I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.

I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.

Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.

But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.

The yield doesn't have anything to do with how deliverable the weapon(s) are. You said that North Korea's nukes are WW2 sized in a comment about missile technology. I'm curious what you based on that assumption on? Or perhaps you were speaking about yield all along, rather than deliverablity, though in that instance I'd wonder why it came up in a discussion about missiles. In any case, a 7kt weapon is enough to kill tens of thousands of people in an urban area. Even a fizzle might manage to do that, via prompt radiation. North Korea's nukes can't be casually dismissed....

Ripple is a debt accounting system.

You can send Dollars or gold over Ripple - you can transfer promissory nodes for those things.

The difference between a promissory note and the value the note represents is something that Ripple should be trying to clarify - instead they seek to obscure it.

Because they try to pretend that promissory notes are equal to underlying assets, they don't include any features that would act like leverage limits. There is no ability to deal with counterparty risk rationally in their system, since trust in a counterpary is binary.

In real world, liabilities of different entities are discounted by a value that reflects their credit risk. Ripple does not permit this operation. You either value liabilities at par or not at all.

As others have mentioned, their consensus system is neither distributed nor trustless. It's a centralized, badly-designed, debt accounting system trying to pretend it's a trustless cryptocurrency.

Do we actually have evidence of that or are you just making assumptions? North Korea is known to have exchanged nuclear technology with Pakistan and Pakistan does have warheads small enough to be mounted to missiles.

This has already happened, sadly.

Sounds like someone missed the whole "BP was convicted for failing to properly install and inspect legally mandated safety equipment" thing.

Nice of you to blindly jump to the defense of an oil company, tho. I'm sure they appreciate it.

I agree with this in principle, but I worry that there's a certain naivete to it -- making surveillance harder will not cause the security apparatus to give up mass surveillance.

In a world with only limited use of encryption, surveillance was generally a matter of just listening, and targets that used encryption were either immune because of the extra effort and/or low profile but if they were high enough profile, they were attacked through other more resource intensive vectors.

In a world of mass encryption, the security apparatus will instead attack the infrastructure of encryption -- root CAs, encryption technologies and software, neutralizing the value of encryption and eliminating the utility value of it while retaining all the costs to the implementer (CAs, extra CPU cycles, complexity, etc). I think it also destroys trust in some existential way, which may be one of the worst aspects of this.

I think the entire encryption system needs to become decentralized in some way that forces attacks on encryption to be more difficult. Locally generated keys without the need for centralized trust seems to be part of the solution, but the existing CA system provides the trust component making it more difficult to rely on random keys.

Shhh.. Talk like that will get the attention of DHS.

Terrorists are to you today what communists were to your father and fascists to your grandfather. Just one intangible group of people that we kinda-sorta know where to find on this globe (along with "there might be some in our country" that we can't find without some new laws that cut down your freedoms) to project your 2 minute hate o

I dunno if "If you watch that movie, chances are you're going to die in a terrorist attack" is a tagline that would make people want to see it. "A movie to die for" might be, but its literal application sure isn't.

I'd ask my appointment to move it somewhere else. Duh.

There's a line between stupid and brave. Brave is to face danger when there's necessity. Stupid is when you face danger when you could easily avoid it without losing anything.

MS is transitioning, ... trying to transition to a service company. Which they should've done 10 years ago, imho. Couldn't tell if they're to late. Even FOSSing .Net came to late, imho. If they succeed, they'll become something like another IBM and Oracle.

However, I expect them to feel even more pressure in the next few years. At least in the consumer and services market MS looks like a toddler joining an NBA Final between Apple and Google. And in the new-gen consoles department they're currently getting their ass kicked by Sony. Doesn't look to good, if you ask me. They've got nothing for the consumer they can offer, that any of the above mentioned can offer better and/or cheaper with less tie-ins. The latest Surface devices appear to be at least somewhat pleasing to the consumer crowd, but I couldn't say it's enough to gain critical mass in that market. Apple has to much mindshare and their margins are *huge*. For anybody for whom Apple is to expensive, there's the devices with Google's Android and Chrome OS. With things and computer time spent moving further and further into the web, it's not looking good for MS.

My 2 cents.

Not? Look at the two nutjobs you picked as examples and tell me it ain't so.

The bigger the group of people who have access to resources that are to remain secret, the bigger the threat that the secret gets out. It just takes one link in the chain to break it, and only one to talk to render a key useless.

Or, in other ways, while breaking a key may be impossible, breaking a kneecap isn't.