I noticed recently that AMD's AM1 processors support ECC and AES-NI as well. It seems odd that in AMD's case AM1 processors support ECC while their FM processors do not and in Intel's case the least expensive way to get ECC is now with Atom.

I suspect that the reason(s) Obama doesn't just deny the application are simple: to deny the project would alienate organized labor (that stands in support of the thousands of construction jobs the pipeline means, just for the construction phase), and once denied, the Canadian firm can appeal the denial and probably has the right to demand a justification for the denial, and a Presidential 'I don't wanna' won't stand up in court.

Not issuing a denial prevents court review and the delay is equivalent to denying it anyway.

The damage the NSA has done will take a generation to repair and that would be a generation with the NSA not actively doing damage the entire time. Absent that, we're not going back to the way things were... possibly ever.

I disagree. The damage will never be repaired if only because the NSA (and FBI and other law enforcement) will continue to cause further damage.

The rest of the world don't want products with official US backdoors though.

Or unofficial backdoors with the NSA and FBI intercepting shipments of equipment through UPS, Fedex, and USPS to install their own. Since the warrants for such are not publicly available after any amount of time, I assume no warrants are needed and that there is no court review.

The Government cannot compel you to incriminate yourself (give up the key) (5th Amendment).....If that doesn't work, who says you can recall the password or didn't lose the key

For fixed installations like a private NAS or workstation, it is possible to arrange for the key to be stored physically in a way such that a seizure would presumably destroy it.

Civil assets forfeiture says otherwise.

At some point disabling the radio will result in loss of functionality like the engine for your protection of course.

maybe "rare" within your specific locale and amongst your peers, but general motors sells a lot of cars,

And having owned one GM pickup and worked on other GM vehicles, I can say through personal experience that they are all junk and have been junk for at least 2 decades.

It only is a matter of time before external SSDs become the storage medium of choice, just like USB flash drives are for small scale storage.

The problem with this is that external storage is often not powered for considerable time and high density Flash retention time is abysmal compared to other media types. I have already had USB flash drives "forget" their contents within months unless continuously scrubbed which annoyingly they do not even do if left powered but not accessed.

Samsung's 3D NAND Flash should be better in this respect but I notice that like the other manufacturers of low retention time Flash, they do not give a specification for this so I have to assume it is no better.

You don't consider the threat of being shot and then having your property taken a violent crime?

Discussions of civil assets forfeiture by the government are off-topic in this discussion.

You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates [wikipedia.org] that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.

The US also has a proportionally high rate of homicide with knives and blunt objects. How is it that our lack of gun prohibition raised those as well?

One problem with the naive "murder rate" statistic is that different countries have different reporting criteria. Many countries only record a murder after disposition of the accused which artificially lowers their count in comparison to the US where it counts as a homicide no matter who kills them.

I don't see how that good guy scenario is supposed to play out. If the bad guy finds a crowd, he can get off 20 rounds, and kill a large number of people, before the good guy can do anything. So having good guys with guns can limit the damage to 10 victims. Unless the bad guy can get a bigger clip.

I doubt detachable magazine capacity matters. One can always carry more magazines and with practice, changing one is not time consuming. Civilians on the other hand are unlikely to carry lots of magazines so standard capacity magazines matter more for them.

Most spree shooters stop one way or another once armed resistance presents itself. Fortunately such incidents are rare despite what mass media would have us believe but this also means that it is difficult to determine what affect a good guy with a firearm will have versus the effect of law enforcement which is well known. There is an added complication in that if a civilian successfully stops a spree shooter, then there could be no mass shooting in which case they did not stop one. A similar issue crops up measuring DGUs (defensive gun uses) when it only counts if the suspect is shot or killed.

The incident at the Clackamas Town Center comes to mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

1 million bits is a megabit. 1 million bytes is a megabyte.

So systems advertised with 17.179869184 GBytes of RAM should be appearing any time now. That will be a lot simpler than labeling them 16 GBytes and no doubt appeal to marketing.

Then most people are stupid. Stop trying to bastardize the SI prefixes for your hard drive edge case, in every other measure Mega is a base 10 power, not base 2.

Bit and byte are not SI units. Let me know when I can buy computers with 17.179869184 GBytes of RAM.

Take up your argument with JEDEC.

There's a particularly rabid strain of libertarianism that seems to hold anything related to authority in contempt, even when it's bound on sound science.

Maybe those with the most authority over us should have set a better example.