The Cobra is a widely used and available helicopter. The US uses the chassis for forest fighting: they aren't exactly difficult to find or examine closely. They probably could have bought one on the open market (maybe even indirectly from the US itself). Nuclear weapons are slightly harder to find.

However, with that said, the problem with building a nuclear weapon has never been (not for 40-50 years or so) the design. That is actually quite easy, most physics graduates could probably design you one. The basic design of basic nuclear weapons* is pretty simple, once you know what you are doing. You can find sketch-ups on Wikipedia. The problem is getting refined nuclear material that actually works in a nuclear weapon, and more importantly, actually testing the weapon. Easy to do for a helicopter: very difficult for a nuclear weapon.

*NB: thermonuclear weapons are a considerably different, and considerably more difficult, story. But they don't really need those.

Ah, that makes sense. I agree that SSD improvements aren't strictly necessary for anyone, but my experience with the speed of program loading and overall snappiness of the computer makes it worth it to me. Of course, YMMV. For gaming, the performance increase is significant, due to the large loading times many video games have and the relative frequency of loading, but for general usage it would probably be (at best) borderline worth it.

Spoken like someone who has never actually used an SSD. It isn't just the bandwidth: latency is also considerably lower. It's expensive, sure, and very few people "need" it, but practical speed increase is a full order of magnitude in many cases (I'm only using SATAII, also, which my SSD more than saturates. Upgrading to SATAIII should net me a 50% increase or more in bandwidth). But then, so is the cost/gigabyte.

However, if you have many companies on the market, the possibility that someone will cut prices and undercut you record profits prevents you from keeping prices high. With basically only two companies in the market, the fear of that happening is minimal, especially since both know the other is making a lot of money as well, and understandably wants to keep making that money at those margins (while a third company might be willing to sacrifice margins for increased volume). It's not collusion, but it certainly isn't good for consumers and shouldn't have happened.

They probably couldn't shut off the oxygen without access to the compartments themselves, especially if the control room was on fire (which apparently it was). Same with sealing the rooms: if they can't get to the rooms, it's hard to seal them off. Ideally, I suppose there would be automated systems capable of shutting off air and sealing specific sections, but these subs are a 40 year old design, and this one was in for a refit, so I don't imagine it has systems capable of that. You normally want a sub to keep supplying air to every section, and you certainly don't want an automated system glitching and shutting it off, so even if you could install such a system, it might not be worth it. Barring that, doing it manually would probably be possible, except for the part where the section you want to seal off is already on fire.

"Disabling", not deleting. Windows services are pretty easy to disable (Administrative Tools-> Services), such that the computer will start malfunctioning, without deleting them. The really important ones can't normally be turned off from the GUI, but there are ways around that. Turning them back on is pretty trivial, unless you go too far and can't actually boot the machine (in which case Safe Mode should still work).

Hardly surprising their tech know-how was stone-age. If they were actually competent, they wouldn't be running some lame over-the-phone scam like this. They would either be working a legitimate job or running a large-scale botnet somewhere. The vast majority of criminals are stupid, because smart people either don't get into crime or don't do low-level crap like this.

A CA signed certificate is still required (well, unless you want a self-signed warning on every browser). This system just allows you to verify for repeated visitors that a new, un-TACK-signed certificate isn't being used. The CA signing is still required to verify a) that the host hasn't been breached (in which case the TACK key would be lost, since as I understand it they retain the private key) and b) that first-time visitors can get a moderately-trustworthy (or at least the same as currently exists) session. This system would require that both the host and the CA are compromised. It's somewhat similar to the Convergence system that was proposed before, only instead of having cloud-sourced verification of the certificate, you have the host verify (based on past experience) that the certificate is valid. By itself, it isn't very secure, but in addition to the present system it adds a great deal of security.

I wouldn't consider "with codecs" and "without codecs" flavors, exactly, since they don't really change the install at all. More like "legally covering our asses." They don't even have direct links to the downloads in TFA.

It's DARPA, so neither really. Just them doing things to see if they can, which is 99% of what DARPA does. Also encouraging innovation and experimentation... which again, is what DARPA is all about.