Also the A380 is pretty silly looking. Have you seen one? It's like a fat guppy.

Would you have said the same thing about gay rights and legal marijuana 20 years ago? Political change takes time and a lot of effort. It helps a lot if a majority of people agree with you when you start, but that isn't a requirement.

Actually the banks have been pushing for a transition to EMV, but merchants are resisting it right and left for various reasons.

Watch all the merchants change their tune in October when all of the banks institute a liability shift to the merchant for non-EMV transactions (magstripe).

During a vacation in early September, my parents had to switch credit cards at a Walmart.

The terminal (correctly) recognized it was a contact-chip enabled card, and refused the mag-swipe.

But the terminal's contact-based reader was nonfunctional!

Don't forget the whole CurrentC clusterfuck. CurrentC is going to get a brutal kick in the nuts in October when the EMV liability shift occurs - the backers of CurrentC will be faced with 3 options:
1) Accept contactless EMV payments (Including Apple Pay and Google Wallet, but not limited to them. I'm not sure if it's possible to block Apple Pay/GWallet without blocking all contactless EMV - no one has done it so far.)
2) Accept the shift of liability for fraud from the CC company to them (very unlikely)
3) Stop accepting credit cards completely (not gonna happen)

Or use a solution that has been in use to handle sewer gases for years - vent pipe to the roof.

Broadband is a description of the technology, not of bandwidth. The FCC is a technical organization, so why can't they use the correct name?

This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.

Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.

If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!

...if it has a screen resolution I like, AND a good processor, that probably means it has Intel Integrated Graphics or something, or an awful pointing device, right?

And they use more burp and fart sound effects than all of Hollywood!

These are really another iteration of the PDAs of the 90s. Remember how dorky those PDA users looked fiddling with their small screens?

There's a bit more to it than that. My tops would be two points.
First, we're memetically infectuous. Plant a new idea here, and someone will run with it, most likely in some direction you never wished for. Many of our memetic infections are downright dangerous, lethal, destructive, etc. Contact might well be considered irresponsible, no matter how well intended.
Second, there's the thing I mentioned about our reverse-engineering technology. They might accidentally give us more capability than they wanted to. Not that we'd be any threat to them, but we've been sitting here for however long with the Doomsday Clock close to midnight. Give us something new that can be weaponized, (We've been able to turn just about everything into a weapon, perhaps the most resistant invention was the "death ray", the laser - it's had so darned many peaceful uses and has been very hard to make into aweapon.) and we will do so. Perhaps that weapon might be what tips the scale, ticks the clock, or whatever metaphor you like.

The truth is that many firms simply don't have the staff and budget needed to support an internal SOC. They also don't have the budget for an MSSP. With that, Mike Rothman of Securosis noted that these firms are "trapped on the hamster wheel of pain, reacting without sufficient visibility, but without time to invest in gaining that much-needed visibility into threats without diving deep into raw log files".

In my experience it is not the budget but the politics.

Is your company's security worth the expense of an additional tech? Or are office politics the reason you cannot get an additional tech?

Does whomever is in charge of your technology have the authority to say "no" to requests from other departments? And the political capital to make it stick?

I've seen too many examples of companies "suffering" from the problems their own decisions/environment created.

Retrofitting security is not the answer.

Rummy has been demonized, and there's no question but that he's a dick and steamrolls people, but he's always been a pragmatist and relatively non-ideological. He always gets conflated with neocons, but he is not one of them.

I don't think he'd argue all that much with your characterization.