I'm missing something. In order for you to use that nice new account with the strong password, Amazon is going to have to connect your data servers back up with the internet, right? And the instant they do that, the hacker has all their access restored too, right? What's stopping them from immediately changing this new account's password to something they know? Or deleting it? Or doing all sorts of other nasty things before you discover each and every hidey-hole they made for themselves?

Really, I don't see how you can cleanup an attack in realtime with the network up without it turning into a game of corewars (which your side is not likely to win).

...unless you work at it, which you should if your employees are going to be designing products for a world that is decidedly >1$ black. There's not really any altruism here; its for the good of the company.

Wrong. It is most definitely Yahoo/Google's problem, and a huge one. Their potential customer base contains mostly people (women + male minorities) who the companies have very little understanding of in their creative development staff. There is no way this doesn't retard the service they give their users, which in the long run affects their own bottom-line.

That doesn't mean it isn't valuable to a company. In any good engineering company, all the best product ideas come from the engineers. That means the more your engineering workforce looks like your potential userbase, the better they are going to be able to serve their potential customers with their new products.

Probably the majority of the users of the hotter social media tools are female. Now I will freely admit at age 47 with a wife and two girls, I don't understand women at all. Perhaps some men are better at that than me, but I think its ridiculous to argue that your 85% male workforce is well in touch with the needs and desires of their 60ish% female userbase. This can't be anything but a problem.

Similarly, black people turn out to be huge users of Twitter. Clearly it provides something for them that other platforms don't. What is that? Well, I grew up in the majority black part of my hometown, so I probably understand them better than your average white guy, and I can tell you I don't understand them well enough to be an authority. You really need to ask your black employees. Note the plural. Several. One token person isn't enough to provide a good perspective.

So yes, there is value to a company in having female and black (and Hispanic, and Muslim, and ...) employees, over and above their basic tech chops. If white guys don't like to hear that, perhaps they should sit and wonder about the fairness of men not getting jobs waiting tables in deference to women, or ugly people not getting jobs as receptionists and actors. Sometimes your background or looks are actually an important part of your job. That's life.

Well, these are the same bunch of folks that decided to redefine a megabyte as 1,000 bytes to make their "xMB" drives look bigger than they really are.

Once we let them get away with that, can we really blame them for thinking that any marketing cheat they can dream up is fair game?

TEMPEST was one of a set of code-words that were themselves unclassified, but their exact meaning was classified. This allowed people like myself to put them on their resume without the resume becoming classified.

It looks like folks (or at least Wikipedia editors) may have pieced together a meaning for this particular one.

Being obese certainly is disabling. However, it seems kind of weird to define a "disability" something that can be easily (if temporarily) cured by a fairly simple operation. It might even be cheaper for society to pay for periodic liposuction for "sufferers" than it would be to start accommodating the obese with bigger doors, chairs, seats, lifts, etc. everywhere. It would be an interesting economic study for someone.

...and this particular pollster is known to be worse than most. For example, in the 2012 election they had Romney winning two states by more than 5 points which he actually lost.

538 did an analysis of this. However, the swing was so huge that you really can't put all the blame on the pollster. Being wrong by 10 points (as they often are) is a whole different kettle of fish from being wrong by 44. Other non-internals recently showed Cantor winning by 10. So clearly something happened.

I worked on a COMSEC job back in the '90s, and both our device and our building (particularly the windows) had countermeasures for this kind of attack.

Perhaps this is a new thing for garage hackers, but intelligence agencies have known about it for decades.

If we were talking about an individual, or were quibbling over a few %, I'd be sympathetic with this argument. But arguing that folks in the aggregate aren't more detached from folks who statistically are just not their neighbors, and won't be bumped into socially around where they live, is beyond silliness.

The problems with this are:

1. We are not currently experiencing a "surge of people ... at the border". In fact it has been dropping since the Great Recession started in 2007. That's 7 years (getting up towards a decade).
2. We are not going easier on illegal immigrants than in the past either. In fact, Obama is on a pace to deport more people than Bush, or in fact any other president in history. This while illegal immigration is declining. (There is actually some debate on this point, but its pretty clear the guy has at least not let up on the gas).
3. Cantor never expressed any support whatsoever for amnesty. His entire crime was saying on local TV that he'd be willing to work with the president on a "border security bill", if the POTUS would change it to make Cantor happy (note, not Congress, but Cantor. There are already enough votes in Congress to pass the Senate's bill unchanged).

A cynic might wonder whether Cantor's bigger crime was expressing insufficient callousness to "illegals", or expressing a willingness to "work with the President".

Thank you for the perspective.

Here's what I'm seeing from the outside:

• His district is 75% white, and less than 4% Hispanic. So his constituents know Hispanics mostly in the abstract
• The only concrete issue I'm seeing him hit on in #tcot #va07 tags is "amnesty".
• Two weeks ago he's polled as up by 34 points in his primary
• A week later (June 6th), on local TV he announces he's willing to work with Obama on "the border security bill".
• A couple of days later, his opponent is campaigning on this statement like it is "support for amnesty". This appears to be his only issue.
• Last night he lost by 10 points - a 40 point swing. Even for an internal poll, that's a suspiciously large swing.

I'm no detective, but the footprints look pretty darn clear to me.

In pretty much any industry you can name, for any given job workers with more experience on the job tend to be paid more. There's nothing special about teaching in this regard. The only real difference is that in union shops the pay raises tend to be set by policy, rather than doled out semi-randomly by management whim.

This isn't a theoretical thing either. My father-in-law taught high school English for 25 years, which made him the highest-paid teacher at his school. So of course the first thing that happened when his principal retired was that the new guy tried to get him fired (and then predictably bitched about being thwarted by the tenure system). Even with the unions and the tenure he was forcibly retired.

This anti-tenure stuff is directly aimed at older experienced(=expensive) teachers.

My father in law was a High School English teacher for about 25 years. He was very good friends with his principal.

One day his principal retired and a new principal was brought in, and the first thing he wanted to do was clean house of anyone and anything associated with the old guy. Of course that included my father-in-law. A cynic might also note that he was probably the most well-paid teacher in the school, thanks to all those years of service. Tenure was the only thing that kept him from being fired. As it was, he was still forcibly retired (tenure, union, and all). Meanwhile the new principal was bitching to high heaven about the tenure system that prevented him from outright firing anyone he wanted. I'd quote him, but it was the exact same anti-tenure spiel you've heard a million times before.

Having seen the other end of it really opened my eyes. Teachers are in a really vulnerable position, and the folks over them (principals, school boards, etc.) are hyper-political. If you want folks who are completely absorbed with covering their own hineys rather than teaching kids (which I think is exactly what a lot of the anti-tenure folks want) then sure, get rid of tenure.

In fact, one of the important properties of steel is that it is not biodegradable. The last thing anybody wants is to have an office in the 54th floor of a building made out of material that is touted for how easily it degrades.