That's nice if you have a selected Intel chip, but many sold today lack such modern extensions, including the i3 you mention.

For the rest, it would great if SSH supported high-speed software crypto like Salsa20 or the improved ChaCha variant. Even on my ancient Athlon 64 fileserver, Salsa20/8 and ChaCha8 would give me perfectly usable crypto at < 5 cycles/byte. That is roughly 400MB/s, and modern chips get closer to 2 cycles/byte and at twice the clock rate with more cores. At this point, aggregate crypto performance is several GB/s, and hardware AES is basically unnecessary.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck with AES which is slow as hell. Or AES-XTS on disk, which is even worse. The Salsa20 key/iv setup is virtually free, and while it is not suited to generic block crypto, it would be perfect for an encrypting filesystem. (XSalsa20 affords 24 bytes of nonce within which to put a transaction# + disk ID + block# avoiding all the expense of a mode like XTS.)

LFTR in 5 Minutes - THORIUM REMIX 2011

Moreover, unless you are using MAFIAA math to calculate "damages", it is absolutely certain that shutting down the site has caused far more damage to legitimate users. It is outrageous that the US government is being used as a tool for private industry at the people's expense, and without any consideration for collateral damage.

Though, the US government is increasingly engaged in morally outrageous acts these days, so it isn't that surprising.

...and what accessory provides stylus support? Those artificial fingers that Apple appologists point out every time don't count. A pen is a perfectly natural input device for most everyone, and it is a gaping hole in the feature set of any tablet that lacks one.

A pen is not a specialty item, and singling out Artists as the only ones who might want one is daft. Think students, or anyone else who needs to take notes or annotate something. Natural input of Chinese/Japanese or other unicode characters not found on a keyboard. Mathematical and technical symbols. A pen also allows for far more efficient text input with systems such as ShapeWriter.

Precisely. As an aside, the Uranium and Thorium present in seawater can be extracted for use in nuclear reactors. Not that we would run out of land-based resources for many thousands of years, but it is interesting that nuclear fuel is so energy dense that this is even economically viable. It could also be economically recovered from coal ash, and there is no shortage of that either.

Ultimately, cheap energy is at the foundation of prosperity. While the US is wasting trillions on wars to keep the oil flowing, and inviting terrorism which we must then defend against, China is investing heavily in securing a cheap source of energy. Not only are they building out conventional nuclear as fast as they can, they are also investing heavily in next generation reactors. Before long, Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will provide them with a rapidly scalable energy source that is cheaper than coal, and allow the massive Chinese population a true chance at prosperity.

While it is only a hope for the Chinese, the possibilities are endless. Meanwhile, the US is truly headed right off the cliff, and before long we will probably be looking upon the now pitiable working class in China with envy. Even our vaunted freedoms and liberties are disappearing rapidly, and it looks like we have a 1984-esque security any surveillance state to look forward to. With a prison state producing slave labor, populated by infractions of laws which shouldn't exist, such as growing a plant or sharing a file.

The lives of most Chinese today may be miserable, but they will have a hope for their children. Our leaders have staked our entire future on intellectual monopoly and war, and there is no hope there whatsoever. The US cannot survive on litigation and banking alone; we desperately need to be investing in a manufacturing base and energy supply. In critical infrastructure, such as transportation and networking. In the people themselves through education. Together we could prosper, but individually the greedy sociopaths running our nation have resorted to cannibalizing the shrinking wealth, rather than investing in the future.

Our government has been complicit, but large corporations like Apple are at fault. They have pushed nearly everything of value out of the country in pursuit of obscene profits, and actively lobby at every turn to thwart any meaningful progress.

NAT provides only the illusion of privacy; the problem isn't the addressing, but rather the huge centralized systems that we have come to depend upon and which are controlled by only a handful of entities.

Meaningful privacy assurances require effort, and must be addressed at the application layer. This is best served by crypto and peer-to-peer communications, and keeping third parties out of the loop. IPv6 offers the possibility of restoring the most important and fundamental property of the Internet: the end-to-end principle. (If you haven't already, please read this.) IPv6 provides the basic foundation for applications of the future, allowing one to build in as much security, privacy, and anonymity as they may want. To communicate freely and on your own terms.

The only lemmings I am worried about are the ones who needlessly cling to NAT, and would willingly cripple their own IPv6 networks with similar restrictions. The primary value of the Internet, is that it allows everyone connected to be an equal participant. Once you hoist a NAT (or overly zealous firewall) in front of your connection, you are turning yourself into a mere client, subject to the whims and abuses of some service provider.

This may be a joke, but it is worth pointing out that the Plutonium used in RTGs is not fissile, and can't be used to make bombs. Pu-238 is only useful for RTGs. The isotope used in bombs is Pu-239, which is a common product of Uranium based reactors.

Producing Pu-238 is actually very difficult, as described in the above link. Unfortunately, the worlds supply is dwindling, and this endangers many upcoming space missions. One attractive option for creating more is to use Liquid fluoride thorium reactors, where Pu-238 is one of many useful products created.

Conventional maglevs are very expensive, yes. An Inductrack based system would be far cheaper though, and may be cost competitive with the proposed high speed rail. The ECCO cargo maglev proposal estimated an Inductrack maglev to be competitive with highways based on throughput. (It would require an 8-lane highway to provide the same throughput, and that isn't cheap either. See page 116.) Obviously, this is not directly comparable, but the point is that maglev isn't necessarily as outrageously expensive as most people assume.

That said, when you aren't moving bulk cargo, a PRT system like Skytran may be more attractive yet. Furthermore, the speed of a maglev is primarily limited by air resistance. Systems like ETT use evacuated tubes, and "proposed speeds are up to 350 mph (560 km/h) for in-state use and up to 4,000 mph (6,400 km/h) for cross country and global travel."