That's because rational people don't have to actually go through with it to see how toxic it is.

If a host receives a notice and wants to keep their 'safe harbour' privilege in the eyes of the law, then the host has no choice but to accept the claims in the notice and immediately take down the file. The host does not (and in most cases cannot) make any determination of validity. It's up to the person who posted the file to prove to the host that the claim in the notice is incorrect. - In other words the DCMA system operates under the assumption of "guilty until proven innocent". There are penalties for making a false DMCA claim but I've never heard of them being applied by a court.

BTW, it's DMCA not DCMA.

An acronym must form a word, that's what distinguishes it from an abbreviation (such as TOS).

the happiest and richest countries in the world are in northern europe, and they are a solid stable mixture of capitalism and socialism

it is true that pure socialist, or pure capitalist countries, are terrible societies

the best is a mix, the middle, not an extreme

social safety nets remove the unjust and abusive extremes of pure capitalism

nevermind that pure capitalism isn't a meritocracy at all, it's a static class of structure of a few ultrarich and a sea of miserable poor

capitalism is just a tool, not a religion. the idea is to put capitalism to work, and have government structures that mitigate the injustices and imbalances that capitalism inevitably creates

to worship the idea of capitalism as some sort of perfect utopia is naive, ignorant, and just dumb, really. it reveals a lack of education and a heavy indoctrination into a dimwitted propaganda without any critical thought

You can (even in uniform) refuse an "unlawful" order, according to the UCMJ.

Yes. You will have to justify it though.

Anyway, back to the previous comment:

there's a magical difference between sworn and unsworn.

It's not magical. It's "military" and "civilian". If you're military then the UCMJ replaces the civilian laws.

if they ask a hacker to create a virus ....

The military does not create the weapons that it uses. It buys them from civilians. The M-16? Parts made by Mattel. The same company that makes Barbie dolls. So a soldier would probably NOT be writing that virus. It would be a civilian contractor or other government agency (NSA).

I think the concept here has gotten lost.

The problem is that if your INITIAL sorting is based upon who can pass Basic Training and such, you will probably exclude people with more valuable skills.

There is nothing stopping the Army from creating a new field and assigning some lieutenants to it. Those lieutenants are the ones that "pull the trigger".

But the network scans, evaluations, compromises and such can all be done by GS contractors. The lieutenants would be the equivalent of "script kiddies" at worst.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Schedule_(US_civil_service_pay_scale)

But to have a whole group of 'different' Army folks - not such a good idea.

100% agreement.

If they are NOT going to be deployed then hire them as GS whatever.

If they ARE going to be deployed to a situation where they can be shot then they need combat training.

Developed countries don't need to promote population control - it happens by itself. Every developed nation except for the United States (which has large amounts of immigration) has a declining birth rate. And, yes, it is a problem for retirement schemes.

It's true. Instead of being a fraud, like Ms. Video Blogger, she's in a place where actual, real medieval misogynists do things like actually kill women for trying to have a real life. Yes, fielding trollish tweets is definitely worse than being shot in the head. Or being stoned for having been raped. Or having acid thrown in your face. Or having your teacher burned alive in front of you before you are gang raped. Or having a hundred of your fellow students killed for being part of a culture that isn't sufficiently backing a particular jihadist nutcase faction. Or being dragged off into the African jungle to be rented out as a twelve year old wife. Yeah, those tweets are for sure worse than that sort of stuff.

It's not so much the VPN technology as it is the failure to correctly implement and secure it.

TFA leaves the real content until the end of the article:

The data is then replayed from the repositories through a set of attack scripts, which use sets of preshared keys (PSKs) harvested from sources such as exploited routers and stored in a key database ...

So if the NSA wants to "crack" your VPN session they first record it (we know how they do that) then they try to brute force that recording using what is, essentially, a dictionary attack.

TFA seems more entranced by the cutesy names than by the technology.

Douglas Adams said it best:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

The WSJ's entire premise is based upon the idea that space is small enough that we could search it for other inhabited planets in the time we've been looking.

Space isn't that small.

Space is so big that BILLIONS of years will pass before we even see the light shining from a sun in a different galaxy.

The universe could have 10,000 intelligent species that we will never know about because they are just too far from us.

No, "necessary" entirely misses the point.

No. That is the point.

Users will find a way to do what they desire to do, and they'll find a way to make it easy to do so.

Now think about a bank. Physical access to the money is controlled and verified and audited.

Employees at a bank are NOT allowed to do whatever is easier for them. They do NOT prop open the secure doors.

If they do so, they are fired.

So why would Facebook be any different? Because people can SEE when the doors to the money are propped open. But they cannot SEE the network access.

You are wrong.

[Difficulty of unauthorized access] / [Difficulty of authorized access]

I would change that second part to

"necessary access"

. I'll explain in a moment.

Making authorized access harder reduces security because people. People will always make it easier fo themselves.

In my experience, the first problem is EGO. There is always some executive who bases his/her EGO on what exemptions he/she can get.

I'm too important NOT to have access to X.
From anywhere.
Along with all my people.

And then other executives have to have the same access because, otherwise, they are not as important. And IT can handle it, right?

So you end up with too many people with too much access. And admin/root access to their machines. That they also use for non-work related activities because why shouldn't I have iTunes on my work laptop?

So you end up with 100 people with VPN access to the HR servers and 95 of them don't even know it and 99 of them don't use it. BUT THEY ALL "HAVE" TO HAVE IT AND IT IS AUTHORIZED.

In the world of physical security, the lesson is: "any door along the quickest path between where people work and the smoking area will be propped open - don't even try to fight it, instead make sure that doesn't compromise security".

And with computer security, they bring the open doors with them. Wherever they go. And they are authorized to do so.

But it is not necessary for them to have that authorization.

Not only will the microwave fixe it but it will charge the battery too.

From the summary:

For driverless cars to work, to decrease congestion, increase safety, reduce lawsuits and lower our insurance premiums everyone would have to be driving one.

Bullshit. Just having the cameras showing that it was the other guy's fault when he hit you should be enough to reduce your premiums. And reduce lawsuits as the insurance companies learn how much video is available.

Congestion will depend upon the specific situation. But since you won't have to focus on it, will it matter as much? And I would expect that the car would call home for the most expeditious route available to it. Accident 1 mile ahead, get off highway at this exit, take these streets, get back on highway after accident ... automatically.