Shouldn't maintainers of compromised systems be held liable for skimping on security?

A long while back, after getting into Python development, I learned to always use the expand tab option (which always puts in the correct number of spaces to reach the tab stop when you hit tab) and never looked back.

Yeah. This guy's boss is an ass hat. The analogy involves a contractor. If that contractor wall-builder has employees, no, they don't actually work for free. Meanwhile, in addition to the labor rates the contractor charges, they'll have overhead for business operation, risk, and profit margin. So if this guy's ass hat boss is expecting that, then he should expect to pay a lot more for the work. Idiot.

There's a fifth level for ads. They create a background awareness such that when the demand does materialize, and you are presented an array of choices to satisfy the demand, you pick the advertised thing, simply because it seems most familiar. This is, in fact, one of the more powerful impacts of advertising.

The Free Software movement is not about money.

I know Henry. He's an enterprise storage guy. My guess is that he was coming from the perspective of enterprise storage builders. Which is to say, the Backblaze data may be a fine review of the experience consumers are likely to have with hard drives, it's a terrible review of what enterprise storage platform makers would do and what their buyers would expect. Whether or not that's an appropriate response to Backblaze, who intentionally and haphazardly uses consumer drives in their systems, is its own question. But what is certainly true is that you won't experience these kinds of failures from Tier 1 storage manufacturers (e.g., IBM, NetApp, EMC, Hitatchi Data Systems, et al). So in that particularly biased way, the study is indeed "deeply flawed".

No, the law hasn't changed at all. But that's not what they're referring to here. Amazon ships the item to a local dispatch point, and holds the final leg of the shipment until the last possible minute. If that final order doesn't materialize, Amazon is being charged for the charge to the local distribution point (and back).

iPhone 4 and newer iPhone battery replacement is fairly trivial:

1: Buy a battery and a pentalobe driver or bit from dealextreme or ebay for about $10
2: Uscrew the two case screws
3: Slide the back cover off
4: Unscrew the battery connector screw
5: Replace the battery and reassemble the back cover

I've done it about once a year on my iPhone 4, once the average recharge interval goes from about five days to about three days.

Huh? "myfirstname.mylastname@myemailprovider.com" is my account on every computer in the world as far as I am concerned. If someone else fraudently registered it, they can take me to court and see how well the court receives their fraud. Not well, in any non-barbaric country, I am sure.

Hint: mainstream.

No, you must be thinking of 1970's stuff. Integrated circuits and surface-mounted components were mainstream by late 1980's.

We've sent more spacecraft to Mars than any other planet. We've had space stations with sustained life-support environments for quite a while. The Apollo stuff on the other hand started pretty much from scratch as far as space-faring goes.

Yes, but it was all-new tech back then. It's not so much about science and research anymore, just about finance and engineering to pull this off.

Not to mention, in Asimov's world, robots were self-aware.

You're letting your imagination get away from you. If you are an insurance company, and a patient presents to you with a potential in $500K+ in medical expenses, you'd want to unbook that risk as quickly and as affordably as possible.