I've never understood the emotional response to the theory of dark matter being some sort of mass we can't see. It seems like the theory personally affronts people for some reason.

The idea that a form of matter doesn't interact with three of the four fundamental forces doesn't seem all that crazy to me. I mean, the photon and W and Z bosons don't interact with the strong nuclear force, do they? (I'm actually asking - I'm no particle physicist.) And the neutrino interacts with the weak force and gravity, but not electromagnetism or the strong force. So the precedence exists - why not a particle with mass that interacts only with gravity? It'd be incredibly difficult to isolate and detect and measure of course, but I don't understand the push-back some people exhibit in regards to the concept. (The cool thing about that concept being that it perfectly fits, far as I'm aware, the observations scientists have made so far.)

The real doomsday scenario for climate change isn't some places becoming dryer, or wetter, or hotter, or colder, or fish and coral dying off, or sea levels rising and displacing coastal communities - it's changes in the composition of our atmosphere. 50 to 80% of the oxygen we breathe comes from oceanic phytoplankton. Imagine a scenario driven by climate change where increasing carbon dioxide dissolved into the oceans and creates carbonic acid, increasing the oceanic acidity level; then increased temperatures cause ice melts that mess up salinity levels of the ocean and disrupt the great conveyer belt; finally due to these disruptions the phytoplankton experiences a massive die-off and the atmospheric oxygen levels are reduced to levels similar to, say, the top of Everest today. NYC and London and Hong Kong being under meters of water would be a disaster, but wouldn't be unsurmountable. Humanity being unable to breathe could make us extinct. (Disclosure - I'm not climate or biology scientist. This is all just person supposition.)

Reminds me of Amazon's profits early on - or rather, the lack of.

Privacy.
Security.
Behavior control.

Pick two.

Same. I'm in my 40s and cannot tolerate video ads. If I watch some interesting video on Facebook that fades in an ad I'll scroll down right away. If I watch something that I've DVR'd I'll mash the FF button through ads. If I'm on a web page that starts playing a video ad I'll immediately close the page. If I'm watching a YouTube video I'll immediate click the Skip Ad button once it becomes available. (I've noticed some new ads last only the amount of time the button isn't available.) I don't go to gas stations that play ads from the petrol pump. This isn't a generational thing - this is a 'these ads are fucking annoying' thing.

Nice. I always reflexively read his name as Prince Riebus.

In the sense of ultimate meaning final or last or most recent, sure. But not in the sense of best or greatest - in my opinion that honor should go to the photosynthesizing plants, starting with cyanobacteria, that pumped tremendous amounts of oxygen into the air, fundamentally changing the preferred biological processes for living on Earth. (Of course this also depends on what one defines as 'pollution.') Humans are altering climate and geologic features, and thereby changing coastlines and what plants and animals live where, but at the moment at least it doesn't appear that we're changing the molecular composition of the air, water and land enough force life to adopt fundamentally new chemical processes to survive. (Although it'd be ironic if our actions were to, say, alter the acidity of the oceans enough to kill off a significant portion of the oxygen-producing life in it that the atmosphere over time becomes difficult to breathe by humans...)

Business critical systems should operate in an active/active high-availability scenario in at least two separate locations. That way the loss of any one node has zero effect except perhaps a transaction retry and reduced performance.

Systems of the next lower level of criticality should have real-time replication to a separate location, so that if a node fails the recovery time is simply what it takes to boot the replacement node.

A further lower levels of criticality you start getting into things like virtualization clusters to mitigate hardware failures supported by point-in-time backups to mitigate data failures. The IT department's Minecraft server can just be a spare desktop machine sitting on an admin's desk.

(There are additional considerations for all levels of criticality too, of course, like SAN volume snapshots, and backups too of course.)

The company I work for is, like most companies, a Windows shop. However, in the case that there's a major issue with Windows the admins have MacBooks as their mobile device. That there will always be something that can access switches and other non-MS devices, and start the rebuilding process.

I figure the ideal programming language to tell an infinitely fast computer what to do is your natural language. Just have the computer sit in on the meetings between the client and the developer. You'll still need a developer to tell the client that no, they don't want blinking fonts, and help clarify vague and contradictory statements, but then just have the computer build what it heard. With infinite processing power, I am of course assuming that very very good natural language processing is possible.

A COBOL programmer, C++ programmer and Java programmer go to the bathroom at the same time. After using the facilities, the C++ programmer washes their hands and uses a tiny bit of paper towel to dry off, using every bit of the towel. The Java programmer grabs a giant wad of towels to dry their hands. The COBOL programmer walks out without washing their hands at all. "Whoa whoa!" the other programmers say. "Aren't you going to wash your hands?" The COBOL programmer responds "Kids, I learned a long time ago how not to piss on my hands."

(Originally, I heard this joke a long time ago using mainframe, Windows and Linux admins.)

I've had similar experiences for two ransom ware infections over the past few years - in each case it looked like it got in by the user browsing to a normal website that served up a malicious ad - we've since then switched to a different web filter appliance. Our antivirus didn't stop the encryption, but did detect and alert on the ransom notes. So we were able to shut down the offending PC quickly - it then got its drive pulled and wiped, as no data is stored locally. That lack of local files meant the malware quickly moved on to network shares before being shut down, but good backups meant we could recover in just a couple hours. Our antivirus now looks for 'unauthorized encryption' but we haven't seen it in action yet against actual malware - just false positives for a program we use that does encryption. We do annual DR tests so we know we have recovery capabilities.

It's best to look at wealth, not income, when deciding who belongs to the group of "folks with all the money." The person in the US making $33k/year likely is in debt - in fact, the article you link says "the typical U.S. household carries a whopping $70,000 in debt." To be in the top 1% globally, the article says one needs to have a net worth of $770k. Somebody in the US making $33k/year but holding $70k in debt likely has a decent standard of living but has absolutely zero power in ThatsNotPudding's scenario. (Please note I'm not commenting on the likelihood of the scenario in any way.)

Regarding setting up a meeting between NYC and UK offices, how do you do it now? You know the US people work 8am to 5pm local time, and you know the UK people work 8am to 5pm their local time... so what do you do? Guess? Call and ask? How do you know a good time to call?

You know these things because you can translate one local time to UTC then from UTC to the other local time if you are given the UTC offsets. Why not skip two steps and just have everything UTC to begin with? You can establish that the NYC folks work from 1300 UTC to 2200 UTC, and the UK folks from 0800 UTC to 1700 UTC. So it's trivially obvious that meetings between 1300 and 1700 UTC will fall within everybody's working hours.

So what about some place you are not familiar with? Let's pick Hong Kong. You would indeed need to contact them for their exact work hours. (Heck, maybe they work nights so that they can be awake during US or UK working hours because that's where their customers are; you just don't know.) Or, the +1, -8, +10 time zone designations could be retained to indicate how much time passes between noon in Greenwich and noon locally, yet still all local clocks and global coordination be done in UTC. But that still doesn't give you all the info you need - all of China, for example, is one time zone but I have absolutely no clue if 8 am to 5pm China time is standardized across the entire nation - 8 am in Hong Kong is astronomically like 4 or 5 am in western China - do they work 8 am to 5 pm China time, or do they work 12 pm to 8pm China time?

Isn't that how aviation and the military do it? Zulu time? Even when they're in a location where 0000 Zulu means is bight and sunny, so as to not cause confusion when talking to a location that might or might not be one two, or twelve time zones away? Heck, even two different locations at the exact same latitude could be in different time zones so even though the sun is at the exact same location in the sky for them, one is an hour ahead of the other. It'd be so much easier to just dispense with translating between time zones and all use a common cock.

Well, it's 23:03 UTC right now, time for me to finish my comment. (I have a UTC clock set up to display on my computer.)

I'm in favor of eliminating time zones and going pure UTC.

• I participate and help with events involving people on multiple continents. We use UTC for all times.
• I have meetings with people in various time zones here in the US and when talking about times we have to be careful to mention what time zone our perspective is from. Mostly, people's computer-based calendars handle meeting invite time zones properly, but not always.
• If I search for when something happens, like a TV show or sporting event, sometimes I get a response in my time zone, sometimes in Eastern, and sometimes no time zone is mentioned at all and I really have no idea when the thing starts.

From working with UTC at times, I've gotten a general sense of what a particular time looks like in various areas. Like, 1400 UTC is quite early for Western but still work hours in EU, while 2300 UTC is afternoon/evening in the Americas and past bedtime in eastern EU. It's easy to pick up after spending a little time with it.

What I don't know, however, is how weird it might or might not be to know that sunrise is at, say, 1100 UTC in one location and 1400 UTC at another, and figure out proper sleep/wake times while traveling.