To my wife immediately. She complains that her memory could be better.

Do we now prefer Microsoft to Apple now? Last I knew Slashdot likes the underdog.

All aircraft engine manufacturers call for zero ash. I'm guessing that they figured that was the easiest thing to do as opposed to doing actual testing. Since it's never been tested properly, I wouldn't blame the governments for following the written specifications. I also doubt that any engine company is going to be willing to take on the lilability of publishing updated specifications allowing some ash.

I don't understand how they can't have full free speech rights, yet be held accountable for criminal acts. If a 17 year old student came to school with a gun and killed someone, they would want to try them as an adult. If you're going to be held to adult standards in that situation you should also have adult privileges.

This is slashdot, Linux never crashes. Crashing is something only Microsoft operating systems do.

Imagine the messages if it was Microsoft doing this. And even better would be if Comcast was somehow providing the service.

Many Europeans live in a much more urban setting then we do in the US. I live in a suburb and therefore I don't bother securing my wireless. If someone wants to use my bandwidth they'll have to be on my property to do it, because I don't get much range out of my house. Why should I bother securing it? It's much more conveniant to leave it open, especially when friends stop over or I'm working on someone's PC. All of my banking etc is run over SSL so it's encrypted endpoint to endpoint anyway. If I lived in a urban setting I would probably have to secure it though since many folks could leach if they wanted to.

I just clicked your link and the third entry is We could not find matches for "Anal Massage for Lovers Vol 2". I'm pretty sure Target never carried that product confirming what you say. I'm wondering if they are spamming from some sort of fixed database or if they are using failed queries from their site. If they are using failed queries, we could turn this against them. Someone could write an app to search target.com for bestiality, necrophilia etc. I wonder if Target would be happy to be the number one result for those search terms.

Mod parent up! This is the same way I get rid of all of the bloatware that comes preinstalled on a new PC. When you get the license agreements, just disagree with them. The software is immediately uninstalled.

I searched a whole bunch of these for the word "fuck" and couldn't find a single instance. I find it hard to believe that nobody got a page from their girl/boy friend saying why don't you come over and fuck me or a message saying holy fuck a plane just hit the WTC.

If this could be done every 4 seconds for hundreds of thousands of data points you might be correct. Unfortunately I don't know of a system that could do this at any speed close to what is required. The speed required doesn't even allow for relational databases, because Oracle, SQL etc can't handle the inserts at the rate required. Here http://www.osisoft.com/software-support/what-is-pi/Architecture.aspx is a typical architecture for this sort of thing. There are multiple layers of firewalling between the control networks and corporate networks, but any company that were to go the air gap route would be bankrupt shortly. These are real-time systems and the markets can change very quickly.

I know all the comments are about to come flooding in that these systems should be air gapped from the Internet, but that isn't practical in today's environment. These systems need to be indirectly connected to the corporate networks, because the data is valuable to the companies. Much of this is due to deregulation. Since deregulation electric utilities no longer operate as islands with their own generation, transmission and customers. Since nobody liked monopolies in the energy industry, the pieces aren't necessarily owned by the same companies anymore. Energy is also bought and sold in a market environment with prices changing all the time and the information is exchanged over the Internet. If you want to see the current Megawatt Hour (MWh) prices in the midwest check out http://www.midwestiso.org/page/LMP+Contour+Map+(EOR). Needless to say air gapping isn't practical in today's environment.

I'm still waiting to see this in action. I know it's fairly easy to synch passwords between systems and even provide some parts of SSO, but I'm still waiting on the application that lets me long into Windows in the morning and never be presented with another login box for the rest of the day. I don't expect it to ever happen.

Even with a SAN you need to limit volumes sizes to whatever size you can restore within the acceptable restoration window. There are also those times where you just want to run a chkdsk and if the volume is too big, it takes too long.
That being said, I can't believe they didn't have any backup. Even if they skipped the pre-upgrade backup, they should have had one from last night/week/month. Any of those options would be better than nothing. I have to assume they were doing backup to disk on the same SAN they were upgrading, which is pretty dumb. I still can't understand why they didn't have a backup at another site somewhere else in the world. We do that sort of thing all the time where I work.

I'm from another state, but I happen to work for a gas and electric utility. There is a reason the charges are like they are. The public service commission of your state has made them do it this way. In my state we are NOT allowed to make any profit on the gas you use. The customer pays exactly what we pay. We are allowed a certain profit (a few %, I think our is 3) on our capital investment, items such as the pipe in the ground, wires in the air, or a new power plant etc. Often there are also additional line items for special things we are legally bound to do. For example a law may be passed that requires energy conservation programs for a period of time and we are allowed to charge our customers for that program. That creates another line item. Because the PSC or law requires these monies be tracked separately than normal income, you can see what happens to the bill.