There's a good satirical movie called fittingly enough, 'The Man Who Sued God'
which is based entirely on the insurance exclusion 'Acts of God'.
Billy Connolly (Scottish stand-up, I compare him to George Carlin) is in it.

I've always thought of "zero tolerance" as newspeak for "intolerance"

BP is one of the main funding providers for this research. I would not think for a second that this technology will quickly convert to cheap solar for the masses any time soon.

Maybe we'll see solar-powered oil drills!

Who says that these lesson plans are produced *at* government public schools? The last I checked, the average overtime a teacher spends dwarfs many other occupations. If a teacher spends that additional time so they can cookie-cut and streamline the information so there is more time for productive feedback and scoring of a student's ability then great.

But.. if teachers use this alongside equally cookie-cut tests (multi-choice) then yeah... I'd start to ask what the hell is it they're doing with our tax dollars.

"I believe that proper real-time monitoring of the system could have prevented most of the attack..."

As someone who has worked in the Card Fraud industry, I can assure you that it is a requirement for every card processor to use real time monitoring software for the prevention of fraud. Visa/Mastercard/etc demand it if you want their logo on the card. The amount of money prevented from fraudulent activity over the past 10 years has dropped very, very significantly. $9 mill on this would be a drop in the bucket in the 90s for some banks. Interestingly this is something that can be worked in to financial institution's budgets as a type of expense/liability.

Here's the problem with realtime monitoring in its current breadth and depth. It can only process and monitor suspect transaction where either the card issuer (the bank of the card user) or acquirer (the bank of the place making the transaction). issuer approvals happen in near-realtime. They have to, otherwise we'd all be waiting at a checkout for hours/days to get approval on the payment. Where banks can fall short, is they are all very much to themselves with their data. Rightly so, this also really, really slows up the ability to share data. Factor in each various country's data protection laws, and this is simply unattainable for some (the UK for example, does not share data just because it'd be nice to do so).

On top of that, there is a bit of a schizm as to whether neural networks or rule-based (human-created manual rules for detection) are the 'best' approach to catch and prevent fraud.

A more recent push, for PCI-DSS enforces encryption of certain data, and to verify that it's done. So I ask you the question, is it the fraud monitoring here, or the security failure and weak encryption allowing this group to legitimize the transactions? It goes back to your original statement that secure design and implementation are the solution.. I'd like to add one-time passwords on to that list.

Lastly, for 'proper' realtime monitoring is a bit of a throw away comment. Take the amount of credit card transaction a day (let's say 3 million) and 1% of those are fradulant (how do we do this properly again?) which means we have to find 30,000 transactions that could cost us money. For 50 people at say, $40,000 a year to find 30,000 fradulent transactions a day would cost say... $2 million annually. So if they caught 'every' fraudulent transaction, then that is a $1 million saving. But realistically, is 50 people enough? how about 500? Now lets make this operation 24 hours, plus office space, equipment, etcetera. At the end of it all, there has to be a line where money spent preventing fraud has a return on its investment (within reason).

Pluto Home This is pretty good stuff. The core is linux, but if you want those essential extras (DVD recording/playback) then you'll need to either add your own packages to the system, or purchase the canned solution they offer.

The thought of shouting abuse at a burgler/stalker/milkman through my home stereo system while watching him on my mobile is oh so exciting! There might be a world's funniest video hidden in there..

I couldn't agree more!
Also, the question begs to be asked: What about all those sub-groups that are morally-ethically detested like say k3dd1e pr3n, or murder? How do these groups or 'hits' flag up? If this type of system had 'hits' crop up with these areas, then what happens? Should that just go on un-noticed because company charters have no legal requirement to have ethics/morals that maintain society? Is it any different than witnessing something like the above in person and ignoring it? Franklin's quote is dated when considering our current society.
On the other hand... like the parent says, how far down does that rabbit-hole go when politics, corruption, and social manipulation come in to it. Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? Depends on the viewpoint. Justified or Illegal.. etcetera.
Lastly, is this kind of data going to be of any use? Schnier has a good article about false-positives and the sheer amount of datamining being a mathmatical mountain. Just because we know that subGroupA is slagging off companyB - is that enough to change somebody's actions? Who decides that is a good idea? does subGroupC get special upper-class opinion status?