If a chef said 'Baked goods are safe' in the face of a movement that claims that baking causes autism, cancer, AIDS (yes, really), and just about near every other disease, would you still trust that chef?

Do you really, honestly think farmers buy Roundup Ready crops so that they can just go and spray more herbicide for the hell of it? Yes, there are herbicide resistant crops, but the systems those are used in result in the replacement of other, harsher herbicides and the promotion of soil conserving no-till methods. When you put it in context, you find that it really isn't that bad of a thing at all. If anyone's got a better viable weed control strategy, I'm the agricultural community is all ears, but until then, herbicide resistant crops are a win.

is there an unknown benefit of having a blood-borne disease vector?

Yes, and he just told you, but you weren't listening. Having a blood-bourne disease vector has the benefit of staying the wrathful hand of Gaea.

Are you trying to persuade us that this disease is somehow important enough to be a bad thing, or are you making your argument to a god?

If you're so intimately familiar with a values and agendas of the gods, then on humanity's behalf I request that you also please explain to Cthulhu that the stars aren't right.

There are so many layers of stupid in this story, it's hard to address one of them without the embarrassing feeling that someone might read a rebuke of one stupidity, and take it as an implicit acceptable of the rest of the stupidity that you didn't address. If you argue too hard that Yog-Sothoth made a mistake in designing camels, somebody might think you're a creationist.

From the point of view of a malevolent user who intends to use the device to harm someone, why would they want your malware?

From the point of view of a benevolent user, why would they want your malware?

What will happen in the marketplace, if a benevolent user is persuaded to run your malware and then has a problem and finds out that it was due to the malware?

What's so special about the security needs of people in a capital, compared to people everywhere else? And is this special need, really a function of where they happen to be at a moment, or is it based on what their powers and responsibilities (and presumably, replacement cost) are?

I am leaving a few dozen obvious things out because it's tiring to enumerate. That my original point: don't think that just because I missed a totally-obvious way that the idea is stupid, as meaning I would debate one of these points from the premise of accepting a lot of other stupidity. It's not even something I disagree with or think is a bad strategy or an us-vs-them thing. It's just a totally dumb idea, a loser no matter how you look at it and no matter what your agenda is.

You call them worthless but then in the very same sentence you admit that they are all-powerful.

Error. You are proceeding from a healthy input of facts. The constraints of the thread are to proceed from a health input of science fiction.

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.