These days, it seems surviving high school requires much more gun skills than programming skills, just sayin'

BTW, bankers are an exception due to what happened with the financial crisis which ended with governement pumping tons of dollars to keep them afloat no matter how bad they did. At then end, everyone did pay for the risk, not just the shareholders and investors. That's what was unacceptable. The rules were bent in that case at the advantage of bankers.

You are right since the devil is right as well.

There is absolutely no reason to cap the CEO or anyone else salary based on whatever equation anyone can come with thinking he is clever than the next door guy.

CEO salary is determined by investors, those who are taking risks in the company and hired him to take care of their investment in that company.

If the investors believe this guy to earn that salary, it is up to them to reduce the salary and compensations or to fire him to hire someone else capable to take care of the investors' money.

It is not a matter of how much money someone needs to be comfortable, it is a matter of how much money this guy will bring to the investors and shareholders.

No investor wants the CEO to spend more money than needed in employees wage and salary. No investor wants the CEO to not spend enough money that the company will be put at risk or go to bankrupcy lacking the talented people it needs to make money. You can disagree with what the investors think and their strategy for the company, that's fair. However, it is not to someone which have no money in the company and who risks nothing in the enterprise to decide.

Pretty much studip idea to solve the problem. Encryption is the way to go rather than trying to build a parallel infrastructure which will anyway be subject to laws of the countries where the infrastructure is installed. It doesn't solve anything. It is not like other countries are not spying anyone else.

In fact, the proposed solution may just create the problem as well. What she propose is what China is building, a network owned by the State, managed by the State and purposedly for the best interest of the State.

I don't believe NSA needs to demonstrate all of this to make the point. The simple fact that Snowden didn't know where the evidence to make his point was is enough to conclude he was really going fishing here hoping to find what he was seeking for, because in first place his conviction the NSA was breaking the law was not well founded.

And second, NSA can always request a closed trial due to the nature of the proof.

I think many here are missing the point. Point the Moon with your finger and the fool will look at the finger.

The entire point about the use of automated tools to scrape data here and there on the NSA network is that Snowden wasn't going at the only data he needs to prove the point he says he wants to make. He was just grabbing a full load of data hoping for some of it to prove something that could make him a credible whistleblower. This is playing against him if he would have to convince a judge he is a "legitimate" whistleblower just wanting to free America from the dictatorship of the NSA. He did grab way too much data and some of it having no relation at all with the point he supposedly wants to make. But worst, he just gave everything to a third party rather than just what was necessary to prove that point about the NSA and the violation of US citizen rights.

So, the point is not about the automation of the data scraping, it is about the indistinct data scraping itself. And NSA may make a point here.

Exactly the point. Snowden has taken way too many data needed to prove his point about US citizen rights violation by NSA. He leaked everything in the hands of a third party with no right to access this data. In a trial, it would be hard for him to prove he was really trying to make a point about violation of US citizen rights. It could easily be seen as an alibi to leak top secret data to foreign countries. It could be seen as fishing without knowing exactly what he will find in the data he has taken. Could a whistleblower been qualified as is if he doesn't have a clue about the data he has just taken? If you say yes to this, anyone taking any dataset from anywhere and leaking it to public could be seen has a whistleblower, including your credit card data and other personal records.

You have a point here. Maybe Google just don't care much about Nest products, they may have bought it to avoid future IP issues with a newcoming product.

Only if you have registered trademark and own intellectual property on the lemonade receipe. Look what people pay for sweetened water with artificial flavor.

Do you realize it's a lot of stupidos out there? What's the whole point of this product? As mentioned above, thermostats are doing their job since 1930 which is to keep a constant temperature. Well, this programmable thing appears nice to economize energy, however in practice there is no need to put it on internet to do that just to adjust a schedule once or twice in a year.

Maybe Google is planning to develop a wireless-coupled-ass-thermometer-with-gyroscope-and-gps to track your body temperature, body orientation and position in the house or even outside and adjust thermostats accordingly. Then you would become a smart ass.

True, Friedman's view of AI is over optimistic. No matter how well certain systems are performing well under controlled circumstances, the point is a general AI system doesn't exist yet and is not to exist soon unless breakdown technologies and scientific discoveries happen really soon.

A typical brain consumes 20 watts-hour of electricity and is capable to reason and learn almost anything. No software is capable to do a thousandth of what a brain can and what it is doing is at the expense of thousands of watts-hour. This model just simply doesn't scale at the worldwide level even if you just pick the very wealthier ones in that world.

Centuries ago, you had slaves to work in the fields for almost nothing. It is untrue the fields were sustaining a full-employement and good wealth at the same time. Most people were miserable accomplishing dirty work for peanuts. Working in the fields was seasonal work, not each day and full-time work neither. You must let the wheat grow before harvesting it. In today scheme, the days between seedtime and harvest wouldn't been paid. In the old time, you would be feed enough to make sure you will be alive for harvest.

True and this is why to some extent cosmology has become something like a scientific religion. And it is why it is doing much harm than good to science since religious people are usually taking it as an example that science is some kind of faith in something, what it is surely not, however, due to the limitations we have, everything that cannot be observed is speculation.

Cosmology is drawing way too much attention for what it worth.

False, the majority of people out-there are morons enough to vote for the guys in the office. You can conclude from that: The probability to pick randomly someone worst than the guys in the office is much higher than 50%.

Well, beside everything else, one point of concern is the hacking of these marvelous little drones to grab an hand or two on a pizza and other goods in route to their destination.