There is a great portion of my favorite book on Political thought regarding wages and the Artisan. Socrates points out that once a person in society receives ample money for a project they no longer have incentive to do future work. Socrates continues stating that this is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the person with the wealth is now free to meddle in the affairs of everybody else in society. That meddling is almost never in societies interests, but that person or the person's close friends and associates, so that they gain further control of society and have more stuff than everyone else.

That book in case you are interested is Plato's "The Republic".

The whole "everyone should code" argument is foolish. Society needs plumbers, welders, architects, accountants, doctors, physicists, line workers, and every other job there is. As society has demand for jobs the wages should go up, which draws people into the needed jobs. Since coders are in demand and receive good wages for their work, it seems at least some of this push is to artificially reduce the wages by flooding the market. And lets face it, there are not a whole lot of decent paying middle class jobs left in the US any longer.

Everyone I worked with 15 years ago as an engineer is now in management. What are they managing? Where is this productivity I keep hearing about?

Strange. I've owned a car (several of them, actually) for a couple of decades and I never made a payment other than the first one I used to buy the car. I've also never paid over $3000 for a car. Something about learning to maintain it yourself and not having much money. Also something about how true ownership beats the pants off someone else having control of my stuff.

Guess as you get paid more, you gather this strange belief that everyone does the same crazy dumb shit that you're doing.

Cars are cash items due to severe depreciation and high maintenance costs. Can't afford to buy it cash? Don't. If you have under $1000 cash (the minimum I find drivable cars selling for) the last thing you need are payments! And if you need it for a job, make sure you pay the car off within a month or two (there's plenty of $2000 jalopies you can pick up at the various fleece-me-blind no-credit car lots that should be priced at $1000 cash).

The article spells out the differences - the India probe took longer, weighed less, has fewer experiments, and probably won't last long. Meanwhile the NASA probe got there quickly, weighs 4 times more, has twice the number of experiments, and can serve as a communication relay for probes on the ground.

I can drive across country in a $5000 car, a $50,000 car, or a $500,000 truck. Each of them have different purposes and will get you there in different ways. To say NASA needs to only use the $5000 car isn't in our long term interest.

Corporations want infrastructure, rule of the law, and educated workforce that comes with doing business in US while paying third-world wages and hiding income in tax shelters. You can't have it both ways.

If it's anything like the science fairs we used to have at my high school, then it will turn out dad is a plant biologist (who swears the girls did it all on their own) and the girls will be curiously vague when asked about the methodology.

What a load of PC "humans are the only baddies in the world" bollocks.

Chimpanzees have a well documented history of intra-group hierarchical violence, violence against females and extra-group murdering raids. This is nothing new. Anthropologists have known this stuff for decades.

In my opinion the peer-review should be changed to a double-blind system: the reviewer should not see name and affiliation of the authors, and judge the work as it would grade an undergrad paper (i.e. harshly). Like this I believe the signal-to-noise ratio in journals would increase, and only good papers would get published. At that point, I'd be willing to accept impact factor as a measure of worthiness of a publication. Until then, it's just friends judging friends, with nobody wanting to piss off anybody else. Minor revisions, congratulations, you're published.

How about we just stop invading other countries where we know people don't like to see Americans? If we had opted out of the second Iraq war, we could have saved thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our own collective faces on the international stage. To top it all off we wouldn't need to be having this discussion at all. We didn't accomplish anything with that war. I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.

They do have nudies, but nobody wants to see them.

Your life is already under a microscope. You can't go to the supermarket without a crew from TMZ following you and paparazzi are camped out on your lawn.... just how freaking stupid do you have to be to post nude pics of yourself to the cloud?

I'm going to start a consulting agency to the stars, called "Common Sense", and get paid to distribute my common sense to people who obviously have none of their own.

Here's a free tip: If you don't want nude pics of yourself spread to the web, don't take nude pics of yourself!

The "iBrute" exploit code didn't become available until earlier this week.

What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases.

Many of them are built around U.S. military bases.

Looking at the EXIF data attached to the photographs, where it's available, and the structure of the filenames I can see that only some of them came from iPhones/iCloud. I can also see photographs from Android phones (Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy 5s) likely acquired via Google Drive, other photographs clearly taken from Dropbox accounts (the dumps include default dropbox files), and many clearly taken from Twitter and Facebook private messages (filenames are a dead giveaway). Some of the filenames look like those you would get from a recovery or backup programme rather than an auto generated one, which chimes with what victims have said on Twitter regarding deleting the images months or even years ago. In any case there are clearly multiple sources and as usual Apple Derangement Syndrome is in full swing. Likely as not this was related to the heartbleed bug. Large amounts of passwords were acquired around that time, and were probably being used on multiple services. It's equally possible that this wasn't a breach at Apple et al but a breach of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft's Azure as those services are used to backup data from iCloud, Google Drive, and many others. What's worse for some of the celebs is that the pictures contain GPS data that could compromise their homes.