Because the functioning of the business relies integrally on both.

Look... I sympathize with the "air gap" argument, but it's not the mid-90's anymore. Business has been transformed by the ability to connect industrial systems with centralized command centers with payment systems with other companies. It's not for execs to have bullshit ipad dashboards... it's for the business to make operational decisions that will take effect in the upcoming hours/minutes/seconds, to meet contractual and legal obligations, to feed customer- and billing-related systems (no point in running a business if you can't cut a bill, eh?).

The world's not going back... VPN's, firewalls, segregated networks, etc., etc., but "air gap" won't do it anymore. Data is the lifeblood of business.

Not related to the story, but watch out for this "split the difference" bias. Often, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But also often, the truth is 90% toward one side or the other. Sometimes (rarely), everybody's right and they just don't realize it. More often, the truth lies far outside the two sides you are listening to. A good solution for that is to listen to more sides. An even better solution is to study chemistry, economics, probability, computer science, sociology, and so forth... not because these fields offer direct insight on contemporary issues (though they often do), but because they help us appreciate the difficulties of understanding (and tinkering with) complex systems. That cautions us against the political certainties we so frequently espouse.

Um... the point, as I took it, of indeterminate progress bars is to show that the program is "busy" and hasn't crashed. In the past ~5 years this has been more or less universally replaced with the "spinning circle of arrows" animation, but the indeterminate progress bar is still useful for dialog boxes that need to express both determinate and indeterminate waits (e.g., because it would be awkward for layout and aesthetics to switch b/t a determinate progress bar and the spinning circle of arrows).

Now granted: the longer the wait the more your design "owes" the user in terms of communicating progress, time remaining, etc.

Hunh? Really? I wish all of my online institutions supported key fobs, but none of them do. Or rather, none of them have volunteered the option to me... I guess I really should start asking, because this "just a password" thing seems very, very silly. Heck, I'd probably setup a dedicated PC for banking in my house, but that one would be hard to get past my spouse. :O

You miss the point... the carefree/flippant attitude of WTFPL can be seen as implicit criticism of the "permission culture" thing the summary is talking about, whereas your alternative is a direct kowtow to the need to "license" everything by default. At any rate, it's not "nasty" language... it's not mean in spirit or viscerally disgusting. "Crude" maybe, if you want to be prudish about it.

Use a license that pokes fun at the concept of licensing: the WTFPL (the DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE).

Seriously though, to change this "permission culture" thing, you need to get ahead of the intellectual property movement by starting a "right to think" movement. It won't be long (historically speaking) before computers and networks access is weaved into every tool we use--if not the human brain itself.

Whoa there buddy... people like to check themselves out in the mirror, even if it's a sort of abstract statistical mirror. Think you're any better? Just watch whose face you immediately look at the next time you see a family photograph... 10-to-1 you look for yourself first.

Also, if you're going to go off moralizing about changing societal attitudes, you can find better examples than a statistical demo developed by a first-rate narcissist of the baby boomer generation.

Okay, now read the studies on defensive gun use. Numbers vary widely and there is much argument over methodology, but a reasonable estimate is that there are 300,000 such defensive uses per year (among Americans). If even 3% of those DGU's avoided a murder, that's on par with your number.

The bigger issue though is that, a well-armed populace disincentives genocide and tyranny. And no, I'm not talking about the "I was forced to buy health insurance"-type tyranny, I'm talking about the Red Terror, the Night of the Long Knives, Operation Condor, etc., etc. Let's not forget about how bad things can be or presume that it "can't happen here".

Yes, the ringers are forgetful (and thus forgivable), but the texters who insist on blinding the whole theater are just outright jerks. Seriously folks... either go to the lobby or wait and read it later.

If you're talking about thieves, yes. But if your talking about accidental child deaths, than safes, lockers, and gun locks are probably pretty effective.

Unfortunately, they also come with the drawback of making guns useless for self-defense. Situations that require defensive gun use come on quick, and the assailants typically aren't willing to wait for you to unlock and load up.

The decision of how to secure firearms must be made on a case-by-case basis. Instead of trying to limit/restrict peoples' right to effective self-protection, the government (and the gun industry) should focus on how to remind/educate gun owners of their responsibilities.

Well the easy one is their recent fingering of violent media/video games. It was not an outright call for censorship, but the implication was there.

But it has prevented ~300,000 individual massacres, rapes, robberies, etc. Per year. That's based on various poll-based research efforts into defensive gun use. (The noteworthy studies seem to range from 80k to 2.6 million, but ~300k or so seemed most credible to me when I was doing some light research into the issue.)

On top of the known cases (which, admittedly, we don't know exactly how they would have turned out in the absence of a firearm), the implicit threat of firearm availability has probably saved many more lives, such as women who fear their violent exes or homeowners in crime-prone areas. And of course, the implicit threat of protracted civil revolt is a deterrent to cases of outright tyranny (i.e., Nazi Germany, communist China, Soviet Russia) that have a habit of killing millions, not just twenty.

...at the cost of development time for developers, play time for players, and headaches for both. Know this: the awesomest technical product you can ever build is something that just works.

A more elaborate linguistic dodge (if you were writing a revolutionary manifesto or such) would be to create a detailed outline of your intended message and then set it aside. Go read works from an author, genre, or time period that you normally wouldn't be interested in. Absorb the linguistic quirks of this alter-canon and then "channel" it while you expand your manifesto's outline into a draft.

Take for instance, the distinctive voice of Thomas Paine's Common Sense :

I normally use "people" instead of "writers" and "confused" instead of "confounded", avoid multiple negatives/inversions in the same sentence ("little or no"... "whereas"... "not only"... "but"), use more parenthetical comments, write complete sentences after a {comma, conjuction} combination, and avoid the words "whereas" or "wicked". So if I channeled Paine successfully (and had some level awareness of my own quirks), I'd probably produce a linguistically distinct text.

Potential drawbacks include (1) being long-winded when you need to be succinct, (2) coming across as gimmicky b/c your speech isn't normal, or (3) coming across as fake b/c you're busy injecting artifice instead of genuine passion.

Perhaps a more interesting use of this approach would be to "frame" or draw suspicion to someone by producing an manifesto that matches other works they have published.

But it doesn't keep ISP's from moving to permanent, static IP addresses. So privacy extensions will "blur" the PC's within a single household together and keep stalking firms (um "ad agencies") from tracking you as you move between coffee shops*, but, in practice, all household traffic you generate will be branded with the same permanent, unique address.

I'm not poo-pooing IPv6, that's just an unfortunate drawback that comes with all of its advantages.

*Tracking you by IP, that is, there are still cookies, local storage, browser fingerprinting, etc.