Yes, I'm saying chip level encryption is worthless since the OS decrypts the data so all that is required is to gain access to the phone and that will always be the vulnerability. I've read that the older iPhone 5c wasn't even encrypted so it's never been an encryption issue anyway. The only protection the phone really had was the 10 passcode try phone wipe. But it appears even if it was encrypted then it would have offered no additional protection for the phone.

We don't know all of the exact particulars in the case - although I read that the technique involved cloning the phone chip contents and could continue brute force retries of the passcode without worrying about the phone being wiped. But one thing we do know that this case was NEVER about encryption technology and Apple's continual portrayal of it as such was simply a marketing lie. I don't think people realize that encryption of all of the contents of your phone is almost worthless since it has to be continually decrypted by the phone OS so all you have to do is to get access to the phone's home screen to access the full contents of the phone.

I absolutely agree with this and this is the only thing that makes sense. Why else would Amazon have encrypted publicly available books on the Kindle in the first place? I suspect Amazon largely made the decision because they considered the encryption unnecessary and their DRM that they kept in place was all that they really needed.

Apple is largely insuring that their devices are in no way accessible except through means controlled by Apple. In fact the current FBI case and other cases have nothing to do with encryption and really only deal with normal access to the device (i.e. 4 digit passcodes or fingerprints)

Encryption and decryption of mostly non-secret text actually slows down the performance of your device. So the effect would be the opposite that you describe. It would improve the performance and would be like adding a supercharger to your car. So they are providing a benefit and not reducing the functionality of your device.

I see that Mozilla is now using the same brain-dead customer feedback method that Microsoft used to remove major features because they were supposedly not used. Microsoft said that no one really used the Windows Start Menu so they just took it out completely in Windows 8. Well we see how well that worked for them. Millions of people were loading Classic Shell and other add-ons to get their Start Menu back. It was a total disaster! They probably lost billions in sales before they realized their stupidity and restored it in Windows 10.

This automated feedback method to determine which features are used has been shown to be worthless. And to hand it down in this dictatorial manner without getting any feedback beforehand just shows how out-of-touch Mozilla has become (they have probably been more concerned about the voting record of their upper management to see if they pass ideological purity). I only use Firefox for the YouTube downloader and I use SeaMonkey for my everyday browsing. So it won't affect me unless this stupidity extends to the SeaMonkey team as well. But the power-users who are usually completely ignored because they've opted out of customer feedback will be screwed. The SeaMonkey team has been good at not dropping UI features (in fact that is the primary purpose in life of the product - to maintain a consistent interface since Netscape Navigator), unlike the Firefox team who have been just trying to emulate the most popular browser of the day which is now the horrible Chrome interface.

I think that cloning the IBM BIOS API was precisely what Phoenix did. Since IBM didn't document the API, then Phoenix had to discover what the API was. Now since this was not documented then IBM couldn't have claimed copyright over it, but it was just as much an API as the nicely documented Java package library API. And now we have books that document the BIOS API. So it certainly was an API that Phoenix reproduced and then wrote their own code for the implementation of the Phoenix BIOS.

The APIs that Linus used for Linux were not ones in general that he created. These APIs already existed in Unix. Linux was essentially a Unix cloning project. Rewriting it to remove the intellectual property attachments that still existed in Unix. The model that Google followed with Java for Android was very similar to what Linus did for the Linux rewrite of Unix. If the copyrightable APIs that you desire existed at the time then Linux could never well have come into existence and we would only have proprietary Unix which would have never would have taken off like Linux has since the primary attraction of Linux is the open source nature of it.

I somehow completely missed that Michael O'Hare had died in 2012 although I had heard about the deaths of the other three, After reading this story I went to IMDB and saw JMS explanation about his schizophrenia. I agree that most people seemed to think of O'Hare's Sheridan as wooden. I agree this type of personality is not as marketable in a lead actor, but to me there seemed to be an earnestness about him that gave me more of a sense of trust in him. This earnestness really came into play during his final explanation of his destiny in 'War Without End' part 2. He was very moving and I thought he really blew it out of the water and it's something that I don't think Boxleitner could have pulled off as well as O'Hare did. But I always felt badly about Michael O'Hare's fate after Babylon 5 and hearing about his mental illness makes it even more tragic. My own father suffered from a mental illness as well so I guess this makes me feel closer to him.

While I haven't invested any time in Indian agriculture research, I do find it pretty hard to believe that "millions" of farmers in India committed suicide over Monsanto contracts. This would place this as one of the greatest disasters in human history if millions of people committed suicide over a short period of time. Could you provide some documentation for those figures or if this was just an exaggeration put a little more realistic value on the number of suicides?

Having a pre-existing condition is no longer an issue unless Congress one day succeeds in repealing the ACA. Insurance companies cannot deny you coverage or charge you more because you use Lipitor.

Well throughout history I don't believe that Nye can provide any actual correlation of a scientific advance that required a belief in evolution other than the study of evolution itself. While evolution is interesting and I like to read about it myself, but it exists primarily to employ college professors and scientific pundits who make their living pushing it. A belief in evolution is not a prerequisite for any field of scientific endeavor, not even in biology or human physiology.

So according to Nye we can't have electrical engineers, mathematicians, etc. unless they have a belief in evolution. To me this is abandoning empiricism and elevating evolution to some sort of religion that if you are not a member of the faithful then you obviously wouldn't have the mental ability to become a member of the holy order of the scientist.

I imagine people will be able to discover new drugs, new consumer electronics, new fuel technologies, etc. whether they believe in evolution or not.

This seems to be a very confused analogy and I'm rather shocked it has been modded up to a 5. You do realize that no chemical reaction actually occurs when a computer models a chemical reaction, right? Modeling mixing a large amount of Sodium with Water does not actually produce real Sodium Hydroxide and no explosion occurs. But then you come to this rather retarded conclusion where you try to tie your chemical reaction modeling with chemicals producing thought. Since no real chemical reaction occurred through computation and modeling; how can you come to a conclusion that real thought could occur just by computation and modeling?

Well it's interesting for Christianity you had to go back hundreds of years for examples, but for Islam all I have to do to find the same thing is search for current events in the Islamic world.

I believe you are acting deliberately dense in order to be politically correct. The Taliban and those with similar Islamist leanings have done scores of events like this in the past (bombing girls schools, poisonings, throwing acid in girls faces) and there is no reason not to have a high certainty that this was done by an Islamist. They feel that women should be in the home, married and not allowed out without a male relative. They are doing this because this is their interpretation of Islam. Saying that this is done by an Islamist does not mean that all Muslims feel this way. Probably most of the girls at the school were Muslim and the staff was probably Muslim. But there is a LARGE number of Muslims in Afghanistan who do feel this way - although is would only be a small but very powerful minority who would go to this violent extreme. But just trying to dodge this and say that this has no relationship to Islam or those who are just saying this is some aspect of Afghan culture are just ignoring reality. The perpetrators of these actions say they are doing this BECAUSE of their Islamic beliefs. So if someone says they are doing this because of Islam I see no reason not to take their reasons at face value.

Actually the subsidies provided by the U.S. government actually are to make prices higher and reduce agricultural output. This is the famous "paying farmers not to grow crops." This was done to insure that farmers get a price on their crops to make a profit.

There may be other subsidies that encourage agricultural output but I'm pretty sure that the crop set aside program is still a large part of the "subsidies" that the U.S. government provides.