Maybe we can have this conversation once you've stopped jumping up and down on your soapbox. Until you stop letting your obvious dislike for our elected officials blind your judgement, you're little more than a troll.

Back when I was playing, I put a lot of thought into suggesting what could be done to fix the problem with the cross-server 5man randoms. A reputation system came to mind, but the problem with this is that the system would get gamed by griefers. Even with perfect play, some people would rate down everyone in the party just for the lulz. In my situation, I was fortunate enough to have most of the asshats coming from a single server. But I realized that any system that relied on player input was going to be ripe for abuse. The extended dungeon cooldown timer for ragequitters didn't do anything to relieve any of the problems either.

None of this is a mitigating factor for his actions. Even if they were experimenting on baby pandas and he disagreed with that, is it this still a valid affirmative defense? No. Feelings for cute baby pandas aside, if they were legally experimenting on these baby pandas, his actions are not defensible. There is NO possible scenario where he can assert an affirmative defense for his actions.

Oh maybe this is actually the Umbrella corporation, and they were making ready to release the T-virus? Yeah, that's the ticket.

Try taking a Criminal Justice 101 class, or any pre-Law class before discussing this topic again, please.

The "what" is the crime. This is the most important part. Let's take a murder since you seem so fond of it.

I've murdered you. This is the crime.

The "why" or motive, is nowhere near as important, and is generally not even considered to be an element of the crime. Nobody argues motive in a burglary, just that the burglary happened. "Why" is usually only important in murder, since we've sliced homicide into types of offenses. Why did I murder you? You posted a silly comment on Slashdot. Is this more important than the fact that I murdered you? No, but it helps dictate what crime I may be guilty of. We can use motive as a mitigating factor. Self-defense springs to mind. I had to kill you before you posted again. I'd probably walk, especially if this was Florida.

So let's look at the crime with the facts we know: Our guy here, using an account and password that he was not authorized to use, accessed a network he was not authorized to access, and proceeded to delete 15 VMWare images.

Please tell me a legally cogent "why" that can be used as a defense for these actions?

He resigned. It's sort of all on him at this point.

I've seen plenty of examples of MBAs who have behaved far beyond the pale, ethically. Just because it's a core requirement for a degree doesn't mean a person may actually learn anything from it. It's been my experience that MBAs behave the least ethically of all the people I've worked with.

I've worked in places where local accounts were not allowed. This was enforced through an automated daily check of every workstation and server. The systems engineers didn't have the root passwords. Nobody knew what they were as they were randomly generated and NOT recorded. Everything was sudo as it was auditable in the logfiles, and we couldn't sudo su - or sudo /bin/bash, etc.. as a workaround. There were procedures if we had to actually BE root, usually involving booting into single user mode.

It's not as dire as you say it is, but sometimes it was terrible inconvenient.

Maybe they don't want to work for someone who can't even spell "MCSE" or use the correct "there".

The purchasable pets and mounts were a crass move.

I've played since vanilla, and for a while was a very hardcore raider, but eventually that wore thin. I stayed on because I had friends in the game and we enjoyed hanging out and running the occasional dungeon together, otherwise I would have left a long time before that.

I thought that the cross-realm dungeon finder would be a Good Thing, and I think for a while it was. Back when it first started, people were polite, said hello, etc... then after a while I've lost count of the number of 5-mans I've run through where not a single word was said, but rather a grim race to the end, collect your points and bail out. Then it got worse with the people bailing- "Oh, I don't want to run this dungeon" or the ragequits after a single wipe. Or the meter-sitters bitching that the DPS numbers are too low and trying to votekick people off. The relative anonymity and odds that you'll never see the same people again really brought out the inner asshole.. it got so bad that I eventually refused to group with anyone from a particular server in my realm because they had a reputation of being griefers that would wipe parties for the lols. The worst example was 2 hunters that joined as a group who would go and misdirect the healer, feign, wipe the party and call everyone n-ggers until they got kicked.

I recall being in a heroic Deadmines run, 3 guys were from the same guild on another server, myself and a random from another server. The party leader declared that he was going to boot the lowest DPS before the last boss so he could bring in a guildie for the kill and loot.

Raiding became a chore, and the social structure that comes from it became unbearable. Raiding no longer became a fun thing, but a way of gaining prestige and status on the server. This of course, required extreme dedication of time and effort, and having an "off day" would more than likely result in getting benched and replaced by the dozens of other raiding hopefuls looking for a slot.

The new raid bosses aren't very impressive. Even the Lich King fight was anticlimactic. The Vanilla and BC fights were much more intense. The fights now are pretty much "stand here, don't stand there" positioning fights. Lady Vashj was a pure bitch because of the fight mechanic with the cores, and it was an achievement to defeat her and make it to Hyjal before Blizzard removed the keying requirement to unlock that raid zone.

Note that I also said I was concerned that an outside party accidentally changes the settings on the pods. I think that is far more likely, but people aren't really going think that walking past the microwave or the 802.11 router is really a threat.

Just a followup to this, I posted a summary of the article on Facebook, and my wife predictably reacted the same way the press did.

Me: "Guy gives a talk about the *possibility* of hacking a wireless insulin pump"
Wife filter: ZOMG HACKERS ARE GOING TO KILL US!

After answering questions of responsible disclosure and security through obfuscation, she asked why someone would want to do such a thing as try to kill a diabetic. She was unfamiliar with the term "for teh lulz"

I disagree. My wife is a brittle diabetic, and she's spent so much time in her childhood years at extreme highs and lows, she's become somewhat desensitized to low blood sugar until she's in the 50 range. There have been a few cases where she has felt a low coming on and collapsed before she could get to something to eat. Other times, she's acted drunk while hypoglycemic and refused to eat anything.

Of course, she's probably one of the exceptions for the "most diabetics" case, but it matters to me.

My wife uses the OmniPod disposable pumps. They are controlled by a wireless PDA-like device. When she was switching from a conventional pump to the Omnis, I wrote to the company and asked them to explain to me how their wireless technology works, what protocols are they using, what security measures they have taken to protect the pods from malicious activity. My concern was the possibility of an outside party either deliberately or accidentally messing with the pod settings, and minimizing insulin delivery or pushing a huge bolus.

I even offered to sign an NDA. Obviously, the company was less than willing to divulge their proprietary secrets, and I was shuffled off to a PR flack, who just reiterated the same marketing material over and over.

I've had to go through a BSA audit after we fired a former employee. The BSA sent their usual demand that we provide proof that we're fully licensed. We (I mean the Finanace and IT department) spent weeks going over years old receipts and license records. Countless hours lost to this bullshit while real work went uncompleted.... the BSA then said that out paperwork was insufficient, that that we would have to produce the original purchase orders. Round and round it went until the C-levels at the company finally bent over and begged "not too hard please". We wound up having to pay a fine for like a single copy of Visio or something. the most expensive copy of Visio anyone has every paid.

The BSA exists entirely to make money for itself. Everything you do will not satisfy them. They really should be stopped under RICO.

What was the ROI on the Apollo program?

We made trillions on Tang and pressurized pens that write in zero-g, right?

This is -finally- a first step towards getting off the oil/coal tit. I'd rather spend 3/4 of a billion on this than on killing some more brown skinned people in foreign lands. Like in any business, there is no guarantee of profit or breakeven, but at least it's a fucking start for once.