This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.

Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.

If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!

Poor word choice in TFS. Chips don't make it harder to use stolen cards, they make it harder to use cloned cards.

Probably because this is a technology site, and not a fashion site. Fashion love change for change's sake - that's why they parade around on catwalks with ridiculously impractical things like dresses made of cutlery, and someone who wears a side of beef to an event is the centre of attention.

Technology isn't about change, it's about progress. Progress involves change, but just because it's change doesn't make it progress. Change for change's sake is inane. Tell us how the change makes things *better* and we'll be all for it.

Yeah, it's an awful system, but the point is, you can't live in such a society without playing the game. And is it then immoral because you play the game, and don't go live in a cave?

"if the majority of the collective wanted to blah blah blah, the US government would be beyond their abilities in making these laws."

Not really, because if they were determined enough the majority could push through a constitutional amendment to make it happen.

Oh, and if you think a dumb terminal solves it, firstly these days terminals are never dumb. Even dumb terminals (does anybody still actually buy them?) probably run something like Linux underneath.

And if you can find a truly dumb terminal and solve all those problems, then you can stick a little thumb drive sized linux server between the ethernet port of the terminal and the rest of the network. Then it can put up the fake login screen whenever it wants, and at other times just pass through the packets.

This could be solved by requiring the terminal to use encryption with the key securely input into the terminal, but who is actually using such a scheme? I doubt anybody is.

That's great, but if the terminal you're logging in with is compromised by the old fake login, then all your keystrokes into your super trusted proprietary app or browser session can be logged and then your passwords into THAT system are now compromised, not to mention screen grabbers which might have sucked down whatever secrets you were trying to keep. Your theory about supposedly "pushing security further into the system" is a mere placebo. There is nothing inherently more secure about a browser than about an operating system.

Actually they have recently introduced style cop, which enforces some things, but it ignores a number of discernible quirks.

I can usually tell who wrote the code in the office by whether or not they put a space after their ifs: if(i == 0) vs if (i == 0); where they put their brackets, whether or not they replace their tabs with spaces, how they deal with bools: if (!var) vs if (var == false) and several other telling signs. There are so many combinations of variations no two programmers in the office (about 12 of us) have the same style.

99% of alien life can be undetectable for whatever reason. If 1% is expansionist, a representative of that 1% could colonize every star system in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in less than 3 million years, a cosmic eye blink.

I hope we are the first. Otherwise we Terrans would end up being second class citizens of the galaxy.

Surely the record depends on the expressiveness of the instruction set of the chip you are programming for. With a suitably advanced chip I could implement chess in 1 byte. It would be an instruction that looks like this:

JMP CHESS.

and an instruction that implements chess.

Of course, when you do take the Ideal Gas Law into account, you'll discover that unless the Patriots clubhouse is routinely heated to 125F, it's not enough to explain the deflation. So Bill Nye is still correct, and the Patriots are still cheating cheaters.