I think we're all in agreement that something needs to be done, but the ethics of disrupting a business's capacity for staying in business is shaky ground.

Imagine... a large car rental place in your city rents out cars on the cheap. They're all identical, impossible to tell apart visually. They have very lax security on them, a basic door lock that's easily broken into without damage, no car alarm.

A criminal gang in the city has started targeting these cars, they're being stolen frequently, used as getaway cars for store robberies and even an occasional bank heist. Security foortage is worthless because all the cars look alike. The thieves apparently have realized if they just dump the cars off where they stole them after they're done without really damaging them, nobody cares. Not the rental place, not the customers. The criminals are impossible to identify or prossicute.

The mayer however is getting pissed off that the rental company is refusing to take any action. The rental co simply does not care, because it's not hurting them or upsetting their customers. Why should they spend money to fix someone else's problem?

What does the mayer do about it? What can he do about it?

This is the botnet problem. So, approach it from that perspective.

The rental co already has a few policies in place. They have monitoring software in the car that is used exclusively to watch for road-rage or dangerous driving. If a customer is driving recklessly and risks damaging the car, they may get a warning from the rental co, or even have their rental remotely disabled for a few days. (copyright DMCA letter anyone?)

So.... since they already have this monitoring system in place, and should already be able to tell when a car is stolen and being used in a robbery.... the mayer forces the rental company to use this information to help curb the problem of their cars being used for public harm.

This is how it would work in any other arena. So why does no one take action against the botnets? Does the rental company's right to run their business like they want to outweigh the serious problem they are facillitating? Of course not.

It's trivial to cut off service, yes, but if an ISP and upstream providers to cut off all offending networks from access, the internet would pretty much go silent.

I think that's exactly why it's necessary. Most ISPs take very little notice of an obviously infected customer's machine, unless of course it's trying to pour its spam through their SMTP server. Then they immediately get their panties in a twist and pull your plug until you clean up your machine.

The difference here of course being who is the victim. You or me? Not gonna bother. US? Red Alert Ban Hammer Time!

So, your upstream pulling (or threatening to pull) your plug is precisely what's needed to motivate those ISPs. Some are lazy. Most are just too cheap to invest in fixing the problem and would rather bank the dollars than spend them to fix "someone else's problem". Make it their problem. Light a fire under their seat and watch them redirect a processes they already have in place, to fix the problem.

Those "sensor pods" are shaped like external fuel tanks. They've got that rounded and curved shape, to make them aerodynamic. Which is horrible for stealth. The F35 has to pack all its baggage inside the fuselage, with minimal openings.

A huge part of this question then becomes a tradeoff between stealth and features. You have to gve up some stuff if you want to be stealthy. So far, on the F35, most of those drawbacks have been "bought out" by spending a crapton on working around them. Stealt VTOL for example was a major PITA.

Considering the already absurd cost of the avionics electronics developed for the F35, tacaking on a completely new ground sensor package (and finding a place to PUT it inside the airframe) would have raised the cost quite a bit. Those sensor pods have been a work in progres for the last 15 years, the R&D is already mostly done. You can't compare that to a completely new package. (and you thought the rest of the new F35 had bugs and glitches?)

how can you possibly not link to an a/v demo or review of this, in the thread OR in the review???

I went looking on youtube and found a metric crapton of copies of the MS demo. I don't want to watch the publisher's demo, of course it's going to be flawless. (and quite possibly rigged) They've successfully flooded the actual honest review demos into oblivion on youtube. Anyone got a link to a review with A/V test?

That's knowing the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is what you know that's directly relevent. Wisdom is a combination of what other things you know, plus your skill at adapting them into something useful to help solve a new problem.

In IT, knowledge is fleeting. Like most certs, it expires given time. It ages fast and requires continuous refreshing. Wisdom on the other hand ages like a fine wine. The background experience can age but does so slowly. The skill of application however, transcends time.

Knowledge is good. Wisdom is better. Knowledge with Wisdom is golden

every time I've left a company the old collegues always told me that they have had a hard time to fill the hole of the missing knowledge and workforce that I was giving to the team...but this, sadly, happens only after I've left.

THAT is extremely important to keep in mind. In the end, it doesn't matter how stupid they'd have to be to get rid of you... it's how LIKELY they are to be that stupid that ends up determining you fate.

That's why it's important to go out of your way to make sure "the powers that be" understand your value. It doesn't help you if YOU know how valuable you are, it frequently doesn't matter if your coworkers know how valuable you are, and it rarely will do you any good if they figure it out after you've left. Management needs to know, before they start swinging the axe around.

There's always a little bit of a "consolation prize" if they figure out what a bad decision they made and turn around and hire you back for a bit to pull them out of the fire they started, but depending on who they feel like blaming for the mistake, it can look either very good on a resume or very bad on a background check. Its usually a bad risk, worth avoiding if possible.

The NSA doesn't run botnets... well, not many, anyways.

From TFA:

Even Symantec thinks it's a government operation. We're just starting to see them, but I think there's a lot more government-run botnets out there that haven't been outed yet. These sophisticated, highly targeted malware like Stuxnet are all government-run botnets.

They either made them, or as you suggested, took them over for their own use. (that's actually a good idea, and I'd bet the more common option outside of say china or NK... those two I could really see rolling their own botnet) It's not like anyone's going to put up any resistance. You don't call the cops when someone steals your cocaine.

just how many botnets the NSA is actually running?

not prevented, just greatly reduced.

Though even just looking at raw numbers isn't even fair. Apppl's store inventory dwarfs all of the others, and still numerically has fewer scams. It ought to work the other way around unless the wall is performing very effectively.

But bottom line here is some reviewers just got fired, and those that remain were harshly threatened. Reminds me of the recent peer reviewed journals that got caught with some lazy reviewers rubber stamping to boost their productivity numbers.

sounds like me. 43 here. Just recently signed on to manage a few hundred machines at a local college. Experience certainly helps with knowing how to make things that will work well in the long-term.

It also tends to mean you have a very broad skillset. I know I do. And everything I've learned up to this point is relevent for the job, it's like my work up to this point has been building me up the skills that I need to be a perfect fit for this position.

Time is the only thing that will turn you into that jack-of-all-trades person that makes you a valuable employee in your position as well as to help everyone around you. I can help the network guy trace cables, the DB guys troubleshoot the web forms, script automation, heck I was even assisting with a power failure in a lab recently. The best way to be a valueable employee is to be very good at what you do, plus be useful to everyone around you that does related work. It's the one-trick-ponies that get laid off first. Make sure that everyone around you realizes just how useful you are to the company in your position, and to them as well.

Remind them that your experience is an asset to everyone in the room. To everyone in the building.

Not to mention I can't actually manage to *read* most people's cursive writing, no matter what era they were taught it in.

I think the skill of being able to read it is more important than write it, but they're both still useful. I worked with college kids up until this year, and several times I was brought in papers written by customers with problem descriptions for me to "read to them" because nobody in the store besides me could read cursive.

Sad. very very sad.

Excluding when I sign my name to something, I really can't rememer the last time I needed to WRITE something in cursive though. I usually just write in individual letters. (neatly though) I wonder how these people sign their names nowadays? "X" ? It must be making forensics people's jobs a lot harder trying to analyze block letters rather than the admittedly much more stylized / personalized cursive.

contraception doing in a Biology textbook? Shouldn't that be taught in Health class?

I can see a small crossover in biology and contraception, since contraceptives do interact with biology. Not so much for the condom, but very much so for the pill ("how does it work?") and then getting into male contraception, and also sterilization (tube tying in both genders) I can see where that has a biology application.

But adoption, how the heck does that belong in a biology textbook???

Companies typically run two sets of books, one for the IRS, one for stockholders. It's legal.

While I don't know if it's legal or not to show your shareholders fraudulent books, I do know it's illegal to try to pull on the tax man. Federal charge of "keeping books" refers to keeping two separate sets of accounting, one for tax purposes and the other being an accurate reflection of your earnings. Basically it's ironclad proof of "premeditated tax evasion".

In many ways, the EPA and IRS have more destructive authority than any other government agencies. So exposing a company's wrongdoings to either of them typically leads to catastrophic results. And you almost never get to cut a deal with them, they'll take you to the cleaners because they know they can.

it seems though it would have been a much better idea to go ahead and indict him, even if there wasn't sufficient evidence to convict. (or even if they believed he was innocent) That would have had several important effects. First, the indictment itself would have cooled people's heads a little, Second, it would have gotten a lot more media coverage of the evidence, (which we've actually not seen a lot of, because if it DID go to trial, they will need to find jurors that haven't been exposed to it before being sequestered, meaning you either can't get a jury together or you have to make it up from people that have been living under a rock, which isn't a good thing) Third, just overall it would have given people more time to cool down before the possibly inevitable "not guilty" verdict. They've had some time already, but have mostly been using that time to GET people wound up in expectation of the failure to indict. This would have let the air out of their tires I think.

I think the basic rule of thumb here is that as a thug if you go for someone's gun, (or take down someone that has a gun) you really ought to expect to get shot. (by police OR private citizen) The bigger difference there actually is probably whether or not they empty the magazine on you. Joe Citizen will typically empty their weapon, which lowers your odds of survival quite a bit.