Given what the actual authors of TOR have said about their system over the years, the likelihood that the talk was cancelled because they've suddenly become evil (or have suddenly revealed that they've been evil all along!) vs. the likelihood that it was cancelled because the lawyers at CMU were being overly conservative and paranoid, I'll go for the latter explanation. There are projects for which that wouldn't be the case.

TOR has its limitations and weaknesses, and the developers have always tried to be upfront and public about them, both for the threat model / design and for the code itself.

And some context for the link, if not clear:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/review-only-decent-people-the-netherlands-continued-dehumanization-of-black-people

Oddly in reference:
http://videolinkz.us/mu.php?url=ox60w8tg5plk

Is this what we've come to? Pretending online trolls are a problem specifically for women?

Here's a hint for the author of that article: Trolls are adept at identifying that which will get under your skin, and will hit that button repeatedly as long as it keeps spitting out a pellet ( much like this article ). If we're going to generalize it, men don't get this particular brand of trollling because it doesn't work on us. Ultimately, it has very little to do with sexism.

But no; let's work on trying to make ourselves a better brand of troll. Let me know how that works out for you.

( and no; had the author been a man, I'd have responded in the same manner )

As an actual product available right now, there's this 250 watt inverter. from Enphase, intended to work with one solar panel. That's 54 cubic inches, or 12W/cubic inch. Google wants 50W/cubic inch, so Google is asking for 4x the power density. This one happens to be configured for 48VDC input, but that's not hard to change. It exceeds the efficiency limit set by Google.

Enphase sells those little inverters for a one-inverter-per-solar-panel system, where power is combined on the AC side. The inverter, at 171 mm x 173 mm x 30 mm, is a lot smaller than the panel it sits behind. Making it smaller won't have any effect on system size.

One big difference: Enphase offers a 25 year warranty on that unit. Google only wants to run for 100 hours. They'll probably get something that will pass their tests but wouldn't last a year in a real solar installation.

No, we wouldn't need our own live smallpox to construct a vaccine against a weaponized smallpox. The original vaccine was made from cowpox, and eventually the closely related vaccinia disease, and was much safer than smallpox-based inoculation which was the other prevention available at the time.

The only reason to keep the stuff around is to attack the Russians in case they attack us with their smallpox, and we can be better people than that. Time to destroy it, and convince Putin to destroy his stockpiles also.

Then you can't afford not to have a backup server and a development server. This point needs expansion :p

If you look at the program in its entirety, terrorist rockets, missiles, and bombs have killed about 600 Israeli citizens in the last few weeks. 2 of those citizens were Jews killed by Hamas rockets. The rest of the Israeli citizens were Palestinians, primarily civilians in Gaza, and Iron Dome did nothing to stop them. It may have stopped some of Hamas's incompetent rocket attacks, but it didn't protect Israeli civilians from the militant Army's better equipment.

It can be disabled, but can you trust that they won't "accidentally" turn it back on with an update? If you must use Chrome, use Chromium instead. The only practical difference besides that it doesn't spy on you for Google is that you need to install a Flash player (if desired) manually.

Stupid objection the first: "This is worth a lot more than a million dollars."
Response:

Does Google own the intellectual property created during the competition?

No. Google is not requiring any IP or licenses be granted except a non-exclusive license to be used only for the purpose of testing the inverter and publicizing the prize. [...] However, in the spirit of advancing this power electronics community, Google may choose to make public some or all of the teamsâ(TM) high-level technical approach documents

Stupid objection the second: (something stupid about 12 volts)
Response:

Will be taking in 450 V DC power in series with a 10 Ω resistor
Must output 240 V, 60 Hz AC single phase power

I know that slashdotters don't RTFA, but seriously, all of you jaw-jacking about 12 volts or about how a million is chump change are a bunch of Useless McToolbags. STFU already.