Isaac Newton was a dwarf, standing on the shoulder of giants -- even for his memorable quotes.

Sounds about right for the 13th century, when John of Salisbury quoted Bertrand of Chartres with "We are all dwarfs, and if I've seen further then because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."

It's called culture, where people learn from other people and use the knowledge to create new and better works.

Here: Homeopathic medical practice: Long-term results of a cohort study with 3981 patients or here: Efficacy, effectiveness, safety and costs of acupuncture for chronic pain – results of a large research initiative.

Splitting your data on language barriers doesn't work at all if people come from all over Europe. You need both Latin-1 and Latin-2 as a minimum just to spell the names of people in Europe, and that's only those who use the latin alphabet.

No. That's not what he said. The only reason we know that you can take NSA documents to the outside is because Edward Snowden actually told us that he pulled this stunt, and he could prove it to us by publishing the documents he took. As I wrote back then already: Something Edward Snowden did probably has been done before but the others didn't become public with it. We don't know how many times this has happened before, and we don't know how many documents have been leaked before, and who got them. We just know that this has been possible at the time, Edward Snowden was still working at the NSA.

From a security point of view, from the moment that Edward Snowden went public you have to operate under the premise that those leaks have happened before, and that other interested parties had and still have unencrypted access to all the documents Edward Snowden took, and to other documents Edward Snowden didn't took because he either didn't knew about them or hadn't had access to them.

Do you really think the 9/11 hijackers would have resorted to box cutters, if they could take genuine weapons on board? Sometimes I think some people seriously lack imagination, and they make up for that with silly sound bits. Yes, the argument about outlawing guns works both ways. If you don't outlaw guns, even outlaws don't have any problems to get any weapon they want.

He actually said that. Just not in this words.

As someone who grew up within the Metric system, I have the same issues with the imperial units. I find them completely unintuitive and out of my normal experience. What good is a foot as a unit? There is barely anything that is a foot long, except a foot. But the working space on my desk is 1 meter wide. The distance from my desk to the wall behind me has to be at least 1 meter to allow me to sit behind my desk. The length of my legs from the hips down is about 1 meter. What good is Fahrenheit either? When my thermometer shows 0 Celsius, I know I have to drive carefully, as the roads might be frozen. Much easier to remember than 32 F. 20 Celsius is a nice spring day, 25 Celsius means I don't need a jacket, and 30 Celsius means it's getting hot outside. Nice, round numbers. But 68 F, 77 F and 86 F? Horrible! 1 Liter of any drinkable liquid weighs 1 kilogram. That's easy. How much pounds is that? And why the difference between liquid ounces and weigh ounces? Catastrophic! 1 km is the distance I walk within 10 minutes. Easy. A mile? Something about 16 minutes. 100 km is the distance I drive within one hour on the Autobahn, even including heavy traffic. Easy. 100 miles? Yeah, one and a half hour, maybe a little more. How inconvient!

Metric works well with my experience. Metric works for me. Imperial units do not.

See how it boils down to whatever you grew up with? Imperial units are in no way more or less intuitive than metric ones. You just remember the real world examples that fit within the imperial units. I remember the real world examples that work well with metric units. None of them is more natural than the other one.

Oh, maybe you should read the article. It's not about the receptionist knowing you or the fast food employee remembering your order. Because a) both work for companies you have a contract with and b) they don't sell this information for profit to someone else.

This was about companies not having to enter a contract with you to identify you and sell that information, which the privacy advocates couldn't agree with.

I used to work for one. A company with ~17,000 employees. And a hyphen in the URL.

And right now, most remote services like their OWA servers, VPN and VoIP access still have hyphens in their URL.

Because there are also OCP network equipments, like a switch design from Facebook that lets you do software defined networks easily.

As someone who does VoIP for a living: Software VoIP clients work as well as the underlying network allows -- same as with hardware phones like the Cisco Callmanager. Normally the hardware phones are in a special VLAN, often using layer-2-priorizing (class 3 and class 5) to the next switch, and they sending their packes with DiffServ information (e.g. the signalling with AF31, and the payload packets with EF), thus they get threated in priorized queues through the network. Desktop computers on the other hand are mostly in VLANs that either ignore the DiffServ information, or even actively strip them off, and often the software VoIP client isn't installed in a way to even add DiffServ information.

You can totally fuck off the VoIP phones by misconfiguring the switches and routers in your network, no problem, and then their voices sounds as shitty as the software client. And you can install the software client correctly, and threat the VoIP packets accordingly also in the Desktop LAN, and suddenly the voice quality will be as good as with the hardware phones.

The Germans call them MdB (Mitglied des Bundestages).

Look at astrophysics again. And really look at it.

While we can't observe a new Big Bang (the last one happened 13.7 billion years ago), we can observe the results from the Big Bang. We can for instance observe the redshift of far away stars and galaxies. We can also observe the cosmic background radiation. The Big Bang gives a very consistent description of what we can tell about the cosmos around us, and no alternative explanation comes even close.

But you would probably also claim that the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883 is "just untestable speculation passed of as fact", because no one survived who saw the actual magma coming out of the mountain. And the reports of a big smoke cloud, tsunamis and earth quakes could have been caused by something else. And we don't even know if they really happened, because all we have are just written reports, like the Bible, right? And going to Krakatoa and finding large layers of volcanic ash which buried the remainings of people and houses and animals and which look as if they were around 130 years old are so very indirect that the actual volcanic eruption still can be called "speculation" in your world, right?

The same goes for Climate science. We have the daily weather report, but the theories that allow us to predict the weather (yes, the single event, and not just the long term average), are "closer to religion than to science"? We have complete daily weather data (yes, the actual measurements done by real humans with real instruments) for some regions of the world starting in the early 18th century, and for most of the world starting in mid-19th century, and drawing them in a diagram and describing the resulting long term average as going upward is "closer to religion than to science"? Please elaborate!

Maybe what you picture for yourself as science has some serious flaws, but that's the problem with the picture of science you have. Not a problem of the sciences.