I am sorry if someone chooses to be offended by this (not sorry they are offended, just sorry they make such stupid choices, such as allowing a random guy like me to affect their emotions negatively) but women, or men for that matter, who neglect their bodies, do not get enough exercise, do not eat properly, have no sense of "balance" (in diet or in fitness) and otherwise are unconcerned that their lifestyle is extremely self-destructive and limits both the quantity and the quality of their lives, ARE NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST WAY ATTRACTIVE OR "GORGEOUS". They most definitely do not make me want to become a part of their lives (such as dating them, for example) because like any alcoholic or codependent person they have problems they need to resolve before they go dragging someone else down with them.
To bastardize a saying about emergencies and failing to plan ahead, inability to live a healthy lifestyle on your part does not constitute blindness and indifference to fact on my part.
Now, having said that - and the people with the knee-jerk reactions will surely fail to read this section - I strongly believe you can do whatever the hell you want to do, provided you don't deprive another person of their life, their liberty, or their property. Meaning, in this case, an arbitrary female can stuff her face full of bon-bons and grow to 600 pounds if she wants... she will receive no interference from me. But this entire "fat acceptance" movement fucking has to go; if you make something easier and/or less painful to do, the result is that you get more of it. Check out the obesity statistics sometime for the USA and tell me how much more of it you want before you will feel satisfied. As an aside, why parents of fat children are not prosecuted for child abuse remains a mystery to me.
That no one wants to support your show about fat "gorgeous" women is one of the only examples of the general public actually making a decent decision that I have seen in a long time.
Oh and to address yet one more excuse. I think the percentage of the "morbidly obese" who have say, thyroid problems, or otherwise truly cannot help it no matter how much effort they expend, is well under one percent. The other 99%+ are just apathetic, lazy, or both - remind me again of why either of these traits should be endorsed? Oh because you want to feel good about yourself for being "inclusive". Right.
That's strange. Arean't the liberals the ones who support freedom to have sex, and freedom to view pornography? While the conservatives are the ones fighting natural biology and saying that sex is bad, and should be limited to domestic situations and procreation? Wasn't it conservatives who were outraged to see janet Jackson's nipple?
That's just it though. You see in the USA, the "Conservatives" think all sex is bad because they hold true to a lot of outdated Puritan ideals, and they are against abortion because they think if they just try hard enough, then their brand of morality can be legislated. But, they tend to be more for economic freedom (tax cuts, etc).
The "Liberals" support freedom to have sex as you please, etc, and think that the government shouldn't be able to dictate what you do with your own body when it comes to abortion (funny they missed that boat when it comes to the War on (Some) Drugs), but, they tend to want to tax the hell out of you and otherwise deprive you of economic freedom.
So what's the result of all of this? No matter who you vote for of the two parties that actually have a chance of winning an election, you never get to be free. It's just a choice of which set of restrictions you prefer. My reasoning for this? Who with an actual chance of getting elected is going to reduce both the size and power of the government? And now that the Republicans have abandoned the small-government stance (just look at Bush. whatever you think of him as a president he cannot be called a conservative unless you think his buddy-buddy status with the religious right counts for anything) there's nothing stopping this system from eventually collapsing under its own weight. But, the lobbyists and the campaign contributors seem to be getting their way. The aristocracy is alive and well in America.
God damn it I haven't had mod points in the last 20-30 tiems I have visited this site. And since I almost never post, IT SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING GREAT TO BE ABLE TO MOD THIS UP.
Sorry.
The power of the Unfounded Charge (tm)
on
Peter Quinn Resigns
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Now the accusations don't even need to stick. Simply whine enough and you will get your way and the other guy will cave. As this pattern is repeated over and over again the spine will become obsolete.
what about those of us who never intend to have human larvae err i mean children? if you make up your mind to remain child-free and want the option of VOIP without yet another measure "for your safety" then why the hell isn't it at least an available choice? just another example of how we're getting shafted in the name of safety.
Calling Intel bad because it wants to make more money is stupid. You want to make more money. Does that mean you are bad? No, it is how you spend your money and time that determines if it is good or bad. Intel spends mney on research, and speeding up computing. according to you and everyone else, that is a good thing.
There's a difference though. If I want to make more money, the desire begins and ends with me. If a big
company wants to make more money, however many thousands of employees they have are marching to the best of the drum that belongs to a very few people at the top. When you do that, when you put aside your own interests and desires to fulfill someone else's, you stop caring so much about why those people at the top have those desires and those interests. The rank and file at Intel don't have much room to question anything the top management does, and if they did, either no one would listen or they would be seen as insubordinate. Meanwhile, they still need to make a living and feed their families. The "evil" (if you want to call it that) of big companies is that they so closely resemble a medieval feudal system, and we're the serfs. Many abuses that an individual could not get away with, a company can, because when you have enough influence and enough money then it's "just business". Any powerful self-serving entity needs to be kept under a magnifying glass at all times, or abuses WILL happen. If it can be abused, it will be abused, count on it. If Intel had a realistic chance at taking over the entire Internet and making it more centralized and more controlled, they would do it in a heartbeat regardless of how nice the CEO is and how many charities he may donate to and how many old ladies he helps to cross the street. That's the difference between individual interests and corporate interests.
Too bad that you don't have to first pass a "humor test" before you are allowed to have mod points -- I see lots of funny comments get shot down because of this.
Supposedly, the same information could be retrieved from the Web site or help file, but those uncomfortable with the manufacturer's site, or those with pathological fear of reading anything that follows F1 were left out in the cold.
So if a user is "left out in the cold" because they choose not to utilize freely available information designed to help them... Am I supposed to feel sorry for them? Seems like the difference between an intellgent person and a moron is that morons consistently refuse to use every resource available to them due to some strange form of laziness. This wouldn't be so bad if morons didn't have this tendency to blame everyone and everything but themselves.
Ah, but if we can say with more certanty how they didn't evolve, that tells us more about how they did evolve.
As an analogy, lets say someone tells you that a friend of you drives a car that is either yellow, white or gray.
Unfortunately it was after my last post but I just came up with another, much simpler response to your analogy. Answering the question that the article talks about is more like saying, "a friend drives a car that is not grey, and according to our latest findings, does not appear to be yellow either. But my graphics card can display 16.4 million colors, and I know it's probably in there somewhere."
It's a bit like when they describe a drug's effects. There are positive and negative (and neutral) effects. A positive effect would be along the lines of "made me see something that was not there." A negative effect would be like "person X always annoys the piss out of me, but while on this drug they didn't." Learning how planets did NOT come to be is a negative advance, which helps because it lets us stop wasting resources exploring theoretical dead-ends. However, the real ground-breaking advances in knowledge were mostly positive, adding knowledge that was not there before.
My whole point to my comment was to highlight the extreme complexity of the question, and in view of that complexity, I believed the article's statement to be a tad unrealistic.
(end logic-only response)
A lot of this comes from my belief that we will get to the heart of the mystery of existence (of planets, of us, of anything) by looking within instead of believing that mere observation, which by its nature is altered by the very act of observing (something that many philosophies have said since long before Heisenberg), is going to give us the really fundamental answers we seek if only we do it enough. Don't get me wrong - science is a wonderful thing that I embrace fully, but it tends to be more useful for problems relating to everyday life than it does for anything really fantastic like coming up with a certain understanding of the mysteries of life. To me this is another case of "the right tool for the job."
I hope it is plain that it's a simple matter of looking without vs. looking within -- neither is at all useless just because one of them has a much more objective nature and can therefore be PROVEN to be useful.
Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved.'
In all likelihood, more like "give clues to how the planets didn't evolve. Answers tend to lead to more questions that way.
Noun group prefixes only helps with ambiguity when you also want to abbreviate. (Omit repeating the noun, because it can be infered by the group prefix on the verb). The only really important ambiguity in natural languages (and it's rare) is the lack of nested parentheses, creating the "He saw her in the park with a telescope".
Any good English class will demonstrate to you that this is considered to be a grammatical error. It's so similar to a dangling participle that I guess this could be called a "dangling prepositional phrase." It could be better written as "By means of his telescope, he saw her in the park," or "She had her telescope when he saw her in the park," just to name two examples. You're right though that other languages make it harder to be ambiguous. Really though the thing that annoys me most about English is that there is no gender-neutral third person singular (he/she/it) because the only neutral one is not used to describe people, so you hear people say "they" instead.
... because the greedier the Music Industry gets, the more demand there'll be for a more repsonsible ogranization to replace them. The more you tighten your grip, and all...
If people in general bothered to cultivate an understanding of human nature, both its darker aspects and its good points, they would have long ago seen as inevitable the breaking point to which this situation is rapidly headed and would have, by voting with their wallets (and oh no! actually doing without if necessary), already eliminated the current music cartels and allowed a more sane replacement to emerge.
I mean, fundamentally, that's the real problem here. Every abuse of power, every corrupt organization, every cultural shortcoming, can all be traced to a mass of people who as a whole continue to put up with these things. I don't really blame an RIAA for coming along and exploiting a broken political/monetary system anywhere near as much as I blame the people for putting up with a broken system in which this is so easily possible and has proven to be quite profitable. If not the RIAA (or any *AA) then someone, somewhere, known by some other name, would be exploiting the same weaknesses of a rather apathetic social system whose motto is not, "don't fix it if it isn't broken", but is rather "don't fix it until it's COMPLETELY broken".
It seems to me that a true artist would want as many people as possible to enjoy their creation. The internet and file-sharing should be a great enabler for this, as anyone anywhere with internet access can see, hear or read their art. It is truly liberating and democratizing, making art available to all instead of only those who can afford it.
Whenever I hear an artist complain that too many people are enjoying their work without paying, I smell a rat. If you are creating art to get rich, you're not really an artist, at least by my admittedly narrow definition.
Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake == business artists. They wet their fingers, stick them in the air, and move the direction that the wind is blowing just like any businessperson with some sense.
{Insert actually creative band here} == music artists. They have something to say and a beautiful way to express it, something difficult to quantify motivates them to do what they do.
Since the former category greatly enjoys being confused with the latter, and since the recording industry will (for some reason) call both of these "artists" in the traditional sense, that which involves an actual form of artistic skill instead of mere performance charisma, I must conclude that the former category can not only be referred to as "business artists" but also as "con artists". They take advantage of the fact that the general public stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H lacking in critical thinking skills and will accept as gospel anything that you promote heavily enough. A genius racket, really. Or did you think that some of these recent legislative tactics and displays of lawyers evidence of entities that are fighting for the public good? heh.
Well, you have SUV drivers who, at highway speeds, maintain a following distance appropriate for a human-powered bicycle doing about 5 mph, not to mention said SUV drivers have this tendency to believe that the Department of Transportation makes all those double-yellow median lines so that they have a guide for their left tires, thus ensuring a head-on or at least a sideswipe collision unless I am willing to risk running down a mailbox or two. Not to mention how many people in this area love to run red lights, follow too closely (it's not just SUV drivers), pull out in front of you, cut you off, and generally drive completely ignorant of the fact that they are currently doing something that people get killed every day doing. Yeah I'm sure I sound a bit anal but I expect people to be a little more "on point" when they are playing with life and death than I do when the worst possible result is only an annoyance.
Selling software/data that requires security is not kindergarten. As far as the customers who have so far trusted you are concerned, identity theft, harassment, and all of the other things that can happen due to poor security practices are no laughing matter. Having said that, the problem is that if you give the company time to fix the problem you are also giving them time to come up with a good PR spin on the fact that they were too busy trying to get the product/service out the door that they did not design it to be secure from the ground up. There is one and only one tried-and-true way to make a company stop in its tracks and LISTEN to its customers - and that is to hit them in the pocketbook. Every script kiddie exploiting them tomorrow because you publish an exploit today, hits them in the pocketbook and provides a powerful incentive to get it right the first time.
Of course there is negligence and there are mistakes. The particular issue in the article is pure negligence. Why is it so acceptable for law enforcement and others to "make examples" and so horrible when hackers do the same and demonstrate that poor planning in the area of security can be absolutely disastrous? Companies are chock full of "can't happen here" mentalities that need a wake-up call. If complete chaos (think support costs, upgrade costs, etc etc) and a bloody nose in the PR department were the predictable results of security-related negligence, just as predictable as the knowledge that punching a brick wall will injure your hand, I believe that the pace at which security overall would improve would be unbelievable and unprecedented.
In short, it is the nature of a business to cut costs wherever they can and do things as cheaply as possible to sell at the highest price the market will reasonably bear. Meaning, that if they can get away with insecurity they will not bother to invest the money and resources needed to provide security. Let's raise the cost of not taking care of this to where the most profitable and least risky decision is to consider these matters from the very conception of a project.
Re:No, you don't have it straight.
on
Are You Annoying?
·
· Score: 1
Anyone who would find one of those phrases perfectly acceptable and find the other some kind of horrible, terrible insult to their humanity needs to get over themselves and stop allowing their fragile childish egos to continue to color their view of each and every one of their fellow humans. So the IT guy doesn't put enough sugar-coating on the bitter pill of the knowledge that hey, if you keep fucking around with settings you don't understand, you will cause a problem. Or whatever the particular scenario might be. Bunch of children who would rather focus on the IT person's diction and ignore his meaning than take responsibility for their part in ensuring that things run smoothly.
If expecting adults to be able to handle reality without the sugar-coating makes you anti-social then that's really quite sad. Sad that just because the majority of adults are really just big children, the few who aren't and therefore don't value the little ego games and the walking upon eggshells are seen as the ones who have the problem.
Since the NSA is releasing security advisories for M$ Products
It's a shame that the NSA does not purchase airtime (I'm sure an argument could be made that this is in the public interest) to ensure that for every M$ commercial telling you how great Microsoft products are, there is one commercial from an official government body that specializes in these matters stating all the known security problems with Windows and other Microsoft products.
Of course M$ has plenty of kickbacks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbyists, so I don't see this ever happening.
Something has to be done about security, and linux (such as it is) is no panacea. That means disabling a certain level of geekiness is required simply because most of those home users don't have a fucking clue how a computer works - nor should they - any more than you should have to know how to rebuild a compressor just so you can enjoy the "priviledge" of preserving your food with a refrigerator.
You are forgetting a fundamental difference, friend. A refrigerator is a single-function device - it does one single task and it does it well. A computer, however, is a general-purpose machine which is why some complexity and some proficiency will always be required to use one. There are various ways to sugarcoat this, but really, it works better when a versatile human adapts to the machine and reads a friggin' book once in a while (I would understand it if there were some secret cabal that monopolized all technical information, but there isn't. All you could ever want to know about how a computer works and how to use/secure one is freely available.) than to try and have a machine adapt to each and every thing that an ignorant user might do wrong.
'The benchmarking was conducted on-site, and the hardware vendors did not have access to the demo before hand, so we are confident that there is no egregious cheating going on.'
It's comforting to know that said vendors are so honest and reliable, that if you make it physically impossible (or at least extremely improbable), that they will not "egregiously cheat" on published benchmarks.
At least...
on
Black Hat
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· Score: 3, Interesting
At least works like this will help to increase the awareness that the fact that people could be out to screw you over does not disappear and give way to a fairy-tale world just because you go online. People who would feel insecure not locking their cars and their houses do some amazingly stupid things online because there's still this idea that Microsoft or the Web site (think online shopping) or their ISP will take care of all security matters for them. I hope the book sells well, as awareness in this area is sorely needed, plus it sounds entertaining.
Repeat after me: Encryption is not magic pixie dust.
Sprinkling it around at random does not necessarily improve security. Encryption can actually reduce security by distracting people from higher-risk threats. It also increases the probability of irrecoverable data loss unless unusual redundancy measures are taken.
You're right, encryption is not magic pixie dust. It's one layer that's a part of a multi-layer security approach. In this case the physical security layer was compromised - this is why encryption would have helped. In the event of a physical security compromise, the data is made less obtainable if encrypted. As far as redundancy, there are password managers, etc. Point is it could be done and it could help. And if the info is really that sensitive, wouldn't data loss be the lesser evil compared to sensitive info ending up in unfriendly hands? Something to consider...
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing personal, but ...
I love you.
I am sorry if someone chooses to be offended by this (not sorry they are offended, just sorry they make such stupid choices, such as allowing a random guy like me to affect their emotions negatively) but women, or men for that matter, who neglect their bodies, do not get enough exercise, do not eat properly, have no sense of "balance" (in diet or in fitness) and otherwise are unconcerned that their lifestyle is extremely self-destructive and limits both the quantity and the quality of their lives, ARE NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST WAY ATTRACTIVE OR "GORGEOUS". They most definitely do not make me want to become a part of their lives (such as dating them, for example) because like any alcoholic or codependent person they have problems they need to resolve before they go dragging someone else down with them.
To bastardize a saying about emergencies and failing to plan ahead, inability to live a healthy lifestyle on your part does not constitute blindness and indifference to fact on my part.
Now, having said that - and the people with the knee-jerk reactions will surely fail to read this section - I strongly believe you can do whatever the hell you want to do, provided you don't deprive another person of their life, their liberty, or their property. Meaning, in this case, an arbitrary female can stuff her face full of bon-bons and grow to 600 pounds if she wants... she will receive no interference from me. But this entire "fat acceptance" movement fucking has to go; if you make something easier and/or less painful to do, the result is that you get more of it. Check out the obesity statistics sometime for the USA and tell me how much more of it you want before you will feel satisfied. As an aside, why parents of fat children are not prosecuted for child abuse remains a mystery to me.
That no one wants to support your show about fat "gorgeous" women is one of the only examples of the general public actually making a decent decision that I have seen in a long time.
Oh and to address yet one more excuse. I think the percentage of the "morbidly obese" who have say, thyroid problems, or otherwise truly cannot help it no matter how much effort they expend, is well under one percent. The other 99%+ are just apathetic, lazy, or both - remind me again of why either of these traits should be endorsed? Oh because you want to feel good about yourself for being "inclusive". Right.
That's just it though. You see in the USA, the "Conservatives" think all sex is bad because they hold true to a lot of outdated Puritan ideals, and they are against abortion because they think if they just try hard enough, then their brand of morality can be legislated. But, they tend to be more for economic freedom (tax cuts, etc).
The "Liberals" support freedom to have sex as you please, etc, and think that the government shouldn't be able to dictate what you do with your own body when it comes to abortion (funny they missed that boat when it comes to the War on (Some) Drugs), but, they tend to want to tax the hell out of you and otherwise deprive you of economic freedom.
So what's the result of all of this? No matter who you vote for of the two parties that actually have a chance of winning an election, you never get to be free. It's just a choice of which set of restrictions you prefer. My reasoning for this? Who with an actual chance of getting elected is going to reduce both the size and power of the government? And now that the Republicans have abandoned the small-government stance (just look at Bush. whatever you think of him as a president he cannot be called a conservative unless you think his buddy-buddy status with the religious right counts for anything) there's nothing stopping this system from eventually collapsing under its own weight. But, the lobbyists and the campaign contributors seem to be getting their way. The aristocracy is alive and well in America.
God damn it I haven't had mod points in the last 20-30 tiems I have visited this site. And since I almost never post, IT SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING GREAT TO BE ABLE TO MOD THIS UP.
Sorry.
Now the accusations don't even need to stick. Simply whine enough and you will get your way and the other guy will cave. As this pattern is repeated over and over again the spine will become obsolete.
what about those of us who never intend to have human larvae err i mean children? if you make up your mind to remain child-free and want the option of VOIP without yet another measure "for your safety" then why the hell isn't it at least an available choice? just another example of how we're getting shafted in the name of safety.
There's a difference though. If I want to make more money, the desire begins and ends with me. If a big company wants to make more money, however many thousands of employees they have are marching to the best of the drum that belongs to a very few people at the top. When you do that, when you put aside your own interests and desires to fulfill someone else's, you stop caring so much about why those people at the top have those desires and those interests. The rank and file at Intel don't have much room to question anything the top management does, and if they did, either no one would listen or they would be seen as insubordinate. Meanwhile, they still need to make a living and feed their families. The "evil" (if you want to call it that) of big companies is that they so closely resemble a medieval feudal system, and we're the serfs. Many abuses that an individual could not get away with, a company can, because when you have enough influence and enough money then it's "just business". Any powerful self-serving entity needs to be kept under a magnifying glass at all times, or abuses WILL happen. If it can be abused, it will be abused, count on it. If Intel had a realistic chance at taking over the entire Internet and making it more centralized and more controlled, they would do it in a heartbeat regardless of how nice the CEO is and how many charities he may donate to and how many old ladies he helps to cross the street. That's the difference between individual interests and corporate interests.
What's this about a motor??
Nice try, but everyone knows that Real Men only
program printers in Pure Lego.
Too bad that you don't have to first pass a "humor test" before you are allowed to have mod points -- I see lots of funny comments get shot down because of this.
So if a user is "left out in the cold" because they choose not to utilize freely available information designed to help them... Am I supposed to feel sorry for them? Seems like the difference between an intellgent person and a moron is that morons consistently refuse to use every resource available to them due to some strange form of laziness. This wouldn't be so bad if morons didn't have this tendency to blame everyone and everything but themselves.
Can't say I've ever abused hardware like this, but I must say, reading this article is really making me want to try. Is that wrong?
Unfortunately it was after my last post but I just came up with another, much simpler response to your analogy. Answering the question that the article talks about is more like saying, "a friend drives a car that is not grey, and according to our latest findings, does not appear to be yellow either. But my graphics card can display 16.4 million colors, and I know it's probably in there somewhere."
It's a bit like when they describe a drug's effects. There are positive and negative (and neutral) effects. A positive effect would be along the lines of "made me see something that was not there." A negative effect would be like "person X always annoys the piss out of me, but while on this drug they didn't." Learning how planets did NOT come to be is a negative advance, which helps because it lets us stop wasting resources exploring theoretical dead-ends. However, the real ground-breaking advances in knowledge were mostly positive, adding knowledge that was not there before.
My whole point to my comment was to highlight the extreme complexity of the question, and in view of that complexity, I believed the article's statement to be a tad unrealistic.
(end logic-only response)
A lot of this comes from my belief that we will get to the heart of the mystery of existence (of planets, of us, of anything) by looking within instead of believing that mere observation, which by its nature is altered by the very act of observing (something that many philosophies have said since long before Heisenberg), is going to give us the really fundamental answers we seek if only we do it enough. Don't get me wrong - science is a wonderful thing that I embrace fully, but it tends to be more useful for problems relating to everyday life than it does for anything really fantastic like coming up with a certain understanding of the mysteries of life. To me this is another case of "the right tool for the job."
I hope it is plain that it's a simple matter of looking without vs. looking within -- neither is at all useless just because one of them has a much more objective nature and can therefore be PROVEN to be useful.
In all likelihood, more like "give clues to how the planets didn't evolve. Answers tend to lead to more questions that way.
Any good English class will demonstrate to you that this is considered to be a grammatical error. It's so similar to a dangling participle that I guess this could be called a "dangling prepositional phrase." It could be better written as "By means of his telescope, he saw her in the park," or "She had her telescope when he saw her in the park," just to name two examples. You're right though that other languages make it harder to be ambiguous. Really though the thing that annoys me most about English is that there is no gender-neutral third person singular (he/she/it) because the only neutral one is not used to describe people, so you hear people say "they" instead.
Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake == business artists. They wet their fingers, stick them in the air, and move the direction that the wind is blowing just like any businessperson with some sense.
{Insert actually creative band here} == music artists. They have something to say and a beautiful way to express it, something difficult to quantify motivates them to do what they do.
Since the former category greatly enjoys being confused with the latter, and since the recording industry will (for some reason) call both of these "artists" in the traditional sense, that which involves an actual form of artistic skill instead of mere performance charisma, I must conclude that the former category can not only be referred to as "business artists" but also as "con artists". They take advantage of the fact that the general public stupid^H^H^H^H^H^H lacking in critical thinking skills and will accept as gospel anything that you promote heavily enough. A genius racket, really. Or did you think that some of these recent legislative tactics and displays of lawyers evidence of entities that are fighting for the public good? heh.
Well, you have SUV drivers who, at highway speeds, maintain a following distance appropriate for a human-powered bicycle doing about 5 mph, not to mention said SUV drivers have this tendency to believe that the Department of Transportation makes all those double-yellow median lines so that they have a guide for their left tires, thus ensuring a head-on or at least a sideswipe collision unless I am willing to risk running down a mailbox or two. Not to mention how many people in this area love to run red lights, follow too closely (it's not just SUV drivers), pull out in front of you, cut you off, and generally drive completely ignorant of the fact that they are currently doing something that people get killed every day doing. Yeah I'm sure I sound a bit anal but I expect people to be a little more "on point" when they are playing with life and death than I do when the worst possible result is only an annoyance.
Selling software/data that requires security is not kindergarten. As far as the customers who have so far trusted you are concerned, identity theft, harassment, and all of the other things that can happen due to poor security practices are no laughing matter. Having said that, the problem is that if you give the company time to fix the problem you are also giving them time to come up with a good PR spin on the fact that they were too busy trying to get the product/service out the door that they did not design it to be secure from the ground up. There is one and only one tried-and-true way to make a company stop in its tracks and LISTEN to its customers - and that is to hit them in the pocketbook. Every script kiddie exploiting them tomorrow because you publish an exploit today, hits them in the pocketbook and provides a powerful incentive to get it right the first time.
Of course there is negligence and there are mistakes. The particular issue in the article is pure negligence. Why is it so acceptable for law enforcement and others to "make examples" and so horrible when hackers do the same and demonstrate that poor planning in the area of security can be absolutely disastrous? Companies are chock full of "can't happen here" mentalities that need a wake-up call. If complete chaos (think support costs, upgrade costs, etc etc) and a bloody nose in the PR department were the predictable results of security-related negligence, just as predictable as the knowledge that punching a brick wall will injure your hand, I believe that the pace at which security overall would improve would be unbelievable and unprecedented.
In short, it is the nature of a business to cut costs wherever they can and do things as cheaply as possible to sell at the highest price the market will reasonably bear. Meaning, that if they can get away with insecurity they will not bother to invest the money and resources needed to provide security. Let's raise the cost of not taking care of this to where the most profitable and least risky decision is to consider these matters from the very conception of a project.
Anyone who would find one of those phrases perfectly acceptable and find the other some kind of horrible, terrible insult to their humanity needs to get over themselves and stop allowing their fragile childish egos to continue to color their view of each and every one of their fellow humans. So the IT guy doesn't put enough sugar-coating on the bitter pill of the knowledge that hey, if you keep fucking around with settings you don't understand, you will cause a problem. Or whatever the particular scenario might be. Bunch of children who would rather focus on the IT person's diction and ignore his meaning than take responsibility for their part in ensuring that things run smoothly.
If expecting adults to be able to handle reality without the sugar-coating makes you anti-social then that's really quite sad. Sad that just because the majority of adults are really just big children, the few who aren't and therefore don't value the little ego games and the walking upon eggshells are seen as the ones who have the problem.
It's a shame that the NSA does not purchase airtime (I'm sure an argument could be made that this is in the public interest) to ensure that for every M$ commercial telling you how great Microsoft products are, there is one commercial from an official government body that specializes in these matters stating all the known security problems with Windows and other Microsoft products.
Of course M$ has plenty of kickbacks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbyists, so I don't see this ever happening.
You are forgetting a fundamental difference, friend. A refrigerator is a single-function device - it does one single task and it does it well. A computer, however, is a general-purpose machine which is why some complexity and some proficiency will always be required to use one. There are various ways to sugarcoat this, but really, it works better when a versatile human adapts to the machine and reads a friggin' book once in a while (I would understand it if there were some secret cabal that monopolized all technical information, but there isn't. All you could ever want to know about how a computer works and how to use/secure one is freely available.) than to try and have a machine adapt to each and every thing that an ignorant user might do wrong.
It's comforting to know that said vendors are so honest and reliable, that if you make it physically impossible (or at least extremely improbable), that they will not "egregiously cheat" on published benchmarks.
At least works like this will help to increase the awareness that the fact that people could be out to screw you over does not disappear and give way to a fairy-tale world just because you go online. People who would feel insecure not locking their cars and their houses do some amazingly stupid things online because there's still this idea that Microsoft or the Web site (think online shopping) or their ISP will take care of all security matters for them. I hope the book sells well, as awareness in this area is sorely needed, plus it sounds entertaining.
You're right, encryption is not magic pixie dust. It's one layer that's a part of a multi-layer security approach. In this case the physical security layer was compromised - this is why encryption would have helped. In the event of a physical security compromise, the data is made less obtainable if encrypted. As far as redundancy, there are password managers, etc. Point is it could be done and it could help. And if the info is really that sensitive, wouldn't data loss be the lesser evil compared to sensitive info ending up in unfriendly hands? Something to consider...