I'd like to throw a few bricks at Symantec over this

What for, exactly?

The vendors don't get definitions out until they have received and reverse-engineered a sample of the malware. In most cases they get it very early, in some cases they get it from the authors themselves who just want a write-up, in rare cases they will buy them.

In any case, I often hear customers saying "Man we got this worm, fuck $ANTIVIRUS_VENDOR!" but I don't know how you expect them to protect you from something if they haven't seen it yet. As you mentioned, your company didn't take security seriously--although I understand (for good or ill) that there are plenty of endpoint products out there now.

I think you're wrong, to the extent that race and culture are congruent.

My folks both taught in the inner city of Chicago for over 30 years. This is a culture where a generation is 15 or 16 years and it makes more sense to kids to turn to violence and crime than to study and try to improve their lot (convincing them that this was in fact possible was, they said, the hardest part of their jobs).

In these cases race and culture were also congruent with economic status, and you see a lot of the same problems (substance abuse, early pregnancy, etc.) among poor rural whites, so obviously poverty has a lot to do with it. But aside from Eminem I don't see a lot of white artists who write wildly popular songs about objectifying women and selling drugs.

As I said, convincing the schoolkids to give up that narrative in favor of a less glamorous and more difficult one is hard--one thing they have found over the years is that if the school district has enough money for things like field trips, so you can show them a greater world, then it helps a lot.

Outstanding points. I'm convinced--this is something I would pay for.

No, you're missing the point. Chess requires you to develop certain skills before you can apply any of the contextual knowledge. If you're not good at "longterm planning" (e.g. holding in your head several branching pathways to represent all the possible moves and countermoves--what, 5? 10 moves ahead?) then memorizing isn't going to help you.

Likewise WoW requires a lot of specific skills or else you just won't be good. I understand this. But WoW players have several times maintained that the IN-GAME ATTRIBUTES they acquire (speed or strength or whatever statistics you guys have) are equivalent to actually being able to apply the underlying skills that make you good at chess--which is nonsense.

Well, no.

The rate at which you regenerate a statistic has nothing to do with YOU, the person playing the game. It's not a skill you have acquired at all. It's just something the game ALLOWS you to do since you performed a certain action a million times.

Knowing HOW to do a raid, that is knowledge or skills you have picked up. But the attributes commensurate with your level, specializations, gear you have selected...none of that is the same as learning how to play chess.

Also that is not very complex mathematics. You could napkin that while blind drunk and write a script to do it all for you (in fact I know people do this in Wow).

Sure, for a given definition of "fun."

I find most games highly derivative and boring. WoW especially. I would rather read or putter around in my garden in my free time.

That is not the same thing at all.

In one you ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING.
In the other, you go through repetetive motions until you are awarded the status of having "learned something" in the game.

There are a lot of new Linux users who are comfortable enough with Ubuntu, and even dicking around in bash, but who are not comfortable compiling stuff from source because it's not immediately clear how you go about removing, upgrading, etc. without the package manager. Yum and Apt are a hell of a crutch.

Right now I'm in dep hell on a CENTOS box because there is no slick way to install php 5.2 from any of the repos. So I know I will have to track down all the dependencies myself (two of the seven have their own deps...le sigh) which I'm just dreading. And then what happens when I need a new version of PHP? I have to jump through these hoops again?

"Strongest signal" is not the same as "best connection" from the customer's point of view. The bottom line is that if there are several towers the device can "see" that will offer the same level of support (it's digital; simply because one signal is stronger doesn't really mean it's better) with varying costs, then any customer will want to choose one with the lowest cost.

I think 10" is still an acceptable size for a netbook. I got the HP Mini 10" and it's pretty portable (fits in a messenger bag), and it's the only keyboard my giant sausage fingers can type on.

Back of a napkin: Using my modest (hypothetical) botnet of about 10,000 hosts, there's a decent (~25%) chance I will find and exploit you inside of a day, and a near-certainty that I will get you within 3 days. Just to be charitable I could throw in a random fudge factor of one week.

I could probably speed it up if I could depend on certain assumptions or if I have a little additional data.

Point being, the internet seems huge but it's not really all that big.

I think it makes perfect sense for two reasons.

One, my impression has always been that noting species is about aggregation, not division--that these specific organisms were all in one class even though they had superficially different species.

Two, say you are able to further separate them based on features but you get some absurdly high number of "species." What does this do for you, exactly? The idea of "species" is a useful tool, but I think when there are a trillion trillion species each with one member in it you haven't done anything especially "useful."