You live in fear. You think you need this for your survival. You build these straw men arguments, and then let them enthrall you. Maybe someone else told you these, late night in a bar some place.

They're half-truths that are used to conflate fear-based arguments. Takes courage to see past the fact that government is for sale. NAFTA is a red herring. Unions screwed themselves. Great idea, horrible execution. Costs went thru the roof, and competitiveness did not. Labor was exported for the same reason that water seeks the lowest exit.

You can live a long happy life without guns. Guns are not the problem. Pulling the trigger out of fear is the problem.

Not stupid?

Ultimately, the backlash isn't going to be pretty. These are people sworn to uphold the US Constitution, but FISA has given them their grip, and the opaque nature of FISA courts means that they're the black hand of government.

The fear-based culture after 9/11 gave rise to lots of brutish and boorish legislation. Freedom Fries. We were fighting a small, even handful of disorganized terrorists. Now, the backlash has caused armies of dedicated fighters, not they're that smart.

So what happens? You dragnet most of the communications infrastructure of the USA, and call that a win. A win? It's enormously costly both in terms of money spent, but also the feeling that we don't trust our own government, and we've reduced the currency of fighting for ideals, rather than for oil, the crooks on K Street.

Stupid? Yes. It's debased the level of trust, and created ostensible enemies of all us, watching all of us. Where is there an ounce of warmth, trust, and liberty in sifting through 10^7 conversations, just to find a nugget or two?

But there is some science, but not much. Go to eBay and search on key reprogrammers for MB, BMW, and Mini. They use a field coil to program the key, after the security code has been read from the ODB2 connector.

What's wrong in taking the signal in the field coil and overwhelming the receiver inside the car with a strong signal, or set of signals that is the delta of codes generated to make keys? The delta can't be huge, maybe a few million of them. How long does it take to go thru the list until POP goes the lock? A little science, but in the end, real hacking is science but also intuition and just plain tenacity.

The sequence is data. I don't think patents cover data. You could modify the data, but a patent claim is dubious. Working pi to infinity-2 is data. It's not patentable. My DNA, your DNA, is not patentable. Mod them uniquely, and you're Monsanto.

Good practices.

And oddly, I know public IPs where ssh to root is not only possible, but in service as I write this.

I'm also subject to one-time-use password generators for clientele that are maniacal regarding security.

There are times when root is fine. But not for long.

I watch coders use root as a default. If you use any of the many distros, the default is user space logon and it works for most needs. I tracked myself yesterday and found myself in root seven times going on misc installation and modding adventures.

A collaborative effort I'm working on lands me as root on another coder's machine. It's always there, CLI forever. Bash at root stares me in the face. If I demote it, it's back again. It's unlikely this person is rooted, but you never know. Rootkits are pretty transparent.

I appreciate your wisdom. It hasn't helped my flamebaiting status. I see sooooo many paste jobs that say something like:

root@frankenstein # grep tail foobar etc.

As a coder, I like to run unscathed by logons, too. But after an indelicate rm decades ago, I'm a convert to user space.

Sudo, hell.

Most non-civilian Linux users run as root. They don't want no stinking user space hassles. They are coders. They are immortal.

Mod me as flamebait ONLY if you don't run as root consistently. And don't lie.

I also find it amusing that the fanbois have modded me down to flamebait.

We agree. The bloom is coming off the rose.

When the rumor mills starts going hum-ho, oh, something might be happening. Yawn.---- > then Apple is in deep trouble. Oh, wait....

Tim Cook seems to be trying hard to lead the juggernaut that Jobs et al built. That the press has nothing to rumor and fuss over is a big wah wah wah to me. I'm tired about reading about the next quarter mm that will be shaved from (fill in this blank) or how the next (trick little ARM CPU) will shave another half femtowatt from the next (iPad, iPhone, iWidget).

That the press is depressed is an alarm point: they need to focus on what's hot and new and important.

A lot depends on what you want to host. The Windows Type 1 hypervisor platforms are well-known. If you want to host Linux/BSD/etc., there's really a different family for that.

If you want to add-in VDI, it's a different mix of products, but the commercial vendors are the same. VMware is expensive, Citrix less-so, Oracle is reasonable if and only if you like Oracle; Microsoft supports Microsoft and a hand-picked set of Linux options.

But you can teach a lot by using Xen, vyatta, and a bunch of FOSS components that are as secure and LDAP-using as the rest of them.

If you need your hand held, and you have budget and hardware, VMware is deluxe but sometimes opaque. Citrix is strong if loose and fast and more egalitarian (especially in VDI support).

You can get HTML5 support from any of the commercial vendors, but supporting Linux is a bit tougher-- Citrix does this better. Oracle doesn't support HTML5 at this point.

If it's so easy and simple, why is Intel in a ditch?

Put on some cleats when you astroturf.

And no, there isn't anything "magical" about ARM. It's just clever, and not an ecosystem you can control, like Intel likes to control.

Uhm, do you realise that Intel sold one of the businesses they owned that had unbelieveable potential? Uhm, do you realize that they, uhm, don't have squat for low power processors and comprehensive consumer platforms? Uhm? Or that they could have uhm, been maybe a leader in uhm, ARM? Uhm?

I uhm, had a Palm and an uhm, HP, and uhm others based on uhm, a processor family that they, uhm, screwed off.

The topic is Intel, so I'll frame it within the reference of a large shift in computing that Otellini missed-- an area of consumer products dominated by smartphones and tablets. Servers have done well, too, but the packaged 1U-5U/generic blade markets haven't done quite so well.

You focus on the iPhone. There's not one high-selling Intel-powered phone or tablet on Earth. Not ONE.

I cited Apple to show how Otellini and Intel in general, though that their domination of the PC industry would make them kings forever. It did not. They deluded themselves.

My first views of the iPhone were that it wasn't all that great, but by comparison to phones in the market at the time, it had any number of good things going for it. The Treo and a few Nokia and LG and HTC and other phones were trying. Not one of those had an Intel chip inside.

Otellini was asleep at the switch and the train wrecked.