Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, Frothy.

Now all we need is a promise from Romney that you won't hold any position of authority in his administration if he's elected. You're unfit to hold any public office.

Spam has two levels of cost - the victimization of the people who receive the spam, and the bandwidth and processing costs borne by ISPs and network operators. I know from firsthand experience working at a large ISP that anti-spam alone was a multi-million dollar cost center and accounted for around 85% of our bandwidth costs.

Based on what I've seen, improving filter efficiency at the backbone/ISP level has the paradoxical effect of increasing spam traffic - if enough of their messages aren't getting through, the spammers will just keep throwing more spam at you until enough leaks through for them to get a sucker. If you improve your filter efficiency by an order of magnitude, they'll just throw an order of magnitude more spam at you, and since they are typically using stolen resources to do their spamming, it's not costing them much (if any) more to do so. The cost remains near-zero and even a single successful scam can potentially net hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

The core problem is that SMTP is fundamentally broken with regards to spam (among many other problems). It's a problem the authors just didn't (and probably couldn't) envision. The problem won't go away as long as sending millions of emails is effectively free (in terms of time, computation, and money)

The rate at which a bot or rogue server can send email is entirely network-bound. Email has to be redesigned from the top down so that it is inherently rate-limited by some irreducible factor. Increasing the computational cost to send email using a memory-bound function seems to be the best way to do this (the rationale being that memory bandwidth has historically only increased at a fraction of CPU speed).

The tl;dr version is that crime pays... and unfortunately that will never change. What can do is change is the economics of sending email by increasing the computational cost by several orders of magnitude. This may not solve the problem of individuals getting scammed, but it will dramatically reduce network congestion and infrastructure costs.

Politics is about getting and retaining power. Anything that helps achieve this goal is by definition part of politics. Attacking your opponent is definitely a core element of the political process.

Sure, we can think about a utopian fantasy world where all politicians act for the public good, base policy on factual information and rational thought, eschew fallacious reasoning, Unfortunately, we live in the real world where fallacious arguments, propaganda, and outright lies are an indelible part of politics because they are highly effective tools for persuading/controlling people.

Which are almost entirely law-abiding citizens who forgot to put their legally-owned and -carried knife/gun/screwdriver/whatever in their checked baggage.

Not to mention the fact that the TSA's failure rate is 70%. So if 4 weapons are getting found daily, they're missing at least 9 or 10 a day. That's 3,650 weapons on airplanes a year, with ZERO incidents resulting therefrom.

This is America. The knowledgeable and motivated sociopaths are too busy making MONEY to bother about making a POINT.

No filter is 100% effective. It costs effectively nothing to spam a 10 million addresses, but for sake of argument say it costs $100. If 1% of those get through the defenses, and 1% of the non-filtered recipients falls for your scam, you've got your hooks into 1,000 suckers. Even if you only take each sucker for $1 your ROI is 1000%.

Either windows in a VM running on Linux or vice-versa. For real work (coding) you have Linux; for everything else you use Windows. It works especially well if you have a multi-monitor setup.

So, by your own numbers, median salary has gone up by 30%, but prices have more than doubled, and you can't see the problem? Are you really that math-impaired?

Bullshit. The entire fashion industry exists solely because people will buy status symbols at insanely inflated prices. People will line up around the block to spend money they don't have (borrowed at usurious rates) so they can latest greatest status symbol.

It's trivial to jailbreak an iOS device or Playstation. It's even more trivial to root an Android device.

If you make it, someone will figure out how to root/jailbreak it and put the crack on the internet.

The only reason there hasn't been a bigger backlash against locked platforms is that unlocked platforms are readily available to anyone who cares.

It's pretty simple: If you're good-looking and/or rich, you're just trying to get laid. If you're not, you're a sexual predator.

Don't even pretend it's not true.

Criminal profiling has been debunked as a form of cold reading, specifically relying on the rainbow ruse and Barnum statements.

It's called cold reading, and it's a parlor trick / con game / pseudoscience. The reason it appears to work is primarily due to confirmation bias - you want to believe, so you focus on the successes and ignore the misses, even when the latter far outnumber the former.

The Black Speech is in a completely different linguistic group than the others, and has a preponderance of gutteral consonants.

German or Arabic wouldn't be a bad substitute, Russian might work too; and any of those would work as the language of the enemy to an American movie-goer.

Not necessarily... given her extraordinary talents and thousands of years of practice, her accent would be whatever she wanted it to be. We're talking about someone who defied the Valar (gods, basically), led a rebellion, and reigned for thousands of years as a beloved and respected monarch; as such one would assume she was an extremely gifted public speaker and politician, one of the best in Arda's history. Tolkien described her as "greatest of elven women" as well as "the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth".