Because nobody out there has "customers who bought X also bought Y and Z" features! (But maybe this one will let Apple take some more market share from Amazon.)

The Russians didn't shoot down that plane. Ukrainian separatists did, using missiles they got from the Russians.

And it's not like the US hasn't accidentally shot down civilian aircraft before, if you remember that Iranian plane the USS Vincennes shot down.

Residential rates matter a bit if you're trying to get people to install low-flow toilets or drought-tolerant non-grass landscaping, but if you live near the Niagara river, you can afford a lot more land than almost anybody in LA (except the folks on unstable hilltops.)

But that's not where California's water goes. 80% is for agriculture, and about half of that is for feeding cattle. It's at subsidized prices one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than residential water. There's also a good chunk of it going to industry.

Most vegetables are seasonal, not perennials, and in most climates you'd want year-round ground cover. It's ok if that's grasses that go dormant in the summer or winter, as long as they still prevent erosion and mud, but growing zucchini not only won't do the job, but you won't be able to find enough grocery bags to leave it all on your neighbors' doorsteps. Most of the SF Bay Area isn't quite right for desert-style xeroscaping (even though prickly pear cactus grows really well here), but there's a lot of low-water native vegetation that does ok.

HOAs would have a fit. But boomers were the hippie generation - we approved of healthy food, organically grown veggies, all that stuff. (As long as somebody else does the hard work :-) In my case, I don't have ground-level dirt of my own, just pots on a balcony, and the squirrels have already stolen both tomatoes, but I liked doing extensive gardening back when I had a yard. And with a yard full of zucchini, I wouldn't have to tell you kids to get off my lawn.

Given what the actual authors of TOR have said about their system over the years, the likelihood that the talk was cancelled because they've suddenly become evil (or have suddenly revealed that they've been evil all along!) vs. the likelihood that it was cancelled because the lawyers at CMU were being overly conservative and paranoid, I'll go for the latter explanation. There are projects for which that wouldn't be the case.

TOR has its limitations and weaknesses, and the developers have always tried to be upfront and public about them, both for the threat model / design and for the code itself.

No, we wouldn't need our own live smallpox to construct a vaccine against a weaponized smallpox. The original vaccine was made from cowpox, and eventually the closely related vaccinia disease, and was much safer than smallpox-based inoculation which was the other prevention available at the time.

The only reason to keep the stuff around is to attack the Russians in case they attack us with their smallpox, and we can be better people than that. Time to destroy it, and convince Putin to destroy his stockpiles also.

If you look at the program in its entirety, terrorist rockets, missiles, and bombs have killed about 600 Israeli citizens in the last few weeks. 2 of those citizens were Jews killed by Hamas rockets. The rest of the Israeli citizens were Palestinians, primarily civilians in Gaza, and Iron Dome did nothing to stop them. It may have stopped some of Hamas's incompetent rocket attacks, but it didn't protect Israeli civilians from the militant Army's better equipment.

It was too long ago, and I didn't save them. I think one was named something like "Login123". Basically all of their "repair" tools were remote login tools, probably run by entirely different companies that they were just customers of, and they'd load the actual attacks after they got in.

Actually, yes, this might be because a Rickfail due to the copyright goons telling YouTube to take down the original RIckroll video.

Yup - Dark matter is simply stuff we haven't seen yet. It might be tiny particles of types we don't understand, it might be supermassive black holes, it might be lots of small black holes, it might be lots of free-floating planets not around stars, or Jupiter-sized gas planets that weren't big enough to ignite into stars, it might be little rocks, it might be accounting errors. It might be weird stuff, it might be non-weird stuff. There's enough of whatever it is to have enough mass that galaxies act differently that we'd expect from the amount of matter we can see (i.e. mostly stars.)

Dark energy is a lot weirder. It's not defined as just the energy form of dark-matter-on particles, it's a different problem.

Rachel never calls my cellphone; she's only called my wife's cellphone once or twice. Her robot army calls my kitchen landline phone a couple of times a day.

Tracing the phone calls hasn't worked very well, but the way to go is to follow the money. Flooding them with honeypot credit card numbers would generate a trail that might be followable (e.g. have an FTC web page that'll generate a credit card number and billing name/address, and have Visa track the merchant information for anybody trying to process a charge against those numbers; the risk is that you have to make sure those numbers don't get used for fraud, even if they're set up to always reject charges.)

I don't know how much information the scammers try to get, such as SSNs; generating fake ones of those has its own risks, though it's always fun to give them 078-05-1120 or Richard Nixon's SSN 567-68-0515. It turns out there is a publicly available official list of SSNs of dead people, which is intended to detect people using invalid SSNs, but it's possible that Rachel's gang doesn't bother filtering on it, considering that they don't filter on phone numbers of people who've told them not to call back.

They really did go away for a while, or at least slow down a lot, when one of the big "Rachel from Cardholder Services" gangs got busted and shut down. But it's such an easily replicable scam, and probably multiple sets of it are being run independently. I'm pretty sure the call center end is independent contractors or else shady call-centers (I know some are in Canada, and I suspect some are run by prison-labor call centers and some are in the Caribbean.)

First of all, Caller ID is trivially easy to fake, and the scammers all do it. For now, most of them pick random or fake numbers to avoid getting blacklisted, but if whitelists were common, they'd start forging real numbers to get through.

But many people (ok, me, at least) get lots of calls from numbers I don't recognize, and robocalls that I want that might not come from the number I recognize for somebody. Most of the robocalls are the pharmacy saying I've got something to pick up, or the dentist's office with a reminder about an appointment, or that kind of thing, and the calls from humans might be from some doctor my wife is going to or some business we were trying to reach that has different numbers for outgoing calls than incoming (like the painter calling from his cellphone instead of his office, or a big business calling from their call center or local office instead of their toll-free number.)

And yes, I could just let the answering machine pick up, and you can too. Some of the robocallers' robots do a better job of dealing with that than others.