You need $2,000+ just to have a decent computer to work with.
The fact it runs games is just a bonus.

I see why you're posting as an anonymous coward.
Don't want to tarnish your reputation by announcing you play a mediocre mainstream game?

Only in the USA were people still seriously considering it being a natural occurrence.
Just how much can you keep putting your head in the sand?

You claim to be concerned about "incestuous relationship[s] with the NSA," yet you recommend another corporate partner in NSA's PRISM spy-ring in favor of another. Why not find/try a tool or service that hasn't already been implicated in NSA-produced documents in serving as a front-end for one or more of their "collect it all" programs? In my view, that one of these corporate partners allows you to hand over more data to the NSA than a competitor isn't a compelling argument for its use — especially when that corporation makes their billions in part by scrutinizing and monetizing anything you give them in the first place.

15GB may be "huge" in comparison to another service willing to oh-so-charitably take ownership of your data for you, but 15GB represents a mere ~1% of a typical modern HDD, or about a seventh of what I upload daily via BitTorrent. Add in end-to-end encryption and a good-availability residential Internet connection, and you can share data without utilizing surveillance-state honeypots. For tools and services that allow you to do this, the website PRISM Break is a great place to start looking for a solution that has had at least some effort put forth in protecting users' privacy.

I do a lot of work that is funded by the government, and that's the opposite to how it works.
You have to budget for more than you think you'll need, because the government will never give you more than what was agreed on.

How hard can it be to make a budget plan and stick to it?
Why are things costing more than estimated? Estimating costs is much easier than the science at work here.

Is it to do with wanting to reduce emissions? I'd have thought it was a much more pragmatic requirement. Fossil fuel extraction costs are going to keep increasing. The costs of alternatives are going to keep decreasing. At some point, they will cross over and at this point the value of stocks in a fossil fuels will suddenly drop. Currently, they are quite high and probably will be for quite a few more years (although increased difficulty in extraction is going to make expensive accidents more common, which won't help). Harvard expects endowments to last a period measured in hundreds of years. Now is probably a good time to start selling off the shares in fossil fuel companies, while there are still people who want to buy them at a high price.

I was thinking about this the other day. The core problem is not lobbying, because it's perfectly sensible that people with an interest in a particular topic would want to talk to their elected representatives about it. The problem is unequal access to lobbying, and that comes from the massive wealth inequality in the USA and the fact that lobbying is expensive. Perhaps a better solution would be for each member of the electorate to have allocated a certain amount of their representatives' time.

For example, each member of the House of Representatives is responsible for approximately 500,000 people. Assume that they spend on average two hours a day talking to their constituents and the rest is spent in committees, or on holidays (since we're talking about an average). That's 2628000 seconds per year, or around 5 seconds per constituent per year (10 seconds per term). If you want to have a five minute conversation with a representative, then you must find 60 people all willing to give you their time allocations. Or 300 all willing to give you 20% of their allocation. If you want to have an hour-long meeting, then that's 720 people who must give up all of their allowance, or 3600 who must give up 20% (or any breakdown).

I'm not sure what testing OpenSSL does, but most protocol tests include a fuzzing component, and if the fuzzer didn't generate heartbeat packets with an invalid length then it's not doing a good job. This sort of code is routinely run by people outside the OpenSSL team to look for vulnerabilities, so I'd hope that they'd do it themselves. Generally, any field that contains a length is used in guided fuzzing, because it's easy to get wrong.

The date that it was added to the OpenSSL codebase is very close to the time when the leaked NSA documents claim that they had a 'major breakthrough' in decrypting SSL. I would imagine that they are not responsible for introducing it, but do have people doing very careful code review and fuzzing on all changes to common crypto libraries, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd known about it (and been exploiting it) since it was originally released.

In fact, by placing the requirement that someone agrees to the license before using a derived work of the GPL'd software, they are violating the GPL...

The FSF requires copyright assignment for all of their projects, so they do have some quite valuable assets. They provide the original author with a license to sublicense their contributed code under whatever license they choose, but they are the only ones that can relicense the whole. For example, if someone else managed to gain control of the GNU assets then they could legally relicense GCC under an MIT license, allowing its code to be used anywhere.

The point is not that a general malloc() would catch it, but that there are security-focussed malloc() implementations that will. Even valgrind will - it knows that malloc() has special properties and so will object if you derive a valid pointer to the wrong allocation by running off the end of another one. You don't need to use the security-focussed malloc() in deployment (unless you're really paranoid), you just need to support testing with it. Running this code with a malloc() that did aggressive bounds checking would have caught it immediately. That's something a continuous integration system and a test suite ought to have caught.