They'll take my XP when they put me in the ground. Warning: this post may contain traces of levity.

If the maker community gets behind it and settles on 0xF055, the odds of collisions is low. And, if the first 65k addresses are taken up, then like a flock of locusts they shall move on to the next identified 'abandoned' address. Either that, or USB-IF could learn to play nice and assign some 'open spectrum'... or just realise the gig is up. If enough product vendors decide collectively to ignore their assignation of numbers, they effectively lose power over their own empire.

Also, the great thing about open source is that often times you can change things yourself if you do have problems.

As I described it to the election official: "It's like wrestling an anaconda".

Since you ask, I'm from Australia. Yes, we have hobos - for the most part they are insistant but polite. Yes, we have fights - but it's mostly drunk people in pubs fighting after 2 am. The police show up and break it up. I never feel unsafe walking around campus or walking through the city - police are usually everywhere I might feel unsafe. When I am sick here I get socialised health care - I have been taken to the hospital with no ID or insurance info and received full care. I accept Australia is not perfect, but compared to my experiences in the US it is far better in many ways.

I went to the US to do my post-doctorate. What I saw there sickened me - I saw hobos fighting (!) for prime begging spots. I saw people who were injured but afraid to call an ambulance because they couldn't afford it. The food was disgustingly full of sugar and the streets weren't safe after dark. And this was in the North East!

My American friends didn't believe me at first when I told them I didn't want to stay and wasn't applying for a green card. They couldn't imagine that anywhere else on Earth could be better. I got the hell out of there and back to civilisation and never looked back.

The goal is to detect the presence of low amounts of certain molecules related to criminal activity. There is no need to detect scents. So the question is: why are there no cheap and portable detectors that find low concentrations of molecules in the air? Animal scent is based on vibrations in molecules that dock to receptors in the nose. This allows detection of very low concentrations of molecules. Similar systems can now be created artificially.

No, they would not. Physics doesn't work that way - you can't just arbitrarily scale things. A bird-sized aircraft can certainly benefit from unsteady aerodynamic viscous force interactions, and insect-sized aircraft don't work without them at all. However, at large scales the inertial forces of the airflow completely dominate the viscous forces. A flapping aircraft large enough to carry a human is possible, but nothing near as simple or efficient as a fixed wing aircraft.

Jiggawatts is just jiggagoules over time.

The problem here is that she may be totally right, under the interpretation of secret courts whose rulings we don't know. If she has been told in a secret court ruling that failure to comply with these requests constitutes treason (no matter how indefensible that ruling may be), then she is correct in asserting that such is the case. What is even worse is that she could not even tell us if that was the case.

Secret courts and secret laws are an existential threat to democratic society: they remove the oversight of the populace in regulating the judicial process, and inevitably lead to abuse. A law you must obey but cannot be told the expectations of can be nothing but a tool of tyranny.

I don't know baout you, but I was created by my mother and father. By virtue of being human beings, they bestowed upon me the full complement of human rights that we all take for granted. Whether you call your creator your parents, your god or the universe itself is irrelevent - simply by being created human, you possess these rights.

It's curious you assume he wants more restrictions, rather than more freedoms. I would argue his efforts are more about pointing out the arbitrariness of religion. If some people are allowed to do X, it stands to reason that everyone should be allowed to do X.

And if we were at war with a technologically sophisticated enemy with a standing army embarked on a belligerent campaign, clearly distinct from civilian populations, then you would have a point. The problem is, when your enemy is indistinguishable (or difficult to isolate) from your population, you are no longer keeping information out of enemy hands so much of keeping your people in the dark. At some point, the loss of civilian oversight of the government becomes more deleterious than the depredations of the enemy.

While I agree with your point that some obvious things should never be revealed publicly (eg. missile codes), a democratic government at peace should by principle minimise its secrecy so as to maximise its accountability to its populace. The fact that we seem to be in a perpetual state of war (even without a credible military threat) speaks volumes about the real politik.

No. There's no pleasing security engineers.

Secret laws that citizens are obliged to follow, but forbidden to know, can be nothing but tools of tyranny.