"As the representative of the Chinese government, I can categorically deny the Chinese government's use of Baidu for a highly effective attack on GitHub. We did not make use of this capacity, which can be used to quickly and efficiently shut down any networked target at will.

As China is a responsible citizen of the world, we would never use specially trained teams of professional PLA hackers to provide a demonstration of our significant power.

Although China is a global superpower and leader in computer science education, and we certainly have the ability to call down multiple, simultaneous, and devastating defensive DDoS's, (a tactic that we refer to as the Great Worker's and Peasants' Rain of Steel), we are a peace loving nation who does not resort to aggression to pursue our policies.

We condemn in the strongest terms this attack, although we do note its effectiveness and our preparation to do battle on these terms, if such a thing was necessary to maintain the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China from similar aggression.

Thank you."

I suppose, but I'd rather take my time asking you your knowledge of key libraries and interfaces and more complicated concepts, rather than asking you to code me a sort.

If you really wanted to test someone's rote memorization of the Big O notation values of various algorithms, then just ask them to give you some examples of n or n log n or whatever. You do need to understand the reason that a sort is better than another, and it's nice to have a set of sorts handy for general purpose use, but really, is that what you want to ask about in a limited time?

I usually don't bother. You can look that shit up in books or on the net. More to the point, you should be looking up that shit on the internet if you need to code your own, because there is a decent chance someone has written a better sort or search algorithm for the type of data or structures that you are working with than the ones you memorized in CS 101 for general purpose utilization. You're a developer, not a CS academic researcher. Go to the net, check the benchmarks on some libraries and then get back to coding the actual special sauce of your business.

Why? Linux didn't come from some company. It came from one person, originally. That person happened to be a male Finn, but it could have been a black woman who was interested in writing operating systems.

Einstein couldn't get a job as a professor, so he joined the Patent Office. Did that stop him from devising special and general relativity?

Sure, writing code for companies is the well trod path for coding, but you don't need that in the age of Open Source to get your good code out there. If you have what it takes, you can make it happen. It will take work, but that work pays off much more than being lumped in some group who needs an opportunity spoon-fed to them.

Yes, it could cause what we'd think of as a "nuclear winter". Which is really how it would do most of it's global damage. The ashfall would also be off the charts, but likely confined to North America.

Basically take the entire Yellowstone park, dig out every cubic centimeter of dirt and rocks from the surface down to the lava reservoir and just throw all of that into the stratosphere. All at once. Of course you don't want to be in the radius where the heavy stuff starts coming down on you, and that will probably be a number of entire states under significant debris.

The rest of the world will merely need to deal with the sun being blotted out for a few years. This is what happened when Mount Tambora erupted which was only a "normal" VEI-7 eruption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1...

Spoilers: The Year Without A Summer (1816) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...

A supervolcano is VEI-8+

Note that they are supposed to be 1/10,000ish year events. Thereabouts, that seems sort of high. While Yellowstone might not go off any time soon, there are other places that might much sooner.

The Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago is thought to have caused a genetic bottleneck in humans were we were cut down to the mere tens of thousands of people in the entire world.

Toba being principally responsible for this bottleneck is disputed, but it should also be pointed out that humans at that time were fairly mobile, so their strategy for survival would probably not be possible for most of us. Our ancestors at the time didn't rely on agriculture and with humans only in the millions in population, we could have probably foraged and moved.

Humans today... well let's just say that our urban populations would not have the ability to switch hunting grounds.

I'm not sure any of the known calderas are actually thought to be ready to blow in the near future, but Yellowstone was supposed to go off in 600,000ish year intervals and I believe we're overdue. It doesn't mean it will go off any time soon, just that it's starting to look like it is time again, assuming that the characteristics of the lava reservoir are similar to last time.

It would probably not cause humans to go extinct, but it could come close. It would probably be the equivalent of a fairly substantial nuclear war.

Deaths would be in the billions, although mostly from secondary effects like crop failure and disease. And yeah, you could kiss the Western USA goodbye.

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.

This had better end in a Steel Cage match.

PC Survivor Series. Make it happen.

Actually, probably not. They'll just find another evil dance partner.

"I didn't know what to make of the Comcast - Time Warner merger, but then I dug deeper. "

"How so?"

"You know my crippled mother? She really wanted to watch Game of Thrones, and Comcast remains committed to showing Game of Thrones."

"I did not know that."

"Yeah, and you know cute little Sally?"

"The stripper down at the club?"

"Yeah. Comcast has committed to showing soft core porn between the hours of 2 and 4 am."

"I remember that's something she's really been aspiring to do."

"And if the Comcast merger goes through, she might well get her chance."

"Hmm. I guess I have a lot to think about."

Even with a few trucks in the yard, they probably made better use of those trucks than the people in the city made of the disposable crap that they use and throw away every day. Those specific trucks, going on what I used to see on farms, can be anywhere from 10 to 50 years old, depending on the farmer's ability to repair them enough so that they keep running.

The question is, then, why would any one care the Romney paid no taxes, assuming that what he did was legal?

We pass laws for tax breaks for specific reasons, like encouraging this, or discouraging that. If Romney reduced is tax due to zero, then didn't those programs simply do what they were supposed to? If not, shouldn't we attack the programs and not the person who is just doing those things that the law was crafted to encourage him to do?

If some rich guy paid no tax in return for opening ten orphanages, are we still going to complain he paid no taxes? Is he a saint, or is he an evil tax avoider?

Depends on how much extraction can actually affect things, but I'd say that the longer it was before the quake was "supposed to happen", the less likely it would be that an extraction event could cause it.

In other words, can we actually undermine 100 years worth of stability with what we are doing now? I don't actually know, but I do know that geologic forces tend to be measured in terms that make human capabilities look positively Mickey Mouse.

In places like California, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a less than 100 year event. So in those places, you could certainly get a 7.0 earthquake for less effort. Could you frack your way to a 7.0 in a much more geologically stable area? The answer is likely, "No".

Too late.

Pakistan is *allowing* us to do this. Do you really think they are not? Pakistan has nuclear weapons, they may have more trouble getting their big gun to us, but they could do it. Sure, we'd turn their urban areas into radioactive glass if they did use them on us, but don't think for a second that they are a powerless puppet state unable to deal with parity with the Big Bad USA.

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his."

If you can actually fight a war with no risk to yourself, that's not a problem. You can suggest that it makes us more likely to start wars, but that's not a reason to allow our people to die, it's a reason for us to improve our ethics to the point where we don't need to have people take bullets to the head to make us consider the cost of war. That is what actual progress is.