I use sentences of my own creation. In the case of mandatory password changes, I will sometimes use some piece of trivia. For example, I might use the counties of a state. It reduces the entropy somewhat, especially if someone finds out what the reference is, but it allows me some room to work and embeds a new bit of trivia into my head.

I do use password managers (a couple of them, actually), and I know there are some enterprise password managers out there. There's a danger to stand-alone managers, but a well-managed enterprise should have all of the core passwords securely stored somewhere.

More launches mean more cost, especially if you're scattering it across launch pads located around the world. There aren't many sites that can handle significant launch masses: Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Plesetsk, French Guiana, Jiuquan (China), Satish Dhawan (India), and Tanegashima (Japan). So you have enormous coordination between nations that have widely varying launch experience for their heavy lifters, that use different technologies and procedures, and have different goals for their space programs. This doesn't even get into the politics of "What do you do for me if I agree to lift this 15T payload into orbit?"

It also would cost more fuel, since launching from different locations means having to match inclinations. This has already led to one major limitation with the ISS, since its inclination is a compromise between the ideal inclinations for Cape Canaveral and Baikonur.

On top of that, you add complexity in having to dock so many more times, increasing the risk of an incident. While the potential loss from a single large launch is significantly more than that of a single small launch, the cumulative risk of any loss is greater with multiple launches. Putting a thousand tons into orbit would take eight SLS launches, but a minimum of 44 launches of the Delta IV Heavy or Proton, currently the heaviest launchers available.

I would rather see projects like the Falcon XX or MCT encouraged, and I expect they'll be showing up on the test schedule around the same time as the SLS. But NASA is going to have their own path despite the costs, and so they may as well work on an SLS-class launcher. If nothing else, it will give SpaceX (and maybe others) something to aim for and probably provide some valuable lessons along the way.

For one thing, that is likely the storage size, not the transfer size which is likely going to be way less due to compression.

The transfer size probably is smaller to some degree. But to hit that uncompressed volume of storage size, there is going to be a lot of data with poor compression rates. I expect that a lot of pristine, high-resolution digital video is in that, and that certainly won't compress all that well.

But as you point out, those can be terabytes in size. Even with the potential value of that, most people aren't going to download the raw files, and fewer still will go through the work of converting them to lower-res files more amenable to download. I'm not saying it won't happen, just that I think it's unlikely. Sony has more to worry about from the financial and personal information that was obtained than the revenue loss from any movies that were downloaded.

Why do random words? Use a sentence. I do that for many of my passwords. You get upper and lower case letters, symbols, and maybe even numbers, and it's not hard to go past 20 characters. It's highly customizable for each user and much easier to remember.

The problem with this is that there are still too many systems that have length caps that are too short. Not really many solutions for limits of 16, 10, or even 8 characters.

While I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the Orion project, I do give them some credit that you clearly don't. A moon mission is to be possible with a single launch, similar to the Apollo missions. (I think a near-Earth asteroid will also be possible in one launch.) I believe a Mars mission is expected to be 2-3 launches, with the last one the manned launch, followed by docking in orbit and then leaving for Mars.

The setup flying from the Delta IV Heavy is only part of the stack. When the SLS launches, it will have a payload capacity of 130 tons, compared to the Delta IV Heavy's 23 tons. (The Saturn V could lift 118 tons.) That's a lot more hardware and fuel that can be lofted.

IIRC, the Coast Guard sends out a helicopter to warn them out of the area with loudspeakers. Failure to comply results in a visit from a Coast Guard boat, and that's where things can get expensive.

A lack of sufficient auditing capability is what has kept CACert out of most browser CA bundles.

StartSSL.com provides free entry-level certificates with some level of verification, enough at least to satisfy the major browsers.

Presumably there will be a collision detection mechanism that nixes the old certificate and alerts you to such changes by e-mail.

Yes, there are ways around it, but that's true of any CA.

On recent Delta flights, I was surprised to learn that I could get free movie and TV streaming to my tablet. I'm fine with that since the resolution on my tablet is far better than the screens that get installed into seatbacks. I also got what was listed as 24-hour access to the movie, though I forgot to check to see if I could finish the movie once on the ground until after the 24-hour mark. It doesn't make up for seat issues, but it's definitely better than options I've seen on United or American.

Franchise opportunities have to be open to anyone (with geographical restrictions in some states), and it's my understanding that auto manufacturers may not have an interest (or at least a controlling interest) in any entity that owns a dealership that sells their vehicles.

Really? You don't reboot after a kernel security update?

I do believe that the comment also include "and in scheduled windows".

I see too many Linux systems with uptimes well in excess of a year and even three years, in the belief that it's Linux so they don't have to worry about it, and no one codes exploits for Linux kernels, ignoring whatever may be on ExploitDB. In many cases, "scheduled downtime" is for when the service is restarted after patching, not for rebooting. It's far more common than it should be, even among people who have been using Linux for many years and should know better.

Obamacare seems to have only helped a little under 3% of the people who did not have coverage previously.

The NBC News article says that 5 million people had insurance who did not have it before. If that's only 3% of the people who didn't have insurance, it would require that approximately 166 million people--half of the country--not have insurance before.

What happened was there was a drop in the uninsured rate of about 3% from around 15% to around 12%. That's about 20% of the people who did not have insurance before now having it. As the penalties go up, the uninsured rate is expected to go down even further.

ERs generally cannot turn away emergency patients or deny them care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA). Even if it appears that they have shown up in a non-emergency state, they still have to be assessed, and they are sometimes turned away for minor things, or at least given prescriptions that they have to pay for and which the hospital is not required to provide. The goal was to combat patient dumping that hospitals were doing for patients that couldn't pay even though they had been severely wounded or were in the midst of labor.

The issue the AC was talking about it a bit different, though. People with insurance (or some other means to pay) can generally go to a doctor when symptoms start to arise instead of only going to the ER when it becomes an emergency situation. This isn't someone who has a sore throat for a few days, but people who have cancer or other illnesses, and by the time the ER becomes a viable option, they're often too far along to treat, and can't pay for the emergency care they do get to stabilize them, which can require ICU or CCU. That cost then gets absorbed by the hospital and passed on to everyone else instead of a much lower cost being covered earlier on when early access might have saved the patient at lower cost.

Corruption as part of the culture is an enormous part of it, especially in Africa and Asia and to a lesser extent in South America. That's a problem that you can't really throw money at because it tends to just add to the issue.

There are economic complications, too. Simply delivering food and water outside of a disaster situation undermines the local food economies: why buy food from the local farm if someone else is giving it away for free? Farms go under, leaving more people reliant on handouts.

War is another major issue. We hear about a million refugees in Gaza, but they're largely just a few kilometers from their homes, so delivery isn't that difficult. There are other cases where refugees in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan end up hundreds of kilometers from home, and these present bigger challenges. But in Africa, there are millions of people who have been moving over thousands of kilometers through war zones that have been akin to the areas controlled by the Islamic State for decades. No one really notices because no one reports on it. Even the Rwandan Genocide took weeks for most people in the West to notice despite on-scene reporters providing detailed reports.

There's a great deal of research going into what works. Solving economic issues is a big start. Reducing infant and childhood mortality rates by directly (i.e., not through the local government) fighting malaria with sterile releases and mosquito bed nets has helped dramatically in some locations. Teaching farmers how to more efficiently tend their crops, and opening them up to international markets has also helped.

The space program helped, too, mapping climate changes that provide hints on where to help, when to change to different crops, and how to handle desertification.

There will be no time that all earthly problems are solved so that we can concentrate on space. Trying to divert all of the money spent on it would be devastating to industry anyway, and no other nation will join in because, like it or not, we now all rely on space.

It was about 50m across, around three times the diameter you were thinking. That makes it a bit less common.