"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of CD-ROMs". That's what it was when I heard it. It goes back further

I had the same knee-jerk reaction too. I blame sensationalist journalism. He isn't being thrown in prison for teaching about Bitcoin. I could publish the same thing and not go to prison. The difference? I wouldn't be doing it as part of my tech-support functions for ISIS. He's not going to prison for teaching. He's going to prison for providing support to ISIS. The teaching is just part of that.

You don't even have to be all hush-hush about it. Stuff is all over the news. They busted one lousy warehouse in the Bay Area a few days ago. Estimated value: $15 million. Even if that figure is inflated, it's one grow-op in a warehouse that got careless and/or greedy and didn't hide the smell properly, and didn't have a plausible explanation for their electrical usage. There have to be a bazillion that don't get caught.

PC may or may not be the PC term for this PC and its PC boards.

OK, after sleeping on this one and reading some of the comments below I think I have a bit more sympathy for the Reddit admins... although I'm not 100% with them. First, it's their site. They can ban anybody they want for any reason. OTOH, it seems like they're being selective in their bans based on political criteria. So what this boils down to is, hold onto your hats (m'lady) here... we have the "millenials" of Reddit upset because they are... wait for it... CONSERVATIVES and Reddit is being run by what in the US we call "liberals" of the "PC speech" type.

In other words, it's just the same old politics.

Who said, "The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it"? Yes. It's old. You've probably heard it a million times; but it's so apropos.

There are 10 kinds of pre-schoolers. Those who've had enough nap time, and those who haven't.

After I posted that, I found this story about what really happened. It's an interesting read, but the tl;dr is that they did in fact totally revamp the business model and fire a whole bunch of people. They're bumping along as a smaller company with a less crazy model.

That may not meet the criterion for these fail lists; but it certainly sounds like a failure for some VCs. The company as originally conceived certainly no longer exists; but it sounds like the corporate framework is still there. It might still have a good outcome for people that survived the layoffs, founders, and some patient investors.

My first thought was that AdKeeper should be on the list, but apparently that turkey is still flying, albeit with what looks like a different business model.

The carriers already use electric motors. They are however supplied with power from nuclear reactors and those reactors produce power with STEAM.

This is true, but if you're going to transmit that power to other parts of the ship, I'm guessing that the Navy has concluded that electricity is better. A pipe that can carry enough steam to power the catapult must be pretty beefy. If a pipe fitting gets beat up when they're under attack, you have to depressurize the pipe so guys can fix it. With electricity, you can shut off with a switch, and it's cold right away. Bolt and/or solder the connection back together and turn the stuff back on. Also, I'm guessing that the wires are lighter which increases the overall performance of the ship.

But they don't have a shortage of applicants. They actually want to narrow the field. If that were not the case, Google wouldn't have had (perhaps they still do) such a notoriously difficult interview process.

Economies of scale are critical here. Only a handful of companies are that big, and that desirable as places to work. So for these behemoths the usual logic is inverted. For them, narrowing the field really does "help recruitment"--the semantics of that phrase are inverted when dealing with relativistic money.

It weeds out the people who aren't fan-boy enough to become proficient in your proprietary language before you even interview them. TFA cites a lot of other reasons they wrote these languages. This one got crab-apple picked for some reason.

Forgot to mention--no discussion of this is complete without bringing up Ken Thompson

Came here for this. Just one thing to add. Back-doors can come from places other than the source. You need to be able to inspect the compiler too, and build it from source. You need to be able to audit MS's complete build system as well. The code has to be in the millions of lines. Even if MS gives them everything they need, I doubt these governments have the time, money, and expertise to pull off such an audit.

Oh, and the day a patch goes out, all bets are off again.

I also enjoy tracking stocks on Yahoo portfolios. It was just a slight nick in my chest (as opposed to a stab in the heart) when they replaced the old Gnuplots with the new charts, which have less data. Maybe they were getting screwed by the data provider, and if that's the reason then I can understand that. Anyway, their portfolios and charts remain useful, and I still use them too. It's nice to be able to check stocks you own without logging into a broker, and check stuff you don't own but are thinking about--all in one glance. Unfortunately, there are sometimes errors in things such as dividend yield. You have to take anything beyond the chart and price with a grain of salt.

The problem with Yahoo neglecting and/or killing off all these services is that while one in particular may not be the killer app that makes us stay, collectively there is something for everybody. It could be death by 1000 cuts. Really though, it seems like they're flailing around in the advertising sand-pit just like a lot of other people in the biz. You know, when you flail in a sand-pit it just gets deeper. Yahoo looks worse than others because they've been doing it longer.