the secrets stolen improved Chinese efficiency (sorry IP holders!). Terrible (for everyone else) if it allows China to consume more fuel. TFA doesn't provide much detail on the nature of the secrets.

I am a firm believer that new/different eyes working with experienced professionals often results in cool things happening. Every coder has had that experience when you are explaining to your buddy some code, and one of those "stupid" questions they ask gives you new insight or perspective.

Missing from the summary is that there were algae present in the salt crystals as well, and that they likely contributed to the survivability of the bacteria. I'm really curious how the algae survived though!

Lets face it - not every future programmer is cut out for that level of understanding. Those who need it, will learn it. Those who don't can safely ignore it. Teaching as you say would waste a great deal of time for the bulk of future programmers who will probably end up working in higher level languages for their entire careers.

The public reaction to the most recent DDoS activities is far more alarming than the DDoSes themselves. Sure, people are trying to silence speech they do not agree with, but the fact that they are successful means these sites need the attention of a network/infrastructure admin, not the media. Once these attacks become irrelevant, they will stop, along with the sensationalist media that has accompanied them. I might be wrong, but I think all this media coverage has just made the problem worse.

It might not be easy to prep, but you could have your firmware checksum the bootloader before it executes.

whoosh!

Are there bacteria that aren't opportunistic, and change their mind's once they show up and see the host already totally screwed?

It is called leverage, and you use it when you need to, if you think it will work for your benefit. It is key to negotiation for trade of resources. Without leveraging your positions, you will lose the game to those who know how to do it safely.

Life in general seems to constantly try to eradicate competing life for it's own benefit, so I think we will know the machines are alive when they start trying to kill us.

Put on your tin foil hat! Perhaps it is an elaborate attempt by the RIAA to further stigmatize the "mp3" format!

Any action without perfect information could be construed as self-destructive. Unfortunately for us, this information obviously isn't available. With this predicament on our hands, I'd like to imagine that the importance to our survival of tasty-fishes is something unimaginably complex and far reaching, which really just means of course, that we'd be fools to care, since just about anything could really lead to our ultimate destruction. However, if we keep eating those tasty-fishes, it might be them disappearing before us, so I figure not being in last place is a good start. So folks eat up those fishes, or in a million years, they might evolve into land-dwelling laser-wielding nuclear-missile-having mermen, and IMHO, that is far from acceptable!

The parent post is as informative as this post is funny, interesting, or informative. Further demonstration of it's non-informative nature:

I disagree.

I disagree.

Two things:

  * Bad experiences with management, eh? We've all been there. Good management is hard to find, but when you do, latch on and enjoy the ride to success. I appreciate good MBA "drones" because they do a crap ton of the work I don't want to do myself, and regularly put on a face to customer's that I myself just simply could not do sanely as a job.

  * The hacker ethic is good for some parts of some jobs, but it is naive to think it is always superior to an effective process.

That would be great, if 1.5v-3v devices could automagically operate safely with 5v. Essentially, your concept requires the device to convert DC voltage, which isn't cheap, and generally very wasteful. However, on the charger end, they could have an switchable transformer and produce the desired voltage.