I don't see the reasoning for this conclusion, it seems to me this program is a colossal waste of money. I did a little searching and these benefits don't seem that great except in the cases of engineering classes. I am sure there are some students who will have their interest piqued, but there's a false assumption in that argument that the students would not have gone on to be engineers without that early exposure to some toy in the classroom.

Chimps eat tons of fruit. Fruit isn't simple sugars?

A CA isn't required at all to encrypt, just accept any self-signed certificate. If we want to introduce CAs or other method of identity verification, that may be fine but it is a different problem from encryption. We are seeing bits of this with the various opportunistic encryption extensions to SMTP and HTTP.

And who else can walk up and simply kick the door in? Is the risk of a break-in significantly changed by using the phone app? Why wouldn't anyone who wanted in simply kick in the door or just break a window? Some guy in a different country has no interest in unlocking my front door. My point is, does an app like that REALLY change your risk at all given how easy it already is to get in? Now if you are running a gold repository or something the equation is different, but for the typical wooden house owner I don't see it is any different.

But I generally agree with you, I don't want Internet connected appliances of any sort. Even my 'smart' TV is disconnected.

A better way to say this might be: the effort the manufacturer puts into security will be equal to the perceived risk. Since my garage door is already easy to open with a crowbar, the manufacturer might perceive that the risk of some wireless vulnerability is no worse than the risk I am already accepting by having a garage door in the first place. The same with vulnerabilities in my thermostat. What is the risk of someone hacking it and goofing with my temperature settings? They might feel this is not a real threat since there is no money involved for the theoretical attacker. And of course, as you point out, the risk to the manufacturer of lawsuits, etc. enters into the picture. As it stands now, they might plan to go into court and argue that since it was already easy to open the standard garage door there is no reason to make the wireless opener any more secure than that.

What good is stopping one missile if the next ten get through and bounce the rubble?

Israeli prime ministers have been making this claim for decades. The year keeps passing and still it hasn't happened. US intelligence agencies keep reaffirming their conclusion that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, please provide us a clarification of how you know better than them.

Yeah, all the US intelligence agencies and the Mossad think so. The 2003 (?) National Intelligence Estimate has been affirmed every year since then, Iran has no nuclear weapons program and no real intention to build any. By all means, tell us how you know better than them.

If it was possible to identify all the PHAs antivirus would still be 100% effective. Not to mention the varying definitions of 'harm.' For instance, i consider all the apps wanting to take my IMEI harmful, and I doubt Google counted these as 'potentially harmful'.

Whatever HAS to be done is already being done. Users are en masse accepting the level of risk as it exists today, so there is no reason to do anything more on the security side. We accept a certain amount of fraud and other crimes in the rest of the world, we will continue to accept this in the Internet world as well. Diminishing returns mean we will never pay the price to pursue eliminating the last 1% of online crime.

Many days there is a wind where I live.

just because your regular news sources don't mention it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. In this case, it happens quite a bit, those who like to report this canard don't bother to look.

How many football fields is that? (American football). I hope when the specs are released for this space station, the length is reported in Library of Congresses so i can understand it.

The existence of this tool is admitting that these papers aren't peer reviewed. Wouldn't it be simpler to just admit that and stop committing fraud?

Roughly correct, according to this. "the contractor was told to allocate total contractual overheads equally across all deliverables - raising the book price of a $15.00 hammer to $435 without affecting actual cost by a nickel."