Given the NSA budget, and how much additional they could be getting through Black Box projects we don't even know about, they can afford to recruit some really top notch people.
I'd like to believe that most top notch people either aren't American, or aren't for sale to the highest bidder. If you're top notch, you will make a decent living anyhow, so you have to be top notch and an asshole to sell your integrity for extra money.
I think fire marshals should be required to shout "Fire" in randomly picked places, and then fine the hell out of anyone who didn't take it seriously, and jail anyone who pushed, shoved or ran. That would surely cut down on all the panic trampling cases we read about so often.
If you can't be trusted to react in a correct manner during an emergency, you should not be allowed in public.
But in the American society in particular, it seems more important to be able to get someone than to meter out justice for everybody. It's the same WTF as when someone runs from the police, and a policeman kills himself or others in pursuit. The escaping person gets charged with manslaughter. That's obviously not what happened - he didn't hold a gun to the policeman's head forcing him to drive past his abilities. But the rabid need to find a single source to blame and inability to see that more than one party might be at fault is so inbred in the culture here that people don't even question it.
It's not
There is a big difference there. IT Staff does one thing and IT Security Staff does another. They must work together though. As a malware remediation consultant, I can confidently say 95% of the organizations out there (mostly small to medium sized ones) do not have any comprehensive understanding of good security procedures or what to do when they are compromised
Most small to medium sized businesses don't have separate IT staff and IT security staff either...
The best place to hide is in the crowd. DO NOTHING. Then they won't be interested in you.
Upper management are always deliberately clueless about security, unless the company is in the business of security.
This is more true than you know. Being ignorant of something protects them. They don't want to know, because with knowledge comes responsibility. If you know you're vulnerable, and you did nothing, it's far worse than being able to say that you didn't know.
Is it right? Of course not. But I have more than a few times encountered people who did not want to know something because of culpability implications.
If you ATTEMPT to get privacy, they will attract their attention towards you. You must have something to hide (which is, of course, yourself).
How does that help to have no address bar? Just make sure the web server cannot read it. People need to have a way to be sure they actually got to the site they intended to go to.
The gas giants are believed not to have an actual surface, but rather a steadily increasing density from what we could call gas to what we would call solid. It is difficult to see how a volcano, which has a defined surface, could exist. If as surface does, contrary to belief, exist, we cannot see it and therefore can say nothing about its structure - including volcanoes.
Samsung has the mid-range market sewn up
Samsung has the best combination of price-performance and advertising cachet at the moment. This can all easily change; they have nothing to give them a stable lock on the market.
Let's not discriminate Charlie Stross by omitting second person...
I loved several of his other books, but that one I could not finish. It was so... alien to read in that style.
There are at least two books in that series now.
I didn't find them that hard, and think part of this is that I grew up with Infocom text adventures:
You're on a hilltop overlooking the seaside village of Festeron.
To the south stands the Festeron Post Office. It's a little brick building with a neatly-trimmed lawn. The Post Office door stands invitingly open.
Roads run down the hill to the east and west. There's a signpost nearby.
Somebody inside the Post Office is calling you.
A trick with Stross' 2nd person books is to take a couple of seconds reading the chapter title until it sticks. It determines who you are.
no, you live it with the limitation imposed by literature.
Why do you think there aren't any?
Why do you think that I think there aren't any?
Yes, there are limitations, which can be pitfalls. Anything the writer describes becomes the limitations for the imagination.
This is also a pitfall, where the writer must take care to describe an object in all the details that later will matter.
I've read a story where the author did not ever mention or allude to the gender of the protagonist. That worked well.
But I've read several stories where the author did not establish limits like gender, age, skin color or height, but then referenced it later, after the user had already made a mental image. That is shoddy writing.
But as a writer, you don't have to go into excruciating details, but take advantage of the minds out there fleshing out the world. And you can provide visuals that is very possible to imagine, but not feasible to cast. Even two thousand years ago, literature had trees with gold leaves. Penned in for a penny. The best movie studios cannot make a believable gold leafed tree, with million dollar budgets.
That's like saying almost all sex they've ever had was consensual and legal, so we really shouldn't blame them for the few cases of rape they committed.
They can compete if the US gets hit by a massive depression that makes the dollar virtually worthless. Then $50/hr is enough to buy a half slice of bread each day.
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. - Kahlil Gibran
