Actually, even the Wikpedia article you linked gives multiple definitions for toughness, depending on application. Which one is used here remains poorly specified and opens up the possibility of ambiguous marketing platitudes. Now, if they said shear strength was improved overall by a certain percentage, that would be information.

That was my first impression too. How snobby of the French to care about serious matters like politics and current events. How dare they not be as interested in cats and /b.

There certainly is a problem, and separately a snob problem even, but it certainly isn't with the French in TFS.

You mean like water?

Congress just makes the rules. But they cannot enforce it. They can persuade the relevant Federal agencies (and Obama) to do so by various means, but that's part of the politics.

These are the checks and balances. And the things Obama has done are still within their bounds. As an example, Obama hasn't raised the H1B limitations because that's set in law by Congress.

Everyone does it. It's called protectionism, and no country is guilt-free. It's a matter of how smartly it's done. This move? Stupid. Picking a fight with Google (or even trash talking, which this really is) is a really dumb idea. Nothing's really going to come out of this, except for maybe a bit of egg on some world leader's face at a Google-hosted party. Toppling democratically-elected regimes in unstable regions? Brilliant. Chances of success are almost a hundred percent, and the trade benefits are tremendous. It's only called bullying if you're caught doing it and nobody's really looking that way anyway.

My point being, you shouldn't be so surprised political leaders are making lots of patriotic noise. It's what doesn't get into the papers that's the real eye-openers.

Your numbers may very well be true, but the U.S. leads in per capita consumer spending. That means Americans spend more money on products per person than any other country (except the UAE, strangely enough). In contrast, the number for most of Western Europe is around 60% of the U.S.

This is why the U.S. is often considered a special market (consumer products-wise) separate from the rest of the world. The only other market that's considered special is China, but only because of its growth potential due to sheer population numbers.

Now, how much spending is on European products, nobody really knows. But the U.S. (and U.S. companies) does not need Europe to sustain businesses tied to consumer products.

GDP numbers tend to be more relevant for B2B and banks, so it would be stupid if IBM or even Microsoft pulled out of Europe. But Google? Their dollars are advertising dollars, and the ROI on marketing in Europe just doesn't have the same potential. Not that they would want to pull out, as it's lost revenue and certainly opens the door for competition. But to say that Europe is a bigger market for them than the U.S. is flat out wrong.

You really have to wonder whether "those days" were ever around in the first place.

Money always talks. The more money you have, the louder you can be. Even on the internet, which equalizes this a bit, money just goes into disinformation rather than information.

Or instead of water, use lava.

There's a reason for this.

There are only so many hours in a day, and only so many of them spent at work. Workplaces will eventually settle on the most efficient tools. These aren't going to be the most powerful tools or even the simplest to use, but the ones who give people the most bang for their buck.

For communications, there's e-mail, IM, and the phone. For document management, there (should be) CMS. For sharing company documents, there's the internal website. For socializing, there's the water cooler.

Where these tools fit in... well, they don't. It takes more effort ("active champions, community managers, and a strategy to nurture") to make them work than the benefits gained over using the aforementioned methods.

Social sites like Facebook work because the links between people are usually physically separated relative to the importance of the communication (the more important the communication, the farther the physical separation). The physical networks are wide and slow, so the digital version has a purpose by making the networks closer and faster. At work, the physical network is close and fast. There's no need for a digital replacement, especially a complex one.

Disclaimer: We also "use" Yammer at work, but the conent is asinine mostly (at least when it's not someone being passive aggressive).

We should put you in front of Stephen Colbert and a camera and see how well you do listing twin primes.

In any case, it's brown and comes from cows.

Yes and no. On one hand, it wasn't the perfect landing. On the other hand, they waited 10 years for a successful landing. And it happened. That's gotta count for something.

Remember that ESA probe to Mars that died when it got there? These guys could've waited 10 years to find out that their probe crashed into the comet, or overshot it, or some other calamity befell the lander rendering it inoperative.

Instead, they did their science, got their data, and have a chance at doing a bit more in the future. That they couldn't do more is unfortunate, but there's a reason they demarcated certain tasks as primary and put enough juice into the thing to complete all of them.

The probability of abject failure was much higher than the probability of any success, even if imperfect. The fact that this was a partial success, and I would argue it's mostly a success, is worth something.

You're relying an awful lot on the service to do the vetting and the work of ensuring passenger (your) safety. Are you sure they're actually doing what they say they're doing?

A lot of regulations are preventative in nature, rather than reactive in the same sense that a metal gate is preventative, but a closed circuit camera is reactive. You seem to think it's sufficient to just have reactive measures in place.

All the dinosaurs live in Florida and Arizona so we're safe for now.

There are simply too many moving parts to the usable Internet (the WWW). Everything from the browser to the DNS request can be compromised. And the browser itself is complex, speaking at a minimum of three languages (HTML, CSSx, Javascript) which, even if one or two are disabled, may still leak information.

And then, let's talk operating system. Unless your OS air gapped, it probably has holes in it that are exploitable. In fact, anything that interfaces with the network will potentially have exploitable holes. It could even be a side channel attack.

Finally, we get to the router. The router does most of what your computer does: DNS resolution, packet forwarding, etc. If the router is insecure in any way, you're also in trouble. If the router is compromised from the start (phone home, secret log, etc.), it's game over. Worse, unless you're running a DD-WRT router (and even if you are running one), you can't even audit the logic in your router.

If you want the kind of security that TOR promises, you're going to need to secure everything from the router to the browser. And that's hard. Chromebook is the closest thing, and even then you can't completely trust hardware you didn't build yourself.