So you suggest that the actual researchers are incompetent beyond belief, but you can't be even be bothered to look at the /. summary?

" that the Romans were trading in Aksum hundreds of years earlier than previously thought"

They outsource it

It could be argued that the NSA-BND cooperation was a case of outsourcing the espionage activities, so the US really did not do any espionage here, just like the US outsource their manufacturing. The fact that they made the BND spy on their own country's companies is just a little ironic icing on that shit cake.

eSports are eSports. They have a different name than "sports" because it's not the same thing. It has a similar name to "sports", because it's a similar thing.

Regarding cheating: Yes, because real sports, especially the professional/competitive level, is known to be free of cheaters.
Arguably, eSports cheaters are much easier to catch because by definition, everything is controlled by a computer and most cheaters leave some sort of trace that can be tracked. I'm pretty sure that you will find no physical sport that has as strict an enforcement of anti-cheating rules as even the most lenient/lazy competitive eSports games. Especially at the highest level of play, during tournaments where competitors are physically present, with hardware provided by and players under observation of judges, cheating is practically impossible. Many physical sports would be better off if their tournaments had the same ratio of cheating as eSports.

Is it really noteworthy when someone does what they are trained and paid to do? What they even have sworn an oath to do? Neither as an affected individual nor as a concerned citizen am I indifferent to what happens in those .1% of the time, if those .1% can mean someone loses money, their freedom, their health, or their life without justification. Police, whether you or anyone likes it, must be held to a higher standard, because with great power comes great responsibility.

The difference between WW2 codebreakers and today's NSA and what have you being, of course, that WW2 codebreakers were used against to crack the communications of a defined enemy. So yes, it's perfectly reasonable to object to a practice that considers literally everybody, civilian or not, foreigner or not, to be an enemy.

As for your claim about lives saved vs. deaths caused: Citation needed. The secret police forces of Nazi Germany, Stasi Germany, Soviet Russia, and countless other dictatorships were certainly not in the business of saving lives. The intelligence agencies of the US and her allied governments are certainly not in the business of saving lives either. They are in the business of target selection for the US drone wars.

docsigma2000: jesus christ man
docsigma2000: my son is sooooooo dead
c8info: Why?
docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPE
docsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCE
docsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nuts
c8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.
docsigma2000: ...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCK
docsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???
docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that much
c8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.
docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.
docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo dead
c8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.
** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)

Problem solved.

Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

It is NOT bleedingly obvious. For once, the dropoff was much sharper than a normal sunset. Also, it came at a time of peak solar power production, early afternoon on a clear, sunny spring day. Real preparations and plans had to be made. If that makes it easier for the IT crowd to understand, compare it to the Y2K bug. The reason why nothing major happened back then was not because the threat was exaggerated, but because actual code fixing has happened.

If we will ever have large-scale use for Helium 3, it will be for power generation. In which case synthesizing it would make it merely a form of energy storage like hydrogen.

Like, "Yes".

Does it even matter who owns a nuclear power company? Those companies are highly regulated, they serve the same group of people that pay taxes (i.e. everybody), and if they are too big to fail, and something goes wrong for them financially, they will be bailed out with tax money anyway. Not to mention massive subsidies, which have been approved recently , just before the new EU commission took over.

Come on. You can use the same argument on broadcasting basically any activity, sports and music in particular. What's the fun in watching someone play tennis or the violin when you can do it yourself? Well, some can't do it themselves, and most cannot do it nearly as proficiently as the talents/professionals they are watching. Word mincing aside, there is an actual "Ludum Dare" channel on Twitch already. It lets people broadcast how they write a video game over a weekend, and I can assure you it has several thousand viewers when it's on, so there's your proof that there is an audience for people writing code.