"Cuts of this scale will also be accomplished by a Paul Presidency abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels."
Source, his campaign website

I'll scream bloody murder for abolishing the Dept of Education and Energy, but I can see where Ron Paul-supporters are coming from.

As others have commented, Facebook probably has less than 40% active users. But that's not what keeps me on G+.

I use it as a sort of augmented twitter, Following a bunch of science bloggers I find interesting (Shared Circle). It started out as a small list from Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science blogger at BoingBoing, and slowly accumulated more people through recommendations (network effect!).

Nowadays, Facebook is for the silly friends' stuff, but G+ is slowly turning into a major science news source populated by authors I respect.

Perfect illustration of why we're resistant to change. And then some new company comes up with that change embedded in their process, and trounce the old one. Then the cycle repeats.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

My point is that maybe the features that the Kindle Fire is missing aren't worth it for the market they're aiming at. Kind of like the iPod in its day.

I really, really hate what Gigabyte does with their BIOSes, considering their BIOS backed itself up on the end on some of my disks, changed the OS-visible size of the disk using Host Protected Area (HPA), squashing the mdraid metadata that was happily living there.

By the time I understood what was happening, I had had 3 of my 6 RAID disks screwed, as I had swapped the disks around ignorantly thinking it was some controller error.

That feature was not advertised, and that version of the BIOS had a bug where this feature didn't properly detect which disks it could accomplish this on (it only looked for NTFS/VFAT partitions, natch) and could not be disabled. While I can understand the purpose and usefulness of the feature, releasing with such a bug has made me swear off Gigabyte.

For the reference, it was a GA-P35-DS3, with BIOS F12.

Marlinspike's approach, implemented in a Firefox extension presented at DefCon '11, is to do away with the notion of CAs altogether in SSL, replacing it with a distributed network that reports on the certificate they see. Basically, if the certificate you see agrees with the rest of the network, then you're not being spoofed.

He had previously explained the properties a replacement to the CA system had to demonstrate in order to be viable

Moxie Marlinspike, the author of Convergence mentioned in TFA, addressed that very problem in a post. Long story short: a DNSSEC system would worsen the rigidity and centralization of the current CA system.

People are confusing this master key that breaks HDCP, saying it can help decrypt Blu-Ray discs. That's not the case: Blu-Ray is encrypted with AACS, which has a similar concept of device keys derived by a master key. AACS has a mechanism of revoking compromised device keys. Getting the AACS master key would bypass that mechanism, and would be great news.

This key isn't the AACS master key This is an HDCP key, which would allow one to create a "unauthorized" device that can connect to HDCP-encrypted HDMI and succesfully decrypt the HD stream.

HDCP has been known to be nearly broken since 2001, in that obtaining the device keys of 40-50 devices is enough to calculate the master key.

Huh, WDE has to give away their HDTVs? Where do I sign up?

To clear things up a little, from TFA:

That sounds cool, but the cynic in me believes that won't happen for a variety of reasons ("we don't have any unsold products! The last ones went on eBay for 1$ each!")

I'd like to preemptively buy a "Free Assange" wikileaks t-shirt. It doesn't exist yet, but I figure it's only a matter of time before it's necessary.

I suggest that from now on, articles about far-out piracy number thrown out by special-interest should include a link to Wolfire's excellent analysis of video game piracy. Choice quote:

It does not, however, say that Gibson approved it.

Considering the distances involved, I found it funny that the sentence implied simultaneity. Voyager 2 is about 92 AU out (according to WP), which is 12 light-hours and 45 light-minutes. So if they send the signal in the morning, the memory will be reset in the afternoon, and they can hope for clean signals the day after.

By and large, government just means worthless expense, and pointless obstruction.

So how's that broadband market going for you? How about health care?

(and that's just off the top of my head.)

this post written from Europe.

I've always envied their ability to maintain control over their brand and use it for appropriately portioned good and evil ;)

From what I've understood from their past posts and various interviews, they owe a lot to their business manager, Robert Khoo.

They like explaining how they actually sold their brand and rights away before Khoo came aboard. Luckily, the buyer disappeared into bankruptcy and nobody else has since claimed that ownership. I'm not too sure of the details and current veracity of this :)