another brilliant idea from the editors of Dice/Slashdot

Every time I hear the name of the store Hot Topic, Jim Gaffigan comedy routines start running through my head.

Those so called "molex connectors" are actually made by several companies. Molex is a company, not a type of connector though Molex is one of the companies that makes the ones you are referencing. TE Connectivity for example sells an effectively identical connector in their Mate-N-Lok line. People know what you mean but I actually run a company that makes wire harnesses and if you came to me and said "molex connector", I would stare blankly at you until you clarified which of the thousands of different types of connectors made by Molex you were referring to.

Those connectors housings can accommodate terminals that will use everything from 14AWG wire all the way to 30AWG. They also cost less than a quarter and the terminals are a few cents each. FAR cheaper than any USB cable and easier to work with as well.

Read Trust me, I'm Lying -- it is a book by a self-confessed media manipulator who got depressed and left the industry. He worked for an apparel company. One example tactic was to take sexually explicit photos of porn stars, and then complain about said photos to feminist groups. And then: OUTRAGE!!!

The story of ACORN is a perfect example of how media manipulators manufactured a scandal -- literally creating reality for movement conservatives -- in order to shut the group down. To this day, some GOP congress critters are unaware that ACORN is defunct. The interesting thing is, the more outraged a person is (politically), the easier they are to manipulate. It is all rather ironic.

I'm not optimistic that the problem is solvable. I honestly do not see any way to make encryption both easy to use and secure/trustworthy. Any solution that makes it easy to use necessarily for most people involves trusting a third party that they do not know. Do you REALLY trust the company that wrote/compiled the encryption software you are using? I'm not a coder and even if I was I don't have the time or expertise to review the code. The whole point of encryption is that you don't want to trust third parties. So you can either make it really complicated to use or you can make it secure but I don't see a credible way to make it be both at the same time.

Furthermore, unless it is REALLY easy to use (near transparent) most people aren't going to use it. Not even enough to get a decent installed base will use it. Hell, I *love* the idea of encryption my data and communications and even I don't see myself using it because it's too much of a pain in the arse.

Nothing but you can use a different client. The key doesn't care what client you created it in. Frankly I have no idea why anyone would regard FB as a trusted party. FB should never ever see the private key. If they do then you may as well presume your encryption is broken.

I think the entire point of (properly done) encryption is that you don't have to trust Facebook. At all. And frankly based on their behavior and that of certain three letter agencies you really shouldn't trust them. I certainly don't but my answer to that is to not use Facebook.

The problem with good encryption is really more in the usability of it than the technology. The technological problems are well understood. The problem is that no one has come up with a way to make encryption both easy to use and simultaneously secure. Making a key pair, storing the private key securely, encrypting your message, ensuring the software has no backdoor, etc all require significant technical chops. Even if you do that the person you are communicating with has to have all those same technical chops AND the motivation to use them.

The.black sheep of our family favored a 12 cylinder Packard back in the days when if you could make it to the state line you were as safe as houses.

The federal police power was built on putting an end to this kind of thing.

Ulbricht conceived and managed a criminal enterprise on a global scale.

He hired a quack, a Dr. Feelgood, to give his business the anarchic-libertarian shine the geek loves so well. I can't help wondering how many will go to their graves following the good doctor's advice.

Because AMD has historically made their business model making a product that is compatible with another company's product and that other company (Intel) has a cost advantage in making the product and generally controls the architecture. Intel is actually quite the manufacturing juggernaut in microprocessors whereas AMD has basically no manufacturing of their own. Intel also has a lead in die size as well so AMD is typically playing catch up. Intel basically can make a smaller, faster processor cheaper and sell it for less any time they want to. Hard to compete effectively with that. AMD has to be smarter than Intel and they haven't shown themselves to be capable of doing that on a consistent basis. Even when their designs have been better, Intel has been able to leverage their die size advantage to overcome design deficiencies. Furthermore they've made some pretty bad tactical business errors (the acquisition of ATI hasn't been the smoothest) and Intel has been known to engage in some arguably shady business dealings with their customers.

Basically probably the only reason AMD is still with us is that Intel doesn't want the anti-trust scrutiny that would come with killing them off. Having AMD around gives Intel a "credible" competitor, albeit one that hasn't shown any meaningful ability to compete consistently. AMD has been trying to diversify away from just PC microprocessors for a while now with mixed success.

No it won't. The only people that will do it are crypto-geeks. It will not result in widespread adoption. Most people A) don't give a shit, B) don't understand public key encryption, C) can't be bothered even if they do understand it, and D) the people they communicate with think A, B and C as well. The value of it is not commensurate with the difficulty of using it to most people most of the time.

In principle I agree with you. Unfortunately precisely none of the people I interact with on a daily basis have even the slightest interest in bothering with encrypting their communications. Worse, only a handful of them have the technical chops to do it properly. The rest wouldn't even begin to comprehend the need to jump through all the extra hoops. If they need to tell me something privately they simply do it in person where no one can listen. Using a tool like PGP securely is NOT simple and this will ensure it is never used except by a handful of crypto-geeks.

There currently is absolutely no way I am aware of to make public key encryption simultaneously simple AND secure. You can have one or the other but not both. It fails the "explain it to your grandmother test" badly. Until some clever soul can find a way to make it nearly transparent to use and still secure, end-to-end encryption will remain a play toy for paranoid geeks and the occasional clever n'er-do-well.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

"Short-term dalliances" tend not to nearly bankrupt a company.