Being founded in a liberal society has nothing to do with an online company's success. Look at Baidu for example. They're founded in an oppressive society, and their success in China far surpasses Google, Yahoo, even Microsoft. If your argument for their "deep immorality" has to do with the betrayal of some sort of idealism that brought them up, it doesn't apply here. Sorry.
Just say, "the Chinese NSA sent us a letter forbidding us to disclose the details of this investigation under the Chinese PATRIOT ACT."
I know China is such a serious human rights offender, but that doesn't legitimize the U.S. for being the same. Furthermore, what makes the House think that it would make sense to bully a company that is just trying to run a business under the pressure between two governments?
It's not accurate to say they're ignoring personal sites. They're ignoring sites nobody links to. If you have a personal site, changes are you also post that url whenever you go to a web forum, thus drawing links to it. You could choose to keep your personal site a secret and have nobody link to your personal website. However, if you're a domain squatter, you probably don't have the means to legitimately advertise these domains through web forums without being flagged spam.
I was gonna say this, but decided it's too inflammatory. Now I figure I could pretend I'm just whispering to you: I consider both Democrats and Republicans the same. They both operate on the same moral, ethic, and religious principle. They're both interested in preserving the structure and stability of government. They both try to provide benefit to workers while maintaining an appeal to corporates, making varying degrees of compromise. I remember recently reading a story on Time magazine about Billy Graham. Both Republican and Democrat leaders, when it comes to their faith, turn to Billy Graham for consolation for the last 50 years.
Al Gore and Clinton are no less Christian than George Bush. Surprise?!
I do find this interesting: Wikipedia puts civil liberty groups on the "comtemporary left-wing of the U.S." spectrum. Google's restrictive terms of use and their ban of perfectly legal ads definitely puts them at odds with civil liberty, but the ancestor post claims Google is too left, which is contradicting. So I suspect G Fab has no fucking clue what he's talking about, and that he's just trolling.
Of course, bias is in the eye of the beholder (some people will think the Washington Post is rabidly conservative and some rapidly liberal)
Then I don't know what's the big deal of being biased, since you don't even define a relative standard to base the bias on. The way I see it, as long as Google is not supporting anyone in the parliament, whether left-wing or the right, then Google is not biased. Of course, in the U.S. there is no parliament, so Google can't be biased based on the left-wing right-wing political scale. Is that clear?
In practice, the political spectra is so broad that it would be a vast simplification if you just put a left-wing right-wing label on somebody. Unless your purpose is simply tag someone biased, so that the person or company gets its share of the negative connotation. If you're not just trolling, I don't see what else you're trying to achieve here.
The first rootkit I got in my life was a Linux box running BIND for a local DNS cache. That was 5 years ago. BIND before version 9 is so lousy that everyone using it should expect to get rootkit someday. I was tweaking the firewall setting. I forgot to block port 53 because I hadn't been using that box all that much, and I forgot it was running BIND. The rootkit tried to replace/sbin/init, but my DSL connection died halfway so that didn't complete, and it left my machine unbootable.
About 3 years ago, I sent a PowerBook G4 laptop to an authorized Apple Care center for hardware repair, and some smart-ass there set my root password to something I couldn't guess. But one of the SSH scanning bot successfully guessed. The cracker downloaded and compiled psyBNC (an IRC proxy) and installed it under "/usr/sbin/sshd " (with a trailing space). I think it'd be used as one of the hops designated to make the IRC connection difficult to trace.
I found out about it a few days later, seeing strange IRC connections in netstat.
After that, I always make sure the root password is disabled, using sudo or sudo su - if I need root access. I only have port 22 and 80 open, and I haven't seen a rootkit since.
It looks like Galileo really dug his own grave. From Galileo Galilei:
By 1616 the attacks on Galileo had reached a head, and he went to Rome to try to persuade the Church authorities not to ban his ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothetically. For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberate, Simplicius, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. This fact made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book; an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defense of the Copernican theory. To add insult to injury, Galileo put the words of Pope Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicius. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book. However, the Pope did not take the public ridicule lightly, nor the blatant bias. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.
Most Slashdotters will retrospectively find in horror that, in those days, the Catholic Church was the whole education system that allowed scientific discoveries and mathematic studies to flourish and advance. Copernicus made most of the observations while he was a Canon Law scholar at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross. Copernicus' heliocentric view of the world had supports as well as criticisms from the church, but it was never under serious attack for 60 years. Galileo had a chance to settle this, by means of scientific method that he pioneered, whether helicentrism is to hold or not, but he screwed it up by turning his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" into a political flame war.
I was presented with the two words "Bliss" and "etnamese", the latter I presume should be "Vietnamese" but for some reason the word breaker dropped the initial "Vi". If they can't even do word breaking correctly, I wonder how reCAPTCHA is going to help.
Besides health reason, drinking herbal tea and unsweetened coffee is a fine way to develop appreciation to a magnitude of senses in the world around us, not just to the factory manufactured sugar and sweeteners. Even so, natural sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, and even unrefined cane sugar (which appears naturally in powder form because it cannot crystallize) all offer rich and distinct textures much more than what corn syrup can offer.
So fuck diet coke. Even though your body is not supposed to consume the sweetener, it is just bad taste. Even water tastes better than that.
Same to the artificial scents that is designed to cover up bad odor with another bad odor. It is just numbing. As a kid, someone told me that flowers smell like perfume (which is supposedly made from flowers). I sniffed the flower and said, "I can't smell anything."
Another problem nowadays is that we have so much light pollution, so we look up in the sky and can hardly see any stars. The milky way is completely gone. I heard you used to be able to see it like a long silver belt that stretches across the sky. I've never seen it with bare eyes in my life. What used to sparkle imagination and humility is like yesterday's fairytale.
We now have entered a technology era where we wholly rely on ourselves and our cheaply manufactured senses that is, ironically, killing us with chronic diseases. Welcome to the future, and the future is now.
I nowadays see more Ph.D. scholarships dedicated to US citizens than ever, particularly in science and engineering. Maybe a post-bachelor Ph.D. program would suit you well.
My code is compliant, tested on multiple browsers, and hardened against SQL Injection and cross-scripting attacks. All this while employed mostly by the technically inept who wouldn't know to ask for such things.
You sound like a heaven-send to them. However, such qualities may never be appreciated if you don't bring it up skillfully. Inspired by dental clinic and architect offices where you always find magazines with subtle or not so subtle messages, I would find magazines featuring a cover story of SQL injection and XSS attacks and just place them around the cube. I would then find excuses for people to pick them up and have a look (sorry, I'll be right with you in a moment. Feel free to read these magazines while I finish this up), then try to find a conversation topic about that. Then drop a line somewhere to mention, "I routinely keep track of these issues to make sure it doesn't happen here." That, and you portray a very professional image like dentists and architects.
(Is it true that Brits have bad teeth because nobody can bloody afford to see a dentist?)
If the way people perceive your value is your biggest concern (it definitely is, otherwise you wouldn't have quit IT altogether), then advertising your value should be your first priority.
About the "not happy enough" attitude, you just need to realize that, after all, American dream is all about "riding on a smile and a shoeshine." Even if you could find an employer who is sympathetic to your past career, it is still best to leave the sullenness behind.
I guess the question is, would Cadmium coating on the solar panel end up emitting Cadmium to the atmosphere like fossil fuel? My guess is the coating would be pretty stable. And at the end of the solar panel lifecycle, we should be able to recover the Cadmium.
The analogy is more like, would you prefer tupperware made of plastic that you can reuse over and over again, or paper containers that you always throw away?
He's a well-known third-party developer for Mac OS X. I guess he senses the danger of losing his business (vendor lock-in, precluding third-parties) and tries to persuade his potential customers against vendor lock-in by saying that it could hurt them. It definitely has a selfish motive if you ask me.
Ever open Activity Monitor? See the memory listed as "Wired"? Those are pages locked in real memory; 'wired' is the Darwin terminology for locking memory.
Wired pages are used as page tables, so they must be resident at all times. Also, if you ever installed new memory modules, the more memory you have, the more wired pages you see. Otherwise, Darwin doesn't allow user locking memory pages according to Jack faq.
What this means is that China finally has the technology to shoot lunar landing in a studio, beating the US to its next shooting schedule. You know, production cost ain't cheap. NASA is just not as accomplished as Hollywood. Porn industry, on the other hand, might actually beat China to showcase some zero-gravity positions. Wouldn't that be a show!
I second your opinion, but I also want to point out the hard work done by Linux Audio Developers.
For one, they pushed the development of preemptible and low-latency Linux kernel to make it possible to do low-latency stuff, even on relatively aged hardware. Mac OS X's micro-kernel architecture is potentially superior in this regard because you can easily go hard real-time with micro-kernels (Linux is a monolithic kernel), but Linux kernel is more suitable than Windows XP for running audio applications because of these improvements.
They also obsoleted OSS (open sound system) and came up with ALSA, which makes it easier to support new sound devices from the developer's point of view. ALSA supports a range of consumer to professional sound cards, just like CoreAudio. It just works.
Another notable framework, JACK, goes beyond CoreAudio by providing audio routing between applications, like ReWire. JACK is also available on Mac OS X, except it is less robust than on Linux. Thrashing can cause audio drop-out because Mac OS X kernel can't lock pages in real memory.
Finally, if you ever considered audio production work on Linux, you definitely know about Ardour at some point. It's the hard work of Paul Davis, working on it unemployeed and full-time for many years. Ardour also runs on Mac OS X, by the way, because of the generous nature of Linux developers for offering you a choice.
If you do mostly recording, then you can get by on Linux quite sufficiently. If you do a lot of synthesized stuff like Reason or NI, then you'll be disappointed. There is simply no comparable app on Linux.
------
On the other hand, Linux has a lot of architecture catch-up on the graphics stack. Cairo recently has some talk about supporting more color spaces than RGB. However, the lack of end-to-end color management is a serious issue. Colors you see on the screen simply will look different when printed out. The colors are also not even consistent from monitor to monitor.
One thing I'm really impressed with Mac OS X is its monitor calibration. It lets you fine tune gamma by inspecting the monitor response in highlight, mid-tone and shadow for red, green and blue. I can easily color-match two monitors by different manufacturers.
Mac OS X also has superior built-in typesetting support, completely unparalleled by any operating system, and this is available in any application even TextEdit. In TextEdit, you can already turn on common ligatures like "fi" and "fl" as you type. In comparison, you must insert ligature glyphs manually when using Microsoft Word. Mac OS X supports more typesetting feature than that. For example, the Hoefler font has an archaic font variant with a "long s" (so congress looks more like congrefs where the f has shorter middle bar---the s at the end of the word remains the usual form because the long s is a contextual ligature that happens only in the middle of a word) and the "st ligature" (there is a small hook that goes from the top end of s to the top stem of t). Needless to say, contextual ligature is a crucial feature to support scripts like Arabic.
Mac OS X definitely has received a lot of attention in the aesthetics that goes way beyond eye candy.
He wasn't turning in homework... any of it!! So instantly, the hammer fell. No, TV, no video games, no friends, NOTHING, until the behavior changed.
I would personally resent this if I were your step son. How long has he been your step son until his school performance started to suffer?
We would sit with him as homework was done - micromanaging every aspect of his schoolwork. We would make sure that each assignment was completed and put into a folder so the following morning, all he had to do was hand it to the teacher to get an 'A'... A week later, we'd get a call from his teacher letting us know that none of the work was ever turned in!
Sounds like a kid who is determined to make your life miserable. Refusing to turn in completed homework is his only feeble attempt at civil disobedience, and then you drug him to compliance. One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Wealthy Christians? Who in the world you mentioned for example is actually a Christian? Church of Scientology is not a Christian chuch. Even a TV show as ridiculous as South Park knows that, if you watch the episode about Tom Cruise trapped in the closet. Uri Gellar, an Israeli psychic, sues people when his tricks are discovered to be, well, just tricks. Mind you that psychics are not Christians because what they do is in direct conflict with Christ' teaching.
You might have heard that RIAA will collect royalty fee for any artist, whether represented by RIAA or not. If you are an artist, and you have no intention to collect royalty fee from Internet radio stations, RIAA gets to keep your money.
Couldn't you just slap them with a DMCA takedown notice?
Unfortunately, you cannot file a DMCA complaint as a third party. You have to be the copyright owner. The best you can do is to put some pages on the web and file complaint for each of them, and your ISP would just end up blacklisting the URLs you provided. That, I believe, still doesn't solve your problem.
What you're missing is the third and fourth point, that security patches attract more attention of blackhat hackers. There are two possible reasons I can think of (that he didn't mention):
1. Poor quality of coding tends to concentrate around a particular feature because they're all written by the same person or team. Security patches indicate poor quality of code.
2. Security patches provide some insight for reverse engineering, so this allow someone to find more vulnerabilities around that particular feature.
They're not trying to save time and money. They want to avoid getting into a race with the underground community, which causes both the vendor and their clients to lose because they simply don't have the upper hand in terms of resources.
Of course, when there are critical bugs to fix, these are prioritized over mid and low impact bugs. Saving money is never the concern. In general, companies don't save money by not working on something, since they're still paying salaries of full-time programmers. You can only save money by laying off employees. Companies get the most done by prioritizing what the employees should be working on, utilizing existing resources.
His second and fifth points are more sociological, so you may have different opinions, but the third and fourth points are impossible to dismiss.
Slashdot Mirror
Being founded in a liberal society has nothing to do with an online company's success. Look at Baidu for example. They're founded in an oppressive society, and their success in China far surpasses Google, Yahoo, even Microsoft. If your argument for their "deep immorality" has to do with the betrayal of some sort of idealism that brought them up, it doesn't apply here. Sorry.
Just say, "the Chinese NSA sent us a letter forbidding us to disclose the details of this investigation under the Chinese PATRIOT ACT."
I know China is such a serious human rights offender, but that doesn't legitimize the U.S. for being the same. Furthermore, what makes the House think that it would make sense to bully a company that is just trying to run a business under the pressure between two governments?
It's not accurate to say they're ignoring personal sites. They're ignoring sites nobody links to. If you have a personal site, changes are you also post that url whenever you go to a web forum, thus drawing links to it. You could choose to keep your personal site a secret and have nobody link to your personal website. However, if you're a domain squatter, you probably don't have the means to legitimately advertise these domains through web forums without being flagged spam.
I was gonna say this, but decided it's too inflammatory. Now I figure I could pretend I'm just whispering to you: I consider both Democrats and Republicans the same. They both operate on the same moral, ethic, and religious principle. They're both interested in preserving the structure and stability of government. They both try to provide benefit to workers while maintaining an appeal to corporates, making varying degrees of compromise. I remember recently reading a story on Time magazine about Billy Graham. Both Republican and Democrat leaders, when it comes to their faith, turn to Billy Graham for consolation for the last 50 years.
Al Gore and Clinton are no less Christian than George Bush. Surprise?!
I do find this interesting: Wikipedia puts civil liberty groups on the "comtemporary left-wing of the U.S." spectrum. Google's restrictive terms of use and their ban of perfectly legal ads definitely puts them at odds with civil liberty, but the ancestor post claims Google is too left, which is contradicting. So I suspect G Fab has no fucking clue what he's talking about, and that he's just trolling.
Then I don't know what's the big deal of being biased, since you don't even define a relative standard to base the bias on. The way I see it, as long as Google is not supporting anyone in the parliament, whether left-wing or the right, then Google is not biased. Of course, in the U.S. there is no parliament, so Google can't be biased based on the left-wing right-wing political scale. Is that clear?
In practice, the political spectra is so broad that it would be a vast simplification if you just put a left-wing right-wing label on somebody. Unless your purpose is simply tag someone biased, so that the person or company gets its share of the negative connotation. If you're not just trolling, I don't see what else you're trying to achieve here.
I would go for 300,000ms minimum latency. Even so, I heard it's not enough in practice. Yes, that's what I heard.
Is there a name to this function?
The first rootkit I got in my life was a Linux box running BIND for a local DNS cache. That was 5 years ago. BIND before version 9 is so lousy that everyone using it should expect to get rootkit someday. I was tweaking the firewall setting. I forgot to block port 53 because I hadn't been using that box all that much, and I forgot it was running BIND. The rootkit tried to replace /sbin/init, but my DSL connection died halfway so that didn't complete, and it left my machine unbootable.
About 3 years ago, I sent a PowerBook G4 laptop to an authorized Apple Care center for hardware repair, and some smart-ass there set my root password to something I couldn't guess. But one of the SSH scanning bot successfully guessed. The cracker downloaded and compiled psyBNC (an IRC proxy) and installed it under "/usr/sbin/sshd " (with a trailing space). I think it'd be used as one of the hops designated to make the IRC connection difficult to trace.
I found out about it a few days later, seeing strange IRC connections in netstat.
After that, I always make sure the root password is disabled, using sudo or sudo su - if I need root access. I only have port 22 and 80 open, and I haven't seen a rootkit since.
It looks like Galileo really dug his own grave. From Galileo Galilei:
Most Slashdotters will retrospectively find in horror that, in those days, the Catholic Church was the whole education system that allowed scientific discoveries and mathematic studies to flourish and advance. Copernicus made most of the observations while he was a Canon Law scholar at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross. Copernicus' heliocentric view of the world had supports as well as criticisms from the church, but it was never under serious attack for 60 years. Galileo had a chance to settle this, by means of scientific method that he pioneered, whether helicentrism is to hold or not, but he screwed it up by turning his "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" into a political flame war.
I was presented with the two words "Bliss" and "etnamese", the latter I presume should be "Vietnamese" but for some reason the word breaker dropped the initial "Vi". If they can't even do word breaking correctly, I wonder how reCAPTCHA is going to help.
Besides health reason, drinking herbal tea and unsweetened coffee is a fine way to develop appreciation to a magnitude of senses in the world around us, not just to the factory manufactured sugar and sweeteners. Even so, natural sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, and even unrefined cane sugar (which appears naturally in powder form because it cannot crystallize) all offer rich and distinct textures much more than what corn syrup can offer.
So fuck diet coke. Even though your body is not supposed to consume the sweetener, it is just bad taste. Even water tastes better than that.
Same to the artificial scents that is designed to cover up bad odor with another bad odor. It is just numbing. As a kid, someone told me that flowers smell like perfume (which is supposedly made from flowers). I sniffed the flower and said, "I can't smell anything."
Another problem nowadays is that we have so much light pollution, so we look up in the sky and can hardly see any stars. The milky way is completely gone. I heard you used to be able to see it like a long silver belt that stretches across the sky. I've never seen it with bare eyes in my life. What used to sparkle imagination and humility is like yesterday's fairytale.
We now have entered a technology era where we wholly rely on ourselves and our cheaply manufactured senses that is, ironically, killing us with chronic diseases. Welcome to the future, and the future is now.
I nowadays see more Ph.D. scholarships dedicated to US citizens than ever, particularly in science and engineering. Maybe a post-bachelor Ph.D. program would suit you well.
You sound like a heaven-send to them. However, such qualities may never be appreciated if you don't bring it up skillfully. Inspired by dental clinic and architect offices where you always find magazines with subtle or not so subtle messages, I would find magazines featuring a cover story of SQL injection and XSS attacks and just place them around the cube. I would then find excuses for people to pick them up and have a look (sorry, I'll be right with you in a moment. Feel free to read these magazines while I finish this up), then try to find a conversation topic about that. Then drop a line somewhere to mention, "I routinely keep track of these issues to make sure it doesn't happen here." That, and you portray a very professional image like dentists and architects.
(Is it true that Brits have bad teeth because nobody can bloody afford to see a dentist?)
If the way people perceive your value is your biggest concern (it definitely is, otherwise you wouldn't have quit IT altogether), then advertising your value should be your first priority.
About the "not happy enough" attitude, you just need to realize that, after all, American dream is all about "riding on a smile and a shoeshine." Even if you could find an employer who is sympathetic to your past career, it is still best to leave the sullenness behind.
I guess the question is, would Cadmium coating on the solar panel end up emitting Cadmium to the atmosphere like fossil fuel? My guess is the coating would be pretty stable. And at the end of the solar panel lifecycle, we should be able to recover the Cadmium.
The analogy is more like, would you prefer tupperware made of plastic that you can reuse over and over again, or paper containers that you always throw away?
Where do you propose to store the nuclear byproduct and radioactive contaminated waste? In your backyard?
He's a well-known third-party developer for Mac OS X. I guess he senses the danger of losing his business (vendor lock-in, precluding third-parties) and tries to persuade his potential customers against vendor lock-in by saying that it could hurt them. It definitely has a selfish motive if you ask me.
Is that why he's no longer the chairman? I don't know if it's official yet, but compare this with that.
What this means is that China finally has the technology to shoot lunar landing in a studio, beating the US to its next shooting schedule. You know, production cost ain't cheap. NASA is just not as accomplished as Hollywood. Porn industry, on the other hand, might actually beat China to showcase some zero-gravity positions. Wouldn't that be a show!
I second your opinion, but I also want to point out the hard work done by Linux Audio Developers.
For one, they pushed the development of preemptible and low-latency Linux kernel to make it possible to do low-latency stuff, even on relatively aged hardware. Mac OS X's micro-kernel architecture is potentially superior in this regard because you can easily go hard real-time with micro-kernels (Linux is a monolithic kernel), but Linux kernel is more suitable than Windows XP for running audio applications because of these improvements.
They also obsoleted OSS (open sound system) and came up with ALSA, which makes it easier to support new sound devices from the developer's point of view. ALSA supports a range of consumer to professional sound cards, just like CoreAudio. It just works.
Another notable framework, JACK, goes beyond CoreAudio by providing audio routing between applications, like ReWire. JACK is also available on Mac OS X, except it is less robust than on Linux. Thrashing can cause audio drop-out because Mac OS X kernel can't lock pages in real memory.
Finally, if you ever considered audio production work on Linux, you definitely know about Ardour at some point. It's the hard work of Paul Davis, working on it unemployeed and full-time for many years. Ardour also runs on Mac OS X, by the way, because of the generous nature of Linux developers for offering you a choice.
If you do mostly recording, then you can get by on Linux quite sufficiently. If you do a lot of synthesized stuff like Reason or NI, then you'll be disappointed. There is simply no comparable app on Linux.
------
On the other hand, Linux has a lot of architecture catch-up on the graphics stack. Cairo recently has some talk about supporting more color spaces than RGB. However, the lack of end-to-end color management is a serious issue. Colors you see on the screen simply will look different when printed out. The colors are also not even consistent from monitor to monitor.
One thing I'm really impressed with Mac OS X is its monitor calibration. It lets you fine tune gamma by inspecting the monitor response in highlight, mid-tone and shadow for red, green and blue. I can easily color-match two monitors by different manufacturers.
Mac OS X also has superior built-in typesetting support, completely unparalleled by any operating system, and this is available in any application even TextEdit. In TextEdit, you can already turn on common ligatures like "fi" and "fl" as you type. In comparison, you must insert ligature glyphs manually when using Microsoft Word. Mac OS X supports more typesetting feature than that. For example, the Hoefler font has an archaic font variant with a "long s" (so congress looks more like congrefs where the f has shorter middle bar---the s at the end of the word remains the usual form because the long s is a contextual ligature that happens only in the middle of a word) and the "st ligature" (there is a small hook that goes from the top end of s to the top stem of t). Needless to say, contextual ligature is a crucial feature to support scripts like Arabic.
Mac OS X definitely has received a lot of attention in the aesthetics that goes way beyond eye candy.
I would personally resent this if I were your step son. How long has he been your step son until his school performance started to suffer?
Sounds like a kid who is determined to make your life miserable. Refusing to turn in completed homework is his only feeble attempt at civil disobedience, and then you drug him to compliance. One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Wealthy Christians? Who in the world you mentioned for example is actually a Christian? Church of Scientology is not a Christian chuch. Even a TV show as ridiculous as South Park knows that, if you watch the episode about Tom Cruise trapped in the closet. Uri Gellar, an Israeli psychic, sues people when his tricks are discovered to be, well, just tricks. Mind you that psychics are not Christians because what they do is in direct conflict with Christ' teaching.
You might have heard that RIAA will collect royalty fee for any artist, whether represented by RIAA or not. If you are an artist, and you have no intention to collect royalty fee from Internet radio stations, RIAA gets to keep your money.
Unfortunately, you cannot file a DMCA complaint as a third party. You have to be the copyright owner. The best you can do is to put some pages on the web and file complaint for each of them, and your ISP would just end up blacklisting the URLs you provided. That, I believe, still doesn't solve your problem.
What you're missing is the third and fourth point, that security patches attract more attention of blackhat hackers. There are two possible reasons I can think of (that he didn't mention):
1. Poor quality of coding tends to concentrate around a particular feature because they're all written by the same person or team. Security patches indicate poor quality of code.
2. Security patches provide some insight for reverse engineering, so this allow someone to find more vulnerabilities around that particular feature.
They're not trying to save time and money. They want to avoid getting into a race with the underground community, which causes both the vendor and their clients to lose because they simply don't have the upper hand in terms of resources.
Of course, when there are critical bugs to fix, these are prioritized over mid and low impact bugs. Saving money is never the concern. In general, companies don't save money by not working on something, since they're still paying salaries of full-time programmers. You can only save money by laying off employees. Companies get the most done by prioritizing what the employees should be working on, utilizing existing resources.
His second and fifth points are more sociological, so you may have different opinions, but the third and fourth points are impossible to dismiss.