Off to pun hell for you.

You will be punnished.

Except that some areas are only served by a single insurance company. It's sad but true. Many local monopolies still exist. The barriers to entry are just too high, or the expected return is just too low for anyone else to compete.

Did you see that compromised on board network adapter or the USB cable? Those things were amazing pieces of tech.

The network adapter really just looked like a big RJ45 jack with some hardware on the back. That's what the non compromised version looks like. It does all the layer 1 stuff right there so you don't need to worry about things like impedance matching. The NSA added an extra chip which is invisible from the outside that acts as a second layer 2/3 controller. A simple single component replacement and that machine is now owned forever. Worse, there is NO WAY that you would know it from on the machine.

Speaking as someone who has a Bachelor Degree in Computer Engineering, I'm impressed. Scared, but still impressed.

Yep, it's found in pesticides and cancer: http://www.dhmo.org/

Might be, but when you're doing early prototyping you go with what the developer knows, and in this case the dev used to work for NVIDIA.

I'm excited about the RT patches myself. I'm hoping one day that whole branch can get merged into the mainline kernel.

Because just about every OS and it's mother reads fat32. I run Linux, but all I ask from motherboard manufacturers are easy to follow open standards. Like it or not fat32 is the de facto inoperable file system.
Are you really saying that you want bios coders to understand NTFS and HFS+? Because you can't have them reading ext2 without those as well. Plus all the OS's touch the EFS partition. If anything you should be grateful that one of those two didn't win.

Besides, I use btrfs not ext2. Expecting bios makers to support every *nix file system is crazy talk.

You don't realize how much easier UEFI makes things until you figure it out and start using it.

UEFI can do other fun stuff, but by default it runs "\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi" on the first fat32 partition it sees.
No more dealing with trying to backup custom bootloaders, or trying to figure out why grub install isn't letting you dual boot. Just rename a shell with a default script to bootx64.efi and you're good to go. Hell, those shells even include their own editor.

I wonder how many people realize that UEFI means that as long as a USB drive is fat32 they can just drag and drop the files without worrying about formatting the thing with a bootloader.

From what I gather the encryption scheme is vulnerable to MITM attacks, and doesn't do anything about metadata.

Every message is encrypted with a unique key so if they MITM a conversation they'll only get that conversation's data.

MITM isn't hard for agencies like the NSA, but it takes a hell of a lot more effort than passive taps.
The idea isn't to prevent a targeted attack, the idea is for users to prevent large scale data collection.

I saw a Webcomic that tackled that issue head on: http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autotwb1281.html

A Zombie Apocalypse means "Fully Justifiable Carnage!"

From less than a week ago: http://slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/210258/atf-tests-show-3d-printed-guns-can-explode

That's a very nice premise. I wish everything were written like that.

Unfortunately, what would end up happening is a small "clarification" would be written in to the legal speak section that does what the lobbyists want. That's what happens today. 90% of the bill is good, but you get one or two lines that ruin it.

Another common trick politicians and lobbyists use is a "Definitions" section. It serves to explicitly define who and what the bill is talking about. While this is a good thing, they sometimes take the opportunity to include or exclude something from that definition. For example, it would be easy to not add any explanation to "Firearms Manufacturer." Then as soon as someone 3d prints a gun, bam they have to follow the same labeling, reporting, and licensing laws as Bereta and Glock.

Good idea, but it underestimates the craftiness of lobbyists and politicians.

Those are some very interesting observations.
What's the smallest etch resist you've been able to work with?

Most of my recent projects have involved small surface mount components. It seems like most non-prepackaged radio modules all use QFN. So, trace size and accuracy are a big hindrance to at home board creation.

The reason is right in the name. Corn is a major part of the US agriculture industry. Do you know how much lobbying power they have?

Not an issue. According to TFA, "[The] proposed measures that would all but eliminate artificial trans fats."

Emphasis added.

DEFCON 20: Hacking Redacted Routers

Huawei has so many bugs that I don't buy anything other than incompetence.
I've linked to the conclusion of that video so you can see a nice list of how bad they are.