I'm not surprised that people use crypto-currencies for criminal acts, just as I'm not surprised they use US Federal Reserve Notes for the same.

As for profiting exhorbitantly by inflating the exchange rate, that sounds like the free market in action to me. Back in the day when crossing the border meant changing out your paper money, you saw the same thing with money-changers near border crossings - customers were willing to pay a less favorable rate for the convenience of not having to go to a bank.

First, I'm not a Rust programmer, but I am a programmer.

Rust's claims about memory safety read to me like "we promise we are memory-safe except where you tell me they aren't. If you use a library that is marked as unsafe, you are responsible for knowing what you are doing and what the library is doing. But in all other cases, we guarantee memory safety."

If I wanted 100% memory safety, there would be a lot of things that I either couldn't do or couldn't do efficiently enough to be worth doing. A large part of kernel-level programming is one of those things.

Smart (read: humble) people admit "We don't 'think we know where autism comes from,' we know that we don't know where it comes from. Anyone who says otherwise is either right and on his way to a Nobel-or-similar prize, or much more likely he's a liar and he knows it or he's deluding himself and anyone foolish enough to listen. If you really want humanity to discover where autism comes from, fund responsible research. Maybe, just maybe, in a few decades we will begin to have an answer. And oh by the way, like the common cold, cancer, and so many other 'things' in medicine, autism may turn out to be more than one 'thing.'"

Not to take anything away from what you said, but you are describing some forms of biological inter-sex-ness, in which the body is neither wholly male nor wholly female.

Transgenderism, at least with respect to people who are not biologically intersex, is more of a psychological or possibly spiritual phenomenon, at least as far as we know today. I say "as far as we know" because there is a lot about the physiology of the brain and possibly the rest of the body that we don't know. Hopefully, future research will find answers.

Funny, but a few centuries after Chaucer. The punch line at the end is worth the wait.

From 2004-2006 or so, Facebook was pretty much for college students and others with a college email address. This meant most early users were born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s.

That tracks.

Just how hazardous are these chemicals?

Some things, like lead and mercury, are considered hazardous in any measurable amount. That still begs the question: What if the amount of the material in my body is so low that it's infeasible to measure? Is it reasonable to extrapolate "down to near zero" and assume it's hazardous, or is it more reasonable to say "we don't know if it's hazardous or not at those too-low-to-detect levels"? I strongly suspect that as you get really close to zero, say, 1 molecule (or atom, or ion) per 100kg of body mass, the hazard is practically zero and not worth worrying about.

For the ones that are "safe at the lowest detectable levels," does the average person have enough in their body to be above the "probably not safe" or "definitely not safe" levels?

The answer of course will be different for each chemical.

The problem in this case was a stolen credential that was left usable for an extended period of time. Near-line storage alone would've only been a small "bump in the road" for this particular leak, assuming the person knew enough to ask for all the data to be loaded from near-line storage before stealing it.

Things like building-access-codes don't need to be kept on a "live" database. If a customer places an order, the key-access-code for that specific customer can be copied from nearline storage to "live" storage well before delivery, then deleted after delivery is complete.

This way, if the "live" database is completely compromised, only the relatively-few customers who have pending or very-recently-delivered items will have their key-access-code data stolen.

A similar principle can apply to the customer's contact and billing information and for that matter all information not needed to login in: only have it available to the "live" system when it's needed.

If a customer decides he wants to review his account information, give him a screen that says something like "it will take 5 minutes to retreive your data" then put a count-down timer in the corner of the web page. Use that 5 minutes to load the data from nearline storage.

I'm placing my bets on the sharks. They have lasers. Pew! Pew! Pewpewpew!

As far as tariffs go, Trump telling the rest of the world they should learn to live without America may be the best thing for the rest of the world, long-term. Sure, there is short- and medium-term pain, but imagine it's 2060 and the rest of the world has weaned itself from any dependence on America. Imagine a Trump-like President trying to tell the rest of the world what to do. Imagine the rest of the world shugging its collective shoulders.

Is that troy ounce, avoirdupois ounce, or hockey-puck ounce?

The latter is defined as 1/6th the weight of a standard NHL hockey puck, exactly.

Linguistic humor, English spelling reform
Source: An old chestnut. In its globalized incarnation below, via Steven Gearhart.

First, there's no absolute proof that Kissinger said this. But he had decades to refute it but didn't, so let's assume he did.

In any case, context is critical.

Here's the quote in context, (words attributed to Kissinger in bold) from snopes.com:

It's good to have a second engine but it sure sounds like Gecko isn't long for this world.