I think your ignoring how some of these people get into this criminal line of work. Suppose you had been doing honest work as developer, or maybe even something like a pen tester. Suppose one day you discover a really reliable vulnerability you can exploit in some really really widely used software, maybe the SMB service on Windows or something. It works just about everywhere and gets privileged access.

Now you got choices:

Tell the vendor - who may be happy to hear from you so they can quickly and quietly patch it. They may even pay you a small bounty. The may also do nothing. They could potentially even try and prosecute you. I can tell you I WOULD NEVER CHOOSE THIS OPTION, little possibility for reward lots of potential for pain.

Publish it in the legitimate white had security world -- Probably the best choice. You'll be getting your name out there which can really help you. You might even be able to make some money off it directly by talking about it at the various *cons.. The vendor or project will be forced to fix the vulnerability which is good because that actually makes everyone safe. If you publish in the proper venue at least people who care enough to follow this stuff will be able to take some mitigation steps until a proper fix is available.

Sell it -- risky sure, but might not be all that difficult these days. Could be lots quick money. Awful hard to say no to a quick $50K shot in the arm. You certainly risk jail and could lose everything, but that calculation then depends on your current situation. If you have a good job and are living comfortable with some savings you'd probably be crazy to try it. On the other hand if you're sitting there wondering how your paying the rent this month and contemplating ramen noodles for dinner again; taking your chances on something like that might be pretty appealing.

I'll use whichever browser NSA says they can't decrypt...they wouldn't lie to me, right?

Don't let the chub fool you. I will knock you the fuck down and sit on you in a hot second.

The same old IT department at your employer is now a Cloud Provider.

No, the real difference is that a diminishing number of companies have an IT department - at least one that operates any significant number of servers. An increasing number of functions are carried out on "on the cloud" - i.e. hosted by some other company whose server farm is largely application-neutral, and which your company shares with any number of others.

I guess your point is that this doesn't change things for hosting companies, but the point is that more companies in general are using hosting in the first place.

Until that happens you company is doomed to failure.

It's not your company, but it's certainly doomed to failure if any part of your strategy takes in any way into account how much of a "pussy" a random Anonymous Coward thinks you are.

And then we are at exactly the problem people were already complaining about in the 1960: the militarization of the energy utilities, or the military-industrial complex.

Any energy source or storage method powerful enough to power an industrial society is powerful enough to wreak havoc, thus this problem is unsolvable. Energy isn't capable of distinguishing between benevolent and malevolent purposes, after all.

The reactor operators can't just leave this mindbogglingly-radioactive boiling-hot slurry in those tanks, they have to clean it up.

Why, exactly speaking, can't they leave the slurry in a tank? How do you think various substances are usually stored?

In any case, if they do want to move it to another container, the obvious solution is to simply pump it out.

One thing that /. readers often fail to take into consideration is that many companies may find that it's easier to outsource to a company with a solid reputation for hiring good people than to try to hire good people on its own. For smaller companies in particular, there's a hiring bootstrap problem here. They have to hire the right people who will be able to identify the candidates to build a solid IT team. A lot can go wrong, and many companies may in fact benefit from outsourcing to a reputable company who they can sue the hell out of if there is an issue and a highly paid consultant can point the finger at them cutting corners to make a few extra bucks.

Exactly, it's more the hundreds of billions of dollars of liability insurance that puts people of experimenting with nuclear.

Indeed, it's better to experiment with a form of power generation that's allowed to externalize its costs, which would be all the rest of them. Build a nuclear plant, and you actually have to pay for all potential problems; build a windmill, and someone else gets to pay for backup power. And choke on smog, for that matter, since "backup power" means coal, at least until it runs out, at which point it means rolling blackouts.

Oh well, the anti-nuclear lobby won, but at least none of us will be needing heating soon anymore. We'll be sitting in the dark, but won't freeze. So there's that.

Yes, duh? Any more questions?

...Though hopefully, they haven't reproduced yet, or they've merely condemned the next generation to consider it a good idea to cross without looking both ways.


/ And if you consider trolling, you don't know me very well. :)

I remain convinced that lead-acid is fine with trickle-discharge. The trick is that car(and motorcycle) batteries are typically optimized for burst power - utilizing lots of thin plates vs thick ones combine with that they really like being fully charged and that a steady trickle current can add up to lots of energy drain before you realize it.

Use 600 watts for 5 seconds to start your vehicle? That's not even the energy used by a 1 watt drain for an hour. As such a trickle current discharge will drain a battery relatively quickly, and unless you get deep-cycle batteries the wear starts racking up on them - but that's more from them being discharged.

And yes, I did mention that they've been increasing the size of batteries due to the extra demand, didn't I?

I wouldn't be surprised if the price of LiIon keeps dropping that we won't end up seeing LiIon starting batteries.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking the same thing.

When my mom and dad were 65/69, I bought them a Winbox simply because that is what everyone else has, so getting software and help would be trivial. That was 15 years ago and they are on their 3rd. Mom isn't here anymore but dad uses Skype, plays poker games (I send them game CDs) and such and he is in his 80s. We Facebook daily.

Sometimes "best" simply means what is most common, or maybe what you, the one who is going to be helping him, is familiar with. For him, the Winbox was handy because he could use it sitting down and the screen is big.

Exactly This ^^^

You want to motivate someone to really learn something show them the power of the thing. If you try to teach programming or math by showing kinds "hey you make 3d animations" many are not going to be interesting; because many won't see value in the application. On the other hand convey this can open endless possibilities its a tool that you can use to accomplish YOUR OWN goals, and kids will take interest.

For one student that might be animating their favorite comic book character, but for another it might be reading in a bunch of statistics and optimizing a fantasy football lineup. So you do need to show them some applications in the real world, but a truly great teacher might let some of the students define what that application is, because that would prove to them and all the others, that isn't about calculating how many swimming pools you can fill in hour with a 3" diameter water pipe, and some given pressure. Its about being empowered to do what you want to get done.

For this case I think I would disagree. While I would never use it myself, iPad would be best. Having a Nexus I have to say it takes a lot of configuration and knowledge to get it working. It does not even come with working email out of the box, and needs third-party email and other apps installed to even do basic things like email.

And these third party apps are almost certainty going to be 10 times more confusing and complicated than the built in iOS ones.

It's fine because you can use Chromium. You've got a captive audience, you can tell them which browser to use. It sucks to have to change browsers just to view some content at home, though.