I believe the channel between the public terminal and the user is expected to be unencrypted. TLS only works between trusted endpoints, and public terminals are inherently untrustworthy. So unless you're running TLS in your wetware it won't provide any real security. Or I suppose you could access the public terminal through your own private trusted device -- then the terminal is more like an open wifi AP than a tablet, and we're back to everyone carrying their own computer.

Never type anything into a public terminal that you wouldn't feel comfortable broadcasting to the world.

What about paying high ranking members of companies in stock options to avoid taxes?

Stock options do not avoid taxes. When you exercise them you pay income tax on their value (sell price minus strike price). It's exactly the same as if the company paid a cash bonus.

Of course, huge stock option grants do give perverse incentives to transient CEOs, but that's a whole other story.

the 1.21 GW of power that each person will eventually need.

You think (or don't) that global is a problem now? Imagine dumping an extra 16 suns worth of power into the atmosphere. Total insolation of Earth's atmosphere is about 500 quadrillion watts. 1.21 GW per person is over 8 quintillion watts at the current population level.

Feminists do not want equality. They want power.

Back when the NSA was still steadfastly pretending that it couldn't and wouldn't ever spy on American citizens, the wink-and-nod agreement between America and its allies was to spy on each others' citizens and share the results.

We all know that airport security and border security failed before 9/11.

What failed on 9/11 was the traditional policy of airline crew and passengers meekly submitting to the demands of hijackers. By 9/12 that policy was corrected, with no government intervention necessary.

Letting multiple armed men most of whom had passport and visa violations into airplanes was a colossal intelligence failure.

Letting "armed" men (with small knives) onto airplanes was not a failure of anything. There is no reasonable way to discriminate at boarding time between homicidal maniacs (an infinitesimal minority) and ordinary people. Trying to make that determination is unreasonable, as is preventing everybody from carrying anything that could possibly be used as a weapon.

Having a passport or visa violation does not make one a deadly threat. Plenty of harmless people with visa irregularities have managed to squeak past the TSA with no repeat of 9/11. A giant state security apparatus to ensure that everybody has all their papers and documents in order before they can travel ... that hurts far more than it helps.

Yeah, you could do that, or you could change to a non-standard port. In my ten years of running sshd on a non-standard port on several public servers I've been hit by exactly 0 (zero) probes on that port.

Obscurity for the security win!

When I was much younger and had better hearing and MP3 was a new thing, I ripped my CD collection and encoded everything with whatever the state of the art was back then (bladeenc? mp3enc? this was pre-lame). After a while I started hearing artifacts in MP3-encoded music so I did some A/B testing against the original CD the music was encoded from. Turned out those same artifacts were in the CD.

MP3 encoding has matured and improved since then, so whatever degradation there may have been, it's less now. I've only ever used 128Kbps stereo encoding, and I've never been able to detect any difference from the CD in any kind of music. This is with fairly high-quality sound cards, amps, and speakers.

Of course, my high-frequency hearing is pretty much gone now so I sometimes worry that my music collection might sound horrible to anyone with fully functional ears.

Making fart jokes and naughty-word puns and such is central to being childish, and being childish is central to being a nerd. I'm not really sure what it's like to be a man.

99.9% of the time those are (1) someone goofing around, not a real threat, or (2) drive-by from a botnet, never going to hit from that address again. So you're adding complexity and extra points of potential failure to your router with no real benefit.

Obviously I pulled that "99.9%" figure out of my ass, but seriously, whom do you think you're protecting yourself from with this script?

I'm pretty sure this story is a very elaborate piece of fiction. That makes way more sense than somebody clearly so smart going to so much trouble to earn themselves a life sentence in prison.

Maybe last year we could expect someone to do this for real, but not this post-1/11 world.

My iphone 3gs is like that too. I figure it's mainly the flash controller working harder as the flash memory ages. I routinely fill it to 99% before purging the camera roll. After 3 years of heavy use I'll bet the average page erase count is way up there, and there are probably more than a few bad blocks by now.

Or it could just be three generations of extra firmware bloat bogging down the primitive CPU.

Never ask why ....

Correction: Always ask why.

The answers are usually pretty interesting.