If your wife is making more noise than the computer, spending money on computer parts won't solve the noise issue.

Intelligence, as a very baseline requirements, should be adaptable.

Pretty much every single AI implementation is designed specifically for a given task. It can not adapt itself, without outside help, to a problem outside its initial scope.

That is not intelligence.

Does it come with dual hidden blades?

Actually, GIMP still uses GTK+2.

It's not that the flash is low grade, it's that it just plain doesn't exist, and the card will just discard data after a while. What flash there is in there probably works, but is useless.

The price is the dead giveaway that it is a fake. Flash memory does cost money, and it is sold at minimal margins. One fifth of the price means less than one fifth of the memory, every time.

The card will pretend to be as big as they claim, and it will silently just lose your data.

Remind me again who has lost their right to hold opinions here?

Maybe he's suggesting to just use plain SSL without the initial plaintext exchange and initiation.

Yup. Nobody needed to reinvent traditional TLS/SSL secure sockets in order to send email.

What's wrong with STARTTLS? To quote the original RFC: "...a client that gets a 454 response needs to decide whether to send the message anyway with no TLS encryption, whether to wait and try again later, or whether to give up and notify the sender of the error."

So in other words, if you're writing an SMTP stack you have to handle a severe security edge case by parsing a string instead of getting an exception from your secure socket library. What could possibly go wrong! Oh right... there's a reason this is on Slashdot.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted.

Look, most severs these days are configured in such a way that STARTTLS runs on a different port than the plain-text connection. The server will reject login requests until the STARTTLS handshake is completed.

So sure, a few old, badly configured servers will continue over an unencrypted connection. But take it from a guy who worked on an email client, this is not a typical setup these days.

(Also: STOP USING STARTTLS!!!)

Except that only the names have been copied. Google provided their own story. (Which is proven by the fact that Oracle didn't allege copyright infringement on any of the actual code except one trivial function, which was dismissed as de-minimus, especially since it had already been replaced.)

The thing you seem to be overlooking is that functionality is something that is specifically excluded from copyright protection. (Which is why trying to make book analogies for software is usually a complete waste of time and highly misleading. Functionality is almost never found in works of fiction; in books, it appears mainly in "how-to" works and the like. And you can't copyright "telling someone how to install a door".) Google may have copied the functionality, but that's perfectly legal, as long as they didn't copy the code. Which they didn't, except for the names.

More akin to words (or perhaps standard phrases). The programmer uses them to express something creative (a program), but they themselves are simply tools of creativity, not creative expressions in themselves.

This is why computer languages have been ruled non-copyrightable. And APIs are simply extensions of a computer language. In some languages (e.g. tcl), the boundary between language element and API is arbitrary and subject to change without notice.

The NSA's mandate includes both data penetration and data protection! For this reason, I suspect it's not the severity, but the obscurity that matters. A vulnerability that's easy to find is going to make government machines easier to penetrate, so they're likely to want to close them. A vulnerability that requires standing on one leg while juggling two white cats and wearing a clown nose is something they can keep to themselves, because it's so unlikely that anyone else will stumble across it.

The difference in gravity is negligible. The lack of drag does help, but you don't need to go quite that high for that. At 7 miles you're past most of the atmosphere already.

"Microgravity" is irrelevant in this context, it just means the ship is falling. Sure, it's a little bit easier from 68 miles than from 7 miles, but again, that's just the altitude, which is already the easier part. It does nothing to help you gain orbital velocity.

And, rocket engines have not developed that much in 30 years. We are still stuck with the weight-to-energy limitations of chemical reactions.

"Suborbital" is a very different concept from "low earth orbit".

"Suborbital" means you don't have enough speed to stay in orbit. Getting to the required altitude is the easy part of getting into orbit. Once you're there you need to stay there, which takes far more energy to achieve.

SpaceShipTwo is strictly suborbital, as is apparently ASM-135.