Yes. The accident, as simplistically as you're describing it - which implies that "failing" or not, "you" were still able to drive around - is the fault of the driver that broke the law by running the red light. Without that driver's bad driving, the accident would not have occurred. Just like without the Chinese deliberately cracking in to take medical records, they wouldn't have thus been in receipt of those records. Which part of "the data theft cannot happen without a data thief actually acting to do the crime" are you unclear about? Though your car analogy is a bad one, it's very similar to, "You can't be in a collision with a person driving a car through a red light without that other person actually running the red." It's not complicated.

or, more practically, make sure your phone password turns on immediately after the phone is put to sleep, rather than there being a 5 min delay.

What would that accomplish, other than getting your phone "dropped"? Or maybe you just get tased until you voluntarily give the password. Or maybe you just get shot for assaulting the officers. That seems to happen a lot in the US.

Let's be honest here: does anyone really believe their rights will be respected by the law enforcement?

You are the one making an elementary mistake, I am afraid. Your conclusion does not follow, even if we accept your entire argument.

You have heard the phrase "trust, but verify". It is far too easy to fake transparency and mislead other states. Every state throughout history has done this. At the very least, you need good intelligence sources to verify a state's public pronouncements regarding intentions are sincere. Even if they are sincere, you need to know the intentions/plans/abilities of internal players who may be in opposition.

Although I guess we could just take Putin at his word that he is just conducting military exercises and has no intentions towards Crimea? I'm sure he'll be giving Crimea back to Ukraine any day now.

Advocating covert verification of states' intentions and abilities has nothing to do with government accountability. That is an extreme oversimplification and false dichotomy.

But if you're looking for someone to subsidize basic research with little or no investment return potential, don't look to a competitive company to do it...

...or to Bell Labs. It's a common misconception that Bell Labs existed for nothing more than the pursuit of knowledge, but nothing in Bell Labs was meant for mental masturbation, or "little or no investment return potential." Discoveries were made as a consequence of trying to solve technological problems, but they weren't just standing around "doing science" for its own sake.

CMB was discovered while looking for noise sources in microwave communications. Transistors weren't patented because the lawyers thought it wasn't new. (Arguably a huge mistake.) UNIX made money by being used internally, and was marketed within a few years, both directly through AT&T as System V, as well as licensed to third parties. Every famous accomplishment was the direct result of looking for technologies to either add new commercial offerings, improve existing offerings, or reduce operating costs.

If you're looking for research for its own sake with little or no direct goals for commercialization, you'll only find it at a very small subset of colleges, universities, and government/NGO enterprises like CERN. Even then, it often becomes necessary to license inventions to stay afloat.

I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.

Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.

Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.

Interesting bit of the training material I found:

"Fuck you,"-- that's my name. You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here. I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. THAT'S my name. And your name is "you're wanting." You can't play in the man's game, you can't close them - go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me, assholes? ABC. A, always. B, be. C, closing. Always Be Closing. Always Be Closing!

Adorbs.

If we estimate only perfect performance, then we fail to acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world. Spills are normal consequences of oil operations. It's not whether or not they *should* happen, but rather how often they *do* happen that matters.

Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!

Apple fixed that problem. The iPhone has no battery door, so it can't be removed in case you don't want the phone to spy on you.

When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.

The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.

I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.

They said they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. The window was zero to two months, not five.

And it's not that data security is a low priority, it's just that it may not be as high a priority as network availability. This is health care, where problems in communication might affect patient outcomes. "Hey, sysadmin, Doctor Green couldn't respond to his page last night, and the patient died as a result." These are the kinds of arguments that are thrown at the IT departments at every health care provider. Whether or not we consider them rational or valid is irrelevant.

So in that backdrop, we might try to understand that they probably don't just slam in every patch that the vendor has to offer, at least not without a giant process circus. I would guess that they have a patch intake process, where they have to run the patch by some engineering team that evaluates the nature of the patch, and devises some kind of testing plan to execute in their lab environment. They then have to pass it to the testing team who will set up and execute the patch process in the lab, document all their findings, and then turn the patch over to the production network team. They'll put it on their list, and they'll have their own manager who says "whoa, why are you security guys rushing to slam this patch in to my border router? Let's slow down and think about this one."

I could easily see it taking a month in a big, regulated corporate environment.

This sums up the core MS issue better than anything else I've ever read. MS has never been innovative, but worse: It has never been a company that likes change. Their world-view is static and stationary. While they acknowledge the world is changing (reality can be quite persuasive), they don't see movement, they see a succession of stationary status quos.

They will now throw everything at becoming the perfect company for the picture of the world they have. And in five years look out the window and see that the world has changed - again.

It's also the reason we all hate MS - due to their still existing stranglehold on computing, they keep much of the rest of the world static with them. The damage done by preventing innovation and progress is easily ten times MS net worth.

All because some people don't understand that life is dynamic.