But I don't think the competition of the official prize with the black market is relevant at all.

Right now a big proportion of exploits come from security researchers, partially because they're looking for exploits, but also because they do have a strong incentive to find and report vulnerabilities. I don't think a cash prize is going to change their calculation much.

The place a prize could make a difference is in ordinary developers. I suspect a lot of bugs are partially discovered multiple times before they're officially reported. Some developer is working with the software, notices some weird behaviour, but doesn't follow up because they lack the incentive. A cash prize increases the incentive and potentially turns some of those dev hunches into new bug reports.

The way the black market comes into play is the devs are competing against the black market. If the bug discovery rate goes up the price of zero-day exploits goes down (since they're shorter lasting) as does the incentive to discover them (since good devs are competing for the same bugs). So you can significantly impact the black hat market without approaching the black hat rate.

64-bit CPU with Ultra-Low Power (runs off 3 AAA batteries)

HP preceeded ARM by years but like everything else they do, don't know how to market it.

Of course you have to make it through the day without getting murdered. Detroit is exceeded only by New Orleans for murder capital of America (48 per 100,000 in 2011). Compare Silicon Valley (San Jose) at 4.6 per 100,000 in 2012. So by this time next year a couple thousand of those 4 million will be dead.

There's a lot more to avoid in Detroit than the snow. I guess that makes me a wuss.

Homeowners' Associations are like little Nazi dictatorships enforcing a bland conformity on everyone. "Think of my neighbors"? How about they worry about their own shit instead of the color of my deck railing?

A lot of the comments comes from long established accounts that have commented on many other topics which doesn't really seem feasible for an astroturf network (unless they were 3rd party groups that get contracted by different entities). But moreso there's a lot of them who do engage in back and forths for quite a while, that's simply something that doesn't make sense for an astroturf because there's no point in a one-on-one with someone you clearly can't convince.

It is by design. The "original" retirement age of 65 was set there because that was the average life expectancy. The idea was that if you managed to beat the odds, then a small pension would pay for your food and incidentals while your family was expected to provide the rest until you managed to do the right thing and kick off.

Today, of course, "retirement" has become an entitlement and you expect the government to keep you in the style you have grown to expect with a sufficient pension to maintain your independence.

If I wanted to describe how you would start WWIII I think this passage would be a good start. Remember Europe actually knows what a real war looks like, even if you could keep it conventional a military confrontation with Russia is going to result in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths. Add nukes to the equation and you really want to get hesitant about calling Russia's bluffs.

Personally my vote is for UN peacekeeping troops in Eastern Ukraine, ideally made up of troops from anywhere except the US (and ideally Europe). It puts a neutral party with a good reputation in the crosshairs, it makes a military invasion by Russia extremely costly, but it doesn't embarrass Putin by being overly pro-West and in the worst case of an invasion it won't escalate into a major war.

I don't think China and Russia being worse is a valid defence for the US. But I do think it's a valid point of criticism for Snowden. It is a bit hypocritical to criticize the US's surveillance activities, and then flee to the only two major powers that are demonstrably worse.

That being said I think he did have understandable motives, he wanted to go to somewhere that wouldn't extradite him to the US. That means a country that is a) not particularly friendly with the US, and b) powerful enough to resist US pressure, that pretty much means China and Russia. As the Evo Morales grounding incident demonstrates Europe was not an option. Maybe Ecuador was but they may not have been big enough and he still had to get there.

It's still unfortunate that he's in Russia, I think the Ukraine incident has revealed that Putin is a bit crazier than anyone anticipated and Snowden's position more tenuous. The Russians may have been threatening to send him back to the US as a concession to ease the sanctions unless he starts cooperating in their propaganda.