That's exactly what I thought first. But then it came to my mind that Bitlocker is much more secure than Truecrypt, because it has been developed and carefully audited by a corporation with a proven track record in cyber security. That fact makes it practically 100% certain that the developers of Truecrypt just thought "nah, fuck it, we now have Bitlocker, which uses military-grade encryption against all kinds of criminals and cyber-threads, and there are minor to medium potential problems with our code, so we just throw the towel and give up all the work on Truecrypt."

That's obvious, right?

The problem is the time window. We use radio waves a bit longer than 100 years and I'd be surprised if we didn't switch to something else within another hundred years. In fact, we have already switch a lot to optical fiber, and who knows what advances in science will bring? Who still uses smoke signals? Combine the probability that some planetary system is inhabited by intelligent aliens right now, which is probably very low, with the time window for radio waves and the probability of stumbling upon aliens will be extremely low.

The good news is that if FTL travel is possible and if we ever invent it, extraterrestrial archaeology will boom like no other science - there may be hundreds of thousands extinct species out there!

He didn't talk about Han, and given that there are 292 languages in China it is pretty obvious that the 56 ethnic groups you mention and who are officially recognized by China do not represent the whole of China. And yes, someone who wants to deny education solely based on nationality, when it was previously possible, is a racist asshole. Besides all that, science is universal. Once you start limiting and nationalizing it, your research will go down the gutter within a decade or so. With a "reverse brain drain" the quality of US science would indeed decline very rapidly, since the US educational system is incapable of providing enough smart and educated people for top universities and centers of excellence.

To be fair, the Taleban are quite a worthwile enemy. These people stone comic writers to death and attack young school girls with acid.

The real scandal is right now going on in Egypt, though, where the US and to a lesser extent also Europe chose to deliberately ignore democracy, are actively supporting a "new" (=old) military dictatorship and take away from the people the fruits of their revolution. As usual, the result will be the exact opposite of what the US and Europe were hoping for, namely more radicalism, more terrorism and less stability in the region.

It is sad that so few, if any, decision makers and politicians in power are actually willing to learn from history. At least their consultants should know better ...

The cloud is just client/server architecture, nothing more. It's neither new nor exciting nor special, and usually a bad idea unless you have full control over the server.

... and since it is DRM and you're intentionally circumventing it, go to prison for the next 20 years or be sued for 3 trillion dollars aftwards just for writing the plugin!

The problem is, once you let DRM in, you let all of it in, including all the sick laws that cover its ass (because it cannot possibly work from a technical point of view).

Yes.

They are traitors and should be hung.

Thinking about it, they have already hung themselves with the latest Firefox updates anyway ...

Why on earth should the search engine be responsible? Why shouldn't the site hosting the content be responsible for removing the content?

This does not make sense, and similar rulings about alleged copyright infringement don't make sense either. Link != content.

Fuck these judges.

Yes.

I don't know. It seems to me that even an FPS needs a good plot. Or perhaps the whole genre has declined and not just the plots. I've recently got a free copy of Battlefield 4 with my new graphics card and to me the SP campaign felt like a completely broken and ridiculous sequence of cheap graphics effects. It was just stupid from the start to the end. Compare that to HL2, which had an interesting plot and good, challenging game play. To be honest, I find myself enjoying Arma 3 more than any recent FPS even though I get killed in Arma all the time. I did enjoy Max Payne 3, though.

Even I can do basic math, and I'm a fairly stupid monkey.

Because, you know: If somebody could produce a massive EMP blackout in the US, he could just as well nuke Los Angeles. So it's best to spend trillions of dollars on nuclear shelters now. And constructing a doomsday world destruction device might also be a good idea, because this would act as a deterrent against the terrorists ...

Still works like a charm (and still a bit slow, hehehe).

You talk like a real social scientist there ...