Well, it's still murky waters if random-pilot-of-the-day does it wrong...

Your first sentence makes a certain amount of sense, but your second sentence indicates a lack of appreciation for dependencies.

Most people look at the cost of a system as the price of the servers, the price of the software, the cost of the project to implement them, and the ongoing maintenance contracts. What they often don't consider or fully understand is the impact to people and process. Changing a system means retraining the people who use the current process; changing paper forms, supplies, expectations, timings. There may be things like quality assurance steps built into the current process that the system builder is completely unaware of, such as "between filling out form 37-stroke-B and submitting form 52-mark-K, we have the testing team pull out a sample for evaluation."

If SAP is progress, that can only mean that the prior process was done by filling out forms in Klingon using wax crayons writing on saran wrap in an iron foundry.

Whatever it may have started, a love of neckties was not it.

I award you one Internets for that joke!

Are you afraid of the whole "shoot out a window and Hollywood makes it seem as if the plane will empty itself via the hole" scenario? Mythbusters tested it. No, the plane doesn't explosively decompress, the passengers don't get sucked out the window. Basically, the results are "it's loud". Much more of a problem is that everyone's panicking and screaming because someone is shooting a gun.

Acupuncture can cause harm. It can make you go blind. If you put the needles in your retinas...

The problem is the air of legitimacy they get by being next to actual medicine. Now, if they labeled the aisle with a sign that reads "you must be this stupid to enter", at least I'd have some people to laugh at.

The label should be more clear: "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING. this bottle contains nothing of value, and will not be effective at treating any disease or illness."

Lots of oddball "medicinal" practices have survived, not just homeopathy. For every disproving study of a nonsensical 'healing' practice, there is a quack profiting from it, and they don't want to lose their revenue stream. They scream loudly, they claim "persecution by the establishment", they hide behind tax havens or religious shelters, and they gather their flock.

I think it's kind of interesting how many of these insane ramblings have survived and are still practiced today.

Despite all the attraction that Sharknado and all the other jumping-the-carcharodon shows have received, they do have a few original sci-fi programs still on the air: Helix and Warehouse 13 come to mind; and while Haven may be a bit more paranormal, it kind of fits.

But if I never see a wrestler, sparkly emo vampyre, or ghoti hunter again, it'll be way way too soon.

...and eat all the food of every new civilization; to boldly go even when strapped into a nylon-web-reinforced-girdle.

Computer: make me a sammich!

The best part about this entire discussion is that the tools in question are IDEs, compilers, and editors. At no point in "putting them down" do they physically need to move from a higher elevation to a lower elevation. "Downing their tools" is already a metaphor.

Whoosh!

Or was that a daa-daa-daa-daa sound and Steve Austin jumping over your head in slow motion?

It's not the size of your bandwidth, but the motion of the torrents.

Because it's so simple to authenticate all parties to the broker. Now we've gone from trusting the merchant, the shopper, and the bank, to trusting the merchant, shopper, bank, and broker. That's the problem here: every solution that relies on trust instead of hardware cryptographic implementations is equally broken.

The smart cards in the EMV system are indeed the way to go, because they are issued by the bank, and your bank stores your account's secret in them. The bank's trust never leaves the bank's systems.

EMV limits fraud only to a person who physically has the card in their possession (and who knows the PIN, assuming your card requires a PIN.) As a customer, you don't have to trust that BigMart's cash register is paying the right company or not, because you're walking out the door with your paid-for stuff. BigMart's transaction security is BigMart's problem. You don't have to trust BigMart (or a hacker) to not steal your account number, because without the authentication coming from the smart chip, the bank should refuse any transactions. It doesn't even matter much if they steal your account number and your PIN, because without the chip they still can't recreate the authentication. And if a sophisticated hacker with an ion-beam manages to read the secret from the chip, it only violates your one card; not your other accounts, not someone else's account, and not the bank's master secret.

If we ever get there.