Child abuse, as horrible as it is, has how much to do with wrongful incarceration?

This is just either mudslinging on your side, or it is showing that you have no idea what Amnesty International is about.

I don't expect Greenpeace to talk about government overreach, and I don't expect the taxpayers union to report on human rights violations in a country on another continent. Why do you expect Amnesty International to investigate cases of child abuse?

In Europe, I've seen Roman roads that are still maintained (and upgraded).

Actually, the same sector of a spinning disk can not be overwritten for the entire life of the disk. I have some old systems around (some of them running since more than 20 years) with old 2- and 4-GB-SCSI disks. While they read fine, you should not try to write onto them. If there is any upgrade necessary, we do it by imaging a 73 GB disk and replacing the old drives (and even the 73 GB disks are leftovers from the old days).

And no, those machines are no all purpose computers, they are phone switches which just boot up, read their OS and configuration data from disk and then work solely from memory. Configuration changes which might cause a sector to fail after a write are seldom, but can still be handled by spare sectors on the disks.

Maybe there are shortcuts which require the ship to be exceptionally fast, because they open and close quite frequently?

And with locks, you have a layered security. You can have the lock of the front door designed by someone different from the designer of your vault. Thus even if your locksmith turns bad onto you, he might get into your front door, but not into your vault, and vice verse the vault designer would not make it through your front door to even get to your vault.

I have one issue: Edward Snowden never sold any documents to the Russians/Chinese. Yes, he has been repeatedly accused of doing so, but so far, no document is known that was sold to them.

Thus, claiming Edward Snowden sold documents to the Russians/Chinese amounts to a blatant lie.

Come on, dude. You REALLY believe that the .gov contract does not go to the cheapest bidder, the one who uses off-the-shelf components?

Computing has an interesting problem right now: The most viable, the most powerful, the cheapest components are the ones available to consumers (or at least very closely related to them), because of the sheer amout of units shipped and the harsh competition in the market. Any we-don't-use-off-the-shelf-components attempt at computing right now is doomed to be late, extremely expensive, full of bugs, and at least two generations behind.

We don't need examples of failed products (for each successful one, there are ten which failed).

The point of the article is that the same people constantly prove to be early adopters of products that don't succeed in the market.

Niederdeutsch (Lower German) indeed is a different language than Standard German (not just "usually"). It derives from the same Old Saxon and Old Frisian dialects modern English comes from.

Actually, researchers of the Romance languages make a difference between Portuguese and Brazilian (and yes, there are some differences).

You must not pay attention much to the fact that most people they persecute are Muslims to begin with - christians are merely collateral damage.

What do you think would for instance GE do if suddenly some quite important addresses within the 3/8 IP space are no longer reachable from the outside, because ARIN reassigned them to someone else? Who will survive the lawsuits for damage and loss of business? What will happen if the oncall GE technician who administers some important GE serviced equipment at some hospital site can't get to it remotely after a break down, and thus the small glitch gets out of hand, and some people depending on the GE equipment on site die?

ARIN will never reassign a GE owned block without clearance beforehand from GE. Too dangerous.

Even with a lot of questions surrounding the IQ, the generally understanding of intelligence and the importance of it, one fact is quite undisputed:

If controlled for social factors, IQ is by far the best prediction of your future educational performance. So the chance of becoming a scientist is directly correlated to your IQ.

The original IQ test, as invented by Alfred Binet, was created to determine in what class to put children who started school. In 1882, France introduced compulsory education, but many children in France had no or questionable birth certificates, and when they were about to start school, it was not clear what their real age was and which class would be suitable for them. And then there were the children who required special care, and until the beginning of the 20th century, it was up to the subjective judgement of the respective teachers to determine which children should get it. Thus Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon developed a test to more objectively assess the educational potential of a child, the Binet-Simon-Test, which was to calculate something called the "intelligence age" of a child, and which was used as a criterion in what class to put a child.

It should thus be expected that the IQ as measured by the Binet-Simon-test (and the later development Stanford-Binet-test and all subsequent IQ tests) is quite predictive for your educational career, because that's what they were invented for.

Calories measure only the physiologically available energy, thus the calorie intake from cotton is essentially zero.

It can, but you have to have at first a clue of what you are doing. To know how to scale back a 100 MByte code base, you have to know the 100 MByte code base first, and you have to have lots of experience from coding within the 100 MByte code base, or from coding in a similar environment and with a similar goal.

To know how to scale back a large government, you have to know first what the government is doing, how it is doing what it does and why it does what it does, at best from your own experience in this government, or from working in another government.

Some outsider with big words but no experience is very likely screwing up big time, because he has no clue about most of the very important details. Yes, sometimes you find that wunderkind who is able to pull the stunt and get a new new code base working. But it surely has coded before, it has a general idea what's the point of the whole thing, and it is able to fastly get a strong team together pulling in the same direction. And sometimes you find that person who is able to redo a government as a relative outsider, but that person needs strong experience in how to govern something, and it has to be able to get a strong team together which pulls in the same direction.

And here the parallel between the government and maintaining a code base ends. Because you can create a new codebase while the old is still running. But you can't start a new government and get it up to speed while the old one is still running.