I stopped using credit cards at retail a long time ago because I was sick and tired of having my credit card numbers stolen every few months. And, these days there are always the privacy implications, knowing that government is collecting every transaction you make with a credit card.

The phrase "Ihre Papieren, bitte!" indeed originated elsewhere, but USSR of those years was a close match. It was mandatory to carry ID during Stalin's days. Patrols stopped everyone who was suspicious, and checked the ID. However from 1960's and until the end of USSR carrying of an ID was just a recommended practice. I was never stopped by the police, and nobody in the street wanted to know my name. The police was just catching criminals, lazily and in relaxed manner. Police brutality was unheard of - at least until USSR failed. From that point on OMON was created (SWAT in the USA,) and if those guys are sent after you, you may not emerge with all your b{one,all}s intact.

Of course, if you drive you have to have the driver's license - not to prove that you are you, but that you are licensed to operate the vehicle. Drivers were stopped for no reason quite often, and the practice continues - but that's only because the sellers of the striped stick want a bribe.

it's much easier to criticize an enemy than a friend, but which is the more moral action?

There is (or may be) more than one set of morals in the world. However if I use the most common rule book, the most moral action is one that results in most social benefit; personal danger to the actor (difficulty) is a separate brownie point.

It may be that your enemy threw an empty paper cup and missed the trash can; and it may be that your friend just killed all his family. Or the other way around. The danger is proportional to severity of the wrongdoing, and probably is unrelated to the perpetrator. If your friend just killed a bunch of people, he is not to be approached casually. But you can say your words to your enemy in cafeteria, and most likely nothing drastic will transpire.

They will lie to you, as it is their default modus operandi. Nobody saw anything illegal, ever. What does that prove?

Hi.

the Nyquist limit of the audio sampling hardware of a cell phone over instruction rate of a modern CPU is a pretty small fraction.

The "audio" in question is most likely all below 24 kHz, that being the Nyquist limit for the 48 kHz sampling hardware, unless it happens that some phones can actually sample faster, and have microphones that can respond to higher frequencies.

The instruction rate of the CPUs in question is many times that frequency.

It doesn't sound likely.

Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies).

Say what? Through what mechanism would multiple cores shift down the frequency? And what about parallel instruction streams contributing to noise?

TEMPEST was a details-secret government requirement meant to defeat means of eavesdropping on classified computer data from its electromagnetic emissions. I guess they need to include audio too.

My impression is that the noise comes from the power supply, not the CPU. I can certainly hear it with some computers, and it is related to work on the video card in my experience. I'm astonished that you can actually pull data from that, and in fact I'd like to see independent confirmation before I believe it.

Heard this one before. On Slashdot, even. Yes, you can do it. No, you don't want to. Remember when LCDs came with a few dead pixels? There used to be a market for DRAM with bad bits for phone answering machines and buffers in low-end CD players. That's essentially over.

Working around bad bits in storage devices is common; just about everything has error correction now. For applications where error correction is feasible, this works. Outside that area, there's some gain in cost and power consumption in exchange for a big gain in headaches.

We're teaching our kids that 2+2 equals whatever they feel it is equal to, as long as they are happy. What do we need with accuracy anymore?

As a store of value, Bitcoin has trouble holding its value for a week. Some days, hours. This limits its usefulness for transactions.

I know. Most of the Xanadu people were libertarians of the "markets are the solution to everything" persuasion. The World Wide Web might have turned out that way. There was a previous generation of paid online information businesses - Minitel, Nexis, Lexis, etc. - where you did pay for almost everything you looked at. Xanadu was supposed to be a better implementation of that model.