The maneuverability on non-level and obstacle-covered surfaces may open more areas to inspection. That was the capability they emphasized.

>If women want to work there, they can and will.

It's instructive to converse with or read the accounts of women who have computer industry jobs.

Would you agree that the IT industry is hurting for competent people?

If so, then shouldn't we make sure the talent pool is as wide as possible?

That's a fascinating question. Let's find the answer. First step will be to fix the social problems so we can examine any underlying genetics.

The social problems are not always as obvious as they used to be, but are still pushing bright, motivated women out of computer-related curricula. http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Unlocking-the-Clubhouse/Jane-Margolis/e/9780262632690

Besides the issue of social justice, I enjoy working with bright, motivated people and anything that reduces the supply of them deprives me of that pleasure.

The unit of "flow" (energy per time) is watts. Not watt-hours (that would be a unit of energy), not watts per hour (not sure what that would be).

If it has a browser, and has Flash or Adobe PDF plugins, it's vulnerable.

Software repositories free of spyware are a boon, but any corporate system is likely to be locked down anyway so users can't install software.

Linux desktops do benefit from being a smaller target. That's a fragile kind of protection that I'd hate to call "security", but as one friend of mine put it, "I'll take that!"

Notice the mention of a 50-kiloton threshold for being "tactical", when bombs in the 15-20 kiloton range had strategic effects in 1945.

The OED Second Edition contains entries for 171,476 words.

If you choose at random from the complete set, there are 8.6E20 possible four-word passphrases.

This is enough to rule out brute-forcing. But notice of course that both assumptions are critical. An average person doesn't have a 171,476 word vocabulary and humans can't make genuinely random choices.

I recommend the Diceware system: a list of 6^5 short words, from which you select each word of your passphrase by rolling five dice.

All of which addresses the wrong problem. Online guessing can be suppressed with rate limits on login attempts. Offline guessing is greatly hindered by adequate salting of the hashes. Today's most dangerous threat is phishing (well, that and password reuse, but that's a related problem).

>mandatory levies by the federal government on the states

The Federalist Papers discussed this idea.

Taxation depends on coercion, by definition. You can coerce an individual with a few police officers and little or no disruption of the peace.

Coercing a state requires a civil war. Ghastly.

It's not going to happen with adults. A good educational system (I did NOT say "school system"!) would try to develop the skills to analyze an argument. It may not succeed, not with human beings.