It doesn't much help his case that circumstantial evidence pointed everyone more or less immediately at the Harvard campus, and thus at the first layer of the 'onion'. Tor is only minimally better (if at all) then straight SSL/TLS if the operator of hop #1 has strong reasons to be suspicious of Tor traffic within a set time period.

You must be one of those 'optimists' I've read about. A public phone isn't strongly correlated with you, personally, nor does it provide much in the way of real time location data (aside from the 'well, he must have been in the phone booth when he made that call' data point). Plus, you can still get computers without cameras and microphones...

SMSes seem to be fairly commonly abused as the cheapskate's "Two-factor authentication" (a convenient excuse to rake in customer phone numbers, and a device that probably isn't infected with the same malware as the users' PCs, plus it's cheaper than dedicate hardware security tokens!)

When there are ~4-6x10^30 of you, you reproduce unbelievably quickly, and know neither fear nor pain, very few things are futile...

Blame is irrational. Identifying patient zero can be very useful indeed. That doesn't give the process a moral dimension; but the mechanics are pretty similar.

I suspect that they are talking about 'genes being released' because they are using some sort of "metagenomic" technique.

Traditionally, if you wanted to study bacteria, you'd take samples, haul them back to the lab, plate them out, try to grow them in culture, then do your tests. Trouble is, not all organisms grow under those conditions. With gene sequencing now cheap and fast, you can go the alternate route of just grabbing a sample, grinding it up, and sequencing everything. You lose the ability to trivially correlate a given gene with a given organism (unless you have prior knowledge that allows you to make an inference); but you get a very powerful 'snapshot' of what genes are present, and in what proportions, in the sample without the need to know how to separate and cultivate them.

It's an extremely powerful approach for hunting novel species, since basically anything with DNA will show up regardless of whether you know anything about its care and feeding or not, and you can then identify novel DNA sequences and start looking for their hosts. It's also suitable in this case, because they aren't really interested in the bacteria (it isn't news that drinking sewage is a bad plan); but in shifts in the gene distribution of the entire population, which is exactly what grinding it up and sequencing it will get you a look at.

If it is pre-tax then it is still not the same, because a part of the health insurance cost is paid by the employer. And you should not only add the universal health care cost, but also the government pension and the compulsary nursing insurance, which is not a part of the health insurance. It is sort of complicated.

Sure, why not? Why would kids or adults need a stable community? That's what Prozac is for.

Here's a question. Let's say that for some reason you could get the same pay you have now but for flopping whoppers. Would you switch jobs or keep what you have now?

How much more would you need to be offered to get you to flop whoppers?

Really, I don't mind well behaved dogs, but anyone telling you that any laws on the books dealing with constantly barking dogs or dog crap on the sidewalks will have any effect at all is insane.

Police will not enforce such laws. Animal control will not enforce those laws. Until the neighborhood comes to blows, nothing you say will make the slightest difference.

There is something about dog ownership that causes deafness.

The closer the dwellings, the smaller the dogs need to be, and the less time they should be allowed chained up outside.

Digital music isn't going to be replacing instrumental artists any time soon, quite possibly it may never be even capable of doing so. Folks like Yo Yo Ma or the various orchestras are going to be able to make a living for a long time yet.

The problem is that digital music very much is replacing and will continue to replace commercial instrumental musicians, which are the vast majority of musicians actually able to earn a living from their craft. These folks are screwed. In the long term this may mean that there are far fewer instrumental artists simply because the chances of making a living from performance have become so small that no one bothers anymore.

The bigger problem is the really poor security options available on Android apps with somewhat ridiculously broad security rights. Most apps will ask to read phone identity simply because the need to be able to identify the device on which the app is installed, but the security grant for phone identity gives a whole crapload more than that. Manage accounts is another good one where in order for an app to actually store its own accounts it needs access to all the accounts.

Add to that the fact that Google themselves have been constantly trying to take over your SMS with bloody Hangouts and it's not really that surprising that folks don't really understand the permissions they are granting.

But I've driven a 16,000 car getting easily 40 mpg. It was crap. It was a Yaris.
Nobody wants that.

Put it on some dodgy mobile cracked app site and have it perform some trivial functionsfunctions, post about it in a conspiratorial tone in some forums and watch the cheap bastards come rolling in. There are a million cheapskates for every real customer of android apps.