Michael Crichton's book was based on another book called "The Lost World" by Arthur Conan Doyle written in 1912. It's not just films and hollywood.

I think you're conflating two concepts or methods of undermining encryption. One method is variations on a 'back-door' (like a master key in a physical key/lock situation), the other is 'weakening' the encrytion by somehow limiting the passkey length/complexity. I think you're referring to the second method when you say it's a practical impossibility and I agree with you. I also think the point is moot because all the attempts (successful or not) so far have been via the first method, back-doors, and probably will be in the future. But your original point still stands, weak (and backdoored) encryption is effectively no encryption, no exceptions. This is because "it won't work in practice because the backdoor key will eventually leak due to hacking, rogue employees, etc" as the AC put it in his reply to you.

This poll scared the shit out of me making me think Mother's day was today or very recently and I'd forgotten. Screw you /.

Although the slip roads (on ramps and off ramps for you yanks) are typically much shorter in the UK, people do this all the time, in London especially, and it is indeed a dick move. If one person does it they save a bit of time and it doesn't affect anyone else, but if more people do it they save less time and it slows everyone else down. I and a lot of other drivers just stubbornly refuse to let them merge back in, but there's always going to be someone idiot who will let you in.

Rubbish, in the idealised utopia (practically unlimited energy, sustainable use of limited resources and sufficiently advanced robots to perform every task unsupervised) then nothing has any COST. You can breed until we hit density limits without working, because there is no COST to having children. You can operate a post office that does nothing because if there is no cost there is nothing to pay for, any individual or entity can exist at zero cost. I believe its technically possible but human nature (i.e. greed) will prevent it from ever happening in practice.

Dear Tesla, Do we really need another unnecessary buzzword? Does 'gigafactory' mean 10^9 (or even 2^30) individual factories? Is that what you mean by economies of scale? If so then that's pretty cool and you can have your new word. Or do you just mean a really big factory? Because if so then making up a new word to make it sound cool is just lame, don't do it. That is all.