If a gun kills someone it's usually because that gun was pointed at that person and discharged by themselves or another individual. That's how guns work as far as I know. That person is culpable for that act.

If someone writes malicious code that rips people off via botnet or phishing... who really pulls the trigger?

In one of America's numerous famous school shootings, the media and the public overwhelmingly blamed the resource officer who's responsibility is to allegedly protect the staff and students. He was hung from his toes by the government and accused of criminal negligence leading to death, injury, public outrage, etc., but later acquitted by a jury.

Is the government going to start prosecuting IT staff who do not adequately respond to or prepare for computer security incidents? Will the person who pulls the purse strings be responsible for skimping on talent and manpower to prevent this? Will the software vendor be held responsible for not forcing the user to install updates and patches, or even for negligence for being unaware of the exploit(s) used in the attack? Does some government agency with word "cyber" or "security" in their name bear any responsibility for failure to prevent any of this? Are we all going to need a license to access the internet soon?

What about a hypothetical multinational healthcare/insurance firm who outsources their IT operations and could give two shits about protecting their data? Are the contractors or the firm culpable for any breaches? Was grandma ever really responsible for lil' Johnny Boy uploading Britney MP3s on limewire?

It's as if tools consisting of data and instructions being used as weapons are seemingly a new paradigm (scale notwithstanding) that hasn't been happening for decades. Such fascinating times.

of killing two birds with one stone is intriguing. If we could get as many politicians as we could to each take their high-end smartphone that came preloaded with TikTok and go occupy themselves somewhere other than here, never to return. That would be great. Or maybe not do that and just stop manufacturers and vendors from locking you out of administrative privileges on your own devices. That would be even better.

That's because Linux isn't an operating system. It's a kernel... everything that is not the kernel is not Linux.

That's what I was gonna say, the "official" version of Linux resides at kernel.org. It's an old truism that people still roll their eyes over. Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. Linus had chosen GNU as the operating system to support his kernel, the time was right, and GNU was already there, available for "any" purpose. Well, having a complete posix compliant operating system with source available gratis when you are developing a kernel is a win. People fail to remember this distinction and some even get annoyed or tune out when reminded of it. It's NOT a 'GNU evangelical' position to state that Linux is a kernel, and GNU is the operating system it uses to pull itself up by the bootstraps, it's a fact. Granted there are cases like Android and many embedded systems that use the Linux kernel and an operating system (the stuff that enables you to use applications and lets them, or you, to talk to the kernel) that is not GNU. Usually, pieces of GNU are used to construct the OS anyway because they are already there, they are proven, they are free, and they are well documented. It's difficult to use the term GNU/Linux without someone scoffing at you these days. This is a personal problem, not GNU's or Linux's problem. That said I will reiterate: "Linux is a kernel, the official version of linux can be found at kernel.org".

Does anyone even use Twitter? Maybe he could buy myspace and resurrect icq and aol instant messenger while he's at it. Hell, bring back Usenet. That would at least be useful so I could talk to folks about 6502 assembly instead of being bombarded by conspiracy theories and nonsense.

Paul Allen was in the room when Dilbert's boss called.

100%

Do you restore other garbage? Or just computers?

It was 2001. I was working for an isp in the midwest, in the noc. Start seeing '/var/spool/mail ballooning out of control, filling up the f@#$ partition' errors coming from a mail server in Idaho. Login to machine to investigate, see that approximately 40 users of a common domain (hosted domain for email) had forwarded a 9MB .avi not only to everyone that shared their domain, but several other local users who also began spamming people with this thing. It was that damned video of the guy fishing for salmon that gets in a fistfight with a bear.

I do a lot of dinking off at work, mostly coding utilities we can use in-house. The boss department merely nods and congratulates on these things because of the man-hours I save by investing the companies time I save for taking a 30 minute task an trimming it down to 3 minutes. I do not get paid extra for this, but the time it saves allows us to to do our jobs in less time. I would encourage folks in the SMB market to let the smart guys (that have been there a while) take a few hours to automate some things that will save people time. If a long drawn out procedure can be automated and require less attention it is going to profit the company.

The best feature is that I can wait for the first service pack to see if it works ok. I have no NEED for Windows 8.

Somewhere PowerDVD is wringing it's hands and cackling madly in it's secret lair.

It's interesting that Microsoft has long been strong-arming hardware vendors into REQUIRING that they sell their machines with an OS(oh, any OS is fine *wink* *wink*). Now apparently they want to make sure you can't take Windows off of the device. This isn't so different from encrypted bootloaders on android devices.

Now that these mobile devices have advanced to being full blown computers in every sense of the word, they are still not referred to as such. They are not even referred to and single-purpose/special-purpose computers. They are referred to as consumer electronic devices or mobile phones. People are used to consumer electronics and mobile phones being proprietary devices, this is normal and accepted. There is still the pervasive idea that with desktop computer or a notebook computer that the machine is the PROPERTY of the OWNER of the machine. "This is my machine and you can't tell me what I can or can't put on it."

They idea of buying a laptop computer that you cannot, WILL NOT, run anything but the operating system shipped with it is just weird. If people aren't thinking of the device as a computer, but merely a telephone or a gadget, this idea doesn't seem weird at all.

How will they be able to stream live video to big brother???

Angry Birds will be running the country.