Encryption keys are different from physical objects. As far as I know, in the US the only cases where the courts have held that a person must surrender the key is when there was definite knowledge of specific incriminating content. For example, the computer that the customs agent had seen child porn on. Things are different in the UK.

For a 256-bit key, I suspect that collecting the results from the necessary parallel universes would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe.

Brute-forcing a 256-bit key (or even a 128-bit key) is not going to happen without changing the laws of physics. The old 56-bit DES key (actually 64 bits, but only 56 of entropy) was vulnerable to being brute-forced. Going from there to a 256-bit key is increasing the amount of work needed by a factor of about 10^60.

The other problem with this approach is that it requires having the owner in custody, and being willing to torture information out of the owner. This is a much higher bar than just having the phone available. LEOs would like to be able to stick a cable in your phone and suck everything out on the spot, or at least be able to confiscate the phone and send it in.

It's still impossible to break a 128-bit key by brute force, unless you're very, very, very, very,...,very, very lucky. The only reason to use more would be that you expect an attack on the cipher that will make it far easier to solve. I've read that, if we can ever make 128-qubit quantum computers (which may be impossible for us to actually implement), the effective key length might be halved, so I'd suggest 256-bit keys to be really future-proof.

This applies to any cipher where all possible numbers of the key length can be used as keys, which doesn't apply to the asymmetric ciphers I know of. Also, it assumes that there will be no tremendously effective break. (For the theoretically minded, note that all cipher systems are in NP, so a general solution of NP problems would include all crypto.)

I live in the center area of the biggest city in Minnesota, an easy walk to the main business area, and I'd love to be able to buy 100Mb/s fiber.

What subsidies can do is make it profitable to make extra food. Food production varies in ways not easily predictable, and aiming for more than enough is a lot more comfortable than aiming for enough. I don't know enough about the subsidies to know if they actually accomplish this, but it is a possible and desirable effect.

As far as barriers to leaving poverty go, health care is probably the biggest one. If a single woman with a couple of kids with slight medical problems makes enough to not get government-supplied basic health insurance, she's taking a grave risk with the health of her children.

22 trillion dollars over fifty years is 440 billion dollars a year, which is quite affordable for the US. It's a noticeable chunk of the GDP, of course, but there's lots of things we spend that much on.

BTW, the answer to James Madison is Article 1. To be specific, the first paragraph of Article 1, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power to...provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States". Essentially, Congress can spend money freely, although their ability to make other laws is sharply restricted. This is why Federal mandates take the form of "You don't get this Federal money unless you allow or disallow that" rather than simply legislating.

They probably advertise "up to" a bandwidth figure, and provide enough bandwidth for what they think they'll need. You may be able to buy guaranteed bandwidth, but it's going to be a lot more expensive. Underprovisioning is a lot cheaper than provisioning, and they'll charge accordingly.

Figure out how you're scanning for things, and the probabilities of finding things if they're there. Then keep track of what you find, and watch the numbers of new things you find. From that, you should come up with an estimate as to how many things are findable by whatever technique you're using. For example, if you were checking fish in a lake by scooping up quantities at random, marking them somehow, and counting the unmarked ones, over time you'd get fewer and fewer unmarked, and you could use that to estimate fish population.

Of course, all this can tell you is about how many things are findable by the techniques you're using. If you're just scanning around the Ecliptic, you're not getting an estimation for how many things are in a different orbit.

I don't know if they're using this technique, but it is possible.

Takes under a second? Maybe if you've got easily read fingerprints. If I can do it at all, it takes at least several seconds. (Back when people wore mood rings that changed color depending on skin temperature, mine always stayed black. Might have something to do with it.)

If you're the biggest company in town, and are likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future (which really isn't that long), what's wrong with basing success on that? Apple does take technical steps forward, but this isn't one of them. Instead, it's an ease-of-use feature combined with "Nice store you've got there. Profit streams break, you know, but if you sign up with us we'll help make sure that doesn't happen.". Seriously, one of the best things about the original iPhone is that Apple pushed AT&T into setting things up like Apple wanted. It added an additional choice of who you wanted to be screwed by to the US mobile phone market (so it wasn't just AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint, none of them notable for using lube).

Apple's not particularly interested in the transaction fees, although of course they'll take extra money if they can get it. Apple's primarily interested in moving hardware, so their primary aim is to make iDevices attractive. I don't know what the reason for keeping this proprietary is, but there is some fundamental reason why Apple thinks it will make iPhones more attractive.

Also, while you can get Android phones in the iPhone price and quality range, you can't get lower-end iPhones (the worst Apple will sell is what was top of the line two years ago). You can get a less expensive and still quite functional Android easily.