It sounds like somebody is justifying have their head in the sand by commissioning a fancy study on mineralogy.

People fucking hate call centers because they have to traverse some hellish phone tree, wait too long to talk to a representative who is generally underinformed and insufficiently empowered to actually do anything about the problem. In some cases the rep is even required by company policy to be actively unhelpful, attempt upsells, and the like. Plus, of course, nobody calls phone support when things are working properly, so you start out with a somewhat skewed sample of people who are having issues of one kind or another; not so much happy people just looking to transact.

What do they want? The magic fancy AI to tell them how to keep customers from being pissed off because of bad service without actually making service better? The one weird trick to making someone feel calm about being told that the problem cannot be fixed? A deeper understanding of why listening to hold music and inane recordings about how much we care about your call for half an hour is obnoxious?

Haven't 'drugs' been winning the war on drugs by almost unbelievable margins more or less continually since it was declared?

Why, if they were as dangerous as my kindly DARE officer claimed, we'd probably be living under the iron heel of a drugs occupation force right now.

While it'd be fun to take out the atheist triumphalism drum, it's worth noting that the thing being measured is religious affiliation not 'theological position' or 'amount of magical thinking done per day', or 'even the vaguest knowledge of how empiricism works'.

Religious affiliation is quite significant, of course, it's obviously notable that substantially more people both can't be bothered to get their ass out of bed on Sunday morning and are willing to admit that they have no formal affiliation(historically, at least in the US, you might not actually attend all that often, or pay that much attention; but denying association was somewhat transgressive). It's also significant for the hopes of various religious groups to exercise political power through organized bloc voting (the 'moral majority', not that it was ever either, sure isn't going to be done any good by the evangelical protestant numbers, nor is the ability of bishops to bluster during election season going to improve with those catholic numbers.

However, it's by no means the case that religious non-affiliation is necessarily anything other than pure disinterest, or vague belief in supernatural entities(probably shaped by a layman-level understanding of whatever your parents nominally believed, with any overtly objectionable parts left on the cutting room floor). There may also be a story about atheism here; but that isn't really the poll result.

In that sense, the results aren't really too surprising: the liberal protestant and 'cafeteria catholic' congregations have been working their way toward being increasingly irrelevant social activities for years to decades now; some nice people and all that; but pretty light on religion, which meant that they drifted into direct competition with any and all other activities you do with other people, without being obviously more entertaining, conveniently scheduled, or otherwise competitive.

The more conservative groups tended to retain the religiosity a bit more intensely; but they really got burned by their flirtation with state power(let's say roughly Reagan through Bush II in round numbers). They did get some of what they wanted, though not enough to prevent disappointment; but they burned a lot of religious legitimacy in the process. Remember that jewish radical who said that his kingdom was not of this world? Well, it'd be hard to argue that the evangelical power-brokers hanging out at the 'National Prayer Breakfast' and trying to get Washington to do something about homos and abortionists do. Even if your beliefs are fairly strong, and largely 'Christian' in outline, it's hard to avoid seeing the liberal wing of Christianity as increasingly wishy-washy and irrelevant, certainly not worth going to church with; and the conservative wing as dangerously unfocused on the kingdom of god in favor of trying to achieve local political gains.

I don't doubt that there are some exceptions, possibly even some motivated enough to be slightly dangerous; but those people I've met who actively want religion to die out (as opposed to merely being atheists personally, or apathetic toward metaphysics) specifically want it do die out by persuasion rather than persecution.

It is relatively trivial, if you have the resources, to wipe out a belief just by killing everyone who holds it. However, that's an atrocity and an atrocious 'argument', if it can even be called one. You prove nothing but power, and being an awful person, by doing it. It is only a victory of ideas if people voluntarily come to believe differently.

There's also the consideration that religions(in addition to their metaphysics and their moral prescriptions, which do tend to trouble atheists and non-aligned) tend to be a fairly large chunk of cultural practice(either because they developed it or because they co-opted and modified existing traditions. It is not at all uncommon for atheists to actively enjoy these aspects (the big, scary, Richard Dawkins himself is said to participate in christmas related ceremony with his family...), so long as they don't include religious leaders being granted state power and other unpleasant side effects.

Perhaps Rob Kaper is more ardent than usual, I don't speak for him; but my guess is that, while he'd be pleased to have you lose faith, you are in no danger whatsoever and may continue without incident.

The difference is the number and sneakiness of systems thus compromised.

Back in the day, when an 8086 was real money and whatnot, you could be fairly sure that only the identifiable computer on your desk was sophisticated enough to be disobeying you; because you couldn't afford enough transistors, even if the market could supply them, for anything else to be.

Now, thanks to Progress, basically anything from 99 cents on up is probably turing complete, phoning home to the mothership, and host to a mixture of 'consumer analytics platforms' and egregious security flaws.

Provide neurosurgery and implant at subsidized contract price. Charge consumer 'brainst genuine advantage' subscription fee for privilege of not being locked out of all inputs and outputs, trapped in a solipsistic hell-world of unimaginable ennui where time has no meaning and consumer begs in vain for death's sweet release. Is compelling sales pitch, no? Also, you can use cyborg body as nimble bio-robot while customer 'considers' sunscription payment. Generate extra income from otherwise wasted labor asset.

Aside from the "zOMG!!!! He belonged to some 'socialist' club in college!" bullshit, most of the rest of the file seemed to be variations on 'some foreign guy wants to be a permanent resident; we have absolutely nothing interesting on him'.

I suppose you might as well write it down if you go to the trouble of checking; but even J Edgar Hoover's paranoid little minions apparently couldn't find too much to hyperventilate about.

I don't know the details of proposed and actual treatment mechanisms for non-pathogen problems (though here is an outline of the regulations surrounding levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc permitted in the US. Regulation of organic pollutants and hydrocarbon levels were considered; but dropped and don't currently apply); but my understanding is that 'composting' on a wastewater treatment scale is not much like what people do in their back gardens, and is generally done in relatively vast hardware far from the neighbors. If anything, doing it properly probably scales up better than it scales down(amateur composters frequently fail to achieve optimal temperatures, moisture, etc. That's merely inefficient if you are dealing with grass clippings; but potentially fatal if dealing with intestinal pathogens; professionals can afford expertise, instruments, and process control, if they care).

Unfortunately, once you get past metals and pathogens(metals are at least measured, pathogens are acknowledged as a threat), you get a whole lot of 'more research needed'(the usual answer on endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical persistence); or 'ooh, it's just a teensy bit, and we aren't required to model bioaccumulation from populations exposed to higher levels of contaminants in food producing biosolids higher in contaminants, which produce more contaminated food, and so forth..'(this is why dioxins, dibenzofurans, and similar known-nasty carbon/chlorine creations aren't covered by final regulations).

In the long run, we've obviously survived exposure to this planet, trace metals and all; and more than a few unpleasant chemicals, so I'd hope that the problems can be worked out; but the financial pressure from people who just don't want to deal with the cost of incineration or landfilling has led to some rather questionable decisions. You tell someone that if they spread the stuff over a large enough area, they get to call it 'soil treatment'; but if they bury it all in one place they need to abide by standards for non-permeable landfill construction to keep the contaminants from leaching out, you create a deeply perverse incentive.

Better separation of industrial sources is an obvious first step(it's always more expensive to un-mix things after the fact than it is to keep them separate); but I get a lot of 'more research needed' when it comes to household disposal and drug excretion.

On the bright side, we don't use pig toilets anymore! So there is that.

The one nasty trick, even with residential effluent; but especially if commercial/industrial gets mixed in thanks to antiquated, defective, or illicit sewer piping; is that sewage is only mostly dangerous because of the bacteria.

Drugs of various sorts show up in residential sewage all the time, and have widely varying resistance to breakdown by low cost measures(if you throw enough resources at a chemist just about anything can be separated out, right down to isotopes; but if you can't biodegrade it, destroy it with UV exposure of modest intensity and duration, settle it out with flocculants, or similar cheap bulk methods, the cost will be high enough to be dubiously relevant to water treatment even in the first world); heavy metals show up from time to time and don't do much degrading at all, nasty persistent organic compounds are always a possibility. People just dump all kinds of ghastly stuff down the drain.

There is a certain...history... associated with people trying to dispose of the byproducts of sewage treatment, where most of these goodies end up, by means cheaper than landfilling. The current strategy involves re-branding them as 'biosolids', composting them long enough that the bacterial pathogens are (mostly) weeded out, and then trying to find suckers willing to use them as fertilizer.

It's too bad, really. If it were just shit, moderately competent composting practices would turn it quite readily into a safe, useful, soil additive. Dealing with the modest; but very much nonzero, levels of heavy metals and persistent organic compounds has proven to be really hairy.

Desalination is still expensive and thirst can be very, very, motivational. That, and thanks to their totally fucked water rights distribution, California will probably still be exporting alfalfa and bottled water as they are installing deathstills to reclaim the body's water of the dead.

You might notice if someone is tacky enough to run a hash cracker on the target machine's GPU; but GPUs are ever so good at very, very, fast memory access without straining themselves much or bothering the CPU at all. The 'ooh, antivirus isn't scanning your VRAM!!!' issue is practically irrelevant compared to the fact that you've got a more or less flexibly programmable secondary processor that can, in most systems, do whatever the hell it wants to pretty much all the RAM.

The only saving grace is that it's probably pretty easy to accidentally crash the system if you poke around too aggressively; but that's a weak defense.

I can see the case for avoiding overt offense just for giggles(Hey, let's call the downs babies 'mongoloids' just like the good old days!); but this WHO suggestion seems both excessively broad(eg. diseases named for people almost always honor discoverers or significant researchers, which is hardly stigmatizing; diseases named after locations, unless novel as all hell, tend to better known than their place of origin/discovery pretty quickly) and deeply futile(the veterinarians and epidemiologists of the world are suddenly going to stop making reference to animal vectors? Like hell.)

Plus, even brutally banal acronyms tend to find pejorative meanings that suit peoples' impressions of a disease pretty quickly. 'Severe acute respiratory syndrome' does its best to mean nothing; but people were still calling it 'severe asian respiratory syndrome' within days of its announcement. Plus, our supply of 'Novel Something Syndrome' form names is going to dry up real quick once the first one stops being novel and a second one shows up.

Some sort of systematic naming convention, ideally shorter than the causal organism's entire genetic code, would be nice; but informal naming is always kind of a mess and seems unlikely to change.

Most security-related hardware is also (and probably largely for this purpose) kept low-voltage/data cabling only, so you can usually do it without getting a full electrician involved.

Especially if you want outdoor mounts, there are still any number of mistakes that can lead to moisture problems, compromise insulation, damage fire barriers, and so on, so you don't want to scrape the bottom of the barrel too hard; but there aren't too many formal requirements compared to mains voltage work or structural modifications.

I know that smearing 'security' all over things is popular; but isn't this almost comically similar to non-security job descriptions?

Suitably high level technical skill pays very well, 'Director of' and 'Chief Something Officer' pay well to very well, 'consultants' are either quite expensive or powerless peons who have been reclassified to avoid labor laws that apply to real employees; and installation technicians aren't quite below the poverty line.

It depends on what is being simulated; but if the user is expected to do something useful under dire conditions(trigger ejection seat or the like), it may not be possible to usefully 'simulate' without beating on them a bit. A simulator that produces people who can calmly press the correct button when presented with the appropriate visual and audio stimuli; but panics, or flinches and jars the controls, when exposed to the shocks of a real mechanical system really failing might well get some users killed.

It's probably unhelpful to actually damage them; but the sensations of (sometimes violent) movement are a big part of operating some types of hardware and somebody who isn't experienced with them is arguably maltrained, or at least trained only to a very limited level.