Or we could just use a solution that was already thought out pretty well, doesn't require massive infrastructure change, actually addresses the problem (i.e. as end users we have to trust the entire certificate chain, and ultimately the CA).

http://www.convergence.io/

And go listen to Moxi's defcon talk about this.

Because, as a professor (who most likely does research himself), he should know what the components of "good research" are?

Ok, so what if the professor cannot guarantee whether or not a student cheated? For example, the methods he seems to be using are looking for the same mistakes, that types of errors, things that would pop up when you recognized the question and just regurgitated the answer rather than approaching the question from your own understanding. What if a student "somewhat" cheated? Their exam looks sort of correct but slightly fishy. And he knows that there is at least some cheating but can only nail down all the "certain" cheaters. So he has a couple of options:

1 - Risk false-positives (i.e. a student that did not cheat yet was unfortunate enough to answer close enough to be suspect) and have some innocent students expelled.
2 - Let some cheating go while punishing other cheating (enforcing the "if you can get away with it, it is alright to cheat"). This punishes students that did not cheat by seeing their peers succeed where they did not deserve it.
3 - Offer a way out for those that cheated to in some way redeem themselves (it is NOT easy to even go in private and admit to cheating; this type of thing while it shouldn't be glorified for these cheats, IS something that is worth learning and will serve later in life), and those that choose not to, get dealt with via the normal cheating rules of the school.

Why the extra chance? Because those that cheated and turn themselves in will STILL most likely fail and those did it without cheating will still get the mark they deserve. Additionally, it will teach any student that knew of the cheating, but that decided not to cheat that they should have had the balls to act BEFORE the test was taken (and it seems that at least one person MAY have known before the exam about the leaked test-bank).

Right, but cross contamination from where? The argument that Earth "cross contaminated" Mars can just as easily be reversed, and as such is not much of a compelling argument. Really, what says that there might be some other source of life which "contaminated" Earth and Mars at that point?

I am an Apple user; so what makes your statement "bad"? In fact, it is just bad for Apple, if they care about that sort of thing. In reality, no company "forces" you to buy their products unless that product is required by consumers and there is only one supplier, neither of which strictly apply in this case. This might be "bad" for hobbyists, but as you phrased it, they will just avoid Apple products like "the plague". And if this does not impact Apple in a detrimental way (read: put them out of business) then I'm OK with that. One might argue that it's not fair to hobbyists that they cannot buy a cheap Mac, but that argument could be made of any high-priced luxury item that people would like. Not having the money to purchase an item does NOT make it unfair. Tying two products together such that they must be bought together at a higher price than is typical of that product domain is NOT unfair as long as there are other options, which there are.

What would be UNFAIR would be Apple charging a high price for their computers, and then saying you MUST buy a copy of OS X and that OS X is the only OS that will be allowed to run on their system (which it is NOT. you may install any OS you wish on their hardware, although I am not aware if they will refund you the cost of OS X, but I believe they consider it part of the machine when they sell you the computer. So at worst they are guilt of doing the same thing that Microsoft does with respect to a "OS-tax").

Yes, with the caveat that it would take a little while before the dosage was known due to development of film. However, what would the psychological effects of being told that you need to wear a badge to detect if the machine just overdosed you? Wouldn't you sort of re-evaluate the need for an x-ray at that point? If it involved the "likelihood" of harm/death to the point that it needed to be independently verified?

Except that the researcher could open himself to a lawsuit by Diebold.

There is also another really important bit about car safety; if it absorbs more energy on impact, your chances of survival / reduction of injury goes way up. I think many people that buy huge trucks that feel "solid" don't quite understand that the car being crushed is what saves the pulpy bits inside.

Predicting the future is a dangerous profession. The only demonstrable, premeditated success at prediction of future events has been in the financial field, and essentially that was betting that things will go bad, and it's just a matter of riding out the "fair weather" (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)). So that being said, the only rational thing to do is to buy insurance, and so far, the best insurance we have is spreading the population out a bit so we're not a single target for whatever the universe decides to throw at us.

I think the issue with the testability of String Theory is as follows:

In a theory, there are generally variables. For example, in General Relativity, there are "constants" (called such because they are measured via experimental science) that emerge from the theory. These "constants" are actually variables in General Relativity (if you were to set them to different values you would have a different "universe"). However the important thing is that "variables" that we had yet to measure which the theory predicted would be certain values (given other variables which we had measured and plugegd into the theory) turned out to be consistent with what General Relativity said they would have to be when we did get to performing experiments to confirm their values (so far).

The problem with String Theory is that there are many variables (not a show stopper) but that they seem to need to be fixed at certain values to arrive at "our universe". One might say General Relativity did the same thing, but no, given a set of variables that we had measured, we got predictions on what the values of the remaining variables in the theory must be. This does not seem to be the case with String Theory where we have not found any good reason to set the variables the way they must be to get our universe's constants out of the theory.

Why is this important? Because String Theory MIGHT be correct (i.e. more accurate than General Relativity) but we have no indication of why the variables in the theory should be set the way they are (i.e. no experiment has been constructed as far as I know that will measure a value in reality and set it to a specific value in the theory). And even if that were to happen, it seems that it is possible to fiddle with the other variables in String Theory to again arrive at the model of our universe. So it seems that we would need to experimentally resolve each variable in String Theory independently which says to me that the theory has no predictive capability.

IANAP, just an enthusiastic amateur who is annoyed at the state of physics.

What if the US had decided to intervene in the genocide in Rwanda? Or the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Or hadn't done anything in Yugoslavia? If one is responsible for acting and for not acting, then can you ever do the "right" thing? Perhaps things are not so black and white?

Actually, running as a non-privileged user still exposes a user to the worst type of risk: corruption of their data files (which of course they only need their user privileges to access). Have you ever heard a user thank you for being able to recover their OS but not their data files (after a crash/virus/etc)?

I'm not even sure there is any real solution to this, although there was some work done in the OLPC security model that related to this:

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=bitfrost.txt

Not perfect, but it is a start in the right direction for a lot of these type of problems imho.

Actually, the simplest most elegant solution is to do something along the lines of what this individual spoke about: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html

And note he mentions that this is TODAY technology, not something that might be around in 100 years from now. Additionally, he makes a good case that climate control will be something that we will want to do in the short term in just this type of scenario.

Dark matter and dark energy are as much "hacks" as "gravity" is; i.e. they all are names for phenomena that we observe in the universe except that we have some sort of an explanation for gravity, whereas the former two we have no (at least known to me) current consistent theories that can explain why there is unobserved extra mass in the observable universe and what is causing the observable universe to expand (accelerating the expansion). Note that both of these properties of the universe have been measured (observed).