If you think only the US government taps individuals and companies, then you are incredibly naive.

A few minor tweaks holds true as well.

Fair enough. But still, if someone installed a vulnerable version of openSSL I suppose they might start using it for other things than openSSH in their Cygwin environment, where HB might still rear it's head. An iffy, minor point, I concede.
In any case, I never really had an issue with puTTY if I had to SSH on Windows, but then that's not very often. It's not my preference. I usually use my linux box for SSH, it's just more comfortable. All of us in our workgroup have 1 win box and 1 linux box, and it baffles me to see that some of my coworkers seem to prefer puTTY. But then, some people have no problem working in a window the size of a postage stamp when they could easily drag the window larger too, so.. I dunno.

Not really so idiotic: up until only a year ago, OpenSSH required OpenSSL for the crypto.

Even more than just seems like.. if actually true that these systems are not physically separated, that's careless design. It's naive and well, arrogant, no matter how good the firewall supposedly is, especially in this post 9-11 era. It'd be just another example of how broken and meaningless security theater is.

I agree with your first 3 sentences, Ghoshroy seems a little too happy to disparage the project. Development of something this advanced takes time and needs public support. I don't get your last sentence at all. I'd rather us not have to smoke anyone, and vice versa.

It's certainly likely some are, but I don't automatically equate the two or think of it as a huge problem. Though this article did qualify with use of the word "some", the tone seems to indicate that the author feels people mostly only get ahead by stepping on others, instead of maybe hard work, investment, and dedication. Sounds like sour grapes. You could run an experiment where complete wealth redistribution was conducted, and everyone in the country (or world) had the exact same amount of money, assets, and access to education. Within less than 10 years, that faux state of "equality" would disintegrate again as a great number of people would squander their assets and opportunities while others invested and worked hard. Anything else is a fairy tale.

Hey, it wasn't that long ago!

You're lucky you got modded to 5. I brought this very thing up last time the subject was broached here (not long ago) and got jumped on like as if I'd said all women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

This guy forgot to add other very real world possibilities: inclination, desire, motivation, ambition, aptitude .. etc. Those who under-perform do not always do so merely because they are victims of circumstance or others, and sometimes that's why they're judged. He thinks of successful people as bullies? lol

I really don't know. I haven't read any newbie books in years. Mostly I attend classes and seminars now when available, via work. If anything, I read O'Reilly books for reference. Maybe the "Idiots Guide"? or maybe it just depends on the book/author.

Well actually the first ones were pretty good intros to basic IT. DOS for Dummies was a classic. They certainly lived up to their name later on though. I'd read the original PCs for Dummies, DOS, DOS book2, Windows 3.11, and Windows 3.11 book two when I started out in IT, and I they were pretty good. And I didn't even own a PC for reference yet, and I still managed to follow through (finally got one in '95).
I tried some later books though and they were awful, they just wouldn't get to stick to the point. Or, maybe I just had a better grasp of things by then and the fluff got in the way.

But.. but.. they've lasted the longest! Granted, they're not very mobile.

I think that's backwards... you do that when you tell the truth, it raises your blood pressure and heart rate for the baseline.

I suspect a lot of tech writing is done because an author is pushed into it and would rather be writing maybe something else.
It's not hard to be ambiguous in the English language, special care (as well as a desire) needs to be taken to be clear and concise. Not my best example, but off the top of my head, when people say something like "Everyone is not right-handed", with the intent to mean that some people aren't right-handed, they don't realize that their sentence literally means that NO one is right handed. They should say, "Not everyone is right handed".
Other examples are, "I saw the man with the binoculars" or "EMTs help dog bite victim". It's just a caveat of the language.

I think the best thing any tech writer could do though - with something like Bash or Cisco commands- is provide more command examples, because sometimes the exacting demands of the syntax just isn't made clear. A few good examples go a long way to alleviating uncertainty.

This is what happened to the "For Dummies" books, IMO. The old classics like "DOS for Dummies" was great for a beginner, but it seemed like a lot of the later books went way too heavy into the realm of comedy or stretched tangential analogies, and it distracted from the key information itself.
Nobody likes dry reading. but they got soppy dripping wet. ;)