If you are not doing active improvements, planning for failover, and using good configuration management techniques then your slow time is adding to the number of hurry-up-and-fix-all-the-things times. There are always external matters like heartbleed that will come along, as a sysadmin's job is not to review the memory allocator in the SSL library regularly. However, if your web services or mail services are down because a single system went offline then you're to be blaming yourself.

They are unnecessary. They're incredibly useful and prevent many illnesses some of which could be fatal, but if I was dying of dehydration, I'd drink water regardless of what it was tainted with - Similar for food. The WHO can give you stats on malnutrition/starvation around the world. This is NYC, where many people eat very well and many people eat what others throw away. If I go to a restaurant, I expect to be served sanitary food (usually - unless I intentionally walk into some dive where it could damned well be stray cat meat, but I at least know ahead of time what to expect.)

This is really just presenting a method for maintaining some kind of level metric for those inspections. So whatever standard these restaurants are being held to is based on what they're actually doing rather than bribes/negligent inspectors/etc. So, when I go in, I know whether I'm getting properly prepared food-stuffs or something that may or may not send me to the ICU.

I'm not sure where you are (I'm in New Mexico, where you can find questionable food all over - Some of it delicious.) When in Vienna a little over 12 years ago, they'd just gotten their first McDonald's. It took YEARS to get approved to open and eventually reached an agreement - They could open, but had to post signs at the entrance in (at least 3 - I'm thinking German, English, French) several languages that said "The beef served in this establishment does not meet Austrian standards for human consumption." You'd think that would dissuade people who turn their noses up at bakeries who only bake once or twice a day, but the line was around the block.

My Laotian relatives regularly ingest unprocessed cow blood (for special occasions) without consequences and, if the infomercials I saw as a kid are to be believed, Ethiopians will happily stab their siblings for a rotten lima bean. Everything's relative.

People around here seem to love menudo, but I can't swallow that tripe.

So that implies that those are non-toxic? Ethyl alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, cough syrup, and countless others are meant to be ingested too - But that doesn't imply zero toxicity. Drink a couple of fifths of vodka with a bottle of percoset and tell me in the morning whether those ingestables had any toxicity.

Depends on the target. Personally, I wouldn't so much mind these vandals white-washing road-side billboards. The casino light displays can be darned near blinding when driving at night or early in the morning. A fresh coat of paint would be an illegal public service.

Building an "inverted pendulum" is a pretty common engineering school assignment. Not too sophisticated, but neat and far more complicated than simply compensating for propulsion from spray paint.

The companies that offer the energy now are in many cases (but not all) the best positioned to invest in future energy sources. They have distribution networks with rights of way for oil, gas, and electric. Deep geothermal needs drills just like gas and oil does. The gasoline sellers have the convenience stores for quick charging stations, battery swaps, or refills of hydrogen or methanol for fuel cells.

If you cut investment in energy companies that plan on being at the forefront of investment of any viable new energy model, all you're doing is making it harder for them to invest in those new models. The worst case is that by cutting investment in the energy giants this way you start a long, protracted battle between new energy companies and old ones rather than getting the old ones excited about new ways to sell energy.

Random? Bummer... I'm going to get in serious trouble when I stick that $5 in an ugly little boy's diaper...

GnuTLS, which recently people were being told to avoid in favor of OpenSSL. You see, there was this bug...

That's all true and correct. When you do that, though, you need to do at least as good a job as what you're circumventing. In this case OpenSSL didn't.

If I chose to go to a strip club, I would feel appropriate tipping the (female) dancers but not the (male) bouncers with my privately owned dollars.

At the same time, I had to foot every dollar for college because I was neither a minority, female, the son of impoverished parents, nor Christian and thus ineligible for the private scholarships. And despite being at the very top of the class, I wasn't eligible for the government ones either.

I'm not even sure which side I'm arguing for.

Yeah - Go pedantics! Big can be size, weight, importance, etc... Knee-jerking "big"=="size" is like saying that the "shortest" route home means plowing through walls, cars, etc, rather than going to my car and taking the "quickest" route home. Yes, "fast" is "speed", but when you're referencing F=ma, I think that "getting something big to move fast" implies changing the velocity of a given mass. How close to Kindergarten do we need to get?

Well, I'm arguing with an AC on an article a day old that will probably never be read. Maybe a day of Kindergarten is what we all need.

Hydrogen _is_ both fuel and air. So is methane (sort of). Oxygen is not fuel. Oxygen is oxidizer. Hence the "oxi" in "oxidizer".

If somebody asks whether accelerating a 23-lb mass to Mach 7 would push the thing accelerating it backward, we may have to go back to F=ma. And defining m=big and a=very fast seems appropriate. So, yeah, F=big very fast. Not perfect grammar, but at least it paints a picture for our friend who has yet to hear of Newton.