That is in fact where political and economic reality arrives. Political reality: not growing in numbers means population control. Even really draconian population control policies are only somewhat effective, and they generate a lot of bad will. Economic reality: growing in affluence requires growing in energy consumption. For that matter, staying at the current amount of affluence while increasing the population requires growing in energy consumption.

Not at all. It's easy enough to release a video claiming responsibility; as you pointed out, that kind of thing is what provides credibility to the organization.

That's what I was referring to, yeah. We've got a much better grasp of the tech these days then we did back when, so if the object is safe cheap power instead of superweapons, we can just do that and not have so much in the way of nasty byproducts to deal with forever. Even so, we still do have all kinds of old spent fuel lying around needing storage, that can't be efficiently reprocessed, so it'd make sense to get places like Yucca Mountain running.

Off the top of my head... given the lack of entertainment in medieval times, I'd imagine that the ancestors in question were too busy fucking horses to care what their far future descendants might eventually get up to.

So... what do you think we should do about it? We need some form of energy to keep running society. The default option is coal. You can try playing around with wind and solar, sure. I say 'play around' because the fact that you can't make money on them is an indicator of the deeper issue: they aren't efficient enough to actually run society. As such, attempts to use them wind up eating up a bunch of money and resources, and not meeting the actual needs of society, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Geography permitting, you can use hydroelectric and geothermal, but it doesn't always permit. Also, even when it does, some people get pissy about dams 'destroying natural habitats' and similar bull; result being that the plants don't get built, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Nuclear would be the best option; we know how to build efficient Thorium reactors, and we can put them anywhere, and we know how to keep them safe, and we know how to properly dispose of the spent fuel... but it's like there's some switch inside people's heads that makes them turn into frothing idiots when nuclear power gets mentioned, and so we can't actually build nuclear plants, nor places to safely store the spent fuel, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. When enough people fall back on coal, price fluctuations get it competing with natural gas and such, but it's basically the same thing; more burnt hydrocarbons, more CO2 in the atmosphere. If that was actually something you cared about minimizing, you'd get behind energy sources that actually produce the way we need them to produce, instead of producing the way you'd like them to produce.

Better to grow a flower in a basement, than to grow it in a sewer.

Mod parent up, please. Most people commenting here are simply reciting the dogma of their favourite brand of politics, without any real understanding of the facts. All too rare to hear from someone who actually does this for a living.

There are all kinds of corporate responsibility laws that essentially exist as legal weapons for shareholders to attack the execs of the company if/when they do stupid things that result in lost money. It's how corporations work pretty much everywhere.

Yes, actually. It's not like these are criminal doctors, breaking the law like some shady purveyors of fraudulent and harmful 'alternative' medicine. When that happens, it gets different headlines, and is treated differently; the doctors involved get fined, stripped of license, jailed, or punished in some way, and that's the end of it. No these aren't criminals at all; they have an official exemption from the Ministry of Health to continue performing the procedure for 'research' purposes (but with sample groups an order of magnitude larger than is normal for this sort of study). It's like if the FDA banned something, but then turned around and started semi-secretly passing out research exemptions to continue use of the banned treatment, and the 'research' groups were mostly just running the procedure as a normal treatment option, instead of as a proper clinical trial (with the associated procedures and controls required to make such trials meaningful). Accordingly, if such a thing were to occur, and then be leaked, with a drug or surgery that actually was harmful, then the headline would be justified; it would be the same kind of situation.

Cite source better? Googling "Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans" gets me stuff by the company itself, pages of positive news results, and government documents determining that the stuff doesn't pose a risk.
Now, it's all well and good to call for caution. Remember, though... every policy has costs. Do you think people farm with pesticides, chemical fertilizers and toxin-resistant crops just because because they're greedy SOBs and absolutely must take in maximum profit for their investments? No, they do this because in some places, you simply can't grow enough food any other way, so if you don't farm that way, there's not enough food, and people starve to death. Google 'Green Revolution'. There are the technologies that transform starvation into plenty. Yes, they turn a profit... but more importantly, they save lives.
Really, that is the essence of the situation. We're NOT merely talking about 'maybe some company makes a little more or less money'. This is food. Being able to grow it better, in worse conditions, means more places where we can grow food, and better yields in those places we can already grow food. That means people can live who could otherwise not.
Like it or not, it IS progress; more food for more people. You can argue specifics about specific cases; scientists are not infallible. Sometimes they fuck up, even with billions of dollars of research riding on them. But on the whole, we have progress; human life gets better on average, permitting more human lives to exist. Your cautions are all well and good, and don't think for a moment that the scientists devising these things are ignorant of the risks. At the same time, don't you be ignorant of the benefits. Norman Borlaug, by spearheading the implementation of this stuff, may have saved a billion lives. That's billion with a B; one-seventh of all humans alive. This is a benefit which vastly outweighs the consequences. Indeed, I'd argue that it's a benefit that vastly outweighs all consequences, but perhaps you have an epistemic position that places something other than human life as your highest good, that considers some other factor as more important. If so, we don't even have a basis for discussion... but if you agree that human life is the highest concern, then you can't disagree that the real effect of these technologies, in human terms, is positive.

Well... it doesn't help that you're an AC. Show some balls and post with your name. Maybe your karma will take a hit, maybe not, but you'll never know if you hide in the shadows. Really, it's just a number. Does the idea of it going down a little frighten you?
That said, I'd be inclined to argue that the 'quality of ingredients' problem is really two problems; one is how to keep good food fresh and healthy between production and consumption (a preservation and distribution problem), and the other is the competition between expensive good food and cheap inferior food (an economic problem).
The first problem is a big deal; fresh food, in the most natural and healthy forms, doesn't have much shelf life... so to continue to feed a growing population, all kinds of preservation tricks were thought up. This is a millennia-old problem; and it's seriously a matter of life-and-death, since failing to use proper preservation and transportation techniques mean that whenever anything happens to the food supply, lots of people die; this is called 'famine'. It's not as much of a problem these days, thanks to preservatives; we can leave processed food in cans and bags on shelves for years, then ship it to the other side of the world when it's needed. Less healthy, sure, but starvation is MUCH less healthy.
The second problem is the result of the practical consequences of solving the first. Preservatives and such make it easy to have cheap food available, and easy to sell it. Quality ingredients don't retain their quality for long; they rot. Yes, you can sell them for more when fresh... but only if you can sell them quickly. To call it 'greed' that corporations prefer to sell inferior, mass-market, preservative-laden food is to ignore the bigger picture; it's not feasible for seven billion people to get their food fresh from the farms, regardless of whatever companies stand between producer and consumer. The current population of the world is unsustainable without modern methods of preservation and distribution.
You, individually, may or may not be in a position to choose better. Many people are too poor to choose otherwise; these people are among those who would die of starvation in the absence of the modern system. Those who can, may not choose to go to the effort regardless; they weigh other factors above their health, and make their purchasing decisions accordingly. Don't judge them too harshly; it's likely that you, too, have economic priorities higher than your own health. The economic state we are in now results from the decisions everyone makes, yes... but that doesn't mean that it's something that anyone or everyone could change. Population continues to increase. The modern system of preservation and distribution is part of the larger system that keeps them alive. There's only so much that can be done to increase productivity of land, so expect to see even more artificial chemicals and such in food as time goes on, not less. This will, of course, have negative local consequences. But life expectancy, on the whole, will continue to increase with population. This is called progress.

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in."

Read post more carefully before refuting, parent was quoting the total amount of 'stimulus' loan guarantees in that year, not the money given to A123 specifically. Now, you could argue that it'd work fine if it weren't for the 'wrong' corporations getting the money, but really... are there 'right' corporations that could be getting money? Someone has to pay the taxes in the first place, after all... and since when has robbing Peter to pay Paul ever resulted in net gains?

I don't; but if I did, that'd be one of the first passwords I changed. Anything related to your money is up there, as should be anything that can get someone into your other accounts (like the emails you use for 'lost passwords' and such).

Generally speaking, you don't make a gazillion tries through the actual authentication gates; that sort of brute force is an obvious threat that people know how to look for, like an army of barbarians storming the gates of the city.
The kind of action described here is more an army of monkeys on typewriters trying to guess passwords off a stolen list of passwords; eventually, they'll get it. They won't know they've gotten it unless they already had (the hash of) your password to begin with, but that's doable now; we finally have enough monkeys to get the correct answers in a reasonable amount of time. Essentially, what this finding means is that the way passwords are currently stored in hashes is no longer cryptographically strong enough to be computationally safe, and a higher standard of security is needed.