God is a crazy woman.
http://www.principiadiscordia....

Facebook etc will not have your fingerprint. There are may different biometric models, but they don't actually store a copy of your fingerprint and then check the whorls against your thumb.

For example, a model may use a hash of key points in the thumbprint and that hash is used in a challenge/response from the server. A model may use the biometrics to generate a derived key or to unlock a local key store.

Any website or OS worth their salt (pun intended) doesn't store your password, they store a salted hash of your password and its the hash you authenticate with, not the actual password. Same concept here.

The first 6 digits are the BIN range which identify the Card Type (first digit) and Issuing Bank (rest of the BIN). Those are not (by themselves) sensitive. The PCI specification states that the first 6 and last 4 digits of a PAN may be in the clear i.e. 5555 43** **** 3232 and that this has a difficulty of being guesses of 10^6 (due to Luhn check).

As long as the middle 6 are not exposed, then first 6/last 4 isn't a 'huge' concern from a card compromise perspective. It is however, a large risk from a social engineering perspective. An attacker could answer certain security questions and/or pretend to be someone who legitimately has that kind of information and convince people to think they are an appropriate organization to share further information with.

10 points for reference.

MCGA FTW!!!

No.. no more so than the XEROX printer hardware was 'vendor lock in' when RMS wanted the driver source code. In fact, while many applications will benefit, maybe require the cloud compute platform... a lot of what they have released can be used, and is being used in projects that aren't running on any cloud.

It's fear-mongering. We should be applauding every time any commercial company open sources something. FFS, I remember when it was an serious philosophical fight to even mention open source in a business for use, let alone broaching the idea of open sourcing any intellectual property. We should be dancing in the street that Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. are opening up their code. At the same time, open source solutions like Elasticsearch, Hadoop, etc.are doing for "No SQL and Big Data open source" what Apache did for "web server open source", or mysql did for 'rdbms open source'. Or what Docker is doing for "Microservice open source"

The world is consuming open source at a scale we didn't expect at the turn of the century. Hell, if nothing else, it has proven that ESR's "Cathedral and Bazaar" was far more prophetic than anyone imagined.

Exactly this!

Free Software was envisioned to open the code, not deny businesses the chance to profit. Open Source TensorFlow and commercial Google Cloud space is a great example of how to do it. Sharing the code isn't primarily about being able to build a competing service, its not about "benefiting the community" (that's a nice side effect in many cases), at its core, its the simple argument that if I use your code, I should be able to look at the code and modify it if necessary.

Besides, TensorFlow is a huge benefit to the community. I may not be able to pay for my own competing Google Cloud, but not every TensorFlow project requires Google Cloud. One can build extremely useful tools and services on a local cluster of physical or virtual machines. There are successful internal corporate projects being built in-house with TensorFlow. Companies are creating new products and services with TensorFlow (and no Cloud), any creative developer could easily build a working proof-of-concept without going to the cloud... they could even be inspired to create new code to improve TensorFlow.

THAT is what Free Software is all about, Free as in Speech, not Free as in Beer

In the organization I work for, sales are also responsible for a lot. Dealing with contract negotiations and making sure that pre-sales and post-sales are correlated. After that, they are responsible for keeping up with the customer to find new potential uses, catch dissatisfaction before it occurs, get feedback from the customer on new requirements or feature requests....

Society has become a reality-tv show based on absurdity. We live in a society that glorified Jackass. We live in a society that has merged fantasy, fake news, real news and social media into a simulation of reality. The psychological impact of no one having any clue as to what is true or false anymore will continue to spawn actions and incidents that make no sense. Sure, there is an issue of personal responsibility... but the hypernormalization of society surely bears some responsibility as well.

Even Pluto can't escape George R R Martin Memes....

Recent studies seem to support that among some individuals, there may be genetic predispositions which pot may effectively set off. IT seems that pot may be a trigger for an underlying situation that already exists. I also had a friend that went from straight A's to dropout. However, pot was only a part of a much larger issue. It took him 10 years to eventually come to realize that it wasn't 'just the pot'. It was a combination of some genetic and social (home life) factors... pot was a part of the problem, but not the cause.

Later studies (2013) debunked the older studies (2011 and before) that marijuana causes schizophrenia in teens. A Harvard study which included pot smokers and their families (both with and without psychotic illness). The data indicates that if you're genetically predisposed to psychotic illness, you're likely to have psychotic illness and marijuana may have an effect on onset age. If you're not genetically predisposed to psychotic illness, then you're not likely to have a psychotic illness, even if you're a teenage stoner. It appears that young people with genetic predisposition to psychotic illness may seek out self-medication with marijuana, but the numbers show a very strong correlation with family traits and no statistically significant correlation with Marijuana use.

http://www.schres-journal.com/...

That's not to say that Marijuana is completely without risks, especially in adolescents with a predisposition to genetic or psychological issues. However, most recent studies do seem to indicate that without the predisposition, 'harm' is relatively limited. In adults, most recent studies indicate no long term effects at all.

Its a shame that the government shut down research on marijuana for so many decades. Who knows how many people could have been helped if doctors had accurate information.

There are tons of references to modern things, existing myths, historical events etc. Many of the main character's names are derivations on famous characters from legends, many of the locations are similarly related to other locations. Rand is very much part of the Dying God/Jesus type myth (Crown of Swords, spear in the side, must die and live again to save man, will fight in the final battle). There are even references to John Glenn and the Moon Landing in one of their myths. :D