Welcome back Glenn Beck! Hey you should really make an account here so we can all subscribe to your slashdot RSS feed.

Agreed. On mine, my wife's, and my Dad's machines the on-machine backup is not in their home directory. It is a snapshot that is copied elsewhere. (off-site)

The question is, in which OS is privilege escalation most likely?

When Linux implements a font rendering kernel-level remote exploit feature, then it will be the year of the Linux desktop I suppose.

If justice is unavailable, I'd settle for an "accident". Those happen all the time, and can be quite gruesome.

The hormel product, Spam, has been around for some time and I've always thought of that as the 1st artificial meat. Perhaps it's just being picky about semantics, but wouldn't this be some sort of 1st genetically created artificial meat?

Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain;

Can't be any more disgusting than the modern intensive farm where chickens are swimming in their own shit and disease-ridden pigs are injected with endless cocktails of drugs and hormones to keep them alive long enough to put into your hot dogs.

This vat-grown stuff will probably be far healthier.

Yeah, so the hypothetical extreme is ... hypothetical.

If not complete, at least there could be some change. If someone is punching you in the face once a minute and they don't stop completely, but they do stop punching you every other minute, that's an improvement. In my book.

But maybe your definition of "improve" requires that there be a complete change?

We run a small IT services firm. Small enough that "management" does a fair portion of the work. What we came up with is that every employee can choose whether or not they want to be on-call (with absolutely no pressure to be in our out of the schedule). We then scheduled the people to be on call without pay. If a call happened to come in during off hours, we would charge double our normal rates for the service, and the technician performing the labor would keep half. If you want to have the chance of making extra money, they you get participate. If your life is too busy to be on call: opt out. So far so good, but then we don't get a lot of calls during holidays.

Ha! I wish...

1) Cold standby Dell PowerEdge 2850 server refusing to power up after sitting idle (i.e. off) for a couple of months. It was only a couple of months old and idling in a real data center.

2) All six 'enterprise grade' SCSI SCA hard drives in another Dell PowerEdge 2850 failing one after another in a period of three weeks. It was only six months old and living in a real data center.

3) Dell Inspiron 6400 dying just inside the warranty period. Dell returns the laptop with a 120GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM when it was originally ordered, shipped and received with a 160GB drive and 2GB of RAM. Ooopsy! where did that disk and memory go?

4) Change the shipping address on personal account via the Dell web site order system. Place an order right after changing the shipping address. Order system pulls out and puts in the old address instead of the new one. Immediately call Dell to have the shipping address changed to the billing (i.e. correct) address. Person in India says no problem, he will fix it. Order never shows up. Call Dell. Another person in India tells me they don't fix the shipping address (even to the billing address) due to "security" reasons. After more phone calls, she person in India tells me they will refund the order to the credit card due to loss of shipment. Dell never refunds the order amount. Lesson learned: Dell Customer Service outright lies to the customer.

Over the last few years, I've bought well over $1 million worth of Dell laptops, desktops, servers and monitors for various customers. And you still get fucked around by them.

What's to stop a nation or group of nations from attacking Eyl in the Puntland region and bringing the problem to some sort of conclusion? Didn't the American Marines do something akin to this with the Barbary States in the late 18th century?

So if I spend a year to produce a product and then make a monetary profit in the first week it goes on sale then my product should immediately become free and I shouldn't receive any more money for it? Who decides how much profit I should make before my product becomes free, the state? It was my understanding that in a capitalist economy that I make a product, and sell it at whatever price I think will make me the most money based upon demand.

Yes. I don't know where the hell your from, but here EVERY time I go down to the Nissan dealer and try to get another copy of an XTerra they charge me for it. Even if I just want a backup copy.

I'm not really sure what the analogy is you're trying to make here. You pay once for a song and then you can listen to it as much as you please. If you're buying the same exact song more then once then your doing it wrong.

Because a digital picture of a car is not a car. A digital recording of a song IS a song. What is your suggestion, that a band play one concert, an artist paint one painting, a movie have one showing, and charge enough for it to make up for the production costs and then let digital replicas be free thereafter?

Or does it make just a wee bit more sense that if you want their digital product that you pay for that file with the agreement you won't share it with other people, and if the price is more then you wish to pay, then you simply don't buy it until price is lowered to a value YOU deem acceptable? In your case apparently, you should wait until they offer it for free.

Playing the Devil's advocate: He also knows just how far he can push the legal envelope and that also takes well thought out claims and statements. In other words, just because he is a Stanford educated lawyer with former clients such as Pixar and Apple, doesn't mean he is incapable of these acts.

I am so tired of it phrased this way as it makes it sound. You make it sound like Obama brought in this secret treaty with him to screw everyone for the media interests benefit. The treaty was started long before the current president was in office. So yes its same boss but same agenda.

Check the data. CO2 FOLLOWS temperature increase, not the other way around as seems to be the common mis-conception. The coldest period in the last half-billion years had 10 times the CO2 levels that we have today.

Water vapor is a much more significant "greenhouse gas" anyway. So, cut down on the hot beverages.

Except gift tax is different, and you could be hit with about a 70% tax on it if it's done incorrectly.
"Big deal, just pay the tax?" "Duh?"
  Do you do this professionally like I do? I just want to be sure we're on the same playing field here.

Giving it to a friend is, again, a gift in the eyes of the IRS. They WILL see it, and they WILL tax it. You can't just get rid of your money and expect them to turn a blind eye if you're breaking the law.

Gambling at a casino is a patronage. You are paying for entertainment.

StackOverflow has a very simple well defined purpose: answering programming questions. I don't quite see how moderators/admins would ever have much reason for abuse on that site, especially as all the voting is done by the community or the one asking the question. There is some room on deciding what is ontopic and what is offtopic, but the core is pretty clear.

Slashdot, unlike say Digg or Youtube, has a discussion and moderation system that actually works. And having such a system encourages users to write useful comments and it also encourages moderators to give useful moderations. With other sites just trying to read a discussion or follow a thread is already a PITA, having a mod system limited to up down votes on top of that, instead of Slashdots Funny, Informative, Offtopic, etc. just encourages rating on agreement instead of on quality of the comment. On Youtube the video upload can also play censor and remove any comments or lock them, which makes it pretty much impossible to comment on a controversial video. Having a character limit and a crap UI just guarantees that nobody will ever write a useful comment on that system.