True, but I'm pretty sure they don't have any sort of HMAC-type mechanism ensuring they're untampered-with. i.e., unless you put something in there that causes their machines to get cranky, your chances of being caught is nearly zero.

Hacking into banks is also illegal, but that doesn't stop determined individuals from trying.

That's kinda the point. Crappy signal results in high packet loss. If you can recover lost packets through some recipient-side magic (clever math, apparently) rather than retransmission, you avoid the overhead of another roundtrip, and get higher bandwidth as a result. This cuts down massively on latency (huge win) and should also decrease network congestion significantly.

I'm trying to think of a way to put this in the requisite car analogy, but don't honestly know enough about the lower-level parts of the network stack to do so without sounding like an idiot to someone sufficiently informed. But I'm sure there's something about a car exploding and all traffic backs up for tens of miles along the way ;)

$266 is a very plausible round trip airfare price. So if you mean one-way... well not 3-4x but 2x for sure.

I've definitely seen trips by train that cost quite a bit more than equivalent airfare; I'd cite one but the prices are always in flux (I think it was LA-SF though)

It most definitely _is_ excessive force by any rational person's standards - it just may not be judged as such by the courts.

Courts get stuff wrong all the time.

Also, they tend to believe more in the idea that our security theater is effective. Hypothetically it makes both sides happier.

An extension cord? Something tells me that's been done before.

They still (autonomously) scan your email and use the data for targeted advertising. Nobody clicks the ads in gmail, but they certainly use the mail to target the ads you see on google searches. I'm sure that's why they don't charge for Exchange/IMAP/POP access.

So... probably not an issue.

Microseconds? Are you kidding? We accelerate at rates higher than 1G all the time, and certainly do it for longer than microseconds. A (very) fast car can pull over 1G (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_cars_by_acceleration), and drag racers have set records of just over 3Gs. Go look at fighter jets if you're so inclined, never mind spacecraft.

Sustaining it for enough time to do serious long-term exploration will certainly be a problem, but what you're saying is just incorrect. And it's probably unnecessary to maintain anywhere near a full 1G of acceleration in order to avoid serious medical complications. 0.5G should (if my understanding is correct) take about 0.25x of the fuel (read: 4x the duration, all else being equal). Maybe lunar gravity is plenty - who knows? That would get you a massively increased burn range, though of course you're travelling over a much longer period of time. I'd be interested to see this graphed out.

So charge me $0.10/GB (plus even a small connection fee, as you do with some utilities) and call it a day. It's important to be able to get a sense of my usage throughout the month, but that price seems more than fair. I'd need to burn through nearly a terabyte of data to pay what I do now... and even I'd have difficulty doing that - and that's living with several other people that use just as much if not more bandwidth than I do, and I'm not a light user. Our house does 300-400GB/month based on some old router logs.

Even charge more for higher bandwidth as they do now, or for higher bandwidth priority. Or penalize with above-average usage, as also happens with many utilities. But a random data cap is just stupid. It penalizes the people who want your service the most and does nothing to help the 95% of your users that just care about things working. Just squeeze down bandwidth a bit during heavy use times.

Also Yahoo and Wikipedia, both of which are in the top five.

That's what the title suggests, especially with the "super bacteria" moniker.

The same reason a 30 year old woman wants to spend all day in a room filled with first grade boys: some people actually enjoy teaching.

Can we stop parroting the media's current trend of "all adult males want to molest children"?

To be fair, most salary gains come through negotiation. Men tend to negotiate more aggressively than women, so it logically follows that men would tend to get higher salaries than women. I've met women in the same field as me with salaries as high or higher than mine; it's no coincidence that they were aggressive negotiators.

If person X will accept the job at $N and person Y will accept an equivalent job for $N-5000, why on earth should the employer pay person Y $N?

Sorry, but this is one situation where I believe the person feeling they're discriminated against is at fault. Want more? Ask for it. Not happy with the offer? Don't take it. I'll bet you'll also find that shy/introverted men tend to make less than extroverted men, also as a result of trying to avoid confrontations (read: negotiating).

I'm sure there's employer-caused discrimination in the hiring process in many places, but I don't think that comes through in wages. There are of course counterexamples all over the place, but I'm referring to the overall trend.

Depends. If you genuinely appreciate life more in spite of (or due to) the daily hammering of your hands, is that a bad thing*? The point of religion is to feel better about your life. Some people feel the need to make me feel better about my life using their methodology and try to shove their religion down my throat (or through my chest, depending how important it is to them) and that's not OK, but your peaceful church-on-Sunday folks that just say some crazy crap that doesn't compute tend to not hurt anyone.

* Medically, yes, duh. Your example might be a little more realistic if it was drinking your own urine, which is relatively harmless albeit weird. Most religious activities are (IMO) relatively harmless albeit weird, so that fits right in line. It's when people start fighting over it that we get problems.

Well, you either use the signed (secure) distribution method and guarantee that you got what you asked for, or you don't. If they don't want to distribute it in such a way that their signature can be verified, that's their business - but that means this kind of thing can happen.

Not that it would likely matter. Their lack of support for signed code means they probably would leak their private key, thus negating any gains it would otherwise bring (and then some, as you have misplaced trust rather than no trust at all)