I hate Oracle as much as the next geek, but Sun really shit the bed all by themselves w/r/t solaris, before Oracle bought them.

Full disclosure: I adore ZFS. I hop between Debian and Solaris and OS-X and windows. I just could never make a compelling economic argument for sun boxen after about 1998, and certainly not as desktops to keep people well-versed in the idiosyncracies of that specific *nix flavor.

Numbers and selective evidence notwithstanding, I'd hardly consider the last decade an exemplary war-free period. Meanwhile, Mars hasn't attacked.

Tell me more about this relativism that has you thinking we're no longer a warlike species. It at least sounds nice.

No, GP is right. It's a different scenario, but it's valid:

If 1 in a thousand users installs X, find a way to target X across a corporation. One hit gets you in. Beachhead there, figure out where to go next or what you can collect.

**THAT** is how to discreetly pwn a corporate net.

Some attackers go big, because their payout is # of machines taken. Some attackers are after a narrow niche: what'll company X be announcing, how their stock is likely to perform, data of value to competitors, etc. Their payout is the same if they own one or a thousand machines in a corporation.

Reread on parliamentary mechanisms. Several flaws are eliminated.

Yeah, you get new flaws. But having more parties wrangling for their favorite positions is a substantial change.

Engineering is about compromises. First, didn't read TFA, but 600 MPH in the summary clashes with your 1000 MPH. Did it say 'mean speed of 600', as opposed to peak speed?

Second, a 'pinnacle' design could make this work. Think like new coasters that either have a 2nd acceleration point or reverse back to start: Go fast, then slow down, then go fast again. Modern engineering's got more than a few tricks -- mix 'em up: pod accelerates at each end, undergoes inductive breaking in as few spots as possible, goes 'slowly' where it makes sense, introduces banks/curves to keep the G-forces palatable, and chooses a route that optimizes against all of these.

If you tell me I can go SFO to LAX in 38 minutes instead of 30 (and a net transit of 60 mins), I'm still happier than I'd be with current alternatives, whether driving or air. Hell, get me and a ton of freight there in under 2 hours and I'd like it.

Sigh, it's been too long since I commented on slashdot. OMG <BADTHINGS> HAPPENED got truncated due to carets. At least it's still somewhat readable -- my net-wired meme-friendly mind just seems to have said 'oh, that could be a noun, I guess'.

Three questions:

What's the difference between a broken snoop and one that's turned off? Put another way, 'OMG HAPPENED BECAUSE YOU MADE US TURN OFF PRISM & ETC!' is just as easy to fearmonger as crapfloods, isn't it?

What does 'hats on the ground' mean?

Guessing contextually... Can they be asshat hats on the ground? Cuz I might be in favor of that...

Palm had a presence. IOS was a complete swerve from PalmOS, yet introduced advantages.

The idea that 'everyone has to do it like Apple' (and 'first to market' in general) remains overrated.

Backwater-of-flyover-state resident here. Midcareer geek, and I make that amount.

There really is a second skillset many nerds utterly lack that gets those sorts of paychecks. I'm not so hot at the skills, but keep trying to focus on acquiring them: networking, communications, diplomacy, communications, career planning, communications, goals, communications, understanding a manager's needs and, of course, communications.

It happens. It even gets screwed up: a colleague currently has a rejection letter in hand and yet the university chair, when asked, said "you got a WHAT!?... no, I will admit that we've got an offer out to someone else, but it hasn't been accepted yet and the provost is still negotiating with that person."

I've gotten rejection letters, then phone calls when positions don't pan out.

And a nonprofit that a family member serves on the board of currently has yet another similar dilemma: they narrowed to a candidate 2000 miles away, took a long time doing that, and the negotiations with the candidate aren't going well. But their 2nd-thru-5th choices all have moved on. They took long enough for a low-paying job that the pool has drained itself.

Who knew there were so many ways to screw the pooch while hiring people...

Am not sure I agree with your 2nd 'graph, bouldin.

By not disclosing X, you gain a competitive advantage Y.

I don't see how that is definitely unethical. For example, must antivirus vendors disclose the signatures used to identify infection? Seems unethical by your sentence. If a brick-n-mortar finds methodologies to reduce loss, must they share the idea? Ditto automotive improvements? Hell, for that matter, if I come up with a whiz-bang idea for improving a car, can I sell it selectively to manufacturers? Yeah, I know there are patents, but what if I choose to retain the idea as a trade secret?

So, discovery of a flaw in someone else's system is work product. It's intellectual property. It's leverage for market advantage. Choosing whether to selectively release that information is not even just an ethical decision, let alone a clear, inarguably inethical act.

LOL. You oughta win the internet for the day. Wish I had modpoints...

I'd learned to put a 3 or a 7 into any fakebake number by the time I was seven. See, I just did it again! Apparently Le FAI and others didn't get the memo.

(now I'm goin' back over to reddit, where "everything's modded and the points don't matter!", to steal Drew Carey's Whos-Line introduction)

Given the presence of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, defense contractors and farming economies like the Imperial Valley, implying that public employees and their union are omnipotent is laughable.

Your economy isn't faltering. Some areas were gutted by industry itself (manufacturing), some have tech-related disruptive challenges (movies/music), and farm revenue and silicon valley revenue are booming. Your tax rate above 200k income remains at record lows, percentagewise. Your tax rate overall is slim compared to years ago. Even CalPERS has trimmed down administrative costs steadily in the last 5 years (http://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip-docs/about/facts/general.pdf)

Individual corruption is a red herring, too. Shine some light into those dark areas, root it out (corporate / private or public), and we'll... oh, wait, that's already being done.

The problem in Cali is the same as everywhere else: mere working stiffs not seeing any of 40 years of prosperity vs. corporate and 1%er's taxes plunging. Add in your state's epic damage from Prop 13 and similar right-wing nuttery, and you've created this economic pinch. Stop blaming the last bastion of union/pensioned people: when most of them got their jobs, they took lower pay in trade for stability and a pension. The problem isn't them, it's that you've screwed so many other middle-class people in the state and propped up banksters and billionaires with the proceeds until public employees' situation looks enviable enough to the rest of the citizenry to assault.

tl;dr: OMGMYEYES!!!

Srsly, I'm a security geek and I'm laughing at the copypasta quantity you just put in there. For a guy who admits he doesn't know security. For a guy who admits he'll never likely know it.

Meh, in less than 17 years, the knowledge that X does Y will be public.

Personally, I didn't map the fuckers out so I can't really be offended that someone that HAS mapped genetic data and suffered through the research to determine what they do gets payment for it for a patent term.

For what it is worth, I suspect there will be a lot more than 40,000 (isn't that number from TFA) unique rules hiding in DNA. In other words, 20 years from now, I still expect us to be making inroads and discoveries that deserve patent. Another few decades after that, if we survive that long, we'll have similar progress with nonhuman DNA, and another wave of patents with value either because our direct or indirect benefit from them (mods to human DNA or mods to critters, in other words).