The issue with not turning over disks that once held sensitive info is a check against nefarious employees (deliberately not erasing sensitive disks) or bureaucratic bungling (which box did the erased drives go in again?), not mad Russians with electron microscopes.

Yeah, it probably is bullshit.

In fact if you are a multi-millionaire, you could probably find a talented team of attorneys to fight the unlimited resources of the US government for a few years at $500/hr each to argue the point. Maybe you could find some judge to agree with you.

Good luck with that.

Also, how well have gitmo done with the objective scales of justice? Not so good.

You would be charged with murder. Shooting at policemen is a bad idea, whatever the scenario.

The agents, although technically violating some law or policy, were acting in good faith in pursuit of justice.

There's a difference between being responsible and acting in good faith and letting your narrow self-interest damage others.

When a chemical company invents a pesticide or hebicide that enables farmers to grow more food or avoid some sort of difficult or dangerous manual labor, that's a good thing. When pesticide has wider-ranging effects that can negatively effect the greater environment or economic fortunes of others, and that same company obfuscates or actively funds research to deflect attention, that is a bad thing.

Many people who claim to be "capitalists", but who are actually aspiring plutocrats, have a very shallow understanding of how markets work and have picked up this near-religous faith that whatever makes a business happy is good. That's not necessarily true -- business also needs to be a good neighbor. If one of the side-effects of your business activity is contibuting to the destruction of a form of life that is a key part of the food chain, you are an enemy of free markets and our free society.

Since Assange claims to be in regular contact with the US government and leaks lots of stuff of questionable value, there's a good chance that he's a total fraud. Supposedly this was all leaked by that army PFC... so the data have been sat on for months.

If you read magazines like the Economist or Foreign Affairs, you've already read paraphrased summaries of all of this stuff. My guess is that these leaks contain misinformation to misdirect folks like the Chinese who have already hacked State Department networks and probably have a limited collection of these already.

Think that sounds far-out? Just Google "Operation Mincemeat".

I agree with you almost completely. The only exception that I take is assuming that a competent IT staff is available.

This may be a given in industrial settings, but municipal government is an area where you often don't even have an IT function -- the role just doesn't exist in the organization. I would guess that this is even more likely to happen in sewer and water districts, which are often quasi-independent government entities on their own that are dominated by a combination of appointed political hacks who need help tying their shoes and civil engineers who think in terms of pipes and backhoes.

Furthermore, I think any physics or math exam that requires a complex calculator really has a wrong approach. Assuming everyone at this level has already demonstrated their ability to perform arithmetic several times over, the calculator should only be there to free them from making mistakes on the menial number crunching (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, squares, squareroots, proper value of e,Pi, etc...). The exam should test for core concepts: ideas where you simply must understand the knowledge through prior practice and learning.

One problem: In your hypothetical world, where hypothetical students just use their notes and other aids, the students probably don't have a clue, since they can't do basic math because some idiot math teacher back in 4th grade decided that understanding the process of using a multiplication table was enough. And using notes as a reference isn't fair either, since some dumbass english teacher decided that actually having the ability to write legibly was ho-hum in the era of the internet.

If you can't hack using a standard 4 function calculator, than you can't hack physics either.

I also hate to be rude, but most universities require that students speak and read english. While I can appreciate the fact that a Korean may not have the best grasp of written English, I also think it that individual's responsibility to learn the language or work outside of class to create notes in his or her native language. I sat through a number of situations in school where I was struggling with difficult material while foreign students were either talking during exams in their language, "sharing calculators" or similar, blatant examples of cheating that went unchallenged due to the political situation at the university.

After being written up in the campus newspaper, one professor "took a stand" by curving everyone's grade up one letter grade, essentially bribing the class into submission.

It's done in a Mac Business Unit separate from the Office team.

This article is about someone in a third world country who is literally witnessing death and mayhem on his front step and wants to shame the local police into doing something about it. Some folks are skewing the comments to talk about how speedtraps suck, etc.

Some municipalities abuse speed laws for revenue purposes, and some cops write dumb tickets such as your scenario. That's why we have courts.

If you don't believe that speeding is a major factor in car accidents, Google for articles citing NHTSA. Look at the numbers yourself and make your own judgement.

Also consider that you may be a driver with better skills than average. My wife's a great driver... I'd happily hold an uncovered cup of hot coffee while she drives. I'm an awful driver, and my passengers would be chugging the coffee down before I put the car in drive.

There are many drivers on the road who are dumb, illiterate or otherwise inept. Do you trust their judgement?

There are literally hundreds of studies that demonstrate that higher speeds are correlated with a larger number of car accidents. This is particularly true in crowded urban environments and general access highways.

The other big issue regarding speeding in urban environments is that not only does it increase the risk of accident, but it increases the impact of the accident as well -- the energy involved in a 60 mph crash is double a 40 mph crash. So when some idiot drives 60 mph on a sidestreet and hits a parked car, he's more likely to hurt himself and other and will likely cause much more damage.

The top 6 causes of US car accidents are, in order: distraction (including rubbernecking), fatigue, drunk driving, speeding, aggressive driving and weather.

Also, speed limits have minimal or no measurable impact on traffic density. In the US, traffic density is generally a byproduct of too much road infrastructure. Read about the impact of the Triborough Bridge on NYC traffic in the 1930's for an illustrative example.

Only in a discussion about teachers does this level of nonsensical excuse-making emerge in a serious discussion.

As a programmer, truck driver, physician, dog walker, mailman or accountant, you're expected to perform a job as well as possible. A truck driver who is great until he gets stuck in traffic is a problem, as is an accountant who can't work if people in the next office are too loud or because the laser printer smells like toner.

It's not about condemnation, but about effectiveness. If different teachers are better in different environments, we need to study those differences and learn from them. The union's agenda is about preserving the power of the union -- and not necessarily improving the lot of the teachers or students. That's why they react so irrationally to potentially negative news stories and budget discussions -- it's about saving face.

That's an issue with all cloud providers. Even the secure Google facilities are probably unmanned. Intel has some videos up about one of their new datacenters, and I think they say there are 4-5 night watchman type staff assigned to each facility. No IT, no offices.

No, I don't need one of the many 3rd party hacks that have been built due to Mozilla's insistence on developing software like it's still 1996.

Why not?

- Users don't have admin rights. They cannot write to the registry. They cannot write to program files.
- The nice folks at Mozilla break these 3rd party packages every few months. (Ask the Debian/Ubuntu folks -- this isn't just a Windows problem)

The authors of trivial software packages have been getting this for a long time. Even Apple Safari on Windows is better than Mozilla. And Apple doesn't give a hoot about anyone! Mozilla doesn't care, and yes, I've worked with people in the past willing to write code and put up cash to get work done -- we were rebuffed and called a bunch a newbie idiots for daring to make a contribution.

Guess what? The 45,000 people I provide services to are not using Firefox, and are not clicking on Adsense while using the Firefox search box. This is one of the top 3 reasons we didn't deploy desktop Linux to a subset of users as well. We're on IE and doing proof of concepts with Chrome.

Your gmail is located somewhere in some central Google server

Nope... your gmail is located on a Google Filesystem (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html), which could be located just about anywhere.

Google knows that I use Road Runner, that my iPhone is on AT&T, and that my employer uses AT&T. It's pretty trivial to replicate my data to cluster inside of a shipping container inside of a network that I frequently use. It also makes for a compelling reason to dump Road Runner for FIOS and AT&T for a VZ Droid, if Verizon has some sort of premium access.

Microsoft Foundation Services (the guys who operate the Azure and hosted Microsoft products) have even published videos about their vision of massive scale hub datacenters, supported by smaller, forward-facing city datacenters for providing Microsoft services. That stuff has been published for a year or more. You can't tell me that Google -- the people who invented this stuff -- aren't a generation ahead of what MS is doing. And a strategic partnership with a telco who owns all sorts of valuable telco real estate and needs a compelling counter to the iPhone is just the way to deliver that vision quickly.