In areas where there really is mass computing (i.e., heavy number crunching), this statement is actually true.

Microcomputers slaughtered mainframes in the marketplace because there was not widespread network for information transfer that mainframes could benefit from. Now we have this network and people are moving towards centralized computing facilities (the "cloud"). For physical goods, such distribution networks have been in place even longer so there's no economic benefit from switching to hyperlocal manufacturing.

We live in an economy of mass production because it is way, way cheaper per unit to produce stuff in very large quantities. Even if 3D printing should become the way of manufucturing in the future, we'll still go the big-box retailer for our shoes and get a 3D-printed one from the shelf (or order them online) rather than printing them at home.

You can put up a bounty for this bug here. Right now, Bountysource accepts only Google Wallet and Paypal, but support for Bitcoins is in the works.

The main motivation behind SUSY is that it solves the fine-tuning problem associated with electroweak symmetry breaking. But if SUSY itself is fine-tuned, this solution creates the same problems that it was intended to solve.

BTW: The largest constraint on SUSY partner masses does not come from the $9bn LHC, but from the ACME collaboration's measurement of the electron electric dipole moment, a $6M tabletop atomic physics experiment.

Go to a good university in Europe that doesn't have tuition fees.

Death is a quite rare thing; ignoring age and other factors, the probability of someone to die within five years is less than 5%. Even when you belong to the top 20% in terms of risk, the probability of death is just 15%, so you're much more likely to be alive than dead after this time. And for what it's worth, the biomarkers are strongly correlated with other factors like "does this person have cancer?", so that in the end the authors say that their new model is just 4% better than previously used models.

As far as I can see, they do not rely on a specific IE vulnerability for inserting the payload, but they rely on a specific (and fixed) Windows vulnerability to bypass ASLR, which is a crucial component of EMET. They claim in a footnote that the "IE flaw could be modified to leak the base address of a DLL in another way", but they do not provide a working exploit that does so.

Further issues:

1. The claim that theories should contain certain symmetries because of aesthetic perceptions is misguided. The standard model, the most successful physical theory ever written down by mankind, is ugly as shit.

2. Symmetry does not protect reality from divergence.

3. It is wrong that without the Higgs, there would be no mass and we all would die. For the gauge bosons of the weak force, this would be true, but all leptons and quarks surrounding us can simply be described by a conventional mass term, as this doesn't break local gauge invariance.

World record for simulation of classical physics: 10 billion particles
World record for simulation of quantum physics: 42 particles

If I had to run a simulation of an entire universe, I'd rather not make it quantum.

This is not possible. In order to be able to answer the question to the interviewer, you have to store the information about which way you went somewhere (e.g., in your spin). This creates entanglement between your position and your spin and destroys the interference pattern.

This guy's Wikipedia page basically only mentions that he's famous for being the victim of the alledged attack. So he's been chosen as a target because he is famous for being the target of the same attack? I'd assume a garden variety mass phising attempt is more likely.

I totally agree with your statement in general; but in today's society being a well-rounded individual mandates some sort of programming skills. For instance, how can you possibly understand what the free software movement is about when you have never written a single line of code in your life?

Is it? Is anyone besides Apple switching from GCC to LLVM as their default compiler? Are more people having trouble to compile stuff using GCC because developers use LLVM extensions than vice versa? Is there any other sign that LLVM is actually replacing GCC?

Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.

I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.