That is the point of using a botnet to run a DDoS, yes. A single control signal issues a huge surge in traffic. That doesn't make it an amplified attack though. An amplified attack is when the zombies trick a third party (such as a DNS server) to reply to the victim with more information than you sent them. This can up the size of the attack 100-fold.

A group of scientists have confirmed a link between the sonar, used by Exxon Mobil to map the ocean floor for oil, and the death of melon-headed whales.

The whales are already having a tough time of it, what with the dying. There's no need to insult them as well.

How do you suggest the control room communicate with all the various power stations and electricity consumers across the country then?

Not only this, but applying different cryptography methods on top of each other may expose weaknesses in the system. IIRC Sony choosing to use "all the crypto" was one of the mistakes that allowed the PSN to be cracked,

yes. many people are unaware of the fact that these major power plants - coal, gas, oil, nuclear - are only efficient when they are at maximum capacity. if you shut them off for any reason (and this can be done fairly quickly), getting them back up to temperature can take *weeks*.

Actually, gas can be spun up in less than an hour. A lot of coal/oil plants have gas turbines on them that run during start-up for this very reason. Nuclear, on the other hand, basically can't be turned off. It's why your electricity is cheaper at night: stops the network becoming unstable from too much generation with no draw.

in fact, it's not very well-known but the wind systems in scotland where i used to live were heavily subsidised. the UK Govt pays them 25 thousand pounds A MONTH to NOT run them.

Strictly speaking the national grid, an independent private company who you would be perfectly free to set up a competitor to, pays them not to run. This is not unique to wind power, as balancing the load/generation across the network often requires plants of all varieties to be shut down at which point the plant owner is paid some proportion of the profits they would have expected to gain from running the plant to get them to turn it off.

in fact, as they're motors as well as generators, when it's not windy enough, from what i hear they're actually POWERED to make them LOOK like they're generating electricity, so that people don't wonder why they're not running.

That was a plot line from the sitcom "Twenty Twelve", not reality.

Most reading I'll do in dead-tree format, but reference materials are where my surface excels. The ability to copy the relevant text in to One Note (and often have it save all the meta data needed for referencing, along with a link to the original) and be able to easily flick between several open texts is indispensable. When researching my dissertation last year, I probably spent at least as long dealing with the one real book as all my electronic sources.

That's why you need alternative treatments.

Doesn't check it works perfectly on all hardware, but a good chunk of the testing could be done on VMs running monkey-scripts which are simply disposed of & a new image spun up if they break. That said, automating hardware resets is hardly an unsolved problem.

He paid $250M? Doesn't he know it's only $1.99 on Kindle?

The point is that it has all the social features that Google decided to strip out of GReader about a year before they shuttered it all together.

Just require all state-sponsored malware to be signed and verified by the a third party. I can see no reason why such a system would fail.

I like WYSIWYG editing, and while I'm sure my use case falls well within LaTeX's bounds, it's also not far enough in to Word's long tail that it stops being particularly good at it.

I've spent the past week composing a ~50 page report for a programming assignment. For this I have used

• Tracked changes
• Decent style formatting
• An actually functional spelling/grammar check
• Mathematical typesetting (It's no LaTeX, but it's enough)
• Smart Art
• Including other Office docs such as Excel tables and Visio diagrams in the one case smart art wasn't smart enough
• Automatic contents/table of figures/index generation
• IEEE Referencing
• Cross-referencing

And that's just off the top of my head. All this wrapped up in UI that exposes functionality rather than hiding it behind layers of obscure menus, in a package that links nicely with my online storage allowing me to easily access it from the office suite on my phone, any other computer with Word 2010+, and an online editor for the ones that don't. Add to this that the default styles in place since 2007 mean you have to be trying really hard to make an ugly document, and you're on to a winner.

Given that this is the seventh such report I've had to do since September, I've easily saved myself 30+ hours in things that are either impossible or absurdly circutous to do in OOo. Multiply that by my hourly rate and I'm closing on a grand saved by choosing to pay for capable software. As for upgrading due to being "blackmailed" in place of additional features, the value added from improved Skydrive integration alone is making me seriously consider upgrading to the 2013 package. All that's holding me back is the subscription based model: I prefer to own things.

There should be clauses in your SLA defining what they have to tell you and when, as well as financial penalties for failing to deliver uptime and/or information. If you don't have an SLA then what are you doing paying for it?

The Romance languages prevalent in western Europe use a double negative to suggest extra negativity, rather than reverting to a positive as in the Germanic languages . As such, I it could be reinforcing the idea of a reduction.