Beta Pictoris is 63.4 light years away, not 64 million light years. 64 million light years would be at the other end of the galaxy and probably not even observable. When the article gets basic facts wrong I stop reading.

There are a few reasons. One is the lights are normally timed based on the road's speed limit, so if traffic is going a lot slower for some reason, then the time to cross the intersection may be greater than the yellow light interval. Another reason is the people who set the timings may be idiots. For example, there is an intersection near where I live that is many lanes across in both directions, and if you enter the intersection to make a left turn on a green light, not even yellow, the light will often be red before you exit it since you must travel a long way and slow down for the turn.

Sorry to inject facts into your soap box, but here is the US Government Department of Transportation manual:

Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices

The definition of what a yellow light means is in section 4D.04, and the federal rules for yellow lights is in section 4D.26.

For the definition of yellow: Vehicular traffic facing a steady CIRCULAR YELLOW signal indication is thereby warned that the related green movement or the related flashing arrow movement is being terminated or that a steady red signal indication will be displayed immediately thereafter when vehicular traffic shall not enter the intersection.

For the minimum and maximum timings: A yellow change interval should have a minimum duration of 3 seconds and a maximum duration of 6 seconds. The longer intervals should be reserved for use on approaches with higher speeds.

Yes, though there is some debate about it since Apple is now using the newly allowed fast reporting of statistics that allow the number of requests to be given in ranges, but only for regular legal requests and for NSL combined. If they say both zero for NSL (the warrant canary) and the range 0-100 (or whatever it was but it was 0 to something) for the combined number, then they violated the legal provisions of the new rules, so perhaps they dropped the apparent canary to allow the other numbers to be legally reported. Or the canary died.

Because he isn't saying people can't encrypt, he is saying the keys must be available such that the government can get in if needed, even if the owner would like to block the access. The CJIS Policy allows for escrow as well.

What he doesn't seem to get (though I bet he actually does), and where some of the arguments here are missing the mark, is that if someone else holds a key that will grant access, even if the holder is the government, that provides a path for a bad guy to abuse the ability to access. The bad guy(s) can be hackers/attackers from down the street, on the other side of the planet, employees of our government, etc.

And the issue regarding the 4th amendment is somewhat misleading because he is saying a REASONABLE search is what is being prevented, namely one where conditions like a valid warrant exist or an imminent physical threat is present (I am not going to argue the problem here about anything can be claimed as an imminent threat). So the question is does the Constitution allow a person to use technical means to prevent the government access to data even when a valid warrant is presented? Many here obviously believe the answer is yes, mostly for reasons like those I gave above, but understand that this doesn't appear to be a protected right under the 4th since the 4th only says you and your effects are secure until a warrant is issued, not after.

A republic, where the authorized representatives have been corrupted by the corporate state. There hasn't been a country operating as a real democracy in over a couple thousand years. Everytime you see a country called a democracy it is really a republic.

To be picky, the showing of prior art does not prove the creators of the identified prior art were the original inventors. There are many cases that predate the one you cite. In this case, perhaps the Chinese did invent it and the NSA copied them.

Gee, I crack myself up sometimes.

I wouldn't know Pro Publica from a hole in the wall of a newspaper building, but there is a difference between publishing well-researched articles though only those that favor your leanings, and publishing tripe for the sake of publishing. The first are still informative even if they aren't want you would like the reality to be, while the second makes you question anything such an organisation publishes. This all assumes one really is a critical thinker since too many people who claim to be are not.

Many years ago I had a similar problem with Comcast. Their system's DHCP wasn't giving me an address, so I called the tech support number. The person on the phone told me that he couldn't help me with my problem since help with all DHCP issues was only handled through their new online text chat system. I pointed out that I couldn't get to their handy online text chat system because I COULDN'T GET AN IP ADDRESS. His only response was that maybe I could use a neighbor's computer. Sigh.

Those places use javascript on webpages to upload what has been typed so far so they can do predictions and make suggestions. When you are entering the phone's passcode or phrase it is a very different matter since that isn't being entered into a browser, it is being entered into the phone OS's native interface. Still, as long as the software was created by someone else, in theory they can do anything they want with it, including after using it to unlock the storage, store the passphrase somewhere on the device or upload it to a server. But given people jailbreaking iDevices and tearing the Apple and Google code apart, as well as analyzing all the device traffic looking for security flaws, how long do you think such a backdoor would remain undiscovered? And why do you think Apple or Google would risk being caught doing it since it would be THEIR software, not some non-attributable thrid party? Just being caught once would be devastating to their sales, likely into a death spiral.

Having said all that, I do think these third party keyboards Apple is now letting take over typing on iOS 8 do present a large security risk for applications, website, etc., but not for the device's passphrase since the device won't use it for that.

No, more like smoke and mirrors. Present but off is an illusion of security.

Because National Security Letters cannot be used for that. They can only be used by the FBI to demand the handing over of data in the possession of or passing through the control of the receiver, not the performance of actions (and how the data is produced is up to the company receiving the NSL, not the FBI).

Now what is in the Cloud is a different matter since Apple would have access to that, though again it may be encrypted with a key only the iDevice possesses so Apple wouldn't be able to decrypt it for the FBI.

No, not random. Today malware will commonly harvest a person's address book (among many things to exploit what it can get off a person's machine), and once the address book has been harvested, sold to spammers. The spammers send emails to people in the address book with the email pretending to be from another person in the address book. The theory is that if both addresses are in a person's address book then there is a good chance they know each other, or they will have received legitimate email from that address before, both with the intention of getting around the spam filter and getting the victim to open the email. Note that the spoofed source email address isn't normally the email of the person whose machine has the malware, but rather others found in the contacts list. All these spam emails mean is that there are people out there whose address book, including "collected" addresses, contain both of your email addresses, and one of those people got infected with malware.

No, the real problem is this is the same response you would get from a company no matter what happened so it is meaningless. You screwed up but don't want to admit it? Say you are committed to security and it was a fluke. It really was a one time fluke by someone exploiting a near-zero-day? Say you are committed to security and it was a fluke. You deliberately sold out your customers and someone noticed their info was in the wild? Say you are committed to security and it was a fluke. Since it is always the same no matter what happened, what real use is the statement? Yes, I know it is to persuade those who don't know better.

Did you check the email headers? On multiple occasions I have received emails showing my email address as the From, but the email headers showed the email originated from machines in foreign countries. Spoofing the From part of an email is trivial. This is a common technique by spammers to avoid spam filters since the account's own address is normally considered trusted. Now if the header says the email really did originate from Yahoo or Gmail, then that is a different matter, but again read the headers closely since many of those fields/lines can still be forged.