But first off, don't be stupid. Sanitize/Sterilize ALL of your data PRIOR to starting your trip.

They cannot find what you are not carrying.

I personally find the concept kind of odd.

I'm going to guess that you've never been in the military.

Think about a conscript. His country is at war because of his politicians. His personal beliefs don't matter. He either fights or he, at best, is in jail. Remember the kids who went to Canada instead of being drafted to fight in Vietnam?

So the least that the professional soldiers and responsible politicians can do is to make basic rules so that that kid can get back to his pre-war life with as much of his body still intact as possible.

Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill. But they do tear up lungs and eyes and nervous systems. So the casualties may be able to move themselves but they cannot pick up their old lives again.

Now imagine the impact that has on a country AFTER the war. Thousands and thousands of disabled citizens that have trouble working.

Damn! You beat me to it. Anyway, from TFA:

Strands, as Nick Hawes of the University of Birmingham said, will "develop novel approaches to extract spatio-temporal structure from sensor data gathered during months of autonomous operation," to develop intelligence that can then "exploit [those] structures to yield adaptive behavior in highly demanding, real-world security and care scenarios."

The key problem with that is that the subjects the robot is studying will know that they are being studied and will be able to alter their behaviour to change what the robot "learns".

Even if they get a commercially viable product on the road in 2020, it'll be at least a generation of these things being on the roads before people become comfortable enough with the technology to trust their lives to it en mass.

Once people figure out that you can have sex in the car on the way to work only the lonely will still be driving.

We're in a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation.

Hardly. We have a lot more options than just (invade | do-not-invade). We can help the refugees for one.

Right now this smacks too much of "wag the dog". A nice war against a "bad man" so that everyone can forget the NSA leaks. And a big party when we kill the "bad man".

The idea is to save lives in the long run by putting limits on harsh regimes in that they don't want to risk the UN/USA coming down on them.

The problem with that is that it is just as easy to kill thousands of people with regular bullets and bombs as it is with chemical weapons.

From a military standpoint, chemical weapons are used for two main reasons:
1. To deny terrain to the enemy.

2. To "soften" a "hardened" target. That's where the enemy is dug in so much that regular bullets and bombs are not effective.

That is not saying that chemical weapons cannot be used on a civilian town. Just that using them is no more effective than artillery or bombs or sending a infantry company in.

There's been rumors of Syria using chemical weapons for a while now, Barack Obama has reinforced the US policy of 'We'll go after anybody who uses CBRNE/NBC weapons', but has been waffling that Syrian weapon use has been unconfirmed.

And that gets back to it being just as easy to kill people with bombs and bullets as it is with chemical weapons.

Why do we care so much that it is *CHEMICAL WEAPONS* as opposed to *BULLETS*?

Why would we not want to get involved if 10,000 people are killed by bullets? But 100 people killed by nerve agent and we're in an uproar?

I guarantee that we will kill/cripple more civilians in a war than they have killed/crippled with chemicals.

I'm on Beacon Hill. Our Internet services vary from street to street. It's ludicrous! I'm stuck with a slow provider right now, but a "gigabit" provider is trying to get access one block away.

Why do you think we legalized pot? Your connection might be slow but you cool with it.

I guess that's good if you have a short attention span.

I presented you with an example from Firefly. So I'm a bit confused by your "short attention span" comment.

Do you believe that Inara's and Zoe's contrasting attire was so that the writers could expend less energy? Or so that the viewers would not get them confused with each other?

Except that fails as a narrative device in this situation.

Having each character wear their own outfit would allow for a visual "shorthand" for that character's history and personality.

Firefly and Blake's 7 are great examples of this. Why does Mal wear that long coat? Inara wears skirts and dresses but Zoe is usually wearing trousers. Jayne's outfits are different from Simon's.

The question I have is why the "renegades" need their own uniforms. From TFA:

Any science fiction fan knows you canâ(TM)t just go to a thrift shop and get your costumes. In Renegades, we will have Starfleet uniforms of course, but our crew, not being Starfleet, will have all new designs.

So they're not Starfleet and it appears that it will just be one ship (at the moment). So why the uniforms? Why not just "casual"?

NO MORE PAJAMAS IN SPACE!

I'm sure that they knew the numbers were crap. Just like they're still going with the crap.

From TFA:

âoeWhen you meet an engineer that has spent a good chunk of his life working on some innovation and itâ(TM)s stolen overnight, you get a good feeling for what [intellectual property] loss means.

And does Mr Fey have the name of that engineer so that others can "meet" him/her? And interview him/her?

Or is that ANOTHER fiction created to help move product?

... but specifically noted the difficulty of determining exactly how much companies, governments and individuals could lose if subject to an attack.

And why are "individuals" grouped together with governments and companies?

Any cumulative losses, he said, would likely ignore data breaches that companies failed to disclose to the public, or those who did not know they had been breached, a problem in itself he said.

So any losses calculated MAY not include losses that were not known to have been losses at the time of the calculation.

âoeIf youâ(TM)re a Fortune 10,000 company, youâ(TM)ve been breached.â

And if you're running McAfee software, you may not even know that you've been cracked. Although, to be fair, the same can be said of Norton and any of the other "anti-virus" software.

I'd adjust that.

No problem. Everyone will have their own idea of which are most important.

My rational for that order is because of the possibility that other apps with similar exploit levels (or even lower in some cases) can be "chained" together to get root access (whether local or remote).

Looking at the order you placed them in, I'd guess that you prioritized exploits for remote access over root access.

Buried in this is the assumption that a given piece of software has an infinite number of vulnerabilities that are discovered at random.

That's the part that I found to be the weirdest bit in there. And then they put a sensationalistic title on it.

Instead, I'd prioritize work based on my own categorization.

1. A remote attack that gains root access that does NOT require human intervention or other app running.

2. A remote attack that gains non-root access that does NOT require human intervention or other app running.

3. A local attack that gains root access that does NOT require human intervention or other app running.

4. A local attack that gains non-root access that does NOT require human intervention or other app running.

5. A remote attack that gains root access that requires some human interaction or some combination of apps.

6. A remote attack that gains non-root access that requires some human interaction or some combination of apps.

7. A local attack that gains root access that requires some human interaction or some combination of apps.

8. A local attack that gains non-root access that requires some human interaction or some combination of apps.

9. Remote OS crash.

10. Remote app crash.

11. Local OS crash.

12. Local app crash.

... normal office computers, not running data-centric applications, access just 9.58GB of unique data per day.

Round up to 10GB. So in 2 weeks (10 working days) that's an additional 100GB stored locally.

In 20 weeks you've filled up a 1TB drive.

What kind of office (aside from video production) works like that? The ones I know of, most of the machines are used to check email, do data entry on one or two database apps, surf, maybe create some documents or spreadsheets which are then stored on the file server. Other than the database apps, that's less than a couple of megabytes per person per day. And other than temp files, NONE of it should be stored on the local machine.

And if your average user is caching 10GB of temp files then you have a problem with your apps.

If they are not already running a firewall then they're probably already infected.

If they are running a firewall then they might be infected through a 3rd party app (I'm looking at you, Java). Or maybe not infected at all (that is possible).

Which will be the exact same situation when XP support expires.

If he is leaving happy, get his contact info and ask if you can check in with him in the future if you have more questions.

Most of the issues I've run into over the years did not center around HOW something was done but WHY that particular design was chosen. Usually there's one or two weird items at every site that the rest of the system has be designed to accommodate.