What exactly do you think Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Discover do??? 2.9% of every transaction, plus $0.35 per swipe. The problem isn't paying a 3rd party to authenticate your transaction. The problem is that BTC only can handle a fraction of the transactions that credit card networks can. Low supply of authorized transactions per minute with high demand for them leads to high BTC fees.

Waiting to have your transaction complete and having the price change during the transaction is going to be the BTC's biggest hurdle, IMHO. Even things like SWIFT and Western Union have significant fees to move money, but you always know up front how much you're going to get when all is settled due to (comparatively) low volatility with traditional currencies (dollar, euro, yuan, etc.)

Well they could've used "Popplers" or "Tastesicles"...

Imagine that, spend more on developing quality original content and consumers and producers will flock to you. Who would've thought... The legacy production houses had a huge leg up but never bothered, remaining content in their old, "good-enough-to-get-enough-eyeballs-for-advertisers" model. Looks like Blockbuster won't be the only giant getting taken down by Netflix.

I like your idea, but since SHA256 outputs hex, how do you get around sites that require symbols or uppercase letters? (e.g. use 3 of the 4: lower case, upper case, numbers, symbols) And then, how do you exclude certain symbols that seem to be more problematic than others? i.e. "." & "!" are usually accepted symbols, while "^" or "|" may or may not be...

I agree with your comment, but you're mistaken on two points:

1. If you're streaming to a TV via Chromecast, then you're already on WiFi and the throttle does not take effect (Miracast would be a different issue)
2. "Turn Binge On off for the whole account" - Binge On is enabled/disabled at the phone number level, not the account. I've turned mine off while leaving it on for my wife.

Besides those though, you're right, it'd be much better if we the consumers could be in control of when to enable this service, and for which streams.

Firstly optical media doesn't suffer from bitrot to the same degree magnetic drives do. (There can still be damage/decay to the optical storage layer but it's much slower than magnetic disks.) Secondly, RAID doesn't protect against bitrot, that's the problem with it. Unaware filesystems have no idea the file has degraded (Ext3, HFS, NTFS, FAT32, exFat, etc.) The raid controller will then happily either A) happily copy the rotting data to the parity drive or, B) if it happens later, the array won't know which copy was the one affected by the bitrot. (No process touched the file so mod dates are worthless for comparison) The filesystem has to explicitly have file level checksumming built in (Btrfs, ZFS, etc.) That can then work across a raid array, but it's the FS, *not* the array providing the protection.

Of course it would. The redirect happens at your ISP's level. Unless you're doing some fancy ICMP tunneling or some such business, you're going to get hit by this regardless of your OS choice.

That's only true if you haven't disabled password authentication. If you've limited to public/private key authentication only, you get nothing.

Or more specifically you get: "Connection refused. Unable to connect to host" At that point, who cares what port number you're running on, unless someone's able to brute force your 4096-bit key, you're fine.

Every time an article like this comes up, the Slashdot masses are always there shouting, "Just encrypt everything!" But in reality, it's not that simple. Sure I could set up GNUPG for myself and close friends/family, but what about the hundreds of emails a month we receive from organizations we have no control over? Cell phone bill, electric bill, credential websites, offers from Amazon, emails from Craigslist/Ebay: there's no way for an individual to force encryption on all of those.

And that's the problem the solution may exist, but the infrastructure doesn't, rendering the solution near useless.

That may be true, but crimes can be broken into two categories: crimes of opportunity and crimes of intent. Security theater _may_ reduce crimes of opportunity, but if someone has the intent to 1) rob a bank, 2) blow up a plane, 3) murder someone, they will find a way. It becomes a game in which one side can play defense only while waiting for the offense to eventually score. Considering TSA was a direct response to 9/11 which was clearly a crime of intent, security theater _is_ worthless.

The difference is, religions typically believe their "creator was, and always has been". OP (I believe) realizes that humans evolved without a "divine touch" and is talking about a possible next step in evolution. Just because "nature" doesn't make it happen, doesn't make it any less significant. We are a product of nature and evolution after all.

The salt also (helps) prevent the use of rainbow tables. Most organizations don't want to force their users to memorize 20+ character passwords. So they set the password limit to 8-16 characters. Normally, a rainbow table with computed values for 8 character passwords would work on _some_ users' passwords. Now add in the salt. If your salt is a 20 character string on its own, the attacker would need to have rainbow tables computed (for at least) 28 character passwords; a feat exponentially harder than 8. Or at least that's what my Sesame Street security has taught me.

Data and voice operate independently of one another. While 3G/EDGE service may be disrupted it won't affect end-users' abilities to make calls over GPRS. And while it may further reinforce AT&T's point that their end-users gobble "too much" bandwidth, the publicity that it could generate would be a nice way of sticking it to yet another corporation that enjoys selling "limited-unlimited".