I guess when he rated the desktops it was a tie.

It'll be free to get people like me who're still on older versions of the OS to upgrade, so they have fewer versions to support. I expect soon they'll announce no more support for Snow Leopard et al.

"[...] a scribbled note with the password" was what the intelligence agencies reported. Greenwald denied it (on Newsnight the other day).

The double standard implied is that the Guardian deemed one way of obtaining data unacceptable (hacking into people's voicemail) but not another (downloading your employer's data onto USB sticks and then giving it away).

I would argue the public interest defence. If someone came to me and said, "on that voicemail is X's confession to the abduction and murder, even though he denies it in public", hacking it could be in the public interest, whereas fishing voicemail for gossip is not.

Similarly if Edward Snowden came to me and said, "on this USB stick is proof of illegal and pervasive surveillance by governments, which I've nicked", I'd at least look at it to establish whether there was a public interest case.

I wonder what this means for geopolitics... will the US continue to support the Saudis etc?

OTOH I expect we'll just see Jevons Paradox in action, which would mean we still need the Saudis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Maybe he meant "uncontrolled dump"?

(You seem to write well so you'll probably appreciate being reminded it's "garner" not "garnish")

Maybe there are power savings to be had in further reducing the randomness of rdrand?

As well as reviewing the standards themselves, I hope someone is reviewing the processes which allowed these weaknesses to get into the standards.

"While this might seem like the height of recklessness, this particular system doesn't use rockets or propellants" ... just magnetic fields, so that's ok then, good think there's no electronic equipment up there or anything!

(I'm sure they know what they're doing, it's just that the summary seemed retarded.)

I've generally loved Apple's hardware design, but I've never been convinced they had beautiful, consistent UIs since the transition to OS X. For example, they went brushed metal for iTunes, for no apparent reason. This started long before Jobs croaked.

That's how I felt when I saw the Matrix, and I'm not even really a sci-fi guy. But I bet even Neuromancer isn't the first occurrence of this idea (if that's what you were implying), someone at the time will have said, "how is this new? It's just Jules Verne / H G Wells / X all over again" or something.

For many people it'll be the first time they've considered the possibility, or perhaps they just enjoy a chance to consider it again with others.

$600,000 is basically a sentence to a life of slavery isn't it? I don't know how much he could reasonably expect to pay back in a year; presumably even less than otherwise given a criminal record. $5K? $10K? But I suppose if that's the assessment of the damage he caused, how he's going to pay it back is immaterial.

How do these kinds of damages even work? No one's going to loan him that kind of money, so presumably the damaged party is going to have to collect over a period of decades?

The probability of Oculus Rift making me want to spew will likely be near 100%. All virtual 3D seems to, and even some actual 3D (reading in a car) so I'm not holding my breath.

If encryption is a "please investigate me" red flag, then we need to find ways to hide the encryption (i.e. steganography).