At the very least, such payments should NOT be a tax deductible expense. No reason the rest of us taxpayers should bear any burden for your lax security (including lack of recovery plan).

Actually it doesn't. Plasma, being conductive, is a pretty good reflector of radio signals.

There's a Robin Hood and quarterstaff joke in there somewhere (recall his first meeting with Little John), but I'm not quite up to it this evening.

And none of that money would go to the author(s).

I don't write textbooks (well, I wrote a couple of computer manuals back in the day), I write fiction, but I have no problem with e.g. used bookstores reselling my books, so long as they're passing on the original copy.

> Not creating trillions of dollars out of thin air would have been a better..

Yep, this. Ironic that the story a couple down from this one is about Zimbabwe.

"How did the bad guys not find Luke Skywalker when he was literally hiding in his father's old home?"

a) Were they even looking? Other than a few Jedi, who knew that Anakin's offspring survived (or that he even had any)?

b) It's a big galaxy. And Tatooine is covered in sand, which gets everywhere.

c) Luke is really good at hiding ... they needed a map to find him in the final trilogy.

> then I'd use it to clean my toilet.

Well, if you filter it through your kidneys first....

When "an inconvenient fact seems to be lost on ... everyone" maybe it's not actually a fact.

There are places on Earth with higher percentages of perchlorate in the soil, and we have hardly explored Mars enough to say that they exist "throughout the Martial soil," much less at a "high level."

Perchlorates are a mild concern, not a show-stopper.

Somehow, "a centralized, secure location" and "where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world" don't exactly strike me as phrases that belong in the same sentence when it comes to IT.

Just saying.

> Surely, Jeff Bezos can crow about how his New Glenn technically beat Falcon to a landing back on earth surface from space,

New Shepard. New Glenn doesn't exist yet.

And barely from space, not from near-orbital velocity like Falcon.

Amen. Once learned, it really isn't that difficult.

For the unaware, the following provides a pretty good overview of available tools for this: https://geekflare.com/secret-m...

I'm most familiar with Hashicorp's Vault (we were an early adopter), and I've played with (ie, for evaluation) some of the others.

Of course, there are probably still ways to do it wrong with any of the above, if you're not taking it seriously.

This, ever so much this. There is no reason -- other than amateurish coding practices -- to store passwords or keys in source code. There are plenty of good (and even free) tools for this. It's not that hard.

Back when I was still working in IT (devops, toward the end), on the rare occasions when someone accidentally left a secret hardcoded (always a dev password, never testing or production), it was immediately scrubbed, changed, and the responsible party given, er, a polite talking-to. (Nobody ever did it twice.) And yes, it was a private repository.

Some are, some aren't. The famed Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found (over 3100 carats, 621.35 gm) was pretty much gem quality all through. Several of the largest gems cut from it ended up in the British Crown Jewels, Some of the cut gems (eg Cullinan II) have minor flaws, but more from less-than-perfect cutting, not inclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

All the panels I've seen -- from the ones on my neighbor's roof to the literal acres' worth of them in fields, parking lots, and office-building rooftops around town -- do NOT move. They're cheaper that way.