Why not? Because Iran doesn't 100% conform to your standards across the board?

You realise that those rockets Hamas has it was probably getting for free, and those tunnels it built were actually the main way to get food and supplies into Gaza due to Israels blockade on imports, as they limited total food shipments to just 136 truck loads a day, for the entire Gaza population of 1.8million...

Hamas are far from blameless, but they also aren't anywhere near 100% of the problem.

Iran specifically has one Parliament seat reserved each for both a Jewish member and a Christian member (as well as a number of other minority groups) as part of its religious minority group policy.

The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.

No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.

To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.

Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.

Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.

I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.

I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.

The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.

Again, cite some things he can be sued for - where is your argument for breach of fiduciary duty? Yes, Elop may have done X, Y and Z, but just because you do not agree with X, Y or Z doesn't make that a breach of any duty of his position.

Uh, you do realise all those things you mention about cash having a paper trail has nothing inherently to do with the cash and everything to do with the regulations surrounding the financial system - they would all equally apply to bitcoins the moment the government says so. If your employer pays you in bitcoins, that would appear on your payslips, and your bitcoin exchange transactions would be subject to scrutiny just as bank account transactions are...

This being slashdot, it would be nice to have the article on "gotcha" licensing accompanied by at least as much information what it actually is, and when it would be worth paying for. (And not just some snarky comments about how cheaper databases already have in-memory tables, unless that's really all it is!)

If you choose a cloud offering which does that for you then yes, you don't have to worry about things like software updates and patching.

However, if you choose a cloud offering which is essentially a hosted server, then you still have to worry about all the things you would with your own local server, excluding power and hardware faults.

Amazon AWS is a platform provider, its not a fully managed solution and never has been - people have been caught out by that before when availability zones failed and suddenly people realised the benefit of having redundant instances in multiple availability zones.

I am a bit unusual in NOT having started drinking coffee until almost the age of 40, and had the same experience of hyper-concentration the first time! Now I can hardly feel anything, if at all.

I think growing tolerance to drugs is practically universal. I've known several people who started Prozac etc. and told me, "wow, so THIS is what I've been missing! Life is so great!" But fast forward a year, and they don't seem that much happier. Yet they still have a costly prescription for the rest of their lives.

You have cited a lot of things to hate over, which you obviously do, but you have yet to cite anything that can actually be sued for.

Sigh, I must be on slashdot. "Unlimited" doesn't mean "free from the laws of physics." It means it isn't limited by the carrier. (If I told you there was no speed limit on the autobahn, would you honestly think I was hoping to drive faster-than-light?)

Ahh, that bullshit.

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

Yeah, or that shining example of progressive intellectuual integrity, John Edwards.