Since when does one (roughly) side of a controversy deserve much more examination and aspersions as to whether they are "bought" or not than another? Does anyone seriously believe the pro-AGW folks all are totally un-invested scholars speaking only pure objective truth as they best see it? Give me a break.

Everyone that has some doubt about the official AGW story or claims has been roundly vilified for quite some time now. They have been compared to flat earthers or young earth folks for bothering to voice an opinion. This is not the stance of any sort of enlightened discourse or inquiry. It is a concerted effort to silence and shame critics of a politically aligned position. It has almost nothing to do with real science.

What happened to "free as in freedom, not free as in beer"? It is not true that open source can always be acquired without charge when it comes to new open source software or customization and extensions.

Do not buy this crap without full control over when it is and is not recording and without full knowledge of how any information it gains is being used and by whom.

The government is hacking every router, server, and computerized device in the country. Yet they will lean "for our protection" on car manufacturers and vehicle computerization. I don't believe this is nearly as much concern. You want better security? Open the sources and especially open what the government is doing to subvert and work around security measures and end them. Otherwise? STFU.

He was the equivalent of an ISP within the darknet (TOR, etc.). This ruling is a very nasty precedent as it says an ISP or at least ones the government does not approve of is liable for everything done using its services. That is profoundly chilling. It is another backdoor for PIPA, SOPA and interminable variants attempting to make exactly this kind of ISP/common carrier liability law. It needs to be opposed with all possible tools and means. It is that serious.

A CS class is a meritocracy. You can either do the work or you cannot. There is no way to force representation of various groups of people including females and minorities to what we out of our hats think it should be. The effort to make it so is braindead.

Statistically women excel at intuition and non-linear thinking which can be much more useful is say theoretical physics that high spatial ability. Guys don't perform well when there testosterone is low either.

Women are just as brilliant as men in about the same percentage. And to advance sate of the art in many fields of science does in fact require brilliance. I don't know if the sexism or ignorance is more offensive.

Driverless allows high efficiency very small people movers. Buses are per person mile very inefficient in energy use, pollution and especially convenience. They are only efficient in the first two when full to capacity which they are only during major commute rushes. The future of self-driving vehicles is highly flexible, electric powered, on demand minimal vehicles for the job. Anything else is nonsense.

Bullshit. We don't care about thinks that never have been called "crimes" in the first place. If it doesn't involve any form of initiation of force against another person or their property or of negligent harm to another person then it is not a crime in a sane society. As much of 80% of prison population is is for such non-crime. Many of the longer term prisoners are there for committing a non-crime 3 times back in the three strikes and you are out days. Let people out of cages that committed no real crimes and never put anyone in for such again.

Boo Hoo there are not enough prisons. Tear them down and celebrate while doing so. At up to $40,000 per prisoner per year we are saving a lot having less prisoners.

Why in the world is this the business of SEC? Why would we not expect people to create computer program agents to assist them in their goals when the possibility of such is exactly what makes most apps including Twitter possible to start with?

Oracle's pricing is predatory nonsense. Anyone worth their salt has moved to MySQL, postgresql and most importantly NoSQL databases. Only old school IT is likely to put up with 23K per processor in today's multicore and highly distributed environment. And the last time I worked with Oracle RDBMS it still had a large number of the same warts I hated in their product way back in the 80s.

Just say NO!

"There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security."

Why should I have any conflict of interest with my customers? I make software of type X that I enjoy making and am good at. My customers who want this type of software buy it from me or subscribed to some SaaS arrangement. Where is the conflict of interest? We have largely the same interest. I want to produce this software and keep them as my customers by satisfying their needs and desires for this type of software.

Why should my users control what I produced? I understand it far better than they do after all. Not to mention that I created it and should get some say in its continued existence, form and evolution. If the users could produce and control this software then they wouldn't need to buy it from me in the first place. They would just have done it themselves.

Governments telling producers what to put in their products is indeed a very large problem. But it is not solved by claiming the producer has no rights and that once a product is offered at all then the consumers should have control over it in contradistinction to its producers.

DRM and other content whoring practices limiting the effect of the computer age on us all LOVE streaming. You never own the bits. There is no danger you will rip that DVD. You may be able to rip the box if your are clever enough with whatever encryption protocols are on the stream. And if they don't want you to have anything you have bought they just remove it from the cloud or remove your permission to see it. I love streaming in some ways, don't get me wrong. But I think it has a dark side.

I have actually had hiring managers try to claim they want people with no more than 5 years experience because that codes for how up to date their skills are. No, it doesn't. Some colleges teach little but Java for instance. If the first job or two after was mandating and existing Java stack then it is guaranteed the developer is no more up to date than a more seasoned developer that has seen more environments and has had to learn many more new things. With greater breadth learning new languages and APIs is easier, not harder. You understand more general patterns and abstractions that can be applied to the next thing to learn.

And yes, after a couple of decades proving myself (multiple times) in the trenches of Silly Con Valley I am not going to work as cheaply as a person without as much experience.

But the managers read the latest buzz feed and thing it looks easy and as long as they get a young person who hasn't learned better they will get their project done in super record time with said latest buzz. After a while you have seen that pattern repeat over and over again. With silver hair you have deflected a lot of silver bullets until you no longer expect them to be efficacious.