Good fucking Christ your, i.e., Timothy, standards are low if that passes for 'insightful'. Usually these sort of puffed-up rantings are confined to sociology or semiotics journals. Since the author seems to pride themselves on the analysis of signs and symbols, it bears pointing out that, in this case, red has precisely fuck all to do with conveying 'danger' as it's McAfee's goddamned branding color. There are about a zillion decent arguments on both sides of whether or not AV products are needed. This idiocy isn't even close.

You're not a climatologist, you're implying that public access will come to erroneous conclusions, and you're complaining about dogma?

"Wow! I could swear I was really playing virtual skeeball!"

That science requires proper evidence for something to be accepted?

Proper???

Please enlighten me as to what constitutes proper?

Frankly, it sounds like the same kind of tripe as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; as if the standards of proof change for what some people consider "extraordinary".

The part that's most galling about this argument is that it usually comes from people who purport to be "scientific", when in fact subjectively shifting standars of proof are anything but.

Science is supposed to, nay, by definition is required to, reach a conclusion by what repeatable observations demonstrate. If said observations annoy people, don't jibe with current theory, or otherwise fail to conform to conventional understanding, it means precisely fuck-all.

Your entire post is a non-sequitur.

1) Tap into old school hacker community mentality.
2) Rely on good people to do your large organizations work for free.
3) Degrade your own service.
4) Profit!

Of course peolpe helping each other and a solid community are great, but in the context of this happening in lieu of large for-profit organizations providing quality service? I think not.

Seeing how they point out how this can save them millions of dollars leaves me nonplussed.

"A supercomputer is a device for turning compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems."

-Ken Batcher

Until self-propagating zero-interaction attacks appear, leave me alone.

Are you talking about for OS X or in general? If it's in general apparently you haven't heard of Code Red or Slammer or drive-by downloads or etc...

...is likely much harder to write a real virus (rather than a trojan)...as you'll need to find a privilege escalation exploit...

That's not really correct. All a virus is is a self-replicating program that infects other files or programs. There's no need for privilege escalation. Granted, that would protect system files from infection (which is good) and perhaps make the virus less dangerous; then again, infecting docs (e.g. macro viruses) and executables in your home directory would still suck. Also since viruses and worms are often conflated (worms being self-replicating programs that only create copies of themselves) it doesn't necessarily follow that a worm would require privilege escalation.

...all of which tend to be pretty robust and having a core that comes from the open source and Unix worlds... as far as I know, there aren't any such exploits known right now.

Come on...having a Unix pedigree is indeed a large improvement but lets not forget where the "root" in "rootkit" comes from.

That won't get you an apocalypse...you need a hart.

I don't disagree.

I also don't condone people annoying other people.

My point is that the phrase "sexual harassment" seems to get thrown about all too easily.

Believe me, I'm not defending that despicable practice, just acknowledging that it exists.

Hell, it doesn't even apply to me anymore. People here (the country I moved to) laugh at the silliness of overly litigious HR practices in the US.

But this whole fucking thread is doing nothing but prove the point of everyone who says CS is hostile to women.

Bullshit.

My comment has nothing to do with manners or social standards; it has to do with what is legally permissible in the US workplace.

I get in a perfectly decent conversation with a nice geek girl, and once she becomes a non-moving target, we get mobbed by a bunch of morons.

My point has nothing to do with your personal dating problems.

So?

The point is that sexual harassment has specific criteria and being "offensive", generally, dosen't qualify on its own.

You did not make that clear in the original post and it's a very important distinction.

I would agree that "repeated unwanted advances" can constitute sexual harassment.