That's the service they pay for, not having to "learn computers". IT is the data janitors. Most actual janitors don't despise the people they clean for, you know (of course, most actual janitors don't get hassled constantly either).

It's more like "is there anything else we can try to save Detroit from the evil non-Detroit manufacturers". Sadly, there's no saving Detroit.

"Classified" is a vague term, but computers holding "confidential" materials were affected (secret and above is a whole different world of computing). The machines were rootkitted by a foreign-owned company, and that rootkit phoned home. The DoJ was not amused.

Now that's a good problem to occupy the attention of Google's "UI designers", who clearly have nothing useful to do with their time!

If they brick many US government computers, and it was deliberate they're in deep. The DoJ isn't so vigorous for consumer protection, but screw with government computers, especially those holding confidential information, and they get quite upset.

Bad analogy. If this was deliberate, which seems likely, there's no legal loophole which lets you destroy someone else stuff. With a court order you can go after unsold inventory with a vengeance, but not consumer gear.

None of which will matter if they end up bricking government PCs, no matter what their excuse is.

Sony was slapped with a fine so large the shareholders winced. The CEO resigned. The DoJ said they got the benefit of the doubt that the effect on government computers was unintended, but if Sony didn't learn the DoJ would simply ... end ... Sony America.

The NSA disagrees: all email ever sent is stored now, in their datacenters, next to the recordings of every voice call for the past decade. Your tax dollars at work..

That's good info, but they do push their annoying-as-fuck unneeded "improvements" by default. I'm tired of it - I've migrated my important email to Outlook.com now, and I'm sorting out my personal email now (harder to change as I search history more there than the financial stuff).

I've said it before on /., but I'll repeat it: Outlook.com doesn't suck. Gmail was the only sane answer 12 years ago, but my how times have changed.

Through the class-action lawsuit settlement, one presumes. This is pretty far over the line, and is likely criminal if it breaks any US government gear.

In the Sony rootkit fiasco, the DoJ made it clear that the only reason Sony would continue to exist in America was the presumption that the damage to government computers wasn't intentional. This was clearly intentional.

Indeed. This will end badly for whoever thought this was clever. You'd think companies would have learned from the Sony rootkit fiasco, but no.

FTDI just bought a ticket to the "fuck with the DoJ lottery". If they happen to brick anything used by the US Government for any official purpose, they're a winner! Who's that at the door, Ed McMahon with a giant check? No, it's the the DoJ with a giant fine! You may also have won: "being made an example of", with complementary federal prison time!

I've had banks screw that up, is the thing. Wells Fargo, is there no paperwork you can't get wrong?

The power to tax is the power to destroy, and I rather suspect that's the goal here: to limit the access of the masses to Western culture in a way that won't spark rebellion. Depressing, really.

PowerPoint - nothing else even comes close. As engineers we don't care about it, but there are just as many people who live and die by the PowerPoint presentation (literally in some cases, as the US military leadership is sadly all about the PPT these days).

SmartArt is freaking magic for some people. It's exactly the sort of automation that LaTeX would be great at, but presented visually, not as "yet another programming language for those geeks." Like VI or EMACS, PowerPoint will always be with us: it's that central to a culture.