Your advice is a good one for subjects of a possible exposé or smear campaign, however, out of hand dismissing journalists as people without integrity is not in the best interests of an informed public and (probably) in many cases unwarranted.

When I was a university professor, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked for an interview about what it's like to be single and a new faculty (ha!). I agreed to an interview and, on several occasions, said that I wanted to say a few things "off the record" about the behavior of colleagues and the spouses of colleagues (ahem). Some of what I said off the record was juicy and I told my interviewer those things to contextualize my "on the record" remarks.

The article was published, my female colleague who was written up got a couple of marriage proposals, and everything attributed to me was on the up and up.

I know not all journalists adhere to a code of ethics, but I believe that many do. Clamming up when a story needs to get out may protect you, but one needn't be suspicious form the get go.

It's unlikely that there are any types of embedded sensors in dams built in the 1940s and 1950s. You know, back when we used to actually give a shit about building infrastructure in the US.

This is likely good old fashioned visual inspection either by drawing down the reservoir, or with divers.

The Wanapum dam holds back 796,000 acre feet of water. The next dam on the river has a capacity that is a fraction of that (237,100 acre feet), but the one after that is bigger than both of those combined, but not much.

All told, if we had a domino action of Wanapum and the 4 downriver dams failing, we'd be talking about 5,780,100 acre feet of water flowing past Portland, which would be a devastating event indeed.

Losing the 1.1MW of "green" electricity that Wanapum produces might turn out to be a bad thing.

But hey, that's what we've got the coal generator at Boardman for, right?

There's more than one dam downriver. In fact, there are five:

Priest Rapids Dam
McNary Dam
John Day Dam
The Dalles Dam
Bonnevile Dam

But hey, we're only talking about 7.1 cubic kilometers of water behind those 5, right? What could possibly go wrong?

It's more about being able to still have agriculture in the hundreds of thousands of acres that get irrigated from the reservoirs behind the dams. These hydropower projects had three objectives, all wildly successful for the last 50 years:

1. Flood control
2. Electricity generation
3. Irrigation of the high plains surrounding the Columbia River

Most of the Columbia River dams were built in the 1950s after Harry Truman strong-armed Congress into passing the Flood Control Act of 1950 due to the second largest city in Oregon being wiped off the map when a levy broke in 1948.

Unfortunately we don't build things anymore. We barely maintain them.

All too often we see the management of a company sacrifice the future in favor of the next SEC-mandated 10-Q filing. Here we have a CEO of a publicly traded corporation telling some political douchebag to take his politics and shove them straight up his ass because it has no place in the management of this company, which is exactly what Slashdot has been clamoring for some CEO to do, and it's still questioned by Slashdot because it happens to be Apple.

If you don't think that guy was planted there by a DC-based conservative douche-tank in order to score a couple political points in the form of a press release, go read the douche-tank's press release. They trip over themselves to basically call everyone that voted down their ridiculous proposal the "Al Gore contingency" and left wing radicals because they have the audacity to spend some of the Cupertino Money Bin on doing something nice for the planet.

I wonder what these ultra-conservative fucksticks would have thought of Andrew Carnegie spending the vast majority of his steel profits on libraries and other philanthropic ventures; or Leland Stanford, a Whig, establishing an endowment for a university bearing his name, now one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. Neither were profit oriented, and both are lasting and significant contributions to society nearly a century later.

Google: Schadenfreude

Or, the submitter (and editor) are bad at the english language and actually meant to say that MtGoX held the impromptu press conference.

At least, that's how I interpreted it, since it's unlikely that a random Bitcoin guy could speak authoritatively regarding the financial mess that is MtGoX.

Yeah, you could still make your own, if you dug into the installer app and found the source DMG that it boots to for the install, and restored that to a USB stick with Disk Utility, or the command-line asr tool.

In fact, I used their InstallESD.dmg as a template for how to make a lightweight bootable removable drive for system imaging at my company. I have a 5GB USB stick image that contains the payload OS (10.8.5) as well as the installation packages for our required antivirus, data-at-rest encryption agent for laptops, software delivery agent, Java, the tool we use to connect to Active Directory, and a few scripts that name the machine properly and set up the network locations depending on what subnet it's on. Time from go button to login against AD? Around 8 minutes if you're on a solid state disk.

Works on USB, FireWire, and Thunderbolt.

believe that nuclear energy is like a controlled atomic bomb

I once saw someone argue that a reactor has far more uranium in it than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, thus if something went wrong it would be far worse.

I wanted to explain to him just how fucking stupid that was, but I just didn't have that kind of time. I instead told him to research the difference between "critical mass" and "supercritical mass".

And, you're right. This was your average liberal-leaning guy that is all about science unless you're talking about nuclear science. Then it's all horrific world-ending hysteria.

Hello. IT guy here.

We're still deploying Mountain Lion, because until two days ago, Mavericks wouldn't work reliably with our VPN, and asked you for your proxy authentication for every single image on an HTTPS page unless you turned off certificate revocation, which is an even bigger hole in SSL than the one they just patched.

Sometimes the IT department has reasons that they just aren't sharing, but are quite valid. That being said, it's a fairly new revelation that we're getting everyone with a Mac to 10.8.5 - most of them were still running 10.5.8 because there was no enterprise-wide standards until I declared them and deployed an infrastructure to enforce them. It's so nice to have everyone on one OS version, rather than the SEVENTEEN we had before spanning from 10.5.8 to 10.8.2.

Your IT guys probably suck then. I've been evaluating Mavericks since it was in beta, and only with 10.9.2 is it an OS that works with all our infrastructure at the same time; so only this week have I even thought about qualifying it to run on our network. This has been the case with every version of OS X - if you mass move a production environment to a .0 or .1 release since 10.5, you're asking for it; I can't count the number of times that DirectoryServices or SMB has been broken in early life releases, and I've been using OS X since it still had the Mac OS 9 UI on it (original Mac OS X Server 1.0).

If you have an automated application deployment system that's worth talking about, it's drop-dead simple to create an upgrade PKG that completely automatically upgrades any supported Mac to 10.9.2, and even in-line any other packages for agents or frameworks that you need. The only issue we'll have is with laptops, as we're forced to use a data-at-rest encryption software that isn't named FileVault. For those, we'll have to mass-decrypt them before deploying, then re-encrypt afterwards.