The other 2% die at some point outside of their lives, thanks to the reckless use time-travel.

We are merely trifling over semantics. As I use the term, respect amounts to nothing more than treating someone with courtesy, and regarding them as a sentient being who is entitled to exist. It does not entail any particular level of admiration; admiration is the thing which must be earned.

Trust has to be earned. Respect should be given be default, and withdrawn for cause.

Duh. There is no need to post stuff that we all know already. ;)

I suggest that you are a genius superhero, and in reply you tell me not to underestimate you.

Mister, I like your style.

I find it difficult to believe that someone who can afford a Tesla Roadster could still be concerned enough about the price of electricity to go to the trouble of custom building a market-timing charge regulator.

Especially since you could have just charged it from the Arc Light reactor in your chest.

I recently went through the painful process of setting new passwords on just about every system and website I have access to.

Somebody in Turkey got into my gmail account somehow and attempted to send a single spam email (google blocked it and alerted me to the activity, thankfully) and although I could have just changed my google password and that would have probably been the end of it, I preferred to play it safe; theoretically someone with even temporary access to my email could obtain my passwords for a ton of things using password recovery mechanisms. So over the course of a couple days I had to log into every site I have an account with, and pick a new password.

You would be AMAZED at how many sites have idiotic password constraints that prohibit spaces, or special characters, or require the length to be no more than some smallish number like 14 or 20. It was frustrating. Especially the sites that act so security conscious by displaying an estimate of my password strength as I enter it, then tell me it can only be 8 characters long and contain no special characters.

So a system like the one you suggest is a great theoretical solution. In practice, I find it is generally unusable because of stupidly designed password requirements.

Must. . . resist. . . correcting reference. . . . Doh, I can't. I'm weak, and will now commence pedantic nitpicking. I apologize in advance.

Count Rugen (That's with an 'e', not an 'a') did not carry the key to the castle gate. The Chief Enforcer of Florin did. His name was Yellin.

There, I feel better now.

The entire purpose of a man-in-the-middle attack is work around the fact that the attacker cannot eavesdrop directly on an encrypted channel. The attacker wants the authentication credentials for your bank account, but the communication is encrypted. So instead he tricks the client device into opening an encrypted channel to HIM instead, by poisoning a DNS cache for instance, and gets you to send him the credentials directly. The whole point is to get access to what he needs to access your account.

If the data is transmitted in the clear, MITM is completely unnecessary. He just eavesdrops on the communication and gets the credentials.

It's not about "seeing your money." It's about seeing the secret numbers needed to access your money. Perhaps it would have been a better analogy if I had said that it was akin to thinking that posting the combination to your safe on a sign right next to it would protect you from safe-crackers, but I still fail to see your point.

That's like saying that keeping your money in a big pile on your front lawn will protect you from safe-crackers.

-1 Exactly Backwards.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=daedalus+and+icarus/

You are obviously a foreigner. Papers, please.

But finders keepers IS a legal argument! It has been repeatedly upheld in every playground in America, and no rational 2nd grader would argue otherwise!

Seriously though, I don't think Gizmodo is on the hook legally for anything here. The guy who found the phone might be guilty of theft, on the technicality of not following the law regarding how to return found property (I sure didn't know the legal requirements for that until this story broke, but I guess everyone in CA is a lawyer). So let's assume that was a theft, for the sake of argument. What did Gizmodo do wrong, exactly?

They paid $5k to take possession of a device that may or may not have been genuine, confirmed that it was, and then announced quite openly that they had Apple's device and would be happy to return it if Apple would care to claim it. I don't see how it matters that they paid to take possession of the device. They paid for a story, and examining the device was that story; they did not intend or expect to keep the prototype. As soon as Apple claimed it as theirs, it was returned.

Analogy time. Let's say someone breaks into my neighbor's house and steals his television. The next day I'm walking down the street and somebody offers to sell me for a TV out of the back of their van. I recognize it as being my neighbor's TV because of a distinctive scratch on the bezel or something. So I buy it for 50 bucks, take it home, and then call up my neighbor to say, "Hey, I think this dude just sold me your stolen TV, would you like to come over and get it back?"

Am I now guilty of receiving stolen goods?

The Apple support person who took his call even contacted Gizmodo and provided an account for the article. Basically, "We thought he was some crank, so we blew him off."

Actually (at least where I live) the pawnshops create an inventory of every item they receive, and supply it to the police on weekly basis. This goes into a "database," by which I am guessing they mean a Word document. If you report something stolen, they search the list to see if anyone pawned it. (I learned about this when my house was robbed a few years ago).

I doubt this is very effective, personally, and I don't think the shops are required by law to do it, but it keeps the pawnshop owners in the clear, and it allows the cops to say they've performed a cursory check for a stolen item without actually having to go around to all the pawnshops, which they would never have the time or inclination to do anyway.