Title

Of course, I like the point of view in my development to add in /basic/ things such as this as part of the standard package, and if they specifically request to leave the passwords plaintext, I'll have that written out in the final hand-over documents that we both sign.

Granted, that's just my opinion, but leaving plaintext passwords is tantamount to purposely not putting SQL injection prevention measures.

Why they think it's 2048x1536

The sad thing is, just why they assume the resolution will be 2048x1536:

File name conventions for images for the new iPad2 vs the original iPad ask that the iPad2 images have an X2 in the filename so the iOS can automatically display the proper images for the new device (likely due to a resolution bump). Now, X2 could be gen2, but very likely could be "twice as big" x2 multiplier... Guess which one makes the best news story? Even if it is x2, the 2048x1536 guessed resolution is taking the current 1024x768 and multiplying BOTH dimensions: 1024x2 = 2048, and 768x2 = 1536 and boom: x4 screen. LIKELY what they're using the x2 for (if it is indeed indicating a multiplier) is a rounded PIXEL count. Current iPad displays are 786k pixels, so 2x786k = 1.57MP. Granted, reversing that down to a 1920 screen leaves only 819 for the x9 side instead of 1080, this discrepancy is likely just because it's easier to say x2 than x2.63671875.

'Nuf said.

BS

Blizz isn't stopping/destroying anything. They've simply claimed that something in the vid infringes their copyright (likely the StarCraft name). Not saying the character creation, nor HUD, etc doesn't whole-sale knock-off WoW, but still....

Anyway, a mod to SC2 likely won't be as full-featured as a real W/GoS MMO even if it runs a pure, reskinned WoW-engine. Granted, it would simply cannibalize the existing WoW base, but it may also draw a crowd from other sci-fi MMOs like Star Wars/Trek.

Point malware at the device? WTF?

Sorry, but you can't exploit flash (let alone just the flash H.264 decode on these procs) simply by trying to chuck a malformed flash file at the IP. Flash is not a server (some might argue this) on the box. It does not have open ports listening for connections, let alone listening for flash files to then try to display.

/Fail for complete lack of understanding of network communication.

Fail

You missed the "tunable" part that would allow it to pass through clouds, rain, etc. UV has no trouble getting through clouds/fog. Since spysats can see through clouds, I doubt the targeting system will have any trouble either.

Title

One must remember, these figures are from Symantec, and thus, it means that this distribution is based on THEIR software DETECTING the infection on the computer. So, only people who have Symantec installed (and have their phone-home-stats bit being allowed...) are in the mashup. Now, considering the number of OSX users running Symantec AV, having 16% of infections is a VERY concerning thing. If the virus survived a Linux reboot, I'd express the same concerns with their (non-)figures. Not that they'd stray from their ClamAV or the like anyway...

It is striking that only 7% of Vista/Win7 machines were infected though. I guess the numpties haven't bothered buying a new computer in a while. How many unwashed mass members do you know that would be bothered to buy Win7 and install it on their current computer anyway?

/paris, because even for the elites, protection is needed

Adobe

"Add to that the fact that some vendors (*cough*adobe*cough*apple*cough*) don't distinguish between security patches and bloated new versions"

Actually, you're incorrect. Reader 9 does not list Reader 10 as an "update." You'll update to 9.4.2 and no further. You have to download 10 seperately if you want the new version.

As for not using a program while the patch is /downloading/, yes, fail on the software! At least the Firefox update is quick....

Problem Is

The problem is, while some point-releases do offer patch-updates, I can think of several programs that when they're "updated" they require you to buy the new version. Ever "update" from PowerDVD 8 to 9? Linux OSes manage this easily because the upgrades are free. The best you'll find in Windows pay-for software is a "lifetime license." That aside, freebie addons, such as Flash Player, iTunes, Quicktime, Firefox, etc should have a package-manager system they "register" with for free updates, rather than the whole "check for updates every time you start" crap or even worse, the adobe/apple update notifiers.

As a side thought, I wonder if this "research" classified Internet Explorer as a "third party" program, as opposed to an Operating System component, or if IE8 was considered an OS "update." If it was classified as a "third-party" app, like it should be, then I can more than believe the numbers toward programs being the bane of existance rather than the OS. It's been a while since we've seen a Code Red-type virus that propogates on its own rather than require the (stupid) user to hit "yes" 3 times.

Limited Access

The laptop in question is a personal laptop it seems. Blocking USB devices from being used on hopsital computers only goes so far. We use several USB-based devices, and it is trival to unplug on, pop on your thumb drive, and copy data. We have policies in place that ban carrying data offsite, period, unless authorized by IT. This way, we can ensure encrypted transport and end-point use. We've even taken to encrypting personal laptops as an extension of services to help ensure data will be safe in the event that it needs to be taken home for any reason. With the IT staff signing off on data-carryout, we also have records (general as they may be) of who carried data off premisis and when.

Good security is a high inconvenience for sure. However, whole-disk encryption, VPNs, and a few other measures help keep the security high (enough) without imposing the inconvenience of the paranoid.

@MinionZero

"Wow hold the horses there, what Facebook can upload my details simply from someone (who is a member of Facebook) who happens to have my phone number? Please explain what Facebook can upload, as this is news to me? ... what can they upload?"

Easy. You flesh out your "friends" missing contact info in your Facebook iPhone contacts app. This information, for your convenience and "data-recoverability" is stored on Facebook servers so you have access to your "additional" information whether your on your phone app or the web. Thus, Facebook now has your address and/or phone number, birth date, etc. all of which you falsified or left out intentially in the first place. Quite simple. What's worse, unlike being tagged in a photo, you don't get notified if someone filled out contact info on you.

"@"vast majority of users simply agreeing with everything they're asked"

I see the Gene Pool shallow end is causing trouble again."

While you can sideline this as a "shallow gene pool" issue, it is not. Unfortunately for many, humans are a trusting lot. Just look at punters on Ebay or craigslist. The truth of it is, they're installing the app because they want what the app supposedly does. Does it matter if they have to hit a "Allow" button? Nope. The programs should all be blocked from having access and leave it to the "shallow pool" people to figure out how to enable it post-install. Might work a bit better. Of course, there's always vetting, as mentioned. Finding a balance between helping the most amount of people and inconvenience level is what many companies are struggling with. Just think of UAC on WinVista.

Yes

Yes, and it is expensive. It would take roughly 20 years of leccy generation to pay off the solar panels and infrastructure for your own home. (depending on use, quality of materials [and panels], and whether you can sell your surplus back). I'm a fairly heavy electronics user, so likely is more expensive for me though...in a northern clime. Perhaps the southwestern deserts of the USA would be better off.

Patches

All software needs patches. Fortunately MS is willing to provide them (sometimes with new/extra features) for free.

I can't say (like some others) that I've had no problems with Win7, but then again, I'm not a normal Win7 "print the pictures and surf the web" user. I'm just glad I can use Eyefinity to mirror my primary desktop to my HDTV and have a second monitor extend my desktop on the side (a feature WinXP couldn't manage, since it had to either extend or clone, no compromises).

Now if I just didn't have to use WinXP Mode to run Civ4....

Numpty

Open for local intranet use, sure, that's obvious. But "...and likely also remotely." fails. Remote access to a company's servers usually involves a VPN connection to the firewall. If they did (unlikely) just stick this machine in the DMZ or outside the firewall, then yes, they should be sacked. Assuming that is what they did? No, I don't see it. Even a radiology clinic with no IT staff would still be behind a DSL/cable modem/router with a built-in firewall and the machine given a 192.168.0.0/16 address. at the very least. So, the "breach" was likely port-forwards or other security slight. Granted, since they had a CoD server running, that means they had port-forward capability on the firewall/modem/etc or the machine WAS in the DMZ....still, fail for assuming and not thinking it through.

HITECH HIPAA

Read up on HITECH HIPAA. Covers network perimeter and remote access, data storage, archiving, etc.

USB Network Printservers

There are plenty of USB Network Printeservers out there for 50$ or so. Be careful, because many cheapo printers require the computer to run the printing so the printserver would be inadequate (think of WinTel modems of yester-year and why they wouldn't work in Linux).

However, the Belkin F5L009 seems a much better solution than this crappy hardware. 5 USB ports and they can be independantly used by network PCs as if the USB device had been plugged directly into the computer. I actually use one of these Belkins for USB modems for a couple VMs. Gotta love being able to virtualize a server that requires a modem, and still retain VMotion and the like. :)

@AC

Apparently, you missed the mention of manufacturer recommending USB hubs to extend the capacity >2.

/fail troll

Graphs

The graphs are a torture synthetic benchmark. They dump random(ish) data sequentially to the hard drive with no TRIM or the like, nor breathing room for the Garbage Collector to kick in. This is NOT how a normal computer operates. This benchmark is to show the actual physical performance of the drive, not use in real-world scenarios. If you stuffed this Vertex 2 behind a benchmark of random read/write blends of 70/30% with a queue depth of 4 (or ideally 32), you'll start to see the drive breath a little. Also, this is continuous hard drive hammering. While I'm typing this, unless I'm transcoding video or the like, my hard drive likely isn't even in use, thus the garbage collector could potentially run and clean the drive a bit.

The real apples to oranges parallel in all of this is this DDRdrive uses DRAM and NAND, whereas the Vertex2 drives actually have no drive cache AT ALL, let alone the multiple GB of cache these DDRdrives have.

New analogy for HDMI cables

HDMI cables are like network cables. Cat5 and Cat5e are different. As is Cat6. What is the difference? Bandwidth (the MHz frequency range the cable can handle). Other differences include wire twist methods, conductor quality, and end termination. All of these components help determine what standard the cable can be rated for. Cat5 quality and twist prevents it from handling Gigabit frequencies properly, and likely your NIC will limit you to 100Mbit. The frequency (bandwidth) range required exceeds the cable's ability. HDMI cables have similar issues, where they're rated for HDMI 1.3b, 1.4a, etc. Granted, you can get a cable that, based on that hard-kink you put in it to sit your TV or Blu-Ray flush to the wall, will compromise the cable's already-mediocre build and cause it to down-grade the signal to the point of only being able to pass 720p. Cable length is important also, since 1080p frequencies across a poor-quality cable will likely require a shorter length, just like Cat5e is not recommended for longer than 100 meter runs (even though it may actually work "well" for 150m in your situtation, lucky you).

With all this in mind, if you're buying a 6ft HDMI cable, likely ANY cable you get will run at it's RATED spec (1.3b cables have no hope of running 3D Blu-Ray, for instance. That's what 1.4 cables are for), unless your cable is defective (or you broke it). Defective rates or User Error is outside the scope of this retort.

So, for those that missed the point, here's a summary:

HDMI is a digital spec. It will auto-negotiate the best quality the cable can handle in the given situation. If you or your cable is a numpty, you may only get 720p when you were hoping for 3D Blu-Ray. Read the cable's spec. Most are likely 1.3b, which can handle 1080p, but not 3D Blu-Ray. No, your HDMI cable from 1.1 days won't handle 1080p.

The "it's digital" people don't acknowledge the auto-negotiate side of the equation, which is what the "high-quality cable is important" crowd is likely seeing.

Cores and x64

"It certainly doesn't need 64 bit architectural address space... now or in the next ten years"

Not in 10 years, no. But by 19 January 2038, yes.

"ARM doesn't greatly need more memory"

Akin to the "640k memory" quoted already.... IF ARM is to make desktop or (especially) server chips, it will NEED to handle plenty of memory. 4GB is a good start, but x64 is a less-complicated necessity to handle >3.25GB.

And as for your code-density comment, the executable code size isn't the problem. Running exe + dlls (windows) or libs (linux) amounts to a very small footprint indeed, compared to what actually eats up the RAM: multimedia. Images (bitmaps), audio, etc. These are things that can't be blitted in a compressed form, and would be too CPU-intensive to keep in a compressed form 100% in RAM and decompressed each time the screen area needs refreshing (think of your wallpaper for instance).

"When do I get a job in Cambridge?"

Never. Lack of understanding.

Failure

@Chris Harden:

The feat of putting the shuttle into space with no pre-existing implementations to work from is laudable. That's a victory in itself. However, the shuttle and method is a failure. The costs to make, launch, and maintain the shuttle+supports is grossly expensive: as proven by "commercial" solutions.

The other sore spot is your comment "pull off a 100% sucess rate." I do not believe Challenger nor Columbia can qualify as "100% success rate." Granted, failures happen. It doesn't make them less tragic, but they can't be dismissed and have the project claimed 100% success rate either.

A few notes of counter

"Start padding out game data with garbage, duplicate data, etc so games fill a 25Gb, 50Gb or 66Gb disc. (Sony has a format in the works for 66Gb)"

Garbage data is easily compressible (unless it's highly random, non-repeating strings of bits) or is simple enough to create a "PS3 ISO compressor" that simply reverses whatever method they use to detect and skip over the garbage data and remove it, then on-the-fly dump the "non-garbage-padded" ISO to a bzip or the like compressed file. On the receiver's end, they would feed the compressed file back into the ISO compressor tool to reinflate it and add the garbage back in. All in all, unless it's real data, it can be compressed (usually). The compressor might even strip the encryption on the files (if needed) to make the actual data more compressible and reapply the encryption on the "inflate" side, since the key is known.

As for things like "Add a challenge / response during PSN sign on. e.g. asks firmware to checksum some arbitrary range of bytes in its fw or memory to proceed. Wrong answer gets flagged." it would be simple enough to have your new "rogue" code respond with an authentic checksum response or the like. Basically, if the response is generated console-side, it can be duplicated. As well as "audits" being defeated.

But you recognize this by stating: "At the end of the day none of these things are foolproof." but fail to mention that it is fairly trivial to the point of worthless to attempt to incorporate the measures.

Logic Fail

"Mind you, I'm not sure what kind of "snazzy media processing" folk really need these days"

Need I remind you that your desktop/laptop is what converts original "HD" content to content your phone can play? And, unless I'm mistaken, your phone doesn't have a 1920x1080 display. It likely doesn't even have a 720p (1280x720) display. Therefore, your "HD" content is likely "HD" compared to the old 4:3 content. But, to transcode video/audio to a decent-quality, lower res, higher compression file (read: stuff a 6GB DVD movie onto a 1GB or less file next to the mp3/mp4s on your phone) takes a bit of compute power. Even the new Sandy Bridge can only do 220fps, which for a 24fps vid is only 9sec of video per second. Fanless ARM chips can manage this without draining your battery (much) due to in-chip video decoding, just like what the recent crop of CPUs/GPUs have. Next time you want to foam at the mouth that your ARM (iPhone likely?) CPU is better than nVidia/Intel/AMD hardware, try transcoding Iron Man 2 on your phone (if you can) and see how long it takes. Be sure to plug it in and put it in the icebox first.

/needed to be said.

Lawyers

"What will the lawyers do now?"

Follow Steve Jobs around.

/halo, since he's the one paying them....

Honor and Self-Worth

"He should have sacrificed his political career and stood up to American and said "We used to be great. Now we suck. It's time you stopped waiting for the White House to fix your problems for you. We can't. If another politician tells you otherwise, he's lying or doesn't understand how it works. We can help, we can try to motivate, but IT IS YOU that has to fix the problem. If you can't find a job doing what you do, find a job digging a ditch. If it's so far beneath you that you'd rather sit on a couch and wallow in your sorrow as opposed to earning your on living, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!"."

Living in an area with lots of government-assisted housing, I see this all the time. There's plenty of people just lounging around milking money from "the system." Why? Because at a certain income level, one can make more money from the government than by flipping burgers at two jobs. All for doing nothing. Not only that, but if you do take that burger job or ditch digging job, you lose your government incentives and actually take a "pay cut" as it were. The government social system is encouraging "bottom-dwellers" to remain there. So, although I fully agree with the above quote, the current edu-work fail is very intricately linked with many other "problems." Most of it comes down to "if there's an easy way out, the majority will take it." This is the failure. A society where it's acceptible to "dishonor your family" by being lazy. Perhaps that is why the Chinese are winning: they have a strong self-worth and even that is moot against your family's honor.

That is all.

4GB is not enough

The problem with the hybrid drives is they're trying too little. 4GB is a great way to boost, say, OS boot times. However, a 16-32GB cache would be much more useful. And include a tool that you could, in OS, "add file to drive cache." Would be a no-brainer to let the OS get auto-cached and simply add/remove files of your Game-Of-The-Day (think the big MPQ files from Blizzard perhaps?).

You sir

Actually, it is in repurposing and shoe-horning *nix and such onto initially unsupported hardware that some flaws in the system are found, be they compatibility modules, drivers, API calls, etc. Heck, just running the OS on a setup with some shortcoming may reveal a weakness (lack of function, not security) of the OS. I'm quite sure they have to troll through the original driver code to see what can be copy/pasted for their port as well, which means: code review. Just reading through the code doesn't solve problems; working with it and modifying it solves problems.

Bright Side

Just wait. Just like smartphones have an "oversized battery" market, the 3DS will to.

Nothing to see here, move along....

Title

Exactly. They should have been checking for the correct AppleID receipt and not just any receipt. However, with how locked-down the iPhone/Pad/Pod are, it's doubtful anyone could have swapped receipts around anyway and exploited this weakness. Trying to push a walled garden into a space that is fairly more "open" will lead to these kind of snafus. I entirely blame the developer however.

And you PC people, Steam has been running this kind of "app store" for a long time. So no, this isn't some thing Steve invented. If he patents his "app store to a desktop" idea, Steam will likely be first in line to groin-kick him into place.

Nope

I think the "8 times more likely" figure might be a bit skewed. Has this company taken into account mobile market share? Perhaps weight the percent of visitors using X OS by their reported percentile of online traffic?

Example (using made up numbers):

If iPhones contribute 40% of a mobile website's traffic, and BB only 10%, there's a 4-to-1 right there. So an 8-to-1 (8 times) visitor rate of iPhone to BB is actually only 2x as likely. Did these "researchers" actually provide such weights to their figures, or did they just assume that they sent phishes to exactly the same number of BB vs iPhone users and counted who visited...?

Audio

Perhaps it would be best not to mention how long they retain the audio recording of your 999 call.... you know, with voice recognition, voiceprint analysis and such these days.

Admittance

Therefore, it would have been most helpful in the article to have written:

"I had willfully removed any resource caps and priority shares on my virtual machines to better see the resource demands of my VMs. It was this that caused all the VMs on the testbed server to flatline, not an inherent flaw in Virtualization Technology. I was asking for it."

Dodgy comparison to cars

Sure, there's "off-the-lot" depreciation on everything. However, I could try reselling a nice '66 Camero in "like new" condition with 50km on the odometer ("played only once") for far more than the original price...

On another note: cars are multi-purpose (utility, recreation, etc) whereas games are simply recreation. Just as one wouldn't stay on vacation for several years, we're talking about different timeframes with cars and games. Games are popular (and playable) for a few months, perhaps a year. Vehicles are ment to be used for many, many years. Might as well consider them vs cellphone turnarounds. Try selling your "feature phone" from 3 years ago now and see how much you get. Anyone able to get anywhere near retail price for the original iPhone?

USB Power

Now to just get a powered USB hub soley to power the 3 or 4 HDMI devices off the back of the TV. Now the problem is, why don't they make a 90-degree version for those rear-facing HDMI ports (instead of some of the nicer downward- or sideways-facing ones)?

VMs

My question is this: why was the solitary VM allowed to dominate the entire VM server to cause the other VMs to crawl in the first place? A virtualization environment has plenty of controls to prevent a VM from hogging resources or infringing on the performance of neighboring VMs. First off, the CPU, Disk, and likely network "shares" (VMWare) should be set either higher, or at the very least, higher priority, than the report/test servers. Likely, the test server should be set to "low." Also, CPU utilization can be capped, which is also recommended, to prevent a single VM from stealing all the MHz allocation. These, I believe, can be edited on the fly too, so a VM that red-lines the server can be adjusted accordingly so the system can return to normal until the process finishes.

Title

Definately agree with the features thing. Granted, there's many of add-ons for the iPhone, such as every iCrap device/speaker-set out there, but when you have to tote around special connectors and devices because your phone doesn't have a microUSB (almost universal nowadays) or be screwed due to not having a microSD card slot to store more 8MP pictures (oh yeah, the iPhone still doesn't have that....) then the obvious choice for a non-drool-on-self consumer is an Android device.

Core i7

If you're not thinking it's worth waiting until the release, you haven't checked the price points. Go ahead and buy your Core i7 and get ripped off. A $310 (US$) 2600K Sandy Bridge part runs (stock) 10% or better than the i7-960. Likely the "old gen" Core i parts are going to get slashed shortly.....

/consumer purchasing fail

Boasts

800 times faster might be alluding to their encrypt/decrypt stuff, which has significant gains, and is only available in the most recent batches of CPUs from Intel, therefore qualifying for the "most."

As for the 60% faster, it does happen, if the chip is OCed to 4.6GHz (yes, very easily possible) and pitched against a stock-speed i7-980X or the like, in /some/ benches. As for GPU, you're only getting a Radeon 5450 built-in, so no needing to buy a $40 discrete gfx card to stuff into that mobo you love that didn't come with an IGP solution...

"Show Stoppers"

"...and ignores a few problems that others see as show stoppers."

Forgive me, but loss of connectivity seems to be a large "show stopper" for just about anyone (excepting you of course) for a connectivity device (ala "smartphone").

You sir

I take it you didn't read the part about being "based" on the microUSB spec? Likely, the "based on" part accounts for extra amps/volts/etc for in-use charging. Likely it would take lower power or higher wall-charger power. Of course, the iPhone won't use the usb connection for data, just for charging, as everything has to go through their special connector. Else they'd piss off a load of iGottahaves that bought the "old" <=iPhone4 accessories for 2x what they're worth.

Reverse numbering

Your calcs land you right near 4015, however you failed in that average movie runtimes are not your reverse-engineered approximation of 2hrs, 11min, etc. Average runtime lands right near 97-118min, bringing the actual number closer to 5000 movies.

Revenue

Having a USB port doesn't necessarily open it to hacking. It's how the BIOS and the like treats the USB (as a bootable location or the like) that's the problem. The i[insert device here] was designed to upgrade the OS from the iConnector, thus made this process open to hacking (for instance).

Likely, since Apple gets a cut of any device branded with an "iDevice" or with an iConnector, they likely don't want to give that up by allowing any old slutty USB device to potentially connect to their Walled Garden Device. Nah, they'll keep selling licensing, and companies will keep charging 2x$$ for iConnecting products. Don't believe me? Check out the pricing for a Monster-branded CarPlay (fm transmitter) with a mini-headset jack vs the iConnector version. And no, the iConnector version doesn't have controls for audio playback either.

Windows Update

Apparently, you've never seen/used the Windows Update feature baked into WinXP-Win7? Last I checked, IE was only necessary (on WinXP only) to manually download patches from MS. Since Vista, the OS simply uses the Windows Update interface to present patches to install. Even in XP, you can cause Windows Update to manually fetch patches. No need for IE.

Responsible Disclosure

The art of Responsible Disclouser means MS is notified before the general public, and thus, they likely have reports of other means of bypassing ASLR and DEP, but are currently working on patches/workarounds before it can become Public Knowledge.

Recoverability

I definately agree with " for definitions of 'backup' that include 'being able to restore same'."

I had to recover some data from a tape written with an arcane version of ArcServe. (guess how long it took me to figure out it was ArcServe, and what version.... and how I came about getting a copy with key...)

Since then, I've been hesistant to entrust my data to proprietary backup systems. It's always fun to have to not only backup the data, but to keep backups of the equipment used to write the data, plus the software with which to read the data back....any of which can fail along the way.

So what can one use? Well, tape is the go-to for large archives of data (multiple terrabytes), just remember that your tape is likely dead after 5 years. Perhaps 10 if kept in "ideal" storage conditions. <3TB of data? Hard disk is a good way to go. SATA may not be around forever, but I'm willing to bet it will outlive a 5-10yr lifespan of a tape. The hard disk itself may last as long or longer than the interface technology (think how long it took to kill onboard floppy controllers....and you can still get USB fdds). With data on a hard disk, it's definately speedy to recover random files. Tape does have the benefit of on-the-fly encryption and any number of protective measures....what what if your drive that you "backed up" (retired with the tapes) fails to work when dusted off? How will you decrypt your data now? At least with hard drives, the encryption can be software-driven. Perhaps TrueCrypt v6? Win/Lin compatible, and shouldn't be hard to dust off or download a copy of Ubuntu9 if it came down to it. Can't rightly say that about Symantec's BackupExec 2010. Since Win98 can't run on some newer hardware, it may be a bit difficult getting an LTO drive into a VM to be able to run your old BackupExec on an aging Win2k3.

Of course, it's all a moot point if one simply considers >7yr-old data "dead" and destroys it. Depending on your area of business, one can't do that. Home users? Likely won't care about anything deleted more than 6 months ago and a couple USB HDDs to cycle through would be plenty (just keep one a family/friend's house! encrypted preferrably).

/end rant/evangelizing.

The comment of [sic]

Unable to determine the level of sarcasm in the previous post, I'll post a brief about the use of [sic]:

A bit of wording enclosed in square brackets [such as these] is used in journalism to denote editor's comments [Thanks for the ack. -Ed].

Sometimes, in particularly sarcastic writings as found here on The Reg, the author will use it as a stab at the sudo-journo stylings of would-be "proper" rags, pointing out terrible ("unprofessional") spelling or grammar. Therefore, if the article had sum impropur spelting [see? a "sic" would be due here], then you can ding the author for it, within a direct quote.

Agreed

The author must be an idiot thinking the extra 0.2% crit from keeping the ilvl264 gear as opposed to 305+ gear with way more stam and exp/hit rating was worthwhile. I found myself swapping out my T10/ICC25 gear by the time I left Hyjal. Deepholm 2nd-shard quest line gives a very nice 2-hander that beats anything prior. I think there's a few fail points for such oversights.

The new environments and the like do make the day, as well as the difficulty. Welcome back CC-required trash pulls! And I think they learned a thing or two in WotLK about boss encounters and have put that complexity into heroic 5mans. Cheers all around.

The main disappointment (for me at least) was with all the new race/class combos, Worgen could not be my two main classes: paladin and shaman. :(

Society's Ills

Without getting on a whole Nature-vs-Nurture argument, a bit of Googling should point you down some decent "profiling" statistics that show the commonalities behind serial rapists/murderers (serial being the key, since "fewer" people would [should?] be opposed to repeat offenders being put to death, as opposed to those one-off types). Of course, draconian regulations that prevent abusive, single-parent households from having children is a bit much, but just as you can lead a horse to water, but can't make him drink, you can't force children to pay attention in schooling either, no matter how "good" it is, or how much funding it receives.

In short: "Rather, they would prefer money to go to...job creation, crime prevention, schools..." This would definately help the more needs-based crimes (theft due to monetary need, other than drug money..., etc) however "crime prevention" would also be detering repeat offenders. And sorry, "even roads and transportation" wouldn't do anything to cut down on the criminal element unless they're giving out bus passes for free....