Doh ... Senor, not senior.

Yo soy el stupido. :-P

but THE Isaac Asimov !!!

El Senior Isaac Asimov. :-P

Sorry about that. If I responded in a civil manner to you, it was because I didn't look at who I was responding to.

Asshole.

There never where smart people here, just technicians and wannabe technicians with an inflated sense of self importance.

Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.

Good point, but I can only despair from afar at what you guys have lost and wonder why so few of you even bother to get off your arses to vote. I've also avoided visiting thanks to the TSA etc - I've soaked up enough rads without getting exposed to a radiation source set up by unqualified monkeys and not checked by any third party, let alone the consequences of maybe getting sick in a country where health care is a minor and relatively poorly funded side effect of insurance.

Maybe, but that's just a guess isn't it? Perhaps it's a good idea to let scientists take a look at it to understand what is going on instead of attempting to trump reality by some sort of political fiat. Even if some declare the climate has never changed since Genesis there's still a great deal of value for global weather forecasting in monitoring conditions in Antarctica - it's half the reason Scott etc went there a century ago after all.
King Canute's lesson to his court over how political will cannot command nature is very apt. You can shout from the rooftops that nothing is happening but there is some reason why last month was the hottest September in more than a century. Putting on a blindfold is not going to help.

The current firmware update ships as a bootable ISO. Burn it to a CD/DVD (or a flash drive if you can work it out), hold down "option" at boot, and you'll be looking at a DOS prompt in no time. I verified this two days ago when I misread the firmware version on the website and downloaded an updater for the version I already had.

Ebola's almost complete lack of aerosol transmission is and will remain a substantial barrier to the population risk the disease poses

The thing is, what you're saying there is just plain implausible unless the air itself kills the viruses with remarkable efficiency, in which case it would survive for only minutes on a hard surface (like HIV), rather than hours (like influenza). From what I've read, it survives for hours on hard surfaces, which lends serious doubt to any claim that Ebola exhibits an "almost complete lack of aerosol transmission".

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that Ebola is airborne. It currently is not (or at least it is not currently believed to be). However, it is unsafe to assume that the way a virus behaves in Africa (hot weather, high humidity, little use of HVAC, mostly rural, families that stay home to care for the sick) will match the way it would behave in the United States (highly variable air temperatures, potentially low humidity because of the use of HVAC, heavily urban, people who go to work even when sick). Such a conclusion would be fundamentally invalid because it doesn't control for an absolutely insane number of variables.

In particular, with airborne diseases, propagation by aerosol transmission increases rather dramatically when the air is cold and the humidity is low (particularly when it is insanely low because of HVAC). That's one reason why the cold and flu season in the U.S. spikes markedly during the winter. In the parts of Africa where Ebola is currently found, the hot air temperature and relatively high humidity don't lend themselves to aerosol transmission. So there's a distinct possibility that the exact same strain of disease that is not airborne in Africa would be airborne in the United States.

Such temperature-dependent and humidity-dependent behavior would also be consistent with researchers' conclusions after an October 1989 lab incident in which the closely related Ebola Reston virus spread rapidly among physically isolated populations of lower primates. "Due to the spread of infection to animals in all parts of the quarantine facility, it is likely that Ebola Reston may have been spread by airborne transmission." (Beltz, Lisa. Emerging Infectious Diseases. 253)

A codpiece?

Small electronic devices that bend easily. No, wait. That's Apple's product line.

https is and always was broken by design. It is, and never was, safe against a government adversary and it never will be.

Other than certificate pinning (which you can do with CA certs and SSL/TLS just as easily), describe a scheme that doesn't have this problem. No?

At some point, you have to have a trusted party to provide trust in a cert. Otherwise, you have nothing. And that trusted party can be compromised, at which point you have nothing.

Web of trust:

The closest thing I'm aware of to avoiding that involves a web of trust, where trust is distributed more, but without a central authority, there's no consistency in how well different parts of that web perform validation of the identity of the requestor, which results in even weaker trust than with a central authority.

Of course, you could set a trust policy that requires multiple signatures to trust a certificate, but at some point, you're still trusting random websites that you don't know, and whatever limit you set, a government could always exceed it. If you say that three sites must sign something for you to trust it, the government can find three sites that can be bribed, or even use their own sites to sign it.

Mind you, you could carefully craft trust policies, and then manually evaluate every certificate that fails to decide whether you trust it, and that would be more secure for people who are highly skilled at crypto, but for the average person, such a scheme would be much, much weaker.

DNS-based security:

Another proposal for reducing the importance of the CAs is putting the certs in DNS records. This ensures that only those who can mess with DNS can change the certs.

Unfortunately, most users rely on external DNS servers for recursion. If the government substitutes their own, they can refuse all DNSSec queries, and most users will be none the wiser. This effectively makes DNSSec useless until OS vendors make it mandatory by showing errors when it gets an unsigned response.

I'm glad I didn't post that example from anywhere near Wasco, CA, Jacksonville, FL, or Staten Island, NY.

Hey, I wonder who's in that black van outsi...

*^%^#%$^*@& NO CARRIER

Since you don't seem to be able to recognize that drawings of children are not children, it seems to me that you're part of the problem.

Video games encourage you to (in character) kill other people. Do we see hundreds of gamers going out every day and killing people? Of course not. Why? Because normal, healthy people are capable of separating fantasy from reality. Anyone who can't is clinically insane—more specifically, psychotic.

In the same way, arousing sexual lust towards a drawing in a fantasy universe, regardless of the supposed age of the character in that drawing, does not result in any increased risk of people attacking actual children. People are either inclined to sexually abuse children or they aren't. The ones who are will do so even without being exposed to drawings of kids. The ones who are not so inclined won't sexually abuse children even if they are exposed to it.

IMO, simulated child porn is no different from simulated rape porn, simulated torture porn, or any number of other similarly disgusting things. It's fake, and the people who like it know that it is fake, but they derive sexual pleasure from the taboo act of pretending to do something that would be horrible if it were real. As far as I know, there's no evidence that such groups have a higher percentage of people who actually commit those acts than the general population. Thus, criminalizing those fantasies, no matter how disgusting you might personally consider them to be, does not serve a legitimate public interest.

The spinal nerves could smell those other spinal nerves an inch away.

Men and women both contribute to creating people.

A mans contribution can be completed in a single night.

A womans contribution requires 9 months, during which time any distraction, disruption or stress can cause the "person creation" process to fail catastrophically.

This is the reason we systematically transform men into specialists instead of men. It is a waste of precious resources to turn a woman into a computer programmer when she's a lot more valuable as a mother.

It's not that women are incapable of being computer programmers. It's that they have more important duties, and when they neglect those duties, the entire human race suffers for it.

At the end of the day, the problem is people like you, who don't care about the fate of the human race as long as you get what you want out of life before you die, and, frankly, the solution is NOT diplomatic in nature.