I used to be in that business, I'll tell you ... it's already out there. I'm very glad I'm no longer anywhere near the industry. I'd feel better dealing with hitmen and druglords.

Some of the Fortune 1000 crowd have their data flagged. If you have access to a service that provides such information, and you search for say "Bill Gates", there will be a shitstorm.

We were told by some 3rd party data sources that we were contractually obliged to maintain a list of "high profile" people, so those searches would always return empty. I pushed them for who "high profile" was. Bill Gates was obvious, because that was the reason the conversation came up. Theoretically, the list should include the Fortune 1000 crowd, and anyone who shows up in the news. They couldn't provide parameters, so that obligation wasn't possible to fulfill.

And on that specific search, they weren't searching for the obvious Bill Gates of Microsoft. It was someone with the same name in another state on an authorized background check.

The amount of data that I was exposed to was absolutely insane. Pretty much, I could tell you stuff about yourself that you may not even remember, plus your neighbors, relatives, romantic partners, and people you associate with. It was down to your hobbies, shopping habits, and even photos and messages from social media.

fuel for the launch vehicle.

That's the #1 reason. If we had infinite thrust with no fuel consumption, we could put up ... well, some really cool stuff. Spacecraft wouldn't need to be concerned with stuff hitting them, if they could put a mile of dirt around a steel reinforced concrete floating bunker. :) And we'd probably have a few Stanford Torus' or Bishop Rings in orbit already.

This puppy can withstand two failures and keep on truckin

Looking at the design, and the images, the front left wheel is actually pretty rough. In the linked story, look at the bottom half of the 9th picture. The metal has split almost half way across. It may end up digging into the softer sand, and could catch on rocks.

They'd have a better chance driving it backwards, letting that wheel drag along. That won't work very well though, since all the gear is on the front.

Who are you talking to?

You know, talking to yourself may be a symptom of an underlying disorder. Have you talked with your psychiatrist lately?

To defend Mathematics a bit, it does tend to advance much more quickly than Physics since it isn't hampered by the restrictions of the real world.

Just think of General Relativity and non-Euclidean Geometry. Often times when a new scientific concept is created/discovered and a model is required to flesh it out, all you need to do is look around existing mathematics and, oh look, there's an app for that.

Mathematics cannot be the language of the universe as the vast majority of the universe does not communicate any ideas. The parts of it that do is an insignificant, tiny portion that includes us and whatever other self-aware/reasoning beings that may be out there.

What mathematics is are a set of insanely great tools that we use to create models helping us to describe the universe. One thing we've learned from math is that self-referential systems tend to have issues that can crop up in spots. And it's hard to get more self-referential than a subset of the universe trying to understand the whole thing.

Saying that mathematics is sufficient to describe the real world, no matter how successful it has been at it so far, is awfully presumptuous.

The card readers that I've worked with do their encoding at the reader. They should only be showing the user (the clerk) something like the last 4 digits, if anything.

From what others said, based on the vague information released, it sounds like the card readers had firmware updates that allowed this to happen.. I still see two tremendously troubling things.

1) If it was someone in-house who did that, how the hell were they allowed to do that.

2) Even if the firmware captured all the card, why was it allowed to send out to a 3rd party destination. If it's all on private circuits, they simply wouldn't have a way to talk out. Obviously, they did, or else it wouldn't have been a breech.

Remember to keep that 50' 18 gauge extension cord running, that you're using to charge your new Tesla, under it. It helps keep the garage smelling nice. :)

But security is hard. {sigh}

They don't need direct access. Actually, your CC data is suppose to be kept away from the Internet. That's what private circuits are for. In the case of a major retailer like Target, they should be doing all financial transfers over private circuits, with no Internet access.

Someone may have decided it would be cheaper to share the circuit with Internet access. That was *very* dumb of them.

So, invalidate and reissue on the behalf of Ulbricht, and any other bitcoins that were confiscated. That would actually be nice. The ultimate in theft prevention.

Imagine, if someone steals your (real world) wallet. You invalidate all the cash in it, and issue new cash.

Unfortunately, I can see the *huge* number of reasons why it's a bad idea. The first being, I do a high dollar transaction. I get the physical product. I complain that it never arrived, and 51% agree that I'm a good guy. Now the seller is out the funds, and the product.

So does this plan go for only funds seized in high profile cases? If the feds didn't say they seized the funds publicly, would they get to keep the them, and screw the accused? Who do you believe for deciding, the holder of the bitcoins, or the media?

So, you're saying this is where the zombie apocalypse is starting, eh?

[puts on his biohazard suit, and grabs a crowbar]

Ok, I'm ready.

Ah. I'm short any college biololgy books here, and college was a long time ago. I remember .. umm .. drinking.. and that one girl.. ahhh...

I understand what you're saying though. I still don't like the phrasing, but I see how it is accurate. :)

That still requires the bacteria, not free roaming genes floating around in the water.

Maybe my knowledge of biology is a bit lacking, but doesn't a gene need an organism? It sounds like they are talking about drug resistant bacteria, which have a traits of their DNA.

It's just as annoy as cop shows where look for DNA samples. You're not sampling the DNA with your cotton swab, you're attempting to capture cells, from which you can extract the DNA.

Then again, we're talking about two of the same groups (news media and fictional cop shows) where they'd both easily say "hack the mainframe". Ahh, the mainframe. The mysterious device I can access from a Nintendo Gameboy in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, using more more than my good looks, the Gameboy, a clothes pin, and some chewing gum.

Ya, tell me about those evil genes floating around by themselves, in their attempt to take over the world.