Are you saying that as long as externally visible behavior stays the same that there won't be new bugs/behaviors under the hood??
You can do all the unit and end-user testing you want; when you rewrite something, some behavior is going to change and you will not be able to catch it all. This is coming from someone who's done a lot of rewrite-it-from-scratch projects.

I couldn't agree more, but that's very expensive and very very dangerous. Why? Two factors:
1. Rewriting means rethinking; most legacy code is functional and is usually rebuilt in OOP. Whenever you rethink how something works it tends to change the entire behavior to say nothing of all the new bugs you'll have to hunt down. You're customers will definitely notice this.

2. Scope creep!! Rebuilding it? Why not throw in all that cool functionality we've been talking about for the past 10 years but couldn't implement because the architecture couldn't handle it. You get the idea.

Want an example? Netscape 5

Maybe you should read all the other posts about all the people that have already been detained despite showing said identification.
This is a law that's practically begging to be abused.

Actually it is very different. We are the f'ing USA; we have a constitution and a supreme court that specifically says this type of action (arresting/detaining people without probable cause) is illegal and a violation of civil rights.

It will be a short matter of time before this law is declared unconstitutional. I have no problem with the State of Arizona trying to deal with the immigration problem, however rounding up and detaining people is way WAY out of line, and making people carry their papers at all times or else go to jail is repugnant.

We are not talking about passwords to his email, his domain account, his laptop,etc. We are talking about THE password (there is only ONE) to Cisco IOS routers and switches. It is the equivalent of root passwords that don't belong to any single person.

That being said, I still think his prosecution is essentially the city behaving like a 5 year old child. The city's CTO should be sacked ASAP for such a huge failure of management: no documentation, no back ups of running configs, no cross-training among personnel so there wouldn't be a single person responsible, etc.etc. No large company runs like that.

Agreed. And that's just the immediate cost. When things like this happen, stores/businesses lose loyal customers to competitors and it takes months to recover.
And what about the IT costs? I guarantee you, there is now an effort underway in all major businesses to (1) test new anti-virus patches before rolling them out, (2) re-review all anti-virus software being used, (3) developing and testing mitigation plans for another failure. All of this is VERY expensive.
Here's another example: Airlines shut down because of a volcano. You think when the volcano stops that their business is going to go back to the previous levels? Nope. Even for something like airlines where people often don't have a choice, it will take quite some time to recover. 9/11 is another example of this; it took years for airlines to get back to pre-9/11 levels, although there were other economic factors that led to the decline in '01.

Many years ago I finally got broadband via cable (it wasn't COX.)
The Usenet service they included was sub-contracted from another company, and to keep things simple, all customers used the same id & pass to access the Usenet servers.
I don't remember what the ID was, but the pass was what I consider to be the most ultimate inside joke ever:
The pass was: abpe4me

She absolutely needs psych help; a LOT of paranoia here, not just re. the government planting the chip, but thinking her coworkers were torturing her.
My wife use to work at a university insect ID lab and got a LOT of "samples" (ie. fuzz, lint, or just an empty bottle) from people with delusional parasitosis. This woman has the same thing, only a little more high-tech.

Not that I'm a fan of Bing.... just sayin' they demo'd this a couple of months ago. I'll try to find a link.

Yup.... it's hard to collect your stalkee's trash virtually.

Unfortunately it wouldn't be anything that cool... it would be more like ComcastNewtons, DisneyNewtons, or ExxonNewtons.

There's a couple of problems with any validation of general relativity short distance scales. Pretty much any measurement you take would fall within the range of experimental error due to things like Brownian motion and quantum effects of working at such a small scale. ...

If DDT were still in use, the Bald Eagle would be extinct, along with several other birds.


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