Replacing the keys doesn't require reflashing the firmware, you just need go into the UEFI setup screen and add or delete the keys you're interested in. If the key gets compromised, you just go to the setup, add the new key, boot and update the bootloader and go into the setup and remove the old key. Or, even easier, you update the boot-loader on a working system, then go into the UEFI setup and remove the old key and add the new key. The procedure you outlined is unnecessarily complex even assuming that you have to reflash the firmware to get new keys.

So the FSF is basically asking people to sign a petition that asks manufacturers to do what they are already doing and plan on doing ? The current requirements for windows 8 is that users must be able to disable secure boot in the bios and do key management (addition/removal) of keys as well. I don't know of any manufacturer that is planning on doing anything different since that would mean that their systems would not be windows 8 certified.

In fact, I don't think microsoft bans having other keys besides their key in the bios by default.If, for example, the FSF or some coalition (e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.) were to come up with some workable way key signing infrastructure, they could petition UEFI/mobo developers to include their keys in shipped products as well. The question is how do you freely allow people to get bootloaders signed without making it easily for malware authors to do the same.

Check out "A study of DRAM failures in the field" from the supercomputing 2012 proceedings. They have some interesting stats based on 5 million DIMM days of operation.

That's not true. There was a recent paper looking at memory defects and causes on the Jaguar supercomputer, and memory errors were moderately common. Just as surprisingly, there were errors were a single DIMM going bad would cause errors for all the DIMMs on that channel.

So, memory does go bad and it does that more frequently than you'd expect.

The problem is that most early results are incorrect and after doing some checking, it turns out they were systematic errors or mistakes or something similar. If everyone published early and often, you'd get so many results (with most of the results being incorrect) that no one could track it to figure out which results were interesting and worth investing the time and effort to work on. Duplicating someone else's work takes a lot of time and effort and may involve building a lot of stuff or flying to another lab to learn new techniques. Unless you're really sure that the results are likely to pan out, why would anyone spend tens of thousands of dollars or a few months at another lab learning a technique?

The costs and startup efforts are much higher for most sciences unlike code so open source techniques won't work as effectively. It's effectively like having to reimplement a good portion of a piece of software before you can start contributing.

A few things. Angel investors usually get involved in a company at it's initial stages and don't buy the company's stock in the open market. But let's ignore that and consider the scenarios. Suppose you bought a bunch of Intel stock on an exchange somewhere and you bought enough that Intel stock went up an appreciable amount. You almost certainly bought the stock from other investors or a market maker so Intel didn't get any money from your stock purchases. Intel's market valuation went up but that won't affect Intel directly or give it more money. Intel would have to sell it's stock on an exchange or put it up for collateral or something similar if it wants to take advantage of the rise in it's stock.

To use an analogy, if the value of your house or car went up by $50k, that wouldn't directly help you out. You would have to sell it or take out a loan against it or something similar if you wanted take advantage of the rise in value. Likewise, stock prices don't directly help companies, contrary to what the submitter says.

Not quite, the market valuation of the company increases but that doesn't translate into money that the company can use. The company would have to either sell stock into the open market or use it as collateral or something similar in order to get money. It's just as if you owned a home and the value of the home increased after you bought it. The increase in value doesn't do much for you unless you do other stuff (refinance, get a home equity loan, etc.) to take advantage of the that increase.

The same kind of trick wouldn't normally work on the stock market -- if you're wealthy enough that you can increase the share price of a stock by buying enough of it to shift the market, then when you try to reap your profits by unloading the stock, the price will drift back down as you're selling it off. (Or if your purchases do manage to create a self-fulfilling prophecy -- your infusion of cash into the company enables them to realize their plans and become a genuine success -- well, then you're just a successful angel investor, more power to you.)

You have a misunderstanding of how the stock market works. Namely, if you buy company X's stock, company X will probably not get any actual money from the purchase. You're almost certainly purchasing the stock from another investor so you wouldn't be an angel investor. A company can take advantage of a rise in it's stock price by selling it's own stock or by using stock to purchase another company or something like that but that is a side effect of someone pushing up stock prices.

If the author doesn't understand a simple thing like that about financial markets, then I don't have much faith in his ability to talk cogently about markets in general.

The specs already require that the x86 EFI allows you to load your own key. This is just something to let you install and use linux or other OSes without having to go through the process of loading your own keys into the bios and instead using the ms key that's already been loaded.

What the hell is electric landing gear? The wheels on the plan are unpowered and spin freely. All of the propulsion for moving around is provided by the engines. You can't keep the engines off until you're on the runway unless you're being towed. Also the engines need to be started using an external device so you'd need to drag that along so that it could spin up the engine and then start it.

Sort of like how mobileme worked amazingly well out of the box. Or how about siri working well with accents or just in general with a variety of voices. Same deal with the antennas on the iphone 4. Apple has a fairly long history of hardware issues on their first version of any new hardware. Steve Jobs being a perfectionist didn't prevent this.

'For all of Intel's semiconductor design and manufacturing feats, its processors suffer from a genetic handicap: They have to support the legacy x86 instruction set, and thus they're inherently more complicated than legacy-free ARM devices, they require more transistors, more silicon.

Intel and AMD x86 processors moved on to using micro-ops and risc like operations internally years ago. The only disadvantage nowadays is a small translator that converts x86 machine code into micro-ops. Compared to the actual logic or cache on the cpu the number of transistors that the translation takes is minimal and not a big deal especially when you consider the size of cpus nowadays.

There have been studies that estimates are about $30 to $160 more per iphone in costs ( http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-manufacturing-cost-foxconn-2012-4) . That means apple's margin for the devices would go from $452 in gross profits to around $293 per iphone. It'd cost more but wouldn't be outrageously more.

Uh...The french gave the israelis the nuclear reactor at Dimona which was the source of the nuclear material the israelis used to get construct their nukes. The British also later gave them further assistance in getting the reactor running and in purifying and producing the components for a nuke.

India got nuclear reactors from Canada and apparently got nuclear technology from other NPT signatories as well.

Wrong. There's always going to be steps where only a single thread of execution can run. Those steps will determine how much of a speed up parallelization will get you. Adding more processors will just result in more processors idling when those bottlenecks occur and if your processors are not fast enough at those bottlenecks, then it could be much better to get fewer more powerful processors so that bottlenecks are finished more quickly.