Which is all well and good... except for the facts that A) the NSA doesn't seem to be constrained by what is legal or not, and B) whistleblower protections aren't doing people who blow the whistle on this sort of level a whole lot of good.

Don't forget that the GP's 1st amendment comment assumes TrueCrypt was developed by U.S. citizens. Being that the domain was registered in Antarctica and the developers are rumored to be European, that could be another blow: the NSA then has full authority under U.S. law to do whatever they want to the project.

7.2 is a different matter, that's a much more recent version and it's probably technically possible that it's been compromised.

lolwut? Version 7.2 cannot encrypt anymore. I would say that is "compromised" even if the TrueCrypt developers did it themselves.

What happened to hiring the best person for the job?

The problem with that is if you are Jessie Jackson and the best people for the job are Asian and not black, you will look like a fool. Rather than trying to get your race to pull up its pants and go to school, you want free handouts while the Asians are working their asses off for those Google jobs.

It is really sad that 1% of their workforce is black. That tells me that Bill Cosby said it right: it is a cultural problem and he is right to be ashamed of it. There should be more black Google employees because more blacks should aspire to be engineers, physicians, scientists: not rappers or basketball players. Yes there are successful blacks in this country and plenty of them: but historically there have also been a lot of unsuccessful ones. Today in 2014 there is no excuse for that. Jim Crow is ancient history. Segregation is ancient history.

I would really be curious to know how many Asians they have, because of the positive stereotype of Asians working their asses off to succeed: and Latinos, which are now the #2 demographic in the U.S. behind whites.

You joke, but I always wanted to know what happens when the cloud blows away? A hard copy will still play. My Blu-ray player has but does not require network access. I can play Blu-rays and DVDs during a cable outage. I can (legally) play games that do not phone home without net access.

And that does not even get into the question of what happens when a cloud provider goes out of business or decides to end their service for whatever reason.

Considering how full of holes Linux based home routers turn out to be, do you think Linux based cash registers would be any better than XP cash registers? I am just flabbergasted that cash registers are on networks with internet access.

Up until a few months ago I worked for a Retail Point of Sale company for more than seven years as a developer. The typical topology goes something like this. Each store has a cable or DSL modem to get to the internet. They have it locked down so the only way in or out is through a VPN to the home office. This essentially gives them LAN access to shared resources such as centralized databases (this is why you can return at a store other than the one where you bought something, or check another store's inventory), payment system gateways, etc. This is a heavily secured and audited network segment due to the sensitive nature of the data. Any "regular" internet access from a register goes through that VPN and a firewall at the home office. Browsers are locked down on each register and regularly patched and updated remotely. They will sometimes use a whitelist of sites, sometimes not: JavaScript and other "features" are typically restricted as much as feasible.

This system works really well, despite having a lot of pieces geographically scattered. The VPN makes it easy to connect to any register in a retail chain since it is essentially a LAN. With the VPN and firewalls, you have a distributed yet secured network. The only times I have ever seen a network intrusion at any customer of my former employer was due to human error: a network technician forgetting to set something up right despite numerous checklists and test environments. Pretty rare in my experience working with 30+ retail customers.

Researchers are actually studying ways to "prove" software is correct. For example, VDM-SL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.... The problem that I see is that they can't prove the proving software is correct.

We can prove software is correct. The problem is that it is equivalent to the halting problem, which is NP. In other words, it is infeasible to prove correctness for all but the simplest programs.

There ain't no such thing as 'hacker-resistant'.

Yep, I especially loved this gem from the summary:

The software is mathematically proven to be invulnerable to large classes of attack

Anyone who knows anything about software and crypto knows you cannot make the software "invulnerable" to attacks. You can greatly decrease the number of bugs and known attack vectors. You can make it infeasible to brute-force your system using a realistic amount of computing power. But you do not know what you do now know, and the system cannot be 100% secure.

I would love to see how they "mathematically proved" it is 100% secure (invulnerable, remember).

Perhaps the better phrasing is don't talk to police if they come to you first.

Do not answer guilt-seeking questions. If you ask the police for help, give them information. If they turn around and act like you are guilty, be silent and talk only to your lawyer. Regardless, be VERY careful when talking to law enforcement. Give very specific, fact-based answers. Do not say "this happened" say "this is what I saw/heard." The difference may not seem like much when you are distraught and providing a police report, but it could be the difference between a conviction and "not guilty" in a court of law: with either the guilty party or your innocent ass fighting for freedom.

Yeah but how effective will this be? A few tens of thousands of miles is barely 10% of the way to the moon.

Objects whiz by at tens of thousands of miles per hour (orbital velocity). By the time you focus the telescope, will it and shade already be out of sync? I am no physicist, but I understand that when things move very fast it is difficult to keep them in sync (reference: I have been to the circus and watched the motorcycles in the spherical cage). With just a telescope and a target that is easy enough, but then you have a shade orbiting between the two and all three have to be lined up correctly for this to work (reference: try drawing a straight line between three points that are not colinear).

Wonder what the repercussions would be of that? Maybe a ban on US tourists visiting the Bahamas? Wonder how many dollars that'll cost?

This.

Follow the money.

People talk about shooting burglars, but most places, they have more rights than the homeowner, and a shot burglar usually means the homeowner is going to prison for a long time, not the intruder.

[Citation Needed].

Here in Ohio, if you come in my house against my will, the law authorized me to shoot to kill. The police and the family of the intruder are forbidden from suing me unless the incident meets certain criteria that are very difficult to meet (essentially, I welcome someone in then shoot).

ORC 2901.09 No duty to retreat.

ORC 2901.05 Burden of proof for self-defense.

Does you TAX office allow payment in cash?

U.S. currency is valid tender for all debts, public and private (within the jurisdiction of the U.S., of course). Certain purchases (e.g. brand new cars) are pretty rare with cash, but any business or government agency that accepts payments will accept cash. It may not be as convenient: for example, to pay federal taxes with cash you may need to drive to another city with an IRS office, but it is possible.

The constitution gives the interpretation to the supreme court. So, while it's totally allowed to disagree with them, but the courts will uphold what the SCOTUS says, not what you say. And that is constitutional.

Judicial Review is an implicit power. I believe it is an important power that should be enumerated and limited in scope, but it is not.

You won't find a right to a bank account in the Constitution.

Which is fine: the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That you won't find the power to stop you from having a Bank Account in the Constitution is a fact that will be lost on the anti-drug "Goddamned Piece of Paper" Republicans and liberals.

"General welfare" clause. It is the Silly Putty of the Constitution: it can morph into any shape and justify any law or government action, even if other parts of the Constitution are at odds with it.

Not completely anyway :). At four or five you're gonna have a hard time with ET. It's surprisingly complex, especially for an Atari 2600 game. The only things that are comparable are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Solaris (and Solaris doesn't count, it's a 16k cartridge, the larges the 2600 ever had) :)

I remember Solaris even if vaguely. That was a tough game. I remember you would have to conquer solar systems and move to others which were progressively more difficult. I remember that after a certain point the controls were all reversed: at that young age I was done, I kept screwing up when I got that far. My older brother was able to keep going but that was still a tough game -- but not dumb bugs like ET which was basically unfinished.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was also tough. If I remember correctly you had to solve a bunch of puzzles and collect artifacts all before nightfall when the door to the city closed and you were stuck with lethal enemies. I remember the tsetse flies being one-touch lethal. I never could beat that game either.