We had the truck round to destroy a bunch of disks recently at work (most of the drives wouldn't have had anything on them, but a few might have been exposed to customer's credit card data), and watching this big green lump of steel turn a harddrive into tiny mettle chips was really fucking cool!
So yeah, maybe it's not necessary, but it's a bloody good show.

Go look at last year's results and see if you still think that:

1) Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Thrift Shop {ft. Wanz}
2) Of Monsters And Men - Little Talks
3) alt-J - Breezeblocks
4) Flume - Holdin On
5) Mumford & Sons - I Will Wait
Not really a particularly commercial lineup, and that's just the top five.

Defence contractors wouldn't be so good at bilking the government out of money if they hadn't had years of practice. I'm sure when this thing was first built someone made a killing, even if they couldn't aspire to the giddy heights of larceny practised today.

That's similar to the wages/living costs disparity between London and other UK cities. Living in London is approx 50% more expensive, while salaries are about 10-30% higher.

EMV/Chip&PIN is used extensively throughout Europe.

You walk up, the clerk scans your purchases, you jam your card into the reader, wait a moment for it to be read, then type in your PIN and press enter. The clerk gets a message saying 'Payment accepted' and off you go.

I don't see any reasons why this can't work in the USA if it works everywhere else.

It's worth noting at this point, that the paranoid among us (fortunately but not coincidentally including people writing cryptography systems), have assumed that the NSA (and others) could theoretically be doing at lot of the things that we now know they have done.
Turns out the paranoiacs were right.

This is definitely taking a lot longer to boot than my Amiga ever did.

Charlie knows full well that there's a referendum soon, he lives in Edinburgh.

And this is why I'm going to be watercooling mine :)
(Assuming the waterblock gets any closer than Neufahrn which is where it's currently languishing on it's journey)

I don't care, I bought a bitcoin back in March, and just sold half of it for almost 10 times what I originally paid.
If the other half I still have drops in value, I'm still well up on the deal.
And to those who say "it's just numbers in a computer somewhere, it has no value!", all I've done is convert it to a slightly bigger number in my bank account, which is also just a number in a computer...

Generally the carrier will not do it for you, but there's plenty of dodgy little shops that will unlock your phone for a small fee.

But surely they'd re-use all of the static assets. Presumably all they did was add in a bit of flash or java or something to implant the actual malware, the rest was probably a genuine slashdot story, complete with images and snarky comments and all the rest.

If they're only selling to manufacturers, it's possible that they haven't attempted to make these drives work at altitude at all, and instead they'll rely on the manufacturers restricting their use to uses above a certain air pressure.

For linux, HP's drivers (hplip), work great in my experience on Ubuntu (their windows drivers are ok as well). Printing is as easy as you'd expect, and even scanning just works (using sane).

Nuclear weapons are designed to survive EMPs because there's a strong possibility that they will be used in an environment where other nuclear weapons are being detonated, either with intent to stop incoming weapons, or as part of a barrage.

So, yeah, they are expecting nukes to have to survive being nuked.