This wasn't as big of an issue back then because not upgrading and keeping a running NT4 or even 3.5 machine somewhere was still an acceptable alternative. Security wasn't an issue for these machines. Forget the Internet, you were lucky to have your machines hooked up to the LAN through ethernet and not token ring.

Then networking got really big halfway through 2K and by XP, security was the most important thing rather than stability. 2K probably had as many or more security holes than XP, but it hit that sweet spot of being stable when that was most important, light (XP was bloatware when it first came out--still is in many ways), and secure enough for the time.

You should tell that to Google, Firefox, Ubuntu, etc. Although, they don't make enterprise software, just consumer software used in enterprises.

But seriously. This rapid release BS is the worse software lifecycle scheme I've ever seen. Throwing away tried and true for new and shiny only works for kids. Microsoft is finding out the hard way why it doesn't work in the enterprise.

That's a lot of post-install work to go from zero to usable. Couldn't they have just bundled all that for us in one package and call it Windows 8.2?

Historically, "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun. Gender itself comes from Latin, and in all romance languages, the masculine is used for gender-neutral or gender-ambigious contexts. It was a hard and fast rule in English until some idiots decided it wasn't PC enough and started railing on people who follow it, but at the same time provide no suitable alternative.

The cause is that the people mandating these actions are unaffected by their consequences. They don't regularly go to places normal people frequent and when they do, it is with armed escort. They are in effect, using the general populace as a shield for their activities.

They are not living above the law (they cannot, as they wrote the laws) so much as they are living above the consequences of their activities. And they don't give a rat's ass about anybody else, so long as they can continue their lifestyle, or even better it. That's the nature of the beast you're staring down.

If many of these Muslim countries didn't have the world's biggest share of the most valuable natural resource currently, radicalization would not be an issue today. This is the modern form of colonization, one that doesn't involve planting a flag and sending people to make war, but instead having the natives make war on themselves while you profit directly and indirectly off it. The important thing to understand is that the best way of exploiting somebody is by destabilizing their life, then recreating stability via a system sympathetic to your intentions. Destabilization can be done directly (Iran in the 70's, Iraq in the 00's) or by proxy (everywhere else, e.g. Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, and one can argue Israel serves that purpose as well).

Radicalization is a response to all of this meddling, and it is directed towards the West because it is the Western countries that have (historically and currently) been the most aggressive colonizers. Don't get me wrong; there are terrorists in Russia and China and other Asian countries too (Tamil Tigers, anybody?), but those countries are engaged in territorial takeover, i.e. the first method of colonization (the one that created the United States). Thus there is no need for radicalization.

I think they both matter. One is the basis of addressing the now of things. The other should be used as the basis of addressing the later of things. Addressing the now without addressing the later is irresponsible. Addressing the later without addressing the now is dangerous.

Biased much?

The main religious text of every Abrahamic religion promotes violence and killing. The Old Testament is still cited by fundamental Christians (see the U.S.) and Jews (see Israel) to legitimize their violent acts. It may not necessarily be violence to other religions, but it's still violence. (I don't know the other religious texts nearly as well so I can't really speak for them, but I'm certain some non-Abrahamic religions promote some form of religious violence in their text as well.)

But the mainstream Jews and Christians have moved away from the extremes of their ideology and on to more moderate viewpoints. They're still picking and choosing the passages to interpret and follow, but now they're picking the less extreme passages and interpreting them in more moderate ways. The fundamentalists in Christianity and Judiasm are marginalized, and given little to no attention (with the exceptions being the fundamental population of Christians in the U.S. and Jews in Israel, and even then, they're kept in check by equally loud or louder moderate voices).

Muslim extremism is still very much in the limelight of their religion. The extreme viewpoints are constantly in the news, constantly being talked about. Hell, the most wealthy, powerful, and famous Muslims, who often act as role models for many other Muslims, are all extremists. Look at the leaders of Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are clearly extremists. Extremism is given significant attention. There are entire political parties dedicated to extreme interpretations of the Koran. And even if they're discouraged from the extremes, Muslims are exposed to it from youth. Hell, we're all exposed to Muslim extremism from youth.

That is the difference. That is where Islam is currently at, not at the opposite end of "modern religions" but merely a few centuries behind. Islam is currently where Christianity was a few hundred years ago, and is where Judiasm was a thousand years ago. The big question is how to get everybody to reach the points of moderation that Christianity and Judiasm are at. How do you marginalize the extremists?

Denouncing the religion as bad, as you are doing, will not serve those ends. Continuing to bring to attention the violent aspects of the Muslim faith is exactly what people don't do to Christianity and Judiasm (or any other religion for that matter). Implying that it should be gone, as you are doing, is no different than a Muslim person trying to get rid of you for being non-Muslim.

In fact, I'll go a little further and say that the perspective you've taken is exactly the perspective of Muslim extremists. The only difference between you and a terrorist is you haven't quite gotten there. You're still only talking about how bad it is, rather than doing anything about it. Why? I don't know. Maybe you're suppressing that ultimate conclusion to keep your morality. Maybe you're living too comfortable a life and don't want to lose your lifestyle. Maybe you're a coward and trying to incite other people to do what you can't. Maybe it's a combination of multiple factors.

That is, of course, the solution. You can't exactly make people cowards, but you can allow them better lives, and promote less extreme versions of their ideology. You can promote the moderate aspects instead of putting the entire religion of Islam on the defensive. You can denounce government leaders or religious leaders who hold extreme viewpoints, and maybe not prop them up as allies or business partners. You can help make the extremists poor and the moderates wealthy, the extremists weak and the moderates powerful, thereby setting role models who are moderate rather than extreme. These things will help, maybe not right away, but over the course of a generation or two, things will change.

What you're saying and trying to imply will not.

I'll only accept it as evidence if it shows Neil shot first.

I'm not sure I get your point. How are costs going to go up with net neutrality? Your pipes are laid. If you don't lay new pipes, you're not incurring any new costs.

Net neutrality is about what goes through those pipes. As an analogy, your sewer company wants to charge Pepsi money for your piss that's from Aquafina water, and charge Coca-Cola money for your piss that's from Dasani, or limit the flow rate so that your toilet gets backed up if you drink any of those products. And what's more, your sewer company is doing this because they have their own water bottle company that they want you to use. Net neutrality just says your sewer company must accept whatever liquid waste comes out of your house equally, irrespective of the size of your sewer pipe. If the sewer company doesn't want or can't handle so much of your shit, they shouldn't have put in such large pipes out of your home in the first place (fortunately, there are regulations and building codes that manage this bit for real sewer companies and sewer systems).

And this article reads as alarmist, against net neutrality no less. It's not the most reliable of sources.

Without having been there myself, Wheeler may only have talked about considering the reclassifying, and he may or may not have said anything about exceptions to the regulations after reclassification.

It's far too early to celebrate, especially considering the unreliably biased source. I'd definitely wait and see.

You can't regulate the Internet, only the companies operating on it. The Internet is just a bunch of interconnected networks. If you create a completely separate collection of networks that's sufficiently large enough, you could also call it the Internet, say Internet 2 (oh wait, that's taken already).

I have no problems with regulations on how companies behave, especially when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. But it sounds like you do.

While I don't disagree on the HOA part (which is a completely separate and irrelevant matter to the idea that leaving shit outside your front yard is douchey), leaving props or anything jarring or glaring on your front yard is about as douchey as blasting your music through your earphones on a train or bus. While it's not illegal (in most transit systems), it's certainly inconsiderate when it isn't the accepted social norm.

I wouldn't use the word "douchey" specifically for this situation; I think the proper term is rude.

That's not true. Most national health care covers the day-to-day things, like check ups in public clinics and hospitalizations in public hospitals. They only cover a portion of visits to private institutions and I believe they don't cover things like cosmetic surgeries (like removing a mole).

There's still a place for health insurers with national health care. It's just a much smaller, less lucrative market. With national health care, the insurance companies would have to design and offer an actual product. That's the undesirable element (from the perspective of the people running the place here).

Yes, but they're mostly used by foreigners visiting the place. Which means it's possible they were occasionally proxying through one of those foreign machines. That's far more likely than North Korea actually, though it's also possible North Korean hackers went in (proxy-less) and dug around after the initial breach.

Hackers don't "get sloppy" technologically. They have scripts to prevent that. They get sloppy in the real world.

This is why we need cert pinning. I use CertPatrol on Firefox currently. Even if I can't do anything about MITM proxies, I know about it at least and adjust my surfing behavior accordingly.

Unfortunately, there's currently no way for a site to say, "hey, I just changed my cert from an old one to a new one, don't mind the difference." I have to take it on faith that the new cert is replacing an old, expiring cert (or a few months back, a SHA2 cert replacing a SHA1 cert). That, and Twitter and quite a few other sites use 50 different certs, distributed across five or six domain names. The constant pop-up gets real annoying, especially when their servers are slowly phasing to a new cert from an old one.