This raises the question about email providers. Who provides good, private, secure email service? If Hushmail has handed over keys & data on request, I'd rather not pay them €50-100 per year. In truth I'm not an international criminal or James Bond or anything... so I can't really justify too much cost. But surely there is a service which does not retain data for too long and would at least ask for a court order before handing anything over... and does not assume you have the financial backing of a TLA.

actually I'm sort of surprised at all the complicated suggestions everyone has come up with. Home routers are cheap and do everything the guy wanted.

I'd like to read a serious comparison between this and jails in FreeBSD and sandboxes in Mac OS.

I think a lot of these ideas have been around for a very long time but they are such a pain in the ass, very few people actually use them.

Joseph Kittinger would agree.

Google's servers have been much discussed... they are standard (but some things are not populated) and they have an on board battery to act as a UPS.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

The project uses a high speed camera... so if a camera from a handy is going to be used, they are going to have to get a lot better.

Given America's inability to adopt serious ecological policies, the refusal to recycle tech waste and instead to transport it to developing nations... I'm not seeing any developing nation willing to take it ever running out of rare earth minerals to sell to the Chinese.

Encryption can only be useful for emails when people use it for all or most of communications, so that one does not instantaneously flag communications of interest. Looking at my email habits, there are: 4 people who work for firms where encryption is specifically forbidden in company policy. 12 people who absolutely could not be taught how to use encryption... Including my mother who writes email as if she sending a telegraph and is paying per character. 2 people who could use encryption but who don't use it either, for the same reason I don't, the pool of potential recipients is too small.

While I don't particularly agree with the OP's claim that "causes him to pirate games", your whopper metaphor is equally lousy because whoppers are not digital.

my god. the kids today are retarded.

"Intelligent design" is gambit to bring creationism to the public school system. This has been established in a court of law, when the "Intelligent design" document was shown to have had a document wide search & replace "Creationism" for "Intelligent design"... rather late in the writing process.

You are in no way "encouraging Robin to do start a better discussion next time". You are simply doing what you always do: rejecting every he writes because he does not share your extremist political views. Claiming anything else simply exposes you as a liar.

This is one of the many issues which peer review is designed to overcome. As far as I can tell it works extremely well. There's certainly no evidence that it works wonderfully in my field but breaks down in other fields.

As a subscriber to Nature I find it interesting that when we're talking about amino acids Nature is a highly respected international weekly journal of science but.... when we're talking climate science it's the nexus of an evil, duplicitous, Socialist, Marxist, environmentalist cabal bent on destroying the fabric of American society.

The key phrases you are looking for are "rainbow tables"; "time / memory trade-off"; "distributed computing"; "embarrassingly parallel"; "GPGPU Computing" and probably "More's Law".

So now computers are faster than when they cooked that "100,000 years" phrase. They are employing many different computers with multiple cores. GPUs are much faster at this calculation that X86 processors. Rainbow tables are ingenious methods to store precomputed results, so the actual cracking is simple comparisons between encrypted text with known values and the data you are attacking.