That climate change occurs naturally is no reason to think it can't also occur artificially. That's like saying that since fire has existed since the earth began, there's no such thing as arson.

You also fail to understand the "oceans storing heat". We measure how much energy the earth absorbs and how much it radiates. The difference must go somewhere. The amount of atmospheric warming plus the ocean surface warming plus ice melting etc etc don't amount to enough to cover the amount of energy absorbed, so either those things are warming *more* than we measure, or the energy is going somewhere we don't measure. So the deep oceans are the best bet. If you have another theory (that doesn't involve the energy being waved away by the natural cycle fairies) then feel free to share.

Perhaps learn some physics first though, yes? (Why do Americans say "physics" but not "maths"?)

If you're using client certificates for authentication, and an attacker obtains the server cert, then the attacker can successfully fool you into thinking that you have connected to the real server, but the attacker cannot successfully fool the real server into thinking that you have connected to it. This kind of "half-MITM" attack is not usually thought of as a full MITM. The authentication protocol uses a challenge/response protocol which incorporates ephemeral keys and hence is not portable even between two entities both holding the same server cert. That is, if A and B both have the server cert, and A challenges C, and B obtains C's response to A's challenge, B cannot then impersonate C to A, since B does not know either C or A's ephemeral DH keys. Even if the attacker just blindly proxies between the real server and the real client, it won't work; in this case the communication would just be a real connection that the attacker can't decrypt or alter in any way thanks to forward secrecy.

Having all their traffic to and from one server is not as devastating an attack as having their password. For one thing, users tend to re-use passwords across multiple sites. I'm sure you can think of plenty of other reasons why client certs are at least *slightly* safer than username/passwords.

The idea is defense in depth. If server cert validation fails for any reason and you're using passwords, the enemy learns all your secrets. With client certs your master secret remains safe even if a single session is compromised.

You're a bit confused. In fact, this is you

Tarsnap offers NSA-proof cloud storage and provides all the source code for all the client programs to back up their claims (in fact the installation is only available in source code form). But it costs way more than the competition.

You often can't customize your own install without breaking the law. The GP post specifically mentioned OEM Windows licenses as a way of getting cheap Windows licenses. This is no accident: OEM licenses are the only way to get cheap Windows licenses. Any sort of enterprise license will be far more expensive. But an OEM license is the least customizable of all the options. You can't even legally install an OEM licensed copy on any other machine other than the individual machine that the software came with, since an OEM license is tied to an individual machine. To get a custom install starting from an OEM copy, you can't just make one custom version and install it on all your machines; that kind of activity is specifically forbidden by the terms of the OEM license. You'd have to spend 30 minutes individually on each and every machine in your organization if you go the OEM license route and you don't want to break the law. Those 30 minutes of staff time are way more expensive than the bare-bones OEM license cost. Alternatively, you could purchase an enterprise license, but now we're no longer talking about cheap Windows licenses, we're talking about very expensive Windows licenses.

So, yes, you can customize Windows installs, but it's much more expensive to do so in any legal way, since you need an enterprise license, which really does cost ridiculous amounts of money. There is no cheap way to get customizable Windows. Even then, it's a bit of a hassle compared to Linux.

It's not the price (free or pay). It's what you can do with the software. Apple software is still subject to BSA audits. You can't distribute customized versions. Things are slightly better in that hardware support is uniform and there are no client access licenses, but you also encounter new problems like Apple dropping software support for your hardware. Free software is just better. The cost of purchasing the software is insignificant. The time and hassle saved by free software is the real jewel.

Microsoft and Apple are poor choices unless your (sysadmin, IT, and staff) time isn't worth anything.

The Microsoft tax is not just about the monetary price of Windows. That's actually the least burdensome part of the tax. The real problem is the cost of license compliance. Most obvious are the direct costs: license management, purchase records, and receipt tracking. How much staff time are you going to spend on keeping track of Client Access Licenses? Is this expense worth it, when there are free platforms with no CAL requirements? I bet you didn't know the MS EULA gives the BSA the right to audit your premises at will. That's another huge overhead which simply does not exist with free software: A single small screw-up (almost inevitable, given the minuteness with which the audit is conducted) results in heavy fines plus having to pay the considerable costs of the audit. Compared to this insanity, anyone using exclusively free software can simply slam the door on the BSA and tell them never to come back unless they have a warrant.

Those are just the direct costs of compliance. The indirect costs of Microsoft's licensing model are something that even fewer users realize. You can't customize a distro and legally release the result to anyone outside of the organizational unit holding the license. You can't slipstream updates and legally distribute to outside parties. You can't create USB bootable media and legally release it to anyone else. Rescue discs and installation discs customized for particular hardware are left to the mercy of your OEM. All of these restrictions cause considerable friction which slows down the agility of your business. If nothing else, it makes it very hard to outsource IT functions; at most, you can hire contractors who have to keep your OS software bits separate from everyone else's OS software bits. How can this situation possibly compare favorably to free software where anyone can create and share anything? It really can't.

Yeah, you're right, I logged out and now it's not working. Oh well, on to version 4.3. On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing this move as evil. Skype was already maximally closed-source. It can't get any worse.

Uh, what? I've been using Skype 4.0.0.8 on Linux (CentOS 6) for years. It still works. Nothing's been cut off.

Finding an incidental collision in SHA512 is newsworthy. SHA512 is an iterated hash function (more specifically, a Merkle-Damgard construction). Any iterated hash function has the property that a single collision can be leveraged to produce arbitrarily many collisions. A single collision would destroy the entire utility of the hash function for almost any application that depends on collision resistance.

Following the link to the SDK gives a 404. Palm development tools were never readily available even when the platform was popular. Now they're almost impossible to find. Obstructing access to development tools is one sure-fire way to kill off a platform.

10% of poor Americans are homeless. That alone renders all of the article's claims nonsensical on their face. There is no way that 97% of poor households have refrigerators.

First of all, the number claimed in your link is 95%, not 97%. Second of all, try making even basic efforts at fact checking. For example, your article claims 99.7% of poor families have refrigerators. This is plainly untrue -- homeless people don't have refrigerators, and they make up 10% of poor people. The numbers in the article are clearly unreliable and agenda-driven, which is not surprising, considering the source.