These may all be unprejudiced articles containing nothing but true statements, but they do show a certain direction of interest.

And how exactly do you do research without "a certain direction of interest," pray tell? Or is your own research entirely aimless?

What's unfortunate is the destructive effect of popular attitudes and governmental policies on scientific research.

Wake me up when "scientific research" is anything but a bunch of petty office politics, infighting, and backstabbing about who gets tenure, time for research, who published more articles with a higher impact factor or some other garbage metric, and who gets grant money or public money for research that will be patented for private gain, who gets the patent money, and meanwhile the public can't even access a write-up or report of this research without paying an exorbitant fee to some journal that touts its "high impact factor".

You scientists are just grubbing for money like the rest of us who are trying to make a buck to get by in this life, so don't try to pawn your work off on us like it's some grand altruism or search for the truth, because it's not. Like everything else, it's all about making a buck somehow or another.

It's quite true that correlation does not imply causation, but how does it really matter whether or not pot smoking causes stupidity, or stupidity causes pot smoking? Smoking pot is still a stupid thing to do, and that remains well established. The really stupid part is that people who have willingly drugged themselves into oblivion think they have a right to live as stoned and high as they please on public assistance because they are unable to work as a pilot, stockbroker, heavy equipment operator, truck driver, lawyer, physician, surgeon or any other position that requires mental or physical coordination and judgment on the job.

And we wonder why the 47% are on welfare, with all those stupid pieces of metal sticking out of mutilated gauged-out body parts, ugly tattoos all over their skin, and brains damaged not just from pot, but meth, crack, heroin, and hard liquor. Never mind the USA is still by far the easiest country to work yourself out of "low socioeconomic status"---these people just don't want to because they enjoy that way of life.

Look. I don't have to be that smart or intelligent to say this.

I don't have any use for MySpace, FaceBook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc., etc. ad nauseam. I am simply sick and tired of the pervasiveness of the online social networking cancer. I can't even read the newspaper without seeing some column about a girl's "Wah! Wah! Wah! My boyfriend unfriended me!" or "My friend friended so-and-so, but she won't friend me, and so-and-so posted this or that on their 'wall' about me? What am I supposed to do?" Then we have Google+ "circles"---just like middle school, it's all about who's in and who's out of the "right" clique.

In the first place, I'm not the kind of person who refuses to speak to friend A any more because friend B doesn't get along with him/her all the time, or isn't "in" with the right crowd. In the second place, it's none of these disgusting companies' business who my friends are. In the third place, a very similar kind of centralized tracking of friends and connections (from phone company records) was instrumental in the Holocaust of the 1930s; let's not forget history.

I don't think I have to be a privacy freak to have my limits on how much I want a complete stranger to know or find out about me unbeknownst to me. Just mind your own business, and leave me alone. And just a hint to the marketing people. "Like" lacks an imperative in anything approaching halfway correct English. In the English language, I either like something or I don't, and if I do like something, it has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. You can't order me to "like" anything. "Like us on Facebook!" makes no sense whatsoever in proper English, and it rubs me the wrong way whenever I see that monstrosity of a phrase.

Manual skilled labor doesn't have too much to do IQ. The 'skilled' part, but not the manual labor part.

I would argue not the skilled part either, but rather how quickly/easily the skill was obtained and mastered. Even then, the individual person and skill probably matter too.

Having a high IQ and obtaining and mastering a skill quickly and easily is not going to get you through a 2000 hour apprenticeship any faster than the guy who barely understands what he's doing. It's not going to earn you any more money or help your career, especially in "manual skilled labor." That kind of work is often but not always unionized, pay is strictly by seniority, not merit, and if you have better than average skills or a high IQ, you keep it to yourself. Management doesn't want you as a worker if you think you're too smart, and co-workers won't cooperate with you if you work too hard because it makes them look bad. You're going to have a difficult career of it if _anyone_ gets the impression that you have better than average intelligence in any way, shape, or form.

Damn right, now why wouldn't Google avail themselves of it?

Because Google doesn't need to. Google has its own "Google Internet Authority" for signing its own certs. What are you complaining about? My point was that SSL certs that Google or anybody else will accept _are_ available for the "little guy" to use as he pleases at little to no cost.

Are you suggesting they provide a certificate signing system of their own to these people, or have an out of bound interface to upload self signed certs to a BIGASS trust store on their end?

I'm suggesting nothing of the sort. In fact I think they did the right thing here by just not dealing with self-signed certs. Big commercial company; vanilla commercial certs are good enough.

the commercial x.509 system

is "good enough" for everyday nickel-and-dime retail commerce on the internet, and not much more. I'm not even disagreeing with you on this point. So trust but verify: your nickels and dimes are probably safe with it, but go over your credit card statements promptly with a fine-toothed comb. Compartmentalize your life a little, be circumspect about the trails you leave online, and don't spill all your secrets to Facebook. If you have something to hide, don't allow it near a computer that will ever be attached to the internet. The internet is not and never will be a crypto utopia.

A cert from BigNameInternetCompany costs next to nothing

In fact it costs nothing from StartSSL, like several commenters have pointed out, but people forget that the commercial x.509 PKI is for convenience, not security.

A self-signed cert is highly secure as long as you can verify through independent means that it is in fact the same cert installed on your server, and as long as the private key has not been compromised. In fact this is really the only way you can really get this level of security from even a commercial cert --- to verify independently that it is in fact the cert you think it is, and you have not been subject to a man-in-the-middle-attack.

It's not as though Google previously made any effort to verify the authenticity of those self-signed certs, or if accepting those self-signed certs as they did before would give their users anything but a false sense of security. Surely it is not a money issue for the "small guy". Commercial certs can be had, if not free from the one provider I already mentioned, for a very minimal price from many different providers, on the order of what the "small guy" is already paying for his domain registration. Why is it that the "small guy" always seems to choose the most expensive, heavily advertised vendors of some service or product and then proceed to complain about the price?

I have to agree (mostly) with Frosty here. No, the mainstream commercial PKI is not the most highly secure thing in the world, but you're trying to authenticate your server to a big commercial company---you need a commercial cert. And if you're trusting such a big commercial company as Google, then you may as well trust the whole commercial PKI, because you're extending your trust far and wide in either case, which there is nothing wrong with, as long as you be mindful of what you are entrusting to the "big boys."

if I can't find a felony you've committed during that 24 hour period, ... Dozens have tried. Nobody's won so far.

Example scenarios, please. Not that I have reason to disbelieve you, but you are talking about felonies here, not misdemeanors. At least a short vignette and a citation to U.S. Code or state law, and maybe some court decisions, because otherwise the other comments are fully justified in that you're full of hot air.

So I don't think, do I? Not that potheads put me in a very thoughtful mood.

You, sir, stand as vivid evidence for the need of an intelligence test to enable the voting privilege. I suggest you permanently cease using Faux Newz as your primary information source,

I have little to no interest in Fox News, Huffington Post, talk radio, and other such dumbed-down media. On the other hand, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has something to say on the dumbing-down effects of marijuana.

take up a great hobby like knitting or perhaps crocheting

According to my grandmother, it was a man that taught her to crochet. I think it's a little boring myself, but it would certainly be a better hobby than pot.

and never, ever breed.

Surely you do not feel so threatened by my manliness as to make a comment like that.

Many recreational users already have that much [half a million dollars] (or more) property.

I don't think so. The way pot destroys ambition, motivation, and self-discipline, and erodes intelligence, it is hardly a path to prosperity. For these reasons the vast majority of pot users are unable to make a living for themselves and thus depend on public assistance and petty crime to support themselves and their habit. Never mind they would be perfectly capable of supporting themselves were it not for their use of pot --- they would rather be stoned and live off the burden of others.

Automation is making human labor irrelevant, regardless of union participation.

That's a Luddite attitude if I ever saw one. To think that so many people on this site, many of whom work in high tech, would be such Luddites is mind-boggling.

The recent boom and bust is a minor blip in the big scheme of things, and why would you ever expect advancement in anything without booms and busts? The truth of the matter is the more booming and busting, the wealthier we all become in the long run. The busts come because we as humans collectively take risks with our capital and labor, and without a willingness to take such risks to try something new, we would be forever stuck in the past and technology in particular would never advance.

Over time, as technology advances, labor becomes more productive, that is, easier, but not without many failures on the way. Nor is it human nature to be satisfied with the fruits of one's labor: we always want more, and as long as technology advances, in the long run there will always be demand for all the wealth that all available labor can produce from all available technology.

People talk about capital vs. labor, but capital is nothing more than the accumulation of fruits of labor that one has refrained from consuming at the time. Capital isn't just that of a financier or rentier class, either. If you work for wages and have any 401k or other retirement account, then you are providing your share of capital as well as labor to society, and you rightfully expect a return from both. If you ever want to retire, others have to pick up your labor where you left off, using the capital that you have accumulated in your account, and your retirement must come from returns to that capital, not labor, since you are not working anymore.

At the moment it looks like email client support is dead â" Are too many users moving into web mail and the cloud instead of having a properly functional mail client on their desktops?"

I, too, am looking for decent e-mail client support, and I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is a lot of pressure this way in any case. Spam filtering has become "too" effective, and now GMail, Yahoo, et al. want us to look at "unobtrusive" ads along with our e-mail. I really tire of "the cloud" and the concomitant expectation that I should sacrifice what little is left of my privacy to Big Data and ever more intrusive marketing analytics just to read my e-mail.

Thunderbird was a mature product not in need of drastic innovation or indeed much of anything but "maintenance," but unfortunately its creators ruined the manual account configuration interface before dropping support for the product. I don't know if it's been fixed in the mean time because I left for claws-mail.

Expecting us to use webmail doesn't cut it. The truth is we don't have a decent web browser in the free software world either. I am not a fan of Firefox: crash-and-restore-tabs makes for a horrible garbage collection algorithm, but I find the web unusable without the equivalent of AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, and NoScript, and moreover I am neither willing nor able to run Adobe Flash on OpenBSD.

ICANN has seen over $350 million come in as a result of the process

That should tell you right there it's all about the money.

but said that covered the cost of dealing with the whole process.

So it went into the pockets of a bunch of connected buddies and well-paid consultants as usual. They had control of a system and found a way to make money off it, so they went for it. The whole "process" is nothing but a farce.

Hint: science majors are overwhelmingly white and Asian. It's not a secret why such a man would support this. What have science majors ever done for the African-American community?

I am so sick of this kind of patronizing of minorities. If a black man can be President, then I am quite sure he can handle a science major. Perhaps the African-American community needs to have some African-American men of science step out and act as role models rather than those basketball stars and rap stars with the trashy lifestyles who are continually foisted on them (and all of us) by the popular media.

What planet you living on? Most people don't even make half that through their whole lives.

You still have to be very prudent with it if it's going to last you your whole life. Most people who win the lottery and take a lump sum are not prudent with it, and they end up broke in a few years. Just like some of the high-paid sports stars when they enter middle age.

U.S.P.S. postage is not taxable by any state. Nor is freight for goods shipped across state lines. Interstate commerce is federal jurisdiction, not state. States are simply not allowed under federal law to impose their own taxes in a federal jurisdiction.