> That's fine for you, but I'm gay, and the overwhelming majority of arguments against my freedom and rights have religion at their base.

That may be technically true, but do keep this in mind: The Soviet Union under Stalin -- officially atheistic (and he would gleefully kill you to DEATH if you even suggested otherwise) (yes, my tongue is in cheek -- partially) -- persecuted gays and lesbians FAR worse than the United States ever has. Stalin and Co. considered it a "bourgeois affectation" and killed them by the trainload.

To this day, the Russian Federation continues to restrict gay and lesbian rights ... again, far more so than the supposedly "Christian" United States. Putin's argument has nothing to do with religion, either.

I understand your frustration, but be careful about believing (yes, I chose that word deliberately -- heh) bromides and truisms simply because of that frustration.

> he would say that theism works against our interests more than it helps ...

Dawkins especially believes that Christians have no business working in science. The oft-quoted example is how years ago, geological strata were described as "pre flood" (or ante-diluvian, to use the right term) and "post flood." This is used as an example of how science was deliberately hampered by religious people who insisted that there was a flood, complete with a boat filled with animals and a guy named Noah.

He's right about that example, but the fact is, there have been cases where anti-theism has done just as much harm to the cause of science. I cover two (of many) examples at my homepage (look for the Introduction to The Case For A Creator, if you're interested).

John Maddox, long-time editor of Nature magazine, is one example. Same as Dawkins, he was convinced that there was no God and that belief in same was actually harmful. During his tenure at Nature, you would NOT see an article favorable to the Big Bang theory (especially after the Catholic Church endorsed it), because Maddox didn't want to give any aid to the "religious nuts." (His term, not mine.) The Big Bang implied a beginning and he hated the very idea.

Hated it with a passion. He allowed his hatred for that theory to affect the objectivity of an otherwise very well-respected journal.

I remember it well. When the COBE results were announced in the 1990's, people whose primary source of scientific information was Nature mag suddenly found themselves a bit behind the curve. :)

> PS: If you're a terrorist reading this ...

I'm NOT defending the NSA, but remember that this type of communication requires ... communication. In other words, you have to arrange in advance that the phrase "the chair is purple" means "proceed to site B." The US Government's plan has been to

(a) freeze the assets of the terrorists so that they're constantly strapped for cash
(b) via drone strikes and etc., make it clear that when they DO try to meet to arrange things, they'll possibly be blown up
(c) look at every single communication between the groups when they DO try to arrange things.

That's their plan, anyway. But anyone with any sense at all should have known that, once all of that surveillance was in place, it would be abused. As it has been.

Counter argument: if the government had *allowed* details of the surveillance to leak, it might deter the terrorists. Kind of like during the Cold War, the US and Soviets *wanted* each side to at least have a rough idea of their capabilities, to further discourage anyone with an itchy finger on the Big Red Button.

But the truth is, intelligence agencies want to know everything. Absolutely everything. It's just like a dog licking his privates: if he can, he will. Likewise, if they can monitor everything you do, they will. They can't resist it.

> So, Microsoft finally does something no geek could object to and the FSF's response is "even if this looks like a good thing, this can't be a good thing because it's proprietary".

Ah, I finally get to use a car analogy!

Your car has broken down and you can't fix it, because you don't have a machine that will interpret the failure codes. The manufacturer will only provide those codes to their own shops.

After complaints, the manufacturer offers free roadside assistance.

That's laudable. Give them snaps for that. But I'd still rather have the service information so that I can go to Autozone, buy the parts myself and fix it myself, if I choose to do so.

> I wonder if they have a sign outside the door to the labs at these universities that say "forget teaching students, we need money! Welcome to the R&D Dept."

Not sure about the sign, but they do have staffers whose primary function is to snarf grant money for said university. :)

One of my friends years ago made his living doing that very thing.

> The karma in this case seems rather disproportional. Yeah, what they did was horrible, but death, esp such an ugly death, seems a bit out of balance.

Looking at all the comments here (someone even quoted Jesus!), remember, this isn't a binary solution set. We don't know what these guys were like. They may have been dumb mules who were ordered by a drug cartel to steal the truck (and said cartel is essentially holding their families hostage). Or, they just be really bad people. We don't know.

I will share this true story: guy I knew, worked at a convenient store back in Southern Pines, NC, when I was living there. It was just down the street from WIOZ-FM, which I was maintaining at the time. Nice kid, always had a smile when I'd stop by for my midnight coffee or Gatorade.

A punk comes into the store, points a gun, says, "gimme the money." The guy does as he was instructed: thank the Lord, the bosses had told him not to be a hero. Just give them the money, let the bad guys leave, then call the cops.

The guy gives the robber the money ... and the robber shoots him in the face. Out of pure meanness and spite. (They had surveillance cameras.) This poor kid spent months in rehab and will never be the same.

Now ... this might not be very Christian of me, but just being honest: if that robber had met a bad end on his way from that convenience store, I'm not sure if I would have felt a lot of sympathy for him.

Just being honest.

> I looked at a datasheet for cobalt 60 apparently you have to come into physical contact. Looking at it shouldn't do them much harm.

You need to throw away that datasheet and get a better one. :)

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/radiation/isotopes/cobalt.asp

Cobalt 60 emits gamma radiation, fairly energetic, which means you only need to be in proximity to it to suffer ill effects. I saw a chart on another site a while ago that said standing within 1 meter of the Co-60 for longer than a few minutes would result in a serious exposure. Being that close to it, without touching it, for more than 30 minutes to an hour would almost certainly be fatal.

The sad thing is, the guys probably didn't know what they were handling and are almost certainly dead by now. I'm frankly surprised that they didn't find the bodies near the site, because after about 15-20 minutes of direct exposure to that much Co-60, they would have already begun feeling the effects -- severe headaches, nausea and diarrhea.

> "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others." - Socrates

> It is good to see someone researching ways to combat group think with technology.

But that always, always starts with the guy in the mirror. First, get your own mind right (as Socrates says).

Next, most people listen to those friends whom they respect. You can challenge them to examine alternative points of view. The only thing I would ask (of everyone) is that you respect people who look at things as honestly as they know how, but reach a different conclusion from you. That's part of the human condition. The name-calling and "group think," as you call it, stops when we decide that it will stop.

I lean conservative/libertarian in philosophy, but I avoid polemics from all sides. My morning ritual nowadays consists of first checking the weather (because of my job), then heading to Real Clear Politics (www.realclearpolitics.com) to get a diversity of opinion, from Ezra Klein and Robert Kuttner to George Will and Mark Steyn. I also love a good (read: FRIENDLY) debate. If I see name-calling on either side, I lose interest in a hurry.

But have a friendly discussion with your friends. The old saying goes, "don't discuss politics or religion," but I say the opposite. If you show them respect, they'll learn to respect you, and in turn, they'll learn to respect opposing points of view. You might even learn a few things.

I certainly have. :)

> Also, why would GET & POST requests be involved in security?

If you have to ask that question, please don't apply for a job with me.

It depends on what I'm looking for. One excellent place is the support forum for your favorite Linux or BSD distro. I'll go to the OpenSuSE or CentOS forum, for example, and ask: "has anyone tried this with a Dell Poweredge?" I get some really good responses from people who use my software, on similar hardware.

I Google, too, but I did have to learn to recognized the obvious junk sites. Far more useful to me are the user reviews at the Websites that sell the equipment. It's really not that hard to sort out the useless reviews from the good ones.

By the way, you people who reflexively dump on Slashdot all the time ... I don't know who you're trying to impress with your smug sense of superiority. I have also picked up plenty of good tips here, some of which have saved my bacon and made me look good. :)

Once again, you have to overlook the cruft and the off topic rants -- same as in any other public forum -- but there are some nuggets buried in here. Slashdot has a very eclectic mix of geeks and other professionals with a wide range of experience.

> MarkLogic's NoSQL managed to land a giant lucrative contract for the venture capitalists ...

+24 insightful and informative. This.

Here's another angle on it. Haven't you ever wondered why everything associated with the government takes longer and costs more?

I once worked with a guy who did government contracts all the time. He said, "you deliberately underbid* to make sure you get the deal. Just be sure to put a clause in there protecting yourself when the government (which is Rule By Committee, remember) makes changes. After you get the contract, you KNOW the government will make changes. You can charge whatever you want and take as long as you want."

* he also said, and I quote: "and you buy the people making the decision a bunch of hookers and get them drunk." Basically his exact words. You'd probably have to update that now to a government that includes many females in management positions, but you get the idea. :)

> Flat out it's a failure of leadership to have this many cooks in the kitchen

And remember, when you're dealing with bureaucrats (and I fully agree that they're the same, private sector or government), they're covering their butts. They do everything by consensus and committee meeting. No one wants to stick his or her neck out.

So, for example, when they were designing the ACA Website: Even though I wasn't there and have no direct information on this, I would bet you any amount you want to name that I KNOW what happened. First, a committee got together and decided (after weeks and weeks of discussion) what the main page should look like. "We need a smiling face!" Then, they spent MORE weeks (if not months) vetting images and tweaking things just to make that smiling face appear as they thought it should. They would have suggested a zillion changes.

In this particular case, knowing how a government agency works, I can guess what happened at the IRS. Middle-to-upper management is judged primarily on case counts: how many cases they turn out. If there's a backlog, they get scolded. Since (as I noted elsewhere) there are many employees who don't do much work, the relatively few who do are pressured to turn out more and more cases. "Security" to them means, "do only as much as I have to to satisfy this hornet who is yelling at me. Just enough to make them go away. Whatever."

> For the 0.3% of Americans that were paying for inadequate coverage ...

We're getting off topic here (I'm tired of Obamacare arguments myself), but according to the latest Congressional Budget Office figures, the eventual number who will lose plans because they don't meet ACA standards will be anywhere from 50-100 million. That's considerably more than .3%.

Provide a believable, authoritative cite for your figures.

> The only means of preventing incompetence and corruption is the rigorous application of transparency and accountability.

And you're right, middle management in the US bureaucracy fights this tooth and nail. Their natural inclination is to go after the whistleblower for "rocking the boat."

Another true story: guy was a middle manager, had been there for years. Did virtually no work. Sat at his computer and played Solitaire for an hour or so, then went down and smoked his pipe for an hour or so. Came back up and played more Solitaire.

If his division manager tried to yell at him, he would just grin. He knew they'd never go to the trouble of firing him, and besides, he knew enough dirt on some of those who might try to do so, it would get ... messy. He didn't care.

I remember reading a quote from a Soviet defector years ago. He said that the KGB actually LIKED it when you had a few skeletons in the closet, because they'd have a way to control you. They hated an idealistic, squeaky-clean person.

I'd like to believe our government hasn't reached that point, but some of the stories I've heard honestly make me wonder.

> The US government - which in its current form has led the world's leading/only superpower for over a century - is "incompetent?"

Yes. The fact that you can point to other governments that are worse don't make me feel any better. I can be shot by a bow and arrow or a .45, either way, it's really gonna hurt and I'll probably be dead. You could argue that the bow isn't quite as bad, but that's small consolation to the one being ventilated. (I.e., me.)

Any large organization will be corrupt. (That's the answer to those who inevitably -- invariably -- answer a post like this with, "but .. but ... big business is worse!") It is the nature of the beast. And if you then make it to where that large beast cannot easily purge itself of that incompetence, well, you really have a problem then.

That's where we're at now.

Only people who've never had to deal with the government OR a large business to resolve a problem think that either is competent. :)

Other side of the coin: I once had a problem with my state (Alabama) income tax. I was able to speak directly with the person who was working my case, by phone, and we ironed it out in short order. Problem solved.

There is no way I would attempt to do the same with the IRS without at least three lawyers and two CPAs behind me.