What are you going to charge them with? It appears that what they did was to register a domain that the botnet wanted to use and intercept the traffic. They didn't load code onto anyone's computer, or issue any commands to the botnot. So where's the felony?

Yes, and I'm sure plenty of Iranians are using this kind of technology to download software from US sites, despite attempts by those sites to honor US export control laws that require the boycotting of Iran. Not that any of this really matters from a security point of view, as the Iranian government would always be able to get what it wants.

The very existence of a huge number of features means that there will be more security bugs. Also, black hats tend to focus their attacks on the dominant player, unless there's a #2 that's super-easy to beat. Obscurity isn't sufficient to provide security but it does help.

It's true that many of the alternatives lack certain features, but most PDF files don't use those features either. You can use a simpler reader except in cases where you need all the features.

You might be lazy, but your computer isn't; it's been sending out spam 24/7 for a while now.

This is great. When power systems go down because of poorly designed software, we can blame Chinese superhackers instead of incompetence.

Since the NSA decided that they want to run cyber-security for everyone, not just the government. First they have to scare us before we turn over the Internet to them. The wingnuts at the Wall Street Journal are happy to get their story out. You did notice that there are no specifics about which facilities were attacked?

And that's why you're seeing stories like this one, plus the other one claiming Chinese penetration of software controlling power plants. Fear, fear, fear. Only the spooks can save us. Turn over the internet to people who will stamp "classified" on what they do.

You are ignorant; the universe is already conducting high-energy physics experiments. They are called cosmic rays, and some of them are billions of times more powerful than the LHC. Yet the earth is still here. And your notion that we delay until we completely understand the laws of physics is comical. What do you think the LHC is for? It's to help us understand the laws of physics! You don't discover laws of physics by just thinking deeply. You discover them by experimentation.

Once again: if there were any chance that LHC could produce earth-swallowing black holes, we'd be dead long ago, because Earth is regularly hit by much more powerful events than anything the LHC will be able to produce.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

Tell them that you can only give them three weeks at most, and that you'll do your best to help them with a smooth transition. If someone suggests that they'll give you a bad reference as a consequence, tell them you understand that they're pissed off now, but you're confident that once they calm down, and perhaps consult with corporate legal, they'll see the wisdom of giving fair and honest information to any future employer who asks, and it would be better to spend the next three weeks working together than fighting.

And if they still want to be dicks after that, make it two weeks, and say that you'd prefer not to get attorneys involved, with a bit of stress on the prefer.

Perhaps it's just the journalists messing this up, but the article suggests that these guys think that only amplitude and frequency are used in digital communication. However, every modern digital communication standard uses the phase as well, which is equivalent to a twist.

Wikipedia has a reasonably easy-to-follow explanation of how this works.