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Comment Re:So that's really why he gave up his citizenship (Score 1) 445

Actually, although your message is clear, the details are not entirely correct. Regardless of how long you are outside of the country, if you have strong ties in Canada (a house, a wife/husband/children/family, bank accounts, etc.) then you are still considered a "factual" resident for tax purposes (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/nnrsdnts/cmmn/rsdncy-eng.html). You must still FILE taxes, but you don't (necessarily) have to PAY taxes. You pay taxes only on income received from Canadian sources. Any so-called "Worldwide income" is exempt from Canadian taxation as long as there is a tax treaty with the counterparty country (http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/t4131/t4131-e.html#P201_20183).

If you live outside of the country for more than 6 months (6 months plus one day), then you aren't afforded medical insurance. Hence, snow birds who fly back and forth from Canada every 6 months.

Comment Need to see the criteria (Score 2) 84

I've always been amazed at things like SAS 70 which, as the poster states, is based on self-defined criteria. The most shocking part, if I recall correctly, is that the criteria are not publicly consumable! This is the worst part of it all and the key part which needs to change.

Comment Re:Revenue or Safety? (Score 1) 506

Wow. The multi-target radar system is *more* complicated than your proposal, is it? I'd like to see how you quantify your variables and make it hold up in a court of law.

Look, I'm all for simplicity especially when it comes to rules and laws, but anything that is "relative" is asking for interpretation and hence, more complexity.

Comment Re:Spread by removable drives? How hard is this? (Score 4, Informative) 370

Actually, TFA believes that the vector was a removable drive by which they periodically update their map collections.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

Comment Northern Canada != Canada (Score 5, Informative) 282

Remember, Canada is a big place. 75% of all Canadians live within 90 miles of the US border. So keep this in mind while you read all of the comments saying what a calamity this is for Canadians. Northern Canada -- and I say this as a Canadian, though some may disagree (like we disagree about what it means to be in Eastern Canada or Western Canada) -- generally are those who live above 55-60 degrees N which is an exceptionally small percentage of the total population.

Comment Re:Complexity arising from simplicity (Score 3, Informative) 74

TFA specifically uses an example of a failed hard drive to describe the workflow. You can see that a failed hard drive is something small, easily diagnosable, and -- in the greater scheme of things -- easily fixable.

Now, if you recall what happened with AWS in April, they had a low-bandwidth management network that all of a sudden had all primary EBS API traffic shunted to it. This was caused by a human flipping a network switch when they shouldn't have. Something like this is not something that happens all the time, has little, if any diagnosable features, is not well-defined to have a proper workflow attached to it, and needs human engineers to correct. This is an example of a complex, large-scale problem.

Read the article, it's actually quite interesting.

Comment Re:What was the state thinking?!? (Score 1) 173

It doesn't sound like you read the article, but your questions are still just as valid. TFA states that they had not exhausted all non-GPS solutions to tracking him. But then it fails to go on the say why they felt they needed to track him in ANY capacity in the first place.

...but if I show up on time during the week and do my job

The TFA does indicate the employee "filed improper time sheets" and eluded to the fact that a "...pattern of misconduct and the difficulty of constant in-person surveillance justified the technique". Guess what, folks? It is not justified. Someone should be fired for this.

Security

Submission + - Blackboard 0-days expose exams, tests and data (scmagazine.com.au) 1

mask.of.sanity writes: "Multiple zero-day security vulnerabilities have been found in world's most popular educational software — holes that allow students to change grades and download unpublished exams, whilst allowing criminals to steal personal information.

Vulnerabilities in the Blackboard Learn platform have the potential to affect millions of school and university students and thousands of institutions around the world.

The platform is used by the United States military to train soliders.

The holes will remain unpatched until at least the end of the year, the company said."

Submission + - Windows 8 Will Run From USB Thumb Drive (computerworld.com)

JohnBert writes: "Windows 8 will include a new feature that lets IT administrators provide workers with a portable Windows environment on a USB thumb drive. Called "Windows To Go," the feature seems aimed at enterprises that want to equip employees with "complete managed Windows images" that they can use to turn a PC into a doppelganger of a secured in-house machine.

It's not known whether individuals will be able to use Windows To Go for the same purpose, or if the feature is enterprise-only. It's also unclear whether Windows to Go comes with a price tag: One report, based on a briefing with reporters at BUILD on Monday, said that the feature will cost about $50 per seat.

Microsoft declined to provide more information about the feature, which was among those demonstrated to analysts earlier this week, according to Michael Silver of Gartner. Instead, a spokeswoman referred to the short summary of a session at the BUILD Windows conference, which kicked off Tuesday in Anaheim, Calif. with a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration of some of the operating system's key components and changes."

Comment Cynical (Score 1) 79

The vast majority of commentors I've seen on both /. and the article itself are all kinds of cynical and this does not help /., and it doesn't help the community. It makes me sad.

Yes, we realize that you are an amazing h4X0r capable of creating code devoid of buffer overflows, race-conditions, (all sorts of) injection attacks, etc. Perhaps you've forgotten there is a spectrum of programmers and like it or not, you are probably an AVERAGE coder. (They don't call it average because everyone thinks they are great.) A programmer will always make assumptions about the underlying environment and will always have to sacrifice security functionality in the name of time/resource-savings. And in case you haven't noticed, some systems do not actually require DoD-level security with zero vulnerabilities. They merely require a level of security commensurate with the environment it runs in. It's one thing to design a system for physical attacks or reachable through a public IP and another thing entirely to protect against measured threats within a managed network environment or air-gapped system.

There is a wide spectrum of security risks and a wide spectrum of programmers and development practices. Corporations generally match them up appropriately, which is why you don't see outsourcing of internal top-secret DoD systems out on rent-a-coder.

Comment Thanks cmdrtaco (Score 1) 1521

There's nothing I can say that others haven't already said. I was introduced to this site in 2000-2001 and by then the uids were already in the high 5 digits. I also remember actually being able to have an email conversation with cmdrtaco about some bug or another on /. and being a little amazed at receiving an actual response within 15 minutes. It was - it *is* - the seeming connectedness of us nerds on /. that makes it one of the true cornerstones of the Internet.

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