I want to extend the right click context menu - same as Win 7-zip managed to add itself to my context menu. I rarely add anything to it but it's clearly possible

That is to say - it's clearly possible with some hacking or by downloading a third party tool to do it for you. It wasn't easy to do so in Windows XP, and it's still not easy to do so in Windows 7. It's not necessarily something that's meant to be easy to do, of course.

For what it's worth, I've only ever added one for exiftools since it makes working with exiftools for my specific purpose (copy/paste EXiF data) so much easier:

1. Fire up regedit. Yep, you'll be mucking around in there.
2. Find 'HKLM\Software\Classes\.jpg' and note the '(Default)' value. That'll be your file handler for most jpeg files (you can also check .jpeg if you want). In my case, that's 'IrfanView.jpg'
3. Find 'HKLM\Software\Classes\ThatHandlerYouNoted\shell'
4. Add a new key there named 'exif'
5. In that new key, add a new string value named 'MUIVerb' and give it the value 'exif (&x)'. That ampersand makes the 'x' key the keyboard shortcut.
6. Add another string value there named 'SubCommands' and give it the value 'exifcopy;exifpaste;exifclear' - these are the command names the explorer shell will look for when handling the submenu (did I mention this makes a nice submenu type context menu entry, rather than a bunch of flat items?)
7. Now find this monstrosity: 'HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CommandStore\shell'. Windows will relocate things to Wow6432Node anyway so might as well place it there to begin with.
8. Create new keys there called 'exifclear', 'exifcopy' and 'exifpaste'
9. In each of those keys, modify the '(Default)' value to 'clear (&z)', 'copy (&c)' and 'paste (&v)' respectively. Again, the ampersands make nice keyboard shortcuts out of the letters following them, and the 'z' is used so you don't accidentally double-tap the 'x' key and clear EXiF data accidentally.
10. In each of those keys, add another subkey named 'command'.
11. In those 'command' subkeys, modify the '(Default)' value to e.g. '"c:\Program Files (x86)\EXiFtool\exifcvz.bat" CommandHere "%1"' changing the path to match your EXiFtool location and CommandHere being 'clear', 'copy' and 'paste' for each as appropriate.
12. Create the exifcvz.bat file to handle the commands as appropriate ('copy' copies the original file to a temporary location, 'paste' instructs exiftool to copy the exif data from the temporary location to the given file (and yes, you can select multiple as explorer will simply invoke it for each selected file), and 'clear' runs the exif cleaning tool.

Once done, you should be able to pull up the context menu when a jpg file is selected, hit 'xc' to copy, select target jpg file(s) and hit 'xv' and the exif data is copied. No messing about with exiftoolgui or any other clumsy GUI, nevermind futzing about with the CLI (which is fine for many things, but not so much when dealing with images).

And yes, all those steps above would be why there's 3rd party utilities out there that will happily simplify the process. But it is doable by them, and by you, whether you're using Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 - and equally painful in all.

And in a parallel universe, the SETI project would be more open to the idea.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=71623

But they're not -and depending on one's point of view, they have good reasons for it.

The other difficulty is making a fold or SETI search accomplishment a proof-of-work without it being wide open to abuse (and, therefore, hugely detrimental to those projects).

A less stringent method would be to set a transaction bit and message to an online solution, and allow clients to check the bit (and the solution) and accept that as the transaction fee - thus allowing anybody who doesn't want to pay a transaction fee to have the option of helping cancer research of the search for little green men instead. Unfortunately, this then runs into a large portion of the Bitcoin community not being open to that idea, since any such framework could easily be abused (see also: Coin Validation).

Given that it's stated that you can't trust a chip's encryption routines, which at the basis means that you don't trust its random number generator, and given that 'a chip' extends down from the latest Intel to a relatively lowly PIC, is anybody aware of an actually available TRNG (true/hardware random number generator) built out of discrete components?

Comments to a Bruce Schneier post titled "Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer Chips" once suggested this would be the only way to 1. be certain* of no tampering and 2. have reasonably sufficient output bandwidth to be used in practical applications.

However, I haven't seen any actual implementation. My Google-fu may be failing me, though.

* Barring some pretty sweet shenanigans like those pulled by Henryk Gasperowicz; [Spoiler video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KMLmpC7-Ls). I can't see manufacturers including any crypto-defeatery bits into a basic transistor thinking that it just might possibly be used in an actual crypto application, and eat the cost somehow.

This is particularly disturbing because they should well have known about this. Disqus used (uses?) Gravatar, and Gravatar's failure in this exact same fashion has been previously covered and was not even fixed for a long time afterward (disclaimer: that AC is me. At least, I think it was. The company I referred to in there did respond to my complaint and fixed it on their side (making Gravatar use opt-in and using a generic 'profile picture' when it wasn't enabled) - not sure if there's statistics on how many people decided to enable it.)

This sounded so, so much worse when I glossed over the second 'and' in that first sentence there.

I doubt this was a case of last resort, though. At the same time, death as karma for theft? Bit much. On the other hand, in some countries that would mean the thieves would have standing to sue if their lawyer finds the cases were not clearly identifying the substance as hazardous/radioactive, etc. and that's more than a bit much.

Of course there's always going to be a subset of people who will choose the option where they don't pay at all. However, I do think that the size of the audience for these streaming sites can be reduced greatly if the rights holders decided to make their material available in a superior form.

And by superior form I don't necessarily mean that it has to be 4k with the full DTS tracks and DRM-free - though that would be nice; it could be as simple as just being vastly more convenient. Take Netflix - I like railing against Netflix because I think its scope of offerings is entirely too narrow. At the same time, though, if I wanted to watch some movie that the Netflix app on my Roku tells me they have available and all I need to do is press a button and it plays... I'll sign up for that anytime over having to wait for a torrent download, or hunt down that one 'news' server that lets me get it at 10MB/s (and still have to wait a long time and find out it's a 540p rip in an MP4 container format that VLC manages to choke on).

The more questionable sources can't match that superior experience, simply because it means a lot of (relatively expensive) high bandwidth hosting. This, too, will change in the (far) future.. which is why rights holders should have gotten their sh*t together 8 years ago. But as the saying goes, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

The people who will continue to use the questionable sources should be ignored as they could never be convinced without very strict legislation that by its very nature requires severe impinging on privacy anyway.

While I agree that the copyright term is too long (for that matter, copyright needs to go - distribution rights is what matters), this only has impact on the streaming sites insofar as a user actually saying "because of the ridiculous copyright term, I'm gonna watch this episode of Walking Dead that aired an hour ago."

Otherwise, the copyright term could be 13 years, 5 years, 1 year or even 1 month.. and the streaming sites would still find themselves with practically the same audience; after all, what good is it to watch an episode 1 month later when everybody at the watercooler (or on your facebook or whatever) is already 3 or even 4 episodes further along?

A complaint about the lack of appropriate coverage for a global audience would make more sense.

It can be, but it's discouraged;
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

There's plenty of free software licenses, libre and otherwise, open source and otherwise, you can choose from that have little to nothing to do with GNU (not sure if you're just referring to GPL there, or..)

Github suggests using this site, but there's other comparative / flowchart-based ones if you google about:
http://choosealicense.com/

I know where my money will be going.

To the BeagleBone Black, of course.

No? The pcDuino, then? No? Cubieboard? El cheapo chinese tablet with an I/O expander? Don't leave us hanging!

While popularly torrents get messed about with in terms of available bandwidth, the same applies to several other P2P protocols. It's the painted nature of the beast - lots of potentially high-bandwidth connections established for essentially low-priority purposes - that hurts it in that respect. (Yet) An(other) archive of wikipedia isn't going to change that - unless you can think of a convincing reason to submit to ISP decisionmakers that would cause them to believe that throttling the download and/or upload of such an archive to be substantially detrimental to their users (and, ultimately, their bottom line).

It's already legitimate and doesn't need legitimizing.

Of course that doesn't mean that just because your favorite popular zero-day movie/series/albums/ebooks/software site of rather unauthorized nature magically gains "but what about the copy of wikipedia!?"-protection from the likes of MPAA/RIAA/Wiley?/BSA.. at least not in most courts of law.

Which is different from closed source software, how?

Take SpaceMonger, for example. There one day, gone the next. Guy's still around, personal blog notes the disappearance, and essentially told people to just not ask. Well alright, then.

I do agree that when an open source software project goes stagnant because one or more active developers quit, it's rather indicative of the fact that just because the source is available that there is no guarantee whatsoever that somebody else will pick it up. But at least they can.

Some of the tests may need to be weighted differently

Which is why the data should be made publicly available, so the weighting can be checked. I'm fine with them saying that Score X on head-on colission at 60mph is worth less than Score X on rear-end colission at 15mph simply because the first probably leaves you in a world of hurt anyway and isn't nearly as likely to happen as some jackass rear-ending you at the lights.

But then...

may not even be able to be weighted in a rational manner

...just means gut-feeling work. That's not a test.

It's an approximation, an educated guess at how safe a vehicle is

The whole point of testing isn't to make guesses. You can't just go around running a bunch of tests, getting measurable data from it, knowing with some certainty what the error in the test methodology is, and then check the alignment of the planets before factoring the test score into what a bunch of tea leaves say.

Essentially...

you can't really claim that one car is safer than another based on the score

...would preclude a stars rating entirely. If there's no demonstrable greater safety in a car with 5 stars vs one with 4 stars, then why does the first have 5 and the latter 4 to begin with? And if there is that demonstrable safety difference, then surely the one with 5 stars can at least claim theirs is safer than the one with 4 stars. And if that is the case, assume there was never a car with 5 stars before - they surely could claim that they do have the safest car evar.

I do get the psychological, PR and industry flak aspect that the NHTSA is trying to address - but that would be a lot easier by dropping the scores and only issuing stars.. or by keeping the scores and dropping the stars.

As far as I can tell, Tesla claims - as do several news outlets - that the NHTSA also releases some other raw numbers to the manufacturers which Tesla then decided to 'combine' (whether that's adding or averaging or whatever - who knows.) to give a 5.4 .

Really, the issue is lack of transparency - since we, the public, don't get to see those numbers. Thus we can't really give a good opinion other than "NHTSA says 5 is the maximum. THE MAXIMUM!" and all nod in agreement at the overlord's words apparently for fear of getting booted out.

This in turn leads to gems like this:
"No matter what, you can't say it's the safest car ever tested, just that it had the best overall test score of any vehicle tested by NHTSA." - NHTSA ( http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/tesla-crash-test-rating-high-maker-claimed/story?id=20024779 )

So it had the best overall test score .. but is not necessarily the safest. But the test is on safety. So it's the best in safety.. but not necessarily the best in safety.

Maybe while they're quibbling they could come up with a system that makes sense to themselves, the manufacturers and, most importantly, the public. If in the end that means Tesla does get a 5.4 and they want to hang on to 5 stars - well I guess they'll just have to lower the rating on a bunch of other cars.

They did not take away game functionality or limit BluRay playback

That's not entirely true. 3D BluRay is not supported at launch. I know not many tears will be shed over that with most people, but it's yet another thing in a long line of things (along the same lines: no audio CD support, no mp3 file playback) that inspire head-scratching.