gnasher719 gave a nice answer, and I just want to add more. For statistical purposes, a true and fair RNG printing a string of zeroes and ones would at the very least print a normal number, and to test for that, one would have to count the frequencies of substrings of every length, in every base, which of course can be done, but may get expensive if one wants a lot of confidence.

What gnasher719 calls cryptographical randomness cannot be tested in practice, but in theory, one can run the countable set of all computer programs in parallel, and see whether they can predict the digits of the RNG sequence with probability better than 1/2. Of course, this is completely intractable in the foreseeable future, with or without functional quantum computers.

IANAL, but I think if one doesn't sign for it, and there are no witnesses to receiving, then saying "I don't recall getting any playstations" should provide a solid defense.

A lot of Web sites are simply broken. I routinely see commercial Web sites that display a blank page even after I "temporarily allow all this page" several times, so as to unblock everything (Firefox haters?). For my money, any Web site that could easily provide its functions without JavaScript, but doesn't, is broken. The ones that don't care to fail gracefully are even more broken. And then there are Web sites that are completely FUBAR, no matter how you look at them. Welcome to the Web :)

What does this even mean? Is that a statement about science or related to science? It's gotta be, since biology is a natural science. So cite your references, or stop spreading lies.

IMHO, an antithesist is someone arguing pro and con at the same time. Nagarjuna, from what I've read, is a pretty famous example.

If by "lifting" you mean stealing, then you are not talking about anything resembling the patent law.

This is irrelevant to my argument, as I am saying that technology has no impact on patentability. It does, of course, affect the patent.

Yeah they do. How? With an algorithm that takes this and gives you that. In short, with a computer. Any software that can do the same is, well, functionally the same. It is entirely consistent that we cannot write around patents, and so the problem is with their very existence. They just do more harm when it comes to software, since the latter is almost always built on top of the older software, and even a "simple" by today's standards program can have thousands of patentable algorithms in it. The kind of harm they do is the same, though, regardless of the technology involved: innovation is taxed or prevented, monopolies distort the free market, and our freedom of expression is abridged.

I'd expect this much if anything. SCOTUS cannot fix the software patents. It is not even clear what a "software patent" is. IANAL, but the way I understand the patent law, there is absolutely no difference. If you have a gizmo that does A, B, and C, then you can patent it, and how exactly it meets these claims in terms of technology is irrelevant. The patent law itself is oppressive: it infringes on our right to free expression, while providing no discernible benefit to the public. Only the lawmakers can fix this clusterfuck, and they can do so trivially, by gradually shrinking the protection term, giving the manufacturers some time to adapt. But they, of course, lack the will to do so, since they respect the opinions of plutocrats way more than those of the general public.

RMS also advocates a way to get to the same goal in discrete steps, by making patents unenforceable in certain fields (like the medical field or the general purpose computing field). The precedents exist: the surgeons are allowed to ignore patents while curing people. This is much better than defining "software patents" within the law, since any such definition will probably be circumvented by technological means. Rent-seekers could simply inject enough non-software payload into a device and patent it anyway.

No, this is not enough. Not if you want an optimal level of privacy and security. If the software is open-source but non-free, then you can fix it all you want, but you cannot share your fix with others. So this is as good as closed source for almost everyone, including you, since you cannot fix all the bugs by yourself.

Meh. The law affects a person's mobility to a far greater extent than any EMP gizmo. The police already can stop almost any car by shooting the driver in the head. This only gives them an ability to stop most cars in a more safe way. Having the right to go anywhere as a free person, and being able to do so in a vehicle powered by free software is far more crucial.

This. But the problem, as I see it, is not with people designing poor passwords. The password authentication itself is the problem. One basic issue is that passwords, ostensibly, authenticate a person, but in practice they do not. It is the computer that gets the direct access, not a person, so we could as well be consistent and have a procedure designed to authenticate a person+computer pair. And that leads us to a much more secure way to authenticate: using the strong encryption, either symmetric or asymmetric. Arguably, this is also easier on the human user! Instead of remembering hundreds of weak passwords, many of which are identical, one can simply outsource this whole thing to a piece of trusted, secure hardware. Let the computer generate and remember the public/private key pairs (asymmetric) and the shared secrets (symmetric), and to use them automagically. Given a properly secured cyber-brain (a private, wearable computer with absolutely no remote control of any kind), stealing the keys remotely is impossible, even if they are kept unencrypted. The only practical way to get them is to steal the actual hardware, which is prohibitively expensive for most kinds of illegal activities.

The biggest benefit to the user, IMHO, is the simplicity of the security protocol. Keep your cyber-brain and its backups physically secure. End of story. Even the dumbest of people can do this much for their wallets today.

Their FAQ says the following about why safeplug is secure:

Oh, wait, it doesn't say anything. No description of the software, no developer access, "activation"? WTF is that? This is just another spy box, folks, just like your cellphone and your self-encrypting storage unit.

The government should only use free software, by law, so that we don't have to check. And it should definitely only serve free software to users (if it makes a Web app), which we can check just fine.