Perdition's comments

So you don't actually have the conviction to refuse to pay the criminals?

If you really believed what you are saying you would move to another country and give up your US citizenship. Until you take that kind of stand you are just a blowhard.

>Except there's no provable way to distinguish between "attack traffic" and normal traffic.

Depends on the DDOS method used. Stuff like the NTP abuse of a few years ago could be sinkholed without effecting any real users. HTTP DDOS has pretty low impact per node so most attackers use some form of amplification attack with other protocols.

And your alternative option is?

Do you still pay your taxes? Because with the way you talk I would call you a huge hypocrite if you did.

Congratulations you have re-invented slums!

I think that was sarcasm.

There was a story I heard about a defense contractor who found an obscure bug in code for a submarine system and as he didn't have the time to fix the issue he put his phone number in the error report. He got called more than a decade later by a sub on patrol.

I don't think "data science" is a distinct science, but it is a distinct field of work.

The business guys need short buzz words. They can't comprehend "online distributed virtual machine on-demand hosting", but they can comprehend "cloud computing" and "data science".

I find the idea of immortality horrifying. People would become ridiculously risk adverse because they could live forever as long as they didn't have an accident. Imagine the sort of repressive policies those voters would support in order to remove risk.

I also think for society to evolve older generations need to die off. Peoples worldview becomes partially fixed in their youth, and for some it is entirely fixed in their youth. I wouldn't want to live with a bunch of geriatrics from the 1800's.

But doing it openly spooks the consumers!

You still have to buy Bitcoin. And given its volatility it is something you probably want to do on-demand, so now you have payment processors in the chain again.

How are they buying Bitcoin in the first place?

I also doubt that people who don't have bank accounts have private computers. So really the pool is "people with computers and bank accounts in countries so replete with fraud that Paypal and CC companies don't service them".

I first saw it on a friends laptop which has a shitty screen with the brightness cranked too high and it looked gold/white to me. When I looked at it on my desktop (which I have set so that blacks are as black as the monitor gets) it doesn't look anywhere near white/gold.

You got some citations? Because in most of the countries you are talking about the poor who will do anything to survive aren't getting university degrees and sexist discrimination exists in abundance.

For example in many Islamic countries like Iran women do make up a significant portion of engineering graduates (sometimes even a majority) but few end up working as engineers due to sexism and cultural expectations.

I did some Googling and what I found didn't really support your argument.

https://hbr.org/2014/03/whats-holding-women-back-in-science-...

That sounds like a crutch for a malfunctioning team and bad management.

I find it incredibly ironic how many software companies apparently don't believe in the power or usefulness of Information Technology.

Companies don't care about security and don't pay for security professionals.

Most big hacks could have either been prevented, or detected and limited, if the company had a proper security team with the authority to make the changes needed.

It will take legislation increasing the liability for companies before this gets fixed. The Internet of Things in particular is going to be a massive problem unless manufacturers are liable for the security of their products.

Aircraft delivery of nukes is cheaper and better for tactical application (easier to disguise the nuclear capability of the strike). But they are far more vulnerable to interdiction and counter-force strikes.

I suspect the UK's reliance on SLBM's is due to the size of the UK which makes finding sites for launch facilities difficult, and would expose their civilian population to too much risk from counter-force strikes (they were going to get nuked a lot already to knock out their airfields and harbors).

There is a difference between "being as simple as required to reliably function" and "being as simple as possible".

False activations of things like alarms are dangerous because it conditions people to ignore the alarm or react slowly.

Going skydiving is taking a risk. Going skydiving without training and without checking your equipment is just being an idiot. It isn't noble or poetic it is just dumb.

The only thing sadder than McCandless pointless depth is the people whose own lives are so devoid of meaning that they seek inspiration from a fool who killed himself.

Except he didn't prepare as well as he could.

IIRC there was a ferry or similar a few miles upstream of where he was "trapped" (because he didn't expect the river to swell as it did) and died.

Learning about seasonal weather and checking alternate routes are a basic part of wilderness survival.

Why would you presume that a startup would offer better wages and conditions for those "below the API"? The first one might, but then the second one would start trying to drive costs down in competition.

In countries that allow such things there are plenty of private college "startups" and they are almost universally awful. There is more money to be made churning out hordes of poorly trained students than there is in properly training them.