Manual skilled labor doesn't have too much to do IQ. The 'skilled' part, but not the manual labor part.

I would argue not the skilled part either, but rather how quickly/easily the skill was obtained and mastered. Even then, the individual person and skill probably matter too.

Having a high IQ and obtaining and mastering a skill quickly and easily is not going to get you through a 2000 hour apprenticeship any faster than the guy who barely understands what he's doing. It's not going to earn you any more money or help your career, especially in "manual skilled labor." That kind of work is often but not always unionized, pay is strictly by seniority, not merit, and if you have better than average skills or a high IQ, you keep it to yourself. Management doesn't want you as a worker if you think you're too smart, and co-workers won't cooperate with you if you work too hard because it makes them look bad. You're going to have a difficult career of it if _anyone_ gets the impression that you have better than average intelligence in any way, shape, or form.

Damn right, now why wouldn't Google avail themselves of it?

Because Google doesn't need to. Google has its own "Google Internet Authority" for signing its own certs. What are you complaining about? My point was that SSL certs that Google or anybody else will accept _are_ available for the "little guy" to use as he pleases at little to no cost.

Are you suggesting they provide a certificate signing system of their own to these people, or have an out of bound interface to upload self signed certs to a BIGASS trust store on their end?

I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. In fact I think they did the right thing here by just not dealing with self-signed certs. Big commercial company; vanilla commercial certs are good enough.

the commercial x.509 system

is "good enough" for everyday nickel-and-dime retail commerce on the internet, and not much more. I'm not even disagreeing with you on this point. So trust but verify: your nickels and dimes are probably safe with it, but go over your credit card statements promptly with a fine-toothed comb. Compartmentalize your life a little, be circumspect about the trails you leave online, and don't spill all your secrets to Facebook. If you have something to hide, don't allow it near a computer that will ever be attached to the internet. The internet is not and never will be a crypto utopia.

A cert from BigNameInternetCompany costs next to nothing

In fact it costs nothing from StartSSL, like several commenters have pointed out, but people forget that the commercial x.509 PKI is for convenience, not security.

A self-signed cert is highly secure as long as you can verify through independent means that it is in fact the same cert installed on your server, and as long as the private key has not been compromised. In fact this is really the only way you can really get this level of security from even a commercial cert --- to verify independently that it is in fact the cert you think it is, and you have not been subject to a man-in-the-middle-attack.

It's not as though Google previously made any effort to verify the authenticity of those self-signed certs, or if accepting those self-signed certs as they did before would give their users anything but a false sense of security. Surely it is not a money issue for the "small guy". Commercial certs can be had, if not free from the one provider I already mentioned, for a very minimal price from many different providers, on the order of what the "small guy" is already paying for his domain registration. Why is it that the "small guy" always seems to choose the most expensive, heavily advertised vendors of some service or product and then proceed to complain about the price?

I have to agree (mostly) with Frosty here. No, the mainstream commercial PKI is not the most highly secure thing in the world, but you're trying to authenticate your server to a big commercial company---you need a commercial cert. And if you're trusting such a big commercial company as Google, then you may as well trust the whole commercial PKI, because you're extending your trust far and wide in either case, which there is nothing wrong with, as long as you be mindful of what you are entrusting to the "big boys."

if I can't find a felony you've committed during that 24 hour period, ... Dozens have tried. Nobody's won so far.

Example scenarios, please. Not that I have reason to disbelieve you, but you are talking about felonies here, not misdemeanors. At least a short vignette and a citation to U.S. Code or state law, and maybe some court decisions, because otherwise the other comments are fully justified in that you're full of hot air.

You, sir, stand as vivid evidence for the need of an intelligence test to enable the voting privilege. I suggest you permanently cease using Faux Newz as your primary information source,

I have little to no interest in Fox News, Huffington Post, talk radio, and other such dumbed-down media. On the other hand, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has something to say on the dumbing-down effects of marijuana.

take up a great hobby like knitting or perhaps crocheting

According to my grandmother, it was a man that taught her to crochet. I think it's a little boring myself, but it would certainly be a better hobby than pot.

and never, ever breed.

Surely you do not feel so threatened by my manliness as to make a comment like that.

Many recreational users already have that much [half a million dollars] (or more) property.

I don't think so. The way pot destroys ambition, motivation, and self-discipline, and erodes intelligence, it is hardly a path to prosperity. For these reasons the vast majority of pot users are unable to make a living for themselves and thus depend on public assistance and petty crime to support themselves and their habit. Never mind they would be perfectly capable of supporting themselves were it not for their use of pot --- they would rather be stoned and live off the burden of others.

Automation is making human labor irrelevant, regardless of union participation.

That's a Luddite attitude if I ever saw one. To think that so many people on this site, many of whom work in high tech, would be such Luddites is mind-boggling.

The recent boom and bust is a minor blip in the big scheme of things, and why would you ever expect advancement in anything without booms and busts? The truth of the matter is the more booming and busting, the wealthier we all become in the long run. The busts come because we as humans collectively take risks with our capital and labor, and without a willingness to take such risks to try something new, we would be forever stuck in the past and technology in particular would never advance.

Over time, as technology advances, labor becomes more productive, that is, easier, but not without many failures on the way. Nor is it human nature to be satisfied with the fruits of one's labor: we always want more, and as long as technology advances, in the long run there will always be demand for all the wealth that all available labor can produce from all available technology.

People talk about capital vs. labor, but capital is nothing more than the accumulation of fruits of labor that one has refrained from consuming at the time. Capital isn't just that of a financier or rentier class, either. If you work for wages and have any 401k or other retirement account, then you are providing your share of capital as well as labor to society, and you rightfully expect a return from both. If you ever want to retire, others have to pick up your labor where you left off, using the capital that you have accumulated in your account, and your retirement must come from returns to that capital, not labor, since you are not working anymore.

At the moment it looks like email client support is dead â" Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"

I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.

Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.

Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.

ICANN has seen over $350 million come in as a result of the process

That should tell you right there it's all about the money.

but said that covered the cost of dealing with the whole process.

So it went into the pockets of a bunch of connected buddies and well-paid consultants as usual. They had control of a system and found a way to make money off it, so they went for it. The whole "process" is nothing but a farce.

Hint: science majors are overwhelmingly white and Asian. It's not a secret why such a man would support this. What have science majors ever done for the African-American community?

I am so sick of this kind of patronizing of minorities. If a black man can be President, then I am quite sure he can handle a science major. Perhaps the African-American community needs to have some African-American men of science step out and act as role models rather than those basketball stars and rap stars with the trashy lifestyles who are continually foisted on them (and all of us) by the popular media.

What planet you living on? Most people don't even make half that through their whole lives.

You still have to be very prudent with it if it's going to last you your whole life. Most people who win the lottery and take a lump sum are not prudent with it, and they end up broke in a few years. Just like some of the high-paid sports stars when they enter middle age.

As far as costs of doing business goes, $1250 is a god damn bargain.

Really wish people would stop whining about $100 development certificate. It's a negligible cost in the face of the actual App development cost.

Whatever you're selling, it's way too expensive if you can throw $1250 out the window as the "cost of doing business" as some freelancer developing an "app" that is supposed to run on some fiddly little device. The entire Apple ecosystem is way overpriced, from their consumer products to their stock, as well as all the little "apps" that run on those things. My pocketbook is staying firmly closed when it comes to anything Apple.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I get my work done on a real PC on my desktop, and when I have to talk to someone on the phone, I use a land-line, because cell phone reception is insufferably poor, spotty, and unreliable out here in the boondocks. A cell phone is great to carry when I'm out and about town in case of emergency, but as a rule I buy the cheapest piece-of-junk cell phone I possibly can, and I interact with the thing as little as possible. I resent the idea that I'm supposed to waste so much of my time to fiddle with some little pocket device encumbered with a thousand patents to text and email people who don't have the time to communicate in real life---and I'd have to "jailbreak" the thing if I ever wanted to interact with it on my own terms anyway.

You need to look at the big picture of what you're developing apps for. Someday people will realize and learn to work with the inherent limitations of interfacing with a little piece-of-junk device that fits in your pocket, and then maybe it won't be so bad, but until then, please spare me the hype and all the stupid cutesy little "apps."

All kinds of math- and physics-related crackpottery are posted to arXiv on a regular basis. It's too labor-intensive for mathematicians to pore through all the math on every paper that's posted. First, a few mathematicians by chance will skim through it to see if it's even worth considering, and if it looks like some half-way serious mathematical thought went into it, it'll get a closer look, and when somebody with some reputation can't find any obvious flaws, it'll start to get some peer review, if it gets that far.

Sorry, I don't grok math at that level, and without any indication of peer review, I'm skeptical that the author of the paper does either. Not news.