I was reading this, and the first thing that popped in my head wasn't the Ebola outbreak, but the Syphilis Experiments here in the US. That and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in which her cells were taken from her and experimented with, without consent or notice, much less compensation. If you've read the book, her kids are still wary of hospitals because of the lies and stonewalling from them. Other than the last line (actually the first phrase only of the last line) of the first paragraph would not work in the US.

Sounds like a bunch of bullshit to justify expenditures on cool new technology which will be quickly mothballed after its found to be useless or ruled by the courts to not be justification for extra scrutiny.

The scary thing is, that's my best case scenario. Worst case? It's used for witch hunts. We have warrantless spying now, do you think they'll put this down once it's pushed back by a court? Maybe it won't be used in court, but just enough to justify "extra scrutiny" of someone, put them on a watchlist they can't get off of.

Jokes aside, it's kind of interesting to see how much our views of Radiation have changed.

1985? no, but 1965? The first thing that popped to mind were old Uranium toy kits.

I remember a podcast where they used to use a fluoroscope (live X-Ray basically) to size your shoes - see bone structure in real time. A family friend has bad feet because they used a huge dose of radiation to kill his athlete's foot.

For those that jibe at the Steve Jobs design aesthetic, so we have a non-Apple company shouting "look at us, we have a metal slab that's a RoundRect too!" Not sure if this makes it more or less silly.

Hmm, a MetalBody RoundRect with 4.7" screen - released right before the iPhone 6 release party.... What are the odds?

(RoundRect was what the Rounded-corner Rectangle was called in old Apple developer docs, either when drawing a button, or using that shape directly in QuickDraw).

Or GM X-Body? You'd be in a much worse spot...

After Jimmy gets to edit, he'll be welcomed as a hero, with roses tossed at his feet [Citation Needed]

Please watch the great 30 For 30 episode Jordan Rides the Bus . Even I, as a Chicagoan that grew up in the Jordan era, was surprised at how good Jordan got at baseball. It seems at the end he had quite a few game winning hits. It seemed there was no guarantee he'd be called up to the majors in 95, but any question of that was nixed with the baseball strike that year. I don't think a lot of people knew how much he improved. Even his main man Spike Lee made jokes about Jordan - with a commercial about his struggles with "the wicked double-A curveball..."

Hell, watch most 30 For 30. The 16th Man is as good as most movies out now.

Never heard of this, thanks much! Though obviously by posting earlier I have no opportunity to mod you up :(

Blackwater has a bad rep, but their logos don't look too bad. Since I've had a lot of plumbing issues recently, I think of Blackwater in the plumbing sense - sewage.

Literally busted out laughing...

I'm just gonna leave this here

We desperately need a language for OS work that is protected more than C is. C was written before millions/billions of network miscreants could attack your machine for days straight with no negative consequences. People still use PHP (shudder) because even though the language sucks, it fills a niche of 1 as a web page/web app language.

Java originally was Oak, a language for embedded set top boxes. It's much much bigger, much different now. Im sure in 1998 people said "we have all the third party libs that we need", then a new target developed, and people made new libraries for mobile devices.

Does iMessage run afoul of this?

If the encryption is good (and China doesn't have the pull to get access as the NSA does) then maybe Apple products DO pose a security threat .... to the government.

As an aside, one of my digs at Steve Gibson is related to this.

Steve has an odd fascination, in 2014, with doing stuff in assembler. Though it's cool to say "hey I can make my own computer by squeezing sand into computer chips", we have a much more complex world now.

Steve "lets worry about security" and Steve "lets write code that may be attacked in assembler, the mode with the fewest checks and constraints against bugs and bad coding" are very much in conflict, almost violently so.

Xiaomi top seller in China

I'm not saying it's 100% Xiaomi, but I'm sure it's somewhat related. Not even "hey we need to have Xiaomi #1" as much as "we need to have local tech #1".

A Real Programmer

Jokes aside, i don't think Mel would get much work now. We're so far from doing that low level (for most things) that he'd spin his wheels for 2 days on a loop while real work needed to get done