The fact that the number of days in a week is arbitrary is completely irrelevant. If there were eight days a week, then could make the same calculations, substituting the number eight for seven in the calculations. Yes, the results would be different but that's because the information you were provided is different. In this case, the day the son was born is narrowed to one in seven. If there were eight days a week, it would be narrowed to one in eight.

The number of sides on a die is arbitrary as well. There are dice with 4 sides, 8 sides, 10 sides, 20 sides, etc. On a six sided die, the chance of rolling a one is one in six. On a ten sides die, it's one in ten. Just because a six sided die is an arbitrary choice doesn't mean that one can't calculate odds based on that number. So long as you know the size of the die being used, the odds are directly calculable. So long as everyone understand the number of days in a week, the odds can be calculated based on that as well.

Not sure what you're saying is not a problem - the change to TACO or the forked Beef TACO. If you're talking about the changes to the original, I sort of agree with you. I can understand people being upset over the size expansion, particularly if it slows down Firefox or significantly increases its memory footprint, but is there any real problem with the changes that makes this some sort of malware? So far as I can tell, there's no malicious activity associated with the update. It's just big and bloated but does offer some significant new and useful functionality. Assuming that to be the case, I think the hysteria is a bit overblown.

This isn't domain hijacking. Hijacking is when you impersonate the legitimate owner to have the domain transferred, use some sort of DNS poisoning attack to redirect the traffic to an alternate site or use some other nefarious method to deprive the legitimate owner of the use of the domain. The domain owner allowed the domain to expire. McCrary purchased it legally and legitimately. No high jacking involved.

A dedicated wireless network is one workable and practical solution. Assuming that the network is using business class equipment and is not running on a bunch of consumer grade equipment (which is NOT always a valid assumption,) it's also relatively straightforward to use wired networks. Computers which authenticate to the LAN are placed in a VLAN allowing them full access. Computers which do not authenticate are dynamically placed in a restricted VLAN that only allows access to the Internet,

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd wager he's in the marketing department.

Perhaps. It's also possible that he works in another department and brings his own computer because they won't allow the apps he wants to use on the hospital computers. I've used my personal computer for lots of work stuff because I wasn't allowed to install anything and the only text editor available was Notepad.

I'd echo the advice already given numerous times to stop checking email on anything other than a company machine. But for personal machines at work, it depends on why they're being used and why they're connected to the network. Are they actually being used to access local network resources or is the network merely being used to provide internet connectivity? If its the latter, it's not difficult to set up isolated VLANs and subnets which only have access to the internet. The hospital IT staff may not be willing to do this, of course, but it's a possible option to consider.

A number of facts are in dispute, or at least the interpretation of a number of facts, and that's why this case potentially "...puts all IT admins in danger..."

The city claims that Terry took a number of nefarious actions that endangered the network. They claim that he installed multiple modems connected to the network to allow him to access it without logging or auditing. Connecting a modem to the console port of a router or switch is a common back-up access method. It's the only way you can remotely get to a network device if the network is down. When you connect, you still need the username and/or password to get into the device and that access can be logged. It's no different from connecting your laptop directly to the console port.

They claimed that he disabled password recovery on network devices to prevent the city from accessing them. But all of the devices where password recovery was disabled appear to be devices that could not be physically secured. Disabling password recovery is, again, a common practice for devices that are physically accessible.

They claim he had sniffers installed on his computers in order to snoop on the network. How many network admins out there DON'T have a sniffer program installed for troubleshooting the network?

After he was arrested, his pager was taken and it went off with an alert from one of the routers. The city claims this was unauthorized access to the network. Again, it's extremely common for network admins to have monitor programs that send out an email or pager alert in the event of a failure.

I agree that Terry handled the situation poorly and was probably a bit of a jerk. But the city's attempts to pile on the charges in an attempt to get back at him do threaten to set dangerous precedents that could come back to bite any system or network admin.

There is nothing you can do to ensure that data you've already entered is gone. Even if you delete photos and change the info, there's no guarantee that the previous info is not stored. That being said, I deleted my account when I saw this earlier this morning on another site. When they asked me why I was deleting the account, I checked "Privacy concerns." In the comments section, I pasted a quote from the article noting what they were selling and followed it up with a single word: Bye. If enough people do this, Facebook will get the message that users are unhappy with this decision, even if deleting the account doesn't protect already-entered data.

And use DenyHosts

This case was settled, yes. But if you RTFA you'll note that there were several rulings that were issued and then appealed up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Those rulings, which strongly favor F/OSS, ARE now binding, at least for that circuit.

It's also kind of hard to answer the question asked without knowing much about the software involved. We know it's a web project of some kind, but that doesn't do much to narrow things down. If it's a web application framework like Rails then promoting it would be a very different task than if it's a blog publishing application like Wordpress. Hopefully, it's not an exact duplicate of some other common open source project, of course. If, however, it does perform the same function as another well known program, particularly a closed source one, you might want to start by listing it on AlternativeTo.

Additionally, he says: "And at best I'd maybe get an injunction, not damages. And, really, they're not making enough money for me to regain my losses."

Uh, what losses? Granted, if he owns the copyright to the image, it's illegal to use them without his permission. But in what way did the use of those images actually cause him any losses? How was he actually harmed? I have no issue with him asking, or even demanding, that they stop using his artwork. But to claim "losses" is downright silly.

It's a sort of self perpetuating system. Originally, the Social Security Number was intended only for use with the Social Security system. However, because it's a controlled, unique number assigned to individuals, it's easy and convenient to use as a unique ID for all sorts of record systems. Having someone's name and SSN makes it fairly easy to do identity theft. Part of the problem is the ubiquity of the SSN as an identifier and part of it is sloppy procedures which don't verify that the name and SSN actually belong to the individual using them.

It is nevertheless better to reserve a machine on your network for just this usage. Nothing installed on it but tcpdump and similar tools.

Or boot from a Linux Live CD.

Also, some switches support spanning ports, which will allow you to sniff the traffic on another port. Your typical home network dumb switch probably doesn't support this, but if you have temporary access to a higher end switch, it makes such tasks much easier. You can pick up older switches that support this fairly cheap on Ebay, although you probably won't want to spend the money for a one-time usage.

What brilliant ideas did Microsoft or Apple have? Microsoft was more lucky than anything else, and used mostly someone else's code to succeed. Apple didn't do anything there weren't dozens of other people trying to do. They just did it better. It was execution and implementation, not brilliant ideas. Edison might have had a few brilliant ideas but most of what he's known for weren't his ideas. He didn't invent the light bulb. In fact, he bought the patents from others who'd been there before him but weren't able to make it practical. See here. He created the first commercially practical lightbulb, and he did it based upon thousands of hours of trial and effort. Many of his other inventions have similar histories. It isn't some brilliant idea that leads to success. It's implementation.

As for the inventor of the burp-tank, several minutes of Googling turned up absolutely nothing. Unless you can provide some evidence, I'll assume that it's apocryphal.

I agree that there's nothing wrong with this scenario per se, so long as the transparency requirement is met. And I further agree that there will be backlash from the gamers over the issue, just as there's now a considerable hue and cry over C&C:4's announcement. But I suspect that people will get used to it and it will eventually become the norm.

The one issue I do have with it is that it cuts out certain segments of the market. For a personal example, I spent 20 years in the US Navy, and I did a lot of gaming to pass the time while on six month deployments. On a ship, you don't have an Internet connection for personal use. The same is true for other members of the Armed Forces who are deployed away from home, and undoubtedly for a multitude of other people who for various reasons won't have open Internet access. Unfortunately for them, they make up only a small percentage of the market. Sucks to be them, I suppose.