Perhaps more accurately, the barycenter is the only inertial frame of reference in the system.

The sun isn't an inertial frame of reference either. Both the sun and the earth orbit something called the barycenter, which is the center of mass of the sun-earth system. This just happens to be so near the center of the sun (because the sun is so massive) that for most intents and purposes, the earth can be said to orbit the sun.

This discussion, however, is not one of those intents and purposes.

Except that a physical key is "something you have", whereas a password is "something you know." A search warrant allows them to make off with physical objects, but a password is just bits in your head.

Of course, whether the court sees it that way is anyone's guess.

The key word being "ludicrous". Libel requires falsehood, which it isn't clear was present in this case.

Well, the BBC is British and presumably paying in pounds. 2000 pounds to a ton...

The idea wasn't to not overfly the Soviets, it was to only overfly them once.

Any second orbit would have been extremely predictable and run the risk of being intercepted.

If we're going that far, we might as well assume that he won't speak English (and it will in fact be a dead, lost language) when the archives need reading. ASCII is really just a substitution cipher on the alphabet plus some punctuation. It can be trivially cryptanalyzed. (Even if we, the entire planet, magically forget the order the alphabet goes in.)

Unfortunately, planning ahead is a dying art. I used to have to plan hanging out with friends a week in advance to make sure everyone would be there. Now you have to call people at the time when you want them to be there in order to get anything out of them.

Federal government is federal. LEOs are, in most cases, paid for by local and state governments. There are a few exceptions (DHS, FBI), but one could make the argument they

1) don't contribute much to day-to-day safety anyway
2) shouldn't really constitutionally exist to begin with (DEA, I'm looking at you)

Rijndael and RSA are both deterministic. However, your implementation may be adding a random salt/initialization vector to the plaintext pre-encryption. I'm not sure why it would be doing this without being asked, especially in ECB mode, but I'm not familiar with BouncyCastle.

RSA encryption and decryption are both just modulo exponentiation by the public and private parts of the key. No random there.

The AES algorithm is slightly more complicated, and I don't have time to fully analyze it, but it is also deterministic. The issue is somewhere in BouncyCastle and how you're calling it. (AES was designed to be fast. Cryto-quality RNGs are really slow and complex: it wouldn't make sense to use one)

I understand how that is true, in a sense, but in another very "real" sense, your processor is imperative. Function calls are just a clever trick played on you by your compiler, your standard library, and some assembly macros.

(Well, unless you're running on a Reduceron or something.)

But there's no need to make the copyright on BSD-licensed stuff go away, for exactly the reason you described: you can make closed-source derivative works.

hindsight is 20/20

Go back and read the rest of the comment before you complain about it.