There is always potential for abuse, regardless of where your data is hosted. Wikileaks gets their thousands of documents from persons that supposedly are authorized to be effective stewards of critical information. For FISMA and the more stringent DIACAP, no one just takes your word for it that it's secured. You demonstrate that security, and the auditors tear you apart. Now, it could well be that it's not 100% secure - it depends if you actually believe in 100% security (I don't). You make risk assessments pertaining to the value of the data you are protecting, and put up controls that reasonably protect those assets. I've built both FISMA (NIST 800) and DIACAP hosting environments. It is neither fun nor easy, but for many use cases, it makes as much sense as any other cloud solution.

If it was accidental, why didn't they voluntarily hand those "accidental" fees back? Why'd a third party have to force them to settle? Btw, here's the link to the referenced source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/10/the_federal_communications_com_5.html

The situation is more like, "oops you missed something, and operational data was accessed without detection, and now you're dead."

Given the choice between keeping data or saving lives, you choose lives, and you scuttle.

In practice, it's an extremely intrusive form of communication that always interrupt workflow, and often interrupt "real life" conversations; how many times are you getting a text message and NOT looking at it right away to see if it's anything important?

I think it's mostly relevant to the point being made, even if it's not really about software - it's about system assistance.

Like many Americans, I've mostly driven vehicles with an automatic transmission. Recently, I purchased a car with a manual transmission.

Driving with a manual transmission REQUIRES you to be more alert, to be more engaged in the driving process, to listen to and respond to feedback that the car is making. I THINK it makes me a safer driver (I haven't empirically measured the number of errors I made w/auto versus manual). It makes me more focused on the thing that's really important: driving. It's "harder", but as a result I concentrate more on the task at hand.

The analogy isn't perfect - does using vi make me focus on programming more than if I used Word? I think the analogy falls down if you end up concentrating more on the means than the end. The biggest danger to relying on tools as a substitute for brain power is when those tools aren't available.

Actually, it doesn't change that much. MS still has a well-earned reputation for half-assed software that doesn't work well, and not merely relegated to OS. Example? LiveMeeting's a good one. Record, pause, continue - then convert it afterwards with their hoaky converter tools into a Windows Media file that lo! Only uses the first video clip's audio (eg, just to the pause). Okay, so we'll just edit it with MS-provided tools and drop the audio in from the remaining clips. NO. Can't read LiveMeeting's weird codecs.

One example of many sub-standard experiences that is the MS Way (if you're looking for others, look no further than Office autocorrection). Yes, Win7 is way better than it was before. But the warts are the same warts we saw in Win 3.x: it takes too much effort to do simple things. Not that Apple doesn't also suck (and increasingly so), but there's still a big usability difference, and not in MS' favor.

Thanks for this, this is EXACTLY what I think everytime a slashdot article concerning databases come up - here come the blowhards who understand every possible application and its needs. How long before someone trashes MySQL? It's tiresome.

To be fair, I think this thread has a lot of signal compared to many - and then someone'll ruin it by asserting some absolute.

And what of computers outside the US?

Clearly there's nothing simple about this problem, or it would've been fixed already.

Yes, they know the IP address they're coming from. It's your box. Or it's your local internet cafe.

The point I'm trying to make here is that it's a long way from identifying a computer to identifying the responsible person for it, and maintaining a list of dynamically changing IP addresses that churns every time someone gets a new DHCP lease from their ISP is not very feasible. You'd think the ISP might have some vested interest in policing their nets, wouldn't you?

Unless we can somehow adopt broad technologies for tying every packet back to a real person, with no possibility of forging (fascists, rejoice!), this problem is unlikely to go away.

All NX does is prevent smash-the-stack type exploits. The world of malware seems to be triggered by poor user behavior, and a botnet doesn't need privilege to read from a twitter-based C&C and send spam.

I understand what you're saying - and my answer is a sort of middle ground. You want a computer? Sure! Go ahead and buy one! But before you can connect to the internet, you've gotta prove that you're qualified to do so, and recognize common scams and unsafe computing practices.

Attacking the source of the issue (the botnet operators and their clients) definitely needs to be a priority (and I mean with pliers and hammers if necessary; examples should be made), but given the wide-ranging social impacts caused by botnets and spam that just aren't possible with the joyrider analogy above, it's reasonable to demand demonstration of basic competency before being allowed to recognize the "benefits" of the internet.

<blockquote>Any money that is issued must be backed up by either some commodity or production capacity so that it's not just paper. Unfortunately the world currently is under impression that rules do not apply, that paper can be printed without any backing and economy can continue. That's just another force that removes the market balance from the equation.</blockquote>

This is nonsense. Money has value because people believe it has value. Whether it's backed or not is irrelevant - it then revolves around whether people believe what's it backed on has value.

Bullshit. What happens to a muslim who converts to something else is completely dependent on that family's individual values. Same as with Christians, same as with Jews.

Expression and practice of religion isn't limited to the endpoints of a line of human behavior - rather, they are more accurately represented by a spectrum of belief and practice.

I'd think that a more-or-less conglomerated area of oil will make recovery processes easier. I'd like to see these recovery processes footed by BP, and the resultant sale of the recovered crude denied BP and used instead to fund environmental cleanup.