Also, most large organisms including humans and cows, contain more bacteria cells than human (or cow) cells.

In the muscle tissue itself? On the surface and in the intestinal tract, yes. The meat the hamburger begins "life" as should be sterile. Of course, in the process of being ground up the meat will receive a small amount of bacteria from the surfaces of the equipment and the air, but those surfaces would be washed regularly.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=291225

They better be careful with those odds... that's dangerously close to a one-in-a-million chance, which everyone knows happen ALL THE TIME...!

I get these phishy emails all the time but I look at the actual URL and see it is not actually coming from the service or agency. One time I saw it vectored to a site which I did a whois lookup of the domain name and it listed the name, address, and phone number of someone in southern Calif (not China).

At which point you should have called them and informed them of the illegal activity. And if they didn't response with a "Thanks for reporting this and we'll get right on it" but instead hung up then follow up with a call to the FBI. That's how you stop such behavior!

However, the scary thing is what happens if these people figure a way to "scoop" or "fraud" (whatever) the URL displayed on bottom of my browser window and in the address bar?

That's why you "Use the source Luke". Look at the actual source of the message and see in plain text there (well HTML with tags but it's all ASCII and usually not that hard to figure out) what the exact actual URL is. And if you have a mailer that is incapable of showing you the actual source then I suggest to you that you need a better mailer!

But on identity theft they say most of it was done with basic skills like going through someone's trash or bank employees (72% of banks report employees committed fraud).

Exactly, which is why most of the hype about this is just that hype. However when you are dealing with large numbers there will be a percentage of people who really are that stupid. It's why we have spam and why we have phishing in the first place...

the behavior of people in prison isn't known for being particularly logical. just watch any television show about prison life, there's a reason those people are in there.

so, our passwords should really be just a long string of 'z' characters, because in the case of a brute-force attack, all-z's be the last combination tried, and therefore give the authorities the maximum amount of time to catch them before they can complete!

No, its just TheCarp's suggestion that we should make prison pleasant because we have bad laws that put "good" people behind bars is retarded. Prison is meant to be punishment, if you don't agree with some of the laws write your congressman.

I run an email service, and regularly get emails like this:

From: Support@MyService
Subject: Service Upgrade

Please send your password so we can migrate your account to our new servers..

Everytime it happens I block the sender and recipient addresses, and grep the logs to verify nobody fell for it. If I'm quick enough, it doesn't matter, but people have fallen for it before I see the fake email.

Rick

If you believe that your worth and your wealth are the same thing, then there is no hope for you.

By your own logic; what makes you worthy of a salary greater than 90% of your neighbors? Why should you earn more than the unfit, 5'1" dullard who is illiterate in any language who cleans your table at lunchtime? How many years would she have to work to have what you make in a year? How is that fair? Indeed, why should anyone earn more than the minimum wage? Anything more would be unfair, wouldn't it?

Therein lies the misconception. Those who believe in capitalism don't believe you gain wealth by winning the lotto. You aren't given a prize for being the smartest either. You do it by adding value - not some metaphysical value that adds to your worth as a human being, but value that someone else can see and is willing to pay for. Sometimes that person is very smart, like Wozniak and Jobs, but more often they are just providing a service that a lot of people are willing to pay for. Like the lady who invented those little buttons that people put in their Crocs. I can personally attest that I would never in a million years have created that product - due to the fact that I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would ever don a pair of Crocs in the first place, let alone adorn it in such a hideous fashion. I would bet that I could best her in a "smarts" contest. You probably could too. But she made a couple of million bucks in her first year in business and you and I are collecting salaries working for someone else. And she deserves every penny of that money, and you and I don't no matter how great we think we are, because she went out there and earned it, and we didn't.

Yes. That's the point I dried to make - you can't expect the western world proclaiming their displeasure to somehow be relevant to Chinese policy (especially when proclaiming the displeasure is all the western world does). You can tell your peers how to live and when enough people do it but that limits peer pressure's reach to, at most, the people in one country and maybe those neighboring it. Any further and the societies are disjunct enough that their members aren't peers. The only kind of peer pressure that could reach China is national-level peer pressure, which of course doesn't work either.

In short, there's not much we can do to tell the Chinese how to run their country.

That's what money is -- a convenient way of exchanging limited resources...When the money represents nothing, we may as well be pretending that we have infinite resources at our disposal, at which point one wonders why we're bothering with money at all.

Sort of. Money is (also) a representation of your labor, not just of your goods. Money (in the US) doesn't represent nothing, it represents the effort the laborers add to the economy. While that effort is intangible it isn't "nothing". The money supply is backed by the efforts of the people using that money. Ideally, the money supply should expand such that every product/service produced could be purchased. However, our numbers aren't quite that accurate and it is better to have a little extra money than not enough money so we aim for a small, but measurable amount of inflation.

I also want to mention that gold is also a "fiat" currency. It only has value as money if the parties to the trade declare that it has that value.
--
JimFive

The United States is to Europe as A (US) State is to (EU) Countries Just because we call them states... and you call them countries doesn't mean you're "traveled." I know its not a perfect comparison but still...

But the other side is that the OS is massive.

It'd be more massive if everything were statically linked.

Remember, shared libraries didn't come first. The world began with static libraries, and shared libraries came later. There were good reasons for the switch, and those reasons apply even today.

Reminds me of an argument I recently had with a lefty. He thought government should do everything that business doesn't have the foresight to do. What's funny is that he was flaming religion just half an hour earlier -- organizations of people that are neither motivated by civics nor (barring Catholics) profits. People do so many things for so many reasons, some of them crazy and some of them brilliant. But talk politics with them and suddenly dollars are the only motivation that anyone has. Yeeeah, riiight.

Academics, hobbyists, philanthropists, religious nuts, crackpots: apparently none of these people exist!

I daresay that the Nvidia execs are unaware of that bit of car legislation, all driving company cars and having them serviced at registered brand outlets.

I don't buy that, very old people have survived the past occurrences of swine flue, that's why they are old and living.

No they haven't. They've survived different versions of flu. It changes, the sneaky little bastard.

Unless you were talking about shoving pigs up chimneys...