If that is all that happens, you get off lucky. I don't know if this is common or not (It isn't really idle chat material), but my "soldier" has been known to salute in a very obvious way. It made high school very awkward.

... a few million kilometers closer to the Sun, that's how weather on Venus is at this time of year.

largest fine in history (by ~2x) is no difference to what is handed to member country companies?
Wow...

GE/Honeywell and Boeing/McDonnell Douglas, both of which were approved in the U.S. but either died in the E.U. or were substantially affected by E.U. pre-merger conditions.

how about that NDC Health (EU) infringed on the (C) of IMS Health (US) in Germany, and while the German courts found in favor of IMS, the EC forces IMS to license the portion of technology/software under scrutiny.

I assume this will not meet with your approval either and that's just fine. I'll not sling mud about it but I do disagree greatly with your opinion. I think the EC is protectionist to the extreme, and I think that's fine. I think the US should force Airbus to give Boeing their flight software in the interest of making all planes safer, after all, it's better for the consumer. Right?
-nB

This is meant to destroy missiles that have already launched. It's safe to assume no one will be standing next to them.

I hear that said, yet it happens.
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/08/01/169247/The-Ethics-of-Selling-GPLed-Software-For-the-iPhone
http://redhat.com/
http://www.novell.com/linux/

So you think that an attacker thinks he must exploit each platform proportional to the market share?

Or do you believe that each attacker randomly chooses a platform to specialize in proportional to market share. Or do they keep a list with number of slots according to each OS's market share?

Consider this:

1. Imagine you were on a shooting range. You can shoot for two different targets, one labelled "OS X" and the other one "Windows"
2. One "OS X" target is 3 times larger than the other (OS X has 3 times the vulnerabilities compared to Windows) and is thus easier to hit.
3. Each time you hit "OS X" you get $10.
4. Each time you hit "Windows" you get $200.
5. You have 12 shots.

Now, if the targets were 10 ft in front of you and both easily hit, how would you spend your 12 shots? Would you aim 3 shots that the smaller target and 9 shots at the larger target because that seems the fair thing to do? Or would you just shoot all 12 shots at the smaller target and go home with $2400? I know what the typical person would do.

Only when you move both targets so far back that both of them gets pretty hard to hit would any sane person consider spending any rounds on "OS X".

Attackers chose target platform based this simple economics. As long as Windows has 15 - 20 times (worldwide) the market share of OSX and as long as the limiting factor of attacks is time (the actual creation of an exploit), the attackers are going to target Windows each and every time. Only if they cannot find any exploitable vulnerabilities in Windows will they invest in another platform.

Oh, and what about Apache you say? Apache has 2 times the market share of IIS (roughly). Why isn't Apache attacked exclusively for the same reason. The difference here is that these targets are pretty distant; both Apache and IIS are pretty tight. Neither Apache nor IIS5, 6 and 7 has seen successful widespread attacks directly at the server. Neither Linux nor Windows are vulnerable at the network level anymore, especially not when behind a firewall as *all* webservers are nowadays.

The shooters have simply given up (for the time being) and went to another shooting range with better odds. BothApache and IIS has seen widespread attacks against vulnerable applications running on top of the servers. Here you could certainly argue that attackers has a preference for PHP and ASP.Ancient.

If you cannot get the source to open-source, open-source the source.

Kudos to Nokia.

E

Any Oracle we have on cheap Linux/x64 runs like crap. That's why we mostly put it on SPARC, PA-RISC or Itanium hardware with Solaris/HP-UX. And the plural of box is boxes.

Agreed a 150% fucking percent. Most of these dumbs laws are really meant to keep 90% of the "cops", prosecutors, judges and politicans with high paying "jobs" and a great pension after 15-20 years. The worse offenders are cops. The TOP 20 Most Dangerous jobs DO NOT INCLUDE LAW ENFORCEMENT! Its a farce, a lie, a dribble. Fire 90% of the cops, prosecutors, lawyers, judges and you'll see some money returning to the state.

Put away your pitchforks and tinfoil hats.

This is similar to regulations already in place which provide an option to shut down the private cellular network during national disasters.

There is nothing in the act to allow suppression of dissent, and if there were, it would be nullified by various existing bodies of law, including but not limited to the constitution.

If you're worried that they are going to simply ignore law like the previous administration, then debate over a law is moot.

Further, this is codifying behavior that you'd want to happen:

Hacker X develops a new malware variant an order of magnitude more virulent, by exploiting a vulnerability in Provider Y's infrastructure.

Only by shutting down that provider until the threat can be eradicated, can compromise of the rest of the commercial networks be avoided.

Provider Y delays, citing some nebulous concern, trying to couch their real fear of losing money.

Provider Y continues to delay, resulting in complete compromise of their network.

At some point, Authority Figure Z steps in, orders troops to take control of, and shut down provider.

After the crisis is over, Y bitches about Z overstepping it's authority, and pisses away a lot of money on legal motions that ultimately go nowhere, as no one is going to sanction the party that saved the day.

  What the act does is codify the actions of Z as within Z's scope of authority, eliminating some of the delay, and post-crisis legal hi jinx.
It also assigns the responsibility for this decision to Z,

The act also mandates a number of things that should be happening anyway, and are due for being codifed.

That is roughtly 30 times too much.

What's more, Apple's been sued a couple of times over the definition of a gigabyte by angry idiots who didn't understand that 10^9 != 2^30. Possibly they're doing this in part to minimize their future liability.

Agreed. As a driver or pedestrian I've been in many close calls because some idiot was on their cellphone. The best is when they start yelling at ME because THEY ran the stop sign or red light without even knowing it.

However on the flip side, I've also almost hit some pedestrians because they were talking on their cellphone and decided to cross illegally without looking to see that I'm already 1 car length away because their cellphone is obscuring their vision of me.

Driving or walking, it's almost like cellphones are accident magnets.

I think this youtube video is highly relevant (no, it's not a rickroll): WWII Pilots - Armstrong, Miller, Mitchell & Webb. It takes a typical RAF scene, but there is something modern about the language of 2 of the pilots. Watch it, it's well worth it.

The point? Literacy may be on the up, but precise modes of expression are falling by the wayside. You only have to read a few books written a hundred years ago and today about characters in similar classes and situations to tell.

Exactly right. It's similar to the situation we have with recent automobile designs, where all kinds of sensors are in place to detect potential engine problems. I have nothing against these sensors being there if it helps consumers realize something is wrong before serious damage occurs, but sometimes the sensors fail, and all you have to go by is the "Check Engine" light. A previous car of mine had a faulty sensor that would constantly trigger the engine light, and even though there was nothing else wrong with the car, it wouldn't pass smog as long as the light was on, which was most of the time. After spending way more money than I had ever intended to, both in attempts to get the car smogged and taking it to mechanics who simply plugged in a computer and "diagnosed" the problem the sensor was erroneously reporting, I actually ended up taking it to a mechanic who was nice enough to reset it for free, giving me enough time to take it across the street to get it smogged before the light came back on. It wasn't until later that I learned the sensor itself was the culprit.