So you're saying the 2002 budget should cover the 2015 expenses because... productivity? The EPA isn't running out to walmart to buy a bunch of mass market testing equipment. Their work requires highly specialized training and equipment, productivity doesn't significantly enter into it. Their methodology has to change year to year to match regulations and changes in technology. I don't know how strongly their expenses track the CPI but facility, utility, salary, transportation and training costs are all affected by the inflation rate. The idea that they should be able to provide services at the same cost over a 13 year period without a budget increase is ludicrous.

Exactly. The cumulative rate of inflation between 2002 and 2015 was about 32%. Kind of hard to get the same value out of the 2002 level budget when everything costs 32% more.

I agree. As someone who lives in a mosquito infested region, I only wish I could get a video of the process. Watching the little bastards get irradiated, then chopped into pieces would bring great joy to my heart!

That sounds poetic and I understand it is a general (likely warranted) shot at windows but it's not really applicable. Cleaning an infected machine results in one less infected machine. The act of cleaning does not generate 2 more infected machines and in fact shrinks the botnet by some, albeit small degree. There is never a situation where cleaning a Windows machine is a bad option - which keeps a significant number of us employed/harassed by friends/relatives.

If you can secure a machine (e.g. by beating the user until they swear they won't click on unknown links) you further reduce the likely-hood of reinfection. I can't remember where I've seen it but I have heard there is some sort of method using a host file but I will not mention it to avoid being down-modded :)

I understand they wouldn't use it in this case but I always used Disksalv. Looks like it is still being maintained and is now freeware. It was one of the only tools at the time that would recover to another disk rather than beat the crap out of the damaged disk while it tried to fix it. I now use ddrescue under linux for recovery but disksalv was way ahead of its time.

It does not automatically converse with others, there is nothing sinister about it. Some people feel the need to send out birthday/anniversary cards when those events come up. When that happens, you can click send for casual acquaintances. If you know someone well you can use the suggested text as a reminder, clear it and type a personal message. If you don't like the concept at all, you can turn it off.

I thought you might be trolling because you can't map a 128bit address space into a 32bit space without collisions when you have >32bits of unique information to store. It looks like there is a patent on this: http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013066969A1?cl=en registered to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_Television_Laboratories,_Inc. not Google. They are a consortium that develops cable modem standards (DOCSIS).

The patent is for a form of NAT which handles 1-1 mapping and allows for collisions with actual/virtual ipv4 addresses by remapping those as well. Each IPv4 device behind the cable model would get a unique IPv6 that the world can see and would see external addresses as a translated IPv4 address. Apparently it is expected to break down when the number of unique connections exceeds 33K/day. Looks like a good transitional form of NAT for consumers who are still running older systems that don't support IPv6. It is not a general solution that could replace IPv6, in fact it requires IPv6 at the ISP level.

It is an additional cost of over $900 which could have covered the cost of a laptop. Tablets are great for consuming content, not so much for creating.

There is a lot of FUD concerning data recovery. It is theoretically possible to recover data from older hard drives that have been overwritten. Peter Gutmann wrote a paper on the method then added an addendum that basically says it probably won't work on modern drives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method#Criticism Most of the paranoia is based on a 16 year old paper which is no longer relevant + the fact that people often do a quick format instead of a full then wonder why their data is still recoverable.

I work for the government and I have met many managers who are technically capable of understanding that a single pass will do the trick. Every single one sticks with the party line (multipass wipe/physical destruction) to cover his ass.

Most data leaks happen when a hard drive is lost/stolen/not wiped at all. I have never heard of anyone recovering data from a formatted HD. Having a process at all is a good thing. It's the verification that you've wiped all the data that is important. Degaussing/shredding is an option for failed HDs but it is overkill otherwise.

I have a tendency to do the same thing so I'm not judging here... You guys seem to be fixating on the cool, innovative solution when there are a dozen better solutions staring you in the face. Several people have mentioned WOL. You can also set a wake time in the BIOS and have the AV run once a day at startup before the normal start of the workday. You said your computers are all moderately powerful. AV can run in the background with very minimal to no user impact. You can adjust priorities, set it to run on idle time when they are on break. You could have a shutdown script that runs daily and does a backup/shutdown of the computer. The user can initiate this or it can be scripted. It's trivial to put in a 'snooze' button to reschedule the backup/shutdown if the user is active. You can also let them adjust the time according to their schedule. Most organizations run backups/AV and still shut down computers at the end of the day. It's standard operating procedure and there are lots of resources out there to help you do it.

Not according to the article you linked:

No. Rift (MMO) seems to be strictly a fantasy game where you fight off forces coming though rifts to the elemental planes. Rifts (RPG) is a multi-genre roleplaying game where rifts between the universes allowed various beings (elves, dwarves, aliens, lovecraftian horrors etc.) to cross over.

Mid-range hardware is insanely cheap these days and will play all but the most high end games. Even tablets and smartphones can handle some pretty intense gfx. The next gen of consoles looks like it won't even be trying to push the envelope on performance because it is already good enough. My gaming rig is about 4+ years old and I'm pretty happy with it. Why exactly would I want to push rendering into "the cloud"?

If they can produce a kick-ass game that cranks everything to 11 with no lag, it might generate some interest. Which publisher is going to push out something like that for a service that seems to be tanking?