What is your threat model?

• -- If your main concern is someone remotely accessing your machine while it is connected to the internet, then full-disk encryption is irrelevant. Programs running on your computer must be able to read the disk. Specifically regarding those WiFi passwords the article is trying to scare you with, they are stored in a file which is only readable by the root (=administrator) user. If the "evil" program can read the file, it has already achieved full privileges on your machine, and it reading WiFi passwords is the least of your concerns.
• -- If, on the other hand, you would like protection against people who physically hold your machine (border guards when leaving/entering countries, or your business competitor who has stolen your machine) then you absolutely need full-disk encryption. Having restrictions on which programs can read a file is no protection against someone who can extract the harddrive from your machine and plug it into theirs (or simply boot your machine from a live-CD), gaining automatic access to every bit of information.

In short, in order to decide what security you need, you must first formulate your threat model. For a funny take on this see XKCD.

I don't think you appreciate the point. In most cases, rather than multiplying 152343x1534324, you might as well just multiply 15x10^4x15x10^5 = 225x10^9

. And to understand this you need to be very comfortable with what 2+2 equals exactly.

This is not about data centers and databases. This is about scientific computation -- video and audio playback, physics simulation, and the like.

The idea of doing a computation approximately first, and then refining the results only in the parts where more accuracy is useful is an old idea; one manifestation are multigrid algorithms.

An "air gap" means making sue a computer cannot exchange information with other computers. LAN is one way to do so, but other sensors on the computer can be used for input, and other devices for output. Is it really a surprise that the microphone on a computer can be used as an input device?

The cost of delivering power has two components: fixed costs (say, power lines to the home) and variable costs (say, of producing the power) The current system was to bundle the fixed costs into the variable ones, and just chage proportional to consumption. Since those selling back power to the grid still need to pay for the fixed costs, this principle of this change seems right. Better execution would have been to add the fixed cost to everyone and make a corresponding reduction to the marginal (per KWh) tariff, at which point those with and without solar panels would be treated equally.

If you assume that consumption of gas is independent of price (totally ineslastic demand), then raising the tax will increase revenue. But in the real world, when prices go up consumption goes down, and at current prices it is very well possible that raising the tax rate will lower consumption enought to lower revenue -- at which point lowering the rate would be the way to raise more revenue.

The problem with a gas tax is that as energy-efficient vehicles become more common, the state's expenses (road maintenance) are becoming less and less correlated with fuel consumption. But since tracking drivers to collect actual usage tax is far worse, I agree that gas taxes are better.

Java applets are an essential tool for science education -- as simulators, calculators etc. Are all these research groups supposed to get some authority to digitally sign their applets?

Fundametally, a major aspect of Java security is that, since it runs on a VM, an applet it is inherently encapsulated. Yes, VM bugs can cause problems, but the value of all the free educational applets online far exceeds any possibly security benefits of unptached VM bugs.

When it was discovered in 2007 that the NSA insisted on adding this PRNG to the standard, with constants they chose the general reaction was "so what? after all, this is one of many alternatives, and it is the slowest and least efficient". I assumed their idea was to somehow choose the PRNG in applications where they were one of the parties, but that seemed unlikely.

It's now clear what the idea was: secretly having companies use this PRNG. The original assumption was that companies voluntarily choose what products to put out, and that no-one would choose the obviously worst alternative. But if the NSA chould be the ones choosing ...

First, note the name of the court. Second, consider the surveillance Google et al would like to discuss.

This is the old Luddite argument: without technology a lot more effort is required to get things done -- so more people get work. It follows that technology is bad.

In fact, the situation is exactly the opposite: if a machine can drive a car, then having a person drive the car is a waste of the person's time. They can instead do something else with their time, so society get both that and the driving done. In the 19th century, more than 80% of US population directly worked in agriculture. Today, the propotion is 2-3% -- yet we have a lot more food, and many other things to boot.

It's true that in the short term, there is a loss when the specialized skills (say driving) of the people displaced become less valuable, and those people lose their jobs. But this is a transient effect. Some skills were standard 30 years ago, yet rare today.

The more important issue is that technology more easily replaces low-skilled workers. Computers have reduced the demand for secretarial work; robots and other industrial automation reduce the demand for factory workers, and so on. This increases the returns to IQ and education, and reduces the number of well-paying jobs available to less-educated workers. But this seems inevitable, and needs to be solved by changing the attitudes of society toward education rather than by hamstringing technological progress.

Wake up and smell the roses. And then try to fix elementary school. It's practically impossible to repair this damage by the time students reach college (and even highschool is too late).

This is definitely not a scam. This company built a device which uses quantum-mechanical effects to quickly solve simulated annealing problems. They get a huge speedup in solving quatum annealing problems — which is what the customers are paying for. The customers understand exactly what they are buying -- no shenanigans here.

However, D-Wave's publicity is rather dishonest. They call their device a "quantum computer" and issue press releases with that term, despite the fact that their device is definitely not a quantum computer in the sense that theoretical computer scientists use the word. It may be that we need to redefine what "quantum computer" means, especially since D-Wave are the only ones with a product on the market that uses quantum mechanics in a computation, but so far this hasn't changed.

So the right to free speech doesn't include the right to speak together with other people, unless you grant me that right? That's downright offensive. I have a right to free speech — including the right to band together with other people and speak jointly.

Specifically, do you think the ACLU and the NAACP (both of which are corporations) have a right to free speech? What about the AFL-CIO? Of do you think that it's OK for the governmet to limit what the ACLU can say on the theory that it's a corporation, not a person?

I think you miss the point of arguing by analogy here, which is to establish a moral or legal reference point (depending on the discussion). Most of us have a personal idea of the moral weight of (relatively) common actions like robbing a bank, stealing a car for a joyride (you asked for it!) and helping an old woman cross the street. When we are faced with a new phenomenon (abusing the fact that users run your code to suborn their computing power for personal gain), we need to decide what moral weight to give it. The natural approach is not to start from first principles, but rather to compare it with our existing framework -- in other words to argue by analogy. We say "this was not nearly as serious as bank robbery" or "this is certainly more serious than selling crappy software". The situation is very similar when we address the legal question ("considering our existing set of legal rules, what should the punishment be?"). To me such thinking is very important, or you end up with the current US regime where criminal hacking into a computer can lead to more jail time than raping the sysadmin.