This is how they wind up in social services (trash men), retail (WalMart), and services (McDonalds)? They get promoted from Line Sandwich Maker to Line Manager?

It's common practice to stand up a Microsoft Windows 2013 server as a Certificate Authority, and put the CA key on all computers by Group Policy. Then you intercept every SSL connection and replace the certificate with an internal one, of which the IDS has the private key. The routers and such also use the same private key. The proxy server (transparent or otherwise) handshakes with the remote server using the correct certificate, decrypting and re-encrypting all traffic as it flows through.

Never ascribe to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. She's not disconnected from reality, she's trying to disconnect you and me from reality.

She doesn't seem to be very good at it.

Explicit language might modify what would otherwise be there only by an implicit doctrine.

In general, a licensor can modify their own terms. So, if you are using the GPL on software to which you hold the copyright, and you add some sort of exception, it applies. You can't do it to other people's software.

Yeah, two-dimensional shockwave? What?

Good. Once it's gone, maybe we'll all be rich enough to buy solar panels.

A solar panel tax break just raises the damand by, say, $500 of government incentive, plus persuasive incentive margin. That is to say: a $1500 installation that gets a consumer-reaching $500 rebate becomes a $2000 installation, in theory; in reality, the consumer sees a chance to obtain a discount on a $2000 installation, and manufacturers can profit more by raising that installation cost to $2100 because fewer than 20% of customers are turned off by that extra $100. Thus the consumer needs $600 more in his pocket, and comes out $100 poorer in the end.

These numbers are, of course, illustrative of a concept in market demand economics dealing with subsidies on the consumption end. The reality is more complex. For example, as you have pointed out, the imminent revocation of the ITC is driving up demand as people grab for the perceived free money; this means prices can go even higher, people can be even more disadvantaged by the government rebate, but they will still have more incentive to buy than in a non-credit market where the total cost to themselves is lower because there is no perceived monetary benefit in such a market.

Three Mile Island was the most fantastic design ever. A catastrophic failure leads to absolutely no negative consequences except for that of a nasty red mark on the balance sheet.

The engineers are the ones hit the hardest! Computer programmers have a better employment rate than engineers!

The main point is not to jump into new things in your industry. When I grabbed for MongoDB, it wasn't MongoDB 0.2 alpha or 1.0 or whatnot; it was MongoDB 2.2, a relatively mature product. At the time, it was new to the industry: a lot of articles on Slashdot and so forth were jabbering about these new "NoSQL" databases and "Document stores" and whatnot, and arguing their merits and shortcomings. The article proscribes that MongoDB would be something that cost me an "Innovation Token" if I were to grab it right then.

My point is that I did just that: I saw MySQL wasn't working, at all, for our projects, and that MongoDB fit some of our needs much better. Our software design and code became orders of magnitude more manageable and efficient. After that, we rewrote the MySQL calls as ORM, while using MongoDB via direct query--we quickly integrated and profited from two new technologies, reducing our risk and streamlining our business.

We did exactly the opposite of what the article says, and gained great benefits in opposition to what the article claims. By identifying and selecting the correct tools, be they old or new, we opened the path to innovation, allowing ourselves to carry out new strategies and develop new ideas quickly and effectively.

I think you underestimate Sir Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing and James Earl Jones. They were certainly top league.

I am still having a little trouble with "we don't need our spies to spy". Maybe we do.

I am also having trouble believing that the kind of encryption we use on the Internet actually stops the U.S. Government from finding out whatever it wishes although IETF and sysadmins might be kidding themselves that it can. Government can get to the end systems. They can subborn your staff. Etc.

MS language is potentially worse than the default. And there is room for litigation to surprise us.

Yes, and there are also key close-out tasks to cap off open projects to deliver to the next guy, or to transfer knowledge and move off responsibilities gracefully. Cutting off is a great strategy where the user is not unique, and a devastating one where he is training his replacement or in charge of things that rarely require attention; most often, it's somewhere in-between, and some careful decisions are required.

Malware isn't as targeted as an individual, although I've seen financial records damaged and personal e-mails disseminated by malware. My stint at various companies, contractors, government positions, and private sector jobs has given me a lot of exposure to shit that goes wrong. Even when I had little technical power, I slowly identified ways to leverage the small access I needed, and to gain higher access; access control is idyllic, and information often leaks around a lot due to the need for certain things to be available.

I used to administrate IDS systems and approve firewall requests. In this capacity, I had no ability to do any real damage: every system I interfaced with was handled by an agent, either to install my hardware, to set my network routes, to configure the firewalls, to route span traffic to me, or to shut off ports when I discovered dangerous behavior on the network. I could damage our IDS, but nothing else. By contrast, those administrators each had a massive amount of power: they could sniff network traffic, route it for man-in-the-middle attacks, leak any information they wanted; even I was able to regularly extract administrative network passwords from our traffic, since our IDS ran decryption through our internal certificates and showed me raw attack traffic. I couldn't see your personal gmail account, but I could see the plaintext of your ssh connection to a CISCO switch.

I do work in network security; most mundanes who dabble figure that security is this rock-hard wall of protection, or it's wrong. They often forget the definition of information security, which includes confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility; it is the accessibility that people most forget, demanding confidentiality and integrity while refusing to sacrifice either where accessibility is impacted unacceptably. In my example with the IDS, the IDS must decrypt traffic to search for attacks which may compromise confidentiality or integrity, yet it also reveals passwords to a small group of people who may themselves compromise confidentiality or integrity by using these passwords; this is why HMAC was invented, but it is not always available within a protocol suite.

Yes. The last stuff I wrote that I couldn't compile today was in "Promal" or "Paradox". My C and C++ code from 1980 still builds and runs.

All of my web development is on Ruby on Rails. That environment has had a lot of development and I've had to port to new versions. So old code for RoR would not quite run out of the box, but it's close.