As much as I would like to believe he won't get the nod, the reality is that they will run Trump if he gets enough votes. He's got too many votes to ignore him. The only chance they have is if every single other delegate and important member of the party gets behind one already serious candidate (realistically, only Cruz meets the criteria) and try to upset the convention.
A candidate that comes out of the convention needs to be one of the three who are running. Otherwise, the candidate will have no legitimacy at all. This isn't the 19th Century where you can push out a candidate who was worked out in a back room deal. We all know who got most of the votes, sadly.
I agree that they might try and put forth someone like Cruz instead of Trump to maintain control of the party for the future, but either way, I think their only real chance of a general election win is Kaisch, but he only won one state in the primary. Putting him out at the nominee would guarantee that Trump would go independent and break the Republican base.
So, I for one welcome our new Democratic overlord, Queen Clinton II.
His title is Commander, US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), which is a unified sub-command of the US Military. Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification, it's not his actual title.
Of course, you can always tell government drones when they refer to "cyber" anything, but that is just the way it goes.
Of all the things that we need to be warned about, the White House is effectively stating the dangers we would have... by simply living in the tropics.
Essentially, they have basically said that having flowers and green plants for longer during the year is a problem. Hell, that's why I moved south to begin with. If I can have tropical weather by the time I'm retirement age, I won't have to migrate to Florida when I have blue hair!
Theft prevents their enjoyment of their goods and services. In no way is someone deprived of their work by copying a file using your own resources onto your own media with your own time.
What they might not do is profit from that work. Fair enough. And that's why the law exists, to allow that to be captured for a limited time.
But make no mistake, if the law did not exist, someone making a copy of what I happen to own, using their own time and materials, would not be an offense and happens in many ways even today. That's because you making a copy of my car doesn't keep me from using my car. It might cut the business for my taxi service in half, if two people in my town now have cars, but that is an entirely separate story. You could additionally argue that a town would be better served by having more than one taxi available, which serves a societal purpose which is higher than letting me become obscenely rich by being the only one allowed to have a car.
Of course, I can't condone the practice of not paying for software that someone else wrote. After all, I do derive my living from software sales.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't consider that to be theft. Instead, it would be more like a disincentive for me to produce more software. If that is the case, then the "pirates" hurt themselves in the process by removing people from the software industry that might give them what they want.
I don't think software copyright infringement is worth people losing serious civil rights over. I think there are enough adults in the world who will buy software because they know that it supports the creators and they want the support or the game titles to keep coming. I have little sympathy for a Sony or another company who needs to lay the smackdown on some kid or his parents somewhere so they can make that much more money on a game they already made millions on.
Yes, you must protect and defend your copyright and trademarks, but we're talking about preventing something like widespread distribution of your software under a different name while you did nothing about it. Nothing about copyright defense requires that you go to the levels suggested by Rightscorp.
And I have an enormous problem with the idea of breaking someone else's computer purposely, as that comes closer to actual theft than any sort of copyright infringement ever has. As laughable as the idea of "locking your browser" is, even considering that line of attack as a valid one puts these people squarely in the same vein of black hats who run data ransom scams. It shows the level of ridiculousness that the line of thought that infringement == theft leads one to.
Yes, being labelled a "toy" is not a predictor of future success. Indeed, being labelled a toy means there is little immediate application for it.
On the other hand, applications do appear which turn toys into game changers. So, it makes sense to evaluate toy-like creations for how readily they can be repurposed for something interesting.
Tabletop 3D printing? Toy. However, it is very clear how tabletop assembly of components can be extremely useful, if you can get around the challenges with the current iteration.
So, toys with a roadmap of improvements and applications ahead of them are probably worth looking at.
Well, that's not really true. There are already industrial 3D printing machines.
Now as for "tabletop" 3D printing? It is a toy at the moment, but it wouldn't be hard to see how the idea could become something very important under the right circumstances.
You're making a huge assumption. There are businesses with offshore accounts, but many who have no such thing. If you treat all businesses like the worst of their kind, you're doing a grave disservice to the ones that you want to foster... those who do pay their taxes properly.
Yes, some businesses are able to hide or otherwise obscure their real earnings, but others do not. Revenue does not equal profit, especially if you are in an extremely competitive business where you need to spend money on marketing, R&D, and even higher quality production.
The original post was asserting that you should not make an assumption that someone who brings in huge-sounding revenues can afford some arbitrary percentage of tax based solely on how large the number looks. Anyone who understands business would know that is patently ridiculous as a notion. I would think that a better counter argument to that is that governments are not that stupid and will be able to take more without killing the source, although individuals who post on forums could certainly be that ignorant of how business works.
Ultimately, I don't believe that the government is entitled to our money. It needs to justify the money it gets in tax. I have no stake in caring whether the rich person evades their taxes using legal loopholes. They're legal. The government itself passed those laws. Are we not to assume that a government with trillions of dollars in budget can't even figure out how to write a tax law that doesn't let corporations get away with this stuff?
Here's the problem. The government only cares about this when something like this leak comes up. Otherwise, they're happy to scurry behind the walls and do their deals and (re)create those loopholes. I don't feel like I have an "ethical" duty to feed that beast any more than I feel I have a duty to pay higher prices for things that I buy. The rich are rich, and they're going to stay rich. The amount of money they make has little relevance to me.
What I care about is the fact that the government is consuming ever greater amounts of money, while convincing everyone else that no one can do as good a job as it can in running just about everything, while at the same time, the legal, but "unethical" loopholes that exist are solely the invention of that same government.
Government is an enabler of the rich, not their sworn enemy. If you want better distribution of income, I would look elsewhere.
In that system, tax effectively becomes the snake that eats itself. If your business isn't instantly profitable, tax can start eating away at your new business, ensuring that you can never quite get into the black. And since most businesses have startup expenses, having a tax become something you pay as a business, no matter what, will start causing weaker businesses to cave in and fail. When those businesses cave in, there will be less tax coming in, so the taxes will have to be raised. And that will cause even more struggling businesses to fail, continuing the cycle.
Any tax policy which adds to the already high burden of startup expenses or the possibility of having a bad year or two, will cause serious difficulties. If you are only taxing profits, you can at least ensure that the engine keeps running. If you tax a business, irrespective of gains or losses, the government has quite literally become a parasite, which does not care if it kills its host as long as it gets fed.
That is *one* method for doing it. Gerrymandering a district is useful to help solidify a majority's grip, or even to create a new majority, if you're clever enough about controlling state houses. It's nothing new, though. The guy it is named for, Gov. Elbridge Gerry, worked that magic in 1812 for the Democratic-Republican Party (a single name that could probably still be applied to the establishment of both parties if you tried).
More to the point, it is far from the only method available for doing so. Having captive blocs of voters who are kept on a leash is by far more important. You don't have to worry about them ever voting for the other side, no matter what anyone suggests. Ultimately, it is that sort of impunity that allows a Congress with a 13% approval rating to return 95% incumbents.
Trump mentions that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose much support. Sounds a little crazy, but at the same time, there are diehards of both party who wouldn't vote for the other side if their candidate ended up as a suspected murderer let alone some other form of lesser criminal. Presumably, I'd hope that most of them just wouldn't vote, but I have the uncomfortable suspicion that some would elect a murderer rather than let the other party win, even through them omitting to vote.
This is why George Washington warned against the evils of faction and party. Admittedly, it is hard to see how we could have avoided it, but it is clear what the danger is. In the Constantinople of Late Antiquity, they used to have chariot racing teams called literally nothing more than the "Blues" or the "Greens", and even individual parts of the Imperial government were mixed up in the backing of a team with a color name and riots would break out if the wrong team won.
There are some days I think we should just rename our parties after colors, so at least no one is confused into believing that the party name matters. They're not principled individuals bound together by a specific cause, they're people who are bound together by the desire to win. There are some people inside the parties with real ideals, but invariably they are accepted by the party only insofar as they have something to offer the Party in terms of bringing in voters. They're draft picks for sports teams.
On the other hand, El Cheapo Cables Inc. might be concerned about losing their ability to sell to Amazon if they keep breaking the ToS. It's not like Amazon gives a crap about one cheap-ass cable maker.
To be fair, Microsoft's decisions are not always about the viability or capabilities of their actual software. They're mostly thinking on how to make a product that gets them a wedge into a market. For that, the software only has to be sufficient, not necessarily ground breaking. The lack of software capability is made up for by clever deals and marketing.
Of course, sometimes they miss the target of "sufficient" and the product fails. Other times, this works well for them.
And for a mediocre product, Microsoft's decisions have maintained Windows' dominance of the desktop market better than you might otherwise expect, and even given them a niche in the server market, where they are much more clearly outclassed by UNIX-likes.
In any event, the original premise is that if BSD had been used, the code contributions could have been locked up in proprietary bundles, thus making sure that the advancements in BSD that were made by those companies are never contributed back to the project unless they wanted to. And they usually don't want to.
In Linux, if you make code changes to the kernel, they get released with source if you try and provide a solution that uses a modified Linux kernel.
Yes, BSD is free, and it will remain free. But only the BSD that is created by the BSD project team for BSD or voluntary contributions back. They're not forcing Apple, for instance, to release their alterations to BSD (if any) as free source code.
This is not to say BSD is bad, only that Linux under the GPL has a gimmick that forces more of the work done with it to end up as open source code contributions which can be more readily made use of by the general development world. This would tend to make it more popular among developers, and more developers means more potential for advancement on a project.
If he did something like that, he'd probably cause a serious fork in the kernel. You can be an asshole about things, but if you start making project decisions that have nothing to do with your kernel function only because you don't like a particular application that uses it, and that application is supported by many mainline distros who provide paid kernel contributors, you're going to fuck your project.
Now if systemd caused bad behavior in the kernel, or took advantage of a feature in the kernel that he hated and wanted to get rid of, I could see him accepting a patch that would trash systemd without a second thought. But then it could be easily argued that this is well within his prerogative. He wouldn't be required to maintain bad kernel just to satisfy some shitty app developer. But just calling out one app because you don't like it is activist bullshit that would make people question his stewardship of the project.
I know he has strong opinions, but I don't this he's arbitrary.
Well... it's many factors. What is more rare? Talent or opportunity? What is more applicable at the time? And is that level of talent impossible to find in another human?
My guess is opportunity is by far, the more rare commodity. Linus was no slouch, but I doubt that he is the Einstein of programming. What he had was the necessary talent at the right time and the willingness to use it.
Make no mistake, the opportunity required someone like Linus, I certainly couldn't have done it, but I think that there are more people like him out there than there are opportunities for someone like him to make a difference.
Of course, this is not "luck". Linus had to have built up skills and the right attitude to take advantage of this opportunity. There is no way this could have descended upon him like a lottery win from a single lucky ticket.
However, if he'd been hit by a bus, there would probably still be something like Linux out there eventually. I mean, it was a logical next step when you had everything for GNU but a kernel, right?
Yeah, Win95 was nothing compared to what it was supposed to be, but it was still light years beyond Win 3.1. It pretty much made Windows the behemoth it still is today on the desktop. I'd say they made the right decision to just ship it.
I remember when I was using tcsh to get tab completions and some other things. Bash was around then, but it wasn't installed by default on the systems that I was using at the time. Now bash is everywhere, which is nice. I don't even have to bother with uploading a custom.cshrc or.profile any more to be productive. It's the little things that make life better, I suppose.
I think that's the major issue with medical IT and computing in general. The products are designed to do something, and security is an afterthought. That's made worse because many of the products were designed a long time ago and not updated for various reasons, including a long regulatory approval process to get them to market.
So you have a supply cabinet that was designed to help with inventory, but now we expect it to be a safe. And the network infrastructure that probably grew ad hoc in the hospitals was just meant to enable interconnection and security only became an eventual concern as attacker capabilities grew. Because the product cycle is so long for medical purposes, they don't react in a timely way to anything, especially something that is not the primary concern of the equipment that is being deployed. So now you have this issue.
I don't think this is a permanent problem for hospitals, but there will be some sacrificial lambs before the process changes. Once those cases are over, there will be more money put into security at those places.
Unfortunately, it's just another thing that is likely to raise the cost of medical care because they will continue to be bad at it, but now they'll be trying to compensate for their incompetence by overpaying for security products and services.
Let's be clear, computers open new dangers, but a lot of our current medical capabilities and even billing and records keeping actually relies on the capability.
This isn't something that hospitals are doing because they love whiz-bang gadgets. Going back to paper is not a solution.
I doubt that they are ignoring security, they just aren't either prioritizing it highly enough, or they don't have the resources to do so.
IT security is overhead. You need it, but it is all expense. This is not a job where all you have to do is just do it. You need to show very clearly why the expense is needed and security is one of those things that seems like a jobs program... until you're hacked, and then its too late.
For once, this has nothing to do with Cloud security. These folks got owned all by themselves on their own network.
They might have actually been more secure in the Cloud. Which is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of Cloud security, but Hospitals are notoriously insecure and their IT is run on a shoestring.
Just because you have your data on-site, doesn't make you safer. If you're a screw-up, or you aren't taking security seriously, it is entirely possible for your security to be worse than any Cloud provider.
Those good ideas you suggest are not certified for medical or mission critical activities. Therefore they will not be used.
It could be certified, but it will take about five years to get through the process and cost probably about a million dollars to do it before they could even sell a single unit to a hospital.
And if it's free, that's much worse. Then there is no one who will be able to pay for the certification process.
This is medicine and the process must be followed as long as it fucks you over for less than a malpractice suit or regulatory inquiry would.
Note that the OS for this equipment often *is* supported, but through a special deal with the equipment manufacturer, so this solution also falls into the same situation as the anti-virus scan would. You need to be running their image on their hardware or your equipment is now unsupported and if it fails, it is now a multi-million dollar brick because you won't be able to fix it.
It seems easy conceptually, but these threats have crept up on a sector where the product approval cycle is measured in years or even decades. They have old equipment and facilities that were meant for medicine first, and IT a very distant second (or third). And if IT security was an afterthought in the products they selected, they're not going to be able to turn them around fast.
Hell, even re-doing the network could be a multi-million dollar project so they can update routers, add more physical wiring and ports, and re-deploy equipment to create air gaps where they never had them before. They're not working with a green field. These are working hospitals that complicate the hell out of trying to redesign networks. They're not going to spend that money or time unless someone makes them. Perhaps someone is about to make them do that. Or perhaps not.
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Yes, it's not clear why he didn't set up a blind trust to hold his investments while he was in office, or simply to declare his holdings.
Something is rotten in the former dependency of Denmark.
As much as I would like to believe he won't get the nod, the reality is that they will run Trump if he gets enough votes. He's got too many votes to ignore him. The only chance they have is if every single other delegate and important member of the party gets behind one already serious candidate (realistically, only Cruz meets the criteria) and try to upset the convention.
A candidate that comes out of the convention needs to be one of the three who are running. Otherwise, the candidate will have no legitimacy at all. This isn't the 19th Century where you can push out a candidate who was worked out in a back room deal. We all know who got most of the votes, sadly.
I agree that they might try and put forth someone like Cruz instead of Trump to maintain control of the party for the future, but either way, I think their only real chance of a general election win is Kaisch, but he only won one state in the primary. Putting him out at the nominee would guarantee that Trump would go independent and break the Republican base.
So, I for one welcome our new Democratic overlord, Queen Clinton II.
His title is Commander, US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), which is a unified sub-command of the US Military. Calling him "Cyber Commander" is a stupid journalistic oversimplification, it's not his actual title.
Of course, you can always tell government drones when they refer to "cyber" anything, but that is just the way it goes.
Of all the things that we need to be warned about, the White House is effectively stating the dangers we would have... by simply living in the tropics.
Essentially, they have basically said that having flowers and green plants for longer during the year is a problem. Hell, that's why I moved south to begin with. If I can have tropical weather by the time I'm retirement age, I won't have to migrate to Florida when I have blue hair!
Maybe even the Devil has disowned Trump and his advocate has been assigned instructions to that effect?
It is not theft, it is infringement.
Theft prevents their enjoyment of their goods and services. In no way is someone deprived of their work by copying a file using your own resources onto your own media with your own time.
What they might not do is profit from that work. Fair enough. And that's why the law exists, to allow that to be captured for a limited time.
But make no mistake, if the law did not exist, someone making a copy of what I happen to own, using their own time and materials, would not be an offense and happens in many ways even today. That's because you making a copy of my car doesn't keep me from using my car. It might cut the business for my taxi service in half, if two people in my town now have cars, but that is an entirely separate story. You could additionally argue that a town would be better served by having more than one taxi available, which serves a societal purpose which is higher than letting me become obscenely rich by being the only one allowed to have a car.
Of course, I can't condone the practice of not paying for software that someone else wrote. After all, I do derive my living from software sales.
Nevertheless, I wouldn't consider that to be theft. Instead, it would be more like a disincentive for me to produce more software. If that is the case, then the "pirates" hurt themselves in the process by removing people from the software industry that might give them what they want.
I don't think software copyright infringement is worth people losing serious civil rights over. I think there are enough adults in the world who will buy software because they know that it supports the creators and they want the support or the game titles to keep coming. I have little sympathy for a Sony or another company who needs to lay the smackdown on some kid or his parents somewhere so they can make that much more money on a game they already made millions on.
Yes, you must protect and defend your copyright and trademarks, but we're talking about preventing something like widespread distribution of your software under a different name while you did nothing about it. Nothing about copyright defense requires that you go to the levels suggested by Rightscorp.
And I have an enormous problem with the idea of breaking someone else's computer purposely, as that comes closer to actual theft than any sort of copyright infringement ever has. As laughable as the idea of "locking your browser" is, even considering that line of attack as a valid one puts these people squarely in the same vein of black hats who run data ransom scams. It shows the level of ridiculousness that the line of thought that infringement == theft leads one to.
I don't think I'd pay a Chaucer tax. His design sounds like gibberish.
"Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote"
I mean, who talks like that? I'm already working on submitting defects. I just need to know who to send them to.
Yes, being labelled a "toy" is not a predictor of future success. Indeed, being labelled a toy means there is little immediate application for it.
On the other hand, applications do appear which turn toys into game changers. So, it makes sense to evaluate toy-like creations for how readily they can be repurposed for something interesting.
Tabletop 3D printing? Toy. However, it is very clear how tabletop assembly of components can be extremely useful, if you can get around the challenges with the current iteration.
So, toys with a roadmap of improvements and applications ahead of them are probably worth looking at.
Well, that's not really true. There are already industrial 3D printing machines.
Now as for "tabletop" 3D printing? It is a toy at the moment, but it wouldn't be hard to see how the idea could become something very important under the right circumstances.
Maybe, maybe not.
You're making a huge assumption. There are businesses with offshore accounts, but many who have no such thing. If you treat all businesses like the worst of their kind, you're doing a grave disservice to the ones that you want to foster... those who do pay their taxes properly.
Yes, some businesses are able to hide or otherwise obscure their real earnings, but others do not. Revenue does not equal profit, especially if you are in an extremely competitive business where you need to spend money on marketing, R&D, and even higher quality production.
The original post was asserting that you should not make an assumption that someone who brings in huge-sounding revenues can afford some arbitrary percentage of tax based solely on how large the number looks. Anyone who understands business would know that is patently ridiculous as a notion. I would think that a better counter argument to that is that governments are not that stupid and will be able to take more without killing the source, although individuals who post on forums could certainly be that ignorant of how business works.
Ultimately, I don't believe that the government is entitled to our money. It needs to justify the money it gets in tax. I have no stake in caring whether the rich person evades their taxes using legal loopholes. They're legal. The government itself passed those laws. Are we not to assume that a government with trillions of dollars in budget can't even figure out how to write a tax law that doesn't let corporations get away with this stuff?
Here's the problem. The government only cares about this when something like this leak comes up. Otherwise, they're happy to scurry behind the walls and do their deals and (re)create those loopholes. I don't feel like I have an "ethical" duty to feed that beast any more than I feel I have a duty to pay higher prices for things that I buy. The rich are rich, and they're going to stay rich. The amount of money they make has little relevance to me.
What I care about is the fact that the government is consuming ever greater amounts of money, while convincing everyone else that no one can do as good a job as it can in running just about everything, while at the same time, the legal, but "unethical" loopholes that exist are solely the invention of that same government.
Government is an enabler of the rich, not their sworn enemy. If you want better distribution of income, I would look elsewhere.
In that system, tax effectively becomes the snake that eats itself. If your business isn't instantly profitable, tax can start eating away at your new business, ensuring that you can never quite get into the black. And since most businesses have startup expenses, having a tax become something you pay as a business, no matter what, will start causing weaker businesses to cave in and fail. When those businesses cave in, there will be less tax coming in, so the taxes will have to be raised. And that will cause even more struggling businesses to fail, continuing the cycle.
Any tax policy which adds to the already high burden of startup expenses or the possibility of having a bad year or two, will cause serious difficulties. If you are only taxing profits, you can at least ensure that the engine keeps running. If you tax a business, irrespective of gains or losses, the government has quite literally become a parasite, which does not care if it kills its host as long as it gets fed.
That is *one* method for doing it. Gerrymandering a district is useful to help solidify a majority's grip, or even to create a new majority, if you're clever enough about controlling state houses. It's nothing new, though. The guy it is named for, Gov. Elbridge Gerry, worked that magic in 1812 for the Democratic-Republican Party (a single name that could probably still be applied to the establishment of both parties if you tried).
More to the point, it is far from the only method available for doing so. Having captive blocs of voters who are kept on a leash is by far more important. You don't have to worry about them ever voting for the other side, no matter what anyone suggests. Ultimately, it is that sort of impunity that allows a Congress with a 13% approval rating to return 95% incumbents.
Trump mentions that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still not lose much support. Sounds a little crazy, but at the same time, there are diehards of both party who wouldn't vote for the other side if their candidate ended up as a suspected murderer let alone some other form of lesser criminal. Presumably, I'd hope that most of them just wouldn't vote, but I have the uncomfortable suspicion that some would elect a murderer rather than let the other party win, even through them omitting to vote.
This is why George Washington warned against the evils of faction and party. Admittedly, it is hard to see how we could have avoided it, but it is clear what the danger is. In the Constantinople of Late Antiquity, they used to have chariot racing teams called literally nothing more than the "Blues" or the "Greens", and even individual parts of the Imperial government were mixed up in the backing of a team with a color name and riots would break out if the wrong team won.
There are some days I think we should just rename our parties after colors, so at least no one is confused into believing that the party name matters. They're not principled individuals bound together by a specific cause, they're people who are bound together by the desire to win. There are some people inside the parties with real ideals, but invariably they are accepted by the party only insofar as they have something to offer the Party in terms of bringing in voters. They're draft picks for sports teams.
On the other hand, El Cheapo Cables Inc. might be concerned about losing their ability to sell to Amazon if they keep breaking the ToS. It's not like Amazon gives a crap about one cheap-ass cable maker.
To be fair, Microsoft's decisions are not always about the viability or capabilities of their actual software. They're mostly thinking on how to make a product that gets them a wedge into a market. For that, the software only has to be sufficient, not necessarily ground breaking. The lack of software capability is made up for by clever deals and marketing.
Of course, sometimes they miss the target of "sufficient" and the product fails. Other times, this works well for them.
And for a mediocre product, Microsoft's decisions have maintained Windows' dominance of the desktop market better than you might otherwise expect, and even given them a niche in the server market, where they are much more clearly outclassed by UNIX-likes.
In any event, the original premise is that if BSD had been used, the code contributions could have been locked up in proprietary bundles, thus making sure that the advancements in BSD that were made by those companies are never contributed back to the project unless they wanted to. And they usually don't want to.
In Linux, if you make code changes to the kernel, they get released with source if you try and provide a solution that uses a modified Linux kernel.
Yes, BSD is free, and it will remain free. But only the BSD that is created by the BSD project team for BSD or voluntary contributions back. They're not forcing Apple, for instance, to release their alterations to BSD (if any) as free source code.
This is not to say BSD is bad, only that Linux under the GPL has a gimmick that forces more of the work done with it to end up as open source code contributions which can be more readily made use of by the general development world. This would tend to make it more popular among developers, and more developers means more potential for advancement on a project.
If he did something like that, he'd probably cause a serious fork in the kernel. You can be an asshole about things, but if you start making project decisions that have nothing to do with your kernel function only because you don't like a particular application that uses it, and that application is supported by many mainline distros who provide paid kernel contributors, you're going to fuck your project.
Now if systemd caused bad behavior in the kernel, or took advantage of a feature in the kernel that he hated and wanted to get rid of, I could see him accepting a patch that would trash systemd without a second thought. But then it could be easily argued that this is well within his prerogative. He wouldn't be required to maintain bad kernel just to satisfy some shitty app developer. But just calling out one app because you don't like it is activist bullshit that would make people question his stewardship of the project.
I know he has strong opinions, but I don't this he's arbitrary.
Well... it's many factors. What is more rare? Talent or opportunity? What is more applicable at the time? And is that level of talent impossible to find in another human?
My guess is opportunity is by far, the more rare commodity. Linus was no slouch, but I doubt that he is the Einstein of programming. What he had was the necessary talent at the right time and the willingness to use it.
Make no mistake, the opportunity required someone like Linus, I certainly couldn't have done it, but I think that there are more people like him out there than there are opportunities for someone like him to make a difference.
Of course, this is not "luck". Linus had to have built up skills and the right attitude to take advantage of this opportunity. There is no way this could have descended upon him like a lottery win from a single lucky ticket.
However, if he'd been hit by a bus, there would probably still be something like Linux out there eventually. I mean, it was a logical next step when you had everything for GNU but a kernel, right?
Yeah, Win95 was nothing compared to what it was supposed to be, but it was still light years beyond Win 3.1. It pretty much made Windows the behemoth it still is today on the desktop. I'd say they made the right decision to just ship it.
I remember when I was using tcsh to get tab completions and some other things. Bash was around then, but it wasn't installed by default on the systems that I was using at the time. Now bash is everywhere, which is nice. I don't even have to bother with uploading a custom .cshrc or .profile any more to be productive. It's the little things that make life better, I suppose.
I think that's the major issue with medical IT and computing in general. The products are designed to do something, and security is an afterthought. That's made worse because many of the products were designed a long time ago and not updated for various reasons, including a long regulatory approval process to get them to market.
So you have a supply cabinet that was designed to help with inventory, but now we expect it to be a safe. And the network infrastructure that probably grew ad hoc in the hospitals was just meant to enable interconnection and security only became an eventual concern as attacker capabilities grew. Because the product cycle is so long for medical purposes, they don't react in a timely way to anything, especially something that is not the primary concern of the equipment that is being deployed. So now you have this issue.
I don't think this is a permanent problem for hospitals, but there will be some sacrificial lambs before the process changes. Once those cases are over, there will be more money put into security at those places.
Unfortunately, it's just another thing that is likely to raise the cost of medical care because they will continue to be bad at it, but now they'll be trying to compensate for their incompetence by overpaying for security products and services.
Let's be clear, computers open new dangers, but a lot of our current medical capabilities and even billing and records keeping actually relies on the capability.
This isn't something that hospitals are doing because they love whiz-bang gadgets. Going back to paper is not a solution.
I doubt that they are ignoring security, they just aren't either prioritizing it highly enough, or they don't have the resources to do so.
IT security is overhead. You need it, but it is all expense. This is not a job where all you have to do is just do it. You need to show very clearly why the expense is needed and security is one of those things that seems like a jobs program... until you're hacked, and then its too late.
For once, this has nothing to do with Cloud security. These folks got owned all by themselves on their own network.
They might have actually been more secure in the Cloud. Which is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of Cloud security, but Hospitals are notoriously insecure and their IT is run on a shoestring.
Just because you have your data on-site, doesn't make you safer. If you're a screw-up, or you aren't taking security seriously, it is entirely possible for your security to be worse than any Cloud provider.
Those good ideas you suggest are not certified for medical or mission critical activities. Therefore they will not be used.
It could be certified, but it will take about five years to get through the process and cost probably about a million dollars to do it before they could even sell a single unit to a hospital.
And if it's free, that's much worse. Then there is no one who will be able to pay for the certification process.
This is medicine and the process must be followed as long as it fucks you over for less than a malpractice suit or regulatory inquiry would.
Note that the OS for this equipment often *is* supported, but through a special deal with the equipment manufacturer, so this solution also falls into the same situation as the anti-virus scan would. You need to be running their image on their hardware or your equipment is now unsupported and if it fails, it is now a multi-million dollar brick because you won't be able to fix it.
It seems easy conceptually, but these threats have crept up on a sector where the product approval cycle is measured in years or even decades. They have old equipment and facilities that were meant for medicine first, and IT a very distant second (or third). And if IT security was an afterthought in the products they selected, they're not going to be able to turn them around fast.
Hell, even re-doing the network could be a multi-million dollar project so they can update routers, add more physical wiring and ports, and re-deploy equipment to create air gaps where they never had them before. They're not working with a green field. These are working hospitals that complicate the hell out of trying to redesign networks. They're not going to spend that money or time unless someone makes them. Perhaps someone is about to make them do that. Or perhaps not.