Not always true - in fact, a lot of the larger breweries got to where they are by making at least one stellar beer. (not always true as Coors and Anheuser-Busch got to where they are by making a popular beer with lucky marketing breaks and a hefty profit margin)

With that being said, the quality control at larger plants is generally much stricter than a microbrewery is capable of.

That's not to say that microbreweries are without merits - My cousin is capable of producing nearly the legal limit of beer as homebrew without being classified as a microbrew and he has made 2 of best I've ever had, not to mention the various Microbrews I've been blown away by, but with that being said, there are treasures all over with the big breweries too. Guinness (Guinness), Fat Tire (discontinued, formerly Anheuser-Busch), Michelob Amber Bock (Anheuser-Busch), BlueMoon (Coors), Yunling (Yuengling brewrey - mid-size) Much of Leinenkugel's offerings (Leinenkugel brewing co. - mid-size), Almost anything Dogfishhead makes (Dogfishhead - mid-size) and a good chunk of what Sam Adams makes (Sam Adams Brewrey, mid-large size)

Unless it means they get free computer repair.

Agreed - even 48 hours is a bit long in today's digital world and the government would only be a middle-man to who the information needs to get to as you were saying.

If the legislators knew anything about computers, maybe they'd do something smart like require auditing software which detects mass-retrieval of data. That way, in most instances, the leak can be detected immediately instead of potentially not at all like some companies.

Heck - I think it would be better to require them to notify the government and their consumers within 48 hours of the breech regardless of whether or not they have detected it and subject them to a fine based on the severity of the retrieval and how detectable it should have been if it took them more than 48 hours to detect and report.

It won't stop data breeches, but it will make sure decent audit systems are in place.

To anybody with even a remote understanding of Slashdot, posts in the forums tend to become highly repetitive.

Looks like the idiot's guide to not being a douche wasn't available either. :-\

Even the new Social Security facilities are gonna blow.

Not entirely true. While countries can make "the tubes" a hell of a lot slower, it's almost impossible to cut anyone off completely from the grid. Look at North Korea as an example. There's almost no internet access in the entire country itself, but we're starting to get more pictures and information from inside the country than ever before because people are more and more easily able to send information outside of the country by other wired, wireless, or even physical means (such as hurling DVDs or memory cards outside of the borders.)

They may be able to delay an inevitable revolution of sorts, but doing that is becoming much harder as we've seen from previous kill-switch scenarios.

Don't even ask about division.

Actually, while I'm no Microsoft fanboy, IE 9 got a lot of things right. Especially when dealing with speed and security.

I still don't think it's quite as good as the recent versions of Chrome and Firefox, but I think some credit is due to Microsoft on that front.

Maybe headaches from sites like google will cause more computer newbies to hit the "upgrade" button. A button that is widely ignored but highly important.

I work with (and against) attorneys every day as a patent examiner...

Of course I over think even the most simple questions!

I guess the "step up their game" comment was more in response to Apple's denial that MacDefender even existed for almost a month instead of dealing with the problem. The nature of Apple (closed market) does make it harder for malware to exist in the system, but outright denial of the problem for so long and then an admission of a known security flaw is just inexcusable.

If Apple can't adapt to the problems increased market share will bring, they'll have some major problems getting to the top of the OS market.

While it is still a virus - I get what you're saying and the later version of MacDefender is only a social engineering exploit (Trojan) and not something that takes advantage of a legitimate exploit.

While that may be true, the original MacDefender did take advantage of a nasty root vulnerability that Mac OS had.

Even with that being said, Trojans are still a class of virus which will also become more popular as the market share increases. Trojans are just a phishing attack with code to allow access to the infected computer in some way. It's a class of malware that the computer savvy like most of Slashdot can avoid, but not a lot of people who expect their computer to "just work."

Of course it hasn't played out. Mac OS still only has a little over 7% of the market pinned down. Windows collectively (between XP, Vista and Windows 7) controls over 80% of the market. That means that besides smaller proof-of-concept exploits programed for fun, there is still very limited utility for mac malware in the wild.

All I'm saying is that getting from 2% to 8% market share will be much easier than getting from 8% to 32% and now that they're getting to almost an 8% market share, the first signs of malware are popping up.

I'd also like to say that while the 2nd MacDefender is indeed much more of a social engineering hack than anything, the first version did exploit a major bug which allowed root access without any additional permissions. Mac vulnerabilities are out there - and that one was a huge one so it was exploited, but look at the numbers - right now to get similar processing power or informational exploit pools, you'd have to have a hack that's literally 10 times as rampant on Mac than on PC.

It is and always will be a numbers game.

Technically, while I didn't have an e-mail address until my teen years, I have had multiple personal email addresses from my late teens to now (I estimate I have around 30 email addresses at this point through various sources)

because I have a personal email address on multiple fronts, the way the question is worded I can only assume that would count as time in addition to the first.

By that metric I'd estimate I've had a personal email address for 700-1200% of my lifetime.

Unless you mean "a" to be "exactly one" in which case I may not even make the first option of 1-20% as I believe I made a second "bacon" account just a couple months after the first.