This sounds like an exceedingly shaky definition.

Charitable work makes you a religion? Is that codified somewhere? Is charitable work sufficient to make you a religion? Or just a subset of things which in some squishy way will?

If I have a foodbank am I a religion? Are the Shriners a religion because they make hospitals? Is McDonald's a religion because it has those Ronald McDonald houses?

I'm not sure I'd want you anywhere near a legislative job if you think charitable work automatically makes you a religion.

Honestly, I think "lack of charity" is the least of their problems:

On the subject of Scientology's status as a religion, the German government has pointed to a 1995 decision by the Federal Labor Court of Germany.[13] That court, noting Hubbard's instruction that Scientologists should "make money, make more money -- make other people produce so as to make more money", came to the conclusion that "Scientology purports to be a 'church' merely as a cover to pursue its economic interests".[13] In the same decision, the court also found that Scientology uses "inhuman and totalitarian practices".[13] Given the lessons of Germany's 20th-century history, in which the country came to be dominated by a fascist movement that started from similarly small beginnings, Germany is very wary of any ideological movement that might appear to be seeking a position of absolute power.[13][14][15] References in Scientology writings to the elimination of "parasites" and "antisocial" people who stand in the way of progress towards Scientology's utopian world "without insanity, without criminals and without war" evoke uncomfortable parallels with Nazism, and have led to Scientology being classified as an "extremist political movement".[17]

So, they operate as a business, and want to eliminate people who disagree with them.

Sorry, but no. It's way more than simply not giving back to the community.

Why oh why would you put the parsing of HTTP at the kernel level?

Why does Microsoft consistently fail to understand that if you make something inherent to the OS it becomes a bigger security risk?

This just makes no sense to me, no more than embedding IE so deeply into the OS they said they couldn't remove it.

This is the kind of stuff which needs to be in userspace, not the friggin OS.

That's vastly different than giving the state the authority to destroy religions it disagrees with.

Honestly, Scientology is a religion founded by a science fiction writer who famously said "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

They use some unscientific piece of equipment to measure people and tell them about the concentration of aliens or somesuch, and then charge them to fix the issue -- and apparently keep charging them. I'm also fairly certain the medical community doesn't recognize Dianetics as being anything other than gibberish.

Sorry, but it's awfully hard to take it seriously as a religion ... it has about as much credibility as being a Jedi or a Pastafarian.

So, what exactly is our threshold for saying "sure, your wacky religion can have tax exempt status"? Because my "Church of the Big Titties" could definitely use some tax free status if we're just handing it out like that, that way we can have more "Sacraments of the Holy Wet T-Shirt" while imbibing "The Blessed Beer".

You're kvetching about giving the state the authority to destroy religions it disagrees with, I have yet to see why we should acknowledge it as actually being a religion.

Can I just make up any old crap and call it a religion? Or are there rules about it? Clearly logical consistency or proof aren't required.

And it's also a situation in which you can get completely and utterly fucked by the people in suits who work in sales.

Many of us have seen what happens when that oily salesguy you'd like to to kick sells something which is complete fiction, and that it is now someone else's problem. His check clears, he gets a new car and a vacation, and everyone else is stuck building a fucking unicorn.

Sometimes, in small companies or with overly greedy salespeople they can sell the farm for a couple of magic beans.

And then no amount of effort is going to make it possible to keep up with an unrealistic client with a gold-plated sales contract which doesn't impose penalties for them failing to stick with a coherent design.

Sometimes, it is the suits who get you into this kind of trouble, and then they double down until there's nothing left.

when building physical products we can't always afford to build and test new physical hardware for it to then crash and burn, so how can we have unit tests for hardware or test in a virtual setting?

Isn't there software which allows you to simulate real machines in software? Adobe Inventor or something?

Has anybody made an open source version of something like this?

If you could just continuously integrate this kind of stuff with your designs to simulate the actual mechanics, you could "build" it without making the physical device each time.

I honestly know little about this space, but I'm sure I've seen some demos of software which lets people build the device virtually and make sure there's no issues.

It is when I play it. ;-)

but it's possible that he was using the computer to augment competent-or-better human play; but not replace it entirely

Are you suggesting that somehow makes it OK?

Because my take would be to strip him of titles, and bar him from future competition.

Saying he only cheated a little is meaningless.

*shudder* While I'm sure this is someone's idea of where rule #34 should apply ... a bunch of nekkid/pasty/flabby chess players is a terrible idea.

Just ... no. Stop it.

Or better yet, allow VPN traffic to be inspected?

Oh yeah, fucking brilliant idea .. undermine the security of corporate VPNs so that the assholes who run media companies can further tell us how we are allowed to use technology.

I have a better idea, feed the execs from media companies and their lawyers to the bears and tell them to piss up a rope.

These clowns won't be happy until they have veto power over all security and technology. Which, oddly enough, the assholes in the NSA and their peers want the same thing.

Because, the entertainment industry has decided that it is 100% in control of who are their customers, when they are their customers, and how much they will have to pay for the privilege of being customers.

In this case, I suspect because they've decided the people in New Zealand will get it six months later, for twice the price.

The same as they don't want you to be able to buy a DVD elsewhere in the world and bring it into your own country and watch it.

Of course the media industry is malignant, but they keep bribing or bullying lawmakers to stack the deck in their favor ... so much so that the copyright of multinational corporations is more firmly entrenched in the law than the rights of citizens on some topics.

We live in a world in which the media companies have co-opted the legal system, with the help of governments who help push the agenda against the interests of their own citizens.

If the media companies had any say in the matter, buying a CD to rip the songs to MP3 to play on your portable device would be illegal.

Because they're assholes who somehow feel their business model is more important than property rights.

You could put the real computer in a locked room, and only provide serial access through a terminal.

And, then you have to have a locked room outside of (and enclosing your locked room) to limit access to the serial connected terminal, otherwise you've just stupidly erased the benefit of your locked room.

I don't think you've solved the problem, just changed where the attack point is -- and that's the serial cable.

Yours just adds complexity so now you have two rooms which need to be secured.

Yo dawg, I hear you like locked rooms ...

If I was to do it, No chance in hell I would be anywhere near the buying of the ticket or the collection of the winnings.

Well, that's grand an all ... but then you have a co-conspirator who could be the source of you getting caught.

So, either you try to be a clever criminal all on your own, or you try to be a clever member of a conspiracy.

It's all well and good to say "yarg, if I was a master criminal I'd have lackeys to do the dirty work". But having lackeys is just another link in the chain.

If you hire some kid to buy the ticket and bring it back to you, unless you off the kid, at some point he'll say "oh, yeah, that guy asked me to buy him the ticket".

Obviously, if people could find infallible ways to do this, they'd do so. And, equally obviously, it's hard to do this kind of thing without leaving some form of trail.

If I had plans to be a master criminal, I sure as fuck wouldn't be posting on Slashdot about how I'd prevent myself from getting caught. ;-)

Except a rootkit can probably bypass anything in the OS which would allow for auditing.

That's kind of the point of a rootkit.

So depending on the OS, and just how much this could bypass, that there was simply no record isn't surprising.

That's what the tool is designed for, and it certainly isn't there to do anything but bypass security.

If you have security holes in your OS which can be exploited, chances are your auditing is included in things which can be bypassed.

Seriously, why don't you RTFA where they point out that a corporation registered in Belize tried to claim this prize through an attorney in New York.

It's not like the someone who was barred from playing walked in and tried to claim the prize.

Yes, your what you say is obvious. So obvious, in fact, that it isn't what happened.

Well, it also says he went in ostensibly to change the time on the computers.

So he was basically at the physical computer, and whether the thing did an autorun or he issued a quick command is irrelevant.

The former security director "was 'obsessed' with root kits, a type of computer program that can be installed quickly, set to do just about anything, and then self-destruct without a trace," prosecutors wrote. They went on to say a witness would testify at trial that Tipton told him before December 2010 that he had a self-destructing rootkit.

If you already have the right tools, and are physically sitting at the machine, and the cameras suddenly are only recording a fraction of what happens ... this is at best a small amount of work.

I mean, really, f:\fuck_em_all.exe will not take long to type before you set the clock as you said you would, and suddenly the camera isn't going to capture you doing it.