Arguably beneficial. Probably not. It may make the plant mismatched for it's usual niche environment. Being a top-flight athlete is not an advantage if all you can get is 500 calories a day.

Problem is, that's just another single point of failure.

The SMTP protocol needs to be replaced root-and-branch. All messages should be mandatorily encrypted, all transport should be encrypted and, ideally, email addresses should not be tied to a particular provider. (I admit I'm racking my brain on that last one).

Arguably it might have made the spam worse, of course.

All emails should be encrypted pont-to-point anyway. This has pretty much been true since day 2 of the SMTP protocol and probably true back through UUCP. There is no reason why not, the big email clients (Outlook and Thuderbird) have all the necessary bits and pieces built-in. It should have been made an obvious option over a number of years and then switched to the default a long time ago. Even before all this NSA nonsense, the geek mail admin down the hall has typically been able to read a huge amount of private and sensitive material and that is just stupid. Trust is one thing but why put information in the hands of anyone who does not need access?

Heck, it might even have cut down on some of the hideous spam explosion we've seen.

You see it this way because you're looking at the politics the wrong way. Obama is somewhat left wing but he is mostly extremely statist. The Republican party is, on average, somewhat right wing but also mostly extremely statist.

You are presumable moderate left so you tend to look at everything you disagree with as right wing. It's not. That's just a lie to get you to side with left-wing statists. They're just as bad as the ones you seem to despise but you'll vote for them anyway.

Or when you can be coerced to act as a spy and be forced not to announce this coercion under threat of law.

The problem is, these gag orders need to be challenged in court. I don't blame anyone for not wanting to take on that fight but *somebody* has to or it will simply stand.

(For all I know, they have been already and found "lawful" in which case, we truly do have problems)

I think RLS already beat you to that pun.

I wouldn't put money on that. There just haven't been any transgressions worth the Amazon "1984" outrage, more likely.

There's an app for that. Wait, why has my screen filled with skulls and crossbones?

I wonder if this could also be used to pass around power from the "mothership"

Obamacoffee FTW!

I think the thread's dead but I just spent most of the day yesterday trying to get a powershell script to run either via srvany or vi xp_cmdshell. In the end, I gave up. Weird issues on the srvany (local machine security showed different than when run from the command line and the snapin needed was not available) and xp_cmdshell just had weird hangs. In the end, the powershell itself wasn't needed (it was just calling invoke-sqlcmd) but it was very frustrating.

Yup.

No, the fork should bend out of the way to avoid entering the coffee at all.