I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years), and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025.

So why is a seven randomly-chosen word password, which would average in the ballpark of 50 characters, somehow less typo-prone than an abbreviation password a tiny fraction of its length for the same level of entropy?

The former being 13 characters long and the latter being about 50 characters long.
Make a sentence that abbreviates to 20 characters and it's more secure than your "7 random words and two punctuation marks" example. And probably a heck of a lot easier to memorize than seven random words and two random punctuation marks at random locations.

"Love is beautiful, like birds that sing." is more secure than "Lib,lbts". Why are you making your password less secure?

"Lib,lbts" is not brute-forceable in most contexts, and the concept of having to type in 40 characters every time you want log in is absurd. And if you don't think Lib,lbts is secure enough, then what about Lib,lbts.Linu,lriapov? It's a lot more secure than "Love is beautiful, like birds that sing" and takes half the time to type in, with half the risk of typos and all that comes with length.

There are better routes than "Correct Horse Battery Staple".

Think about how memory champions memorize arbitrary data: yes, it's visual, but it's not random words stuck together like "Correct horse battery staple", it's a meaningful scene, something you could describe with a sentence. Now, of course, that's too bulky to make a password. But you can deal with that easily - the easiest way is just take the first letter of each word, an abbreviation / acronym password. For the first sentence in my post, depending on how you apply the rules you may get something like tabrtchbs or Tabrt"CHBS" or the like.

Now, obviously on an attacker can reduce the search space with statistical analysis of sentences, but overall sentences yield an extremely random password - moreso than "Correct Horse Battery Staple", it's much shorter, and it's easier to memorize. And if the security of such a standard approach isn't good enough, you can apply your own extra rules, such letter substitutions, arbitrarily inserted characters, change the order of the word or what letter you pick from each word, etc.

Whatever the X-37B does, it seems to do it well. The USAF sends them up into space, they stay up for months or years, they do whatever they do, and they come home.

Space is the place - for robots.

*holds up mirror for Florian to gaze into*

What does it do, establish a connection to the "cloud" to send a message to your cell phone? I

You were a valuable unbiased source of information on software patents and patent litigation. Particularly the German court's struggle with them. However it came to light -- in a rather surprising way -- that you were paid or possibly employed by Microsoft and Oracle. I have heard much about this and it often casts a negative light on your blogging but I would like to hear your side of these relationships. I can conceivably understand how you could accept money that furthers your ideals but it is difficult to comprehend how I can be assured this does not influence your writing, position, selected details and bias. Are you able to lay my concerns to rest?

Oh, hey, just looked it up. Seems that there's wide belief among the skeptics that it works based on a really simple trick: a rigged plug. Inside the plug he's got the ground wire swapped with a live wire. So inside the box he can at will make the power draw seem to disappear, because they're not measuring the ground wire. He's actually refused a million dollar prize from a skeptic who wanted to test his device in a way that would include measuring current from the ground wire. Funny, that. ;)

Also looks like in all of his previous incarnations there were no unusual isotopic concentrations measured in the ash. So funny that all of the sudden after facing that criticism his reactor changes how it works and starts outputting extremely enriched stuff in the "ash". Funny how that works. ;)

Publish what for review? This "paper" is not peer-reviewed, and would never pass peer review. And it doesn't take doing stuff behind their backs, their setup is so bad. And FYI, have you ever looked up Rossi's background? This is his third scam. His first landed him in jail, it was an "organic waste to oil" company that took the waste, illegally dumped it, and never made a drop of oil. His second was "20% efficient thermoelectric generators", which were anything but.

Just a random thought, the device could be profitting from distorting the phases on the AC supply. Multimeters designed to read AC power can give false readings when presented with a non-sinosoidal supply.

The papers' commentary about the nuclear "changes" seems really over the top, leaping on to the cosmological significance of lithium 7 depletion and the like. They don't describe how this ash materializes but it's quite possible that it's just a non-nuclear isotopic enrichment process. Another possibility is less pretty - that some parts were designed to specifically burn to ash, and these were made of enriched isotopes.

If it's so legitimate then why isn't this paper peer-reviewed and published in a legitimate scientific journal?

If it doesn't meet the standards of peer review, then it's hokum.
If it does, then either:
* They don't plan to publish (really? scientists who think they're on to something world changing but don't want it to be evaluated and accepted by the broader scientific community?)
* They plan to publish later but are going to the press first (an extremely bad practice that gets scorn heaped upon scientists)

The fact that you're seeing this without it having gone through peer review is not a confidence-building sign.

It's just that the user doesn't have access to the playback function.

The article says the actual paper is being posted, but doesn't link to it. Anyone have a link?

The last time I looked at this, it appeared that the thing requires input power to function, and the input power is provided in a "proprietary waveform", even though it's just used for resistance heating. Other "free energy" schemes have turned out to be fake because measuring the wattage of a funny waveform is tricky, especially when current and voltage are out of phase. So I'm a bit suspicious.