It worked for me as well - BUT: I think the barrier for entry is too high for kids today; in the early 80s when Byte was truly at the top of its game, there just wasn't a lot you could DO with computers without access to great resources like Byte or Creative Computing.

I was kind of surprised about this, too. I think there are two things going on:

1. It's science, so it shouldn't matter who submitted it, it either stands on its own or it doesn't, BUT:
2. It DOES matter that kids did this work.

And maybe a third thing:
3. people have forgotten joy and have become grumpy curmudgeons.

Bullshit. Average teacher salary here in Montana (yay, 45th in the nation) is $38k.

http://www.teacher-world.com/statespages/Montana.html

Nationwide, not much better:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary

For something as important as education of our children, yeah, those salaries are WAY too low. You should not be able to make more at the post office than as a teacher.

Here's something fun to try - head to a pawn shop and see if they've got an old iMac. 233MHz G3 would be best, but just look around. See how snappy that interface is. Snappy! After years of running MacOS X, I was surprised to see what System 9 was doing. (System 7 is similar if you can find a box that'll run it: though everything else on that class of machine is slow, the interface wasn't).

It was a good interface that didn't really need much fixing: only the underlying core needed improvement.

Thank you for serving our country. My point is to differentiate between "major damage" to our country, and any other issues. Our country will survive without substantial change because of Wikileaks.

I hear you, and I still don't see any major damage done here. None of those that you have mentioned strike me as substantially harming our country in any significant way. The sun'll still rise tomorrow, and McDonald's will still be serving coffee.

It sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree.

What "major damage" done to the country? Serious question here. Other than egg on face and some ruffled feathers, how has the US been harmed in any significant way?

- Communications disrupted? Nope (well, except for the Air Force...)
- Major utilities infrastructure compromised? Nope
- Mass casualties? Nope
- Economic catastrophe? Nope, same ol' recession.

Seriously, the Wikileaks releases mostly show that shit is classified that shouldn't be, that the gov't is afraid of the masses, and that our diplomatic corps are pretty catty.

Easy way to fix it is to use the botnet itself.

They're 56. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/snapshots/670.html

Sensitive .mil data, however, DOES have the option of being passed over the internet, depending upon application. An example might be management of military benefits, wherein service members have a reasonable expectation of being able to interact and query their benefit data without having to find a red terminal.

John - here's the report that suggests it may well have been operated as a transit network:
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=249#

The relevant bits:
"This happens accidentally a few times per year, Alperovitch said. What set this incident apart from other such mishaps was the fact that China Telecom could manage to absorb this large amount of data and send it back out again without anyone noticing a disruption in service. In previous incidents, the data would have reached a dead end, and users would not have been able to connect."

They

Read again, closely. Look at the FAQs. There is definitely preparation ongoing, and units that operate limited platforms, but there certainly is not an AUTOMATED system in place.

I don't think this much of that is true: even popular kids probably only text a handful of folks, and even those less social certainly can text and interact plenty with the friends that they do have.

Am I the only one that read this and didn't go, "duh, popular and social kids get laid", but rather, "addicts of one are addicts of another"? I don't think being more social has anything to do with "over" texting, or drinking, or sex, or 3 hours a day on facebook. Rather, it seems more like attention-seeking teens - get it.

It's losing the battle to fight the war. Realistically, it's going to be virtually impossible for GoogleApps to get a play in the current DoI RFQ.

What they can do is create such a stink and furor that the DoI becomes a cautionary tale on how not to create future closed bids.