The first report was bullshit by some nobody to make money, nothing more and nothing less. This is more of the same bullshit to make bogeymen, and Russia has been a good target lately. I have worked in IT security for nearly 3 decades, so yes I do have some knowledge.

The 1.2 billion "credentials" was nothing to worry about (see disclaimer below), and still isn't. Hackers move massive lists of email addresses all the time, and try to run brute force attacks all the time. We block hundreds of thousands of these attacks every day. The majority are [email_addr@domain] with a password of 'password1'. Most of the time these are easy to see, as neither the user or domain exist on the targeted servers. Even the legit addresses are easy to detect, because hackers will use the top 25 worst passwords (just like you can find in articles every year, no I'm not kidding). Rarely do I ever see anything complex, like .00001% of the time rare, where there is actually a worm running on the back end (think John the Ripper).

If I was a conman and wanted to make fast cash, I could start dumping all of these email addresses to a DB, and say "Oh Noez! This email account is haxxored! When in reality, there is no such compromise. To fluff numbers, I hash 'password1' in SHA, MD5, CRYPT, and maybe even use plain text. 300 million accounts has now given me a claim of 1.2 billion 'credentials', and you can hopefully see that the claim is complete shit! I can gather that 300 million addresses in a week without breaking a sweat.

Disclaimer. You should be changing passwords for anything you care about frequently. 8 character passwords every 90 days, 14-16 character every 6 months. If you are using a strong password and are up for a change, go do so, no big deal. Since I write this shit for policies regularly, a "strong" password consists of the following.
1. No dictionary words, proper names or common acronyms in forward or reverse.
2. No QWERTY keys, including qazwsx, 54321, etc...
3. Contains at least 1 special character, 1 number, 1 upper and 1 lower case character.
4. Is not 'p@SSw0rd' or some other l337 speak that would be in a cracklib dictionary, and there is plenty there.

There are obviously restrictions in some places, so if you can't use certain characters make a longer password. If you can't make a longer password change the password more frequently. The majority of 'hackers' are script kiddies, not hackers. If you make things hard, they find a different target. There are numerous people out there that use 'password1' for their password, don't be one of them.

As you said, this is clearly a double standard. I believe your use of "sued" is incorrect, because there was no stop of a civil trial just criminal. It's not an easy thing to change when corruption is this deep in the legal system, but people need to get out and start protesting and getting people on ballots to oust the cronies.

I wish I could say this was just a training issue, but clearly this goes well beyond a training issue. The DA just let all cops know that if they drive distracted "too bad" even if it costs a completely innocent person their life.

Chrome is is just like IE for more operating systems, no thanks I won't touch the stuff. Rating things on a combination of user security and functionality, Opera is hard to beat with Firefox in a close 2nd. I don't care how fast Chrome can load pages, I don't sit and watch memes flash by all day.

A viable alternative is that they found and use the same back doors available to the NSA. It's speculation either way, because there are no independent reviews of Microsoft's source code and shipped binaries. The released binaries may not even match the source they provided for review.

I didn't say it was bad to have some statistics, I said it was bad to have this study focus on one statistic. You know as well as I do that if the numbers are off, people against legalization will jump all over the study just to wreak havoc on the legalization. Illegal marijuana was (and in many places still is) a huge revenue source for both the criminal side and the law enforcement side (and yes, we would probably agree that the line between those two elements is crossed very often).

Yeah, and the ATF and DEA were still raiding shops as recently as 2 years ago in spite of California's laws legalizing marijuana. Normalization is not recent.

I think you meant this as sarcasm, but that one is mostly correct. These cars are not doing cross country trips, so claiming a few thousand miles of roadway is probably an overestimate. They drive the same roads and areas over and over and over again.

I have been tempted to carry a bucket of chaff and just see how well a Google car handles it, but then again rain and snow are problems so the experiment is really not needed.

The point here is that a human can notice things that a current auto driving car can not. Not all humans pay attention, but for the percentage that do you can tell when a paper bag is blowing around on the freeway. Human reaction to those things is generally measured and controlled much better than a google car. In time, I am sure it will get better but you need to discuss what is there today, not what we wish it had and are working for.

I'm not sure how much you drive around California, but if you ever do you will see why this one is an issue. Many traffic lights in Mountain view for example are angled downward, so you have to be at a certain distance to see the color. There is one by Shoreline and Central that you can't see until you are about 40-50 feet away (for those interested, east bound traffic at the fire station).

Compare that issue with scanning for a red octagon pattern, and is should become obvious why stop signs are much easier to do. Traffic lights would be easy if they broadcast a signal, but they don't.

Overall, I'm not against self driving cars as long as we can choose between modes of operation. I think we are a long way off in terms of technology to make them safe in all environments, that does not imply even decades. I am mostly concerned with the health impact of all those radars and sensors broadcasting everywhere, but that's mostly due to my own ignorance (I have not taken any time to study since they are extremely rare).

I'll guess allergies, and building those little straw men triggered them.

I won't argue that the war on drugs is a huge failure, but that's a different argument in my opinion. The primary argument here is whether or not marijuana legalization has reduced deaths from prescriptions.

Given legalization is extremely new, the conclusion of the article and study is grossly premature. Making matters worse in my opinion, is that the study only looks at a single element of drugs, and not the complete impact.

As with my opening paragraph, I'm not pro drug war or anti marijuana. I simply think that these types of studies would be better to include other impacts, because in 3 years the stats may show something completely different. Studies should include things like crime reduction and savings to law enforcement due to crime reduction, local economy impact (Dorito sales!!), overall health of patients receiving and using medical marijuana, etc...

The war on drugs is a failure for many reasons, and single impact studies won't flesh all of those out.

Maybe, but I don't think that any real discussion could be had about our megacity future based on this type of video game. Notice there is no food growing anywhere, very little greenery (think pollution), every inch of terrain was flattened, there was no water, etc..

Don't get me wrong, I think SimCity is a cool game. I don't think it's simulation software, and therein lies the big issue.

From Wikipedia: "The radio program This American Life reported in 2009, that, contrary to claims made in the case, the accident report contained no information on the secret equipment on the plane except to note that secret equipment was present, a fact which had been reported in the press at the time. The program interviewed the daughter of one of the crash victims who described the government's claims in the case as fraudulent."

The court may have found that the government did not abuse its privilege, but I do not agree. Courts have also ruled that people who suspect they are being spied upon have no standing to find out, since the spying is classified and they can't know if they are or not. Whatever the material of my hat, court rulings do not guarantee fairness, good judgement or good policy.

The defense, as I understand it, was that the accident report was privileged information and therefore not subject to disclosure under Rule 34 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. However, the cause of the plane crash was determined to be a fire in the engine. What does a fire in the engine have to do with secret surveillance equipment on the plane? Why would an engine fire be privileged? How would its disclosure impact national security?

I know that the families of the airmen received a settlement, so they didn't go away with nothing. But the precedent was set and it really looks to me like the government used a supposed threat to national security to avoid accountability. YMMV

One of the things President Obama has done for this country is to show us that whether the Republicans or Democrats are in office, we get a lot of the same policies. Not identical, but most of the foreign policy, national security, surveillance and domestic security policies are the same between the parties. Some choice!

That just makes it all the more disillusioning when you figure out that it's bullshit.

In a republic, the people must be able to hold their representatives accountable and ensure they are working in the country's best interests and obeying the law. Secret policies like the one governing the members of the no-fly list work against people wanting to know what their government is doing and why. It is not a matter of whether we are protected or not. It is a matter of transparency in a government by, of and for the people. That's not to say that the policy governing the no-fly list should be published in the New York Times. But if the government can hide behind the state secrets privilege to bar people from finding out why they are on the list and how they might get off it, they are denying those people their right to redress of grievances.

It is true that some things must be kept secret. But part of the issue here is that in order to be trusted with secrets, you must be that; trusted. Members of the intelligence and national security apparatus have been found lying to Congress, the judiciary and the public on numerous occasions. When they say we must simply trust them that they are doing the right thing, any thinking person should be skeptical. They have blown their credibility and have lost the trust of the people they are supposed to be protecting. That's not a good thing.

It should be noted that in the seminal case that established the state secrets privilege, United States v. Reynolds, the government used the national security argument to hide negligence. In the very first case that they used that argument, they used it to cover something up (lax maintenance that led to the downing of an aircraft). So it has been a dubious privilege from the start. Given their track record since, there is no reason to trust that the government is being honest in their invoking the privilege now. They may indeed be on the up-and-up. But that needs to be independently verified, and that should be the job of the court.

What is more hilarious is your ignorance regarding education required for a job(feigned or otherwise). If you have a mechanical engineering degree, you are not going to go out and be a plumber (at least legally in most places). Plumbing requires trade school and certification, not a mechanical engineering degree. As with college, that requires money and time to achieve.

After you get your apprentice certification, you will work on your Journeyman certification, then you will be working toward master certification. None of this will be applied to a PHD.

The hype about STEM is mostly just hype. Society can not function if everyone is a brain surgeon, ever. You need plumbers, welders, mechanics, farmers, textile industry, etc.. etc... and the education for those types of jobs is very different from that of a nuclear physicist.