They ought to know the basics of how a network is put together. Understand vocabulary like router, server, LAN, WAN, ethernet, packet. Not saying they're all going to be future sysadmins, but people who understand how data gets from one place to another definitely have an advantage in today's world.

He's the one that made the claims. He said he did it, and then went to the FBI to explain how he did it. Other than finding the tampered box lid, all the "evidence" is in his claims.

I could knock a panel loose and then claim I hacked the in-flight entertainment system and made an airplane into a sperm whale and then a potted plant. That doesn't make it real, even if I showed them a box containing an infinite improbability drive. Funny thing about that, when most people see it, they see an empty box. How improbable.

NASA already has the answer. Glitter filled Super Balls are the best thing for the job. As we all know, they are infused with magic energy. A 10kg payload traveling at 11.2 km/s could deflect an object the size of the moon.

It does have risks though. Once set in motion, the Super Balls would be set loose on the universe, potentially disrupting entire galaxies.

For the sake of the universe, I hope we never have to deploy such a weapon.

They also have an abundance of people who wear funny hats.

It depends on how the theoretical spaces work. You can have multiple things in the same space. Just where you're sitting, there is air, light, heat, radio waves, sound waves, gravity, probably a few neutrinos.

I just used "spaces" because I couldn't think of a more appropriate word.

How often does your PM (also the SM?) re-estimate the stories? I could understand doing that at the end of a sprint, but not in the middle of development, other than "How's that widget coming? I should be done tomorrow."

I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.

That's probably the biggest reason to have good in-house security people. They don't have a financial interest to make breaches or lie about them. It's in their best interest to keep everything secure, and continue to look for new ways to attempt breaking into their own stuff.

I've never felt good about letting third parties in to do security testing. When someone above my rank decided to let a 3rd party do external tests, they'll pick anything and make it sound disastrous. One place was bitching about anything.

They complained that we had the current version of Bind running on the DNS servers. "But people can do DNS requests!" Yup.

They flagged the fact that we dropped unwanted traffic at the firewall. Yup. Get over it. They were upset it took forever to scan the network. Good.

They flagged us for having a web server providing static content. They were upset they couldn't find any way to exploit CGIs or do SQL injection. Yup. That was kind of the idea.

There were a whole bunch of other trivial things that they flagged us for. Then they were brought to the office, and got upset that we didn't provide wifi. Nope, that's a security risk. They wanted to plug their laptop into our network, so they were only given external access. Again, they bitched. But letting an unknown computer owned by an unauthorized party plug into our network is a security risk.

They eventually gave up trying to bully us into dropping our security precautions and gave us a pass.

I already habitually ran tests with privileged access to make sure even if all layers of protection failed, nothing really bad could happen.

Honestly, if they are given everything, they can find something. Give them administrative rights to everything, and credentials to everything, they can find something. Like, email accounts can be accessed with full admin rights. Funny how that works.

Yup, if it wasn't Microsoft, all kinds of other companies could have dominated the desktop market. IBM (OS/2), Quarterdeck (DESQview/X), Apple (Mac OS), NeXT (NeXT), any number of *nix companies (X11), and others.

Microsoft got big because they got the consumers interested, and questionable deals with vendors.

Plenty of people only know the tunnel-vision version of computer history and they believe Microsoft is it. They either don't remember (or are too young to have seen) software boxes (ahh, the good ol' days) had logos to indicate which OS they worked on so you could pick the right one.

Saying "We're sure he had..." without evidence is not evidence. They have to have the evidence that he actually *did* have what is claimed.

That's the hard part. They have to gather the evidence to get the conviction. Without evidence, they can't get a conviction. At least if you have a competent attorney. If you have a crappy one, you'll get the 5 years because they talked you into taking a pre-trial plea agreement. That's how innocent people go to jail.

Remember 7/11 buddy. 7/11. ... I think today is 2 for 1 Slurpee day.

That's what I was thinking. I didn't look it up, but I'd be pretty sure that the maintenance interval is shorter than 5,952 hours.

Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.