If you or I get hacked, and our computers are held for ransom, the FBI acts like, "Meh. We don't know who did it. Just pay the ransom." But if the DNC gets hacked, suddenly we know exactly who did it, and we're expelling diplomats and what not.

"Every day" means each 24-hour rotation of the globe.
"Everyday" means mediocre.

Unions are needful. Kindly do the needful.

Much as I dislike Mark Zuckerberg, the real problem is not him, nor Facebook, but the users who have made Facebook the " lynchpin of the distribution of news and information around the world..." I realize that Facebook is how a lot of people get their news, but the responsibility for that rests on the shoulders of the dumb shits who use it that way, not on Mark Zuckerberg. While Zuckerberg has made it clear that he would like for Facebook to become everyone's entire internet experience, that can't happen without the cooperation of the people using it.

I see a lot of reasons stated for using one type of phone over the other, and they are all good reasons based on individual needs or points of view. The one thing I haven't seen yet is a reason that's based on "status", which is what I was addressing. There may have been a time, back when the iPhone was a new thing, that it was a status symbol to own one, but smart phones are so common these days, and there are enough manufacturers, that I don't think anyone really pays attention to that sort of thing any more.

The main reason I have an iPhone has nothing to do with status. It's because I like the way it works. I had an Android phone for a couple of years, but it was noticably slower than the iPhones of colleagues and friends. The iPhone seemed snappier. Additionally, I have a Macbook, iPad, iPod, and AppleTV. It makes sense to have a phone which is compatible with that universe. Again, I don't have these devices because of whatever "status" they might impart. I have them because I like the way they work.

Besides, is there really some sort of status attached to an iPhone these days? They are ubiquitous -- even my 83-year-old father has one, and he doesn't even know what he has. He just makes calls and sends texts. If he has a problem, well, his phone has an Apple logo on it, and the Apple store has an Apple logo on it, so he knows he can go in there and some friendly person will help him with his phone. For him it's like taking your car into a mechanic. He has a GM car, so he takes it to the GM dealer when there is a problem. For him, that is how it is done. If an old fart like my dad has an iPhone, it can hardly be thought of as a status symbol.

I would like to add that I also have friends and colleagues who have Android phones. They seem happy with their phones, and that's great. I do not, in any way, feel like I am superior just because I have an iPhone.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that humans, particularly young human females, have an innate desire, probably driven by hormones, to reproduce, and no amount of scolding, cajoling, lecturing or whatever is going to override that.

Wake me when they're available in my city. zzzzZZZZ

I guess that's bad news for all the grumblers out there threatening to "move to Canada" when their candidate doesn't get elected. :-D

So they're saying a botnet was used to gain access to the data, then passed on to third parties. Unless I'm mistaken, the IP addresses will be pointing to machines on the botnet, and the owners of those machines have no idea that is happening. It sounds like a lot of innocent people might get swept up in this.

Also ironic that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, who is no doubt responsible for the operating systems running on all those bots on the aforementioned botnet.

This is bullshit. Software does not "age" the same way that a car or a washing machine ages. The hardware can age, but the hardware can be replaced, and in this case we are talking about IBM software and hardware, which has a long-standing reputation for reliability and for maintaining backwards compatibility.

I think the more likely story is that the interfaces to these systems are being compromised. That's why it's happening, first at one airline, then another. Someone, somewhere is fucking around with the airlines' reservation systems.

I think these stories about "fires" and "aging" software is covering up for the fact that these systems are getting hacked. If people start to lose confidence in the systems they'll fly less or stop flying altogether.

This is why I don't understand the rush to have all these IOT devices in the house. I have a couple, but they are isolated, and if they were hacked I could still function without them. There seems to be a rush to have everything, from the washing machine, to the microwave, to the toaster hooked to the internet, and there seems to be even a push to build these devices so that they do not function without an internet connection. I used to be baffled as to why consumers would even want such things. But, of course, it is not the consumers who want all this IOT, but the vendors who sell the devices and the services, trying to turn us into the product.

Of course it is stoppable. I mean, how are these companies getting their phone numbers from which they operate? Why are companies like AT&T selling blocks of phone numbers to people for next to nothing? The phone companies are responsible for this mess and nobody is taking them to task for it.

He was creating an operating system for a microcomputer -- something running on an 8-bit processor like the Intel 8080 or Zilog Z-80. There was a memory limit of 64K, and early on that 64K was expensive. I mean, if you had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, in today's money, you could buy a Heathkit H-8 kit, and put it together, and you might be able to afford a 116K machine. If you could also afford a diskette drive, it was probably a hard-sectored, single-sided drive and the diskettes held 90K of information. It made sense to limit file name sizes, etc, for the diskette catalogs, so that the space available for data could be maximized. I encourage you to read up on how these old disk systems worked, so that you can understand why someone might limit the size of file names.

Furthermore, the "Mother Of All Demos" was NOT done on a little microcomputer. It was done on an SDS 940 which was a 24-bit machine having 64K of ram and 96MB of storage. The research for that was completed by a large team financed by DARPA and NASA. Kildall had nothing like these resources to work with either in terms of hardware or in terms of financial support. He was creating an inexpensive operating system to run on inexpensive, stand-alone systems.

While I agree he was somewhat myopic, it was only to the extent that he could not see how his product might be expanded. I don't think he deserves to be called "stupid" by any means.

I liked Gary Kildall. He was a pioneer in the business-oriented microcomputer world. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit H-89 and it ran CP/M. It was an operating system geared more towards business, with a number of compilers, and applications like SuperCalc and VisiCalc available for it. In the late 70's to mid 80's it dominated the business microcomputer market and was very nearly a universal operating system among those kinds of machines.

Given the popularity of CP/M and the growing microcomputer market, it is understandable that Kildall would feel confident in how things were going. However, I wonder if he was not a little myopic. I think that IBM could see right away that their customers would not want to use their PCs as merely stand-alone tools, but as a device that would talk to the mainframe and mini computers. It probably did not matter much to IBM where the PC OS came from, so long as it could do the job. Since they had a veritable monopoly in business class machines, they could plop down whatever they wanted on customers' desks and their customers would buy it as long as it worked.

Was Gary screwed by Microsoft? Yes, to some extent, I think so. However, he had ample opportunity to recognize the potential of working with IBM and to capitalize on it. He made a poor choice. I would like to read his memoirs to get an idea if he was as myopic as I suspect him to have been.