I wouldn't even bother. No matter how valid a point you make the Kool-Aid Drinkers will never agree with you, and just continue quoting their gospel and insisting it's "fact", not politics. I know: I've been there many times.

No, that's not the point. Having a live virus for developing vaccines and antivirals are where the usefulness is.

It is very much like the anti-missile component of MAD, which neither side wanted the other to have.

There are techniques that allow searching within encrypted files, but they rely on the client creating the index. You can then search the index for an encrypted search term and, if you know the keys, interpret the answer. Getting this right is quite tricky (there are several research papers about it), so he's right, but it's not impossible.

The main reason that I suspect DropBox discourages encryption is that they rely a lot on deduplication to reduce their costs. If everyone encrypted their files, then even two identical files would have different representations server-side if owned by different users, so their costs would go up a lot.

I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.

Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.

In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.

I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.

I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).

Predicted the 1960's (Kerr-induced self-focusing: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab... ), and it was a big part of SDI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... and was again applied to space-to-ground weapons systems in 2009: http://journals.aps.org/prl/ab...

It was ale demonstrated at LLNL in 2009: http://www.researchgate.net/pu... and 2010: http://www.researchgate.net/pu...

What's new about this one is that they've renamed the tunnel as the desired artifact, rather than describing it in beams going down the tunnel.

Let me guess, they outsourced this particular code to EDS?

That's not quite true for dental work, but the price is capped, so you'll typically pay £18.50 to see a dentist, £50.50 if you need something done, or £219 if you need something serious. It's only free if you qualify for extra assistance, which is automatic if you are under 18, under 19 (25 in Wales) and in full-time education, on income support or similar.

Your comment would be much more insightful if you're read all of the way to the end of the first sentence of the post that you replied to.

"On the other hand, if you want a solar-powered Chromebook, the inverter could be a deal-breaker on the weight."

You wouldn't need an inverter, really. In many cases, low-power laptops run on ~10VDC, so a direct solar panel connection with resistor would be roughly fine to hit the battery through its charge controller. For those needing ~20V, you just use a cheap-ass boost converter and resistor before you feed to the charging/power circuitry.

Been there, done that, made solar-powered headless laptop servers.

600? 480VDC would be fine. 5A roughly? Easy-peasy.

K. gimme an oscillator, variac, and an inductor.

Deuces.