It's his deity. He's dyslexic.

As to whether his deity can copulate or not... well, what happens on Mount Olympus stays on Mount Olympus... except in the case of pregnancies - those are the things of which legends are born.

Please forgive me for taking the article summary at face value when it said

The only way that could be true is if there was no properly functioning hardware reset button.

I've been around /. awhile, I really should know better than to assume article summaries are accurate.

Where's the factory-reset button when you need it?

Consumer-electronics that aren't so cheap they are "disposable" should have a "reset to last known good state" hardware button and for some types of devices, a "save current state as known good state" hardware button. If the second button is missing, the "factory fresh state" will forever be the only "last known good state."

The second button is needed for installing "bios-level" anti-theft software and the like that can't be undone by the first button, if the customer wants to make that software non-uninstallable by a security-savvy thief should it be stolen.

For some products, one or both of these buttons may require opening the case and breaking tamper-evident seals, but they should exist, and they should be true hardware buttons, not defeat-able by software.

They need to be hardware buttons so a virus or malware doesn't "press" them, defeating the purpose of being able to "roll back" the machine to a previous state.

Please do.

The only one of the examples I listed in the grandparent post that I plan on implementing are those in a role of a parent.

When I have a 6 year old kid who is using the Internet, no amount of "client-side resistance" that you add is going to stop me from seeing what's on the screen as I watch my kid use the computer.

Question: What's more common and arguably more dangerous than a Windows XP computer that hasn't received any OS updates in the last 2 months?

Answer: An "unpatched" (naive/uninformed) human operating the keyboard.

If counteracting the detecting and blocking bridge notes becomes a problem - and it probably will as soon the the Chinese get good at it - someone will find a solution.

A resource-intensive solution would be to layer the TOR/bridge traffic on top of and steganographically embedded into some seemingly-normal traffic, such as an encrypted streaming video, so that a traffic analysis would say "it's probably just someone watching online TV."

Which is more evil:
Telling employees "we block all encrypted traffic and snoop on everything else"

or telling them

"We MITM all encrypted traffic we can so we can snoop on it, we snoop on everything we can and block the rest"

or telling them

"we block all traffic except traffic to the few Internet resources we know you need, and oh by the way we snoop on that"

or telling the

"we don't think you need a computer to do your job, if you do need a computer to do your job then talk to your boss and he MAY give you the keys to the one room where there is a computer. Oh, by the way, there are TV cameras all over that room so don't even think about using it for non-business purposes."

Substitute "school," "institution," or "parent" for "employer" and substitute "student," "client/end-user," or "minor child who the parents deem too young/immature to use the Internet unsupervised" for "employee."

Speaking of parents, many parenting experts highly recommend that if a kid under a certain age/maturity level wants to use the Internet, he only be allowed to do so under close supervision, as in mom or dad in the room within eyesight of the screen. What age? Experts disagree, but almost all would put the cutoff age where mom can leave the room for a few minutes at somewhere in the elementary school (age 5-12) age range.

Time will come when firewalls inspect all outgoing packets and use heuristics to guess how dangerous encrypted traffic might be.

For example:

• Whitelisted sites Encrypted traffic to an IP address previously whitelisted by the firewall vendor or end user? It's whitelisted, let it pass.
• Heuristically safe sites Encrypted traffic to an IP address known to be associated with a well-known domain whose DNS is known to be valid and who is known to typically use encryption over this port and whose recent activity hasn't been suspicious? Probably safe.
• Suspicious traffic to an okay site Encrypted traffic to whitelisted or probably-safe web sites that is uncharacteristic in size or other known details? Possibly not safe.
• Unknown site Encrypted traffic to anyone else who isn't blacklisted? Possibly not safe.
• Blacklisted site Encrypted traffic to a blacklisted site? Block it.

In the middle three groups, give the user a chance to approve/block/whitelist the traffic or, if the user just wants such traffic logged or just wants to see an on-screen alert but doesn't want to be bothered with the "should I block it" question, log it and/or put up a visible notification to the end-user.

Decades ago - we are talking the 50s and 60s, possibly up through the '70s and '80s, large companies treated employees as a long-term asset not as a short- or medium-term one.

They wanted to cultivate the reputation of "we take care of our employees" more than "we take care of our stockholders."

Back then, it would take a radically different skill-set between those being laid off and those being hired for you to see simultaneous layoffs and hiring from abroad. As a hypothetical example, if a conglomerate were shutting down its meat-packing division and hiring new researchers as it expands its pharmaceutical research division, the odds are that most of those meat-packers wouldn't have the intellectual capacity to qualify for the Ph.D.- or at least graduated-in-the-top-quarter-of-my-class-from-a-good-school B.S.-in-chemistry-or-a-related-field- degree required for the new jobs even if the company was willing to invest 4-6 years to re-train them.

Today, by contrast, if the employee being laid off can't be quickly retrained, the short-term-economic decision is a no-brainer: lay that person off and hire someone for the newly-created job who can hit the ground running.

But don't tell him that.

*joke*

I assume you mean the rest of the industrialized world.

Do Canada and Australia not count?

I don't think Canada suffered much infrastructure damage in WWII. Other than the northern coastal areas (particularly Darwin) and some ship-launched attacks on harbors I don't think Australia did either.

I'm going to get a lot of flak for this but I generally favor open immigration when it comes to people who can contribute to our economy, even if this means my paycheck will go down and my field's labor market will be more competitive for me as a result.

Why?
* America shouldn't pretend to be the land of opportunity if it's not.
* If I can't compete in in my chosen job market without depending on the government to protect me from immigrant workers, either I need to get better at what I do or I need to find another line of work where I can compete.
* If my standard of living is higher than the income I would make in a free (from an immigration perspective) labor market, I need to lower my standard of living or find a more financially lucrative line of work.
* If a company has a choice between
1. hiring US workers who may be in short supply and demanding higher wages
2. importing workers to increase the supply and as a result possibly depress wages slightly
3. outsourcing the work overseas where the supply is more plentiful and the wages are significantly lower
everything else being equal it will go with #3.

Now, everything isn't equal, and there are usually clear benefits from having employees who are if not on-site at least in-country. But if the benefits aren't high enough to do #1 over #3 and #2 isn't an option, guess what choice they will pick? If you make #2 an attractive option compared to #3, American will at least benefit from the imported workers paying rent or buying homes, eating food, and otherwise helping the local economies of where they live.

In other words, if America let in anyone willing and able to work who had a job offer in hand, enough skills and financial resources to make sure they don't become a burden if they get laid off, and no particular reason to not let in that person, we should let them in to work.

See http://www.treasury.gov/resour... .

Short version:
* Yes for " debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
* Not necessarily for goods or services.

In short, if you go into a store to buy something, they can say "no cash accepted, check or credit card only." But if they extend you store credit, you can pay off that debt later with cash, at least in theory.

You might make a few few people who still hate the damned Yankees or any number of other groups upset for comparing them to criminals.

"...while providing no substantial benefit."

I'm going to be pedantic and call BS on this one. If they hadn't been so bold and instead said "while in almost all cases failing to provide enough benefits to justify the cost" I wouldn't be making this reply.

Why am I upset about their hyperbole? Because it cuts into their credibility.

What's the specific counter-example I can provide? Read on..,.

In some societies, criminalization leads to social stigmatization even if the laws are not enforced or only lightly enforced, a stigmatization that would be absent or less strong otherwise. You see this in some parts of the United States, where the existence of little-enforced laws such as laws against littering, talking on the cell phone while driving, etc. reinforce and amplify the existing social stigma against such activities to the point that it's the stigma of being seen doing "the wrong thing," not the fear of getting a ticket or getting arrested, that drives people to follow the social norm.

Even if the enforcement of drug laws doesn't lead to reduced usage in and of itself, the stigmatization can.

Reducing the use of harmful drugs can benefit society in many ways, including fewer early deaths and fewer health problems.

The key though is that whether stigmatization by itself will lead to less drug use or not will vary from society to society and even sub-culture to sub-culture. A sub-culture which is known for being defiant of the larger society may in fact see doing things that are stigmatized by the larger society as a way to rebel. The 1960s young-adult/youth counterculture sub-culture in the United States is one example where a "main culture" stigmatizing an activity may lead to more, not less, overall use.

Now, does the existence of drug laws result in an enhanced stigma that leads to overall reduced drug use worldwide? I don't know. Is there someplace on this planet where drug laws are creating or reinforcing a stigma where the social stigma (not necessarily the fear of being caught by the police) is driving lower drug use? Almost certainly.

What's the bottom line?

* Don't summarily throw out drug laws worldwide.
* Do encourage every country and locality to ask itself to examine the totality of effects of its drug laws both within its own borders and on the rest of the world, and make an educated, informed decision about whether to change the drug laws to achieve the desired goals (which I assume are nominally a safer and healthier society, but which I sadly acknowledge may include things like keeping trading partners happy, keeping a dictator's friends flush with cash, and other factors that are irrelevant to the nominal purpose of drug laws), and if so, how.