It doesn't do comments on blog posts, it does not have an interface to post new blog entries, it does not keep track of which articles have been viewed. You might as well generate your pages from templates and serve them statically, 0 lines of python needed on the webserver.

Actually you can upgrade Wordpress with the click of a button on the Admin panel. You can even delegate that to your users. Or have Wordpress.com host you. Yes, there are more secure frameworks (your hand-made one is not among them), but few that receive as much auditing as the widely deployed Wordpress.

Building websites based on Wordpress is super-easy, there are extensions for everything, and you can let other people design and integrate the layout/template. Also, other people can take over what you leave behind.
Your other options are things like Drupal or Joomla!, but they take significantly more effort to adapt and hack.

I suspect that there is an enormous selection bias in that people who made a lot of money with BitCoin are featured in (online) newspapers, those who made a little money comment in discussions and the other 80% who lost a little or a lot of money do not comment.

Also, many people invest a lot in hardware to mine BitCoins (and other Coins), which is where their profits go entirely. That seems like a hamster wheel to me. Those people like the experience of learning about hardware and crypto-currencies. Then again, some people like running in hamster wheels too for fitness, so I think the comparison is not off by much.

"Are you up to loaning bitcoin or something less popular for 10 years?" Confidence in any given currency can be tested with the terms current holders are willing to accept to make loans payable in that same currency. (On the other hand, if large companies will accept it in payment, they've probably got an idea that a given currency will be around next month or next year.)

That does not follow. A large company can accept Bitcoins and convert immediately to their local currency. That does not require faith in a long-term forecast.

(The report can be found at http://static.berkeleyearth.or...)

Your argument is misleading. It is true that the question "which was the hottest year since recording in 1860?" Has three possible answers within the uncertainties, 2014, 2010 and 2005. But to the question "which was the hottest decade since recording in 1860?" has a clear answer: the last one. Of course there will be year-to-year fluctuations. But to look at the plot on page 3 and say "oh global warming has stopped just now" is wishful thinking. Also look at the "Ocean Surface Averages", page 5.

There is still no way of authenticating Java downloads? Either a download through HTTPS or a hash fingerprint of the file, accessible via HTTPS? This used to exist up until ~2 years ago, but now it is all insecure (the download can include drive-by malware).

They are 6 male authors from the Computer science departmentIt, one female (not a professor). Your stereotyping misled you.

I was concerned about this as well, and frequent crashes on my laptop (battery empty) can ruin a file system (I have made some bad experience with reiser4 in that regard).

However, I tried it, including forced poweroffs while writing, many crashes, etc., and it is fine. You mount the encryption, and recover the file system as usual, and the encryption layer does not influence the recovery at all.

I can recommend ext4 with LUKS (cryptsetup). It is very easy to set up for a single partition. You can choose AES or TwoFish (512 bit key).

The other thing I was worried about was read/write throughput. There is a benchmark utility that will tell you how how different cyphers perform. However I have never noticed any difference when working with encryption, probably because data comes in blocks and is cached efficiently by the kernel. Today, I do not see any obstacles for encrypting some partitions.

No it's not because you can add your own, or third-party repos, without needing authorisation.

To install python libraries like scipy, matplotlib, etc. Apparently that is such a pain in MacOS, and there are so many half-assed distributions methods that you can really botch your system. It makes sense to run a Virtual Machine with Linux on it.

So you have not read any, and have no idea what you are talking about. Start with the open source definition (opensource.org) and the Free Software Foundation (gnu.org).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
http://opensource.org/faq#free...

You are making, unintentionally, an excellent point that one should refer to gratis software and libre software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
GCompris is always libre software, but sometimes not gratis. That is OK with both the FSF/GNU and OSI.

The president on Friday argued there must be a technical way to keep information private, but ensure that police and spies can listen in when a court approves.

If the court approves, they can just go and obtain the computers. That is already solved.

If the hard disk is encrypted (very rare I suspect), the expectation of legal costs or indefinite holding at Gitmo without any trial are already there as motivation to comply.

No, better spying is not what we need. It destroys our freedom of speech and quality of life. We need due process. We need protection of all those not proven guilty yet, because it could be any one of us.

They probably try to avoid torturing with Tasers. This happens when the Taser is activated multiple times or for extensive durations (e.g. 3 minutes, causing death)

That would be great, but it is currently not possible to run a mobile recording camera 24/7 with the batteries available today.

Noise could also be proportional to the unresolved intensity. However, you can see that the dots are actually round, and thus resolved stars, and not simple individual pixel noise.