" your password recovery phrase will be the street you lived on in high school or the name of your first dog. This is not secure" if the email account it sends the password to has already been compromised.

That's a very astute observation, OTOH; OPEC is not a free market, it's a cartel. A free market is one where anyone is free to participate, it has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of regulation.

Nitpick: We have no fault divorce here in Oz and the "old" telstra was state owned up until the 1990's.

However your logic is spot on. Telstra can retrieve the information easily (and do on a regular basis for police work). However the law does not compel them to give it to customers and they don't want to set a precedent by doing so. The only way you will get it is to wave a court order at them. Good luck, their lawyers are very likely better qualified and more numerous than yours.

I think you meant to say, 'nobody told hollywood', I was born in 1959, it has been common knowledge since at least the early 70's that the "keep 'em on the line" trope is bullshit, in the same way CSI style "infinite zoom" is widely seen as a 'theatrical device" today.

Personally I appreciate it when hollywood takes pride in getting the scientific and technical detail straight and the idea seems to be more popular than ever with shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, BBT, etc. But I still enjoy Star Trek, Dr Who, Buffy, et-al because the trick to good entertainment is not accuracy, colour, or special effects, it's about "suspension of disbelief". We enjoy drama because it tells a human story, it's the fictional human interactions that enthrall us, not the fictional events they are reacting to. If the interactions are implausible the theater will be empty, if the events are implausible it often adds interesting twists to the human story, eg Douglas Adams infinite improbability drive..

I worked for them for several years, of course they can retrieve that information, they do it on a regular basis for the cops. Half of the info is on the itemised phone bill. What you won't get (without a court order) is the other half of the information about who called you.

Must be an American thing, here in Oz your average John-o and Steve-o play with their leg-o, great for keeping them occupied while dad nicks down to the bottle-o.

For me, Greenpeace lost all credibility in the 1980's when one by one the founding scientist left in disgust, the last one left in the early 90's when Greenpeace were using a mountain of pseudo-science to attack the use of chlorine in drinking water (arguably the most effective public health measure of the 20th century). Basically the leadership was taken over by political types and they lost their scientific roots. However I am grateful for the fact they put an end to nuking pacific islands in my neighbourhood, and wish them the best of luck in their efforts to kill the coal industry before it kills us.

iii - Mention pseudo scientists and one will always turn up to tell you how cold it's been lately.

Troll food: The min temp anomaly map for Australia over the past six months, it's clear minimum temperatures have been warmer across most of the continent. It also clear that maximum temps have been well above average for the same period.

Is it just me, or do the roles and rituals in agile development sound a bit like a dungeons and dragons game?

I think you will find the remand centers of the western world are chock full of people defending credit card fraud charges.

Not sure about the US but most of the western world have laws covering the storage of financial data, belive me you don't want to fuck with the banks on those rules.

Again, not sure what happens in the US but here in Oz the credit company foots the bill if you've been ripped off. People who foot the bill themselves are usually doing so to avoid having a relative or "friend" formally charged with fraud. If you do get stung by a drive by hacker it takes a few weeks to sort but everyone I know who has had that problem has had their money returned by the bank, one card was drained of 25K by people having a wonderful time touring Europe.

It's worked that way since the mid-90's, possibly earlier. At the end of the day it's in their best interest to keep the customer happy and claw back the "spillage" with interest rates. If they were to change their policy and tell everyone "tough titties" it wouldn't take more than a few years to reach the point where everyone had a few friends who really did lose thousands in one hit. At that point the credit cards would have a terminal problem with distrust since any rational person would start avoiding plastic like the plague.

I've been a software developer for longer than some slashdotters have been alive, sure programming is a creative exercise, to quote Knuth it's both an "art and a science". However a programmer is merely using technology, not creating it. If you don't agree, think about the music world, is a good composer creating new technology or merely using it skillfully?

It's also hard to see how anyone but a megacorp or government could build a chip fab plant or a HDD factory. Take a look at those two commodity devices and compare them to their 1980's counterparts, now tell me again how corporations and/or governments stifle technology?

Ironically, your assumption that fish just calmly swim about waiting to be eaten by a 30 ton killer whale is an excellent example of the GP's original point about humans and jail cells.

If it wants one and has received them in the past using that sound, then clearly, yes. The "monkey see, monkey do" hypothesis is nonsense born from the perfectly natural tendency of humans to believe they hold a special place in the animal kingdom. For example, there's a native bird in the hills near where I live called a lyrebird. It's said to be the world's best mimic (check it out on YT), it will accurately mimic any other sound it hears.

What people rarely mention, or even notice, about this "mimic" is that it is also displaying creativity when it takes those sounds and forms a unique song. Once it has created its own unique song it remembers it and builds on it in the next mating season, similar to the way jazz musicians improvise around a basic theme. But a more accurate analogy would be a musician who creates aesthetically pleasing soundtracks from samples to attract and impress the opposite sex, both analogies also imply the opposite sex posses some form of "artistic taste".

What TFA really shows is that dolphins and whales adapt their "language" to the environment they find themselves in. Humans also do this, nobody is surprised when an English baby born in England but raised by Chinese parents in China, grows up speaking Chinese. Apes can do it via sign language but they will never speak to us because their vocal chord anatomy is not up to the task

My brother has had a white cockatoo for a couple of decades and like your parrot it says all sorts of things in context, for example whenever someone comes through the front door he says "G'day mate". Nobody taught it that phrase, basically it will start repeating any phrase it hears often enough in the same circumstances. To me it's clear that parrots are not always just mimicking, when they ask for food, lights and their bed in the right context they are clearly communicating. When the cockatoo teaches itself to say "G'Day mate" it's not getting any reward accept attention, which is pretty much the same way a human child learns to speak.

Most multinationals now train ALL their staff on SO act and give a mandatory refresher once a year. Although the training is a drag, it's a great piece of "international legislation". It forces the executive level to push an anti-corruption policy from the top down. Since once you have been trained the responsibility falls on you to behave ethically, Joe Office Worker is now far more likely to expose a corrupt manager than cooperate with him.

As for TFA, which I didn't read, if the guy was threatening someone in a personal dispute and using my name/property in an attempt to legitimise the threat, I would sack him too.

Good point, they are often seen as the same thing.

Nitpick: The "free" in "free market" says nothing about regulations it simply means anyone is free to trade in the market. An economic market is not a place or a thing it's a set of regulations governing trade. Fox News has sold Americans an oxymoron, unfortunately a great number of them have bought it and spread it across the globe via mass media. Now that they have bought a false assumption about a key concept in economics, it distorts their reasoning about economics to the point where they often argue against their own best interests.

Village bartering is often held up as an example of a "natural free market" by romantic libertarians, but at a minimum there must be some form of property law for it to exist. Also bartering doesn't scale very well, which is why we invented currency in the first place.

Yes, corporations are a "legal fiction", but at the end of the day, so are markets, free or otherwise.