Death is a quite rare thing; ignoring age and other factors, the probability of someone to die within five years is less than 5%. Even when you belong to the top 20% in terms of risk, the probability of death is just 15%, so you're much more likely to be alive than dead after this time. And for what it's worth, the biomarkers are strongly correlated with other factors like "does this person have cancer?", so that in the end the authors say that their new model is just 4% better than previously used models.

As far as I can see, they do not rely on a specific IE vulnerability for inserting the payload, but they rely on a specific (and fixed) Windows vulnerability to bypass ASLR, which is a crucial component of EMET. They claim in a footnote that the "IE flaw could be modified to leak the base address of a DLL in another way", but they do not provide a working exploit that does so.

Further issues:

1. The claim that theories should contain certain symmetries because of aesthetic perceptions is misguided. The standard model, the most successful physical theory ever written down by mankind, is ugly as shit.

2. Symmetry does not protect reality from divergence.

3. It is wrong that without the Higgs, there would be no mass and we all would die. For the gauge bosons of the weak force, this would be true, but all leptons and quarks surrounding us can simply be described by a conventional mass term, as this doesn't break local gauge invariance.

World record for simulation of classical physics: 10 billion particles
World record for simulation of quantum physics: 42 particles

If I had to run a simulation of an entire universe, I'd rather not make it quantum.

This is not possible. In order to be able to answer the question to the interviewer, you have to store the information about which way you went somewhere (e.g., in your spin). This creates entanglement between your position and your spin and destroys the interference pattern.

This guy's Wikipedia page basically only mentions that he's famous for being the victim of the alledged attack. So he's been chosen as a target because he is famous for being the target of the same attack? I'd assume a garden variety mass phising attempt is more likely.

I totally agree with your statement in general; but in today's society being a well-rounded individual mandates some sort of programming skills. For instance, how can you possibly understand what the free software movement is about when you have never written a single line of code in your life?

Is it? Is anyone besides Apple switching from GCC to LLVM as their default compiler? Are more people having trouble to compile stuff using GCC because developers use LLVM extensions than vice versa? Is there any other sign that LLVM is actually replacing GCC?

Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.

I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.

Red Hat offers support for their distribution for up to 13 years. If you want, you can still get support for Python 2.2, which was released in 2001.

The emprical evidence for this claim is extremely weak, to say the least. The total number of hours worked is pretty much on par with population growth, so despite the enormous increase in automatization in recent decades, the workforce as a whole appears to be able to adapt to it quite well.

Actually, I used to be working on a CentOS workstation for quite some time and it was a very pleasant experience. The only issue I remember is that I had to manually compile some applications to be able to watch soccer streams during EURO 2012, but I'm pretty sure people at the IT department saw this as a feature rather than a bug ...

That's the usual situation in complexity theory and it applies to classical algorithms as well. There is also no proof that quantum computers are actually superior to classical computers when it comes to cryptanalysis. Still, most people believe this to be true.

Remember that we're talking about actual physical devices that need to be built and being really smart only helps you somewhat when you need to solder electronics or align a laser. And so far, the NSA employs hardly any physicists which you can also tell from the fact that they've outsourced the research mentioned in the documents to a public university. This is very different than in mathematics or computer science, where it is well known that the NSA is a large employer. That being said, I still think that the NSA might possess some interesting knowledge on quantum computing. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were sitting on an efficient quantum algorithm breaking AES, for instance.

These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.

Some time ago, I wrote something on the history and possible future of quantum computing. Moreover, one also has to keep in mind that there are public key cryptosystems that most likely cannot be cracked even with quantum computers.