> WTF?

Maybe distraction tactics? "Hurr durr we have Tor and PGP, you can trust us now, pls, pretty pls, we promise to not abuse, pinky pie promise, we'll be good now!!!11". But more realistically it's to log IP accesses to key server, so they can make nice fb target address sender home ip correlation maps of interesting people who are foolish enough to fall for this trick. That's all assuming their plan is indeed to replace pgp.mit.edu. Keybase tried to do that already with not much success, but facebook has far much better social leverage to get traction than mere app appers doing twitter apps.

Incidentally, mass effect game universe. Engines eventually reach full charge cloud, which needs to be neutralized by dispersing it into atmospheres of planets en route. We could do the same.

> Term limits aren't necessarily a good thing
While your argumentation is sound, incubents for life are not great either - status quo tends to get more and more entrenched - bureaucracy keeps growing indefinitely even after system achieves base performance. All the problems of executive branch seeping into legislative.

When country starts to suck, people get disillusioned with politics, lethargic. This further amplifies the feedback loop - less informed voters, more need for term limits to enact at least some change.

Otherwise posts of career politicians are still replaced due to pawn exchanges, death and occasional corruption scandal - which luckily prevents efficacy converging towards zero as time goes. However members are keeping post for two decades or more in extreme cases, and we get very nasty things - paradoxically short sighted planning due to populism (because low quality voter base), rampant coat changing, high level corruption - old guard is well connected for it, compared to n00bs in office.

> if you replace people at too high a rate
It's an interesting game theoretic/social problem - design optimum algorithm to dynamically adjust term limits. Perhaps applying progressive handicap to ballot results depending on time already in office. But just like fixed term limits could be counterproductive, no term limits at all could be sticking head in the sand, hardly optimal.

> vswitch, ip balancer gear etc

But this is just tiny fraction of stuff done, mainly low tier last mile or local company DC. NOCs of big internet companies and ISPs operate with far bigger assortment of gear and technology. HW/SW tasks tend to be more intertwined plus ton of stuff which can go wrong and speed of troubleshooting is important.

Redundancy solves hardware problems, but unfortunately human errors tend to be more costly in networks - by their nature these are usually far less compartmentalized than "software" when looked at from bird's view. Put simply, incompetent operator can do far more damage.

Finally, OP makes it sound like all it takes is just CCIE and not being an immigrant. But the cert is just an entry pass and netops job market is is several magnitudes smaller, so there are proportionally less H1B workers doing it.
I'd not recommend to OP doing this, unless he can get through CCIE fairly effortlessly just by using years of experience. That being said, basic programming skills is a must for such a job to get familiar with internal tooling used at any given place (eg here he'd need ability to parse bash,php,python,ruby at minimum).

obligatory webcomic to explain difference between hand holding (implicit) and hand forcing(explicit)

The formal logic approach is still the only one that has a theoretical possibility of creating some aspects of true intelligence.

Sort of. We actually do have fairly robust theorem solvers written in prolog, but thats not enough. Intuitively, "true AI" works like extracting formal logic theorems out of huge set of before/after data fed to a blackbox.

Just like humans do something intuitively at first, with some degree of success, but when they find rational backgrounds (with help of formal logic rigor) behind that intuition, it gives significant accuracy boost. The two work in tandem - formal rigor is toothless when facing the totally unknown, but can explain it after intuitive models are trained and it can feed its hypotheses into them in lieu of farmed data.

Trouble is that layered NN camp ("intuitive") and formal logic camps are still too separated. But corporate interests will force merger to a degree.

This is most visible in speech recognition, and more recently, vision where formal grammar models sit above low level intuition NN, or better said, directs training of layers so it can work with less data and reason about unknown inputs because it actually "understands" what's going on on a formal level.

250Gb kinda blows, but other specs are fairly decent considering it's the US. The norm in rest of world with broadband is that nobody cares (like 6TB+/mo dont care) unless you run the line red hot for several days.

Or "I'm the ISP". It's a fallback for everything else.

Yes and no. Fun stuff is still done, especially in terms of computer vision and hearing - there are numerous stakeholders.

However zero interest in actual research, it's all engineering.

They do not want code monkeys, as you still do need a PhD-level knownledge to even design this kind of stuff, just like computers in the 60s. Thats why companies are bought and people are hired only if they have something useful to show already in applicable field.

The trend is real. Its not called AI, but "deep learning". Basically Google and Facebook bought few datamining companies and ball got rolling.
Google torch7 for specific stuff.

It's not that bad, but the gist is similiar.

1) Megacorp allows to run your models on their data, and you can write paper about it
2) But your results are not reproducible, because well, private corporate data

Solution indeed is to put the training sets in the public domain.

Quite the opposite, strong AI was the previous boom/bust.
This time we're using "sheer brute force" to train NNs in a bid to get emergent intelligence-like patterns, instead of using formal logic constraint solvers.

Aluminium can be oxidized to 3

That's not how rechargeable batteries work, your deoxidize charging would be super tricky :)
Aluminium indeed sucks weight and even price wise, but can make it up potentially with longevity and ability to sustain high charging currents.

Don't forget about valence electrons which affect net ion charge you can transport in a chemical bond - it's 1 Li vs 3 Alu. The reason why alu sucks weight wise is first and foremost unfavourable chemistry for cathode counterpart, not atomic number.
Alu does have interesting properties, though:
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
While it indeed have a magnitude less specific capacity, these cells can serve as interesting interim in place of ultra capacitors (regenertive braking etc). Li reactivity is both blessing and curse.

People of color this week.

Which is weird, because looking at world in this black and white fashion is well ... monochromatic.