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Comment Hawaii? (Score 1) 75

Ummm... hasn't anyone told these scientists that Hawaii is the Pacific headquarters of the US Navy, including such things as nuclear powered aircraft carriers and nuclear powered submarines? I would think this is a horrible place to run an experiment given the fact that you would never know if the results were due to a submarine entering, leaving, or patrolling....

Comment Re:Why are there so few black engineers? (Score 1) 397

Many places have had wages taken so high that there is insufficient teacher presence in halls, yards and stairwells that bullying flourishes in these areas, and this bullying chills many black students into mediocrity.

I think you are reading more into the issue than "high wages" for teachers causing a lack of teachers. If teachers charged the city/state like lawyers do for every minute that they worked, you would see that teachers are far from underpaid even at your "wages taken so high" rates that you currently claim. Even with summer "off", and not including time spent at "teacher meetings" or pre/post school year, teachers in primary and secondary schools work on average just 100 hours less than a person with a 40 hour work week does across the entire year. If the pre/post school year time, and days that teachers are required to report when students do not are included, teachers work more hours during the 180 day school year than a normal person does across the entire 260 day work year.

To be quite honest, I think teachers should be paid by the minute, just like lawyers charge. Maybe then we might actually have teacher salary that reflects the work they put in and people like you would see the actual time spent to do the job. Remember, when the students go home, the teachers still need to grade assignments/tests, create tests, update lesson plans, student learning plans, input grades into school grading software, possibly hold office hours for after/before class assistance, hold shifts covering detentions, call parents, hold parent teacher conferences, etc., etc.. All of which adds up to a lot of time over the 6 hour 40 minute "school day" that you think is the end of the time a teacher needs to be on the clock...

Comment Re:hmmm (Score 1) 104

If the security industry at large actually knew what they were doing, websites wouldn't be instituting such asinine password rules, and my own employer wouldn't have recently cited "industry standard practice" as a reason for requiring I include special characters in my domain password.

But the security industry does know what they are doing. The "industry standard practice" for special characters is to limit the ability of a brute force attack of your password. By requiring a special character, they increased the search space needed to find the password. For an 8 character length password requiring lower case letters, there are 8*26 possible passwords. Add upper case letters, and there are 8*52 possible passwords. Add numbers and there are 8*62 possible passwords. Add special characters and there are 8*94 possible passwords. This requirement fights a specific type of attack vector.

Are there other attack vectors? Sure, and they too have their own security rules to mitigate the chances of a successful attack.

Comment Re:hmmm (Score 1) 104

This isn't about the hacking groups being able to hurt anyone. It is about doing proper security and handling of personal information. The data was being stored improperly, end of the discussion. It doesn't matter if a hacker group then hacked the website or not and discovered the data and stole it. The data should never have been there to begin with for the hackers to get to, and that is the problem. However, doing things "right" costs money. Businesses and organizations need to know that cutting corners with personal information will not be tolerated, and heavily fined, so much so that it is cheaper to do the work correctly than it is to not do it correctly and pay the fines.

Comment Re:So what happens (Score 1) 253

You assume their logs will even record that data. And even if that happens, the FBI/Secret Service will claim that they simply did not recover the exact piece of hardware that you used because you either a) hid it b) spoofed the MAC Address or c) got rid of it. The benefits of the a) and c) arguments are that they don't need to recover incriminating evidence on your other devices (i.e. CP, etc.) because you also only used that particular device, but with the "facts" of the logs and your username/password usage, they know for a fact that you had such a device and did such activity because they have the logs, and the logs do not lie.

Comment What a load of steaming BS (Score 1) 389

In other words, he concluded, Microsoft is "making two meals now instead of one. That way we can provide steak for the grown men, and skim milk for the babies."

If that's the case, why not allow power users to turn off the settings they find annoying? "We needed casual users to learn this interface,"

What a load of crap. If it truly was setup with Metro for casual, desktop for power users, then you would be able to select one or the other. If by default, Metro was used, and they made it some normal "difficult" to get to setting that had to be edited under the system management areas, your "casual" users would have no clue how to make that change and would thus, be using Metro. We also wouldn't have Metro on the SERVER editions being used PRIMARILY BY CORPORATE PROFESSIONAL IT DEPARTMENTS!

This entire interview is just PR hogwash trying to put a good light on the horrible mistakes of Metro for desktop user interface. It works perfectly fine for a tablet, or phone, but it utterly useless and time wasting on a desktop or laptop that has a keyboard and mouse.

Comment Re:Maybe yes, maybe no? (Score 2) 716

If you are a contractor then almost certainly it should be fixed for free. You are paid to do a job and if it wasn't done right the first time then you need to make it right or expect not to get many more contracts if you leave behind in your wake bugs that either go unfixed, or you charge additional to fix.

I disagree with this blanket statement. If you are a sole contractor who bid on a contract to produce software that does XYZ and it was a fixed price contract, than yes, I would say you need to fix the bugs. But that typically isn't the case for contract workers. They are contracted to fill required services, including development, and code debugging. If they are not satisfied with the level of code produced by the contractor, they have every right to end the contract, but asking for code debugging to be done off the clock is outside the scope of work.

Comment Re:Wrong again (Score 3, Informative) 510

The poster said nothing about cancer. But what has been found true is the human body's reaction to the sweetener in which insulin is still produced even though there is no sugars that it can attach to, which drops the blood sugar levels to an extreme low level. This DOES have health implications.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/261179.php

Comment Re:Bury those cables (Score 1) 291

You are assuming that the long term costs are footed by the company themselves. For instance, most places have insurance policies that will pay for damages from storms/weather and the drivers of the vehicles (and/or their insurance companies) pay for it when they are involved. Those prices are SUBSTANTIALLY lower than the costs involved in getting new "right of ways", checking against documented and undocumented subterranean lines (water, sewer, gas, oil, etc.) as well as the costs to actually excavate and bury the lines.

Comment But the goverment doesn't create jobs! (Score 1) 227

Seriously, you are 100% correct in what you say, but according to the GOP, the government doesn't create jobs, and thus, the government can't hire qualified people to do work, but instead needs to outsource it all to private industry, all the while not having the expertise needed to even evaluate the private companies it is contracting to do the work.

Comment Re:Reset? (Score 1) 599

That is/was actually best practices for a secured network. One of the exploits for gaining access to the network required rebooting the network equipment so that it would load code injected by the attacker either from local/physical access or remote access. By having all the settings wipe, the attacker would trip monitoring sensors (due to the network segment going down) as well as not be able to gain any more information about the network from the device that was breached.

However, usually when this is done, a network backup copy of the config is located somewhere that the admin knows. Terry very well could have had such backup copied, but since the city had already fired him, he felt no obligation to give them any more information than what was already documented (which very well may have been saved in a readme, or disaster recovery document that was available somewhere on the network, but again, he was fired on the spot and thus, should not have had any obligation to tell them where to go looking other then between his cheeks as he walked out the door).

Comment Re:History rewritten (Score 4, Informative) 599

He was asked to give the passwords over during a meeting with several people who had not signed the appropriate papers for having said access and had not been documented by information/system security for having a right to the passwords. There was also a conference call being held on the phone in the room with unknown persons who would have then also been privy to the password divergence. Terry simple say "no" to diverging the passwords in that location, at that time, in that manner. In his contract, he had a duty to protect the passwords, and he was still an employee at that time. Giving up the passwords in that location at that time would have been a breach of his contract and he could have been fired on the spot for doing so. He was placed in an impossible situation, where they were firing him if he gave them the passwords or didn't give them the passwords. At that time, no one from security had authorize anyone else to have the passwords, and as such, Terry did the only thing he felt was correct, which was to attempt to give them to the only person who was in charge of the system, which was the mayor, who could then give them to whoever he felt like, in whatever manner he thought he should since it was not written in any contract that he had to protect the passwords or be fired for giving them to someone who had not filled out the proper paperwork and been given approval to have them and doing so in a location where only the person who had been authorized to have them would receive them.

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