The SoC contains potassium benzoate.

- I know quantum computers can do fast factorisation (ie. break the RSA assumption), but can they also break the DDH assumption (diffie-hellman, elliptic curve crypto)?

I quick browsing of the wikipedia page for Diffie-Hellman key exchange leads me to believe that what makes breaking it difficult is the discrete logarithm problem, which is precisely what Shor's quantum algorithm solves efficiently. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no quantum algorithm for finding rational points on a general elliptic curve (the hard part of breaking elliptic curve crypto).

To summarize: quantum computers break DH key exchange and RSA, but not ECC.

Jobs' health has been deteriorating in the past few years. If there's anyone has the financial resources to become a cyborg to stave off death, it's him. All he needs is a respirator helmet, a glowing iPad stuck to his chest, and a swooshy black cape to go with his turtleneck.

Though, if Jobs is DV, who's the emperor?

First, obviously as we exist, there was not an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created at the big bang. Furthermore most kludges that have been devised to explain this discrepancy have been less than stellar ....

Without the kludge, the theory predicts a universe devoid of stars, which is quite a bit less stellar.

Yeah, I'll bet that last bit is hard. I've heard that it's routine for the FDA to approve double-blind studies, but I don't think that would be statistically significant in your case.

"has a pattern" != "repeats eventually". It is well known that Pi is irrational and thus its expansion in any base is never eventually periodic.

If you want to solve the problem, work on a zero cost certificate authority.

If DNSSEC became ubiquitous, would it make CAs obsolete? All you need are some new fields in your DNS records to store a public key, and presto, you can have encrypted communication with an IP address that you know is correct.

Could someone explain why this woudn't work?

All boundaries are mental constructs.

Post-modernist deconstructionism is arrant crap, and should be lumped in with other intellectual goo like "creation science".

The way our brains lump things into "objects" evolved to help simplify our mental models of the world so that we could function at a higher level, but that doesn't mean it's truly representative of the real world. Quantum mechanics seems to model the universe very well at certain energy and length scales, but it's extremely non-intuitive; i.e. our evolved, common-sense ideas fail us. And in other areas of physics, everyday objects become merely collections of atoms that are stable at an arbitrary energy scale. You can keep playing this game all the way down to today's "fundamental" particles. But even then, (I believe it's true that) in most models, a particle is only a certain subset of the degrees of freedom of the universe. Objects only seem appear when you make choices about what you consider to be an object. Making the choices is implicitly defining the boundary that defines the object itself. It is almost completely subjective.

Thus, there is a scientific basis for all those Zen statements about how there is no difference between you and anything else in the universe: it's all just arbitrary energy and entropy scales. I can destroy any object by merely deciding not to consider it an object anymore! ;-D

... when in reality the borders exist mostly in human minds.

All boundaries are mental constructs.

So 1 LoC = 14,000,000,000 BTU or 14,770 gigajoules.

Because of this, the previous claim that (in terms of information) 1 LoC = 10 terabytes, and that a Joule/Kelvin is a unit of information, one can calculate that the temperature of the Library of Congress to be 14,770 * 10^9 J / (10 * 2^43 bits) * bits / (ln(2) * k_B) = 1.75461 * 10^22 K.

Not a very useful unit of temperature.