Not regarding the Boeing 777 there haven't. There's only been seven accidents, and only one prior to MH370 that involved any fatalities. And if the cause was a fault with the plane rather than human error/intervention, it's important to know because there's a whole bunch of other, more-or-less identical aircraft in use and it's entirely possible that one or more of them has the same problem.

The problem is less to do with the OS and more to do with the business application. There is no half-decent F/OSS accounting package, no half-decent F/OSS payroll package, no half-decent F/OSS line-of-business application for most specialised industries.

Inevitably, you wind up looking for commercial line of business applications. 99 times out of 100, these run on Windows on the desktop (even when they're nominally web-based - you'd be amazed how many developers heard about the idea of web-based applications and thought to themselves "Great! We'll get right on it! Now, let's see how many ActiveX controls we can require for our application!") and the main platform for the server is Windows-based.

You are technically correct, but you miss out one important fact.

99% of the time, that does not happen. The last time there were major incompatibilities between versions were in the days of Office '95 - there were interop issues between '97 and '95.

Assuming you are not using a version of Office that's old enough to vote, you can exchange documents between Office versions all day long and never see a problem. Oh, sure, it can happen, but it's rare. So rare, in fact, that I think you'd have trouble finding anyone who's ever found it to be a significant problem.

You will absolutely not have the same experience between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office.

IME, this is only the case when your wastage (from "Oh shit I meant to put photo paper in there!", "Damn, there was a bit of dried ink in the printhead, better reprint that one" and "I'm sure I can make that come out better if I twiddle the settings just right") is zero.

I have never yet seen zero wastage.

A couple off the top of my head:

  - You wouldn't believe the number of poorly written applications that will happily bring a server to its knees no matter how powerful. This way you can reset just that application, not the whole business.
  - An application that was never written with any sort of HA in mind can be made highly available without any changes.

Because every environmentalist I've ever seen is never for anything. They've got nothing constructive to say, it's purely "Let's get rid of dirty power sources!".

The important lesson you are about to learn is this: Pick your battles.

This is a battle you cannot possibly win.

Why not? Because you're still a pupil.

Virtually every argument you can come up with for why that certificate shouldn't be there - no matter how well-reasoned - is going to be dismissed by staff. Even if you can come up with a well-reasoned argument that no sensible adult would counter (you probably can't; there are very good reasons for a school to want to monitor everything that are likely to be perceived as overriding any concerns you have about privacy), you'll be crushed.

At this level, arguments like this inevitably wind up being less about who is technically right or wrong and more about who has the power. As far as the school is concerned, the person who wins the argument has the power - and there is no way they will ever let a pupil win such an argument because it means conceding power to a pupil.

In your position, I'd install some sort of plugin that allowed me to verify that my HTTPS session was using the "right" certificate - and if not, I'd tether my laptop to a personal mobile phone.

Replying to myself, but.... £200,000 is a pretty big fine by ICO standards.

Reading the report, it seems that while the BPAS did everything right once the breach was discovered, the circumstances that led to it happening in the first place were caused by pretty blatant incompetence. They knew (or should have known) that the details of people who wanted to use their services would be confidential information, they sacked the firm that built the website over concerns for their ability but they kept the site without ever auditing it.

The fine isn't just based on how flagrant the data breach was, it's also based on how much the organisation being fined can afford without causing undue hardship.

I'm not surprised the CEO wants to appeal the fine. The circumstances that led to it suggest gross incompetence at several levels; if she doesn't appeal or the appeal is unsuccessful, I imagine her job is on the line.

That's not how ICO fines work.

The way they work is this: If you suffer a data breach that the ICO hears off, they'll investigate.

Once the investigation is complete, they'll do a few things:

  1. Write a beautifully-worded press release explaining exactly what you did wrong and put it on the news wires.
  2. Write an equally beautifully-worded report explaining what you did wrong in explicit detail.
  3. Issue a thumping great fine.

It's important to note that they don't have to take an organisation to court to raise this fine. It's the other way around - if your organisation gets fined, it's down to you to raise an appeal.

Virtually anything you might buy or sell derives at least some of its value from faith, and currencies are no exception to this. In other words, as long as a sufficient number of people believe that 1BTC is worth ~$680, then 1BTC is indeed worth ~$680.

This is even true of gold to a certain extent - its value goes up and down too, though it's seldom as volatile because it has other uses beyond currency.

When something happens to shake that faith, the value drops. When something happens to strengthen that faith, the value rises.

Any currency that isn't backed by something tangible (eg. a precious metal) by definition derives more-or-less all its value from faith. This isn't usually a big deal - most countries came off the gold standard decades ago - but one side-effect is that if your country's government is unstable, there's a very good chance your currency will follow suit in short order. For extreme examples, see Zimbabwean dollars, Afghan Afghanis and German Papiermarks.

It's already been done - though only in fiction.

Roald Dahl wrote about a machine called the Great Automatic Grammatizator. A machine that you plug in various parameters - such as type of book, characters, proportions of violence/sex/humour - and it churns out something that's pretty much guaranteed to be a bestseller according to those parameters in fifteen minutes flat. Being a writer himself - and a somewhat dark one at that - the end result was a dystopian universe in which writers were forced to give up writing and just license their name to the man with the machine, simply because the machine brought the cost of production down so much that this was the only way to earn a living as a writer.

Worse than "bad".

Looking at the (admittedly obfuscated) screen grabs and the comments that say the bank provide RSA hardware tokens if anyone wants one - I reckon it's a software implementation of an RSA SecurID token, probably bought in directly from RSA. And if it's bought in from a third party, it follows that anyone else who's bought in the same product would almost certainly be vulnerable to the same issues.

There seems to be this idea - and I've been guilty of it myself - that the world is black and white.

In this case, the argument is DRM either works 100% or it works not at all. As "working 100%" is obviously wrong, it follows that it does not work at all and is in fact a stupendous waste of money on the part of the people who commission ever-more-complex DRM systems.

But what if DRM was never meant to work 100%? What if it was only ever meant to slow things down - for instance, to ensure that you can't find a good quality version of a new movie on the Pirate Bay the first weekend it's in the cinema? To ensure you can't pirate a game on the day it's released in stores - and for maybe a couple of weeks after?

More often than not these things get named by the antivirus vendors when they hit the wild and not before, which is why there isn't a name for it.

There is, but when you've spent thirty years turning PCs into commodity items the habits become ingrained and hard to change.

Then you discover that the word "commodity" has a number of connotations, most of which are pretty bad for your business.