I'm sure the Sales people will be very happy when they receive an e-mail saying "amended contract" with zero attachments. Oh yes.

Right. Because there's no sort of technology that could apply different policies to different people... We all know computers can't do shit like that.

Why are you blaming the users at all? They erred on the side of caution.

Tee hee.. You must not be old enough to remember Outlook or Excel Macros.

I'm old enough to remember the Stoned virus. Anyway, how are incorrectly implemented security models in crappy products the user's problem? Why don't you give the user software that isn't full of holes?

Its rarely about just opening an email. Its about opening attachments in that email, or opening links that lead to sites with malware.

Why are you not stripping attachments from external email? Or are you arguing that stripping attachments isn't a technical measure?

Think about how phishing works. They are trying to get you to open at attachment, or visit a resource which is fake (could be a URL, phone number, etc.) So strip attachments and resource identifiers (URLs, phone numbers) from external email. Problem solved.

If part of your job function requires people outside the company to send you attachments or URLs, then you ought to have received training how to handle those things safely. But for Joe Cubefarmer who's day-to-day function is completely internal to the company, there's no excuse for IT to allow for this stuff to happen.

The problem is 100% technical. How could viewing an email ever result in malware being installed? Somebody failed -- they're called the IT department.

But when every single company does it, what choice will you have? Not give any of them your money? Quit gaming alltogether?

Sounds reasonable to me... Jeez, you guys sound like drug addicts.

For those with a signal processing background, it can be explained like this. The conjugate pair of momentum and position are related to each other by the Fourier transform -- the Fourier transform of the wavefunction in spatial coordinates yields the wavefunction in momentum coordinates. Anybody who has worked with a Fourier transform knows that if the input is band-limited, the output will not be, and vice versa. To know the position of a particle with exactness implies that its wavefunction is impulse-like in the spatial domain, which causes the momentum wavefunction to be a wave that extends infinitely throughout momentum-space. When you squeeze the bandwidth in one domain it grows in the other. Because the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is another Gaussian, a particle with Gaussian distribution in either space or momentum-space constitutes the most localizable wavefunction one could possibly achieve. The limit of the resolution is given by the Heisenberg relation, but this is a purely mathematical result, having nothing to do with measurement technique.

Everyone locks down ARM. It sucks when Microsoft does it, but no more than when Google does it (you can't boot whatever you like on ARM Chromebooks), or Samsung, or Apple, or...

Have you not noticed that tablets and smartphones are dissolving away the PC market? There won't be a big consumer market for x86 for much longer. "It's just ARM" is a really shortsighted assessment.

The fact is that Linus is still in charge of the 800-pound gorilla that Linux has become for one simple reason: he does a great job. He makes good decisions, manages the process well, and generally keeps things moving along well enough that no one is really even tempted to seriously try to fork the kernel in a way that pushes Linus out of the picture.

True, but chances are there is somebody better. Linus got the ball rolling, but how much of that was due to personal awesomeness vs. pure luck and being in the right place at the right time? Is your crush from when you were 14 in high school really the right choice for marriage? Yeah, she was cute, intelligent, and funny, but so are a hundred million other people -- you aren't even looking around.

Linus doesn't suck enough to have been ousted yet, that's all.

What they are doing is creating a "derivative work" by altering the content of the HTML stream you are receiving from the website in order to make the pop-up appear. If you're browing foobar.net when one of these pop-ups appears, perhaps you should contact foobar.net and inform them that Comcast is altering the content of their website to produce an unauthorized derivative work. Nail them with copyright law.

His heart is pure, so his free money scheme has no externalities? All righty, then.

Is YOUR net carbon emission negative? Have you ever bothered to even measure it?

That'll get shot down because it'll violate HIPAA regulations. Collecting medical data without sufficient privacy safeguards.

The ignorance is astounding. HIPAA only applies to medical professionals (and even then, only those who conduct business electronically, which in practice means everyone, but in theory, some backwoods doctor with a paper-only record keeping system, accepting only cash for payment, and no land line could POSSIBLY skirt the law)

There is no law in the United States which generally prohibits storage and processing of medical information. It does not apply to you or to a company making security devices.

I have one child (almost 10 months old.) When working from home, I work in the same general area of the house as where she and my wife are playing, watching TV, reading, and doing all that other stuff you do with a baby. I change most of her diapers while I'm there, and sometimes I take a meeting or do work with her sitting on my lap happily burbling away and grabbing at the keyboard.

Hehehe. Oh, the ignorance of a new parent. Your kid is more like a blob than a child at this point. You haven't even hit the tough shit yet (no, that chronic sleep deprivation in the early months wasn't the hard part).

It makes me sad that someone could run up a $12K monthly electric bill without assigning an environmental cost to where that power was coming from.

Making assumptions is bad.

Before the Bitcoin operation got started, my friend's business was making biodiesel out of local rendered chicken fat and other things. He single-handedly supplied most of the farmers in a 5 mile radius with fuel for their farm operations. Prior to the biodiesel years, he ran the largest privately owned solar grid in the county, providing something like 25 kilowatts back to the grid, for a couple of years solid. He is the most environmentally obsessed person I know, and has certainly contributed far more to the local green economy than he has taken out of it.

The ultimate plan, which did not come to fruition (because of the rising difficulty of mining bitcoin, as I stated earlier), was to completely cover the 40 acre property with an array of solar panels, each panel having a custom GPU mining module installed on the underside -- open air cooling of the machines, solar power for the bitcoins, and it would have qualified as the largest solar array in the United States.

To think that he's some kind of forest-destroying air-blackening capitalist is about the furthest from the truth as you can get. Check your assumptions.

Dude, it's a farm. A fucking farm. 40 acres of red wheat.

He designed the rack system himself, along with custom power supply headers that he had fabbed at a nearby plant. He even tried to reduce equipment costs by hiring a Taiwanese company to produce custom GPU cards for him for $70 a piece (they didn't work very well).

Nobody does that shit anymore. It was like watching Steve Wozniak.