Such a bullshit argument. People who believe this are speaking out of their assholes.

This would be the "penny wise, pound foolish" option. Even if that figure was accurate, which it's not even close, doing so would cause a wave of additional immigrants looking for that handout. Oh, and while we're at it, why not just pay everyone who's unemployed, and already in the U.S. that minimum wage?

You can "be sure", but you'd be incorrect. This isn't a classified program, and the people working on it don't have to hide what they do at all. There are too many individuals working it, and if you were correct that tidbit would quickly leak out. Just like with so many other conspiracy theories, when more than a handful of people are involved, everything inevitably comes to light.

I'd suggest that Russians are a bit cheaper labor. Conscripts don't cost nearly as much.

You're implying that there's less overhead with a fed? That's flat out incorrect. Yes, individual contractors typically make better wages, and the overhead is there. But, don't get me started on the size of govt. offices, and the overhead they bring. As for CEOs, they're a tiny fraction of the cost of doing business...though I won't argue that any of them are under-compensated (trying not to stroll off-topic). I've seen numerous govt. IT shops replaced by fewer than half as many contractor personnel.

FWIW, I've been on both sides for the last 38 years.

Yes, it's better to be a contractor because they typically bring skills to the table that govt. employees don't have. They're also typically fired at will, which is something you almost never see when a govt. employee's position is no longer needed, or if they're a screw up.

What happens when someone programs the AI to think that it is God?

Not really. It's pretty ignorant to think that a well understood law of physics can be transformed somewhere else. Now, if by some circumstance we got that law wrong, then the possibility could exist. But unless there's some chink in the armor of that law that was missed, the GP is absolutely correct.

Court orders to /. would still give up your info. I've seen it happen to former coworkers.

I love people perpetuating myths. Have you looked at any recent data? American vehicles have also recently been showing better quality numbers than Euro cars. The Dodge I'm driving today (2012 model), isn't anywhere near the crap they produced twenty years ago. And FWIW, I've owned everything from Mercedes, Saab & BMW to Infiniti, to nearly every flavor of US make, in my ~40 yrs of driving. Just anecdotal here, but most of the foreign brands broke as frequently as the domestics, but were more expensive to repair, with my Infiniti being the exception (most reliable vehicle I've owned), though they wanted ~$500 to replace a headlight ballast.

Your basic premise is that nobody should be allowed to legally make a website w/o "implementing basic IT security", correct? Because if they get hacked, they should be punished.

Yes, that makes perfect sense...in some small minded world.

Who the fuck creates a new account when they change employers?

You watch too much TV

Maybe you should look at the graph that YOU provided, and notice that the years that Reagan was in office '81-89 in fact leveled off the steep decline from the Carter years...go figure.

You've clearly got no fucking idea what you're talking about. Everyone makes mistakes in parenting. But then my own circumstances were never part of the topic. But since you asked, I've raised a child (including 7 yrs as a single parent) very successfully, put her through college, and she's spent the last year in a three year leadership program at a major national company. So yeah, I guess I fucked up.