You know, its pretty funny how many macho men become squeamish little sniveling babies when something inconsequential -- like piss -- gets anywhere near them. Now, whether they are *really* snot-nosed immature squeamish little shits or just lazy ass shits with a "I'm gonna be sick if I have to do work" excuse... I'm really not sure which is better.

And WTF is wrong with you that you think the menstrual cycle somehow predisposes women to be fit for unpleasant work. It sounds more like a misogynist, whiny excuse for not doing something. If a little blood bothers you there is something seriously wrong with you. On second thought, did you know that your body is just *full* of that horrid blood stuff and -- on occasion -- people get injured and it comes out of them? In fact, most kids bleed quite a bit over time (do you even have any idea how little blood is passed during normal menstruation?) so "a bit of baby poo and vomit isn't going to ding the notion that a baby is a neat idea" for guys. At least not real guys. Maybe the sissy, squeamish, sniveling, whiny variety, but the rest of us got over it around two years of age.

My support of the 2nd amendment has waned over the years, but you are absolutely correct in calling that out. I'm not sure Trump really has a position on much of anything, which by default means that he is better on 2nd amendment rights than Hillary.

What I would call out more than that is her *general* disregard for the constitution. She fully supports the spy-on-all-American-citizens that has grown seemingly without bound since 9/11. She implicitly supports search & seizure without court order, and the indefinite retention of it. If Hillary becomes president I expect we will see the government's grip tighten even further. The fact that that calls to mind a certain Star Wars quote is cold comfort.

Ah, but all of these self-righteous posters know more about discovery, legal process and the court system. Especially when it doesn't support their conspiracy. Sigh.

thank you for replying.

You are conflating events. During the course of the operation of the email server, emails were deleted. Have you never deleted an email? The fact that "emails were deleted" has been conflated with "production of evidence" is no mistake on the part of the news media.

I seriously doubt Hillary ever said that her lawyers read each and every one, she is way too savvy to make such a sophomoric mistake. Feel free to produce a citation. Much more likely is that she said they *reviewed* each and every one. Which in any normal discovery process is the case without each and everyone being read. The fact that you (and most other people) aren't familiar with the discovery process helps them with the deception.

Perhaps you are not aware, but the importance of header data is something that is only recently coming to the awareness of the legal system. For a long time the courts of have insisted on printed emails and, not knowing any better, this has meant without critical header information. You and I may be well aware that full headers are required to assess an email -- and that *is* changing. But legal practices change slowly and a particular lawyer's lack in that regard may be deplorable, but is not itself evidence of conspiracy.

Your final statement is completely unsupported by the evidence. I know, Judicial Watch is certain it is there, but no one can seem to point to actual evidence beyond unsuccessful attempts by individuals to gain privileged access. Feel free to provide a citation, but make sure it goes beyond the "Hillary's staff stonewalled an attempt to gain access". The fact that people *attempted* to use the Clinton Foundation should come as no surprise.

Use enough hard drives and you will discover all sorts of undesirable behavior. It doesn't even take that many, I've probably gone through less than a hundred drives personally.

One server that was core to my home network was also used to serve files from a raid-5 set. Thing was on a UPS and back then linux stayed up until it died -- the frequency of kernel security updates was minimal. So the thing had been humming away for a long time when I reboot was eventually required and it would not power on. Long story short, one of the drives died in such a way that being connected prevented the motherboard from powering on. There had not been a single issue with reading and writing data. If you don't count all the log messages about drive failure, but that is a lesson in making errors visible. When a dead drive is discovered says little about when the failure occurred.

More recently in a NAS had a drive die. As a precaution ordered two replacement drives. As an extra precaution I borrowed a drive from work and immediately replaced the dead one. Which was good, because another drive died shortly after the RAID rebuilt. Long story short, I cycled through every drive with the RAID rebuilds staying just ahead of drive failure. I still nearly lost all of the data because one of the rebuilds failed. Fortunately I had an excess of drives at that point, imaged one of the failed drives (it wasn't 100% dead, just dying fast) and was able to manually rebuild the RAID from that.

Hard drive failures tend to cluster. In an attempt to circumvent this some people advocate buying from different lots. But in my example above that was in fact the case. The lesson of course is to back up your data. Show of hands for everyone that has all of their data (personal or business) backed up. Now, how many have verified that the backups are good? My personal data is backed up locally and remotely. But achieving 100% coverage can be difficult and verification only goes so far.

How does this relate to Hillary's alleged data destruction? Speculation proves nothing. I've never successfully recovered data from a tape backup (even though they were all verified when created). Dislike of Hillary doesn't make *everything* that occurs a conspiracy. I get that because she is corrupt and a liar whatever she says should not be accepted as gospel -- but I prefer evidence to speculation.

"This is totally false"

Hey, at least you used the reply button instead of the -1 "I Disagree".

However, here's the thing about statistics: unlikely events happen. It doesn't matter how unlikely an event is, the odds of something occurring *never* proves or disproves an event. In other words, you need actual evidence to back up your claim.

Now, previous administrations are documented as destroying evidence when it was requested. That is a fact, however under reported. Just one case: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... -- there is well documented destruction of evidence and everyone convicted for their part in selling arms to muslim extremists (you know, terrorists) was acquitted by a Republican president.

This should *not* be taken as an endorsement of Hillary nor saying that any actions she has taken are okay. I think it is quite clear that she is a corrupt, lying politician. But lets try to stick with the evidence when it comes to specific claims.

This is mostly due to media distortion. Her team did not "delete" emails -- that is a deliberately misleading term. What actually happened was normal discovery, but that isn't a field that many slashdotters actually have any familiarity with and so when the journalists misrepresent the facts? People predictably jump to the wrong conclusions.

For example, one "journalist" said that Hillary's team "skimmed the subject lines" when they did no such thing. What *actually* happened is they used discovery software to filter emails based on keywords. As anyone who has had to work with a large data set of barely structured and nearly arbitrary data can tell you, this is more art than science and results are iffy. Now the FBI went through *all* the emails, not just the ones provided by Hillary's legal team. And instead of using filters they put a number of their employees to the mind-numbing task of *manually* combing through the emails. Make no mistake, this is a man-power intensive task and it is easy to make mistakes. So auditing the effort for *that* adds time and takes even more resources. People should really appreciate the amount of effort the FBI put into looking for malfeasance.

I realize the above will rub a number of people the wrong way, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation, nor does not liking it alter the facts. It also does not excuse Hillary or absolve her of wrong doing. James Comey said that she was negligently careless (or words close to that, can't be bothered to get the actual quote) and she has taken the lawyer's way out of never answering questions asked, but instead rephrasing the question to her liking and answering *that*.

In short: this fantasy that Hillary attempted to delete evidence is completely without basis and is essentially due to media fabrication/misrepresentation about what is really a rather mundane and very common task in litigation. What she *has* done is tried to *misrepresent*, the most egregious being her assertion that Comey agrees with her.

I disagree with your signature. I'm going to vote for Cthulhu this year because I insist on voting for the lesser evil.

(Okay, so its off topic. At least I posted to the duped story.)

You are assuming that this was an insider. If that assumption is false then your #1 is really a witch hunt (as you designated it, though given the rest of your comment I doubt you understand what the term means).

"Really, this is not hard."

Great, thanks for your confidence. You mention Edward Snowden in a comment below to justify this fantasy. An important difference is that in that case they *knew* who had done it. You conveniently overlook the difficulty in conducting this kind of investigation.

Taking as true your assumption that it was an inside job, for your "witch hunt" to be a real investigation with ability to identify the actual culprit there has to be a means of discrimination. One example of how the government routinely fails in this task is their reliance on lie detectors. Everyone working for the NSA has been through it during screening on periodically thereafter. The government loves this absolutely unscientific and thoroughly discredited technique for the simple reason that it gives them the ability to score individuals with pass/fail for clearance. Note that, in general, it is not required to go through a polygraph to obtain a TS clearance -- the various scopes are reserved for particular employment (e.g., FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.). In other words, this is the "step-up" tool that they rely on to improve discrimination before granting access to an individual.

And yet, it fails. Edward Snowden is the currently most famous example, but there are others. If the polygraph had any utility it would have identified the insiders before things blew up. Everyone with a clearance has been investigated during screening, and again periodically. And yet, these investigations failed to stop these individuals. But you have faith that "doing it again" will somehow reveal their identity. Bully for you, but pardon me if I lack such faith.

One of the other difficulties with finding an insider (assuming that such is the case) is how do you know that you aren't tasking the insider with finding himself? When it became obvious that the CIA had a mole leaking the identities of turned agents the investigation was 100% need to know and very few people were in the know. And yet, the target of the investigation was one of those people (head of counterintelligence). Yes, they did catch him. Just because the mole is aware of -- and even running -- the investigation does not preclude identifying him. But it is pretty easy to understand how it complicates things by providing opportunity for framing, surreptitiously destroying evidence, etc. And, considering that case in particular, it was clear from reviewing his file that Aldritch Ames was career managed, but the CIA claimed they found a solitary mole and that imprisoning him ended it. How many other moles did the Soviets successfully implant? Who managed Ames' career?

Without clear knowledge that it was an insider, any internal investigation is very likely to result in what aptly termed a witch hunt rather than a productive investigation. Someone may be identified and it may even be a mole -- related or not to the present incident. But ground knowledge truth is remarkably difficulty to achieve, as is apparent to anyone who has conducted real investigations.

Really, this is hard.

what are you smoking? You provide no evidence to support your moronic thesis and dismiss as a strawman counterexamples.

Ah, wait. You aren't smoking anything: you are trolling.

For the edification of anyone who might come across this tripe unawares: a native English speaker has an easier time learning German than Japanese because of the many similarities. The same for a native English speaker learning a romance language. A native speaker of German can learn Dutch or Swedish even more easily -- and once you learn one romance language (as a native or otherwise) the remainder are fairly trivial to learn. Of course, this is well known and understood by one even remotely connected with linguistics or learning foreign languages. The implication that this is not known or utilized is not just laughable, it is really sad.

The "by concept" mentioned above is of course of more than passing interest to actual linguists. In fact, experts on the matter have so thoroughly analyzed languages, their inter relations and how they have changed over time that they have been able to (largely) group languages into "families". It even turns out that languages having similar sounds for similar basic concepts (like "papa") can be collectively grouped as Indo-European. Interestingly, this group is largely restricted to languages rooted in India or Europe and for some bizarre reason languages rooted in other regions, such as Africa or Asia, do not share most of these basic sound/meaning pairs. That is, Japanese for father ("otosan") does not share sounds with "father" or "papa". It is almost like it comes from a completely different language group.

Naturally, structured teaching does help a serious student of a foreign language. Trying to learn Latin without studying conjugation and declension is possible, but much slower. Taking advantage of Arabic's word-root greatly accelerates vocabulary building. Vowel shifts in what is now termed German, the effect of isolation on English as used in the Appalachians, the change in language over the last 1000 years in Norway versus Iceland, the details of Sumerian, the resistance of some languages to firm placement on a language tree -- all make for interesting study. And no linguist would ever mistake a programming language for a natural language.

trolling or ignorant?

When you say there is anything more than the most superficial similarity between programming languages and natural languages then you come across as someone who knows nothing of at least one of the two. Everything I've thought to say would most likely be considered insulting to your intelligence. Perhaps you could offer some actual evidence to support your extraordinary thesis?

That is an ... interesting ... take on history.

The actual reason that IBM did not do the PC in-house was because they were scared. Apple had made a big splash and was getting attention, but even worse, it was penetrating corporate America -- IBM's exclusive reserve. Due to predatory practices (the term FUD originates from IBM) it was often not possible to use corporate funds to buy an apple computer. But they were still popping up due to discretionary or personal funds. A lot of this was attributed to spreadsheets. Even the early, primitive spreadsheet made business work much easier.

So IBM was scared. They didn't have time to re-invent the wheel and do everything proprietary, the IBM Way. They felt it was more important to get to market quickly, and to do that they relinquished an unprecedented amount of control ranging from the BIOS to the OS. No proprietary hardware. No proprietary software. They latter tried to fight the BIOS issue and lost. They tried introducing PC-DOS and later OS/2, and lost.

I have no idea why you would even bring the Amiga into the discussion. It came much later after a failed attempt to bring a game console to market (failed as in over designed, too costly, never produced, and then shopped out as a computer, which Commodore bought). While the Amiga was priced competitively against Apple, it (like Atari) was a niche product and lacked sufficient market share to be self sustaining. Sure, stereo sound and full screen animation was something no other platform offered, but those weren't *necessary*. And, eventually, other platforms not only caught up but surpassed the Amiga's early capabilities. In the meantime Commodore thought the future wasn't in the Amiga platform, but in being yet-another-PC-clone-maker. So they went out of business and the Amiga died (a long, lingering death to be sure, full of "I'm not dead yet" moments, but still quite dead).

The only "twist of fate" about Amiga is its genesis from a failed attempt to create a gaming console. In the grand scheme of things the Amiga was always completely irrelevant to the PC market as a whole, just a few brief niches (e.g., Disney, Babylon 5, etc.).

His wife. The IBM representatives freaked her out, all those people in cheap suits -- she thought they were federal agents trying to gain entrance and would subsequently discover the pot stash, putting her and her husband in prison.

Paranoia, it isn't healthy.

Not necessarily. If the system only stores a sunset date then only those that are definitely strong because they were complex and recently changed could be identified just from that data. Of course, tracking the last password set date permits computing the time.

However, this discussion is missing an important point -- context.

A website that is storing a hash of the password (which, btw, is *not* best practice despite being a common practice) is prone to having the password store dumped due to site vulnerabilities. In general, this is not true of corporate environments where if you have access to the hash database then you don't need to crack anything (e.g., because you already have domain credentials or could use a key logger to obtain it or leverage pass-the-hash or...)

Even then, in the web environment having a flag as to "which are weak" is unlikely to make any difference to the crackers in the event of a leak. Sure, they could get a slight speed bump by ignoring the stronger passwords on the first passes -- but those are the passes with the least time cost which is why they are done first and so exclude them from the more costly cracking attempts. In other words, it could help them, but not significantly.

As for corporate, your overall security is better the more of your users you can convince to use stronger passwords. Breaches are more likely to be caused by malvertising (resulting in keylogging, for example) or phishing (where users voluntarily reveal their passwords). Ad blocking and phishing training will give you a much better reward than password rotation.

(for the curious, what websites *should* be doing is SRP [http://srp.stanford.edu/whatisit.html] which not only provides better security than the standard send-the-password method but protects against password re-use)

I agree with you 100%. Now, we need to exhume Reagan and the various people in his administration who provided weapons to extremist muslims in Iran. Or was that before you were born?

(For the history impaired, Bush pardoned the few who were convicted, though most of the conspirators were never even convicted thanks to massive destruction of evidence.)