I should listen to the podcast, but I've got things to do... What about Platinum?

If I buy a fancy new patented electric car, and I leave it in the garage with a pile of metal filings and enough electricity and in the morning I've got 2 cars, don't sue me. If your product will reproduce copies of itself, then your beef is with the product and your R&D department.
Now if i disassembled your (my) car and made copies of all the parts and reassembled all the parts and copies into two cars, then I'd be violating your patent.

Please feel free to contact our sales guys if you're interested in fiber switches :-)

http://cyaninc.com/

I wonder about a website which embedded javascript which mined bitcoins as long as you were active on the page. You could burry in the TOS that you were doing it to be on the up and up. Of course you'd want to throttle the JS so the user's fans didn't spin up and alert them, but still if you had a popular enough site, you might be able to make a pretty bit-penny...

Intelligence would allow us or aliens to go.
Emotion would lead us or aliens to go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass

Sure, but when I _can't_ write to the drive because it's gone bad, then I don't have the choice of 'overwrite'. I suppose I could use my belt sander or welding torch on the platters, but I think shattering them into little pieces and putting some in one trash cycle and some in another works well enough. I'm paranoid, but not that paranoid.

I use multiple passes of random data in a working drive, but when the controller is bad and I have data on the drives I don't want people to get to, I take it apart, save the magnets and shatter the (now glass) platters.

Crease the platters? These days, they are _GLASS_ coated with metal, and they shatter into _many_ pieces when they break.

From the article you linked:

Editor's note: Connecticut State Police have confirmed that Adam Lanza did, in fact, use a Bushmaster .223 high capacity rifle and two hand guns. As far as we can tell, NBC has not issued a retraction

It's the only way to be sure.

It was the "beer" :-)

It's not that there's no inflation, it's that it's very low. Like historic lows. Certain goods have had spikes, mostly due to competition with the emerging world and due to diversion of food to fuel stupidity. Higher inflation would be a _good_ thing because real inflation requires wage inflation, but doesn't inflate the amount you owe in your debts. Inflation is something you should put into calculations when getting a mortgage. If your mortgage takes 30% of your salary now, and there's 5% inflation (but low interest rates like we have now) you'd be crazy to get a 15 year instead of a 30 year. The dollars that you use to pay off the second 15 years would be worth much much less to you than they are now.

You don't have to trust what the Fed tells you: http://bpp.mit.edu/ and http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/billion-price-update-2/

The rich, the "rentiers" are the people who cry foul about inflation. People working for a living shouldn't, it raises their wages and ameliorates their debts.

One Time Pads are "provably good"

Using them is a PITA though...

Was that addressed to me, or the grand-parent?