Yes, but it takes a week to find papers and reset passwords for direct import from bank/brokerage accounts. If you have a hardcopy of everything in one place, filing by yourself is dead simple too.

You do realize you can download an image and upgrade now rather than waiting right? The first time you ever do it, you will need to backup and restore a device, but pretty simple otherwise.

I can not even begin to describe goodness of the syntax. It's forever etched in my mind, right along goatse and tubgirl.

Uh.. no! There are no sane reasons for using 1.44MB storage medium. I would fully understand CD-RW, zip drives or sd cards for reasons you described. And if you don't want to depend on single vendor, Blackberry is not the best choice.

From what I understand, all it takes is one knock with a hammer to ensure platters are bent and can never be used again. And there is no known practical method to restore data after a single overwrite with 0s. Everything else is pure paranoia.

- person uses drive for copyright infringement, a civil offense
- a lawsuit is filed
- it's now a criminal offense to destroy evidence

For civil cases, police is not involved, but it's legal requirement for both parties to preserve evidence and testify truthfully. For criminal cases, you can lie/conceal all you want without additional penalty. But jury will consider how trustworthy you appear to be very heavily.

He did exactly that and .gitignore was accidentally lost.

Service providers are responsible for 90% of work by designing solutions secure by default and in depth. It should take multiple explicit steps and dismissed warnings for an inexperienced developer to incur a catastrophic financial liability.

telnet and ftp practically died a while back, http is on the way out. In most corporate environments, other protocols such as X are local only and remote use is over ssh tunnels. IMAP/SMTP takes place over TLS when using decent providers. I guess there is a question of whether SSH and HTTPs should be merged. But a lot of work has been put in both and would be difficult to replicate and make as secure from the start. No hurry.

The only exceptions are organizations with lax security (like Sony apparently) and cases where security or integrity is completely not an issue. I guess if you broadcast a video as unencrypted UDP over a local network, that's fine.

Nope, there are things YOU can say in Japanese but not in English. Someone who has to communicate in English will use idioms and allegories to express nuances of their feelings. May not be as compact, but will do the job.

I think the need for instructions to operate a toilet point more to falling average human intelligence than anything about languages?

Single world language is a great thing, and I don't care if it's Spanish, Chinese or (most likely) broken English. We will get much better science when everyone can instantly read everyone else's research. With that come huge tangible improvements to our lifestyle, like clean energy, high yield/nutrition crops and cure for cancer. Next, wide access to world news and entertainment will reduce armed conflict and increase people's demands on their own governments. Even non-political soap operas invite the question of "why the frak can't we live like this".

Once we are done with language, I think we will end racial conflict by ending race. This is well underway in SF Bay Area. Nobody under the age of 30 really cares. After a few generations of gene mixing, there will be no large homogenous groups that can gang up against others.

Oh sure, there will be holdouts. I envision pure Caucasian villages in Wyoming where conservatives can, with full public support and protection, practice their indigenous hunting, armed self protection, petrol-based lifestyle, "traditional family" culture and religion. They will probably refuse government-provided healthcare in favor of homeopathy mixed in whisky and enjoy booming trade with Amish.

ASCII porn in bash is evil man! At least he was not using rc.

When you sign up for a developer account, you should be asked how much you plan to spend per month. $2375/day would not be a common option for an individual. Given proliferation of free 15GB storage accounts, a very low end developer account with no credit card is not a crazy option. People will learn the API and use it in future, but neither them nor hackers will have enough quota to run a production site. This is just like limited data cell plans where a single buggy app can run up crazy charges. Good that they refunded money, but fundamental structural problem must be fixed.

Seriously, spending the whole day in isolation and, except for a lucky few, away from natural light is depressing. Being able to holler a joke across the hallway or look at sunshine through a shared window makes all the difference. There are always noise cancelling headphones for when you need total concentration.

If good science would be still available after a decade (Opportunity) or many decades (Voyager), at least light components like flash and electronics in general should be designed with good degree of redundancy. Or else if the probe has a limited mission and has accomplished it, there is nothing wrong with abandoning it and focusing money and talent on new missions. Would engineers working on attempts to fix Opportunity be more useful working on newer Curiosity mission? My gut feeling is that making existing missions last longer is much more cost effective than launching new ones. But I am not a space scientist. The point is that mission planning should have clear focus one way or the other.