Imagine now that they have your ID (IP, MAC, user_profile) being charted over time, showing which types of traffic you are commonly sending, establishing baselines. It should be pretty easy to spot the short encrypted sessions in your months of traffic, and determine if it's low-lying fruit. If so, hmm, what have we here? Profile it. I don't think most people, even crypto-savvy people, are aware enough of their profile and how easily and transparently they can be monitored, given the impetus.

Nightly builds... you mean like OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE? Why doesn't M$ make OSS? Is that the question?

Are you suggesting the full vested interest of our military industrial complex cannot manage to break commonly used encryption schemes, or that they just can't do it quickly and easily?
I'd argue both are probably outdated notions. The computing power they have available is pretty damn amazing. If these encryption schema were breakable, why would they announce it?

Well, uh, as I understand it, the govt's have pretty substantial physical access at the telcos and ISP hubs. Rooms, in fact. It seems like it would take a big budget, yet be otherwise feasible for them to record _everything_ and dump it off. Later, using grid power and secret NSA hax, they can pick apart your encryption retroactively to get the details they need. If you were REALLY bothering them, they could then use that data to backdoor your box and read your DRIVE encryption. I'm sure they could probably have you on the list in under an hour. I mean, they have the budget, the mandate, the capability. Just because they say they're scrapping a program... doesn't mean it's not a redundant capability. Likely contracted it out. Did you think the military / NSA / CIA / XXX were all just a bunch of keystone cops, waiting for authorization to wiretap? It's just a matter of priority and focus. They're dealing with a pretty large data set, so you've got to be worth their while. I guess that's the comforting thought here... if you're not a truly bad guy, they are not likely to waste resources on you.

Take a NORMAL intelligent person and put them on the unfiltered net for extended periods, I think you'll find it rubs off on you. No amount of soap, scrubbing, or red bull can get your mind clean again.

Net neutrality _means_ internet access to the whole internet, unfiltered, uncensored, ungoverned, including all ports, protocols, and pr0n therein. Amen. We pay the local connection fee to the ISP. The content handling is mostly paid for by advertising and click-thru-purchases, as I understand it. Shouldn't they be mandated to explain EXACTLY how they are throttling the service we are paying for, instead of obfuscating that information? What, exactly, is the difference between throttling something to the edge of usability and flat-out denying access? Please, tell me. Money trickles down, or companies go out of business. That's how it works currently, and you can see LOTS of revenue being made as-is. The internet is not going bankrupt under the current management. Mind you, 18 Republicans support deregulation. REPUBLICANS! When you begin to charge a fee for any larger segment of the internet, you are sliding headlong down the slippery slope towards information control. When you begin to throttle the connection of those deemed 'undesirable' where EXACTLY do you, sir, draw the line of desirability? Aha. Are the corporations and lobbyist groups the guarantors of online rights and privileges? Or is the internet a greater entity, a medium, which must be protected as speech is? We are deciding these tenets of our future society now. I would prefer a world of equals to a world of powerful tyrants, but perhaps you'll sell me something shiny instead. These corporate lobbyist groups and their Republican handlers don't have a great track record when it comes to honesty or altruism. "you and I are not much different than they are" - MindlessAutomata indeed! You are an apologist for the corporate excesses that have bankrupted our world economy. I'm not damning ALL corporations, I'm damning the IDEA that corporate rights are synonymous with human dignities and that they are granted the rights in our constitution. They are not living beings. They are not citizens. They are profit motivated collections of groupthink consumerist elites hell bent on world domination. Spin it as you like. A corporation cannot vote, cannot be drafted, cannot own a firearm or be shot dead by one. They do not require, and should not be granted, such inalienable rights as we are. Our only hope is in rallying behind organizations like the EFF to fight for our future rights online and the very shape of our future society. They are our champions. Not congress. NOT Comcast! They are willing conspirators of control, if for different motives. They cannot be trusted to act benevolently, now or in the future. As for the mindless automata, willing to trade freedom for convenience, may your simple dreams be the nightmares of those who went before. Repeat history as you will.

No, new regulations could hinder THEIR DEVELOPMENT of price per byte structure which they've been salivating about for a LONG TIME. Greedy pricks. Green-wash as you are able, we will see through it and hold you accountable.

No no no, it's flying cars, THEN Linux desktop. Just read Balmers blog, it answers all these questions and more. This is precisely why I deleted all my certificates, and now manually verify each site line by line in a sandboxed 16bit hex. Did you know that Paypal is actually run by a guy named Moxie Marlinspike? This is a pretty elaborate prank, obviously.

Well, consider that they had a board CUSTOM MADE for them, which means custom BIOS fitments, custom feature implementations, custom BUGS Then add the reality that is DRAM - an imperfect 'art' form of data storage and retrieval. No two chips are EXACTLY the same... though very close. Manufacturing defects may not manifest themselves under normal conditions, and require heating/cooling cycles or fluctuating voltages to break down. Running ECC performs a basic parity check, nothing more, and it's still possible to pass bad bits with ECC enabled, just much less likely. The idea is that you can't really test subcomponents individually and have them check out, and then assemble a system and expect it to just 'work'. Some ram is pretty damn finicky. Standards are anything but.

What a strange thing it is to pursue total annihilation in the interest of world peace. Yet the horror of war is the greatest force for peace. Seeing as how the nuclear weapons haven't been used since the first time(s), I fail to see how they can CAUSE these small conflicts. I could see an argument that they facilitate lesser combat more readily because the conflicts CANNOT escalate, and therefore the larger military force with nuclear weapons is more disposed to attack conventionally, knowing it cannot be overcome conventionally. However, nuclear weapons also prevent the TYPE of warfare that they embody - TOTAL WAR. They stand as a warning against atrocity. We could conceivably use nukes as retaliation against biological, chemical, or similar attacks from lesser non-nuclear rogue states. No state would dare use WMD of any type in any capacity because of M.A.D. Of course, terrorists could be immune to M.A.D. They could also be used in the case of an all-out invasion or similar major theater warfare, for example if India invaded Pakistan. With such stakes, even the most hawkish generals are forced to reconcile their ambitions with the chance of worst case scenarios. The nuclear genie is out the bottle, perhaps, but I would argue that we resealed the bottle in horror after we realized the ramifications. The most dangerous nuclear weapons are the smallest ones. The less collateral damage, the more likely they'll be used. The newest low-yield nuclear bunker busters would open the door to 'conventionalized' nuclear weapons worldwide. Conventionalized nuclear war, now that is truly frightening. Thank god for the doomsday machine, it served its purpose, real or not.

Ingenius. Ingenius.

Yes yes, the games are mindless drivel. But the MARKETING of said boring games... ingenious. They truly have given every 14 y/o boy in America a half chub. KUDOS!

Agreed, this is tastefully tasteless, tongue in cheek, and WAY better than EA's other marketing. Besides, bribing game reviewers blatantly? We knew they did anyway, but this smacks of BRASS BALLS! I love it. The wooden cases with pillows were a nice touch... heck, I'd write a favorable blog article for that alone.

I think those estimates are for the public, the PHB's, the congress, etc. Astronauts are smarter than that. BTW, all random probabilities are exactly 50:50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't. Anything else is an estimate. I'm only half kidding.

In the future, heroin will be replaced by pure Colombian electricity and the streets will be filled with hordes of electricity-depraved zombies. Now, you could waste precious ammunition on these pour souls, but why? Just set the Tase-more mine, flip the switch, and run along. The zombies get their daily fix of electrified needles and fall into a peaceful slumber. Problem solved. Meanwhile, you've saved your buckshot for the REAL enemy of the people; the comcast horde and its mighty flotilla of death vans! If the comcastinites were ever to get their hands on Taser technology... we would surely pay a price. After 6 months, we would pay more.