Yep. All means are not legal to catch bad guys. Never have been and never will be.

If a judge says this is legal it does not mean it is right. It only means it is within the law or precedent as the judge sees it or claims to see it. It does not remotely mean it is right or even Constitutional. And I don't give a damn. What the NSA is doing is utterly wrong. Unbearably wrong. It shall not stand.

Any language describe as "not that bad" is not a language I am keen to use any more than I have to. Programming asynchronously as your predominate mode is not remotely natural. We should not be inflicting that kind of deep impedance mismatch on ourselves. If Ruby has attracted to many amateurs or hype then what of node.js and the misplaced web client programmers that think that using code with the restriction required by the client on the server is actually a good thing.

A scramble for moon real estate and mining rights would be the best news in half a century on the space front. I suggest you divvy up much like other Homestead type plans and land / mining claims in the past on earth. If you can get to a plot and do something at all to add value to it then you can claim it as yours.

I go out of my way to find work opportunities at new or existing employers where I will need to substantially increase my knowledge and acquire new knowledge and skills to be successful. Doing so is what I am being paid in part to do in service of my employer's goals. I have no problem doing much of this learning on the employer's dime and at the office. As long as I produce sufficiently quality results in acceptable time bounds neither do they. I also seek to tune what I need to learn for the day job to what I need for my startup and other projects and am just plain interested in. Thus I get paid directly for learning things that I want to learn and indirectly by all the multiple uses for that knowledge and those developed skills.

I have way more computers and computing capacity at home than I have time to fully utilize to do much that is very interesting. It is difficult to get the day job and the startup bootstrapping and a bit of R&R and have space capacity to fully build out even a couple of the cool ideas I have thought of for the home machines.

How the hell do you know what the CEO is worth? Most workers most places I have ever been employed are not interested in doing more than the minimum to keep their jobs. Few care about the company or the product or whether it will be able to keep them employed in the future. It is a CEO's job to think and plan around all of these things and much much more. Most workers could not remotely do what a good CEO does. Also the vast majority of the CEOs of the world do not make 10000 times or ever 10x what their average worker does, especially in most technology companies. Whatever their compensation package is it is negotiated with the hiring committee which is generally the board of the company and senior company people. If they do not think a given CEO candidate is worth some large package of compensation they will in no wise offer it as they have no financial stake in such over compensation if it really is more than they believe the individual is worth as CEO to the company. The compensation they do offer reflects what the market will bear, how much they have to offer to draw the kind of CEO they believe will make and keep the company successful.

You and I have no right whatsover to second guess that compensation package nor any other privately arrived at voluntary financial agreement for employing anyone. It is pure naked envy to do so. Get a life.

In a sane world a strike at the busiest time of year would be seen as a clear case of extortion and would not be legal. Such nuttiness will add incentive to greater replacement of human workers by automation.

Bit company bootlicker? No, simply no fan of extortion and someone sensible enough to know that no one owes me a job just by virtue of my existing. I am a huge fan of actual freedom of people and groups to voluntarily interact with each other to mutual benefit. But I don't consider breaking a contract and demanding another under an extortion situation to be voluntary interaction so much or reasonable behavior. At the very least in a sane world I would expect the company to be able to fire all people doing this at its first convenience.

Look around you if you are in the US. How many "well nourished adults" do you see? Well fed yes but that is not at all the same thing. Go to your average grocery story and count the number of isles and what percentage of them contain actual food, much less healthy food. People generally are not well nourished in the US. Also it is a known fact that various micro-nutrients, hormones, types of nutrient uptake and so on deteriorate as we age, starting about at a bit after 40 for most people. Note, the world wide population is aging rapidly. So if you want reasonably healthy and functional people it seems rather obvious you want to supplement various things that deteriorate with age.

I would not care about such biased research in an actually free country where I can purchase and consume whatever vitamins and supplements I wish. But in a country on its way to government controlled medicine and with a powerful FDA this could doom me to "officially approved" opinions in this and other medical manners. I took the time to find a good longevity research group that did substantial over time blood work and other testing regarding recommended supllementation. The end experiential result is that I felt 10 years younger in terms of energy and mental focus and general health. So I don't really give a damn how many official studies say there is nothing to it. I know better.

Congress has been using its Constitution granted power to "regulate interstate commerce" in absurd fashion to gain more and more power over all aspects of our lives for at least 100 years. In this case there is a genuine and direct instance of states interfering with interstate commerce to attempt to ban or penalize products from being sold in the state that local business and political interests may not like. This is a legitimate instance in the since that is what the Founders actually intended. So why doesn't Congress act?

The last thing S. Korea or the world needs is caving to more nuclear power hysteria. Nuclear power safety record to date is three orders of magnitude better than coal and 2 orders of magnitude better than oil and gas. Yet everyone goes hysterical. And that is with so much hysteria, starting in the 70s, that no designs that are more modern can be approved for building in most countries. We are running 30-50 yr old designs. Fukushima reactor was nearly 40 years old and scheduled for decommission mere weeks after the once in 300 years mega disaster hit the region. Modern nuclear plant designs are failproof for such events and some designs produce 95% less nuclear waste. What waste they do produce has a half life 100 years instead of on the order of 10000 years. Yet their is too much hysteria to build them. Nuclear is also cost competitive with oil and gas despite the hysteria hugely driving up all costs of building and running a plan far beyond sane levels.

Oh, nuclear power also puts no CO2 into the atmosphere.

So if you want a future of clean, safe, and cheap enough power then go nuclear. At least until solar reaches grid parity which proponents say is not likely for 20-30 years.

Also if you started later in the game of wiring up access then you start with more and better tech options than countries that started earlier. This helps tremendously.

One thing that is likely to cure the wired portion is the work that noted that you can get 1 Gbps over twisted copper over the distance from the pole to the home. This makes bringing fiber everywhere much much easier if it pans out.

Actually it has more to do with government interference in the market and the way spectrum was licensed and then sold at high costs by the FCC. As a result at one time there were like 300 little fiefdoms of bandwidth in cellular traffic. Which is one reason we tend to lag on cellular and one of the reasons WiMax and friend don't catch on for wireless broadband throughout a citywide area. Too many companies have paid to much for spectrum that they nickle and dime us to recoup. On the cable stuff the monopolies granted in an area are very anti-competitive. So a Comcast can charge like 97% profit rates for home internet.

The answer to the existing problems is most certainly not more regulation. It is getting government as out of the business and dropping some of the monopolies.

Read a bit about dash and what it does and doesn't do. Much as I admire Stallman the man is into some serious polemics (otherwise known as FUD) at times.

For instance read:
http://www.zdnet.com/ubuntu-extends-unity-dash-search-shrugs-off-criticism-7000021869/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/12/richard-stallman-calls-ubuntu-spyware-because-it-tracks-searches/

Has Stallman head of Machine Learning and its use to improve search results? How does this occur without training data from actual searches over time? As long as it is anonymized at the recording end I don't have an issue.