I get that a monoculture is bad, but... When was the last time AWS lost an entire data centre to a DDOS?

It's probably exactly what the attackers want, but as someone with a responsibility first to my employer, how can I ever recommend a company like Linode?

They need to figure this out, because every time one of these articles hits the news the reputation damage is pushing them further and further into a spiral.

> Most homes today are heated with electricity and having original light bulb means you as well add that consumption to heating and it is so on off from that (not so good ratio but still).

Speak for yourself. Everything here is natural gas, which is probably actually better than the coal they're using to generate our power.

As per Wikipedia, the expected life of an LED bulb is ~30,000 hours. The expected life of an incandescent is ~1,000 hours. Obviously, if you're paying a dollar each for the incandescents and $20 for the LED, you're going to pay 50% more over time by using the incandescents.

> but android is a pretty mediocre experience on anything not designed as touchscreen hardware, usually without a keyboard or mouse.

I've had a mouse and keyboard hooked up to my phone (with an OTG adapter). I honestly didn't find it bad at all. The scroll wheel worked, avoiding having to click and drag to scroll. Everything else worked as expected... Really, the only thing that was a bit weird was 'swiping' down from the top to get my notifications and stuff.

That may have been a dealbreaker at some point, but with Windows 8 around it's now no worse than the flagship OS from the world's largest software company. At least I'm familiar with the Android gestures...

I've searched for the link but can't seem to find it, but I saw a "confession bear" meme at work the other day from reddit (boo reddit, whatever) about some guy getting let go and saying that "his employer should have changed the passwords" because he made several changes, including putting the calendar a month out.

Coincidence? Maybe. Probably not.

He was not doing it to be "leet". The attitude he potrayed seemed to just be that it would be worth some internet credit.

Nah. I *know* I'm far too smart. Many years ago I was driving my friends car down a major road through town (~60mph speed limit) with him in the passenger seat and slammed the gas to pass someone... It stuck. I was quickly picking up speed to run into the car that was four or five car lengths in front of me in the middle of dense traffic doing 60mph. If I had slammed the brakes, I would've caused a pileup. There was nowhere to bail to as I was in the left lane. It was shaping up to be a disaster involving a lot of wrecked cars and lots of people hurt.

I didn't panic. I stomped the accelerator a couple of times to try and loosen it up - nothing happened. So I told my friend "Hold the wheel.", leaned down and stretch my arm in and wiggled and pulled the accelerator loose. Sat back up, took the wheel, and kept driving.

I've had my accelerator stick in other cars (whether due to them being old or catching on the floor mats). I've also driven (and successfully stopped - repeatedly) cars with no vacuum assist left on the brakes (there was a large leak somewhere). Never anything approaching 'panic' or an accident.

Even the people who only *think* they are too smart are probably now prepared for this having thought about and discussed it repeatedly. At least the steps are somewhere in their mind - instead of having to try and come up with a solution on the spot.

"This sounds like his experiment bears as much similarity to a reactor as a balloon full of hairspray resembles a car engine."

... It's a smaller, much more explosive version?

I'm not sure that's comforting.

Oh, funny. Mine didn't make the list.

Bank teller will only let me have a 4 digit PIN. Went to an ATM and used the 'change PIN' feature. Could get it up to twelve digits. I settled on 10. Changed banks, did the same thing.

I've yet to run into a single place where it doesn't work - I do get some really funny looks though when I start typing up a novel on the pin pad.

Sure, maybe I've got some sort of virus/trojan/spyware. It must be a particularly nasty one too, there's no noticeable spike in network traffic (so I must be spamming), nothing picked up by the IDS (from all those malicious port scanning and network attacks going on), no pop-ups (making them lots of money), nothing picked up by clamav on my fileserver (not infecting things allows it to spread more effectively) nor any changes in the md5 hashes of the vital system files and directory listings I monitor (allowing it to truly root my system).

Oh, and my router doesn't support uPnp.

Of course, you could play the card that it's possible it has so effectively rooted my system that the on-system checks (md5 hashes/listings) are compromised, and it doesn't perform any activities that would allow the other machine to pick it up.

But I'm not playing possibilities here, I'm playing probabilities. I find the chance that I've been infected by a piece of malware that would slip under my radar sufficiently low as to be acceptable. Consdering the one or two infections I have let slip by (by running executables I really shouldn't have) have been picked up almost instantly.

Especially considering how ridiculously ineffective most modern AV programs are and how much they negatively effect system performance. Merely monitoring the hash of vital system files and keeping an eye on changes in the list of files in Windows\System32 will probably be more effective.

But hey, what do I know.

"There are a few things that should be off-limits though:
Race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, place of birth, etc."

Err, despite being politically incorrent, using religion and place of birth is probably a good idea.

How many Buddhists have blown things up? How many Taoists?

How many Christians? How many Muslims?

How many people born in Canada have gone abroad to blow things up?

How many people born in the middle east have gone abroad to blow things up?

Hell, given that most of the bombings are religiously motivated, and most religions don't tolerate gays, you could probably just clear most homosexuals right off the bat without worry.

Anyways, political correctness is stupid, blah blah blah.

ND