Apparently you are missing something because while common practice, it's not ubiquitous. And like all common practices, it gets spoken of less and less until new developers reinvent the wheel and decide they want passwords in plain text to make password recovery 'easier' ("click on the http link in your email and you'll see your password!")

Except that the human brain can separate out words as atomics rather than the parts that make up their whole. This makes remembering a string of a small number of truly random words easy to remember.
Demiurgic precompel Pediculicidal superimpersonally trichromate Voq
increep Sporodochium impassioning Winesburg Spicknel bacon-and-eggs
Are those really so impossible to remember? The biggest problem is when someone starts using sporodochium in casual conversation a lot, you know it's part of their new random passphrase or they started a word-of-the-day calendar.

Which is silly since the difference between first and last is thirty seconds at most. First used to mean something back when papers came out once a day. A full day's lead time on an important story means everyone buys your paper that day. Today, I'd rather pay attention to a news service that checks sources and gets the story right than one that "had it first".

No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

"We have a deliverable! Congratulations, you're fired!"

I'll grant you that print servers and web servers tend to be on VMs these days, but the VM host OS has to run on bare metal, and if you're doing number crunching or large data storage, it's going to be bare metal too, because the VM host/guest overhead is a waste of resources.

You should neko a Japanese file instead.

No. I want it to go back in time a couple minutes before grub even runs to magically make all the bios stuff happen in parallel. I will accept nothing less. And I want binary consoles instead of just log files so that I can feel like I'm in the matrix.

Thirty seconds every six months on a system where the motherboard BIOS POST, each NIC firmware, the SCSI card firmware, spinning up the drives, and the RAID bios take around two to three minutes to complete. So not really much at all. I propose new features to systemd to parallelize the hardware components to server startups. And a pony. I want a pony.

Court mandated identity theft. Too cruel or too unusual?

Did he have an employment contract with his employer? Did Comcast purposefully interfere with this contract? Also: Libel, Slander? He can actually prove monetary damage, which is more than most libel cases.

That settles it then. I'm naming my first son Gene.

People speed because they are impatient and because they think it's just as safe. Notice how most people speed at 5-10mph over the limit. They speed "safely". Occasionally you'll have some fool who speeds at 40-50mph over the limit. They're the people you describe, but they're very rare. Same thing with the hand-washing. They don't go through a full calculation and think to themselves "I've washed 40 seconds. 20 seconds more is worth someone getting sick". The risk doesn't even occur to them because they think any sort of washing makes them and others safe.

Re-training is already an ongoing expense with Microsoft products. Office ribbon, Windows 8 tile screen, any slightest change in Windows XYZ where the ABC isn't in the same pixels on the screen or is renamed something intelligible. The biggest drawback isn't the training expense, it's the fear of incompatibility with other companies' software.

So are the computer, CPU, and hard drive, but people use those terms interchangeably.