"Throughout most of history, wandering beyond the horizon would have been suicidally insane and very few to attempted it were ever heard from again."

Not from the tracks our ancestors laid down. We left tools. We traded with other humans far from our homes as far back as we can find records. Humans have wandered over the horizon for as long as we have been on this planet. The archeological record demonstrates our many migrations from place to place as does our complicated genetic heritage. We are wanders by nature and our settling down into cities is recent, though with as much as we move around, we've not really stopped wandering. (I have lived in twelve cities and five states in less than 50 years.) Wandering over the horizon is suicide? Hardly. There is no land on this planet that we have not figured out how to live upon from the Inuit of the North, to the bases in Antarctica and every island and continent in between.

I really have a hard time understanding where you get the idea that US is so weak and irrelevant. We spend 1.7 trilliion dollars on defense on this planet and 36.6% (640 billion) of that is done in the US. China is the next most prolific spender on defense and they spend around a third of what the US spends (188 billion).

The comment about legacy yet relevant weapons really doesn't make sense to me.

The value of NASA has never been commercial. It is a pure research area. WE are learning how to live and work in space, which is an environment so alien to us that our bodies don't even function properly. That knowledge flows into the private commerce section of our economy and slowly brings benefits that we have yet to imagine.

I don't know where you get your 1/6th figure. US military spending for fiscal 2014 according to the wikipedia page is 43% of the total amount budgeted. Only 1.4% goes to NASA and 0.6% for the National Science Foundation.

Pranks have to be funny. What is funny about DDOS?

Ok, here are a few points:

(1) Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) is not a security issue for the victim. It is a security issue for the thousands of computers illegally used in the attack - think thousands of illegally accessed computers, theft of the electricity and network access required to run a bot net sufficient to impact a large network like Microsoft or Sony's.
(2) Nothing the Victims security team could do would prevent a DDOS from occurring. That Microsoft or Sony's security was bad, is irrelevant to any DDOS. DDOS is like having a group of people drive bumper to bumper around your block. You can't get out, and that fancy home security system isn't going to stop the cars in the street.
(3) They were apparently in it for something other than principle as it has been pointed out that they tweeted that they received compensation to stop the DDOS. So extortion? That's not a protest at all. That's like someone getting out of one of those cars and asking you for money to make the artificially created traffic jam go away. Which is very similar to an arsonist selling protection from him burning your house down.
(4) Anyone who wanted to access the affected networks was denied access because of the DDOS. They paid for access to that network and their time on the network was essentially stolen from them. The customers who are adversely affected here are not mentioned - they are just as much victims as the corporate network. Consider for a moment that many of these people may not have much time to access the DDOS's networks due to other constraints upon their time (work, school, etc.) and were looking forward to enjoying some play time. Those plans were cancelled without recourse by the Lousy Lizard Squad and their army of stolen computers. I say stolen computers because I am pretty sure that any DDOS was not done using thousands of willing participants who signed upon on someone's website to allow the Lousy Lizard Squad to DDOS Microsoft. They are accessing other peoples property and spending other peoples resources in electricity and network access to run the DDOS attacks and that is theft of services plain and simple.

So there are four decent reasons to call these people thieves and that makes them assholes.

The mentality and intelligence level of the officers is screened to fit a certain profile. Perhaps that profile is the issue.

Link: http://thefreethoughtproject.c...

Who cares about how popular code is now? How popular was it? How much stuff is coded in C that is vital to people willing to pay people to fix it and maintain it and perhaps even improve it. Fer craps sake, Cobol is still alive and kicking. Just because some computer science wiz farts out some new language every three years doesn't mean that all the previously built code goes up in flames. The old code has more lives than a zombie apocalypse and some poor sap gets to make a living off of it. This is supposed to be a serious profession not a gaggle of high school sophomores giggling over who got asked to the senior prom.

Lizard B was distinguishable from Lizards A and C only by the name on the Ballot and the face used in the advertising literature. Beyond that, the campaigns were so identical, the policy statements so generically similar that nobody really knew which lizard was which. In most cases the voters simply picked the first Lizards on the list and shuffled out of the voting booth. Other, more creative voters, flipped a coin, or in one case rolled six sided dice.

And if they get there way, they will raise prices and still not roll out anything faster than the current system.

I have two observations: (1) From your command of language, you are not an average GED holder. (2) Your advice to young programmers is virtually the same to that given by Stephen King (and a long list of other authors) to young authors.

Running a small business is being on the job 24 hours a day seven days a week. Starts ups, especially small ones don't pay much in the way of money. So what kills the business is fatigue. People get tired of 18 hour days and burn out after a couple of years. Remember, running the business is being the marketing guru, the advertising designer, the customer service representative, the tax accountant, the book keeper, the maintenance person, the person that runs the website and other internet services, on top of what ever the business actually does. Or you can pay for those services, and that is money going out the door. And you have to have been both wise and lucky at the timing and location of the business.

I know. I started my own business in a down economy and that business is still running six years later.

Getting to the top of a field or extracting lucrative grants from government is a system with the same inherent susceptibility for abuse. As an example: the whole link between autism and vaccinations was a fraud and an abuse of the existing grant system.

Any system we humans build will be abused. So yes, Pub Peer will be abused. As is the current system of peer review. Disruption in the systems for review keeps the game afoot and the published data gets better. Cheaters have to adapt and change so their job is harder. That is good. Refraining from using a system simply because it can be abused is absurd as every system we have is abused. That logic pretty much eliminates participation in civilization.

This part of the article caught my eye: "Roumel’s response is that his client has no responsibility to critics who refuse to put a name to their accusations. “I don’t think he has any obligation to provide the data [behind the papers called into question] to anyone other than a journal,” he says."

It is fundamentally wrong to fail to provide the data behind a published paper simply because the requester is anonymous or not a journal. The scientist involved has some questionable published figures and an explanation as to validity of the data would be useful to the scientist involved and to those who are questioning the figures. Far cheaper to put up the data and let the accusers hang themselves on the own stupidity or ignorance. On the other hand, if there is something less savory going on putting the data up would be a disaster and suing the accusers is an obvious strategy: accuse me of anything and I'll bury you in legal costs is a pretty steep penalty for questioning published data.

Unfortunately from my own experience with reproducing published work: the typical paper leaves a lot to be desired and sometimes, the published results cannot be reproduced using the methods and techniques described. This is sometimes due to fraud and most times due to incomplete experimental sections.

And the little fuckers talk about their exploits like some drunken dip-shit at a bar. They've lost sympathy from one group of people that might have some for them and they've called in a federal felony level bomb threat. Someone, perhaps their own bragging, is going to rat them out for this and a few years from now, they will be drug out of their mom's basement to the glaring light of CNN while mum tearfully cries on national TV about her over weight pasty skinned stereotype and the loss of every microprocessor device in the house.

Then the feds will hit the formerly bragging stereo type with every thing they can think up to up the charges to several hundred years in jail and the little stereotype will whine on face book and kickstarter about how the government is out to get him. Well, buddy, WE are the GOVERNMENT and WE are hoping you took metal shop in high school so that you can spend a few decades making license plates in a penitentiary. DDOSing a game is bad. Scaring hundreds of innocent people on a plane with bomb threat is way worse.

The cell phone, complete with camera and upload ability is carried by nearly everyone the police meet. Not so for the computer - ever tried to use the web cam on the lap top to film something out of a window or on the street? Pretty awkward. The regular camera has been around for decades and the police are used to those, see them, and often take them for evidence, but they are not carried around by the majority of people - and haven't ever been carried by the majority of people. Tablets are huge compared to the phone and make filming both awkward and obvious and again, most people don't have one on them all the time.

The danger to the police is that while they are focused on the guy with the camera filming their arrest of some citizen, everyone within sight can be filming and uploading their rights violations, overly aggressive behavior, etc. The media guy with the big camera, they've got a plan to deal with him. The five hundred eye witnesses? They have a plan to deal with them. The incontrovertible cell phone video showing their behavior is the problem. They have been living in a world where the court, prosecutor, and judge accept without question that the police officer's testimony is true. So after the arrest, the cops get together and make up a consistent story that justifies their actions, and fits the evidence that they gather. Since it is the job of the police to investigate the crime and tell the court and prosecution what happened, they can get the evidence to read any way they want it to read. There is no one looking at the crime after the police unless the citizen accused has the resources to do so with private investigations, private autopsies, etc. The universal presence of video endangers the beat the fuck out of some suspect perk that many, not all, in law enforcement have enjoyed. It threatens their reputation by providing independent evidence that may very well controvert the story the police tell. No other technology does this.

Once the brick feature is added to the phone, it will not be long before technology is developed that can brick a selected list of cell phones within an area. The cops can then pretend ignorance as the cell phones actively being used during the protest brick, while others, not being used, are left alone. Film the cops, brick your phone would spread through the police departments like wildfire. After the event is over, then the phones on the list can be un-bricked. Police would then be safe to make up what ever story justifies their actions and make sure that the evidence they find fits the story.

It's not paranoid. Look at the published police attitude, the rise of no-knock SWAT team served warrants, and realize that citizen cell phones have played an important role in revealing the bad operations with in the police force. Many police do not want this scrutiny and many are afraid of it because they know that if everyone knew how badly they acted as cops, they would be unemployed or in jail.