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RSA Admits SecurID Tokens Have Been Compromised

Completely true. There's still tons of things that can be repaired these days: I've replaced the display in my Palm Treo smartphone, and the touchscreen overlay in my Nintendo DS. I've re-soldered headphone jacks (and then coated in glue to prevent it from breaking again). I've taken my PC video card apart and put a new fan and heatsinks on it.

And as for making things from scratch, that too is actually becoming easier. You design with free software and have a PCB manufactured in single quantities for $2.50 a square inch (batchpcb laen pcb). There are services that will produce plastic parts from uploaded 3D models for a fee (shapeways ponoko), or you can put together one of the many rising 3D printer kits and create your own parts out of plastic (makerbot bfb ultimaker).

Mozilla doesn't need to bundle h.264 codecs...they simply need to use the codecs that are included with most operating systems these days. This would avoid them from needing to get a license, but they don't want to do it because they'd prefer to do as Google, remove built-in support so as to try and push their other codecs.

If true, this is actually a GOOD thing. Showing different pages to google bot and to actual users, violates Google's ToS. So this might get them banned from google. One can only hope.

You forgot Safari. So the default browser on the two most popular desktop operating systems, both support h.264. There is no technical or legal reason both FF and Chrome can't support h.264, it's all political.

"The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy." Sorry, but that's not how things work. I discounted the entire thing after I read that sentence. Either they are naive, or trying to fool us.

Perhaps all these legacy APIs are the problem? I mean there has to be some reason Android has gained so much marketshare so quickly, while the other Linux-based smartphones sat on the sidelines twiddling their thumbs.

Perhaps...though I believe a large majority of Arduino users are non-professional developers, and will never become a professional developer. Of course, there are a lot more non-developers than developers, so it's a good target market for Arduino themselves.

Except the standard arduino model costs $30, so might be hard to build a $10 alarm clock using a $30 board.

I used Eclipse with the LaunchPad, didn't have to pay anything. Seemed pretty full featured, included a debugger and everything. Eclipse is FOSS right? This just seems like anti-arduino-competitor FUD to me.

$30. The standard base model is $30.

"Dictionary attack" == computing hashes of things like "password" and "sparky" and seeing if they match. Finds poor passwords much quickly than testing every possible combination

pure brute force == computing hashes of everything from "aaaaa" "aaaab" "aaaac" all the way to "zzzzz" (a simplification).

If I know the salt, say it's !@#, then I can still run a dictionary attack, such as "!@#password" and "!@#sparky". If I don't know the salt, I have to do the much slower pure brute force, testing every possible combination.

I think you're confusing dictionary attacks with rainbow tables, where you compute all possible hashes in advance, so when you want to reverse a given hash, you just compare it to your pre-computed "rainbow table" and find the answer right away.

Yes it de...but having the salt means he can do a dictionary attack, easily breaking badly chosen passwords. If he has only the hash but without the salt, dictionary attacks would be impossible, requiring him to do the much more costly & slow pure brute force attacks.

High end smartphones (eg iPhone, Droid, etc) run in the $400-$600 price range on release. These prices aren't advertised as much, usually you only see the 'subsidized' prices. Eg the phone might be advertised as $99 or $200 -- but that's plus a $30/month data plan for two years. You do the math.