If you're a spy or diplomat or whatever, don't use Gmail. At the very least it is subject to the US government's laws. Get yourself a secured server somewhere else.

But with the newer stuff, their abilities are amped and their weaknesses are nerfed. Why not?

Exactly. You get eternal youth (at whatever age you "died") and all kinds of extras in exchange for a literal blood thirst. Which may or may not require you to kill a person (depending upon the writer) or animal.

So what effect would that have on society? And when did it start?

Are there "good" vampires and if so, why aren't they converting some of our best scientists? Why aren't they our space program? Stake them on Earth, send them to Mars and have a machine pull the stake. No need for food during the trip. Be the first vampire to see Saturn up close and then turn the ship back to Earth. How many astronauts on Earth would willingly "go vampiric" to do that?

Do you feel that we should stick more with the classic mythos? Or are you in favor with your own spin.

The problem would be FINDING the "classic" vampire. They've been changing ever since they were first invented. Mostly because the person telling the story needed a certain feature set for that story.

I'm not saying anything against Michael Reaves. But the main problem with most of the stories is that the reality created by the writer is inherently limited to the knowledge of the writer. So there are usually huge plot holes such as "if vampires are so cool then why wouldn't everyone want to be a vampire" or "if vampires are so powerful then why do they have to hide".

All excellent points. And there are still more.

#1. Unless your password is "password" or some variant AND the site does not limit password attempts then "password strength" isn't that important.

#2. You are more likely to have your passwords compromised by using a cracked computer or by falling for a phishing link.

#3. If not #2 then when one of the sites you use is cracked and their username/password file (unhashed, unsalted) is stolen.

Also, why can't a site tell you what the requirements are PRIOR to you having to come up with a username/password/secondary-password/pet-name/school-name/maiden-name-mother?

The part that annoys me is:

The example given is around shark attacks. While the risk of shark attack is extraordinarily low, the media often makes it seem like an epidemic, and the gullible populace overreacts. The authors give many examples of where people don't comprehend risk and statistics. The authors note that people buy lottery tickets, often described as a tax on the mathematically disinclined, despite knowing the odds.

So if you misjudge a shark attack, you keep all your limbs and you have one fun day at the beach. Otherwise you might end up dead or crippled.

But if you misjudge the lottery, you lose the few dollars you put into it. Otherwise you end up with a lot more money than you started with.

They are not at all similar. At least not until you get into "gambling addiction" and phobias.

uh... I've always thought that to gain any meaningful stats, you need a large enough sample...

That works for trends. Not for the actions of individuals.

From TFA:

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other.

He's a bit wrong there. It isn't a million unnumbered pictures. It's one picture per person in the country at the time. That's over 300 million pictures. Each one overlapping millions of other pictures.

uh... I've always thought that to gain any meaningful stats, you need a large enough sample...

And after a certain point you are just amplifying the "noise". And enough "noise" can appear to be a pattern.

It is only after an event that the "noise" can be filtered out and the extraneous pictures discarded.

The additional data allows a more solid case to be built, and makes it easier to find co-conspirators.

Yep. So the "compromise" could be lots of data collected but only kept for a short time (weeks, not years).

On the other hand, the frequency of any threats is so rare that do we really want to erode our liberties like this? Is regular police work just not capable of "connecting the dots" without this kind of surveillance?

Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.

Are you telling me that the galaxy isn't full of people who grow lumps of rubber on their heads?

Who happen to breath the same combination of gases and who are comfortable in the same temperature range and gravity range.

Not to mention the inter-breeding. So much inter-breeding.

But that's what happens when you have writers who know more about getting a job writing for a show than they know about science.

As that was a plot point in Star Trek Enterprise.

I think that the main issue is that people see the TV shows and movies and think that "life" has to look like that.

But those are just theatrics so that human actors can play the parts. Look at the variations of life on Earth. From whales to worms.

The Universe is so large that it cannot possibly be that we are the only life thriving on a planet orbiting a star.

It's not just whether there are other civilizations out there. It's also whether either of us would develop technology that the other would be able to understand or recognize as signals AND broadcast them during the time when they could be received AND with sufficient power to be received.

When they talk about "privacy" they mean the privacy of the people who are not the police and not the politicians. They still get all the privacy they want.

Because of, you know, "national security" and "terrorists".

Drop the idea of "TV show". They've been done and you probably do not have any better ideas than the networks have.

Instead, look at the books you're selling. Create "mini-series" type programming from the literature that is already out there. Focus on story arcs where you can have a beginning and an end.

The Black Company by Glen Cook.
Vlad Taltos by Steven Brust.
A steam-punk version of Doc Savage.
Perry Rhodan.
Neal Stephenson either The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon.

Go big. Bigger than the networks. Bigger than the movie studios. Fill the niche they aren't willing to.

What is special about gmail servers that would stop greylisting? Do they really not retry mail transmission?

The message gets bounced to a different server that tries delivering it. Since it is a different IP address it also gets greylisted.

So it bounces the message to a different server (probably not the first server) and tries again. And gets a different server greylisted. And so on and on and on.

After X failures the gmail system gives up and returns the message as undeliverable.

A lot of the big sites (hotmail, yahoo, etc) do things like that. So I exclude them from the greylisting option based upon their reverse DNS lookup. Which works most of the time.

First off, because spam is so bad (80% of messages by some counts) just about ANYTHING that ANYONE does will reduce their spam (ignoring false positives).

Secondly, READ YOUR LOGS!

There are broad categories of how different groups use email (and their email infrastructure). So what works great for one group sucks for a different group.

So I recommend something like SpamAssassin where you can tweak the settings to what works for your specific circumstances (and the people/groups that you send/receive email with).

Greylisting is great, except when you try to greylist gmail servers. So know how the tools work and think about situations where they would fail and then adjust the knobs to deal with those potential failures.

And if you don't accept EVERY email sent to you (I don't) then make sure that you customize the rejection notice so that the SENDER can contact you if his server includes the rejection message (which most of them do). I include my phone number.

In my opinion, the more knobs that you can adjust the better it is.

Instead, each person has a desk with low dividers, and people can grab conference rooms as needed â" much like the headquarters of a small tech company.

I've seen attempts at that. It quickly turns into whomever has the highest status permanently booking a conference room. In effect, turning it into their own office.

I'd recommend focusing on teaching science and skip the gimmicks.

From TFA:

Google the Safest
The study concluded that while all the search engines the lab evaluated delivered malware, Google delivered the least. It was followed by Bing, which returned a disconcerting five times as much malware as Google.