So the guy's mom talks to his dad like a child, correcting his grammar and such, for 50+ years, and DAD's the one that's uncoachable?

Maybe this whole article is sarcasm. It makes more sense that way.

I think that was intended as a bit of a silly example.

At least I hope so.

See, this is why we can't have nice things. Some jackass has to go and build the excuse that government will use in the future to erase the freedom of the net.

Also, WTF is this supposed to mean: "'I walked up to a three-star general on Wednesday and asked him if he could help me deal with a million-node botnet,' said Rick Wesson, a computer security researcher involved in combating Conficker. 'I didn’t get an answer.'"

Yes, I don't get this quote neither. I honestly am not sure how to interpret it. Does his lack of answer show that he has no clue about this million-node botnet thing ? Or that he does not want to talk about such a sensitive matter ?

Moreover, is any 3* general supposed to know what this is all about ? Are we talking about a specific general well versed in these matters ?

I submitted this story though, because I have not heard about this worm before and I found the speculations about the final goal of this attack rather surprising.

At Arbor, the people that were involved in FedGov sales heard a little anecdote about John Casciano, a retired Air Force Major General who advised the company. What we were told is, despite the fact that he retired in 1999, and despite the fact that he walked into the building in plainclothes looking like any business guy off the street, every uniformed person he passed saluted him. That's a 2-star, retired.

The idea that anyone in the military would have up-to-the-minute intel about malware doesn't ring true to me. My sense of it is, from talking to people who've worked there, the NSA deserves the reputation it has. The rest of the government is a backwater.

The idea that a Lt. General --- in command of 50,000+ unforms, roughly the equivalent of a Fortune 200 company plus rifles and tanks --- would have an opinion about Conficker seems even less likely.

(I never met Casciano, but I did get to go to the Pentagon a couple times --- it feels like the largest public high school you've ever been in, except that people brandishing automatic weapons stare at you when you come through the door. Apparently unless you're a ret. 2-star, in which case they salute.)

Setting the goal was not the problem here: the problem was the way they chose to achieve that goal. Building better cars might, rather than doing everything to sell crappy ones, would have had a much better chance for success.

They could have decided to produce something completely different, like nokia, that old world-leading manufacturer of rubber galoshes.

That's a matter of setting the right goal. Perhaps "make better cars" would have been appropriate goal, insetad of "make more money".

Making more money is an ok goal, though a bit too general for practical use.

The problem comes from a short-sighted approach to making more money now at the expense of making money later, which is what GM did. If they'd decided to sell more cars by making better ones, it probably would have taken longer to get to that point, but they'd have been in a much better position to compete with the other car makers.