I fear you may be right, and that's exactly why they don't do it more often... but I think that also underscores my point a bit. Shouldn't they work to get it to the point where users won't be impacted?

Netflix does this pretty aggressively and users don't seem to notice. Though I realize for most companies I am being very idealistic.

The founding fathers also did not see a right to freedom for blacks, suffrage for women, suffrage for non-property owning white men, or mixed-race marriage.

Funny enough, most openly discussed the need for protection of minority (in the original sense) rights in a democracy. Given that they were at the forefront of "freedom for all" in the context of the norms of their time, it is fairly likely that they would support all of those rights if they adopted modern norms.

Either way, it's all very irrelevant. The founding fathers were very clear about both 1) the separation of church and state and 2) protection of minorities from majorities. These, combined with the 14th amendment and mixed-race marriage protections form a solid legal basis.

If the system is architected well, shouldn't all of those steps be automated... including monitoring and failover success/failure?

Not sure on this particular piece of software (though it looks handy!), but recommend you take a look at this Windows 7 OEM Activation article.

There normally is hardware magic for the OEM copies, but I'm not really sure how this one deals with SLIC.

I'm really too tired to pull links in response to this clueless tripe today. Spies can and do prevent wars by conveying credible information regarding intent, capabilities, and plans.

A government's public statements cannot be trusted. Verification from reliable assets? Very valuable.

It is extremely likely that a soviet spy/American traitor prevented the Cuban missile crisis from leading to nuclear war. The US was actually planning to invade, and did not know that Cuba both a) already had nukes and b) the Soviets lacked the ability to prevent local commanders from using them (no centralized code system). Woops!

double the admin costs, half the interoperability... for an increased attack surface and a higher increased zero-day count on any given day?

The way I see it, the problem isn't that % of workstations are infected. The problem is that all their data are belong to someone else. I think they'd be better off rearchitecting and rethinking things than mixing OSes for the sake of diversifying IT.

Don't despair! There are new spurious correlations every day. We just need to feed him the sunspot data.

Actually, I do. I find theaters painfully loud and prefer to wear good earplugs when possible.

Citation needed. The celebrity actually has more rights in my fictional case because, effectively, it's easier to appropriate their image.

Look up case law on street photography. You will find that, in most places, there are very few restrictions.

No, that is a completely incorrect interpretation.

Anyone can publish photos taken in public places in a reasonable way (i.e. not using a ladder and a supertelephoto on a sidewalk). They can publish these images in any way, with or without editorial, in nearly any way... as long as it's not exploitative of a protected attribute.

Coca-Cola cannot take a picture of Michael Jordan having a soda at a public event on public property, slap the Coke logo on it, and make that into a marketing campaign. The National Enquirer cannot edit that image to show Michael molesting a child, then publish it. But any person can take the unaltered photo, put it on twitter, and say "Hey, check out this photo of Michael!"

Thank you, I was wondering about that mod. And I'm glad somebody enjoyed the joke

I hate to burst your bubble, but most definitions of "terrorism" explicitly exclude state actors.

You could certainly argue that that is an artificial constraint designed to protect states from the accusation, but then you'd have to come up with a better definition. There are a few out there, but in all honesty, they tend to suck.

Two points.

1) for spinning platters, being able to recover significant amounts of data after even one pass of zeros is a myth. See this article on recovering overwritten data or any of the top google results.

2) SSDs are different, but far easier to wipe if you get a good model. There is an ATA Secure Erase command, and you can use it directly with hdparm on linux. It takes seconds to wipe most SSDs this way.

However, firmware implementation of this is spotty. You will find some studies showing secure erase failures. But the paper is 4 years old, and manufacturers seem to have gotten better. So if you're REALLY concerned about this level of security, encrypt your SSDs and find a manufacturer that properly ATA Sanitize Block Erase.

You never have to trust PHP programmers. Just exploit the vulnerability of your choice and check out their database yourself.

I can't tell if you are denying the similarity between ducks and geese, have not seen a duckwalk in open ranks, or just have some sort of humor aversion.