According to the employment contract Bob made Alice sign, probably. Luckily Alice probably knows that's unenforceable in the state of California.

We all know who Steve is. Paul at times pretends to be an independent analyst.

Interestingly the article he is reacting to did not say "takeover" it said impact. He can claim there is no impact, but he would be wrong. The other numbers show at least a correlation of an impact. His own numbers shown an impact. I suppose if you lie about what the person you are responding to said it is easier to prove them wrong.

Have you considered archiving virtual machines with old versions of Word along with the documents? I think that you can get old versions of Word for about $50 each on ebay.

"I am not a networking wiz and I don't even like networking issues" So you tried to setup basic RIP and you are amazed the internet works at all huh.
Well this artical is pure BS, sure you packets go between multiple backbone ISP's and a couple smaller isps on the edge maybe, but the guys that run the bigger ISP's do have rules that govern how they BGP peer with other backbones and peers. They enforce strict BGP filtering, to keep the smaller compaines from causing major issues.
Sure every once in a awhile someone might fat finger some shit and mess something up that will effect 1 of the main backbones, but with more automated tools this happens way less than it used to. Most big backbone ISP's use router hierarchy and pure core routers are protected from anyone configuring them much at all once setup.
I think the system runs well, I am sure it could be made better in many ways, but the issues made here are non issues, the backbones one security would be the main factor here, and that should get only better over time.
Its better there is no central routing authority on the internet. Each company has it in thier best interest that it has the best routes to get to a centain network, and if that company messes its routes up, others should be protected by proper BGP filering. BGP filtering can get pretty complex, on ciscos this can be with prefix based ACL's and also with BGP AS number based ACL's, you can also use BGP communities to keep things nice and neat. If done correctly it can be pretty rock solid, if a rookie does the filtering you can have holes and issues, but a big company like LEVEL3 for instance, should have standards and all this stuff pretty hardened and worked out.
This internet sky is not falling.

Thank goodness. I'm glad I'm not the only one wondering why the hell that would be 'curious' argument.

It could be a wrong argument...perhaps we are just as unsafe as before, or perhaps, having moved some of our resources, we are less safe.

Those are, of course, possible. In fact, there's a very good argument that our actions after 9/11 have made us more likely to be targeted by terrorists, although, strictly speaking, that's not the same thing as 'less safe'. (Because we could have increased our protectiveness more than the increase in people targeting us.)

Likewise, some of our responses have proven self-defeating, and actually resulted in it being easier to terrorize us. I'm reminded of a city going ape-shit over stupid Cartoon Network ads.

But it is the expected outcome, that after being attacked, that you tend to be more prepared for later attacks. As preparation is usually helpful, you are expected to be 'safer'.

I.e., it's possible to argue that Schneier is incorrect, but it's really strange to argue that his argument is 'curious' when it's normal position. It's like arguing that it's 'curious' someone bought food when they went to the grocery store, or 'curious' that a married couple sleep in the same bed.

This seems to be the opposite approach to what these scientists are taking: they are happy when people who disagree with them die.

For the same reason evolutionary biologists don't like creationists. If I had a bunch of denialists on a crusade to pick apart my work in my area of expertise, I wouldn't like them very much either. That's hardly a proof of a "very real" and corrupting agenda.

The presentation to the general public is different than the presentation to scientists. When they publish in peer reviewed publications, they are careful to qualify their statements and not make unsupported conjectures (at least according to the review mentioned here, which I have no reason to doubt).

Of course the presentation to experts is different from the presentation to laypeople. This is good communication. For the most part, the general public doesn't do science, so how are they supposed to interpret qualifications correctly? You've read the science articles that get linked to here; you know how bad science journalism is.

You're asking for a standard of purity that simply doesn't exist in human communications. I work in a totally uncontroversial corporate job and I see these same things all the time. If someone causes us grief and/or accuses us of incompetence, we make unpleasant comments (in private). If a manager wants some information, we don't give them every tiny concern that goes with it (to avoid triggering an unjustified CYA reflex). My girlfriend regularly texts me to say she "wants to kill" customers she hates. The only difference here is that the emails got dragged out into the light of day. I guarantee you that any collection of emails from almost any organization is going to have the same sort of stuff. This is just how people work.

> As a former very avid Usenet user, I really can't blame them. The medium is
> falling out of favor precisely because most of the groups are filled with
> junk.

Then why isn't the Web falling out of favor? Almost all Web pages and most Web forums are also filled with junk.

This is the path to preference overload.

Are you talking about the mobile version?

Speaking of D&D, Baldur's Gate pulled this off really well. They did a damned fine job of allowing you to kill pretty much whatever you want, if you could suffer the consequences and it wouldn't ABSOLUTELY RUIN THE STORYLINE. I can only think of a fistful of people that this would apply to, usually those who would overpower you in a heartbeat anyway if you played through the story without cheating.

That said, you could go wander around and do whatever, or go back to the main quest and events would pull you through to the same conclusion because of your relative uniqueness in the world, good or evil. It wasn't so much AI as accounting for "what would happen if you killed this guy?"

Sense of humour failure, mods?
More seriously, I'm sure that this is one of many ways that Google will use to drive adoption of Android & Chrome/web-interface.
You wanna Flash? We havva Flash! And all the funny Flash videos you can eat!!
Until they're big enough to 'fuck off' Adobe, that is, just like MSFT & Apple are trying to do.
Of course, the hope is that the 'not evil' boys will achieve this with open, standards-based stuff instead of, for example, Silverlight.

Yep. I got the prices from the adobe shop (the €1015.40 price was after taxes btw.) Their price ~structure~ doesn't seem to be based on anything but pure randomness somehow.

For a similar view of the advanced use of content-aware fill see this video

It would make sense, but good luck with that. CRU threw out their raw data back in the 80's, iirc.