I think it's more that the evolutionary pressure is not currently present, so what you're seeing is a genetic holdover from past generations. Imagine you're witnessing the evolution of the giraffe, in years of drought the tallest survive as they can reach leaves higher up on trees than others. What do you see in rainy years when there's plenty food lower down, do you expect giraffes to keep getting taller? Why not, because even though it may seem pointless and irrational in this generation maybe in three generations there'll be an extreme drought that only the tallest survive and the genes that selected for it, despite the lack of advantage and need will come out as winners in the end. In the same way this bacteria selects for greater variability because history has given it reason to and it'll keep selecting for it until there's a stronger selection pressure to the contrary.

As long as it doesn't backfire in the public opinion, a lot of Americans might be sympathetic to exposing the extensive spying on others but when it starts hurting their own wallet is that anger going to be directed at Snowden or the NSA? I mean in the whole "Snowden - hero or traitor?" debate tanking the US economy is probably not a plus. Personally I think you'll get a lot of first-order reaction and the second-order reaction "But should we really have been spying in the first place?" will be much weaker, the reason the saying is "don't kill the messenger" is that people do have a tendency to want to kill the messenger. Doesn't matter how dirty the laundry you're airing is or how many skeletons were in your closest, it's the one who brings it out in the open who has to pay the price.

Well, nobody knows how much of a choice they have in the matter. If the NSA come rolling in with a National Security Letter, comply and keep quiet it's rather hard to refuse. It's not like they'd just make a corporate fine for leaking it, they'd be going after individuals to put them in prison. Are you ready to do a Snowden and screw your whole life for the sake of not complying with a government order of questionable constitutionality? If the government wants to put you over a barrel, they can.

That software has to run on hardware and if you can't trust the hardware you are screwed anyway, it's like trusting your software (oss) encryption when there's a hardware keylogger installed. Send the right magic numbers and the hardware could start doing anything it wants like mirroring traffic, dumping memory, whatever the attacker needs to completely compromise the box. The only advantage would be that it could run on more generic hardware that you hopefully could buy from a more trusted supplier.

Assuming they want slaves and they don't want to kill you just for being of the wrong religion, race or other deviancy. Particularly if they're that good at robotics, they might not want much slave labor. I think it would be rather hard to make slaves productive in a modern society yet repressed enough not to pose a threat to their masters. Then again, the robots could be used to control them with an iron fist. Still, the risks and costs might not outweigh the gains.

Which is why you put your tinfoil hat back on, so the aliens can't use their mind reading rays to spy on you... do you also hate getting shot on when you dress up in a moose costume during hunting season and run around the forest practicing your moose imitation act?

The DNS system by nature has a single root, the trust chain doesn't necessarily have that. You could for example require that all TLDs be signed with the keys of the five permanent members of the UN security council and require all of them to be present. So Canada would own the keys to the ".ca" domain and they would be signed by the US, Russia, China, UK and France. Canada gets to do whatever they want under their domain and nobody can spoof them unless they a) steal Canada's private keys or b) steal all the other five private keys. Of course the tin foil hat brigade don't trust any authority and that's fine, you can always check the fingerprint. But I don't see how it hurts your security to have the ".com" server certifying that you own "yourdomain.com" versus a totally self-signed certificate with yourself as CA. At worst it's no trust vs no trust.

As for being "blackmailed", well if they're being nasty they're already holding all your traffic hostage (except direct IP access). The base certificate "owner of yourdomain.com" should be free with the DNS service, if you want something to actually certify who you are that's different. Really it's nothing more than the service they're doing already with DNS and DNSSEC, making sure that they're pointing you to the right server.

In engineering? Yes. Science? Well...

They do sure sound like great ways to drown yourself in work.
1. Blazing trails - great, but my impression is whoever starts the ball rolling is stuck with them, often to the determent of your "real" job, unless you've got your nose so far up your bosses ass you want to "work extra days necessary to install new office software". That's a direct quote.
2. Knowing who knows - that is a valid point, but there's a difference between that and small talk and unless it's really to the point those other people have other jobs of their own. But hey, managers love people find answers in their spare time.
3. Proactive self-management, seriously she took vacation time and went to a conference for her own money? Then continued to work on it on her own time? Get a life.
4. Getting the big picture - again the example is that every night - I assume that means after hours - she'd study her notebook looking for ways to improve.
5. The right kind of followership - be the boss's No 2. That's great on Star Trek but it's also a job of its own, you want to be the sparring partner to his job as well as your own?
6. Teamwork as joint ownership of a project - in short take the team leader or mediator or coordinator role even when it's not really yours, probably a great way to get ahead but again one more job in addition to your own.
7. Small-l leadership - now you're also your coworker's coach and personal development counselor. Don't forget to share the late night pizzas, even when it's not really you having the late night.
8. Street smarts - or I'd say corporate politics, why not since we're already piling it up.
9. Show and tell - why not add some presentation, salesman and PR skills to the picture. And of course you don't spend any time at all trying to wrap your work up, as opposed to getting it done.

I've met a few people like that, they're working around the clock because in addition to the job they're really supposed to be doing, they have two or three other jobs that didn't really go in their job description. Personally I'm very much a fan of "management by opportunity cost", if you want me to do an hour more of something it means that hour must be coming out of something else. And for me taking it out of my leisure time is out of the question, so it means taking it out of other work time. I can do initiatives, find answers, find new opportunities, learn new skills, spar with my boss, direct a team, take charge, manage politics or sell solutions but they're all coming out of the time that involves actually developing the software. And if the boss thinks that's a good use of my work time that's fine, but usually there's more than enough development work that needs doing.

Honestly I'd much rather be the somewhat shielded guru that have others running interference so I don't have to deal with pointless meetings or chasing requirements or corporate politics because if you just clear me a path I'll run bloody fast, avoid all the pitfalls and score the touchdown. It's not the only job on the team, but it's an important one. Once two seniors quit with a month's difference while a third knocked his head good and was on sick leave for many months, I was doing all the heavy lifting while two juniors and a senior project manager was doing everything they could to ease the load. And training them, but honestly it was more pedal to the metal and try to keep up with me because I didn't have time to be pedagogical or work on training cases instead of large complex customers. But it worked quite well and I got a lot of credit for that.

I think by "anything but video" he was referring to gaming, even the 780 Ti and R9 290X struggle with 4K. What do you think DDR4 would change? As far as I know they already support the 4K resolution but it'll play like a slide show.

The Wordpress blog's conclusions at least, in reality the last problem is the same as the first problem. We use so much energy and resources because we can afford to, if "the rest of the world" had money to compete for those resources we'd have to cut back. And despite what the Greens feel like we do recycle and care about emissions and pollution but we also like our cars and huge houses and big screen TVs and air condition and holidays in exotic places. We're not going to stop until we can't afford to, anyone who thinks the first world is going to voluntarily live like the third world is seriously deluded. Next month I'm going on a long vacation flight and I really want this vacation, I can afford it and no amount of eco-babble is going to make me sorry for the CO2 burn.

Like they're pointing out, people are getting literate. People are getting educated. People are getting better health. People spend less time child-bearing. The rest of the world is trying very hard to take over the first world work and bring down the wage equality between them and us. And of course we hate it, you can see people frothing at the mouth if I mention outsourcing here. But I totally understand the employees who of course would like to undercut a westerner and make a lower, but locally still a very good salary. With the world becoming far more connected you are going to get a lot less screwed just for being born in a third world country and you are going to get much less of a free ride for being born in a first world country. The differences are still huge of course, but there's poor and there's illiterate, seven kids, bad health poor.

Actually I think it's the complete opposite, it's the knowledge that yes I'll easily find a torrent that has it and yes the speed will be good, so there's very little reason to hoard it just to have it available or to avoid downloading it again. With the war on piracy it seemed for a while like the good times would come to an end, napster shut down, grokster shut down, winmx shut down, suprnova shut down, grab it now while it's easy because tomorrow it might be harder. With the TPB raid and trial I'd say that was the case no more than five years ago. That and slow speeds, if you want it now then in an hour is very different from in two days. I realized it must be an insanely good movie or series for me to watch it more than twice, if you know all the dialog, the plot twists, the gags I mean some are classics I still zone out way too fast.

I had two friends so around 2001 who tried explaining it to me as they were on a ridiculously fast 100 Mbps campus connection while I had barly gotten DSL - I think less than a megabit. At that time it was rather inconcievable to me how they had no need to hoard because they could just grab whatever they wanted, any time. Today I'm almost there (90Mbit) and I totally get it. I used to have a big maxitower with disks, now I'm down to a half-full miditower and if I really wanted to I could easily live on one SSD and one big HDD. Good series, great series, am I really going to go back and watch season one again? Naaaaaah probably not... ok, delete and if I change my mind later that's no problem.

They said the same thing about YouTube and Netflix, but when the mainstream starts using a service the caps tend to adjust. Granted I'm not in the US but in Norway however YoY bandwidth growth here is 25% and with H.265 promising the same quality at half the bandwidth the transition from 1080p to 4K is about three years of technological advance. Personally I suspect the bandwidth will arrive far ahead of TVs and content to watch, there's a massive fiber deployment and speeds are constantly upgraded as it seems most of the cost is in operating the line, not in bandwidth charges. Like my current provider, you can get a 10 Mbps line or a 90 Mbps line for 1/3rd more. I guess it's also because mostly it means my burst speeds are higher, really I already download all I want to download I only do it faster but averaged out I don't use significantly more.

People are creatures of habit, if you go to the book store and they serve your book needs why screw with what works? Just knowing that there's alternatives out there isn't usually enough to push people over the edge, but if you go to the book store and they're pushing the Kindle and eBooks maybe you figure it's time to follow the crowd. If you go to the whip & buggy store you expect them to try selling you just that, if they instead try to sell you a car on commission because that's where the market is going they're only spelling their own doom. Either you milk the market as long as it lasts or you sell your own car, but unless you're getting very well paid I don't see assisted suicide as being profit-maximizing.

While we're talking about apples-to-oranges comparisons, I don't care much about "trivial" fires that don't cause any personal harm. They're rare enough to be an annoyance for the insurance company to deal with, but not a big deal for the overall cost. For example it's much more expensive to have a small crash with a modern car that has huge, soft crumple zones than an old rigid car as much less gets bent out of place. But if you're in a solid crash you'd want to be in the modern car that diverges all that energy around you, not transferring it to your soft meatbag. I suppose it does sound bad if you're upside down in a ditch or the doors are jammed shut by the collision, but the rate of fire doesn't directly translate to the risk of being hurt by an engine fire.