This is the danger of the whole "living Constitution" idea. If the Constitution is as pliable as putty, then it's really just a matter of whose hands the putty is in.

The problem with your idea is that we have a bunch of judges who are perfectly happy to rule, for example, that the 1st amendment only protects speech and words printed on large sheets of paper -- because the Founders couldn't possibly have envisioned the idea of words being transmitted via network cables and cached in RAID arrays.

This is absurd, and there are only two ways out of it. One is to accept that every minute technical or social challenge requires a quorum of the state legislatures, the Senate, and a constitution with 10,050 amendments. At which point the immutable Constitution becomes unusable and is abandoned in favor of some more workable form of government.

The other way is to accept that this is absurd, and that we're going to have to allow the Founders' ideas some room to breathe. And of course, once we do that, there's no clean way to draw the line.

I'm convinced that this is why the Founders gave us three branches of government, two of whom are elected (in some fashion) and in control of appointing the third. It's certainly not perfect, but it works a hell of a lot better than some alternatives.

In any case, if you want to try out Option 1 I'm fine with it -- provided you do it in the desert or on some tropical island somewhere. Option 2, the one so far practiced in the USA, isn't perfect. But we're all here, aren't we?

didn't realize that reversing IA-32 excutables was the modern meaning of cracking a code. I figured it would be difficult and possibly even rely on dictonary attack of a cryptographic hash, but IA-32 machine code?

For better or for worse, modern intelligence agencies are much more dependent on people who can RE software and develop exploits, than they are on pure cryptographers.

This is a consequence of the rolling disaster that is software security, combined with the fact that crypto folks have (mostly) gotten their act together.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

I think the idea that LA is going to maintain its current sprawling vehicle-centric layout past, say, 2040 is a pipe dream.

Who's going to pay for the fuel?

Yep.. shareholders are stupid. Not Microsoft's fault they don't want to reward their success.

Alternatively, the flat stock price represents investors' lack of confidence that they will ever see any of those profits. Microsoft is perfectly capable of sinking all of their money into failed expansion strategies, then gradually becoming another Kodak and fading away.

The Tea Party was smart and taken over the republican party.

I would say that the Republican party took over the Tea party. I imagine that's why OWS is trying to be apolitical.

Whatever their politics, there's a huge political value in a group of angry, underemployed people showing their anger with the existing system. Pretty much every 'fair' or 'just' aspect of our economic system was put in place because the powerful didn't want to worry about angry mobs taking over the political system or confiscating their property.

Until the 1990s the wealthy were legitimately afraid that if they went too far in their self-dealing, they might give an edge to communists. That's why the US has a safety net, and it's why Europe (in particular) has an even bigger one. But since the Soviet Union collapsed there hasn't been anything to be afraid of. A bunch of hippies in a park may not seem scary, but you can bet it's getting their attention.

Err, actually WebOS was around in 2007 or 2008, it just wasn't officially on a device until 2009.

Who knows. Android was around in 2007 as well, but it looked nothing like the Android we know today. Had it shipped in that state, it would have failed catastrophically.

Maybe WebOS was all brushed up and ready to go, but it's telling that they couldn't push a device for nearly two years after the iPhone. That's half a device lifecycle.

Let's see, when Palm was first starting out, their competition was Apple in the form of the Apple Newton... I remember how the Newton flew off the shelves... oh wait... no they didn't... Palm PDAs were flying off the shelves.

Hmm, I always felt like Palm's first OS was just MacOS (pre-OSX) rebranded into a portable format. Everything from the fonts to the icons to the dialog boxes looked the same. I mean, you couldn't move the icons or resize the windows, but that was about it. It even felt like MacOS at the API level.

Palm's had two primary innovations, and then they surfed on momentum until they inevitably died. The first was Graffiti, which they dumped with the Treo. The second was the Treo itself, which 'innovated' by having a built-in phone.

Palm's problem is that they failed to innovate beyond this point, which made them vulnerable even to a POS like WinCE. Their fate was set by that time. The actual doom came from the iPhone OS, but they were done by that point.

Had they come up with the ideas for WebOS in 2005, everything might have been ok. But fundamentally, WebOS was mostly innovated off of the iPhone, which hadn't been invented yet, so I can't see how it could have happened even if they /had/ it together. Most likely they would have just put out a WinCE-clone and then subsequently gotten crushed by the iPhone.

Judging nuclear power's safety by a first generation reactor design that was built nearly 40 years ago, and that despite a M9 earthquake and 15m tsunami

I think the objection is that the reactor was still operating, despite the fact that it was 40 years old, past its design lifetime, and wasn't rated to handle an event that would occur with relatively high probability in the reactor's lifespan.

In other words, it's everything the previous posters have said: bad management by a for-profit company. It doesn't really matter how safe the technology can be if it's going to be mismanaged in the way that this plant was.

If you're interested, here's a summary of the attack:

http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/10/attack-of-week-xml-encryption.html

It would probably have been calamitous but extinction level, maybe not. I mean most of those would probably have landed in the ocean anyway, with maybe a thousand or so dropping on land.

My understanding is that a major asteroid strike on the ocean could be catastrophic due to ozone depletion.* It's just a theory (because obviously we haven't tested it), but if true it would indicate that asteroid strikes are a bad thing no matter where they hit.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-asteroid-ocean-deplete-ozone-layer.html

* This depends on a single very large asteroid, so a bunch of smaller ones might not be as much of an issue. Unless they're fast moving.

Granted, processed oil isn't the friendliest thing to the world, there is a finite (though huge) supply, and cleaner fuels are a better alternative once they're economically viable without gigantic government subsidies. But for now we're just fine.

My understanding is that new oil fields continue to be discovered, but the pace and size of the discoveries is trending downward or at least stagnating. Meanwhile global oil demand is accelerating.

Since oil price is the congruence of supply and demand, and because oil demand is relatively inelastic (it's very hard for people to do without the stuff), whenever demand pushes up against supply we tend to see outsized (and unpredictable) price increases.

Furthermore, while there's plenty of oil to be found out there, the cost of recovering that oil is expected to increase (tar sands, deep water oil fields, etc.).

And so far we haven't even dealt with the impact on the environment.

In any case, the point is not simply that our economy is dependent on oil, it's that our economy is dependent on inexpensive oil. Once you increase costs by a factor of 2-3, everything we take for granted -- trillions and trillions dollars of built infrastucture -- becomes completely unviable. When this predictable crisis actually rolls around, the cost of replacing this infrastructure (or switching energy technologies) will be unbelievably high.

The cost of doing something about it now is trivial by comparison.

Well, yes. You have the right to shout that the king is naked, but you also can't be surprised if the king decides to hit you with a club.

In a democratic republic based on the rule of law, you should not have to worry about a king hitting you with a club.

Yes the law can, and is, being abused to produce this outcome. But that'ss an argument against the law as construed. It's not an argument in favor of the abuse.

Its not the only the browsers that need to support the newer versions of these protocols, but also the servers.

Maybe not. It appears that OpenSSL in 0.9.6d implemented a "fix" to TLS 1.0 that may not require a change to the server. The basic idea is that the browser injects message prefixes into the stream as a kind of "fake" IV, to keep the Javascript from having control of which messages get encrypted. This may stop the attack.

Furthermore, if the prefixes are formatted in a certain way --- total speculation --- it may be possible to get the server to filter them out even if it's not running the same software. Anyway, I can't imagine how OpenSSL would implement this fix if the servers don't support it. But I admit I'm just catching up on this aspect.

Here's a brief post describing the "fix":

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvpn.user/32566

And my speculation on how the attack works, in detail:

http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/09/brief-diversion-beast-attack-on-tlsssl.html

I had posted this in another thread, but in case it's helpful --- this is my best guess on how the attack works in detail:

http://practicalcrypto.blogspot.com/2011/09/brief-diversion-beast-attack-on-tlsssl.html