Sinking a US carrier by being undetected has been demonstrated. see http://www.dutchsubmarines.com/boats/boat_walrus2.htm

US carriers have been routinely sunk by canadian, australian, dutch and english subs. As another commentator mentioned, aircraft carriers are great for projecting power against an inferior enemy, not as much when facing a sophisticated foe.

Having used both name/password, electronic tokens etc. to access my financial data, I would like to see an objective analysis of their security. I personally prefer the electronic tokens used by several Dutch banks (ING, Rabobank, ABN AMRO), above the name/password features used by American banks (BofA, Wells Fargo, Chase, JP Morgan, Credit unions, etc.). But the main question is: how do they perform in real-life? Which schemes lose more money to scamming or phishing?

Evaluating the performance of my parents (70+) with modern authentication schemes, does not bode well. My parents are generally unable to distinguish phishing mail from real mail - how should banks balance the convenience of email against the requirements for safety?

Can anyone point to objective evaluations of bank security and authentication schemes?

The market is anonymous, unless you and our 'friend' agree on which product to trade you have no way of identifying the other party. On popular products, i.e. Google or Apple, this is impossible. On other products liquidity (trade volume) is so small that such transactions would stick out like a sore thumb.

On top of that, it will take a lot more than two lines of code to defeat all the checks and balances in trading code. These checks and balances usually trace their origin to things having gone wrong in the past. I would expect all trading firms to have good source code management systems, your 'enhancement' will not go unnoticed.

Thanks, I now appreciate the dilemma faced by the jury when interpreting and judging the actions of all parties involved.

It's a sad case, I hope he gets sentenced to time served. He will be punished more than enough whilst trying to put his life back together again.

Thank you for your post, and thank you for your jury service.

Without access to all the evidence and testimony presented in court, I am still stuck with one question: Was justice served?

Based on your comments I concluded that Terry Childs did violate the law, and that in your opinion the whole situation was handled badly by all parties involved. Since law only exists within the context of human society, I find it dissatisfying that the human context was removed when you were instructed to apply only the law. By your own comments you were unhappy with the conduct of both parties in this trial, but what in your opinion would be a just outcome, in other words, how would justice be best served?

I for one am sick and tired of these types of attack. Whoever, in their right mind thought it was a good idea to expose SQL query inputs on the Web?

Ever heard of input sanity checking? It was very popular in the say, 60's, 70's and 80's. It means you reject fields you don't expect to be there, instead of arbitrarily passing them onto the backend database. These types of attacks illustrate what is wrong with web security: developer convenience trumps common sense everytime...

Next time we see Ballmer hopping along shouting developers, maybe could he please add the words 'SECURITY BY DESIGN', please, pretty please?

SQL injection attacks are asinine because they are so prevalent, easy for the hackers AND easy to fix. We should name and shame every site, and every web-application stack that allows these attacks to take place.

nuf said.

Not to forget that the business unit manager sold non-existent capacity in an effort to lock-in his bonus...

Data-centers are businesses, even if they are wholy owned by the company. The business of a data-center is delivering reasonable service at minimum cost. When you think long and hard about it, you can only conclude that a data-center is in the commodity business. The past ten years have clearly shown what happens to commodity businesses... The main problem however is that data-center competition and customer demand lead to the same end-result: shitty service at an acceptable price. In the end, large data-center screw-ups are rare and most companies do try to make an educated guess on their risk.

For data-center management to be fun again, we need: better tools, less proliferation of half-baked OSes, standardization of management APIs etc... Is it likely to happen: no, because it is a commodity and not enough people care....

To make you feel better: when cars where new and exciting, most people knew how to change a flat, check the oil, fix a bulb and manually crank the car, becuase cars would break down. Nowadays the average person may know how to check the oil and change a flat, but only if their dashboard warns them.... The same is true for data-centers, technology is amazingly more robust and easier to manage, to the point that most users don't care or know any better....

I second that, study what you enjoy and see where your interest takes you. I struggled with statistics when I studied for my masters, but my current job is steep in statistics and I am much better at it. Funny how that goes.... It's a lot easier to learn a Math subject when there is a real need to understand it present, otherwise it can remain abstract and obtuse.

The other piece of advice: do your homework, everyday, and don't give up. Seriously, I was a B+ student until my math teacher started checking my homework - I told him that there were other students more deserving of his attention. Within a few weeks I was an A-student...

As for making a choice, I would do both, but take the easier one first.