It's not quite that simple. When B purchases the data, the contract between you and A doesn't just disappear. B purchases the data subject to the contract. Since there is no provision in the contract that it's not transferable (at least not on RS's end), that's a normal and acceptable thing to do with a contract. That's not a guarantee that they won't do the most nefarious thing with it that they can get away with, but simply putting up a torrent of it probably won't fly. In fact, that's exactly what the NY AG is talking about here. RS received the data under an agreement. They can't breach that agreement just because they're going bankrupt.

That their culture was steeped in something does not mean that every individual is obsessed with it. American culture is obsessed with a bunch of people named Kardashian, but all I know about them is that there are several of them, and I think one of them is named Kim or something.

And racist or not, yes, Japanese culture was obsessed with killing and torture. It had been for a very, very long time.

I call BS. Before the atomic bombs, Japan's strategy was to basically arm every citizen and make the invasion of the mainland such a bloody, costly quagmire for the Allies that they would negotiate favorable peace terms. Even the Wikipedia article on Surrender of Japan has a deeper understanding of the issue than whatever you're making up. Even after Hiroshima, the Supreme Council voted against surrender. They thought that maybe the U.S. only had one bomb, or that it lacked the will power to use it again. After Nagasaki (and the Soviet invasion), the Supreme Council still didn't want to surrender, so they tortured a captured U.S. P-51 pilot, and he told them that the U.S. had at least 100 atomic bombs (he was lying). But the cabinet still split on whether to surrender. It took the emperor basically begging the cabinet, for the sake of the millions who were about to be slaughtered, to persuade them to vote in favor of surrender.

Modern navel-gazing revisionist historians really don't appreciate how truly warlike and blood-soaked the entire Japanese culture was before 1945. They were obsessed with killing and torture. The Japanese surrender and subsequent disarmament fundamentally transformed the entire nation.

It's U.S. Patent 8,981,261, issued Mar. 17, 2015. It is an "actual patent."

No, they aren't. (See part II, perpetual motion machines lack utility.) So you are partly wrong and partly right. You absolutely do not need a working prototype to get a patent. Many, many patents are issued without a prototype. But there is a specific basis for rejecting perpetual motion machines. (And yes, I am an actual, honest-to-goodness patent attorney, so I am not just making stuff up. I have filed many applications without a working prototype, and have turned away inventors when they have brought me what amounted to perpetual motion machines.)

That's not the point.

Terrorism isn't about making the statement "We can hurt easy targets". It's about the statement "we can hurt any target."

The World Trade Center was a giant building. With control of a plane, it would have been easy to hit. The terrorist aspect is that the hijackers interrupted a regular normal daily routine to commit their chosen atrocity. Now, it's doxing. ISIS is claiming that they have supporters in the US who are willing to kill anyone with a name and an address.

Sure, they've picked a few soldiers now, but the subtext is that their targets could be anyone. A few articles later on the front page, there's discussion of video gamers calling in SWAT raids. 4Chan makes a point of identifying anyone for any reason for the fun of it. Anyone paying enough attention to understand what ISIS is threatening today knows that they could end up a target next week, and it's probably too late to scrub their records from public systems. There is no defense against the doxing, and if ISIS really does have a hidden network of bogeymen in the United States, there's nowhere to hide.

That's the real message ISIS is saying here: You could be next if you piss us off. Bow in fear, praise our particular flavor of deity, surrender all of your free will to our self-interested leader, and so on and so forth.

I'm pretty sure this predates Red Dwarf.

Your "gut feeling" is also often wrong, but you don't notice because of your confirmation bias.

The paranoia's adorable, but here in the real world, everything I do is a balance between risk and reward.

Sure, our data could be sold off, but that's what contract lawyers are for, just like any other business deal. Sure, I risk a malevolent company holding my data hostage, but even at increased prices, it's still cheaper than handling the data myself. Sure, I could be using the same rack a terrorist uses, but he could also be renting office space in the same building we use.

My company could, of course, buy its own building, own its own servers, manage all of its own data, and run all of its own processing... and then promptly go bankrupt, because the cost to do that is too high for the extremely limited benefit.

Well, yes...

The problem is that we don't know what the problems will be. Today, Network neutrality is the hot-button issue the FCC is finally forced to deal with, but tomorrow, who knows? Maybe we'll have to have regulations on compliance (or not) with encryption-busting wiretaps, DNS hijacking, advertisement injection, or something completely different.It's taken long enough for the FCC to move on this that we've already had a few cases of effective extortion by an ISP, and maybe those issues will be even more problematic.

The solution, then, is to bring the FCC in as an advocate for the American citizen, since that's pretty much the government's primary job. This establishes a process where the FCC can say "You're not breaking rules now, but you're getting really close" and give the ISPs a chance to avoid sinking investment capital into systems that will be outlawed as soon as people notice. Cooperating with regulators, especially by asking permission rather than forgiveness, is also a great way to reduce future penalties if the FCC's policies do turn against them.

If the ISPs' new business models don't piss off the FCC, then they don't have to worry about new regulation in the short term. Only ISPs with predatory business models to hide should be worried.

Not quite the same ring to it...

But let's be honest, most of the people outraged by this article don't know who either one is. I didn't until I read TFA.

The upside is that my problems are now someone else's problems.

I no longer need to manage my long-term backups for my team's projects. They go off to a cloud provider, and if we really need something, we can get it back, and I don't have to worry about keeping tapes or disks around, and I don't have to be the one going through the library to find some old media. Data is encrypted prior to archival, so privacy isn't really a big deal.

I no longer have to worry about constant availability. If my local servers go down for a few minutes, maybe a user will notice. If they're down for an hour, I'll probably get an annoyed email, but I will get that email because our constant-availability services are hosted elsewhere.

Now, I do still have local servers to manage. I do still keep a decent number of nines, and I do still make my nightly backups, but I don't need to be managing every aspect of every problem. I can push that responsibility elsewhere, and make my workload more manageable without bringing on significantly more risk.

The unspoken assumption behind this proposal is that yes, Obama does want the uninterested and uninformed to vote, because he assumes they will trend Democrat. Some of the Democrats' greatest strongholds are high-density urban centers where both education and income levels are low. So Obama extrapolates that out and decides that means that mandatory voting will be a big windfall for Democrats, and give them a one-party lock on government.

I suspect that the reality wouldn't be as rosy for them as they're hoping. I could see it being a boon for third parties, as people who have no interest in the two major parties are compelled to find a candidate they don't hate.

Who has won the case of SCO v. IBM? Why, IBM's lawyers, of course.

There are already a lot of suggestions for which particular package to use, so I'll contribute my thoughts.

I've used RT. It worked.

The main feature that helped me move my (financial services) office from word-of-mouth to proper tracking is that RT supported submitting issues by email. We already used internal email extensively for other workflows, so it was easy for me to convince people to send an email to <project>@tracking.<domain>, and they'd get an emailed response showing the ticket number and a link where they could follow the progress.

RT let me run different projects (which in my case usually meant only 1-3 people) separately, and each project had nice charts showing how many open issues they had to work on. Managers loved that, because they could see who was overloaded and by how much. Each user was also able to create their own dashboard to display when they logged in, so they could get a to-do list first thing in the morning.

For each project, I could modify what information was needed when a ticket was created. Almost the entire ticket form was customizable, so that was adapted to the project needs. For our financial advisors, they had simple forms with a customer name and a description field. Traders had buy and sell forms with security symbols, amounts, account numbers, et cetera.

I haven't been in a position to manage very many trackers, so maybe these features are standard-issue. Maybe something else will work for you, but like it said, RT worked for my needs.