I disagree with your basic premise, that things are secure, or insecure. Everything is a tradeoff. Using a foreign CDN is a tradeoff of trusting a third party to be secure vs doing it yourself. Just because you do it yourself doesn't mean it's "more secure", it's just more in your control, which can be good or bad.

We make this tradeoff all the time. Have you ever used 3rd party software on your website? Well then you're making a tradeoff as well.

You're right to be suspcious of trusting a 3rd party, but I don't agree that using a CDN is always a bad choice, incompetent, and obvious to anyone competent.

I'm talking about a slightly later period. The third plutonium implosion bomb (Trinity was #1, Nagasaki was #2) was ready to go before the end of the war. Groves decided not to ship it to Tinian. Production rate was about one every 3 weeks.

But that design wasn't suitable for long-term storage. Wikipedia: "The lead-acid batteries that powered the fuzing system remained charged for only 36 hours, after which they needed to be recharged. To do this meant disassembling the bomb, and recharging took 72 hours. The batteries had to be removed in any case after nine days or they corroded. The plutonium core could not be left in for much longer, because its heat damaged the high explosives. Replacing the core also required the bomb to be completely disassembled and reassembled. This required about 40 to 50 men and took between 56 and 72 hours, depending on the skill of the bomb assembly team." It took a few more years to develop a bomb that was suitable for routine storage at an air base.

This already happened with desktop computers. A few years ago, we reached the point where basic desktop machines had a few 3GHz CPUS, a few gigabytes of memory, a terabyte or so of disk, and the capability to talk to a 100MHz Ethernet. There, things stopped. Desktop machines haven't become significantly more powerful since. They still power much of the business world, they work fine, and nobody is "upgrading". Innovation in desktops has become cosmetic - Apple makes one that comes in a round can.

Phones seem to be getting there. The iPhone 6 has no major technical improvements over the iPhone 5. Its specs are comparable to the Nexus 4 of two years ago. We may be approaching that point with phones.

It's amazing how bad many nuclear weapons were, and perhaps are. The Hiroshima gun bomb wasn't much better than an IED. If the Enola Gay had crashed, it probably would have gone off. (The crew was under orders not to land with the bomb; if they had to return to base, they were to dump it in deep water.)

For a while after WWII, the US didn't actually have any functional nuclear weapons. This was a major secret at the time. The war designs weren't suited for long-term storage. Nobody wanted another gun bomb, and the first generation electronics for triggering implosion didn't store well. A "GI-proof" line of bombs had to be developed.

The first round of Polaris missile warhead wouldn't have worked. This was learned only after there were SSBNs at sea with functional missiles and dud warheads. That took over a year to fix.

In recent years, there was a period for over a decade when the US had lost the ability to make new fusion bombs. The plant to make some obscure material had been shut down, and the proposed, cheaper replacement didn't work.

There was a tritium shortage for years. The old tritium production reactors were shut down years ago, and no replacement was built. The US is now producing tritium using a TVA power reactor loaded with some special fuel rods. Commercial use of tritium (exit signs and such) is way down from previous decades. (Tritium has a half-life of around 11 years, so tritium light sources do run down.)

The US was the last country with a gaseous-diffusion enrichment plant. The huge WWII-vintage plant at Oak Ridge was finally dismantled a few years ago. There's a centrifuge plant in the US, privately run by URENCO, a European company.

The US had a huge buildup of nuclear capability in the 1950s, and most of the plants date from that era. They're worn out and obsolete.

And that's the stuff we know about. Being a nuclear superpower isn't cheap.

Identify what resources are limited and change the culture and work culture to use less of them.

Its hard to argue against longer lives when nearly everyone from age 21-62 drives a car to work to get printed fiat monopoly money to feed themselves in the age where nearly all the work is transitioning to knowledge can be done from home/telecommute/virtual teams.

Dream big, its OK. Maybe if life was possibly longer people would take more time making big decisions and the rat race would slow down. I think there would be less inter-generational low/middle class reset where every generation is in a rat race to build from zero.

I think Star Trek type futures are possible for Earth, and we dont need to install lifeclocks to get there. We should also just consider valuing life and not simply pleasurable existence.

I don't think there are many dreams of futures without some form of life extension.

Some wax poetic and philosophic about how life extension is like the One Ring stretching out Bilbo and Gollum, but with a properly enlightened society with strong family ties multiple generations co-habiting could provide an awesome view of the past, living history, to help teach the next generation.

I see ageing as a currently inescapable fact of life. I also know there are 400 year old clams. I think we should attempt to treat ageing as a disease, who that each life is valuable and worth saving and cherish the time the elders spend with the young to bring a different (but sometimes wrong and thought provoking) perspective.

There was an episode of TNG (Half a Life) where people who got to a certain age killed themselves. I was strongly in favor of letting the scientist live, but the show used the family and social norms and mores to make this a hard show to call black and white on.

So let's think to do the opposite of Logan's Run. Lets dream big and not run to the grave like its a cradle.

This service has to be really cheap and fast to succeed. Iridium and GlobalStar already offer a satellite-based service. Iridium really does cover the entire planetary surface; GlobalStar has most of the planet, but not the polar areas. So it's all about being price-competitive.

I'm not qualified to judge whether it's secure, but it's not distributed. "Each user is provided by PKG with a set of private keys corresponding to his/her identity for each node on the path from his/her associated leaf to the root of the tree via a secure channel as in IBE scheme." So there's a tree of all users, maintained by somebody. I think; the paper suffered in translation.

"No, not spaceman. Specimin." - von Braun, in "The Right Stuff", speaking of the Mercury astronauts.

Or the right wing social network..

Or Ricochet wireless networks.

Besides, most Tor exit nodes are monitored. Using Tor is like screaming "I'm hiding".

That lasted until WWII.

Until the 1980s, anyone could enter the Pentagon and wander around the corridors. (George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, decided during WWII that there was no way a building with as many people as the Pentagon could keep spies out, and requiring badges would give a false sense of security.) In the 1960s, anyone could enter most Federal buildings in Washington, including the Capitol and all the House/Senate office buildings, without passing any security checkpoints.

Isolated event, and the guy was brought down. There'll always be a risk as long as their are fanatics or loonies who don't give any though to their own personal safety, but there comes a point of diminishing returns.

Suppose they hired 10 times as many Secret Service agents? That just increases the odds of one of them going bad and offing the President himself. (Not a likely event, but having 10x as many agents also means more chances of confusion in a crisis, etc, etc.)

Security is never perfect (wasn't there an incident some years back where an intruder wandered into the Queen's living quarters at Buckingham Palace?) That's one reason we have a line of succession -- it's not like the government collapses in the case of an untimely death.

Mind, given the choices of VP over the past few presidencies, that line of succession might actually be helping lower the odds of someone trying to assassinate the Prez.

It was a Friday evening. The President had left for Camp David earlier, and his main protective detail went with him. Most staffers had gone home. The guy got just inside the outer doors, where there is a security checkpoint, before he was tackled.

The Secret Service made the right choice not shooting the intruder dead on the lawn. They certainly had the capability to kill him. They would have been heavily criticized, with pictures of the dead body on national TV.

On September 12, a man wearing a Pokemon hat and carrying a stuffed animal jumped the White House fence. He was tackled and arrested. Should he have been killed?

Apple, yes. Google or Facebook, no. Google and Facebook have two classes of stock. The class with all the voting rights is in both cases controlled by the founders. The publicly traded shares cannot outvote them, even if someone bought all of them.

Until recently, multiple classes of stock were prohibited for NYSE-listed companies, which tended to discourage doing this. (The classic exception was Ford, which has two classes of stock, the voting shares controlled by the Ford family. This predates that NYSE rule.)

This matters when the insiders make a big mistake and the stock starts going down. There's no way to kick them out.

The Red Line crash was not computer-related. The signalling system for the Washington Metro is a classic electromechanical relay-based system. Just like the New York subways. The Red Line crash was caused by a failure of a track circuit for detecting trains, trackside equipment using an audio-frequency signal sent through the rails and shorted to the other rail by the train's wheels. All those components are pre-computer technology.

As with most railway systems, manual driving isn't enough to prevent collisions, because stopping distances are often longer than visual distances. That was the case here.

The Washington Metro had been sloppy about maintenance of trackside equipment. They do have a central computer system, and it logs what the relay-based signal systems are doing, although it can't override them. They had logs of previous failures, and should have fixed the problem.