You got that right. On a twinked out, fully chanted lvl 19 rogue, I could not solo kill a lvl 15 holy priest wearing BA chest and shoulders and random quest greens no higher than ilvl 11-12. I could kill lvl 19 retpallies as a lvl 15 twinked out and fully chanted mage, and as a twinked and enchanted lvl 10 mage, I got ironman and wrecking ball in my first WSG,

I have a wireless router running named FBILOADNET. Wonder how many people have tried to access the network? Alll of them have failed, as I can guarantee not even the NSA could crack into my wireless server and either use it or access anything connected to it of mine.

This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.

It is a cheaper "fix".

What ancestors? God created man. Says so in the Holy King James Bible. Prepare yourself for Hell, for all eternity sinner. And may the Almighty G-d send all your family there with you so your suffering and be more complete watching them suffer eternal damnation and pain.

You miss the point - the researchers discovered an application of the laws of physics to cryptanalysis. Cool, interesting, but not inherently patentable. Then they patented every way to fix that problem, many of which would be obvious to someone skilled in the art.

If I discover that 1+2 = 3, I cannot patent that equation. If I discover an application of that equation to a physical problem, the intent of the framers in patent law was that only a non obvious application may be patented. The fact that they discovered the problem doesn't (at least by law) eliminate or nullify the PHOSITA requirement.

The researchers found a hard to find problem, then patented the obvious solutions to that problem.

This is one of the problem with patents in general - patents are being issued where the person "skilled in the art", i.e. someone who has the same degree of specialization, would have developed the same solution, and the USPTO no longer makes a reasonable effort to prevent that.

Not everyone who complains on Slashdot is naive on patent realities, and the problem is real and ugly.

Aside from the legal fiction of the PHOSITA (Person Having Ordinary Skill In The Art), the intent of this clause by the framers was that it should not be possible for anyone to obtain a patent on something that would be obvious to someone working in the field.

In this specific case, once the feasibility of power vector side channel attacks was understood, any ideas that should have been obvious to someone having ordinary skill in the applicable fields (cryptanalysis of side channels, EE, FPGA layout internals) should not be patentable.

While credit must be given to researches who discovered these attack vectors, the fact remains that the patents they obtained are broad enough to intersect essentially every idea a PHOSITA would come up with. While it is possible to interpret claims narrowly through the context of the background and description, juries often (especially in East Texas) fail to narrow interpretations sufficiently, and just attempting just a narrow interpretation will still cost you $1-3M in legal fees.

If your job includes evaluation of risk of patent infringement (which mine does, for one of the worlds largest companies) then you would understand that the combination of lowering the bar on "obvious" and "prior art", along with the challenges that venue shopping presents, have created a situation where it has become nearly impossible to do anything interesting without infringing many patents that should NOT have been issued.

An interesting blurb from the Actel linked page:

Many of the fundamental techniques used to defend against DPA and other side-channel attacks are patented by Cryptography Research, Inc. ... One of CRI's businesses today is licensing this portfolio of very fundamental patents. Nearly all the secure microcontrollers used in smart cards, set-top boxes, SIM cards for GSM phones and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) for personal computers are built under license to CRI, amounting to about 4.5 billion chips per year in total.

Yet another critical set of concepts which should be obvious to anyone working in the field locked behind a paywall due to USPTO incompetence and/or malfeasance...

The only thing changing is that IT in general is generally considered a "cost center" to trim, IT security an even less indirectly profitable component of that cost center, and management of most organizations is becoming more aggressive at reducing that cost. Add outsourcing and subcontracting issues and you end up with a system where there is real interest only in having an appearance of security, and standard practices revolve around plausible deniability and passing the buck.

Almost everyone whose been in enterprise security for a while has a collection of cringe worthy stories they cannot share... (sigh)

And your point is?

How many of them were committing crimes to buy illegal drugs?

If they could have done like the local winos do, and panhandled for an hour to get their fix, they might not have been engaging in those crimes.

That is the cost of the WoD.

Which has spent at least a trillion US dollars, raped our Constitution in the US, and the end result?

Legalization would make it harder for underaged kids to get it, cut off funding to the criminals and raise money via "sin" taxes.

Ok, call me stupid, but password stuff is not my area of expertise.

If "salt" means added random bits (from wiki) how does memory play a role?

Is it RAM they are talking about rather than hard drive space?

With TB drives less than $100.00 USD, it seems that space can't be the problem.

My only solace is knowing that I don't use the interwebs for any type of banking access, and that all my passwords are 15+ characters long and stored securely on Post-it notes by my computer. And if they are in my house looking at them, I got bigger worries than the sanctity of my WoW and /. accounts.

I first read the Hobbit, then the LOTR before I was 8 years old. Of course, I learned how to read sort of young. My sister was 5 and in kindergarten and I was 3.

Everyday when she came home, I made her play school and teach me everything she learned that day.

And all my family members were/are readers. Mom, dad, grandparents on both sides, uncles and cousins.

Teens old enough to have a baby, ~12 years old, but they can't decide to have sex.

A 14 year old, who can't make any decisions that are legally binding, such as consenting to sex with an older person, drive a car sign a contract or even refuse medical treatment if ordered by his guardians, can make a decision to do something that can get him a needle ride.

The major problem is that the age of accountability needs to be set, What age is open for debate, but at some point kid needs to be kids and on the other side they need to be adults.

And yes it needs to be across the board, drinking, smoking, fucking, dying, whatever.

Their slanted eyes also played a role, as did their buck teeth and affinity for raw fish, rice and killing innocent US babies.

Hmm, I can not refuse to provide service to a customer based on his religion or race. The courts have ruled to do so is violating his Constitutional rights. And I am far from being a government entity.

It is 2011, who clicks on blind links in emails from people you don't know, or do know for that matter?

There are 4 people who can send me an email with a link that I will click without at least googling it first.

3 of them are IT professionals for major corporations, and the other is a security nut.