Because the US has the most to lose if every shipment of iphones from China or oil tanker from the Gulf had a big bulls-eye on its stern. International trade becomes very expensive without overwhelming naval power to deter every two bit dictator and warlord who can afford to put a 50mm cannon on an old fishing vessel from trying to steal a big boat every once in a while. And standing navies are a lot cheaper than arming every merchant ship, even more so if you aren't the country that's supporting it.

If they restrict password length (on the back end), then they aren't hashing. That is not the same as: if they don't hash, then they restrict password length.

It is not conclusive proof but I think it is a fair assumption, yes.

The worst thing about this isn't that it means you have to choose a weak password, but rather that it is very likely that they are storing passwords in cleartext and somebody could get access to huge numbers of accounts with a single breach. If they were just using javascript to ensure password length, then they could change the code for the form validation immediately. So the fact that it hasn't been fixed yet means that the password length restriction has to do with something on their back end that will require real work to fix. But a proper back end system should salt and hash the passwords and the site would have no idea how long your password is. Since they know and care how long the password is, they probably aren't hashing

I'll be the first to complain about the stupidity of zero tolerance policies and curtailments of civil rights in the name of the war on terror (or war on drugs), but that is clearly surpassed by the stupidity of duct taping a box to a transportation chokepoint without telling the people who own and operate it.

That's nothing. I don't even have a common gmail address but I get:
-Advertisements for pharmaceuticals that claim to fix my virility problems (clearly based on mixed up lab results from someone else)
-Opportunities to collect millions through Paypal, money orders, and cashiers checks (from Nigerian royalty, even!)
-Photos of people making a family
But sadly I can't remember the last time someone sent me a personal email :(

Exactly. In order to become a scientist one generally has to become an expert in a highly specialized field that might not be the right field necessary to judge the overall impact of a technology on society. Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives the example of a carpenter who builds a roulette wheel. That person knows every inch of the machine, yet it is not the best person to determine issues of probability about the machine (e.g., is it a fair bet, what is a good betting strategy, etc.). For those questions, you need a statistician, or even a gambler with a very good "gut".

Another analogy is cryptography. For a good cryptographic cipher, you can't possibly brute force the math. But for any particular implementation, there might be other attacks that have nothing to do with the math, but rather, on knowing how to place a keylogger on the person's computer, or a social engineering attack. So a mathematician is probably not the best person to understand the risks of computer security, even though they are the only person who can understand the algorithm being used.

In the case of a GMO scientist, they might (will?) not know the entire industrial chain that takes things from the lab to the manufacturing plant to the field. So they can't know all of the risks involved, and would typically have a financial incentive to naysay those risks anyways.

Having said all that, I am personally not too worried about GMO in the foodchain (as a safety issue), I would be more concerned about things like patent protection and other IP issues. But I understand that people's fears are not going to be assuaged just because some scientist says they are unfounded.

Precisely. Whenever people try to make a moral equivalence between some Western nations like the US or UK and some totalitarian hellhole by saying, "The US starts wars too" or "The US discriminates against minorities too" they should remember this kid's quote. But not the bolded part that parent highlights, rather the sentence before it - "We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in [my country]." When the US starts wars that people don't like, half the population tries to influence the government. When minorities are oppressed, people change what happens.

All countries and places have problems, the difference is what people can do deal with them.

Is there a +1 Meta moderation? Or should it be -1 Meta? I'm going to keep reading your post and gp post until my head explodes. Well played, sir.

No no no...clearly you need some kind of further explanation, perhaps a metaphor, or even an analogy, using some kind of personal transportation technology in order for this to make sense. I am sure that one of the many knowledgeable commenters on this site will provide one shortly.

This is a great idea and wonderful in it's simplicity. I actually assumed that this was the BB CEO's proposal, and that the summary and the article was just misunderstanding.

But no, he really is saying that we should continue to have closed protocols, just that their sponsors should be forced by the government to put them on Blackberries. Interestingly, he only mentions that they should be forced to run on iPhones, Android, and Blackberry, and doesn't mention Windows phones - "iMessage for me and not for thee!". So I can only assume that his proposal isn't really about forcing app "openness" (which is a stupid idea, but at least it's a coherent idea), but rather just a simple handout from the makers of online services to his company. Which I guess is his job to do, but I hope nobody takes this seriously.

Those are all excellent points that can help us to increase the *supply* of health care (which is something that should be done no matter what is done on the allocation side). But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can ever make the amount of health care that could be supplied equal to the amount of health care that we want. For the former will always be finite and the latter will always be infinite (mod singularity).

So even after increasing the supply with the kind of reforms you suggest, we will still have the problem of how do we allocate those resources. And if we continue to use the current Rube Goldberg contraption we will still have problems.

All discussions of the health care system needs to start and end with agreement on this quote, if nothing else. Of course we can't afford all the health care that we want; we also can't afford all of the iPhones that we want, or education, or anything, really. Economics is the study of how we allocate finite resources to try to satisfy infinite wants, and nowhere is that more stark than with health care.

Whether the method for allocating those finite resources is a price system, a queueing system, a random drawing, or otherwise, there are always trade-offs. The problem with health care is that nobody wants to acknowledge that some trade-off will be required. If you only use prices, then the poor won't get as much care as the rich. If you only use queues, then everybody will suffer with ailments during the wait. So we have this phenomenally complex system that tries to pretend that there are no limits to our medical resources, because while we are generally OK with the fact that rich people can have the latest iphone while others make do with generic android, or that you wait in line to get a table at your favorite restaurant, we are apparently not OK with hearing that someone doesn't get exactly the health care that they want when they want it because they don't have enough money, or other people with the same problem have booked the doctor's time for weeks.

Once we are honest about who we are willing to deny care to, then we can have a productive conversation about health care. Everyone can say "This is how I think care should be allocated" and we would create a system that allocates resources according to the wishes of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives. But instead we create layer upon layer of employer backed insurance, and government backed insurance, with some private delivery, but some public delivery, so that nobody can understand it. So now people's positions on health care reform are mere reflections of mood affiliation rather than of what they actually want out of the system.

This one? I suppose they would be as much an expert on drone warfare as anybody.