Because MS is still selling XP?

The principles of Public Key Cryptography are still secure (at the moment). But the practice is not. Whatever key size you choose will only be secure for some period of time. Only a few years ago people were using quite short keys (1K bits). These are no longer secure. Anything using such keys can possibly now be broken (with some effort). If you relied on 512 bit keys then your 'long term' has already expired.

A foot pound is a unit of energy, not force.

No diesel car I have had has used spark plugs. They all have plugs, which from the outside look a bit like spark plugs. But they dont spark - they 'glow'. If you look you will see they are all wired in parallel - and they receive a continuous voltage when the engine is cold. They are used during starting to provide a hot spot which will ignite the fuel in a cold engine.

What if the encryption technique is not one that the USB device understands? I dont mean the algorithm used (AES etc), but the way the password is converted to the encryption key. Even if you give him the password, the USB device wont be able to decrypt anything.

But doing the modifications in place is not safe if you might get a system crash (or power failure). What you could do is to create a backup file and then do the write in place. You would need some kind of procedure to restore the backup if the original write did not complete properly.

I suppose you really want to have a file system primitive which says 'open a temporary file for writing as a new version of this other file'. When you close the temporary file the filesystem would atomically replace the contents of the original file with the temporary file, preserving all attributes such as ACLs (unless you modified them on the temporary version). You could go further and arrange that the temporary file started off with the same contents as the original file - so the entire update sequence became a single transaction.

Saving data ought to be automatic, without requiring the user to do anything.

I would expect the charge to mass ratio to be more important than the mass alone. The He nucleus has twice the charge as an H nucleus. So He4 has the same charge/mass ratio as H2, and a greater ratio than H3.

There are 4 apostrophes. All correct. (court's, it's, you're, you're)

So if some other state fancies being first why dont they pass their own state law that says that? Surely Iowa and New Hampshire laws dont apply to other states?

If I were some non-american government then I would prefer people to use Linux. Not because of any backdoors that I could put in it, but because I could be reasonably sure that there were no backdoors put in it by the US government.

Sounds like you need a simple proxy server whose only job is to insert the cookie. Then direct all your clients to use the proxy server. Could even be a transparent proxy in your router.

That is exactly what an ISP would want. You would have the correct URL, the correct IP address and everything would look correct. But your traffic would be monitored by the ISP (in some kind of transparent proxy).

Being able to save a certificate and not having a message pop up every time it is seen would be useful. The first time you came across a certificate you should get a warning message. But if you can manually verify the certificate then you should be able to silently accept it in the future.

But the engine in a truck or bus is not fixed speed. It varies according to driving conditions, and there is a loss in efficiency due to the need to allow for the flexible load. If you use an engine merely for charging the battery then it can be a fixed speed, fixed load engine - I.e. it can run at peak efficiency whenever it is running, and the efficiency can be higher than a more flexible engine.

It would be very easy for an ISP to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on supposedly secure sites which use self-signed certificates. Self-signed certificates provide some security against eavedropping by third parties, but almost none against a malicious network. They can only be useful if you have some independent method of verifying them, and very few people would know how to do that. (Of course, that also applies to certificates signed by many certifying agencies - it is probably quite easy to get a fake certificate that will be silently accepted by browsers)