with very little else, that I think digital restoration is feasible. I'm having difficulty sorting out the theory from the substance of the numerous claims on the issue. Is there a skilled genetic biologist here who can comment on the feasibility of this?
Oh, dear. That's not good. I thought it was an ongoing issue of US and corporate lobbying to _allow_ software patents, and it hadn't quite worked yet. I see from checking Wikipedia that your claim is substantially correct: it's merely a matter of degree of what can and cannot be software patented there.
That's in Germany. There are no software patents in Europe, and Germans are (traditionally) much less interested in lawsuits than US citizens and corporations. I'd also expect German patent grants to actually be valid, rather than relying on lengthy court processes to refute patents that never should have been granted due to prior art or attempting to patent laws of nature.
None of these conditions apply in the USA. It is actually to the advantage of some large companies and their lobbying organizations to keep the patent office overwhelmed and confused: they can assemble portolios of defensive patents to protect their interests, and apply those portfolios at whim against smaller, more creative, developers or businesses that haven't already invested in manufacturing or development or sales of an older product line.
You said something fascinating that caught my eye:
> So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it.
This doesn't seem to be correct. Applying any medication to someone who is already ill is riskier than applying it to a healthy person: between allergies, mistakes in dosage, infections from visiting a hospital or mishandling needles, and allergic reactions that are far more dangerous in an ill person, the risk seems higher.
The problem is in the "benefit" side. The risk of getting polio or German measles today is small, so for an individual to refuse the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of such negative consequences, and creates only a miniscule risk for them of infection. The problem is when enough personally cautious people refuse the vaccine that a threshold of vulnerability is crossed and the disease becomes far more common, and the risk is increased, and especially if the disease mutates slightly and becomes drug-resistant or requires new vaccines. We do not want to see polio or German measles become rampant again.
And we had the opportunity, several times now, to entirely eliminate polio. The vaccine was ready, the last active strains of it could have been wiped off the planet (with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere). The remaining nations with transmitted cases are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to WHO. Why does the disease still exist there? Because of war and fear of poison, especially of sterilizing poisons administered by foreign governments to control native population. By the time natives who understood enough biochemistry to attest to the vaccine's effectiveness and safety could be gathered, the stockpiles of vaccine for Nigeria, for example, had expired and were a complete waste of UN money.
Parents in the US refusing vaccines are doing the same thing. They're actually extending the lifespan of the particular diseases by leaving infectable children as a significant part of the population, enough to keep the diseases active.
There were many reasons to switch to grub. The limited namespace for bootable configurations was one: the old 1023 cylinder issue, where the entire partition containing LILO had to be within the first 1023 cylinders of the hard drive, which was why many Linuxes required a small first partition for "/boot", was another. The need to re-install the boot loader, every time you added a kernel to your boot list, was another.
I'm personally hoping for the Linuxbios project to progress and eliminate many of the legacy booting problems, including the peculiar steps necessary for grub and lilo. It's also far faster to boot, much more documented, and supports resetting BIOS settings without rebooting the system.
Yes, the first round of people in the BSD software pyramid scheme can benefit fiscally by merely collecting other's work and refusing to publish or release their own for similar open source use. Look very carefully at what is happening with MySQL right now, and look very carefully at what Microsoft did with Kerberos (to make Active Directory incompatible with standard Kerberos), and at what Apple does with its now-closed-source BSD.
If you're lucky enough to be the company that can market the source you close, well, you're in good siscal shape. If you're a developer who wants to debug it for your personal or professional use, too bad. We're seeing this right now with commercial MySQL vendors: the results are fascinating, but one can hardly call them the results of "free" or "open" software: they're the result of taking open software closed.
I'm not sure if you're being ironic. In case you're not, cancer treatment is a big problem for veterans: cancer is expensive to treat, it's debilitating, and it's shockingly common among veterans exposed to battlefield poisons not necessarily listed as cancer causing (such as the Agent Orange problems), poison handled in their workplaces with less than rigorous toxin handling techniques because the military is in a rush and saving money during battle, and all the _smoking_ common to troopers forced to hurry up and wait for hours and days at their base and in the field. There's also radiation damage which has happened in weapons testing and in handling nuclear materials, even in peaceful times.
And there is, of course, the military applicaton of exending the viability of exposed military personnel in nuclear warfare, especially in case the Soviets invade Europe and we drop nuclear weapons on the border. This was a very closely examined scenario, and is partly why NATO has nucleare weapons in Europe.
You may as well point a finger at the hospital "supergerms" themselves. They're an evolutionary response to mishandling of basic security, and of the basic economics and legal handling of spam. Even if you personally went and shot the authors of this particular botnet tonight, plenty more are waiting in the wings to fill the economic and social niche they occupy.
This doesn't make the authors good people who don't deserve punishment, but like crack dealers moving into empty houses in your neighborhood, arresting one just leaves space for the next one to move in. You need to deal with the empty houses, or in this case, the ludicrous ease of spamming and refusal to act against it in general coupled with the wide open vulnerability of over-sophisticated software.
Slashdot Mirror
And as the demon Crowley said when he sent the EULA's to the demons that draw up agreements about souls.
"LEARN!"
(Submitted with respectful acknowledgment to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, in their book, "Good Omens".)
You wrote:
>> I think you overestimate the power of each citizen when given this kind of information. The people who can *actually* do something about anything are already getting that kind of information.
Sir, I'll tell you what. Name any two instances of such information, and I will name you matching sets of more dangerous information because it was kept concealed. I want the information revealed because its secrecy has far, far, far too frequently permitted abuse of the information, out of the sight of public, the voters, or those who provided the money and the manpower to commit criminal actions.
If their actions and policies are effective and just, trot them out for us to see them. Not doing so has contributed directly to torture camps in Guantanamo Bay which have not produced a _single case_ for the courts or any evidence of a single life saved, only torture and the death of three prisoners at "Camp No" in Guantanamo Bay.
The "lives on the ground" most at risk from such national security arrangements are not those of the agents: it those of the innocents they can, and in far too many cases have, injured and killed. We're lucky in the US that the separation of powers has helped control these risks, but the idea that the government knows better and should be trusted to handle the important decisions without having to show its data or its personnel who obtained it is straight out of the operating manual of every totalitarian state in history.
Governments, and the people in them, _lie_. The cloak of national security should not be permitted to keep these lies concealed: it's far too easy to say "national security" and hide a crime.
Bush should look bad, and the people who provided the information should be available for _questions_ and so that the information can be tested.
Knowing that Manuel Noriega was CIA funded, and what agreements he had with the US, could have exposed his sources of US funding and support and had Congress cut them off. We've had far too many failures with criminal, even terrorist US "partners".
Yes, it is. Revealing them can allow us to realize whom we've been trusting with our money, our information, and to set policies. For example, Manuel Noriegas's status as a recipient of CIA intelligence and funding and trainee of the "School of the Americas" contributed to his eventual takeover of Panama and control of its cocaine trade. Don't you think it would have been helpful to know exactly what money or support he got from the US, and useful to know what gangsters we're currently supporting and funding worldwide? And wouldn't it have been helpful to know, in advance of the war, that the claims about Iraq purchasing "yellowcake" uranium ore came from, so that they could be exposed before a war costing billions of US dollars and thousands of US lives, and which cost us any hope of lasting victory in Afghanistan?
And of course, you'll lose years of your career and maybe your house if you try this. The mobile application market is wildly overpopulated with "brilliant ideas" that founder on small but fatal flaws, ranging from poor user interfaces to being blocked by the apps stores for arbitrary and unpredictable policy reasons, to simple theft by a larger vendor who can undercut your price and merge their development work with other work and undercut you.
Get out of the "mobile device development" marketplace unless you're extraordinarily gifted: with decades of experience, get into infrastructure work to support the mobile device companies. And make sure you get paid cash, not stock.
No, I read it. My point is that what would be removed is not "negligible" in volume or mass, and whether valuable commercially or not, it ordinarily comes out of the topsoil. Even if not as high in trace nutrients as the fruit or, say, edible tubers, the losses in an ongoing process of sequestration will accumulate and need replenishment from some source.
Admittedly, the 50 foot comment was based on topsoil in undeveloped areas enriched by factors like river silting and beaver dams, centuries ago. It's been heavily farmed since then, and much, much thinner now. That's why I called it exceptional.
The US midwest, enriched by beaver dams, used to have such topsoil hundreds of years ago. I've no idea where it might be left in the world.
I don't know where you attend, but where I've worked, people always have shell access to at least one testing host environment and often have NFS access to home directories. Coupled with local root exploits, that leaves any no-password SSH keys and subversion or CVS stored passwords, and jabberd daemon stored passwords or poorly encrypted .htpasswd server files running on a server that they can reach out tol, quite accessible. Then there is VNC, which stores passwords in $HOME which are encrypted, but only DES encrypted and therefore often crackable, and which does not enforce password changing policies. And there are the continuing stream of fools who teach students "Just set 'xhost +' and set your X display to your local machine, and your remote X programs will work correctly". I continually have to educate sophisticated users about that one.
Students often have virtualized environments running on their desktops or laptops for access or access or running servers they care to test with, and those are often not under the management of IT sufficiently to enforce upgrades. It's a big security problem. So yes, local root exploits remain an ongoing issue.
Don't ignore water content: whether urine is "mostly water and salts", it counts as mass, and is included both in water or fluids we drink and as a significant part of most food.
I'm afraid it's naive. Every gram of plant material removed from the fields represents a gram of soil and water, removed from the local ecosystem. The field does not care where it is restored from, whether manure, river silt, or petrolum based fertilizers. But if the material is not replenished, the field will lose topsoil and productivity. Topsoil also isn't that thick: 50 foot thick topsoil is considered rare and extremely valuable. The layer in many "farm belts" is quite thin from over-use.
So just carting it away, or washing it away from badly eroded fields, is a big problem.
By the way, your definition of "expert" is very strange. From your attitudes towards groups like IT, I assume you use it to pretend that "experts" really aren't and that you can therefore safely ignore them?
You've selected an example that exactly proves _my_ point. An expecting mother is in one of those situations where some expert advice and preventive care is _most_ useful because the situation is under enormous and unusal stresses that can often be handled with informed caution. (Mecications to avoid, checking weight gain, treating morning sickness and testing for diabetes, educating the mother on breathing exercises and avoiding eclampsia, etc.) The consequences of ignoring the situation and saying "people die when they go to doctors, let's not see them!" is devastating, tet that is _precisely_ what you originally suggested.
You told people in your work situation with mission critical systems to avoid IT because IT imperils the systems. The parallel is with parents who refuse vaccines to avoid autism for their children: even after the claim has been demonstrated false, parents still do this.
As IT staff who've had to deal with the mess, I'm forced to say "you're not telling the whole story". I've been forced, in the past, to negotiate the security requirements to handle access to resources, and too often been told "we can't be bothered to learn how to use the secure tools, we'll just leave it wide open: after all, we have a firewall and a non-disclusure agreement". And then I've been blamed for the open access. Or "we daren't update that system, it's too critical", and then been blamed for the cost of the errors and failures in software that were fixed 3 years previously in published patches.
So let's not say "IT messes up our systems" any more than we say "vaccines cause autism", shall we? There are risks, but I'm still seeing far too many instances of misuse and abuse that IT is responsible to clean up when systems are run without any guidance by people more familiar with network and security principles than a paperwork handler or even most software developers can be expected to have.
And that "airgap" means the hardware can't report its state, such as temperature, power issues, time synchronization, automated shutdown procedures among multiple nodes in case of an upstream systems failure, empty materials bins, or usage reports. Having an airgap is like virginity. It's easy to pledge to, but turns out to create other losses.
> Yes, parent is correct. It is very difficult to protect employees with laws for this kind of thing, at least not without also protecting employees who are simply inept, have a rotten attitude, or are just plain old lazy.
Oh, my. I see you've worked with members of the teacher's union.
It's important in a long career to notice the signs of someone starting such a paper trail on you. It's occurred in my career: I was able to identify the manager responsible for it, who was actually in another department that I dealt with, and outlast him. But I was very fortunate. The fool had his secretary printing up all the notices to submit in my annual evaluation, and that secretary asked me for help with some printer issues, and I had the opportunity to read the documents in advance. I was quite surprised, and able to lay my own paper trail to trace his precise claims as quite false.
I was quite fortunate, and I've outlasted that manager. But he might have caused a lot more damage if I hadn't caught on.
If you show the same sort of attitude in the process that the above anonymous coward is advising, you will be fired within months if not days for wasting the company's time and money and not being a "team player". Like being fired for being smarter than your boss, or for not being willing to work 80 hour weeks, it will be subtly transformed into grounds on which you can be fired with little legal risk to any employer with an HR department with a clue. And many HR departments are trained to find ways to get people fired, or hired, outside the clear boundaries of the law. Given the description, this workplace is a place to get out of in any case, becase the original poster has already been judged guilty.
In a situation like this, I'd recommend laying a clear paper trail to protect your references. Getting fired for identity theft like this is nasty: it can be a "he said, she said" scenario that leaves people discouraged from hiring you just from hearing about it. And yes, you absolutely _do_ need a lawyer to help you stay abreast of the rules about wrongful termination, your contract, your NDA (which may restruct you from discussing your firing with your next employer if it would affect your current employer's reputation), unemployment benefit issues, etc. These vary tremendously from state to state and from country to country.
Oh, I'm not saying that they currently do digital storage. I'm saying that they should switch to digital storage, to make sample theft that much more difficult. I'm looking for references on replication of viruses from digital storage: they're small enough objects, with very little else, that I think digital restoration is feasible. I'm having difficulty sorting out the theory from the substance of the numerous claims on the issue. Is there a skilled genetic biologist here who can comment on the feasibility of this?
Oh, dear. That's not good. I thought it was an ongoing issue of US and corporate lobbying to _allow_ software patents, and it hadn't quite worked yet. I see from checking Wikipedia that your claim is substantially correct: it's merely a matter of degree of what can and cannot be software patented there.
That's in Germany. There are no software patents in Europe, and Germans are (traditionally) much less interested in lawsuits than US citizens and corporations. I'd also expect German patent grants to actually be valid, rather than relying on lengthy court processes to refute patents that never should have been granted due to prior art or attempting to patent laws of nature.
None of these conditions apply in the USA. It is actually to the advantage of some large companies and their lobbying organizations to keep the patent office overwhelmed and confused: they can assemble portolios of defensive patents to protect their interests, and apply those portfolios at whim against smaller, more creative, developers or businesses that haven't already invested in manufacturing or development or sales of an older product line.
You said something fascinating that caught my eye:
> So there is actually a higher chance that the vaccine could make you worse off than you were before you got it.
This doesn't seem to be correct. Applying any medication to someone who is already ill is riskier than applying it to a healthy person: between allergies, mistakes in dosage, infections from visiting a hospital or mishandling needles, and allergic reactions that are far more dangerous in an ill person, the risk seems higher.
The problem is in the "benefit" side. The risk of getting polio or German measles today is small, so for an individual to refuse the vaccine significantly reduces their risk of such negative consequences, and creates only a miniscule risk for them of infection. The problem is when enough personally cautious people refuse the vaccine that a threshold of vulnerability is crossed and the disease becomes far more common, and the risk is increased, and especially if the disease mutates slightly and becomes drug-resistant or requires new vaccines. We do not want to see polio or German measles become rampant again.
And we had the opportunity, several times now, to entirely eliminate polio. The vaccine was ready, the last active strains of it could have been wiped off the planet (with digital storage of the DNA, just in case a sample was hidden somewhere). The remaining nations with transmitted cases are Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to WHO. Why does the disease still exist there? Because of war and fear of poison, especially of sterilizing poisons administered by foreign governments to control native population. By the time natives who understood enough biochemistry to attest to the vaccine's effectiveness and safety could be gathered, the stockpiles of vaccine for Nigeria, for example, had expired and were a complete waste of UN money.
Parents in the US refusing vaccines are doing the same thing. They're actually extending the lifespan of the particular diseases by leaving infectable children as a significant part of the population, enough to keep the diseases active.
There were many reasons to switch to grub. The limited namespace for bootable configurations was one: the old 1023 cylinder issue, where the entire partition containing LILO had to be within the first 1023 cylinders of the hard drive, which was why many Linuxes required a small first partition for "/boot", was another. The need to re-install the boot loader, every time you added a kernel to your boot list, was another.
I'm personally hoping for the Linuxbios project to progress and eliminate many of the legacy booting problems, including the peculiar steps necessary for grub and lilo. It's also far faster to boot, much more documented, and supports resetting BIOS settings without rebooting the system.
Yes, the first round of people in the BSD software pyramid scheme can benefit fiscally by merely collecting other's work and refusing to publish or release their own for similar open source use. Look very carefully at what is happening with MySQL right now, and look very carefully at what Microsoft did with Kerberos (to make Active Directory incompatible with standard Kerberos), and at what Apple does with its now-closed-source BSD.
If you're lucky enough to be the company that can market the source you close, well, you're in good siscal shape. If you're a developer who wants to debug it for your personal or professional use, too bad. We're seeing this right now with commercial MySQL vendors: the results are fascinating, but one can hardly call them the results of "free" or "open" software: they're the result of taking open software closed.
I'm not sure if you're being ironic. In case you're not, cancer treatment is a big problem for veterans: cancer is expensive to treat, it's debilitating, and it's shockingly common among veterans exposed to battlefield poisons not necessarily listed as cancer causing (such as the Agent Orange problems), poison handled in their workplaces with less than rigorous toxin handling techniques because the military is in a rush and saving money during battle, and all the _smoking_ common to troopers forced to hurry up and wait for hours and days at their base and in the field. There's also radiation damage which has happened in weapons testing and in handling nuclear materials, even in peaceful times.
And there is, of course, the military applicaton of exending the viability of exposed military personnel in nuclear warfare, especially in case the Soviets invade Europe and we drop nuclear weapons on the border. This was a very closely examined scenario, and is partly why NATO has nucleare weapons in Europe.
You may as well point a finger at the hospital "supergerms" themselves. They're an evolutionary response to mishandling of basic security, and of the basic economics and legal handling of spam. Even if you personally went and shot the authors of this particular botnet tonight, plenty more are waiting in the wings to fill the economic and social niche they occupy.
This doesn't make the authors good people who don't deserve punishment, but like crack dealers moving into empty houses in your neighborhood, arresting one just leaves space for the next one to move in. You need to deal with the empty houses, or in this case, the ludicrous ease of spamming and refusal to act against it in general coupled with the wide open vulnerability of over-sophisticated software.