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Comment Replacing the systems... (Score 1) 195

...should be the ultimate goal. Understand the design, get it under basic control and then work with a team (largest you can muster) of diligent specialists to design replacement systems that are firewalled off from the original. The reasons for this are twofold:

1) No matter how well documented, well designed, etc. the system is, your knowledge of it will never be perfectly complete and you'll never be able to turn around changes with the same degree of confidence and alacrity as the original admin.

2) Your Career -- If you bend over backwards to make the system work perfectly the original designer will still get most of the credit. If you try your best but the system falls short of expectations, you will take the blame as the new "owner" of the system. It's a lose-lose proposition. Building something new, something that you can demonstrate is supported by more than just one person (unlike the original) will be a feather in your cap.

Comment Re:good (Score 2) 783

Killing the city of Jericho, Sodom and Gomorra because they don't agree with you is a good thing, while having a wank is a mortal sin. Burning oxes before the sabbath because the odor pleases the lord is good, but putting a dick up one's bottom is a mortal sin. If two people have sex outside of a narrowly defined set of circumstances, it is OK to stone them to death in the village square, but it is a horrible sin to show someone a breast.

Not all religions agree with one another, and some (i.e. Unitarians) are actually fervent supporters of gay rights.

These examples just serve to illustrate the complete moral bankruptcy of many religious writings. These books were not exactly written during the renaissance.

I don't recall saying anything about books but, um, okay.

[...] but it has been proven that schizophrenia and epilepsia do cause religious visions, and hence religious beliefs.

No, religious beliefs are caused by someone (typically family, ministers, etc.) telling them to you, and then by you believing them. Psychotic episodes don't cause completely original viewpoints to come into ones mind.

There is a researcher called Dick Swaab in the Netherlands that has done interesting work on simulating certain attacks by use of electrodes in humans and has thus been able to conjure up end-of-life visions, out-of-body experiences and religious epiphanies with the flick of a switch.

You may be interested to know that there is a researcher in the US called Feelma Vulva who has done some even more exciting work in the study of people responding to things that weren't actually said. Check it out.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 783

Do please enlighten me: Is stoning your brother's wife for adultery right or wrong? Is killing gay people right or wrong?

I don't need to enlighten you. All I do is toss your questions into my Relig-o-Matic 3000 system-for-telling-right-from-wrong and...*poof*...out pops the answer, thus proving my point. By the way, most religious leaders would quite obviously find those things to be wrong. How you and so many others (with similarly sized chips on your shoulders) can't see that is beyond me.

Hint: There's the religious answer, and there's the answer deemed acceptable in modern Western civilisation.

...because religion neither exists in, nor is a part of, modern Western civilization?

Face it, religious dogma and indoctrination is WRONG. I don't need a fucking religion to tell me that.

Life is not a series of black-and-white dilemmas with obvious answers. For the not-so-obvious issues, the theist turns to his faith while others may turn to the study of ethics. And then there are those like yourself who seem to deny the existence of such issues while having misplaced knee-jerk reactions to the (completely unspecified) beliefs of others.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 783

This perpetuates a society which can't distinguish between right and wrong,

Huh? The world's religions, each and every one of them, are a system for doing just that!

real and imagined,

Religion does not cause schizophrenia. That is a scientific fact whether you choose to believe in it or not.

and fosters abuse of the minority (be it communists, pedophiles, [...]

Yeah! Especially those darn Unitarians, always abusing pedophiles and other minorities!

Comment Re:How were they storing the passwords before? (Score 2, Interesting) 497

From TFA:

[...] this can only mean one of two things, according to Kaspersky:

        Store full plaintext passwords in their database and then compare the first 16 chars only.
        Calculate the hash only on the first 16 and ignore the rest.

I’m fairly certain Microsoft isn’t stupid enough to go with the first option. Storing passwords in clear text would be a disaster,

I wouldn't doubt for a second that MS would go with the first option. They are, after all, competing with Yahoo :-) Also, wasn't it Microsoft that came up with the oxymoronical term "reversible encryption"?

On the other hand, Hotmail was originally built on FreeBSD by non-MS types, so who knows? To this day I still find it amusing to think of all the difficulty they must have had porting the platform to Windows.

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