I used to run DD-WRT once, and liked the configurability and stability. However, a gigantic security hole found in 2009 pretty much destroyed all my confidence in the competence of the maintainers with regard to security. Basically, it would execute commands (as root!) directly from the url of a request to the management interface. All an attacker would need to do is get you to click an embedded link somewhere, and you are owned. (My link above is safe, by the way -- did you click on it?)

That's actually an interesting question. Out of curiosity, I had to check what Swedish law says regarding (fully) autonomous cars.

The first question is: Is it still a car if there is no driver, or is it something else? To which I think the answer is yes. It has an engine, is meant to be used on roads for the purpose of transporting people or goods, and is not a motorcycle or moped, hence sufficient conditions for "car" are met.

Then it gets slightly trickier -- technically, it might be a truck (which is a subset of car, together with bus and "personal car"). For it to be a "personal car" (i.e. a normal car), it has to have at most eight seats "apart from the driver's seat". So here, the existence of a potential driver is stipulated. If we interpret this as "apart from the driver's seat (if any)", then it is a personal car. If, on the other hand, that statement precludes a driverless car from the definition, it can neither be a bus (which has the same wording), which lands us in "truck", cleverly defined to encompass anything that is a car, but not a personal car or bus.

As for the laws regarding what you can do with an autonomous car, all of it pretty much assumes that there is a driver. However, the laws are using a word that I think is slightly weaker than the English verb "drive"; it might be translated as someone who "controls" or "leads" the car. I'm not sure how courts would interpret a situation where everyone in the car is a passenger, nor if there is precedence of some sort. If there is only one person in the car, or maybe a distinct person who entered the destination and pressed start, a wild guess is that they would define that person as the "driver", and apply normal laws if something goes wrong.

...with the risk of hanging on to cracked and exploitable copies. Are you sure that's the better alternative?

Actually, even 20 years seems overly optimistic. Some quick web searching indicates that the average age of a car in the US is 11 years. Assuming the total volume remains reasonably unchanged, that would mean that it would take around a decade* to reach 50% even if all cars sold from today were self-driving.

If we assume it takes another 10 years for fully autonomous cars to be commercially available (an legal), it is still unlikely that zero "ordinary" cars would be sold from then on. So I don't really see how any alternative lower than 30 years could be realistic. Remember, the question is when "most" driving is autonomous, not some driving.

Personally, I think we'll see a gradual transition, with an increasing degree of automation, over several decades. We are approaching the intermediate state where cars are more like horses; you still steer them, but they refuse to run off cliffs or into objects.

(* The time obviously depends on the shape of the distribution, which probably isn't uniform, but probably close enough for the sake of this argument.)

If they found a weakness in Twofish, and wanted the world to migrate to a crypto algorithm that they have an attack against, then wouldn't it just have been easier to select Twofish instead of Rijndael for the AES specification in the first place? They were both finalists.

Look, it certainly seems like the NSA has tried to meddle with crypto standards in order to have an attack vector, and I can agree that a certain amount of paranoia is in order, but the theories you propose are so convoluted that, of all things the NSA might have cooked up, that has to go far down on the list. What is even to say people switch to Twofish if they switch, and not one of the other AES finalists? Or use both Twofish and Rijndael simultaneously for that matter?

Besides, the weakest part of most crypto systems (disregarding implementation and usage for a moment), is probably the key exchange/management algorithms. And from what I have understood, that is where the indications of standards manipulations have been.

I'm not suggesting that people should necessarily switch from AES to Twofish, or that Twofish is more secure. I don't even think Bruce is saying that. But I find the idea that the NSA would somehow be behind some kind of covert manipulation scheme to get people to switch to Twofish simply extremely unlikely. If nothing else, for the simple reason that I don't see it happening anyway. Could the NSA be sitting quietly on a weakness? Sure. But in that case I would be more worried about EC, and to an extent RSA. That is, if we limit ourselves to the theoretical component, and disregard the obvious target: implementations.

It would be an insanely unlikely coup. Think about what you are suggesting: First they get the entire world to use AES, to the point where leading CPU manufacturers have even included special instructions in the hardware specifically for encoding and decoding AES. They do this only so that an alternative algorithm (Twofish) would get less scrutiny by independent researchers for a number of years. They then orchestrate an elaborate leak indicating that they have attacks against some unnamed publicly used crypto algorithm. Meanwhile, or even before that, they have recruited an established and well known writer and cryptographist, and have him attack them openly in the public debate, only to give an apparent credibility to the algorithms he has designed. The intent of this is to get everyone in the industry to suddenly switch all cryptography to his somewhat less scrutinised algorithm (probably after reading about it on Slashdot), despite the fact that the author, who they had recruited to attack them, still claims that the math behind AES is solid, and despite the fact that replacing AES would now require replacing hardware and software that permeates our entire society at enormous costs.

If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...

The term "climate change" pre-dates "global warming". The former has been used at least since the 1950's. See for example The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change, Plass, Gilbert N., 1955 (link).

Also note that the UN panel (established in 1988) is named the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", not Global Warming.

They never really "changed it".

If you argument is that an atrocious act somehow resulted in the smallest amount of total (civilian?) deaths, compared to whatever events could have occurred otherwise -- an argument which, like I said, I don't even agree to on principle -- then certainly the burden of proof is on you to show that. Why bomb two cities and not one? Why civilian targets and not military? Why not wait longer between the first bomb and the second? Why not bomb mount Fuji or some other symbolic object instead? Why not warn the inhabitants before bombing? There are hundreds of alternatives, if you bother to think about it.

Yes, for the umpteenth time, I know that! What does that have to do with anything? This is a discussion about nuclear weapons. What's with this pre-school level logic that keeps coming up; do you believe two wrongs make one right?

Furthermore, the difference is that if you gather a bunch of Germans and ask them about it, they will admit to that description, which is the entire point of my argument.

Since this discussion is going in circles, this will be my final post in this thread. Sorry about that, but I just don't have the time for it.

I think they should have not dropped the bombs. And if they did, I think they should have dropped only one, and not on a densely populated civilian target.

Underneath your question lies the assumption that the circumstances somehow forced them to commit these acts, and that they didn't have an option. I don't agree to that.

I also don't buy the utilitarian argument. Not only is it speculative to the extreme (and I could argue that the war would have ended anyway), but I find it fallacious on its very principle. If not, why not use nukes in more wars? And why not use biological and chemical weapons as well? Why not rape the wives and kill the children of enemy soldiers that refuse to give up, to break their morale?

It seems to me that you are rationalising, because the idea of the US having done inexcusable acts of barbarity doesn't fit with self-image of being a righteous nation under God (or whatever you want to call it).

People are not evil, deeds are. There is no point in passing judgement on individuals who are long gone, but it is important to recognise what they did in the name of a nation and a people that is still here today. This isn't limited to the US, just because we happen to be discussing that now, nor to the nuclear bombings for that matter, as far as historical events are concerned.

That's one part of the equation; a few big titles is more or less necessary for them to stand a chance at all. But they still need someone to produce the consoles cheaply (if they cost like a gaming PC it'll never compete with XBone or PS4), and that requires volume, which in turn requires a huge initial investment and commitment. I'm not saying it's impossible, and as a Linux user, once a gamer myself I really hope they succeed, but they only way I'd bet on it is if they've managed to attract some of the big players in the hardware industry (e.g. Samsung, LG, Asus, Acer) that might be interested in grabbing piece of the console gaming pie and are willing to chip in some serious resources to do it.

It's not going to be easy. Bootstrapping a console ecosystem is immensely expensive. You need to become big very quickly, or you get a negative feedback cycle where you have few users, leading to few games being developed for it, leading to fewer users, and so on. To an extent, they can leverage their PC gaming presence, but it's still going to be an extra cost for developers to support an additional platform, which they aren't going to take unless there is a significant market there. And if the consoles are much more expensive than the competition, it'll be a tough sell to console gamers. If they don't have the economy of scales, they'll have to subsidise the hardware, and that costs serious bucks. Microsoft took an enormous investment when they entered the console market with the original XBox.

I'm thinking their best bet is to make it an open specification for which they develop a standard software stack, kind of like Android did for smart phones. That way, they can get hardware vendors (Samsung et al.) to make the heavy lifting.

Yes, I know that the US firebombed Tokyo and several other cities, and that those bombings caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Why do you presume that I think they were any better?

I also don't get what Germany and Russia have got to do with anything. We are discussing the nuclear bombings of Japan. If I were discussing Russian history with Russians, you bet I would be pointing fingers! There is nothing precluding me from recognising more than one barbarity. As far as Germany is concerned, I wouldn't need to have this discussion with a German when it comes to the holocaust.

Honestly, both of those arguments have got to be among the lousiest you could find. The first basically amounts to something like "Yeah well, we also did much worse things. So there!", and the second is what I would expect form a child, trying to excuse a mischief by the fact that other children did something similar.

You can call it whatever you want, but putting a label on a situation doesn't somehow suspend moral. There are choices in a war just like there are at any other time, and people are responsible for them. If the Japanese had possessed nuclear weapons, and used them to obliterate New York and Washington before the war ended, do you think that would have been found acceptable?

I get that people sometimes do horrible things when they are under pressure. I can even accept it, if those who are responsible have the conscience and dignity enough to fully recognise their actions and their consequences, and deal with their history honestly without rationalising or looking for excuses.

I'm not really sure what your point is regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, the scale of which I am already fully aware. Did you think I was okay with it, and by extension should be okay with the atomic attacks?

One can of course argue about hypotheticals, but the fact remains that the US chose to two densely populated civilian targets, with the intent to massacre as many civilians as possible, as efficiently as possible, most of them women, children and elderly. They did this without warning, and they chose to drop two bombs with such a short interval that the Japanese hardly had a chance to fathom what had happened before the second one dropped. The original plan even was to drop four, but they apparently had the decency to change their minds before manufacture of the other two had finished.

No matter what rational one can come up with, there is no other word for those actions that atrocities. That a lot of Americans will not recognize this, I personally find despicable. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said, quoting General LeMay: ""If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?".