It certainly less risky than walking around the streets with huge money clip

Did you not even read the links about Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's? It is not certainly less risky. For example, it is more risky if you live in an area that has very little threat of mugging, or if you are perceived as a bad target for muggers. I generally have a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and have never been mugged; but my card is for sale on the Russian markets right now because I used Home Depot.

You are as stubbornly ignorant as people who say self-driving cars will automatically be safer. Computers aren't magically endowed with perfection. Believe me; I'm a software engineer, and I've seen some really heinous bugs. I'm not saying electronic payments (or autonomous vehicles) are bad -- I'm saying software and networks have risks just like meatware and meatspace.

If cancer was insta-kill instead of the slow-death-money-milking disease that it is

This ignores a basic fact about cancer treatment: standard chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery aren't very profitable for pharmaceutical companies, and for many cancers, that's all we have. They may be profitable for other sectors of the medical system, but these are also a huge drain on the economies of rich-world countries, who have a big incentive to keep costs down. If you get one of the cancers for which there isn't a $100,000/year drug, your only option is a quick course of debilitating treatment aimed at eliminating metastases, which will either work and leave you cancer free (if you're "lucky" and have one of the less aggressive types of cancer, and/or catch it early), or not work, and you'll die in a relatively short time. Or, if you're especially unlucky, the therapy itself will kill you. No pharma company is getting rich off these patients.

If you do get to take the $100,000/year drug, there's a good chance you'll only add a few years to your lifespan anyway. Which is part of the reason why these drugs are so expensive, of course. On the other hand, a drug that could either a) eliminate cancer outright, or b) suppress cancer permanently for as long as it's taken, would be worth an incredible amount of money, either up-front or over the course of decades. And insurance companies and governments would be much happier shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a treatment that might actually "cure" the patient in some meaningful sense (and enable him or her to keep paying taxes and/or insurance premiums!), rather than a treatment that probably isn't going to work over the long term.

in my kid's school in the USA the only way to pay for school lunch is to send a check once a month... no tracking

Interesting difference, there. There must be tracking in your kid's school's system, otherwise they wouldn't know who paid for lunch, but the tracking data probably doesn't get appropriated by an outside company. Presumably, this biometric company is not just making a buck on the scanners, software, and cloud-based management contract -- presumably they also have a plan for monetizing the data they are collecting about the kids.

The benefits are that pupils are less likely to lose [money stored in the fingerprint system than money carried in their pockets]

That is a spurious claim. The security on money stored in pockets and exchanged by physical transfer of a monetary token is fallible, but so is the security on the cafeteria electronic wallet system. Home Depot, Supervalu, and Albertson's are very recent examples of major compromises, and the number of small scale compromises is enormous.

Fingerprints can be faked, networks can be cracked, databases can crash. Merely moving from physical currency to electronic currency does not make it more secure -- just ask Mt. Gox.

If a company finds a cure for all cancers (emphasis on the plural form, cancer is not just one disease) they could demand any price at all and people would pay it.

It's even bigger than that. The best statement I've ever seen on the subject came from a Slashdot poster, and since I can't remember the specific post (or user, sorry!), I'll just paraphrase:

"Curing cancer" implies an incredibly high level of technical competence, so advanced that anything you touch would turn to gold. You could start to treat aging as a chronic disease.

This should ring true to anyone who understands the biological basis for "cancer". To start with: it's not one disease, it's many, they just all happen to take the form of uncontrolled cell proliferation, which can have many different triggers. Attacking specific molecular mechanisms is difficult because there are so many to choose from (and the targets tend to further mutate over time within each patient anyway, decreasing the efficacy of drugs). Also difficult: killing cancer cells without killing the rest of the patient. To actually treat all cancers at once - without lethal side effects - would require extraordinarily advanced knowledge of human biology and most likely a degree of personalization beyond anything we've experienced. It's the stuff of science fiction.

The supposed "cures" that are being suppressed are either poorly tested experimental leads (pharma companies have more than enough of these already), or dodgy experimental therapies that haven't undergone real testing either, some of which may be outright scams.

1/1075th of one LoC, given the numbers in this Wikipedia article and extrapolating from its information:

Library data: The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team claims that "as of March 2014, the Library has collected about 525 terabytes of web archive data" and that it adds about 5 terabytes per month

525 tb + 5 months of 5 tb / month = 550 tb.

(Not counting September as completed, so only April through August.)

Or, you'd need a stack of 1,075 of these SD cards to hold one LoC. (The actual calculation is 1074.21 or so, but you have to round up or truncate off 100 gb of data, and it's the Library of Congress... you can't just throw away 100 gb of data!)

Also true in actual careers like nursing fwiw. There's a nursing shortage (at least in the U.S.), and men are very underrepresented in the field, so nursing schools have been going out of their way to recruit men.

Isn't it pretty explicit that the lights are on? Review of applications isn't some kind of blind-review process.

It seems to be structured as kind of an intro to programming, which is one way CS101 classes (in Harvard terminology, CS50) are structured. Not really an intro to CS the discipline, but a broad intro to computers/programming in general for people who may or may not go into CS. Traditionally MIT took the opposite approach, but many schools took this approach.

Fwiw, you can find the 2013 version of the curriculum here (it seems to have been also co-offered as a MOOC). It does seem a bit like a grab-bag of "random stuff in computers".

Harvard gets far, far more applicants in every area than they can possibly accept to their relatively small student body. So shifts among disciplines and interests almost entirely reflect decisions on the part of Harvard admissions policies. They don't necessarily reflect shifts in either broader society or even the subset of society that applies to Harvard. It's possible they do, but it's also possible Harvard explicitly decided to accept more CS applicants for various reasons.

from what i understand of the definition of "customer", a "customer" means "someone who is paying for a service". here, there's no payment involved, therefore there is no contract of sale.

The correct legal term for payment is, "consideration." The user's relationship with Gmail does involve payment in the form of consideration, and they are customers.

As a counter-example; if you download Free Software, or Open Source Software, and use it without making any promises to the developer, you are not a customer. Possibly if Gmail had no ToS or AUP, they could argue that their users gave no consideration. I'd be interested to see that argued.

Maybe this guy is genuinely sorry, and maybe he's not. I don't know, and unless you personally know him, neither do you.

Given the limits of what anyone can ever really know of another person's intent and thoughts, arguably true. Nonetheless, the observed evidence is a pretty good indicator.

If he felt remorse at any point before incarceration, it wasn't sufficient to actually make him stop his bullying and harrassing. As such, it's not relevant as "remorse", unless you choose to cling to a particularly futile and ineffective definition of "remorse".

please drive past the Exxon station, and fill up at a more responsible company.

As long as it's not Shell (supported the Nigerian military junta), or Unocal (supported the Burmese military junta). I don't really expect moral purity from oil companies, but it can occasionally be difficult to find one that doesn't have blood on its hands.

Thank the Republicans who hate science and don't want to fund pure research but would rather corporations subsidies

I can't believe I'm defending the Party of Torture, but I think this is unnecessarily harsh towards the GOP. When they took over Congress in 1994 and Gingrich rose to the speakership, my father (who, like me, worked in academic research) was terrified that they'd slash his program and he'd be out of a job. Ironically, he told me years later that what ended up happening was exactly the opposite: Gingrich loved basic research and that's when the funding really boomed (it didn't hurt that the economy was doing reasonably well). Arlen Spector was also a big proponent of NIH funding.

Now, that doesn't mean that Republican candidates like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry won't use this issue for their demagoguery, but it's less of a systematic problem than you might think. It especially doesn't hurt that private corporations like public funding for basic research too, because it takes some of the burden off them, and because most of their employees get their training working in labs funded by public grants. Every time the NIH or DOE needs to reassure Congress that they're still relevant, they get Big Pharma heavyweights to testify. (Which I realize means there's a corporate welfare aspect to this, but Big Pharma doesn't really have any interest in building a $1 billion X-ray generator when they can rent time on the DOE's equipment, which works out well for everyone.)

The current environment is a bit of a weird situation, but let's not forget that the sequester was a bipartisan deal.

If McCarthy was right, it was mostly by accident. The caricature in "The Manchurian Candidate" isn't too far from the truth, except probably not booze-soaked enough.

McCarthy was basically several years late to the game, and was taking advantage of a crises that had already dissipated for his own political ends. There was widespread Communist infiltration of the US government in the 1930s and 1940s - but they were largely purged during the Truman administration once the government realized how bad the problem was.