The first report was bullshit by some nobody to make money, nothing more and nothing less. This is more of the same bullshit to make bogeymen, and Russia has been a good target lately. I have worked in IT security for nearly 3 decades, so yes I do have some knowledge.

The 1.2 billion "credentials" was nothing to worry about (see disclaimer below), and still isn't. Hackers move massive lists of email addresses all the time, and try to run brute force attacks all the time. We block hundreds of thousands of these attacks every day. The majority are [email_addr@domain] with a password of 'password1'. Most of the time these are easy to see, as neither the user or domain exist on the targeted servers. Even the legit addresses are easy to detect, because hackers will use the top 25 worst passwords (just like you can find in articles every year, no I'm not kidding). Rarely do I ever see anything complex, like .00001% of the time rare, where there is actually a worm running on the back end (think John the Ripper).

If I was a conman and wanted to make fast cash, I could start dumping all of these email addresses to a DB, and say "Oh Noez! This email account is haxxored! When in reality, there is no such compromise. To fluff numbers, I hash 'password1' in SHA, MD5, CRYPT, and maybe even use plain text. 300 million accounts has now given me a claim of 1.2 billion 'credentials', and you can hopefully see that the claim is complete shit! I can gather that 300 million addresses in a week without breaking a sweat.

Disclaimer. You should be changing passwords for anything you care about frequently. 8 character passwords every 90 days, 14-16 character every 6 months. If you are using a strong password and are up for a change, go do so, no big deal. Since I write this shit for policies regularly, a "strong" password consists of the following.
1. No dictionary words, proper names or common acronyms in forward or reverse.
2. No QWERTY keys, including qazwsx, 54321, etc...
3. Contains at least 1 special character, 1 number, 1 upper and 1 lower case character.
4. Is not 'p@SSw0rd' or some other l337 speak that would be in a cracklib dictionary, and there is plenty there.

There are obviously restrictions in some places, so if you can't use certain characters make a longer password. If you can't make a longer password change the password more frequently. The majority of 'hackers' are script kiddies, not hackers. If you make things hard, they find a different target. There are numerous people out there that use 'password1' for their password, don't be one of them.

As you said, this is clearly a double standard. I believe your use of "sued" is incorrect, because there was no stop of a civil trial just criminal. It's not an easy thing to change when corruption is this deep in the legal system, but people need to get out and start protesting and getting people on ballots to oust the cronies.

I wish I could say this was just a training issue, but clearly this goes well beyond a training issue. The DA just let all cops know that if they drive distracted "too bad" even if it costs a completely innocent person their life.

Chrome is is just like IE for more operating systems, no thanks I won't touch the stuff. Rating things on a combination of user security and functionality, Opera is hard to beat with Firefox in a close 2nd. I don't care how fast Chrome can load pages, I don't sit and watch memes flash by all day.

A viable alternative is that they found and use the same back doors available to the NSA. It's speculation either way, because there are no independent reviews of Microsoft's source code and shipped binaries. The released binaries may not even match the source they provided for review.

I didn't say it was bad to have some statistics, I said it was bad to have this study focus on one statistic. You know as well as I do that if the numbers are off, people against legalization will jump all over the study just to wreak havoc on the legalization. Illegal marijuana was (and in many places still is) a huge revenue source for both the criminal side and the law enforcement side (and yes, we would probably agree that the line between those two elements is crossed very often).

Yeah, and the ATF and DEA were still raiding shops as recently as 2 years ago in spite of California's laws legalizing marijuana. Normalization is not recent.

I think you meant this as sarcasm, but that one is mostly correct. These cars are not doing cross country trips, so claiming a few thousand miles of roadway is probably an overestimate. They drive the same roads and areas over and over and over again.

I have been tempted to carry a bucket of chaff and just see how well a Google car handles it, but then again rain and snow are problems so the experiment is really not needed.

The point here is that a human can notice things that a current auto driving car can not. Not all humans pay attention, but for the percentage that do you can tell when a paper bag is blowing around on the freeway. Human reaction to those things is generally measured and controlled much better than a google car. In time, I am sure it will get better but you need to discuss what is there today, not what we wish it had and are working for.

I'm not sure how much you drive around California, but if you ever do you will see why this one is an issue. Many traffic lights in Mountain view for example are angled downward, so you have to be at a certain distance to see the color. There is one by Shoreline and Central that you can't see until you are about 40-50 feet away (for those interested, east bound traffic at the fire station).

Compare that issue with scanning for a red octagon pattern, and is should become obvious why stop signs are much easier to do. Traffic lights would be easy if they broadcast a signal, but they don't.

Overall, I'm not against self driving cars as long as we can choose between modes of operation. I think we are a long way off in terms of technology to make them safe in all environments, that does not imply even decades. I am mostly concerned with the health impact of all those radars and sensors broadcasting everywhere, but that's mostly due to my own ignorance (I have not taken any time to study since they are extremely rare).

I'll guess allergies, and building those little straw men triggered them.

I won't argue that the war on drugs is a huge failure, but that's a different argument in my opinion. The primary argument here is whether or not marijuana legalization has reduced deaths from prescriptions.

Given legalization is extremely new, the conclusion of the article and study is grossly premature. Making matters worse in my opinion, is that the study only looks at a single element of drugs, and not the complete impact.

As with my opening paragraph, I'm not pro drug war or anti marijuana. I simply think that these types of studies would be better to include other impacts, because in 3 years the stats may show something completely different. Studies should include things like crime reduction and savings to law enforcement due to crime reduction, local economy impact (Dorito sales!!), overall health of patients receiving and using medical marijuana, etc...

The war on drugs is a failure for many reasons, and single impact studies won't flesh all of those out.

Maybe, but I don't think that any real discussion could be had about our megacity future based on this type of video game. Notice there is no food growing anywhere, very little greenery (think pollution), every inch of terrain was flattened, there was no water, etc..

Don't get me wrong, I think SimCity is a cool game. I don't think it's simulation software, and therein lies the big issue.

What is more hilarious is your ignorance regarding education required for a job(feigned or otherwise). If you have a mechanical engineering degree, you are not going to go out and be a plumber (at least legally in most places). Plumbing requires trade school and certification, not a mechanical engineering degree. As with college, that requires money and time to achieve.

After you get your apprentice certification, you will work on your Journeyman certification, then you will be working toward master certification. None of this will be applied to a PHD.

The hype about STEM is mostly just hype. Society can not function if everyone is a brain surgeon, ever. You need plumbers, welders, mechanics, farmers, textile industry, etc.. etc... and the education for those types of jobs is very different from that of a nuclear physicist.

You forget that aliens are often branded as "science" (minus the fiction of course). Watch a few Discovery and National Graphic TV shows, and remember that those are supposed to be our "educational programming" networks.

Prefixing an argument with "Scientists believe that" is an easy way to dupe people that want to believe they are more intelligent than those other people. That particular appeal to authority is used quite often with good effect.

You are attacking the wrong target. The intelligent people repackage these and create new rhetoric to convince the ignorant that they work. Normally they can become pretty wealthy before they are told to stop, which only happens after enough of the ignorant petition grievances.

I don't judge Canada poorly by people from Windsor, those were the people I referred to as mostly like Americans. IMHO the worst part of Canada is in French Quebec, and not because of guns or violence but because the people there hate anyone that's not a French speaker from Quebec (and have no problem spitting on people and telling them to get the fuck out of Quebec).

My family is mostly blue collar workers from Detroit, and most people in Windsor are similar blue collar types.

No offense intended to any Canadians, I spent a good amount of time in Windsor when I lived in Michigan and long time family friends are from Windsor. Better beer than the US, and not much different than folks in the US (minus the "aboot time" and "eh", but we have people in the US with their own quirks).

The study is by the Council of Canadian Academies. An immediate question of bias should pop into your head with that little fact. There was exactly one person on the council not from Canada, who happened to be from London.

Where did Canada really rank #1 (p19)? 93% said they were interested in scientific discoveries and technological developments. Big whoop to that, I know lots of people believe "The Big Bang Theory" is where they should learn science. Interest levels help for sure, but if there is no market for scientists then they will have Big Bang for entertainment and learn jobs that are actually available. This brings us to their other number one.

#1 with tertiary education. Considering that they rank 22nd with the percentage of population working in science and technology, most of that tertiary education is _NOT_ in science or technology.

There are some very questionable measures overall, but we can skip those for now. I think the most telling is that the numbers they are comparing are to other countries from 2005 answers to similar questions. Discussing GMO today compared to 9 years ago is going to provide drastically different results in all countries (one example of a bad statistic). If you are doing a study and claiming you are now smarter than someone, at least test them at their current level too.