The preditors will not have to stop flying based on a ruling that the intellectual property of IISI was stolen. See the last clause of the fifth amendment to our Constitution: "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." This means the CIA doesn't need a license, it just needs to be willing to pay just compensation.

Of course, what constitutes "just compensation" tends to be considerably less than fair market value in practice. Fortunately for the tax payors, CIA might have a breach of contract claim against Netezza if the facts are as reported.

Yes, IAAL, but I am not YOUR L.

How on earth did this get modded insightful? Ignorant is more like it.

I guess I shouldn't presume that an institution made up of people is better than the people that make it up? Slashdot, that is.

The Church REQUIRES that instances of paedophilia be reported to the responsible civil authorities. Ratzinger is the one who issued this rule, long before he became Pope, back when he was the head of the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As for long ago, do you blame the church for trying to counsel (read "fix") priests with problems, when that was what all the EXPERTS were telling civil authorities to do? Surely there are problem priests in the Church, but that is not an indictment of the Church itself anymore than bad cops are an indictment of the Police Department. I challange you to actually investigate the FACTS, not just the pontificating (love the irony of that word) of the talking heads and self interested plantiff's counsel, and still come to the conclusion that the Pope has done anything but act in the best interest of the children.

Because if you take $200K and pay off your house and then lose your job, you will have no money to live on. On the other hand, if you keep the $200K and lose your job, you will have sufficient money to live on for several years. This presumes, of course, that you have the discipline to not spend the $200K. Besides, mortgage interest is tax deductable, so you deprive yourself of that benefit to boot.

And I thought glitter went out most of a decade ago. Time to dig into the closent!

. . . everything else comes after that. A small illustration:

When I was system admin for a small brokerage, one of my first tasks was to determine the hardware configuration of every server. There was one particular server that I needed to shutdown in the process. I asked every employee (it was that small) if there were any critical services on that machine. All agreed it was ok to take it off line. For the next 15 minutes, while the machine rebooted, no trading happened because the main program was linking to some libraries that were served off of that server.

I immediately put a new task at the top of my to-do list: reconfiguring the network. Thereafter, production was done on one network and development on another. The router between them would not allow nfs mounts. Production users were not given accounts on development machines. Developers were no longer given the root password, but it was kept in a safe for emergencies.

I know that wasn't what you were asking, but that is the first thing I would take care of.

When I first read the headline, I saw "NASA Discovers Life's Building Blocks in Cement". I figured they had found Jimmy Hoffa.

The most common test for the seizure of currency is a dog sniff. It is little know that cocaine is, in fact, odorless. Drug dogs do not detect cocaine. They detect a biproduct of the production of cocaine called methyl benzoate. Methyl benzoate is a volitile organic compound that dissapates quickly. If a dog hits on it, it is a clear sign not only that the money has been in close contact with cocaine, but that it was RECENTLY so.

Take a look at this case United States v. $30,670 in U.S. Funds, 403 F.3d 448 (7th Cir. 2005). There the court does a good analysis of the available facts. You would need at least 50,000 innocently tainted bills (not dollars, but bills!) for the dog to hit on it.

Of course, this is Slashdot, so I don't know why I would expect someone to know what they are talking about . . .

I think what you have in Mexico is a system where there are so many different identifiers that no one of them is worth much by itself. Here in the United States, it used to be that banks, schools, drivers licenses, health insurance, and, most importn, the credit reporting agencies all used your SSN to identify you. Thus, it was easy to commit identity theft with just your SSN. Now most states will issue you a non SSN drivers license upon request, and many companies are getting away from it as well, but there are still enough that insist on it that giving out your SSN is an invitation to identity theft.

Were it up to me, I would prohibit use of SSNs for any purpose other than social security. I would require the IRS to issue its own identifier to be used for all tax (including banking) related purposes. I was also require IRS and Social Security to allow you to change your number once every 5 years or earlier upon a showing of identity theft. Finally, I would require that the numbers be longer and include some hamming code. But that is just me . . .

Isn't there a theory that if we ever get a formally proven OS that all OSs will instantly vanish and be replaced by something more complex? I think there is a corallary that says this has already happened. Obviously, the proof referred to must be mistaken as my OS is still running as I typ