...exhume his skull, embed gems into it, and put it on a table. That would really screw with those in the know.

/yes I know the Tomb of Horrors jokes are getting old.

..was the operation runner named "Peggy"?

..isn't this how executives expect to be treated, even though they're not the necessarily smartest ones in the company?

So what's their excuse? Special treatment occurs in the workplace all the time.

...is this a fancy way of saying a transactional system? Just say it then!

Nice to see that the paper author reads Slashdot :)

Are these two options mutually exclusive?

You don't think when Columbus came to America he was afraid for his life? That most of the actions of the consequent European conquerers came from fear? That the safest course of action was the conquest, and oppression of an entire continent of people? The burning of the Mayan Codecs. The dividing and conquering of the Aztec, and Incan empires. Religious conversions. Enslavement. Genocide. And, where applicable, the conscious spreading of disease among Native Americans.

So you were using Bitlocker instead of EFS then, right?

You already carry five of the six devices you'd need: five bank cards. The sixth device is a card reader.

Neither of the banks I use require me to use the card reader to log in, but both require it to actually do anything important (send money, etc).

I have two card readers (both banks sent me one) so I keep one at home and one at work.

The thing is, a lot of us don't care that much about Open Source. Sure, there's a lot of fondness for the little guy, but personally I find it hard to get my knickers in a twist when someone violates the GPL. The source code that they based their changes on is still available. If the violators didn't use GPLed code in the first place we'd not be in a better position.

There's a bunch of fallacies in that:

1) You don't need exotic types of propulsion. You just need a lot of time. We're likely a matter of a half dozen decades from molecular manufacturing, and substantially increasing lifespan. The two together are all that's needed for *us* to colonize the galaxy. (And if you doubt that, think of a list of problems with it, and then ask yourself what a mastery of genetics and molecular engineering would do for all of those problems.)

2) Ask yourself what reason we'd have, in that scenario, to need weapons any more potent than what we've got now. You assume the aliens would.

3) We rarely spot fairly large mile-plus asteroids before they actually pass us. What makes you think we could spot even MASSIVE spacecraft with any warning?