Yes, but plants and sub-stations don't need to shop on e-Bay or check their Facebook status now do they?

If they need to be connected to a network, make it a private network and most of these issues go away.

There is no sane reason that these networks and these facilities should not be air-gapped from the internet at large. There are ways around the air-gap (stuxnet), but even these are trivial to prevent by not allowing random USB keys from outside by gluing the port closed and/or securing the hardware properly, and/or beating anyone stupid enough to do this with a stick.

It's not nuclear science or anything, it's just common sense.

.. and they don't want to goto school.

If you want to give these kids a solid foundation to build on that will instill good habits and understanding of how computers work - C.

Java runs on top of an engine written in C - same with Python. They're great for doing that they do which is providing a massive library to take out all the menial tasks, but those menial tasks are the ones that teach people how everything works in the first place. How do they become a menial task if no one ever learned they were there?

Do we teach calculus without first teaching numbers and then general addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, etc etc etc

I have spent years beating the bad habits of Java out of programmers. Garbage collection is all nice and wonderful but it prevents programmers from having to think about memory at all. Taking that Java programmer and trying to get them to write even simple C/C++ code or even something as basic as assembler is damn hard! Everything they have learned has to be re-grounded. It's like boot camp - break them down to so they can be built up into something useful.

It's easy to teach someone who knows C how to write C++, Java, Python, or the zillion of other languages out there.

Any of the contact addresses here:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/contacts/index.shtml

My gmail account has had 2 spams make it to my inbox in the last 6 months (probably longer) of the 20-50 spams a day the account receives. I have never published the address and have only even given it out to friends and family but it has received spam since the day I opened it. I also don't have any other email addresses forward to it. Very effective for me.

All my servers have SSH sitting on a high port and have never had SSH attacks on them. In the one case where someone found the port, their bot attempted to use the port to proxy a web page. On port 22 I run a program that firewalls out anyone who creates a full TCP connection :)

I've found that Synergy doesn't work correctly with the mouse look in WoW. It just spins the view around really fast and eventually settles on looking straight up - quite annoying. Keys & clicking on things work just find though.