I can confidently say no NASA money was wasted on hookers and blow, in space. yet.

Money has never been wasted on hookers and blow. Spent, yes, but not wasted.

Right, if decades ago the inventors of the internet had realized that it would scale from 10s of users to billions. I'd say the address space length that they used still makes it outrageously overengineered for the time, and we're lucky they had the vision that they did. To criticize them is preposterous.

I say we take those rights away and let United Nations handle TLD's like...

The problem is that 'we' usually means 'somebody else'. And since the US isn't going to give that right away anytime soon, 'we' will need to have some teeth.

That, and if you think it's screwed up now, wait until the UN gets it. That'll be hilarious.

It wasn't a question as to whether it's legal. The question was whether it's a kind of crappy thing to do. If the issue was legal, he would have sent a C&D - since the issue instead was CNET's being crappy, he used public shame instead, which is the effective means of attack in that instance.

I can attest that it's being researched for numbers 1-3. Numbers 4-5 are likely but outside my field. #6 is currently unlikely as graphene is a helluvalot more expensive than copper.

Who says they'd find out? All they'd know is that you used their software to open up a port.

They had pretty good control over that bad boy, and if activity happened that wasn't theirs I'd think they'd know.

If you can get someone else to do your dirty work without them realizing they're doing it, it's harder to trace back to you.

I get the deniability angle, but you can always deflect even if you did the dirty work.

For one, because if you're engaging in a "cyber attack" you wouldn't want someone else to have that much insight into what you're doing. Do you want the Eastern European thugs knowing how your stuff works? Worse, do you want to be dependent on their vector?

It makes more sense here to do it right than to piggyback. I'd also like to think that the agency that might have created these things can out-do a rag-tag bunch of European criminals.

If you do Air and Space, you want to do the one out by Dulles Airport. That's the one that has a space shuttle, Enola Gay, tons of other awesomeness.

50k to develop an app? How is that high, again?

Sounds like someone is unfamiliar with developing real budgets for real companies.

They let the market sort it out. I might not have been the best approach from a technical point of view, but from a capitalistic point of view it was fine.

Why? I'm all about the free-market love story where supply meets demand and they live happily ever after, but that doesn't describe the cell carrier industry. You have a market where there are at most...5 participants? In a mature market where the margins are about 2%, and the barrier to market entry is measured in many billions? The 'market' doesn't solve problems under those conditions because no new entrant can jump in.

I don't tend to be a huge fan of centrally planned economies either, but I think it's important to recognize situations where the 'free' market doesn't exist and won't solve your problems. In those cases, we might benefit from some sane regulations.

Right, because fatasses are only found in America. How come when blatant insults are hurled regarding someone's nationality, they get -1 - unless it happens to be America, in which case it's +5? Really, there was absolutely *nothing* insightful about that comment.

I just bought four SanDisk USB drives, in original packaging, at Costco. I had to clean them of junk before using them. They even had autorun files and some kind of installer. Send the guy an empty drive that's really empty. That's a real gift today.

That's an especially fun gift for computer security professional. Since they'll never believe the drive is actually *empty*, you've given them a fun game where they try to figure out how you hid the malware. Everybody wins.

Yeah, but like every company, they continuously issue new shares. They obviously haven't initiated another public offering, but I imagine the executives are more than happy to keep issuing themselves additional shares every year.

Do consider that, in 2000, MSFT was still considered a growth company - I'd say that a tripling of earnings was probably baked into the price at that point. We could also consider share dilution, but I can't find stats on how the number of (split adjusted) shares increased since 2000.

Just to modify my own post, I don't think the Volt issue is common, or that safety issues inherent to lithium batteries are limited to the Volt. But the notion that one can simply replace the batteries as an easy solution is silly because they're expensive.