If you think I'm conservative and pro-gun, then you've clearly never read any of my other posts. In fact, if your entire reply is not just an ad hominem, but one attacking views that are diametrically opposed to the ones that I've publicly stated on numerous occasions, I can only assume that you are completely lacking any meaningful responses.

How many factory workers were middle class, during this heyday of which you speak?

That's a distinction without a difference.

It looks like they thought it was a Ukraine military plane and were a bit too trigger happy, not realising it was a civilian aircraft until too late.

Here's the thing: if the Ukraine were responsible, then Russia would have a vested interest in a visibly transparent investigation and be in a position to ensure that it happened. If they could convincingly portray the Ukraine as having shot down a civilian aircraft then that would significantly alter the political sympathies in the current conflict. Instead, they have done everything in their power to block it.

The problem is in your phrasing of it as 'government abuses'. In the most part, it's not 'the government', as a monolithic entity acting based on policy that is abusing the power, it's individuals whose abuses are enabled by the government's programs. There's a political split over whether you can trust 'the government', but both sides agree that you probably can't trust an underpaid civil servant with a napoleon complex.

Linux users are incredibly prideful and niave and feel vulnerable and will not believe you when you claim you are infected. The perfect demographic.

Arstechnica had something a few months back on Linux malware. It is easier to infect linux users because they feel they are secure and do not run AV software and many run outdated versions because they do not like gnome 3

The problem is if you install java 6 and early java 7 it will install plugins for your browsers.

Visit a website and you are 0wned as it runs as full admin since javaw.exe runs as a freaking service with admin privledges! ... facepalm.

I think the old myth do not click on ads is 2004 knowledge. Unfortunately recent operating systems have terrible GUI's so many run older flavors like 7 and XP which do not have the same level of protections.

It pulls my hair out to see java 5 and the same users whine I AM INFECTED week after week after week because some beancounter does not want to upgrade to save $1,000 means $10,000 in lost productivity.

Not really
  Java is easy to exploit and almost everyone has an obsolete version with dozens of exploits. Double bonus if the user is running XP as a local admin.

Once I imaged a computer and opened IE to go download Firefox and other apps and my webcam went on instantly! Ad appeared doing a fake AV scan all from msn.com since computer had 0 updates yet it was 0wned.

Had to reimage again.

XP users really are in trouble and you don't need social engineering. Just IE, no updates, reader, or Java. Scary stuff.

It is why I don't run ancient operating systems, updates, and never use a root or admin account.

In general, I'd much rather use the kiosks (or, ideally, check in using the web or a mobile app) than go to a human check-in desk precisely because it presents the information more efficiently and it's a lot faster than a face-to-face interaction would be. The only time I prefer to go to the human-behind-a-desk lines are when I'm doing something unusual (e.g. my flight's delayed enough that I'll miss my connection and I need re-routing[1]) and I need an actual brain on the other side of the conversation (contrary to popular belief, I've found the people at the desks to be very helpful - and quite creative - in this regard). For anything purely routine, don't pretend to be a human, just give me an efficient interface.

[1] Actually, given that this has happened on about 70% of my trips to the USA over the last couple of years, I can't really justify calling it unusual.

What about cafes that serve coffee? You know, the beverage containing a highly addictive drug? Should we ban those too?

The issue with pot cafes is that it's hard for people to work in them without being exposed to passive smoke, but if you can address that then I don't see the difference between them and normal cafes.

I don't see a contradiction (although I'm not an American). I have no problems with people smoking, snorting, injecting, or otherwise consuming any drugs that they want. I do object if they blow smoke in public areas or leave needles (especially used ones) lying around in public places.

I would be in favour of banning smoking anything in public places (including places of work) and permitting people to take any drugs that they want in their own home. There are some difficult areas (for example, should people with children be allowed to smoke whatever they like at home around their children?) but the general rule of thumb should be that you can do whatever you want to your own body and mind, just don't do it to anyone else.

Not really. Whuffle is more sensible as a currency concept - it's fungible. There's no difference in how you can use Whuffle based on who gave it to you. There are some interesting economics papers based on the idea that anyone can create a mint and the value of its currency would be tracked based on the reputation of the person.

New since, umm, the 1960's? 1980's, anyway. The US has tested several different ASATs over the years, and has long had countermeasures. I assume other countries have countermeasures as well.

It's difficult to rate-limit login attempts from a botnet. The attack pattern I see on my server is one IP making three login attempts, then another IP making three login attempts, and so on. I do rate limit (via temporary IP blocking) attempts from one IP, but it doesn't help much. Of course, they're all doing password-based login attempts and I disable password-based SSH logins for all Internet-connected machines...

Yup. Compiling for the Burroughs architecture was easier than many segment-based systems, because they allowed segment descriptors to be placed in main memory, with the CPU responsible for tracking the value type by updating a tag. We adapt this slightly so that we only require one tag bit per 256 bits of main memory (the paper describes the implementation of this in some detail, but I'm happy to answer questions) to be able to safely store capabilities in main memory. Our design also allows normal C data structures to work as expected. You can mix C code compiled for MIPS and C code compiled for CHERI in the same binary (though you only get coarse-grained protection in the MIPS code).

The Burroughs architecture had very little impact on the computer architecture community, but was enormously influential in the design of VMs for high-level languages. One of our goals is to pull out the aspects of such VMs that are required for memory protection and put them back in the hardware, so a buggy VM has a far more limited security impact. My student's work on JNI dramatically reduced the amount of C code in the trusted computing base for the JVM implementation that he used.