> So if anything this is testament to the security of tor.network.

I'm afraid not. It's a strong indicator of the underlying _vulnerability_ of the Tor architecture to malicious or mishandled exit nodes.

Explosives, especially homemade explosives, degrade over time and with exposure to moisture and weather. So do control electronics, and organic poisons. The stability of C4 is the exception, rather than the rule. Documented cases of old mines and artillery going off at unexpected times are common in the aftermath of military conflicts around the world. Maintenance in buildings that large, occupied by the pubic on a frequent basis, absolutely require maintenance crews to do thorough inspections to avoid collections of far more mundane materials. Some of the relevant regulations can be found at http://www.fifa.com/mm/documen....

This is why cab stands near bus and train stops can make good money. When you've missed a bus, a cab to get you to the meeting on time, or in which you can use a cell phone without bus noise, is invaluable. I used one yesterday.

I'm afraid it's a step forward to dotcom project planning. De-scripting the init process has made it unpredictable, especially if specific components are delayed, such as network component recognition. There are advantages for running daemon: systemd has been fragile. But since Dan Bernstein finally released "daemontools" as public domain, they could have used that, which has a much better serial behavior at boot time and manages dependencies more consistently.

I'm afraid this is not true. Traffic from behind various proxies would need more local monitoring: man-in-the-middle attacks with pilfered SSL keys are easiest when you can access the private keys from the load balacers or proxies that host local copies of the private keys. It's certainly true that the broadest access to core network traffic would be upstream, but assembling the information into a useful whole, or a useful transctipt, is easiest with more localized monitoring.

> Well, that's not fair. I feel that you took what I said out of context. Murder is something that has to be done, period. I "murder" a plant to eat it. But what to do? This is a limitation of our language

No, that's a failure to use thelanguage. "Murder" has a number of specific legal, historical, and common linguistic meanings.

> Humans do not have to be greedy

Nor do they "have" to obey the laws of gravity nor their own hormones. With effort they can be overwhelmed, quie successfully. But the basic desire, the basic emotion, will be there nonetheless.

> The beings that replace us (if we were to die off en masse due to these factories) would be forced to respect the fact "greed" (unless they come up with a better word) kills.

As do lack of food, or water, or the presence of metabolic toxins or suicidal depression, yes. But then, we already know that now. It's why "greed" is one of the "seven deadly sins" of Catholic doctrine.

It's more lucrative _to some_. To the patients, it' can be very expensive, and to society as a whole, it's very expensive indeed. The chance at a Nobel Prize could easily overwhelm the pharmaceutical shortsightedness if someone finds the cure but is worried about retaining funding if they publish.

The "non-critical" systems can, and should, either be turned off or kept updated. The problem is the "mission critical" ones that _cannot_ be given that protection.

Dogs are quite sophisticated, and they've also been strongly trained by humans. Beetles, bacteria, worms, etc. are not, and they certainly outmass us. Altruism, as opposed to greed, is admittedly a fascinating biological and psychological subject, and I may have oversimplified the needs to show genuine altruism. But greed? Greed is built right into the concept of "desire", and applies to the desires for territory, food, and sex. The idea that "desire" is good, while "greed" is not, for example, is core to many philosophies and social structures, and would include what you mean by "altruism". The idea that this is a matter of "level of evolution" is as silly as as calling rich people "more evolved" than poor people.

The idea that altruism is "built-in" to anything is a fascinating concept. It's certainly necessary for civilizations, or the greedy would eat all the stored food for the winter or the dry season. Societies that failed to control greed would fail very quickly. So it's absolutely necessary for societies beyond a certain size to evolve, as societies. But that's social or even cultural evolution, not biological. Its role is often confused with that of biology, but they're not automatically linked together.

As for lifeforms "ruining the planet", I suggest you look into the evolution of photosynthetic life altering the oxygen level of the entire atmosphere. The result was devastating, and unavoidable worldwide. The "knowingly" part of that process, I suggest is unnecessary. While there are many things Robert Malthus got wrong, the tendency for species to breed until they overwhelm the available resources is built into most evolutionary models, The results are often disastrous, poisoning the ecosystem in which the original organisms evolved.

Humans are an extreme example. Our adaptability, and very large population, and control of our environments are are a startling combination contributing to the _scale_ of our ecological effects. But genocide and greed collapse small ecosystems _all the time_. If you don't believe they can devestate the planet's ecosystem, then look at the evolution of photosynthesis. It _changed the atmosphere of the whole planet_ to include roughly 20% of a searing, chemically reactive, and quite poisonous gas to the rest of the ecosystem. The results were _devastating_ worldwide.

> No other species that we know of has ever been as selfish, and foolish as mankind.

Have you gotten to know any other species well? Altruism is a very sophisticated behavior. So greed is pretty much built-in, along with deceit, rape, and genocide. Foolishness.... you have to have pretty sophisticated behavior and intellect before you even have anything to acuse of oolishness.

When you consider that the German Army, in both wars, had considerably better equipment than the countries they successfully invaded, you see the problem of relying on technical superiority. They became overextended, and could no longer supply the necessary armies occupation. Japan became similarly overextended: they started a fight with a much, _much_ larger nation. America's pre-deployed and quite expensive tactical reserve was devastated at Peal Harbor. Spending US military resources on a very, very expensive stealth fighter is analagous to buying one Oracle server running all my databases, when I can deploy 20 laptops running MySQL around the world for less money, better failover, and better local response times where the data is actually needed.

Not all teachers. I remember that in one course we had a long discussion about the history of religious genocide in the Bible. But my teacher on this was a theological history teacher. It was a fascinating course: the concepts of a "promised land", a "manifest destiny", and "the divine right of kings" all were examined. I do believe it helped prevent their getting tenure, but the material was fascinating.

F-35's are not for "major wars". It's bleeding edge, horribly expensive multi-role aircraft that does none of the roles well. The ill-founded claims by its manufacturers that it is "eight times more effective in air-to-ground combat" is pointless since it is almost 10 times as expensive to build and operate as a more specifically ground combat focused aircraft. The "build a core design and bolt on different components for different roles" has led to a variety of tragic design flaws that have been incredibly expensive to address for all its different variations. It's also a complete maintenance nightmare: the redesigns needed to reduce the weight, after it was enlarged to hold more weapons and provide larger engines, has led to customized parts that no one else uses, on the very edge of the strength/weight tradeoff to keep the weight down. So they fail, frequently, and are very expensive to replace. When confronted with various design flaws, such as the extremely por cockpit visibility leading to trivial destruction by cheaper aircraft in combat, Boing's suggestion that "that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead"

There is no chance that this aircraft will have the reliability and longevity of many existing models of current US aircraft, which means incredible ongoing costs in repairing and replacing expensive aircraft that can never be used at their full capabilities_. They are displacing budgets for manpower (needed for ground warfare and holding territory, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan), supply craft (for keeping troops and warcraft supplied), base maintenance (to train and equip men and machines), and drones (which are far cheaper and more effective than modern aircraft at targeteed strikes). The best thing that could happen for the US milatary with this aircraft is to pull the plug on it _now_, throw 1/3 of money into a rebuild and oversupply of more conventional aircraft, use 1/3 the budget to build newer, more specifically suited aircraft for each military branch instead of a Swiss Army Aircraft, and use the remaining 1/3 for manpower support. America is short on the ground troops and personnel to run the several occupying wars we're in the midst of.

No, but it's correlation, not direct causation. The rapid development common to startups often leads to poor security. Approaches like "if someone can access our machines, we have much bigger problems" lead to storing passwords in plain text, sharing accounts, making the "root" password "root", storing mysql passwords on the monitoring server, and other unfortunate errors. Another month making a project secure, really reviewing the vulnerabilities and updating core components, is time to market being lost. So it's very rare in the early "get market growth first before someone else can outgrow us and capture the market" phase.

My work is often with slightly more mature environments, where people will be working there next year or 5 years from now, and don't want to suffer exactly this kind of disaster. So I get to see a lot of the cost of cleaning up and re-educating personnel about the risks of this kind of carelessness.

> so spying on them would likely be a major problem

With the current NSA guidelines, as revealed by Edward Snowden's revelations, any communications with foreign nationals would automatically be susceptible to monitoring. So it's certainly a common practice with the pervasive, wholesale telephone and email monitoring currently in place: Congress is _expected_ to speak with foreign governments as part of diplomacy, trade agreements, investigating treaties. and on behalf of foreign families of their constituents.

Whether more targeted monitoring of Congress is done by the NSA is another matter. The NSA's charter specifically forbids them from domestic intelligence, that's the role of the FBI. And for human assets in foreign intelligence, not direct communications monitoring, that's the CIA. But of course, with the new "Homeland Security" overseeing all the group's efforts, the lines have become not only blurred but deliberately concealed. When the responsibilities are deliberately overlapped and merged "to aid communication", it puts the tools of one group for specific uses in the hands of their supervisors who may have quite different agendas or guidelines. I'd look very, very carefully look at "Homeland Security", at the people who are expecte merge and organize the data and precisely what they are ordering or being allowed access to.

They've managed to keep out of most of this NSA exposure. But as an "organizing" agency for all the other departments, they're in a very dangerous position to weave those threads together into a much tighter cocoon of monitoring at every level.