Bruce Schneier http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/ stated that "Breakthroughs in factoring have occurred regularly over the past several decades, allowing us to break ever-larger public keys. Much of the public-key cryptography we use today involves elliptic curves, something that is even more ripe for mathematical breakthroughs. It is not unreasonable to assume that the NSA has some techniques in this area that we in the academic world do not. Certainly the fact that the NSA is pushing elliptic-curve cryptography is some indication that it can break them more easily."

I'd not rush from DH to ECC but would strongly recommend a move to 2048-bit or above keys

And have just realised that I haven't posted to Slashdot for many years...And yet somehow my .sig is still relevant. NSA may have dropped their plans for mandatory Escrow 15 years ago after the quote was made...but they didn't change the fundamental goal: to read everything.

Nowadays folks know his Bolo works, but Dinosaur Beach, Worlds of the Imperium, End as a Hero, and the Retief series were pretty unique for their time. One of my favorite authors.

Dinosaur Beach has to be one of my favorite novels, its a cracking good time travel novel with transhumanism before such was known.

http://www.dinosaurbeach.com/

There are several very cool results from String/M-theory, but nothing that can be fully understood without the mathematics. But a theory that fully explains all interactions, including matter fields, with supersymmetry and supergravity arising naturally from it, an explanation of the heirarchy problem, and use of perturbation theory and renormalization for gravitons which are generally non-renormalizable, is interesting.

Loop Quantum gravity is interesting too, especially for its background independence, but it will never explain matter fields, and the semiclassical sector is currently lacking. By contrast, string theory has a natural extension to classical general relativity.