I'm willing to bet the NSA has prior art on this.

I've always considered SMB to be a steaming pile of crap for reasons that have nothing to do with security and this incident just adds another steaming shovel full of manure to that pile. The best protection agains SMB worms is not to use crap like SMB but pick something more secure instead, that is to say if such an animal even exists. In that case you can either try to find a vendor who offers a similar product and does a better job of testing and patching it than Microsoft does or go with an Open Source alternative which gives you the option of hiring a third party to test and patch it to your satisfaction. Mind you even if SMB is a pain to use the problem does not necessarily have to be with Microsoft. The problem could actually be with your systems department being lazy and negligent about patching their SMB software and the problem could also be with lax, amateurish or even non existent security policies or if you do have a proper security policy the problem could be a complete failure to enforce it. In that case you really only have one alternative and that is to light a fire under your people, fire them if they put up a fight and hire some proper sysadmins and a security chief with the same attitude toward instilling professionalism and security awareness in your employees and a marine drill sergeant has toward making proper soldiers out of every batch of teenage drama queens he is handed by the recruitment office.

Plus he has nothing to loose by pissing off the Republicans who aren't going to approve a single bill his administration pushes anyway even if they had to do it to save their lives. Hell, half of those people don't even believe he was born in the USA. Of course Obama is going to veto all the most important stuff the Tea party and the Republican want to do so basically everything is exactly like the Tea-baggers and Republicans like it. Congress will be in complete and utter gridlock for at least another two years, four if you get a Democratic president (read: Hilary Clinton, which will have every Republican/Tea-bagger reaching for his vampire killing kit). Every time I despair over the state of politics in my own country I take a look at the US congress and the way your Republicans and Democrats are behaving like a bunch of petulent kindergarteners to remind me that things could be a lot worse. Compared to the lot of morons you guys have managed to vote into office my lot looks like a panel of Nobel prize winners.

Let's not forget either that Constantine's personally approved proper religious authorities didn't just clamp down on Christians that didn't agree with them they embarked on a campaign of destroying, pillaging, desecrating, vandalising pagan temples, tombs and monuments as well as raping and murdering adherents of these religions who weren't willing to see the light and accept the state approved flavour of Christianity (i.e. the same basic package heretic Christians were treated to). Examples of Christian intolerance and willingness to subject minority religions and secular groups to extreme persecutions and violence (which is a base insult to everything Christ preached) are legion.

You can find examples of such violence and intolerance beginning at the moment Christianity became dominant enough to be able to afford committing such atrocities and they continue until today with one of the latest, worst and most frequently forgotten being the mass murder of Moslems in Bosnia by Christian Croats and Serbs. It pisses me off every time Christian fanatics in my community try to portray Christianity as the religion of love charity and peace while Islam is the religion of war and hate, yet whenever I bring up the subject of Bosnia and what was done there in the name of Christianity they are unwilling to even discuss the issue. The obvious conclusion is that Christianity is not an inherently violent religion any more than Islam is even if some of it's adherents have found clever ways to user these religions to rationalise acts of violence and downright inhuman criminal acts like blowing yourself up on a bus, sawing peoples heads off on camera, torching places of worship or setting up a concentration camp camp where the local Christian perverts can get their rocks off raping moslem women. I don't really see the difference between the way the Serbs behaved with their rape campaigns in Bosnia and the way ISIS is doing by selling Yazidi women in markets in Syria like cattle at an auction.

You managed to Godwin this thread on with the fifth post.

I suppose this could not possibly be because Google dialled down the abuse now that they are under the microscope of the EU competition authorities? I have to say I am in awe of how you managed to render any anti competitive investigation of Google's business practices unnecessary with a single web search!

Like I tried to explain to presidenteloco this isn't about a monopoly per se. What we are talking here is Google leveraging their search engine monopoly to take away the consumer's right to choose services that compete with Google's which IIRC is one of the things people got their panties in a twist over when Microsoft tried to do it, i.e. Microsoft decided to get in on the some segment of the software business , so they built their own Microsoft brand specialist software and bundled it with their OS with the result that hardly anybody bothered to investigate competing alternatives. They took away consumer choice by leveraging their dominant desktop OS to kill off competitors just like Google is now leveraging its dominant search engine to put links to the products of competing service providers on the second page of search results or some similar skullduggery. That's a conflict of interest. It was recognized by German law makers back in the 12th century that it's a bad idea for a physician to be his own apothecary because they invented diseases so that they could sell drugs to cure them and for the same reason it is bad for Microsoft to have their consumer and OS software operations in the same business unit and for Google to have the same business unit that handles web searches also pushing Google services. It encourages them to abuse one to gain a competitive advantage for the other.

Product names should be descriptive. How about Quisling? ... or Canary? ... Stool Pigeon? ... Rat? ... Grass?

I'll wait for the final report thank you very much.

And you are basing this on what? A few low resolution pictures in some news reports?

Because this is is an really strange story that does not make sense on any level. I would have expected better fiction, even from a conspiracy theorist. The fighter in that picture looks like a MiG-29 or a Su-27 to me. The UkAF has both of these fighters and they can fire BVR missiles. BVR missiles are big fat 3.5-4 meter long monsters with a massive range and a large warhead intented for air to air use for anything up to bomber and large transport sized aircraft. The main BVR missile variants used by the RuAF and the UkAF are the R-27 (Nato code: AA-10) and the newer R-77 (Nato code: AA-12). The range of the AA-10 and AA-12 BVR missiles is something like 80-110 kilometers. I'm not sure if the Ukrainians have any AA-12s but they definitely have the older AA-10 whose seekers they have extensively upgraded to the point where they are still able to sell the AA-10 abroad for use on modernized MiG-29s and SU-27/30s with other air forces. So why the hell would a Ukrainian air force fighter have had to shut up the crew of MH17 with gunfire before downing the airliner with a WVR missile (presumably an AA-11, 7kg fragmenting warhead) when they could have picked MH17 off with a more powerful AA-10 radar guided missile (which has a 39 kg fragmenting warhead) that more closely mimics a BUK? I'm pretty sure that even if a UkAF fighter had fired a BVR missile from a 60 degree cone behind MH17 to make sure the crew did not see it coming (a more realistic scenario), they could still have fired it from about 25 km away and that missile would have come like a bat out of hell for the crew of MH17. They wouldn't have known what hit them, i.e. no need for gunfire and with a 39 kg warhead... you can imagine the rest.

Word! Here's another similar conundrum: Is it OK to teach people how to manipulate a ouija board session until you teach people how to manipulate the outcome of a ouija board session being run by the government for the purpose of contacting the spirit of a murder victim in order to solve that person's murder? This is a completely ridiculous situation no matter how you look at it. Polygraphs are pseudo science and as such a completely unreliable metric for determining truthfulness. It's not the people who teach others to beat these gizmos who should be answering to a judge. The ones who should be in deep trouble with the law are the government officials who use polygraphs despite their glaring shortcomings as investigative tools, who pressure people into taking polygraph tests and who convince juries that refusal to take a pseudoscientific test is equivalent to an admission of guilt.

... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?

True, it's easy to throw snide comments at the people who designed this mission but until now nobody really even knew any details of what the surface of a comet looks like. Furthermore landing on Mars is difficult enough, the success rate for landings on the Martian surface is something like 30%. Getting a probe to rendezvous with a comet and land on the surface is a way bigger achievement. Finally I'm not exactly surprised that some systems failed after almost a decade in space. I just hope they manage to milk the maximum amount of data out of this probe.

I've been watching this mission with a certain degree of anticipation for a while but I'm no space/physics nerd so I have two questions for those who are:

1) How likely is it that anything will come of the drilling now that the harpoons that were supposed to hold the probe down have failed given the low gravity?
2) Will the comet ever again come into a position that might cause the probe to get enough sunlight to do any worthwhile science?