I wanted to see for myself what government agents or advertisers would find when they went sifting through my web history, so I took a close a look through several years of my own web history.

I have scientifically determined that I am an amazingly dull person. I bore myself to tears. I'd rather read the phone book than go through my own web history again.

I'm in one of these "critical" industries that will be most likely be included under the benevolent government security umbrella provided by this bill. I've gotten pretty good at predicting how our loving, caring government is likely to respond to this type of challenge, to wit:

After a competitive bid involving only Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft, they will likely hire Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft to tell them what's needed. Unsurprisingly, the solution will include the requirement to purchase lots of expensive products from Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft.

This new regulatory function will obviously need oversight by the government. The government will expand (bloat?) the bureacracy by hiring an excessivly large number of underqualified, overpaid people to monitor compliance with their byzantine rules, which will constantly change to suit their whims. There will be minor incidents, which will be blamed on laziness and non-compliance by the industry. More regulations will be drafted, new equipment will be purchased and the bureacracy will expand even further.

At that point, we commence the never-ending circle of more regulation, more money paid to a select group of "certified" vendors and the unceasing growth of the bureacracy.

IT shops have to do what their users want, within the regulatory and financial framework laid down by government, corporate counsel, shareholders, lenders, legal privacy requirements, and all with an adoring eye focused on our fiduciary duty to our employees, customers and suppliers.

Just because a user wants to be able to have a neat toy doesn't mean we throw all those requirements to the wind. Trade secrets that leak out into the public domain through insecure devices means those secrets aren't, well... secret. Credit card numbers, social security numbers, private medical information and such all require a certain standard of care in handling, and if the device can't meet that standard, which means that we as a corporation can't CONTROL how that device is used, then we can't allow our users to have those devices, regardless of their heartfelt desires. The legal liability alone dictates what we can and can't do.

I really do like Apple products. I own far too many myself. However, we won't allow those devices on our internal network because of all the reasons I listed.

Leap seconds are a tiny bit of problem when you have to time-stamp transactions coming in from all over the globe and keep them in date/time order. Some OSes don't support leap seconds, which complicates matters. We have the procedures documented from the last time this happened in 2008, but, of course, we've changed OS, DB and message queue vendors since then, so nothing applies anymore.

Time to spin up a new project and pay some high-priced consultants a lot of money to rewrite the procedures documentation yet again. I suspect we'll take the coward's way out and shut down processing for a minute before until a minute after and resync the clocks in the interim.

That will, of course, be charged to our SLA downtime, which will affect everyone's performance reviews at the end of the year. All this for a single goddamn second.

Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone?

No. If it makes me feel superior to IE users, the story must run.

How appropriate. You post like a cow.

Your definition of "troll" is astoundingly wrong.

People who suffer from Aspergers or Autism (like many Slashdot users) are unable to read those cues in real life, much less on the internet. They are victims of a disease, but your definition lumps them in with people who try to raise the hackles of others on purpose.

If someone does not understand the nuance of your post, it does not mean they are a troll. The inability to read such nuance over the internet is very much akin to Aspergers and Autism. The person on the other end is working at a disadvantage.

It isn't nice to mock the mentally disabled, but you seem to think it's fine. You, sir, are the exact kind of person this story was written about.

No YUO!