Probably because you have not followed the Norwegian public discourse during the last year, in particluar ahead of September's election.

One of big discussion points has been about how and how quickly oil production should shut down (it will shut down eventually in any case). The factual question behind this is "If Norway phases out its (relatively CO2e-efficient) oil and gas production more quickly than what is economically optimal, how does that impact global CO2e emmisions?" There have been reports saying global emmisions would go slightly down and others saying it would go slightly up (due to it being compensated by increased production in countries where the production is more CO2e-intensive). I think the key word here is slightly. For every additional barrel of oil the Norwegian production is reduced, the global impact of global burnt oil is far less then a barrel (whether positive or negative). In this setting, is it rational to refrain from the income which comes from participating in the global oil market, canalizing the lost income to the other oil exporting countries instead?

Yes, but the weak pulses still have an average number of photons well below 2. The loss in a long fiber only means that perhaps only 0.1 % to 1 % of the photons arrive at their destination, but those arriving may still be used to generate a secret key.

No, but we also know that in a world where this is possible (sufficiently well), lots of other cool possibilities will open up, such as superluminal communication and time machines. The currently known laws of physics describe pretty much everything possible on earth (and other places in the universe with weak gravity) today. But of course if you could integrate a couple of black holes and maybe a few wormholes into your interception device, we cannot quite rule out that an attack is impossible.

The part about future privacy is spot on. The following to statements in the last paragraph are wrong:
1. It fails if I send lots of photons each time (which I really need to do)
2. [It fails if] our attacker has better equipment than we do

As for 1, the performance certainly degrades quickly if you send more than one photon or each signal, but it is still possible to get a secret key from two- and three-photon pulses provided a protocol ruling out photon-number-splitting attack is used (such as decoy-state or SARG).

As for 2, in QKD setups, it is always assumed that an attacker may do anything to the signals allowed by the laws of physics. For example, a photon-number-splitting attack is unfeasable with current technology, but it is still taken into account.

What is usually challenging in practice is avoiding side-channels. An attacker with better technology may attack side channels that the designers of the QKD equipment did not realize were there (or have the capability to test for). In principle, QKD based on entanglement may rule out many of the possible side channels (but it is still possible to get it wrong).

I used Madrake up to version 9.0. Unlike other distributions it worked out of the box without hours of fiddling to get a working setup. When I installed 9.2, that experience was gone and the Windows partition I hardly ever used before, suddenly became my default choice for a while. Then Ubuntu came along. Hope it doesn't reinvent itself away from usefulness.

If you start the LiveCD only to use online banking there isn't much time between the startup and the time you need randomness for a secret key. The question is if there is enough time to gather sufficient entropy from the environment.

Others have suggested to seed with the current time, but that is easy to guess for an attacker. Netscape's original SSL implementation was broken because the PRNG used only the current time (in microseconds) and the PID as a random seed ([1], [2]).

[1]: http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=87602167418753&w=2
[2]: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.html

Since a LiveCD doesn't save anything between reboots, it doesn't have a random seed that it keeps changing. Therefore the random number generator is initialized to the same state every time a system is booted (and probably to the same state for all computers using a specific LiveCD image). When the random number generator is in a predictable state, isn't the security of SSL essentially gone? To work around this, one can add some randomness to the random number generator on boot, but it is extra hassle. Something like "echo ssj s lsl sfi random hits on keyboard shdflsh sl fhlinaw nvnai dnsi >/dev/random"

During the "hardware phase" of a quantum key exchange there is a certain amount of noise that has to be corrected due to imperfections in the channel and that means that there is in practice always possible with some information leakage. The apparatus therefore estimates the maximum possible amount of information leakage (making sure it is overestimated rather than underestimated) and performs "privacy amplification" to make sure that this information is useless to an eavesdropper (this lowers the key rate and is one of the reasons it is only 1 kbps). Now say an eavesdropper finds a new source of information leakage. This is only a problem if the total information leakage is greater than the estimated maximum leakage.

I agree that creating and securing these HDDs is much cheaper, but a QKD system would fail more gracefully if you have a security breach in some realistic scenarios. Imagine that in month 2 you had an employee with malicious intent at your secure site. If this employee would be able to copy the 1 TB HDD, anyone outside would be able to decrypt anything during the next 31 years. The same person would only be able to leak information from his period of employment if a continuously generated key is used. (This is a somewhat oversimplified version of an argument made by a MagiQ representative)

QKD probably has a place in niche markets (companies like MagiQ and IdQuantique actually have customers). An intersting observation regardig the cost of QKD devices is that the cost of a full system is not much higher than the single photon detectors they contain. This means that if somebody finds a way to manufacture single photon detectors cheaply, the cost of QKD devices will drop drastically. If the devices are not very expensive and you already have fibers, why not use them?

Disclaimer: I have benefited from SECOQC funding, but have not worked on anything related to the implemented network or any other QKD implementations.

Well, the point of the SECOQC network is to demonstrate a network with routing capabilities. It is a network that consists of many point-to-point links.

Quantum mechanics has been tested over several decades and has been found to describe the world we live in very accurately. Any post-quantum deviations would be very minor. We cannot exclude the possibility that if someone is able to put the fiber through a wormhole, something strange would happen, but from a bright PhD student imagining this possibility to this becoming realistic there is probably a span of several decades.

Also, a quantum cryptography protocol will have to be broken at the time of the key exchange. If someone realizes two minutes later how it could have been broken it's too late. With modern cryptography the encrypted messages may be intercepted and stored until some bright PhD student in computer science makes a breakthrough, so that all messages sent in the past can be decrypted.

Yes, it could if if devices allow for this. This has been known for years and no modern device that lets this happen will be taken seriously.

I thought you there was no copyright on data under US law. C.f. the OpenStreetMap legal issues http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262. There may be contractual rights in the picture, but only if those were negotiated already.

The title and summary gets this paper all wrong. It does not propose that ocean currents are causing the earth's magnetic field. In proposes that many of the small scale variations of the field is caused by variations in ocean currents. The main field is still produced by the core.