Well your second statement is correct, anyways.

This isn't DRM. There's no need to turn text into an image here. I think people are confusing this for some sort of document protection scheme which is trying to do something that's impossible.

You're mistakenly treating the recipient as a hostile entity. If you can't trust them to view and *not attempt to copy* confidential information, then they shouldn't be allowed to see it anyhow.

Instead, you need to consider the recipient as an imbecile who will, for example, accidentally forward a confidential note to their entire address book, or forget to delete the message as requested.

Good security is often about simply making the default behavior secure. In this case, you're simply ensuring that the recipient has to do nothing at all for that information to remain secure, which is about as good as it's going to get once you release information to another party.

I'm with you man, but this was exactly the same thing that people said when NASA confirmed the results. I was with you then too. Skeptisisism and all that.

The fact that the Germans now have also confirmed this is pretty huge. I'd say this moves out of the 'anomalous experiment' territory and more into the 'can we devise more and newer experiments to understand what the flaven is happening here' zone.

I didn't want it transparent, I just wanted the phones unaccessible so that the users could do something useful with their time instead of staring at the phones.

Key- and screen-loggers? Pretty standard stuff I believe. All that's required is the wrong virus or trojan sneaking on to your machine somehow.

The main point is only that only one thing is needed to compromise security - knowledge - and thus is a stretch to cal two-factor under the traditional definition (at least so far as I understand it. I'm a programmer, but no expert on security)

I certainly don't contest the challenge that it's probably significantly more difficult to bypass. At first glance it would seem to have great potential, IF done well. But I don't even know enough details to judge the theory, and as always implementation details will likely expose far more vulnerabilties to hackers. The question is, would it continue to be fundamentally more secure if it became the primary means of security, or is it's primary benefit that of being a small small enough target that it's not worth the effort?

This article gives some details:

So, essentially, the buyback amount in this case is roughly the market value plus ten percent. My understanding is that a buyback is not a trade-in, so there's no obligation to purchase the same make of vehicle.

Under typical lemon laws, for example, if the dealer can't fix serious problems with a new vehicle in three visits within the first 60 days, you're eligible for a buyback. In those cases, I believe the consumer is eligible for the full purchase price. In this particular case, it looks like the federal government is mandating the buyback because even of older vehicles of the seriousness and scope of the issue.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on this subject matter, so I may have some details wrong.

It's not as bad as it could be. While charging it seems to be efficient, as good as wired charging at least. Most of that efficiency is not from the induction charging but rather from better design of power supply, so you're relying on the manufacturers actually paying attention to efficiency. What's hard to determine is what is the power leakage when the system is not used. Is it better than a wall wart (remember people, unplug those when not in use), how much power is used to detect if there's a phone or not, will manufacturers even bother to turn off power if no phone is detected, yada yada.

The QI literature is 99% about convenience, that's their end-consumer marketing spiel, and the 1% time that they pay attention to efficiency is hard to track down. This is all amazingly consumer oriented (as in "buy me", "consume me", "be the first on your block", "stop thinking for yourself").

That's good to know, and it explains the rationale a bit more.

Still... Would Congress really have complained had they requested a portion of their budget be directed for the research and preservation of some artifacts of substantial importance to American history? Are they really that limited by the scope of their federal budget? They seriously can't undertake important projects like this without breaking rules?

I think I'd be more comfortable changing the rules attached to their funding in order to give them some discretion for special projects like this, rather than relying on the hit or miss chance of public fundraising. It would have been a shame if they hadn't happened to have met their funding target. They might not be quite so fortunate the next time they try to generate additional funds this way.

Encase those phones in a block of solid quartz. Even better if the quartz is opaque.

So, keep the cable. Cables are good. Except maybe for the people who think cordless mice are a good idea, because we just can't have enough batteries in our landfill. Conspicuous consumption goes hand in hand with conspicuous waste.

No, it's not hard. People just don't care. They want the latest cool thing, NOT the latest smart thing. It's a huge waste of power but who cares because they haven't had a brownout in a few years so as far as they know electricity is an infinite resource. Remember, these are the same people who buy a phone and then throw it into landfill after one year (ok, the "green" people will give it to a recycler who will then put it in the landfill on their behalf). Being smart is a social liability, but it's ok as we're breeding away those undesirable traits.

Videogame programmer here. It wasn't really a compiler optimization issue. There's no compiler on the planet that can perform high-level optimizations like that.

The real problem was that those vector units (SPEs) were highly specialized computational devices, best suited for churning through relatively simple, parallel tasks with a high volume of sequential data (e.g. media streams). Videogames, unfortunately, are loaded with tasks that require access to complex data sets and/or require lots of context switches, neither of which the SPEs can handle well. Ultimately, the SPEs, while powerful in specialized roles, often had problems compensating for the slightly less powerful CPU or graphics hardware, despite requiring many times the work to optimize the game for that hardware, and all that just to get similar performance to the Xbox 360's more general-purpose hardware.

In short, the Cell processor was immensely powerful for its time in highly specialized situations, but it wasn't very well suited to the typical tasks and loads seen in a videogame. It was an idea that sounds great in theory, but didn't work so well in actual practice.

A wonderful idea! Unfortunately politicians make the laws, and their campaigns are funded by bankers, so it seems unlikely to be be achievable.

So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.

What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?

The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.

From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.

But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.

These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.

If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.

In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.