Well, think about it. Self-repairing machines are pretty hard to design and there's always the danger of overlooking things, while humans pretty much are already there, so using humans for tasks that involve a good chance of being damanged instead of machines only makes sense.

Plus, replacing humans is way cheaper. They get produced for free.

Um, sure. And when's the last time you heard of a successful litigation under CCPA? Yes, I know this is brand new legislation.

It's not even a matter of pride. No one falls on their sword, gets publicly sacked and castigated, or probably even loses their job. It's in the lawyer's hand, here, have a nice credit report service (from people whose site's been jacked).

At one time, long ago, Target Stores were breached, and it hurt their sales for a long time, along with Marshalls/TJMaxx/etc. Now we all shrug, because we are essentially powerless. There is NOTHING WE CAN DO unless legislation like the CCPA has actual teeth. It's the New New Corporate Flatulence (with apologies to Michael Lewis).

As far as web applications are concerned, I think the larger problem is the move towards client-side programming.

Client-side web apps expose huge amounts of application logic and schema that would otherwise be kept secret in a server-side application. Certainly, the requests for data can be restricted and secured, but a client-side app provides a detailed roadmap to bad actors about all the potential resources available to them. A server-side application would only output a view.

I find it ironic that many security scanners flag issues such as, "you're exposing which version of Apache you're using", or, "a page is showing phpinfo()", yet few developers question why they're sending all the internal secrets of their models and controllers to the browser.

I'll just try to keep it brief, at some point I was five years ahead of my math class and ran into people even more extreme than me. It's kinda surreal, at one point you're talking about university grade math then suddenly you're talking to a little kid who's totally failing to relate to his age-peers but doesn't fit in with his skill-peers either. Make no mistake, I was totally not high school level maturity in elementary school even though I could to the math, nor was I college level maturity in high school. I always felt held back but to be honest, I'm not sure if was for my own good or not. In some ways I totally belonged with kids my own age. Would it have been better if I'd been stratified into a gifted class? I'm not sure. Maybe academically, but I really needed to learn to interact with the whole spectrum.

True. The problem of course is that we have a choice with the car. Life sustaining meds? Well, I have already said that I will kill myself before bankrupting my family.

I guess perhaps once you include that, there are choices we can make.

There are resources on the moon, we've already been there with chemical rockets. The 2007 Dawn mission used ion engines to visit the asteroid belt, more resources there too.

That's how it's been for the past few hundred years. Is it new because now it's "on a computer"?

Amazon processes donations through smile.amazon.com to random PTA groups, to major charities and everything in between. I don't know much about Narconon, it may be shitty and Scientology associated, but if people opt in to supporting it on smile.amazon.com that is their business.

I personally use smile to support a charity in New York that develops schools and employment opportunities in a developing country in Europe. If that's not your cup of tea, that's cool, Amazon making that available on smile isn't an endorsement of the particular charity.

I hate Scientology personally, but Amazon processing donations to a vaguely Scientology-affiliated charity is no worse than lots of other causes or charities that I don't support or agree with and is not some sort of secret endorsement by Amazon of Scientology.

You are ill informed, obviously you are not among the scientists and engineers of which you speak. Chemical rockets have already accessed the moon and there are resources there. NASA has already used ion engines on spacecraft visiting the asteroid belt, 2007 Dawn mission, where more resources may be found.

Also your "this decade" argument is a straw man. The topic was moving industrial production into space, therefore the timeframe is automatically decades into the future.

It's not like Amazon/Smile is directing unknowing user's funds to this entity -- you choose where the money goes when you enroll in smile. Amazon relies on the listings at GuideStar to determine charity status, pretty much only blacklists groups on the naughty lists maintained by OFAC and SPLC.

There are many questionable groups among the "over one million eligible 501(c)(3) public charitable organizations" enrolled in the program.

The user-facing login page has always been an API. Just because there is a different API now available means nothing.

A "user-facing" login page is just a client (or even proxy) to the existing login API. It makes no difference if that API parses data from a HTML form request, XML or JSON. It is all the same. The underlying authentication method is all that matters. In most cases the APIs meant for server-side consumption are much more secure. Especially when it comes to a brute for attack.

I don't see the problem here.

Because I (for example), routinely interact with a dozen financial institutions and would prefer not to give control of my computer over to all of them when it's safer for them to use standard vetted code on the server-side instead.

Exactly.

Also, how does he think all those phone apps work? They don't have a special VPN to the bank's network, they have to access a public API just like everything else.

APIs are easier to secure than web pages, because they're typically simpler. Smarter designs make the web page version also just use the same API under the covers. That way you can completely enforce all your security in one easy to review server-side set of code.

In terms of attacks, they have to balance between being vulnerable to denial-of-service or man-in-the-middle attacks while blocking anyone who fails too many login attempts. It's not that complicated, though. For anything large, require a separate channel authentication from the customer. It shouldn't be possible, for example, to wire transfer thousands of dollars out of your account without either an agreed-upon pattern and usual destinations, or else separate confirmation which doesn't involve the API.

There isn't. The current manufacturer will just drop the price long enough to make sure the new venture fails if it comes to that. Or, like the last time, buy it up and shelve it.

Your argument is akin to "God must have created the world, it's here, isn't it?"

Really? There are people spread all across the state, the country, the world where this is a reality, and they do t even know how to program, or ... internet.

Not so fast with your not so fast! See page 5

In this case, the status is for ALS and should be running out any time now. There are other indications that have no protection at all. No competition there either.

It's also worth noting that the entire orphan drug program was the result of a desire to keep drug manufacture privatized in the first place.

Swimming in sewerage?

Yeah about that... where do you think all the manual labor went? Power tools has replaced the manual labor of the shovels and sledges almost entirely. Maybe there's some sarcasm here I totally missed, but it's close to the worst possible option. It's one of the points in the Matrix where I just went "lalalalala it's a movie pretend that makes sense", we're a terrible source of energy and work. One nuclear plant could probably replace all of humanity as batteries.

You completely ignored the immense energy requirements of getting stuff up there and blathered about the second phase of de-orbiting, which by the way is initiated with a fuel burn of course

'only company allowed to process cocaine.'

I think Merk does also.

False, nothing you say is possible with chemical rockets, other propulsion systems would have to be used which are decades if not more than a century away. Please leave science and engineering to scientists and engineers.

Best health care system, ever! If you are independently wealthy that is. And we've sold the myth that anyone can rise up from their bootstraps and become a billionaire that the voters defend the interests of those who are billionaires to their own detriment.

Do those nations need the kind of ransom a gas plant could pay? Answer is no, would be waste of time. If they attacked, it would be a one time debilitating attack.