Read between the lines. An *IT security company* (which includes protecting against Malware and botnets) wrote a press release saying that the recent increase in Tor traffic is due to something it co-incidentally provides a service protecting against.

This is a piece of advertising.

Here, look at this:

Pull up a google search:

http://www.vir.us.com/delete-trojanwin32mevade-b-user-guide-to-remove-trojanwin32mevade-b
> Countries Affected: Germany, USA, China, Switzerland, Canada etc.

Now look at the Tor user numbers from China:

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-06-01&end=2013-08-30&country=cn#userstats-relay-country

Why is Mevade creating Tor traffic from places as tiny as Vatican city, and having zero impact from China? When apparently China *is* affected by the botnet, and if past knowledge is any indicator, is probably the world capital of malware?

It doesn't add up.

Libertarianism merely cuts out the middle man in letting the rich own you.

An impatient prankster can toss your phone into the loo and make your phone unusable for a good while longer.

There are 15 key elements instead of the usual 3-5, but they tend to be obvious and inevitable elaborations of the standard structural components, that the author decided to assign 5, or 10, or 15 pages for.

For example, 'Opening image', 'Theme is stated', 'Set-up' would all be part of the 'Exposition' part of the 5 part structure. In turn, 'Bad guys close in', 'All is lost', 'Dark night of the soul' would be parts of the 'Falling action' part of the 5 part structure. If your story involves bad guys at all, it's difficult to see how else you can do a falling action otherwise.

I don't think so. I think that companies fail, for sure, but this just doesn't lead to any grand arc of improvement. What it means instead is that the companies that remain are the ones that still also make a lot of mistakes and are filled with incompetence, but are more capable of absorbing this failure - typically by being larger and more diversified. Gradually the market gets taken over by these large monolithic entities, as things get tougher and tougher on the lower end since the threshold for failure gets lower and lower for the little guy.

Ensuring meritocracy isn't a private sector monopoly, it's just general good management, and can be imposed in any organisation or metaorganisation.

Those businesses go under, the people get fired, but the guys at the top still nevertheless collect their final bonuses, and then completely new businesses arise to make the same mistakes. In government, when things go bad, sometimes people actually learn lessons from their earlier mistakes.

Over half of the financial impact of this stupidity was paid to contractors.

Right, the line from the article people ignore is:

"The NOAA isolated and cleaned up the problem within a few weeks."

The NOAA did it in-house, with well trained and well motivated government employees who knew what they were doing, and the problem was sorted out.

The EDA went to the great american private sector, outsourced out to contractors, and the whole thing blew up into a huge mess.

What's the lesson here? The lesson here is that governments should collaborate between departments, communicate better, and make use of the resources they already have. Not that the private sector is superior.

Yeah, I kinda question this article, and its focus solely on defective panels from China - we don't really have a reference point for what sort of defect rate is 'normal'.

It boggles me that people can repeat mantras like that and get modded up as insightful. 'Bad'? 'Good'? Can you not pause for a moment to consider 'for whom'?

Yeah, sure, a nice warm humid environment is awesome for a very biodiverse set of tropical diseases. It is surely also worth it to lose much of the existing local ecosystems to be replaced by a set of warm-climate invaders which will, over subsequent millions of years, generate new biodiversity.

I'm *sure* this is what everyone wants.

GeoGuessr DLC announced?

An exception that proves the rule. Even with minor novelty vendors like bitmunchies, at some point there needs to be an interaction with a real economy. That is, with suppliers, with landlords, utilities companies, so on and so forth. At those points, for the business to continue existing, there needs to be the large scale conversion of bitcoins to USD, or whatever the local currency is. However you might be personally be about to avoid bitcoin conversion on the small scale, that's only the tip of the iceberg.

People who sell drugs have to eat. Grocery stores don't accept bitcoins.

If the First Amendment is broken, and commonly abused to create a government alienated from the needs and wishes of the people, then it needs to be fixed. I can never comprehend the US trend of continuing to allow the letter of laws pervert their intent.