It's very Science. You tinker with the disease so it'll no longer kill you and then expose yourself so that your autoimmune response will be triggered. This results in antibodies ready to fight off the full strength version should you ever come in contact with it.

That's what a vaccine is.

The concept was discovered back when someone thought to wonder why milk maids always had smooth skin. It turned out they didn't get smallpox like everybody else. But every one of them caught smallpox's weaker cousin, cowpox, early in life.

Catch is, tinkering with a disease so it won't kill you is only about 99.999% successful. The other 0.001% of the time it kills you anyway. So you don't want to take a vaccine for every conceivable disease... just for those you're likely to come in to contact with.

The reason computer security jobs go begging is that anyone competent to run the checklists is bored to tears by them and perfectly competent at so many other things.

Er... a vaccine is generally a weakened form of the actual disease you're trying to protect against. It's a little concept called "immunotherapy." One doesn't create a vaccine by running away from toxins, one embraces the toxins in a manner that stimulates the body to protect itself.

I use scripts wrapped around tried-and-true tar for my backups. And since I routinely build new servers from backups of a comparable one, I know they work.

Does anybody still use the fsdump utilities for their filesystem? Did anyone ever?

I have a laptop loaded with books and some portable solar panels to charge it. My plan is to locate some survivalists and suggest that if they get me through year one, what I bring will see them through years two through ten. Do they want to scrape out an existence as hunter-gatherers or do they want to LIVE?

We went from Edison to Google in only a century. With knowledge preserved, civilization and its comforts can be rebuilt in less than a lifetime.

Assuming I survive being within 10 miles of a probable ground zero for any apocalypse, of course. And hopefully they don't shoot first.

I call B.S. NSA contractors operated thousands of systems with sensitive NSA data running the affected versions of openssl. It's extraordinarily unlikely that they'd have intentionally left a certain important body part swinging in the breeze for years for the sake of an advantage over adversaries. it would have been an insanely gutsy move, the kind requiring you to judge your adversary's data more valuable than your own.

If a banker steals money from the bank, that's a problem with one banker. The a dozen bankers steal money from the bank every week and upon discovery the bank fails to fire them, that's a problem with the bank.

More oversight of the bankers won't fix the problem with the bank.

Yeah, we don't send them to the colony on Molokai Hawaii any more. We've deprived the poor lepers of their tropical paradise.

Ever heard of citizen's arrest?

Only for infractions where the maximum penalty is a small fine. In every other matter, a police officer's testimony carries the same legal weight as anybody else's.

A cop is no more able to injure you and get away with it than anyone else. Indeed, a teenager is much more likely to escape penalty than a cop.

Actually, bounty hunters have far more rights in this respect than cops do. And they're not government employees.

George Zimmerman.

Citizen's arrest.

Then limit the recorders to officers who've received X complaints in the prior 12 months. You know, people for whom there is a reasonable suspicion that they're engaged in bad behavior.

How will you ever get rid of the bad actors if you make it horrible job for anybody who might replace them?

Because they're not. An ordinary citizen can legally do almost anything a police officer can do, even arrest somebody. The biggest difference is that a police officer enjoys qualified immunity to lawsuit if he gets it wrong.

Well I WOULD like to see a few more people prosecuted for perjury. Not just cops.

Last I heard, any member of the public has a right to record a police officer's activity while he's on the job. The courts have repeatedly affirmed it to the point where police interference can cost them their qualified immunity.

His employer has the right too. I think it's a really bad idea because you're more than dangerously close to "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide."

As it turns out, neither does any police officer. They may do it from time to time, just as burglars may break in to your house from time to time, but they don't have the right.

Do you believe it would be wise to give your typical call center employee a gun, a squad car and instructions to arrest lawbreakers?

Call centers offer dehumanizing jobs that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. The last thing in the world I want is for someone who has grown used to that environment, someone who considers it an acceptable form human interaction, to be in charge of whether or not you or I go to jail.

If you have any sense, you don't want that either.