As someone who goes to caves, you should be aware more than most of the cross-contamination you are unwittingly causing. One of the leading thoughts on white nose disease in bats is it is caused by the transportation of bacteria and such from one cave to another.

A family member works for the Bureau of Land Management and has seen firsthand what happens when people randomly go in and out of caves. Once a single bat has a white nose, the entire colony is on a death march, not to mention the general trash spelunkers leave behind or the damage they can cause.

Not always. Going to a 1018 grade steel (0.18%) essentially renders the steel non-magnetic (you lose about 97% of the permeability of decent magnetic steel). Not stainless (still low enough carbon to rust easily), but very weak in terms of magnetism. I design and build audio transducers for a living, and work with various grades of magnetic (and non-magnetic) steel daily. Getting much above 0.15% carbon content or annealing the steel, and you lose a lot of the magnetic properties (permeability goes to pot) that allow for easy harvesting.

Using a magnet to sift out your nails is not a surefire approach to keeping them off of beaches.

"Your book, that I downloaded in digital format rather than the bulky dead wood format, is unreadable as I sit on the subway/bus on my way to work. This is an outrage!"

Apparently the person(s) who complained have such perfect lives and no other issues to worry about, they had to find something to complain about.

So, assuming Microsoft is sincere

That's a pretty fuckin' big assumption there, guy.

>BMO goes back to read the Halloween documents

The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, A Sincere Microsoft Board Member, and a Rabbi (a Rabbi is required in every joke) come to a 4-way stop/intersection at the same time.

Who goes first?

The Rabbi, because the others don't fuckin' exist.

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BMO

Otherwise it's potentially just a matter of inserting a tiny reprogramable USB stick when there are few cashiers on and the cashier who is on isn't looking for a few seconds (ie two people walking into a Staples store can pull this off really easily).

Indeed, so much this.

I've seen open USB ports on all sorts of POS terminals and it just boggles my mind, especially because I've been in industrial environments in small companies where hot-gluing USB ports shut is a matter of course.

You can buy a USB flash drive that sits almost flush and if you take a little bit of elbow-grease and sandpaper, you can get it to sit flush easily.

So I don't see how big companies like Staples, who have the actual budget to look at security this way, don't even bother to do the basics like this. It's time we start fining/class action lawsuit-ing firms that don't even do the least bit of security, with amounts of money that actually hurt and not take "5 minutes of profits" to pay.

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BMO

ie 'nothing that bad has ever happened before and therefore it's probably not happening to us'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

There's another bias where you feel you emotionally can't take any more responsibility and thus just pray that the worst case scenario isn't happening. Not sure it's been studied yet.