You know, our immune system as a whole is, to paraphrase Stephenson, stupendously badass. The reason pathogens still get us sick is because they too have had billions of years to adapt to combat our immune system. The chances of scientists (or some panspermic disaster scenario) introducing a pathogen that bypasses our immune system completely by accident are pretty infinitesimal.

If you want to create a bioweapon you don't start with something unknown and then try to hack around our immune system. You go find something that nature has brought 99% of the way to where you want it and tweak.

eVIL mode is better. Any vivivi users should check that out instead.

Two men being immature at a conference and they lose their livelihood because someone quasi-famous tweeted about it? I'm sure many people would disagree but the tons of triumph in the reporting that they lost their jobs is very distasteful to me especially in this job market. I don't want to live in a society where everyone is so uptight that they don't say anything without 5 levels of mental filtering because other some random stranger can completely screw them over.

Except we don't really want to bomb them back to the stone age. What do you do after you take out the Kims and their government? We'd have to do something about the millions of poorly fed, uneducated people who live there. In a war blasted country they will flood to the south or west to China and the mechanisms for coping with such a thing just aren't there. It would be an absolute crises socially and economically and it gives the nation-states involved in the Korean peninsula a reason to want to maintain the status quo. Which is one of the reasons North Korea gets so much slack diplomatically speaking.

This is a strange statement to make when the Standard Model is known to be incomplete since it does not factor in gravity. It clearly is not the final theory if any such thing can exist. I guess it may not meet your criteria for 'exotic' but to say physics is done is comically short sighted.

My favorite part of this thought experiment is that Schrödinger constructed it to point out the ridiculousness of quantum theory and how it couldn't possibly be correct if it allowed for such a thing. Reality sure is strange, maybe the strangest thing is that we can understand it at all.

One of them is some sort of television feed. This plays right along with the ad videos! I feel like Ozymandias in Watchmen with my wall of a hundreds of video screens on that page.

M-x evil-mode you mean.

If the primary motivation is getting a job I'd probably stick to Java and C#/.NET. Not the sexiest technologies but ubiquitous. Neither is going to be replaced anytime soon and even if they are they'll turn into what COBOL was with people working on legacy systems well past the host languages shelf-life. Given what you've said I'd probably focus on Java since you already have experience there. Another plus with Java is that you can still focus on mobile development with the Android platform if that's what's exciting you.

Or you can take the badass Paul Graham approach and create the next big thing in Common Lisp and ride that wave to YCombinator-esque superstardom! This is the more exciting/perilous route.

It seems like a lot of these systems we are discovering are "abnormal" (e.g.; Jupiter sized planets orbiting where mercury is in our system, this recent example, etc). Is our solar system the weird one or are there characteristics about these 'abnormal' systems that simply make them easier for us to detect (thus explaining why we seem to find alot of them!)

"Installing updates while the session is running causes havoc with some apps like Firefox that have file resources that have not been locked (just try updating xulrunner when Firefox or Thunderbird is open)," blogged Fedora developer Richard Hughes.

Seems to me adding features to the package system that can determine and possibly correct such things (ie, closing Firefox or Thunderbird) would be the better way to go rather than force me to have to reboot. Hopefully it will retain the capability to install new software while updates are pending. I'd hate to have to reboot to install some tiny dependency. (A restart is required before you can install libfoo. Ugh!)

I don't don't believe that exposing user data is not not a big deal!

Pshaw, antiquated solutions from a simpler time. The one true path lies on the road to EviL

The hosting industry really has segmented itself along pricing lines. The overhead to start a small hosting business is so low that there are hundreds if not thousands of hosting 'companies' that offer a very mediocre product but can get by on providing for the cheap and the clueless.

When you see these types of operations with 'unlimited' resource plans starting at 2 or 3 bucks a month is it any surprise that system security is not a core compentency?

While not a universal truth I've found you most often get what you pay for especially as you leave the budget shared hosting segment and move towards VPS or dedicated offerings.

Well there's a big red line to cross. Would could possibly go wrong?!