"And who pays for the insurance? Why should I pay for it if the accident will not be caused by me, but by some programmer who forgot to take some variable into account when writing the software for my car?"

What if insurance for a SDC is 1/10th the cost of insurance for you driving the exact same car? Will you still complain, or just drive yourself (and pay more) because you don't trust the software?

" I cannot begin to count the number of near missis "

A near miss is still a miss.

Sure, that could work when registering the account, but you don't have any email yet at that point. The real user wouldn't even be able to log in since they would never receive an the actual SMS code. Who cares if an empty account is compromised?

CEH is only a couple hundred bucks. Sure, having it doesn't mean you are an expert, but lots of paying "customers" like to see that kind of thing. And you can pass it in an afternoon if you have the skills.

Perhaps with the term "Mistress" in the title, they were worried that people would confuse it with the 50 Shades genre.

This problem was solved in 1965. Just get a Cone of Silence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence). Just be sure you don't get it from a "discount place".

No. We need to send sugar. Everyone knows, first you get the sugar...

"You don't really think it's necessary to have four Gap employees to fawn over the three concurrent customers, do you?"

If this were the old Communist Russia then you may have a point, but do you think the Gap employees people it doesn't need to in order to keep civilization going? I don't.

I may be mistaken, but Congress passed the Patriot Act., not Bush or Obama. If blame is to be had, it should go to the people who voted for it, and the people who voted to keep and expand it.

This shows who has been in control since the Patriot Act was created - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

I understand gridlock, but there were a solid 4 years after the Patriot Act being passed where the R's controlled both houses and the White House. The Democrats had 2 years of owning the whole show. Neither group seemed to care about limiting government powers.

That's true. If a friend or nephew committed suicide or has brain cancer, there is a good chance you may google info about those items. Someone looking at your searches could easily incorrectly assume you are contemplating suicide or have been diagnosed with some disease. Perhaps people need a startup file that does 10,000 random searches on diseases, terrorism, health foods, travel to Neptune, etc. That could hide any real searches and bury legitimate results.

If we are unaware, then how do we have a hypothesis?

"we are on track to exhaust our resources and die off on a withered old planet in the next 1,000 years or less"

The sun gives us an insane amount of nonstop energy. Do you not believe we will figure out how to effectively harness that in 1000 years time?

Let me be the first to predict Hexagonal Graphene.

While I'm at it, I'd like to also predict the following:
A sequel to 50 Shades
Future tension in the middle east
Hershey's coming out with a white chocolate syrup
Taco Bell being the only survivor of the restaurant wars
Facebook to soon cause an uproar due to a perceived privacy violation

"Microsoft has been continually dying for the past decade"

Yeah, 10 years ago their stock was $25 and now its only $43.70. And in all that time they have only paid 40 dividends. And for 2014 they only showed a 25.42% net profit margin. I'm surprised they are keeping the doors open.

"The person started off by asking me if it was an excel file, a PDF, etc"

He may have also been trying to determine the size of the file. You may attack the problem differently if it is a 200k pdf vs a 40GB log file.