Coincidentally, female suicide bombers are actually pretty common in Chechnya, where the bombers are reported either to have originated or had ethnic ties to. There is even a word for it: shahidka.

There seems to be this common misconception that a network can be broken into without causing any damage. Tell that to the IT department that has to re-flash and re-image every damn machine on the network to make sure no backdoors were left behind.

What makes American schools the best in the world (especially at the graduate level) is that they admit the best students in the world. Stop admitting the students, and the schools will no longer be the best. It's that simple. Furthermore, top professors/researchers choose their universities on the basis of where they have access to the best students, which makes this proposition a vicious cycle. So, American schools would lose their edge in less than a generation.

Better yet: why not organize a good, old-fashioned act of civil disobedience? I'm thinking along the lines of several thousand people meeting up outside the Lincoln Memorial and simultaneously unlocking their phones.

If you decide to start weight training, get this book, learn how to squat correctly, and do it.

Donohue and Levitt botched the study: a programming bug meant they failed to control for things they thought they were controlling for. Furthermore, they accidentally predicted the total number of arrests instead of the arrest rate, as they should have.

The CDC (i.e., the US government) lists the US homicide rate as 55/million, which would make it 6th on that list. Furthermore, that list seems to exclude just about all countries in North/South America and Africa, many of which have the highest murder rates in the world. And why is the murder rate for Turkey listed as twice that of the highest country in the wikipedia list? This doesn't even come close to passing the smell test.

Old fogies like me remember that back when Blender was commercially developed, they had an odd business model consisting of giving the software away for free (as in beer) and selling the documentation (see the old review here, for example). Documentation is now one of the weakest points of Blender, IMHO.

Judging by the charts here it looks like there were about 200,000 homicides with guns in the last 20 years (not counting suicides). So... a little more concerning than lightning strikes.

If interference could really be a problem (unlikely), then politely asking passengers to put their gadgets away is a laughably dumb solution, because it doesn't account for people forgetting to do so accidentally or willfully (say, terrorists). The only sane solution is to design the planes to be robust to interference, which I'm pretty sure they do already anyway.

Again if you placed your companies data at a DC in lower Manhattan you should be fired.

I don't know anything about Datagram, but there are legitimate reasons to have a DC in lower Manhattan... For instance, for latency-limited high-frequency trading operations. I don't know if this is the particular case with Datagram's clients, but the fact that DCs exist in a ludicrously high-rent area means that they probably exist there for a good reason.

Forgive me if Im skeptical of an AC claiming that a company who has been creating consoles for 30+ years managed to make RAM slower than disk access. That would be basically impossible to pull off even if you were specifically trying to do so; theres about 3 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the two.

Mod parent up and grandparent down. It is mind-numbingly ludicrous to believe main memory access on the Wii U is slower than disk accesses. If that were true, there wouldn't be any point in having a CPU faster than about 100 Hz (which = 1 / x, where x = random access disk latency ~ 10 ms).

Argh, a million times yes! Stupidity of stupidities!

Exactly. The "bananas" you see in supermarkets are a genetic monstrosity; basically all clones of the same individual, thanks to human meddling over the last 7000 years. It doesn't get more GM than that. So, where do you draw the line?