..and he got terminated from all of his positions.

If it stopped at him being mocked, that would be fine. Still an overreaction, because his comments were taken out of context and completely not understood (perhaps *willfully* misunderstood, as was the case with may who piled on Justine Sacco). But, whatever.

But he also got fired. And that's why this is a serious problem.

"Jet" means any stream of high-velocity low-pressure fluid... like rocket exhaust, or water, or air, accelerated in a ducted fan.

It's a jet device.

He can't sell that exploit. He's already given it away. Here.

Please tell me about the other amazing business strategies you're contemplating. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Brute forcing your own account isn't banned. But it's not rewarded, either. That's what the "If you believe you have found a method to conduct a brute-force or code injection attack, please report it to us without testing it." bit of the rules means.

In other words, no, Bennett, you did not outsmart those meanies in charge of making the rules of this bug bounty system. Your hack wasn't particularly clever, so doesn't get rewarded as if it were. However, the bug report itself is probably valid, and United obviously has some fixing to do. (No failed-PIN limiter? The 1970s called; they'd like their input validation methodology back.)

for support reasons

You're not asking the correct question.

"To support whom?"

I'm going to go one step beyond.

I'm going to market a homeopathic router. Radiated power measured in femtowatts, properly diluted with open air and succussed* correctly, will have an effective wifi range measured in light-years. I figure a good 30C dilution will work fine.

(BTW, if the user doesn't get the proper range from the device in use, it'll be because they didn't hit the router correctly.)

Problem, wifi router market?

In Windows, use the Java Control Panel and select the "Advanced" tab.

At the very bottom of the list, completely out-of-sight unless you scroll aaaaaaal the way down, in a category called "Beware of the Leopard"... no, sorry, I meant "Miscellaneous"... there's a checkbox labeled "Suppress sponsor offers when installing or updating Java".

Of course, by default it's not checked. Because money.

But check it and apply or "OK" the settings change. In the current implementation, this prevents bundling the Ask.com malware with Java upgrades -- it's a pre-opt-out, and you never have to think of it again. (At least, until Oracle decides the option should auto-magically unset itself when the user's not looking. Because money.)

Assuming this option continues to exist in future Oracle Java versions and is honored for the Yahoo tie-in, this would alleviate the pre-opt-in crapware issue. Big assumptions, of course, because Oracle.

(Or alternately, don't install Java if you don't actually need it. Or install OpenJava rather than Oracle's.)

This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

--Clark's corollary to Hanlon's Razor after Clarke's 3rd Law

What Voltaire taught long ago:

Il est dangereux d'avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort.

("It is dangerous to be right when established men are wrong.")

Hence, a record. Seriously, just leave off the opening < on a href? And then post it?

Yea just like non-coding DNA is junk. Does every generation have to make the same hubristic errors?

You're grossly overstating the case here. The fact that non-coding DNA contains essential regulatory information has been known for many decades, long before the modern age of genomics. The label "junk" was applied because nobody knew what most of that DNA did, and it obviously has very low information content compared to genes. But this pejorative never stopped people from studying it or trying to figure out what role it played - of course it imposes a significant metabolic cost on the organism, so why keep it around? We just haven't had mature tools to study it until relatively recently. Despite some sensationalism to the contrary, it's still far from resolved whether and how much it is functional; the best-supported hypothesis that I'm aware of is that it's structurally important and facilitates the 3D organization of the genome in cells in such a way that enhances regulatory control. We certainly don't have any clue how to derive therapeutic applications from our knowledge, unlike coding DNA (i.e. translated into proteins that most drugs target).

The claim that "mainstream biologists assumed that noncoding DNA was junk, and therefore asked the wrong questions" is simplistic nonsense at best, and creationist propaganda at worst. Scientific investigation - especially biology - proceeds on the basis of incomplete evidence all the time, because we have no choice (among other lacunae, we still don't understand what half of all human genes actually do). And unexpected new discoveries or inventions shake up molecular biology on a fairly regular basis - 10-15 years ago, RNA interference was thought to be equally revolutionary. So we always hope for surprises (all research faculty at major universities fantasize about making discoveries like Crispr/Cas), but we have to concentrate on areas of study that we feel are most likely to yield actual results.

I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature

I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankly, I think it would be better for everyone if the patents around Crispr/Cas were limited to specific treatments rather than the general concept. But regardless, any useful therapies are going to involve a great deal of engineering and trial-and-error - and clinical testing, which is going to be the most expensive part. What's the incentive to spend money on this if China ends up copying it? Don't say "for the good of humanity" - if that were the primary goal, money would be far better spent curing various endemic infectious diseases.

1998 may be a "convenient" mile post but it doesn't reflect reality. There was a lot of large scale development going on in C++ in the early & mid-90's. By your measurement, C++ is younger than Java!