I like the Austrian way better.

There is always hydrogen. Sure it has a bad rap, but can't we make hydrogen more safer?
Automatic pressure release. Static control materials, etc.

I don't see why hydrogen - although it is very dangerous - has been abandoned as an alternative.

There is only one star in ba'*'d.

These values are from the article. The hardware is described therein.

Crack times based on a password composed of 70 possible base characters:

algorithm-attempts
based on: 6 character,10 character,16 character passwords

MD5-180 billion attempts per second
0.65 seconds,182 days,117 Eons

SHA1-63 billion attempts per second
1.67 seconds,519 days,335 Eons

LM-20 billion attempts per second
5.88 seconds,1635 days,1053 Eons

sha512-364 thousand attempts per second
89 hr 47 min,246 077 years,57901611 Eons

bcrypt05-71 thousand attempts per second
19 days 4 hr,1.26 million years,...A really long time.

1Eon is 500million years

Times are based on how long it would take to go through all the possibilities.
If the password is composed of random characters the average time would be halved.

Dear slashdot, I had a very nice table laid out with all this information, it was a table using only spaces, no html - and you said "Too many Junk Characters".

This has been studied time and time again.
Any sport that involves any repeated impact to the head - whether football, boxing or soccer will result in brain injury.

Damn it! And I had a good one planned, now you spoiled it.

Wait, I think I hear my 5 year old Nokia Communicator crying in the other room. ...

damn moisture sensor changed color

I pledge allegiance to the mighty pufferfish.

And if there is something I don't like, I'll write my own or fork.

If he did this to prove that the security measures are so lax that lives are in danger - then he very honorably sacrificed his career.
If he made a backup copy, then he should go to jail.

If his advice included encryption and proper employee screening, maybe he was right.

I don't really use Linux, although that's going to change soon as I will be working with it daily.
I haven't used Windows in almost a decade.

But what other proprietary code do you have in mind?
How many proprietary operating systems are there?

Windows - already mentioned.
RTOS - if you need this - stay with i386.
OS X - license does not allow you to run on anything but Apple hardware - why would you care.
If you are amongst the remaining 0.1% using a niche proprietary OS then I guess x86 compatibility might be nice.

Any code optimized for x86 will run slower compared to an actual x86 processor, hell back in the early 90's Apple used to have an x86 processor add-on card.

If you are using proprietary code on an open source OS (eg. Flash on Linux) then x86 code execution would be nice, but in the long run - the ability (and documentation) to create an open source flash version has been available for years now. If anything - having a x86 proprietary Linux flash player has hampered development of FOSS flash implementations as there is less of a perceived need for it.

A rock made of silicone. Oh, wait...

We are talking about a processor being as open as possible.
Unless you are running proprietary code - (Windows) why would you need x86 compatibility?

Granted there is some software out there that is difficult to port because of its size, complexity or willingness of anyone to put in the effort to make it run on anything but x86.

My money is on:
Apple 'Reality Distortion Field'.

You're kidding, right?

Here from Wikipedia:

Cultural influence of Star Trek

or from The Guardian:

Star Trek technology: how 21st century scientists are making it so

I'm certain Star Trek was one of the top reasons many of the engineers at NASA became interested in engineering in the first place.