You do know we're talking about Snowden here, right? The one who actually took the time to sift through and prepare the data, just sharing elements of it that really show USA wrongdoing and carefully timing it for maximum impact? Not Manning? Just what did he release that caused more bad than good? Or perhaps your definition of "bad" is "makes the US look bad even if they're violating the constitutional rights of their citizens". Just who or what do you think you're talking about, exactly?

Not all meetings are created equal. If I can provide an alternative to your closing sentence... "Meeting can and should be about collaboration, with group participation, and getting something done. If you can not get that out of a meeting, fire the participants or reconsider why the meeting was called in the first place."

This is not science going wrong, this is wrongly calling something science.

Good thing that lightsaber quote isn't getting out of hand.

I actually kind of agree with your joking sentiment... GPS instructions should be taken with a grain of salt. I've had my Tom Tom tell me to drive off a cliff before (really, it said "turn left", left was a sheer drop), but I didn't listen to it. Pretty sure if I were told to drive onto a runway I'd engage my brain and reroute myself.

I consider any machine I don't control unsafe, especially servers run by any corporation. Machines I do control are still suspect. At this point the only guarantee is the one that the government has long known to be the best option... air gap. Even that isn't 100%, as evidenced by ip/thumbdrive as with stuxnet, but it's the only way you can consider something private.

It doesn't show that the official is anything but... it shows that the official believes the American public is anything but.

Yes and no, I think.

On the one hand, it is a good thing to prevent yourself from constrained thinking. I work with someone who thinks exclusively in design patterns; it leads to some solid code, in many cases, but it's also sometimes a detriment to his work (overcomplicated designs, patterns used for the sake of patterns).

Unlearning all we have figured out in computer science is silly, though. Use the patterns and knowledge we've spend years honing, but use them as tools and not as crutches. I think as long as you look at something and accurately determine that a known pattern/language/approach is a near-optimal way to solve it, that's a good application of that pattern/language/approach. If you're cramming a solution into a pattern, though, or only using a language because it's your hammer and everything looks like a nail to you, that's bad.

I do have a kindle in there actually, yes.

I already have all that covered. I have a very well stocked survival bag (the list of contents is very long, but it's a surprisingly reasonable weight). I am quite pragmatic :)

Well, it has built-in GPS, so I could load it up with maps, survival guides, etc... but who am I kidding? It's more because I'm an engineer and I think it would give me +5 sanity.

It's going in my emergency bag. Looks like a perfect emergency and/or post-apocalyptic laptop.

Brilliant! We can make people exercise less and remove their healthcare at the same time!

"Eclipse requires about 3 megabytes of memory"

Hah! My current instance of Eclipse, with a handful of relatively small Maven modules open, no build in progress, is using about 800MB. If you look at help.eclipse.org you'll also find:

"By default, Eclipse will allocate up to 384 megabytes of Java heap memory"

I'm not so sure I trust the credibility of this author.

Totally true. My first computer only had 16k available. Now that I have 12 gigs of RAM I have 786432x the amount of memory I need, so everything is always fast!