> the U.S. government often takes a surprisingly passive role
> when China acts aggressively towards it.

Looks like the Navy, at least, is keeping an eye on China. Note that one of the selections in the "senior leaders" section of the Navy reading list is "The Great Wall at Sea: China's Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century". Nothing about cyber-warfare there, though.

> I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers

And you provide a RubyForge mirror - many thanks for that!

> Denyhosts is fantastic, though.

Indeed it is. Here are the RubyForge DenyHosts settings. The comments on that post have a good suggestion about DENY_THRESHOLD_ROOT; makes sense to have that at 2 vs 1 to avoid blocking someone who accidentally hits the wrong box.

From the article:

> "You get the feeling the developer are trying very hard, though. When I see a
> dark shape in the distance, which turns and disappears, I don't get scared."

I thought the F.E.A.R. developers did this very well... when Alma would scuttle by in my peripheral vision it was almost always good for a start of surprise. Now if only my laptop had been able to play it with all the dials turned up...

> most things that are designed to make people forget about their problems do
> very well indeed during periods of economic downturn

Not to pile on, but yup, here's still more supporting evidence of that in reference to the movie industry.

> That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't,
> then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.

Hm, although, that assumes that the killer robots are perfectly efficient and the country being invaded has no method of striking back "out of band", e.g., with Tomahawks or something similar.

Also, for understanding what today's senior military leadership thinks is important, check out the selections on the various military reading lists (site contains affiliate links, copy/paste the title links and search on Amazon if you prefer). "Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East", "On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace", and more. Thoughtful stuff.

> After all, the CG is primarily a law enforcement and safety entity these days.

Perhaps... but they still carry all the comms gear and COMSEC and whatnot so's they can do joint ops.

> I'm told that organizations like the DoD that have
> separate networks with no physical connection to the Internet

Yup, it's the SIPRNET as opposed to the NIPRNET.

From that same Wikipedia article, it looks like the Coast Guard Academy has a SIPRNET node... kind of surprising... but the cadets might as well get used to working with classified materials. CMS officer on a ship, there's a job with court martial potential!

If you do go the VM route, consider using puppet to define your machine configurations. That'll make it much easier to build out more than one of each machine.

Along the same lines, if you don't want to run a bunch of machines or VMs yourself you could spin up new EC2 instances as needed, point them to your Puppet server, and have them built out - consistently and correctly - in short order. Good times.

> With Flash you can write whole applications

You can _write_ whole applications, but running them will be painful. Try instantiating a few hundred objects in the Flash VM... in my experience, you'll see why people are still reserving Flash for little widgets and animations.

> Slashdot readership plummets to an all-time low as programmers actually have to work.
Not at Sun, though... yikes.