The government had no way of covering it up even if they wished to. As I've said, they were in the hole many times their worth. At least in the almost-failed Euro countries, you've had debt on the order of GDP. In Iceland, GDP was a joke compared to what was lost.

It wasn't exceptional evil, just wholly everyday stupidity, concentrated in one spot.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but hey, all we have is their word for those numbers of suspects. For all we know, it might be enough to misdial a number once to be labeled a terror suspect. How can we trust the government when all of this stuff is secret? I'm pretty damn sure that in any clandestine service organization, there's lots of compartmentalization of knowledge and even MI-5 chief is not privy to all of the nitty gritty - he'd be a big liability if it were so. So even if the MI-5 chief will swear by something, there's no way for us to know, because even he truly can't be fully sure of what's going on.

Just because there's the word "terrorism" in an informative (non-binding) title of legislation, you shouldn't get your panties in a wad, you know.

As someone who gets to watch CCTV footage every now and then, I'd say that's one of the things you should fear the least. The quality of CCTV footage universally seems to be anywhere between smooth crap and rough manure heap.

And how is that bad? I'm all for staying as far away from totalitarian way of running a country, but man, this was one of the very few sane things that anyone did when faced with Icelandic insanity.

For those who just don't appreciate what has happened in Iceland, let me give a condensed story. Iceland was a tiny nation of farmers and fishermen. Suddenly more and more people see themselves as bankers/investors, and the whole country gets converted to a hedge fund almost overnight. The Icelandic banks were issuing paper worth many times their national GDP (orders of magnitude more!) You have people who have no fucking idea of what they are doing turned investors. And I mean those were people who had no idea. You'd think of people with serious investment banking backgrounds - nope. They literally had no idea. They just found a niche and decided to exploit it, given all the free money available on the markets at the time. I mean, come on, their banks would do stuff like buy 10% interest in a major U.S. airline and refuse to even talk to anyone from the board. While all of this was borne by stupidity, it was all in effect criminal negligence executed on an astounding scale.

Doing anything to prevent the country-turned-hedge-fund a.k.a. Iceland stealing any more money from abroad is a good thing in my book.

I'd have thought that in 2013 nobody cares about SYN floods on open ports any more than they do about receiving just a barrage of random packets in general.

Not if an account is permanently locked out after 20 unsuccessful tries, like it should be. Heck, I'd say that by default ssh should only allow password-less logins anyway.

Yet most people don't give a fuck about piping between utilities. To the, a "utility" is something that shows a UI.

Presumably many games use game engines, and those things abstract DirectX/OpenGL away and simply run on both. Unreal engine would come to mind. I mean, come on, that thing even runs in a browser (seriously).

With Linux, you normally don't have to install anything, openssh is just there, started and waiting for a connection.

Except that most consumer-market computers are shipped with home versions that you can't RDP into. A Linux distro without openssh installed by default is pretty much unheard of, I'd assume.

I agree with you about generation of reports and other things for widely considered submittal. I was extremely productive in grad school and was spending my time on the subject at hand, not on technicalities and drudgery, precisely because for every homework problem or lab report I could do "make submit" and it'd end up where it was supposed to. Even graduate engineering students routinely seem to waste insane amounts of time on clicking their way through the most rudimentary of changes that, once you have scripted the process, become so routine you don't even think about them.

Ansys, for example, is a usability 7th circle of hell until you realize it demonstrably wasn't designed to be used normally in point-and-click mode (maybe it was, but the designers were on crack the whole time). You can point-and-click a bit to get a feel for things, but if you want reproducible analyses, you must script them from the start all the way to generation and saving of the plots. I would not trust any FEA done in Ansys unless accompanied by a script that starts with a system in default state and ends up with output files you're after (raw output, tabular data, plots).

Same really goes for, say, generating plots or generally data-dependent drawings in Office. Once you're down to populating the entire document from a template in VBA, it becomes even less hassle to do it on a Unix system using Latex and makefiles. Never mind the basics like version control. Text-based scripts and formats really mesh well with diff tools used with version control. VBA embedded into Office documents is not handled by normal differs; you pretty much have to whip your own to dissect the OLE compound file and feed the extracted text via diff. The work needed to maintain such a tool (I've had it for a while) is simply not worth it when in the text-based Unix approach it simply works quite effortlessly. Good luck to anyone wishing to develop a blame tool for Excel, for example - good luck dealing with figuring out who did what in to an Excel spreadsheet otherwise.

Spreadsheets are very bad at visualizing the errors in their implementation. I even question their use in "exploratory" endeavors that merely guide further development in a real programming language: you may well be misguided due to hidden bugs. There's plenty of frameworks/libraries that make it very easy to format whatever you might want to format in Excel, and at that point the primary benefit of using Excel vanishes. Once you are not using the presentation aspect of Excel, there's really no point to using the cell-centric computing aspect. Eventually what's left of Excel is VBA, and at that point you might as well ship a self-contained .exe file generated from Visual Studio, instead.

Given the sad state of most people's computers, I'd dread to be the one fielding something like TurboTax, where probably 10% of the machines running it are either owned or so loaded up with crapware that it's unbearable. At least with a SaaS solution you can go to a library or a similar managed computer lab where the machines are free of crap. I presume that the desktop TurboTax is just a thin shim around a local deployment of their SaaS code, or at least that's how it should be done if they cared about efficiency of development.

I have been using the SaaS TurboTax for ages, and it works just fine in Firefox. In fact it has worked pretty much since the day they have launched their service IIRC. I see no point in downloading a piece of bloatware to my own computer just to do taxes once a year.