Maths that accurately describes the physical world is DISCOVERED not "made up". Seriously, read a fucking text book and immunise yourself against that populist nonsense.

So by what metric are Neanderthals extinct, if there are Neanderthals who have living descendants with a measurable amount of their genetic makeup?

There is no living population, large enough to produce additional generations of viable offspring, with a full, or substantial, Neanderthal genome.

That never happened. The NSA tapped Google's fiber without Google's knowledge, but there's no evidence that Google ever willingly participated. As soon as Google found out about the taps, it accelerated a program to get the data on all those fibers encrypted, to lock the NSA out.

Google trades the right to target ads to you in exchange for services, and enables you to opt out of the trade if you want, even providing the necessary tools for you to do it. Google has never given the NSA an "unaccountable back door". See David Drummond's numerous public statements on this issue. From my personal perspective as a Google security engineer, I think it would be virtually impossible for such a back door to exist in Google's systems without my having noticed some trace of it. Take that as you will.

You're coming to this question with a whole bunch of inaccurate assumptions, which are seriously skewing your perspective. You should take a breath, look into what really happened (as much as is public information anyway) vis a vis the NSA, PRISM, etc., and then re-evaluate.

Or not, that's your choice. I'll merely point out that time will prove me right with respect to any purported military-focused work by Google X and leave it there.

Had a lady friend like that, it was a good long distance relationship with a friend of a friend, she had wanted to come live in Melbourne for work so I invited her to move in with me (we both had 2 teenage kids each who got on well with each other). Religion didn't come up until she moved in and spotted Darwin's biography and Dawkins "selfish gene" on my bookshelf, took me 3 weeks to decide the way her brain worked was just too fucking annoying to live with, took me 3 months to get her out.

It's an endless source of humour looking back at it, at the time I thought she was joking when she saw the logo on a NASA web page I was reading and started asking me about how to find aliens in NASA's basement via the internet. Looking back at it now, I'm sure she wasn't joking.

Personally I think they are both "good men" in the sense that their heart is in the right place, but it's certainly not unheard of for good men to go to war.

They all have your data, they can do whatever the f... they want with it. Unless you're talking about a client backdoor to access all the other files you didn't want to share with the cloud, but I don't think any of the others are any better. If you want real control, it's ownCloud or no cloud I think...

Let's play a game, you name a 80s geek hero movie for every 80s action hero movie I name, ok?

Do we have to start or do you agree that I win?

Yes, there were a few "geeky" movies. But claiming that they have anything to do with women avoiding computer science is ridiculous. If anything, the 80s movies were misogynic in general. Women were stereotypically abused as either the love interest for the hero, the dumb idiot that gets the hero in trouble or needs to be rescued by him or the inefficient example of how women just can't do what the hero later has to fix.

Women in anything but romance/love stories were basically the same as geeks in 80s movies: The bumbling idiot that makes the hero look so much better.

Haven't read TFA but I do know Roman battalions advanced by marching for a few days, stopping at a strategic point, and proceed to turn a nearby forest into a 3 storey fort in a single day. The forts were all of the same design and required ~5,000 trees to build, each man was an expert at a specific task. Reinforcements moved from fort to fort and signal towers were set up in between so that there was a visual link along the entire path. Today, we call this strategy a "supply line".

The Romans did a similar thing building up their Navy with spectacular speed when circumstances required, it was a classic "assembly line production" that existed 2000yrs before Henry Ford "invented" it. They also stole the boat design from the Carthaginians who had kindly numbered all the individual planks for them (no IP lawyers back then).

For a modern army or even a well organised militia, erecting a fake ruin in a day is definitely doable, so it boils down to motivation, which both sides have in spades.

Nobody could complain if they simply went and made their driver incompatible with the forged chips. If there is no working driver, then the customer would have to complain with the original maker of the hardware and demand a working driver. That's quite within FTDI's rights.

The point is that they attack the firmware of the device involved, which is by no accounts ok anymore. This isn't locking out a competitor, it's destruction of a competitor's hardware. Yes, that competitor didn't act correctly by trying to get a free ride. No doubt about that. By that logic, though, it's just a-ok for any printer maker to trash the printer (e.g. by hosing it with printer ink) should they detect that you use anything but their overpriced original stuff.

More like you accuse someone of defamation and it's the difference between "He told people I'm an asshole" and "He told people I'm a child molester". Both are defamatory statements by definition "1. (Law) injurious to someone's name or reputation)" but only one is actually illegal. Even if you're selling a polished turd you can make a lot a objectively highly questionable praise, misleading statistics and lies by omission without actually incriminating yourself. Like the defamation example above, you usually have to be caught in a factual lie in order to be convicted. Every sales pitch strategy I've been involved in involved pushing our strengths and concealing our weakness, if that was illegal we'd have to put all of marketing and sales in jail. And every person who went on a date ever. Meaning /. won't change much, I guess.

Yep, the French and the British are still arguing about who shot the nose off the Sphinx during the Napoleonic wars. Military types don't generally blow up iconic buildings for fun, they do it for propaganda purposes, eg Shi'a mosques in Northern Iraq are currently getting pounded into dust by the Sunni extremists. Irregular forces are more inclined to go for iconic building to demonstrate their power, eg: twin towers, UK parliament, etc.

The worst case of heritage destruction I can recall recently was on the 3rd day of the Iraq war when the US sacked the entire public service and then sat on their hands while the locals went on a looting spree. It was an extremely foolish decision that backfired badly, no cops, no ambulance, no garbage collection, no school, etc. After the looting rampage was over the US had well and truly lost the "hearts and minds" battle with ordinary Iraqi's.

First of all, I agree with the general thread that the Windows 8 GUI had no business being on a server. Heck; even Server 2008 R2 had all the chrome turned off and ran as close to NT4 as it possibly could.

But removing all the "advanced" stuff? Like what, precisely? If it's a DC, all the normal DC stuff is there (buried under the "Manage this server" nonsense). Because I can remember setting up NT4 and needing to specify IRQ and base settings for things like network cards. Back in the day, it was easier to install Windows 95 and let it autodiscover all the hardware settings, note them down and then install NT. I'm really happy to see those "advanced" settings gone and things "simplified".

As far as editing group policy, I don't know there is a way to simplify that. There are just so many policies that can be set Microsoft have (wisely) left "simplifying" that area alone (although I wish I could search through group policies for the setting I want).

Coincidentally, the earliest known stone villages appeared in Turkey ~12,000 years ago, they had no streets and the houses had no doors, they were all squashed together as one big flat building, people entered individual homes by navigating the roof and descending through a hole into their "cubicle". They also had a habit of burying dead relatives in the living room. Similar architecture and burial practices were common across the N. Hemisphere for the next 10,000yrs.

From the article:

The new driver for the FT232 exploits these differences, reprogramming it so it won’t work with existing drivers.
(emphasis mine)

So, yes, something is destroyed. Sure, you can undo the damage by writing new firmware to the chip... if you can somehow access it, that is. Have fun looking for the JTAG pins on it and I hope you enjoy soldering under a microscope.