You should read about the Milgram experiment.

It's all about cost. It costs resources to break keys or break into machines. If you increase the cost by 10x, then they can break only 1/10 of what they could originally break using the same budget.

Don't worry, weekly recalls for firmware updates will totally fix the problem.

Yeah, imagine all these iPhone owners with rounded corners they can't even see because Apple had to hide them.

I'm talking about http here, not https. The idea is that even with http -- where you don't pretend that anything is secure -- you still encrypt everything. It's far from perfect, but it beats plaintext because the attacker can't hide anymore -- it has to be an active attack. I don't pretend to know all about the pros and cons of http 2, but plaintext has to die.

Nothing is NSA-proof, therefore we should just scrap TLS and transmit everything in plaintext, right? The whole point here is not to make the system undefeatable, just to increase the cost of breaking it, just like your door lock isn't perfect, but still useful. If HTTP was always encrypted, even with no authentication, it would require the NSA to man-in-the-middle every single connection if it wants to keep its pervasive monitoring. This would not only make the cost skyrocket, but also make it trivial to detect.

AFAIK, HTTP2 allows the server to encrypt even if the client didn't want to.

If you're able to modify packets in transit (i.e. Man in the Middle), then you can also just decrypt with your key and re-encrypt with the client key. Without authentication, there's just nothing that's going to prevent a MitM attack. Despite that, being vulnerable to MitM is much better than being vulnerable to any sort of passive listening.

Last I heard, it still supports unencrypted, but only if both the client and server ask for it. If either one asks for encryption, then the connection is encrypted, even if there's no authentication (i.e. certificate). With no certificate, it's still possible to pull an active(MitM) attack, which is much harder to pull off at a large scale without anyone noticing (i.e. you can just collect all data you see).

The boneheaded part was not realizing that clock speed was about to stop increasing very very soon.

Having been to a private school, I can tell you that most of the focus is not education, but on looking good to the parents. I don't think teachers are any better (though probably not worse), and the main reason students are better come down to pre-selection (entrance exam, no poor children). The only fundamental plus is that they're allowed to expel troublemakers.

The thing that bothers me most with Google (not just Gmail, Android too) is the constant change in interface. I use the average app about 2-3 times between UI redesigns. I don't care how great the new UI is if it takes me more time to learn it than the time it's going to save until the next redesign. How about you make your new designs 3x better and update 1/3 as often? Seems like it would help the vast majority here.

The hydrostatic pressure at the surface is the atmospheric pressure, yes. Not at the bottom, I'm not an idiot. So in your fantasy siphon, you have 100 kPa pressure (absolute) at the surface, then 10 m higher, you have 0 kPa pressure, then 10 m further up you have -100 kPa. Oops.

Indeed, the difference in pressure is independent of atmospheric pressure. The only problem is that at the base of the column, the hydrostatic pressure equals the atmospheric pressure. Oh and you're not allowed to have a negative pressure!

and where do you think the hydrostatic pressure is from? You seem to be saying that I could build a siphon that starts at the top of a building, bring the pipe all the way up to the edge of space, then back down to the bottom of the building and the siphon would work fine? In any column of liquid of height h, with density rho, the change in hydrostatic pressure between the top and bottom of the column is going to be equal to rho*g*h (g=9.8 m/s^2). This is why for water, if you start with 1 atm and go up 10 m, you have zero hydrostatic pressure left. Beyond that you'll get a bit of surface tension, and then if you keep going up, your column will split unless you have some other force.

At 9 m high, the column of water can't break because that would create a vacuum and the atmospheric pressure of ~100 kPa is enough to push a column of water up to 10 high. OTOH, at 11 m, you'd end up with vacuum and two columns. It's the same reason you can't drink water from an 11m high straw, even if you have really powerful lungs. In any siphon, you need gravity to get the liquid to move, and you need some other force to keep the columns of liquid from separating around the highest point. That force can be atmospheric pressure, or it can be attraction between the molecules themselves (aka surface tension). At one point, any of these will break, or are you saying you can build a siphon that goes 100 km high?