Every time someone has tried to be the nice guy its backfired. You see something like this? Keep your mouth shut and forget it even happened.

It doesn't. The parent said our space program sucked. I was pointing out that for a program that sucks it does some pretty awesome stuff.

It is seldom the veracity of facts that the debate is over; it is their significance. But that happens to be where this falls idea falls short, because misinterpretation of facts is where the most potent misinformation comes from.

Case in point, "vaccine injury" -- which is a real thing, albeit very rare. Anti-vaccine activists point to the growing volume of awards made by the US "Vaccine Court" (more accurately called "The Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims") as proof that vaccine injuries are on the rise.

It is a verifiable fact that the volume of awards has grown since the early years of the program. That is absolutely and unquestionably true. However, that this is proof vaccine injuries is gross misinterpretation, because the "Vaccine Court" program is no fault. You don't actually have to show the defendant *caused* an "injury", you only have to (a) show the child got sick after being vaccinated and (b) find a doctor to sign off on a medical theory by which the child's illness *might* have been caused by the vaccination.

Since you don't have to actually prove injury in "Vaccine Court", the rise in cases and awards doesn't know vaccine injuries are on the rise. All that is necessary is that more people think that their child's illness was caused by vaccinations, and the low burden of proof will automatically ensure more awards.

And so there you have it. A perfectly factual claim can be cited in a way that leads people to preposterous conclusions.

And the thing wrong in your post which others have not already pointed out is that many phones come with the ability to add a wireless coil of choice already, even older phones like the 3 generations old Galaxy S3 which has a pair of contacts right above the battery. That isn't even taking into account phones like the HTC One which has had wireless charging since its early models.

Well, I know this sounds weird, but during a conflict the U.S. Military and Russia's and China's are not going to be relying on commercial weather satellites. Something about they possibly being pwned by the enemy. Militaries worry about these sorts of things, clearly you have never been in one.

Yeah, yer right, why would the Air Force and Navy need weather satellites.

Hmmm...so those 50,000 people marching through Moscow's government district in memory of the pol, and braving Putin's secret police and other semi-evolved Simians, are doing what, exactly? Going to a picnic?

Stop watching TV, it is bad for you.

It's a cop-out if you say "laziness" as if it explains anything. That's like the police finding a crime scene and concluding that the gun killed the man, and then packing up their things and going home.

We need to figure out why people are lazy and check if we can address it. Maybe we're making it too difficult?

Here's an example: Backups. Even I didn't have a good backup regime until Apple came up with Time Machine. It's just too much stupid work. But someone sat his ass down and asked the right question. And that's not "why are these fuckers so fucking lazy?", but "how can we make it easier for the users?".

That exactly is the point. If people see our work as an obstacle - maybe every once in a while we should climb down from our high horse and admit that they could be right?

Messaging apps are driven purely by networks. If all your friends switched to Threema, you'd do it too. If nobody does it, you're unlikely to be the first. Security doesn't matter enough to lose contact with all your friends.

Yeah, cause Mars Exploration Rover, GRAIL, Dawn, New Frontiers, Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Spitzer and Kepler telescopes, all those things are boring science. Only nerds find things like discovering Earthlike exoplanets or determining the origin of the Moon thrilling. They should get their own news site so the rest of us don't have listen to stuff that only matters to them.

This is what I said, but we should be clear there is zero resistive heating *until* the superconductivity breaks down. There is a critical current above which a superconducting wire ceases to superconduct (for complicated reasons).

Again not necessarily. For example the web page and the download server might not be the same, in which case it is not true that being able to modify the download necessarily means you can also modify the webpage checksum.

Another example is when people download and stage a large file on their local network, which is very common practice. If the server on their local network, in a sense the file is modified "in transit", but the malware needn't be anything special or exotic. I'd go so far as to say if you stage anything on your own servers you ought to check its hash religiously before using it.

Yet another example of "not necessarily" is monitoring. It wouldn't be hard to automatically monitor the download page for unauthorized modifications. Of course you should monitor the downloads themselves for modifications, but that takes more time. You can monitor the hashes on the download page continuously from another computer, automatically shutting the page down if anything changes. That wouldn't prevent your download page from unauthorized modifications but it would contain the consequences and it's very easy to do.

This is what I mean by it's the stuff that goes *around* a security measure that makes it work. A hash doesn't do anything unless people check the hash. That includes people who are hosting the file. I often think of this as a kind of diminishing returns exercise; since people often have spent *no* effort on preparing to respond to being hacked, often the best marginal expenditure is in that direction.

It's well established that a person may become an "involuntary public figure" -- someone who does not intentionally thrust himself into the public sphere, but whose actions (or inactions) a reasonable person would expect to draw public scrutiny.

So the question is whether becoming a "revenge-porn" impressario is something a reasonable person would expect to draw public scrutiny. You be the judge.

True, but last time I read up on this their superconductivity broke down when they carried high currents. They're superconductive enough to be useful, for example making very powerful magnets for NMR machines, but not capable of carrying unlimited current.