That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.

I suspect that federation(at least outside of paying customers, who are both more important to listen to, and less likely to be spambots), is viewed as more trouble than it's worth; but dropping XMPP entirely is an entirely different game.

The extra amusing thing about the unrelated case is that he is representing his wife. "Sorry honey, not 'attorney-client relations' today, I'm under investigation for moral turpitude unbecoming the profession..."

A private company operating an enterprise of equivalent size might actually have made a few little 'community investments', possibly scored some sweet 'development incentives', maybe even a 'public/private partnership' to get some of the infrastructure built for them...

Sucks for their smaller competitors; but private enterprises shake down state and local governments all the time. If anything, this particular situation is probably coming up because the location of the NSA datacenter was decided by jockying at the federal level(rather than by the NSA shopping it around and having states beg for it), so once the location was fixed, the state has a strong incentive to soak them just hard enough that they don't actually pack up and leave.

Does anybody know how mucus differs from the 'extracellular polymeric substance' of which biofilms are made, such that the one would be a haven for bacteriophages and the other a haven for bacteria?

The 'just throwing a pointed stick' might actually work; but require group endurance-hunting strategies(which are arguably a flavor of technology, albeit applied political science, rather than material science or engineering). At low speed, a pointy stick is unlikely to be very swiftly lethal; but(especially if it lodges in the wound) it will slow you down and cause continued bleeding and local tissue tearing.

Hunters who are equipped to work together to keep on the track of game as it slowly weakens would probably be able to hunt faster animals(if the animal isn't expecting a thrown weapon, you get a first strike with a potential to reduce its speed) even with dubiously lethal hardware; but less coordinated groups would need a solid kill, which you could probably only get with a thrust, until substantially better tech became available.

I suspect that it's a mixture of technical cluelessness and PR. The people who actually made the mistake that led to the records being exposed probably realize(now, I'm sure it was either an oversight or 'just temporary' at the time) that they fucked up; but they have little to gain by pointing that out.

People higher up the food chain probably have only the haziest distinction between 'something I didn't want happening' and 'something that you circumvented an access control to achieve' and, again, not much incentive to clarify the situation. "Getting hacked" isn't good; but it's a bad thing that just happens sometimes. "Being massively irresponsible" sounds like something that might incur liability.

I did make a mistake; they made 13 million in revenue(my use of 'income' was wrong), with costs of 25 million. So I (incorrectly) stated it as though they were making money; but they are in the red.

Oh, hardly. I find that they are an excellent heuristic for identifying people who are likely to be rather irritating in person, and quite possibly in whatever email resides above that vapid regurgitation... They really do a fine public service that way.

I always carefully add:

"Confidentiality: The information contained in this e-mail is intended only for the
personal and confidential use of the designated recipients of the email. This message
may be an attorney-client communication and, as such, is privileged and confidential. If
you are not an intended recipient of this message or an agent responsible for delivering
it to an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this message
in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution, or copying of this message is
strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all
copies and notify us immediately by reply e-mail or by telephone"

To the signature section of all my emails. Surely that qualifies as due-diligence concerning information security?

There are also some not-immediately-obvious additional technologies which make spears substantially more effective.

The history of ironworking in general is a total mess: Not only were the best techniques(at any given time and place) some combination of trade secrets and National Security Stuff, leading to dubious recordkeeping, iron and most iron alloys corrode enthusiastically, often leaving archeologists to stare at an intriguing-looking rust stain and puzzle from there.

Then(as in the case of Damascus steel, as you mention) the properties of iron(actually a pretty lousy material, pure) change quite dramatically with the addition of relatively small amounts of various alloying agents, frequently ones that weren't even identified as distinct substances(much less 'identified' as 'elements') until centuries later, in addition to being sensitive to heating/cooling parameters and any other treatments affecting crystal structure.

There were improvements over time, of course; but until fairly recently, with modern metallurgy and chemistry, even a good-faith effort by the original craftsman to share his technique would likely leave us with considerable puzzling left to do.

As if millions of hypochondriacs cried out in terror and suddenly went to check WebMD.

I don't see how bringing out the speculative accounting hat changes things: yes, it's an 'asset'; but it's an asset whose current rate of return is worse than what you'd get by plunking $500 in a retail-bank savings account... Unless there is a yet greater fool waiting in the wings(who wasn't willing to outbid Yahoo and acquire tumblr now...), Yahoo just turned a huge pile of liquid assets into an asset whose rate of return isn't even positive. Compared to even a low-yield, highly conservative, investement of the money, that's a lot of opportunity cost that they'll need to scrape out of tumblr somehow, probably in a way that its users won't like...

Ok, let's take a look here: Tumblr, pre-aquisition, made $13 million in income with reported costs of $25 million. So, they are losing money, surprise, surprise...

Yahoo comes along and sinks $1.1 billion into the company. Unless they are total fuckwits(a possibility that cannot entirely be ruled out), they are going to want to squeeze that cash back somehow, whether directly by 'monetizing' the Tumblr userbase, or by some farcical theory about a halo effect drawing users to their other properties...

In what possible universe is a service that is going from "VCs are paying you to use it" to "Yahoo wants to scrape 1.1 billion dollars out of you" going to improve? At best, it might improve in an absolute, technical, sense; but be accompanied by a subscription fee or something. More likely, we'll start to see increasingly aggressive frog-boiling attempts at upping the advertising, theme microtransaction, and other revenues.

They might realize some incremental efficiencies in terms of web hosting costs, given Yahoo's volume and datacenter operations experience; but unless Tumblr's previous management was wholly incompetent, they were probably already using the cheapest commodity web platforms they could get their hands on, so I find it very hard to believe that there is enough fat to cut to magically fix the situation without end-user pain.

Hey, Yahoo, remember that other photo-sharing site you already fucking own?

Please, do, tell me what 1.1 billion dollars worth of tumblr brings to the table that a mild reskin(to put the pictures with captions in columns, rather than in 'galleries') of flickr could have ready to demo inside a week and roll out in short order?