Now, this was four years ago, so it might be a lot better now; but I worked for an RF smart metering firm and their security and authentication was appallingly bad. The problem with the free market and new technology is that the incentive just isn't there to do it right the first time when you can do it wrong and still get sales (and then require the users to buy a replacement product later on). We had some large purchases of our products (think home meters for half the the biggest state in the US as one of our larger clients) that were in my mind pretty weakly secured. I'm not surprised to hear they've been infiltrated.

I felt very suspicious about the whole affair to be honest. Microsoft giving me an OS upgrade for free? Yea, that doesn't sound suspicious at all! Turns out I was wright to be suspicious, and will stick with my old version of Windows until they decide to behave. The UI in 10 does look nice, but not at the cost of feeling like my OS will be farming my information. Maybe, hopefully, finally, one day - this will encourage people to invest in and explore ways to improve the Ux of alternative operating systems.

You were wonderful once, but now you won't cover tech news that makes your parent company look bad. You're not what you once were, so I'm packing my bags. Farewell!

We could have mental healthcare and support systems readily accessible to the mentally ill, then maybe more tragedies like this would be stopped from happening in the first place. I'm not trying to minimize how terrible and sad this really is, it's an awful situation. I just know that I'm the kind of person who doesn't even hurt ants if he can help it; and I had to dig for a second to remember that these were humans just like me... That's tribalism for you I suppose, but I fear that if we don't start treating everyone in this country with more justice and care (part of which involves the wealthy corporations actually paying their share of taxes so we can provide services like food, shelter, medical, and mental care for those who don't have it); we're going to see tragedies of this sort increase no matter how many people we put behind bars.

She's got a serious set of sociopath eyes.

I couldn't agree more. Just the fact that this this wretched, ill informed, deeply ignorant and greedy human being even warrants a headline on slashdot means we're all fucked.

By this line of thinking then any Atheist business should be free to discriminate against Christians simply because Christian is who they are. They can post a tasteful sign like, "No Christians".

and I feel all kinds of empathy for everyone in this situation. The problem is, when you're trying to stop 0 day malware you have to work and release samples rapidly to protect your users. Developing a flawless battery of tests is tricky, and now and then a sample can slip through. The last time this happened at my company the sample was caught after 27 minutes, but 27 minutes can do a lot of damage when you have millions of users. It took a lot of personal phone calls from everyone in the company to make that right with our customers. Where humans are involved, mistakes are made, and while ideally this would never happen; loosing core OS files is still better than having your entire hard drive encrypted.

I don't get how even on slashdot you get so many fucking unbelievably insane ass-wipes who believe in the scientific method *except* when it applies to global warming. However, every time it's mentioned they come out in the crazy droves to drop their dumb-ness on the rest of us, so, by all means crazy morons - have at it.

No we wouldn't, I couldn't stand Bush and I definitely didn't like Cheney - but I wouldn't be worked up about this huge big fat non-issue. I'd be worked up over torture, sure, but not the use of a personal email address. That's a slap on the wrist offense.

If climate change and the next ice age we're inevitably bringing down on ourselves doesn't destroy human civilization, robots that learn how to behave by watching YouTube certainly will.

He lives about two blocks away from us and actually donates to a local arts organizations I volunteer with. I've seen his email and address in the members database; I wouldn't even dream of taking advantage of that information though. I'd heard he lived here for years; and it was just cool to see it there and know he was a real tangible person donating to the arts.

Even though he lives so close I've never seen him once. That's ok though; I feel lucky just knowing that he's around (and it gives our much maligned rust belt city a little bit of cred for being the wonderful place that it is - Watterson *wants* to live here - I don't think you can get much more awesome than that).

I visited the woods hole facility over the summer, and they truly run a top notch operation (keeping these vessels in one piece at that kind of pressure is insanely tricky - what they're doing is amazing). I'm really sorry to hear about this loss; I'm sure it's going to have a significant impact on important research they're doing.

Everyone says the same shit about tromaville, but gratuitous gore is the perfect place for social commentary.

Because, you know, how could the open source community have developed code with the exceptional quality of a product offering like, uh, oracle forms for instance?