1) Around 10% of the population is African American. Even if there were the same proportion of "reverse racists", the numbers would be ineffectually small.

2) Segregation, sundown laws and lynchings were common up until the mid '60s, and not the 1860s.

3) This election featured a center-right candidate, a party moderate, famous for his business-friendly policy positions and support of the petroleum and natural gas producers - Barack Obama. White men voted against him in droves, against their own economic interest. Tell me again how white supremacism is no longer an issue in this country.

Depends - do you think a government should govern according to the will of the people, or do you think the people should be ruled by men of ideas?

As a fan of democracy, I have absolutely no problems with a candidate finding out what the people want and need, and using that as a platform from which to run.

The radioactive tool's gone missing in Texas? Did they check his dad's compound in Kennebunkport?

The reason why we aren't receiving radio signals from distant civilizations is that they're not using radios to communicate... they've figured out something better.

First, I don't think you are working from a good definition of "racist." If someone insinuated that Cisco had a backdoor deal with the NSA, I doubt people would be screaming "racist" or even do anything more than shrug and frown. It's sound strategy, and the Chinese government is very good at infosec and cyberwar - the reason why people are up in arms isn't because the Chinese are a different race, it's that the Chinese government has been caught repeatedly engaging in corporate espionage as well as old fashioned espionage, where the US generally only bothers with the latter.

Second, almost anyone who has a real infrastructure to protect knows that Huawei works arm-in-arm (or hand-in-pocket, more likely) with the 7th Bureau of the 3rd People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military infosec unit responsible for network penetration. The 7B3PLA has investments all through China's technology sector, to the point where individual chips on routers made elsewhere need to be vetted, as they might be compromised from the factory, and counterfeit devices are a real issue.

Again, not a race issue. China is a global power, and it's acting like one with a solid strategy. It's likewise a solid strategy to avoid cheap off-brand network equipment for your infrastructure. TANSTAAFL, you get what you pay for.

How well or poorly does NewEgg treat its warehouse workers? How about Overstock, or Buy.com, or any of the other comparable online retailers?

Most warehouse work is well paid with reasonable working conditions. An honest day's pay for an honest day's work is something that's fallen out of fashion in the Great Recession - Amazon just took it to the next level, and leveraged its considerable IT expertise to wring every last dime out of people desperate for work. Once the recession fades, they are going to be in real trouble when there's competition for their workforce, their reputation as an employer is permanently stained. If it doesn't fade, the workers will unionize and take what the company refuses to give - fair wages and decent working conditions - and they'll be in even deeper trouble when they can no longer meet their obligations to Prime customers, as the local distribution center is on strike.

Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.

And now we're back to politics. The Senator who was largely responsible for the legislation opening up the internet for business and personal use, allowing those private providers of capital to invest and grow was... ...come on, say it with me kids... ...Al Gore.

One of those instances where a lie runs twice 'round the world while the truth is still pulling on its boots.

Macs have fewer viruses because they are not nearly as numerous as Windows Machines, less machines == Fact.
Macs have the same kind of malware Windows machines, Flashback proved that == Fact.

Please explain the disparity in scale. The amount of malware simply isn't proportional... there was one self-installing bit of malware available for the Mac platform. One. In the entire history of the platform, dating back to the '80s, when it was NeXT, up until just this year. And you're really going to say it's because the Mac has a smaller user base? Really? Don't Mac developers make money hand over fist on the platform? Isn't it mostly comprised of home machines, which would be more likely to have valuable personal information to strip-mine?

Your hand-waving is alarming. It indicates you don't understand security, or worse, believe it's a problem solved by third party software - a common problem for Windows enthusiasts.

The old (but still true) fact is that Mac OS X has less malware because it is a smaller target (about 10% market share) than Windows for the bad guys to be cost effective.

Baloney. If Apple and Mac developers are making money off of the platform - and they are - then malware writers should be as well. We're not talking
"a tenth of the malware of Windows", we're talking a significant order of magnitude less malware, almost all of it trojans requiring user intervention to install itself, and just two that were self-propagating (drive-by downloads rather than viruses), and one of those required you to run a version of MacOS X best described as "antique."

Mac OS X is more secure than Windows on an ongoing basis - that fact is indisputable. This isn't theory, this is stark, cold reality when you look at the numbers of "in the wild" rather than theoretical exploits. The reason for it is that the tricks to bypass the Windows security model with third party software are all still there - where Apple ruthlessly roots out and deprecates without notice unsupported API's and other system hooks that cause trouble. Mac devs need to play nicely with the security model, and make changes to accomodate new OS releases, or their software breaks. This makes many devs and users screamingly angry, and none more so than malware writers, who find months worth of development rendered useless overnight.

Microsoft goes out of its way to make backwards compatibility happen for even its most wayward developers, and that means keeping around the kluges and hacks and workarounds that have been floating in the Windows ecosphere since forever. This gives everyone the warm fuzzies, especially the malware writers.

Microsoft plays whack-a-mole with security, Apple plays nuke-them-from-orbit.

You know, we had the same argument with RISC versus CISC architecture. And we know who lost that one. Badly.

CISC. Translating CISC into RISC and then back again was still faster than a native CISC instruction set - which is basically what x86 does these days, with some vector processing instruction-set special sauce.

The failure of the RISC powerhouses (with the exception of SPARC, which always kind of sucked except for the Fujitsu chips) was mostly due to the internal politics of the companies using them. In the late '90s, early 00's, it was common knowledge that HP and Intel's new IA-64 chip family was going to be lightyears faster than RISC and that Windows was going to rule the universe. SGI and HP were incredibly invested in this strategy, to the point where they let their advanced RISC architectures wither and die, and stopped moving their Unix OS development forward.

Well, SGI did. It spun off MIPS into its own company, and didn't give it any funding for high-performance R&D, though MIPS is still doing well as an embedded processor company. HP was a bit more prudent - probably as they were the ones actually developing the Itanium in partnership wit Intel - they kept PA-RISC and HP-UX development humming along, and it likely saved the company. Meanwhile the mighty Alpha was given a kiss goodnight after HP bought Compaq, who had bought DEC. HP already had two high performance chip families (well, one and a half, Itanium wasn't ready yet) and didn't need a third, even if it was faster and better.

So, since IA-64 was a decade late in arriving and didn't live up to the hype once it arrived, that left the platforms who relied on RISC hanging in the wind. HP, who kept development of PA-RISC active until IA-64 was ready for primetime, managed to hang on, and is now happily selling giant IA-64 Unix servers (or they were until Oracle pulled the rug out from under them). SGI is now owned by Rackspace, and they just shove lots of x86 system boards in racks to run Linux these days. DEC lives on as HP OpenVMS running on Itanium servers. IBM is still kicking much ass with its POWER RISC architecture, although it's no longer in the high performance workstation game, and really, killing the desktop-class chip designs was a golden opportunity to screw over Steve Jobs(which backfired). Sun still kind of sucks, except for the Fujitsu chips.

...so I found an article on the history of Electronic Mail that names all of the relevant RFCs and their date of publication, beginning in 1972, with links:

http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm

Chomsky sucks at websearch... altho the crux of his argument is linguistic, where "email" was not in use before '81, and therefore Ayyadurai's innovation was a new contraction. I can see how that would be a big deal to a linguist - using "email" instead of "electronic mail" or "mail." It's an innovation of the profound nature of McDonald's coining the phrase "chicken nugget!" Before, we were adrift in a benighted age of the chicken crouquette.

OK. You're talking about SDN. While it is a fundamental leap forward in configuration management, it shifts the responsibility of knowing how the hell the network is put together from network engineers and admins to programmers. Those "five lines of XML" (Just in time for JSON to completely take over) represent features offered by the network, storage and/or virtualization systems, each with a =vast= domain of knowledge. Can your system tune itself for distributed database performance based on your application? Of course it can't. Oracle and IBM have been trying for 35 years. ("NoSQL" vendors have gone from "next big thing" to "the new standard to replace the obsolete RDBMS" to "a valuable component in a larger infrastructure" to "Hey, everyone, let's go do NewSQL now!" in less than half a decade.) Howabout load balancers? Take a look at a F5 or Fortibalance manual lately? Application-specific firewalls from Imperva? Client compliance and patching systems from Juniper?

It's possible to push these decisions to "the cloud", but they will be simple default configurations that will fall over and die, and when you contact the "cloud" vendor, solutions will be expensive - optimization for reliability and performance takes money, time and manpower, in-house or outsourced. Also, now that manpower has to be both a network/database engineer =and= a software developer, and those five lines of XML sure bred like bunnies, didn't they? So now the configuration needs to be integrated into a development workflow, and sent through QA (a specialized QA who knows about modern load balancing and database optimization) and then through the compliance tools and possibly a manual audit.

I'm not saying SDN isn't the way forward - it clearly is - I'm saying it's barely keeping up with advances in technology, and in no position to obsolete anyone in the IT department. Silver Bullets are, as ever, a myth.

Driverless car is a car that, by definition, is a perfectly law-abiding driver.

One, trips will take longer, as the car will adhere strictly to speed limits, won't roll through empty intersections, and will always drive within its limits. It won't drive without its registration (verified wirelessly with the DMV)

For another, this means no more traffic tickets, which are a huge source of revenue for the city and state. What's more, revenues from gasoline taxes will go down as well, as a car that isn't speeding is a more efficient car. This will dramatically increase property and income taxes.

I'm OK with this, as traffic fines were essentially a regressive tax, applied inequitably to minorities and the poor at the whim of the police.

You want to compare track records? MacOS X, since its inception as NeXT, has been around since the late '80s.

Only now, in 2012, are we seeing the first widespread outbreak of malware. I don't buy the installed base argument. If Mac developers can make money off of the platform, then malware writers sure as hell can, too - more, with its exclusivity, it means they have a large pool of potential targets largely to themselves. I think Apple's willingness to gut and rebuild their systems when desired, and to ruthlessly deprecate old revs, a feature some users and devs absolutely hate about the company, has done more to thwart malware writers than anything else.

Lots of zero-day exploits out there, but very, very few of them survive the next Software Update. This is rough for malware, which relies on crufty old code surviving =years= past its sell-by date, which is pretty common in the Windows world (How YOU doin', WinXP?)

In the latest round of Macageddon (the ONLY round of Macageddon), we have either ancient and unsupported Macs targeted by APT, or an unpatched Zero-day sploit Apple took a loooooong time to fix. Don't get me wrong, Apple made a boo-boo of Kodiak Bear proportions, but I don't think this is an opportunity for AV and Anti-Spyware and firewalling and other security-scam vendors, and it's not the herald of a new age of mass Mac attacks. Instead, it's a signal Apple needs to make sure this stuff is properly sandboxed in future revs, and critical security updates moved on early and quickly.