To be fair, you could also say that it's an insult to Librarians to claim Google is equivalent. I don't call doctor's the "The webmd before webmd" after all because there can be additional value in receiving an answer from someone knowledgeable over receiving data.

I live in a town with a population of 70k in the UK and have had 76mb fibre for a couple of years; so no, no just in large cities or even large towns.

I sure hope you followed your own advice and stayed away from any career that could notably affect anyone else based on the piss poor logic applied here.

Between the extortionate prices they gouged Australians for to escape the shooting, and crap like this ..

Oh come on. They have an algorithm that detects high demand and increases prices. It's not like someone was sitting there watching the news and salivating at the idea of ripping off terrified Aussies. If that surge pricing actually got more drivers into the city, and more people out, then it achieved exactly what was intended.

I agree with just about every other criticism so there's no need to try and imagine up new attacks like this.

e.g. how come my local chinese food deliverery guy uses an electric scooter but not a segway? 'cause the scooter is a few hundred bux at best.

A segway would be a rubbish delivery vehicle for fast food, perhaps for something like delivering the post where you're stopping constantly and don't have time to reach a high speed between stops. Segways could be a couple of hundred quid and they'd still likely be a failure. I can already walk, and although the segway could speed me up a little the hassle of charging it, being unable to use stairs, avoiding obstacles in tight spaces and having to secure it when I need to leave it to enter buildings would make it a massive pain in the ass. If I can't walk it, or don't have time, then a car/motorbike/scooter/bicycle can all get me there faster than a segway.

duh, it doesn't have to be complicated

The only people who think it doesn't need to be complicated are the simple; any method of splitting the Artic and its resources would have winners and losers, and the losers are likely to oppose it. Any fool can come up with a way of splitting land up, getting it accepted by dozens or hundreds of countries...

Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them

Is Youtube a torrent site? The summary is pretty clear that it was the status of torrent sites that stopped them, so it neither relates to Youtube or does anything to suggest they wouldn't do something similar with 'legal' video sharing sites.

Google, being in a monopolist position may not be in a position where it can extort entire countries by just walking away (which it is doing in Spain). With current mood being like this across the EU, it just may trigger a pan-EU response.

You can't be a monopoly when you don't even offer a product in the country anymore! It isn't extorting Spain by no longer offering Google news there, anymore than it is extorting any other country it doesn't offer a dedicated service in. Existing, and alternative, operators can contest the market without competition from Google and unless it abuses its monopoly in search to stop them filling that niche they're doing nothing wrong.

That being said, are people too stupid/too lazy to just go to the newspapers' websites and browse the articles?

Well some people are stupid enough to think using news aggregators is stupid/lazy so anything is possible... Google's entire business model is collecting information together so you don't have to search through hundreds of seperate sources.

Any good programmer should be able to program on any level from assembler to C and C++ to Python and shell-scripts and up.

And every good butcher should be a great farmer, every good soldier an expert weapon maker, every good driver a world class mechanic ;)...

I learnt assembler, I think it was valuable to do so and I'd still suggest it to others, but it's nonsense to suggest that you need to know it to be a good programmer.

But a bird is made up of meat and feather...whereas the drone could potentially contain titanium or other such strong material. It could contain explosives too. So size shouldn't matter.

What on earth is the point you are making. He said drones shouldn't be near airports then made the valid point that a typical drone would almost certainly not cause a crash when hitting a large plane. Obviously if you strap a bomb to one the calculation changes, but then so would the calculation if you shoved a grenade up a ducks ass and managed to hit a plane with it! Neither point is counter to his post.

Your statement seems to imply that a felon is some sort of untouchable non-human.

Only as much as your statement implies you can't resist trying to mold other people's points into hyperbolic strawmen! He wasn't suggesting anything about felons other than that some people would consider drug charges a non-issue and yet would reject immediately other types of felon. You yourself used violent crime as a line in your example, should I assume you consider them untouchable non-humans?

Yes, it's pretty high precisely because of all the people like yourself with such an attitude.

Anyone with high school level reading skills would be able to understand that his post was about how things are, not how he thinks they should be. He even suggested that more 'enlightened' countries might be more forgiving. Unfortunately you, and the people who modded you +4, failed to understand his point before railing against it (at least that's /. SO I suppose).

A password doesn't need to be overly complex to avoid brute force cracking, just sufficiently long. Most people are incapable of remember past 7 to 10 random character sequences. And any password system with limited character lengths is insufficient against brute force attacks.

A secure password depends largely on what you're priorities are. Personally I wouldn't put brute force attacks too high on my concerns list. My workplace locks out accounts after 3 incorrect attempts. Personally I think one of the biggest priorities with passwords should be ensuring that, even if every password isn't incredibly secure, you don't use the same password in multiple locations.

I'm probably more likely to have my password taken by a hack on a server than by someone brute forcing it. If I care enough about it then I'd rather have 2 factor protection (google authenticator for example) than a strong password. Beyond that I priotise having passwords I can remember/workout for every website/application which is unique rather than having fewer stronger passwords.

Laws have existed for various odd things in the UK in the past, and certain examples like that and being allowed to kill Scots within York's walls at night were claimed to still be technically valid in widely spread urban legends. IIRC there isn't any law allowing the murder of someone in the UK that is still valid.