"Apology follows bikini backlash"

Nor a girl in a bikini getting her back lashed either!
We've been cruelly misled.

This weird taboo attitude towards sex confuses me.

Combining it with work is the problem, especially if it's siphoning off funds that could have gone elsewhere.

And I thought Enron was creepy. So the trading floor pricks getting laid has spread out into other industries like a rampant venerial disease?

The entire "booth babe" thing is rather pathetic - a step below being desperate enough to pay to see strippers that reveal less than you would see at the beach.
It's a cynical sales trick that shows a vendor is not taking the visitors seriously.
Yes, they may be cute, but if you are going there to see cute girls instead of elsewhere then something is screwed up.

Sounds like the increasingly common SSL compromise and MITM attack. Some workplaces do it deliberately to their employees (out of industrial espionage paranoia) and do not understand that they are only one incident away from being fucked over by the legal department of a major bank.

The xkcd cartoon example covers this. The number of combinations is very large due to the size of the dictionary.

I stopped using Groklaw back in the day because they started requiring excessively complex passwords.

People were being paid to disrupt Groklaw and even stalk and shame the founder. It's not paranoia when serious cash is being splashed to deface your website and a fucking insane horror writer (who pretends murdering ghosts are real) is parked across from your house watching your front door.
It's a special case.

The word is "reactionary" and they want to go back to the ways of the "good old days" of England that inspired America to revolt. The sort of stuff Dickens complained about is their template.

Good point Mr Buttle, or is that Tuttle?
When the objective is to catch someone and hold them responsible it's gone beyond the point where it matters if you've got the right person.

To catch whistleblowers without owing the NSA anything. There's apparently (ten year old info) a lot of foreign collected data that becomes "US eyes only" and getting something reclassified is not trivial.
Also there has been noise about using it to track down copyright violations, also not worth the NSA's time.
Plus we don't really know how much is collected with carnivore or whatever the current Five Eyes system is. It may not actually be slurping up everything.

The ALP want to appear to offer a "united front" on anything related to security or terrorism because of the "if you are not with us you are with the enemy" approach the government has pushed on occasion. Also the individuals in the ALP don't know enough about the issue to think it's important enough to pick a fight over. That's a bit of an artifact of many Australian politicians starting their career from student politics and having little exposure to anything else outside politics, so metadata to them is just "computer shit" and nothing of importance.
Very disappointing but not unexpected since Conroy of the ALP was pushing for similar things when he had the power to do so.

There is a comma which is meant to inform the reader that the first thing may not be the same as the second thing, but yes I could have put it in a different sentence.
Try reading it as:
The AP1000 reactors in China seem to be taking a while.
That reactor in Sweden (Forsmark upgrade) is taking a while (since 2004).

FFS - They all use air as the heat sink via fucking huge cooling towers filled with a lot of water. While they don't actually lose much water you still need a fair bit to start with.

Well I went from drawing board to AutoCAD, then on from there (pov, blender), and I still do a lot of time saving stuff with arcs as if I had a compass. The interface may change but the geometry doesn't and IMHO that's the really hard bit, especially in 3D.
However I'm not a 3D art professional and ugly but reasonably accurate visualisations of objects have been enough for me. For that level of operation the hard bit is not a changing GUI.

This is right, but depends a lot on your threat scenario. For many applications where security really matters, both online and offline cracking are by far not the biggest risks.