If we're dealing in the comic universe, and arguing from the viewpoint of those trapped inside, the justification that all databases WILL be compromised requires 4th wall perspective that only a select few characters have.

Really, the idea that super-villains will always be able to defeat anything the super-heroes can cobble up has little support within the universe, because the heroes constantly win against ludicrously slim odds...and do so with ridiculous regularity. They laugh while leaping into their apparent doom because they'll survive largely unscathed as they have many many times before. Their bravado has been supported by experience. From the viewpoint of the superheroes within that universe, It's just as feasible for the superheroes to cobble up insane security measures that could not conceivably be broken by any entity interested in earthly affairs. It's only the readers like you and I that know that comic authors only detail the complexity and robustness of a security system only to have it breached shortly afterward. But for the heroes, that's not a factor they can conceive, and it shouldn't be influencing their opinion on the matter unless they have 4th wall perspective.

For example, pick any superhero with a secret known by someone other than themselves, or documented outside of their own mind. The fact that secrets still exist in that universe shows that they can indeed be preserved. Even Spiderman's identify after being made public, was made secret again. The mutant registration act could just as easily succeed as it could fail. And given the heroes vs. villain track record, it should lean heavily in the direction of success from the viewpoint of the heroes. Hell, it's being pushed by the illuminati, masters of science, technology, magic, heck, reality itself was subject to their will.

If we want to go really really meta, then we should know that we'd never have the secret identify of every marvel superhero revealed to the world because it would derail far too many character arcs and make for bad reading. Leaks would be limited at best to C and D-level characters, or somehow retconned if it somehow happened to major characters.

I agree, the mutant registration was puffed up to be this big bad thing, but really, it's not unlike registering a firearm, and requiring that people walking around with guns have at least had some training in how to properly handle a gun, in order to prevent harm to themselves and to others. Even gun control activists would agree that proper firearms training is essential.

As for the active use of powers, the mutant registration act wanted them to register and answer for using their powers, like a cop deciding to use his gun. If the mutant doesn't want to actively use their powers and just go about their business like a normal person, that's fine, it's like leaving the gun holstered instead of popping it off willy nilly.

OTOH if you launch 1st generation product that's flawed just enough that there's no interest in a 2nd generation product, all of the development effort was wasted, and none of the feedback will make any difference since the opportunity has been lost.

Right now they have only mild interest in the 1st generation product to begin with, even if all of the promised features are fully realized.

Really, the "Steam Machine" isn't terribly exciting, it's just a branded PC. I don't see any realistic scenario where the Steam Machine makes an impact on the industry.

SteamOS is useful to me, since I play PC games on my TV, and further development to expand Big Picture mode into a full OS experience would be very welcome because a windows UI is horribly clunky for use on a TV. But even as one of the few people in their very niche market for this product, I'm not all that excited about it. My setup works already, though SteamOS might help, it won't be a full replacement for a long time(if ever).

The new controller is the most interesting piece since it may widen the types of games that can be playable with a controller on a couch. I have a rising coffee table and full keyboard and mouse, but I'll gladly take opportunities to play more comfortably with a controller so long as I'm not trying to play a game competitively.

I "believe" in evolution, because I don't have a deep enough knowledge of the theory's mechanics and the primary evidence to form what I'd need to really know it evolution to be true on a factual basis. For the most part, I'm simply accepting evolution to be true on the authority of experts. There's probably quite a lot of other people like me who accept scientifically derived facts based on an apparently high consensus among experts.

I'm taking comfort in the belief that if I were so inclined (and had the wherewithal to do so), I could directly examine supporting evidence that establishes this information as fact. It's an important distinction from a belief in religion which, even if it were somehow testable, makes no guarantees about holding up under direct observation.

How is XMPP in any way comparable to Twitter?

The problem with the VAST majority of criticisms against drone warfare is this: /They don't cite alternatives./

If an author has a problem with intervention policy. THAT is what the author should be targeting! Drones are incidental to the intervention policy and are off-point. If the goal is to persuade the audience against intervention, then the subject of intervention needs to be directly addressed.

If an author has a problem with drone warfare itself, then present the alternatives. If "boots on the ground" is a more effective way to ensure surgical precision and minimal collateral damage, advocate for that and present the supporting arguments, and preemptively address the counter-argument of the potential for taking casualties along the way as a necessary cost of preserving civilian life and reducing the amount of backlash that creates new terrorists. If the author believes that counterintelligence and local partnerships is more effective, then THAT should also be presented, citing past successes in reducing insurgency and improvements to civilian quality of life.

But if the author has a beef with drone warfare, and presents no alternatives, then they leave the massive hole in their argument of "If not drones, then what?". If the perception of drones is that they kill enemies and prevent us from losing soldiers in the process, and the author wants to do away with drones, then the audience is left to wonder: "Is this author really suggesting that we should lose our soldiers for no good reason, when we could have used drones instead?" Address that question head on!

This happened at my previous job, it was about a quarter-mile walk to get to the coffee in the cafeteria (no free coffee). The bathrooms over there were also much cleaner since they were more inconvenient to reach, (so of course I took the extra walk for a cleaner toilet). Took about 10 minutes to walk there and back. It adds up over the course of the day.

They never really explained why federation wouldn't work or why XMPP wasn't sufficient for their needs. As far as I can tell, this was purely to thicken the walls on the garden.

I think it's obvious isn't it? The "Hangouts" product works in a fundamentally different way to XMPP. In particular, it's trying to be a WhatsApp competitor, which means users are identified by things which are not JIDs, like verified phone numbers and Google+ profiles. What's more the entire thing on mobile runs over the C2DM system which uses tightly packed binary protocols to save bandwidth and battery instead of XML. GTalk had been architecturally moving away from XMPP for years as the product evolved, it's hardly surprising that this trend continued.

As to why they stopped caring about federation, I'd guess the answer is: nobody uses it (except spammers). Heck, I'm a technical guy with lots of technical colleagues and friends, mostly using GTalk, and zero of them use a federated XMPP server. XMPP just is not competitive and is a market failure as a result. Or can you give me one good, solid reason why an ordinary person would want to use a non-Google XMPP server? No ideology please, just practical things. I can't think of one.

The European Economic Area is not identical to the European Union. For example Switzerland has most of the free trade agreements but does not have to obey random dictats from Brussels.

Isn't Twitch the official streaming app for the XboxOne? (Isn't there something there with PS4 too?)

I bet the deals that allowed those service hooks to happen helped lock-in some positive margin on those users.

Did you read the paper? I did. That's what the research does. It turns out that there isn't a lot of malicious MITM out there, and what little does exist is done by malware on the same machine. The other MITM "attacks" are things like corporate proxies, etc.

The most interesting thing about this research is that it rather decimates the oft-repeated meme that SSL is broken and gets busted all the time. The data doesn't show that.

Pax Americana as a theory might hold water, if it weren't for the fact that the USA has spent most of the latter half of the 20th century fighting wars that it started itself. How many active wars did the USA decisively stop by itself? None? Bosnia might have been an example, except that would be better described as being ended by NATO, in fact Operation Deliberate Force had 15 nations take part. It would probably have worked out the same even if the USA did not take part.

It's deeply unclear that the USA is single handedly responsible for a net drop in state-on-state violence. Certainly just looking at surface facts would suggest it's the opposite: the world would have been even more peaceful if the USA had a less aggressive foreign policy.

It's actually a bit of a muddled critique ("I will say 20% of jobs are BS but I won't say which ones") that attempts to convince people that they shouldn't criticize other jobs they might think were overpaid (like unionized auto workers, as specifically cited) just because the complainer has a job they are unhappy with. In short, it's a load of academic twaddle, but interesting as a conversation starter.

Right on the money. Actually he does identify some job categories he thinks are BS at the end - an entirely arbitrary list that labels actuaries as having BS jobs, but poets not! Right, because insurance is so useless!

That said I agree it's useful to start interesting conversations, even if the article itself is largely nonsense. The question of why we aren't all living lives of idle leisure is an interesting one to explore. I can think of several explanations. One is that many of us are essentially idle. Unemployment figures exclude people who have stopped looking for work. If you look at raw data series (graph here) you can see that actual employment has been steadily falling since the 1960's in the USA, typically taking a dive after each recession, then regaining some but not all of the previous employment. This is not what futurists envisioned because this is a form of enforced idleness, but then again, in a world where machines do all the drudge work wouldn't we expect that to surface as unemployment? We'd only see this as a problem due to a hard-wired cultural expectation that unemployment is immoral and working is ethically superior. The transition to a world of leisure would require rewriting of that fundamental component of our psyche which clearly has not been happening.

Selling you something at a higher price than you'd like to pay is not "extortion".

Regardless, issuing certificates involves real work. If you'd like to do that work for free, in perpetuity, eating the costs on your own, then please do! The internet community will love you for it.

Mexico has a tight restriction on guns yet their murder rate is 23.7, Switzerland where every adult over 18 is issued a true assault rifle has a murder rate of 0.7. It is not the gun laws that cause problems it is the culture.

Mexico has tight restrictions on guns yet are flooded with guns from the USA. This effect is so severe that researchers have actually studied the effect on Mexican homicide rates from the lapsing of the US Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which had a ten year sunset rule.

Switzerland does have a lot of guns .... at home, as part of their military system. There is no culture of people carrying around guns with them in civilian life just in case they get randomly attacked for no reason. I live in Switzerland. I've not spent a huge amount of time in the USA, just visits over the years, yet I've seen there a bar with a "no guns" sign outside. This is something I have yet to encounter here.

But even if it is due to culture, you aren't going to turn the USA into Switzerland, so stop blaming culture (which implies that's how to fix it). Instead look to the UK, which has a culture far closer to America's. The UK experienced steadily growing gun crime rates for decades (graph on page 4), with very small occasional falls being quickly reversed by growth again. The big jumps in 1998 and 2002 are due to changes in counting methods - so you can mentally smooth the graph if you like. A few years after the UK passed much stricter gun control laws firearms offences started to fall dramatically and have continued falling every year.

I've noticed that UK statistics are frequently abused by gun rights advocates in the USA. Ways I've seen them be distorted include: chopping off the earlier years and then trying to claim that passing gun control laws made gun crime go up (it was going up anyway and the big jump was due to counting method changes), and claims that the UK has more violent crime than the USA (the category of "violent crime" excludes homicide, because the stats are collected through surveys and dead people don't reply to surveys, homicide rates are over 4x higher in America).

Something else to consider about the UK experience is that the stats cover up a lot of interesting detail, like the fact that whilst there are still firearms offences they are almost invariably committed with used guns and that provides a lot of evidence that can be used to bring the cases to resolution. "Clean guns" that have never been used before are exceptionally rare. In the USA they're the norm because it's so easy to buy new guns, so why leave a trail of evidence? Ammo is also hard to obtain. Some gangs have tried to make their own, but their home made ammo is far less deadly than professionally manufactured ammo.

I do not expect the USA to actually ever shift itself on the issue of gun control, even though it stands practically alone amongst developed countries. Instead American's who don't want to fear getting shot should simply leave.