What is especially crazy about promoting a less secure environment for everyone, just so that you can hack your enemies, is that the US is among the more dependent on hackable IT systems...

Sure, neither computers nor good hackers are free; but they are cheap and broadly available enough that more or less any country that isn't starving to death in its own filth(and some that are) can trivially afford some. Even relatively petty gangs can run a profit by fielding a few. Vulnerability, though, is something that you accrue as your society becomes increasingly dependent on electronic communications and finance, SCADA-controlled industrial base, etc.

So, if you reduce security overall, you increase your own vulnerability to every last hellholistani intelligence service, nationalist script kiddie, and slimy pin-skimmer gang, in order to infiltrate the systems of people who probably depend less on computers than you do.

Genius, really.

You do realize that much of the world has fallen below replacement rates by the simple expedient of making people wealthy enough that they can choose whether to extrude yet another baby or not?

China has been trying to avoid the messy demographic squeeze that occurs in the intervening period(since improvements in standard of living usually slash child mortality before they slash fertility rates, you end up with ~1 generation of unsupportable boom children); but the evidence is overwhelming that people actually don't like keeping up the uterine-clown-car act once they have an option.

To say that they 'need' it would be a gross overstatement; but if they are doing their casual youtubing on a relatively recent wintel, they'll be using it anyway...

Does anybody know what language(s) are used for the "Dead Hand" second-strike control system that the Russians were working on during the Cold War? Personally, I'd nominate them as the programming languages that will outlive us all...

You do realize that, while Hypertransport vs. FSB was a hilariously lopsided contest(and one of the reasons that even the most Intel-friendly OEMs were forced to start shipping Opteron servers in the multi-socket segement), all remotely recent Intel silicon(except Atom, which is off marching very slowly in its own direction) use QPI and integrated memory controllers? It took them long enough; but recent AMD and recent Intel CPUs again have substantially the same layout in terms of interface bandwidth and placement of system RAM.

The Woz probably isn't the best comparison: In this rant, the guy who kicked off MS' Xbox strategy is complaining about how MS is fucking up Xbox strategy. In the case of Wozniak, Apple's original hardware-hacker-geek occasionally laments the fact that a company that bears almost no resemblance to the "Apple" of his era except the name now produces products that don't even pretend to be interested in the likes of him.

Not to the degree that the old-school enterprise players (IBM and Oracle, say) do it; but Windows licensing has already been spec based for quite some time now. As far back as NT 4.0, there was 'server' and 'enterprise server'(if you wanted 3GB of RAM per-process and an 8 CPU SMP license).

2000 brought 'server', 'advanced server', and 'datacenter server' (4CPU), (8CPU, 8GB RAM w/PAE), and (32CPU, 32GB RAM w/PAE) respectively.

Oh, you wouldn't literally do it that way, you'd work with the OEM to do a re-badge with your preferred changes(just as the Nexus itself does, though on a much larger scale). My intention was just to note that, given the profit margins that would allow you to do something as inefficient as 'purchase-at-retail-and-tear-up', you really should be able to OEM a top-end device to wrap in bling.

Given the existence of options markets, you could probably assign a market value to parking the thing in some convenient orbit for later use... It wouldn't necessarily be a terribly high market value; but, if you could find an orbit stable enough, the value of an option to exploit some slice of the asteroid at your leisure over the next several decades probably wouldn't be zero...

Without a good parking orbit, and some rather sci-fi hardware already in place to park it, the whole issue is moot, of course.

If their motives were so pure, they might have considered passing a law to deal with kiddy porn and child rape(which would now be in effect) rather than tying action on that issue to successfully ramming through a variety of much more dangerous and ill-considered changes(because of which they now don't have any progress on the issue).

Tackling serious issues is a good thing; but tying them to getting your way on much more controversial(or simply frivolous) issues is about as overt a sign of bad faith as you can exhibit...

Nothing particularly requires that 'performance art' only include things that are legal and/or unobjectionable. However, punishing people for doing things that are illegal for other reasons during the course of producing 'art' is not generally considered to be a restriction on freedom of speech, any more than the illegality of sacrificing babies to satan is considered an infringement on religious freedom...

There are some edge cases that get tricky(mostly on the side of people totally incidentally banning things that are required for speech or religions they don't like); but it isn't a terribly difficult conceptual distinction. Banning a speech act as such is a clear infringement of speech rights; but that doesn't confer any immunity from any other relevant laws on the speaker, should their speech involve breaching them.

We have 'zero proof' that building legal and technical mechanisms suitable for the suppression of a given flavor of content leads to the use of those mechanisms being used for the suppression of other flavors, sometimes including your 'actual speech' category? Srsly?

Mission creep is a well known phenomenon, and it's both easily historically observable that people's descriptions of political and social commentary they don't like frequently ends up tinged with the same vocabulary of condemnation as that used for porn('that's obscene' actually means that that includes some sordid fucking surprisingly infrequently).

On the architectural side, technical and legal mechanisms for efficient content takedowns are virtually content-agnostic. Blacklists, wordlist filters, DMCA takedown forms, any of those can be trivially re-targeted just by dropping some new parameters in to the configuration.

Lest this be dismissed as theoretical, observe the Russian experiment.

As for the babble about 'meaning' and 'the sacred', I'm just going to have to admit complete bafflement about what you are talking about.

The study certainly does suggest that mice(and some mouse findings) are much more troublesome than previously suspected. On the plus side, the methods that they used to establish that there was a real problem with mice(the examination of gene expression under the various conditions) seem like they might also be broadly applicable for examining the problem of what is and isn't a good model organism for a given problem...

Obviously, in an ideal world further research would confirm that you are on the right track and everything is just wonderful; but by our non-ideal world standards, a paper that hints at how animal models may be more accurately chosen or excluded for given lines of research seems like it could be quite handy.

Is so-called 'objective reality' also a social construct?

My understanding is that researchers shop them around, and that the large number of available journals, some more prestigious than others, and some more narrowly focused than others, is supposed to handle that(there has been some concern, especially regarding papers with negative results, that it may not do so optimally in some respects). If a paper is rejected from the very high prestige, relatively broad journals, it can work down the list toward journals more narrowly focused on its exact topic, and/or work down the list to less selective journals(or other selective journals where their luck is better).