They're not qualified to make public policy - period.

Fair enough. I bought loads of it when it was around $400 an ounce to protect part of my capital. I don't see that as an investment. I also have no plans on selling it. And I sleep very well at night, even with the economy lagging the way it is.

Here you go. You should google it while you're still allowed to google stuff.

Gold is a safe haven not an investment.

It's not fraud at all. They are not making any false promises. They say they will give you bitcoin in exchange for cash, and that is exactly what they do (less a modest commission I'm sure). It's not their fault if you haven't researched Bitcoin at all and get taken out by one of the swings in value.

Wrong. You may become important in the future. So you are important enough to target. They are collecting data on everyone, and holding on to it. They just might not be actively going through all the data from everyone (or they might be, if they have enough computing power). But if it's recorded it doesn't really matter if they do it today or in 20 years. They've got you. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." --Richelieu

You can still read the patterns on the ink ribbons... Or the drum, for that matter :)

Only because the researchers don't know how to find the key and the sequence only looks random but it's non-random in a way only the NSA knows how to recognize. Because other leaked documents claim that the NSA has been heavily involved in the development of all consumer-level cryptography chips. It doesn't matter how you code, it's the chip that's giving the game away. If the NSA has a pattern it can recognize which tells them how to decrypt it, then researchers will see it as unbreakable while the NSA will be able to crack it.

You want complete security disconnect it from the network and never ever connect it again. And don't allow anyone to use that machine, or service the machine, or turn on the machine. Then it will be 100% secure.

I think you're missing the concept of what a back-door actually is. Yeah. Trust your "key chain" app. Your data is safe! If only the NSA had thought of that. Curses!

Or drivers. Especially closed source proprietary drivers, like Nvidia, etc.

Unless the "unrelated compiler" is also compromised. How far down does the rabbit hole go?

> That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files.

Protools stores its audio as wav or aif files.

No, that's what it costs to play in this game. There are theoretical problems to be solved, for which solutions may not be known. There are also many practical problems to be solved in mechanical design, actuation, and electronics. Those will yield to money and routine engineering effort.

That was the lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2003-2005. Until then, the typical robotics project was a professor and three to five grad students, and it took years to make minor advances. DARPA had been putting money into automatic driving since the 1960s without getting anything useful out. Dr. Tony Tether, the DARPA director at the time, decided that academic robotics needed a major kick in the ass. The DARPA Grand Challenge did that.

It wasn't the $1M prize which caused major universities to devote big chunks of their CS departments to that project. It was the threat that if they didn't do well, their DARPA funding would be cut off for failure. Fear worked as a motivator.

A side effect of the 2003-2005 Grand Challenge was that many key components, like integrated INS/GPS combos and LIDAR systems, became smaller, cheaper, and better, now that there was some demand. The original CMU INS/GPS combo took 9U of rack space and required air conditioning. Three years later, you could get that in a box the size of a thick book.

That's a nice piece of machinery. Much good mechanical engineering went into that robot. It took $120 million to get to this point, via BigDog and the LS3. DARPA is really throwing money at this, and it's working.

The DARPA competition in a simulator in August indicates that the perception software is getting reasonably good, but the movement software from the teams still sucks. The best team had 12 falls in simulation. My guess is that the results in December 2013 won't be very impressive, but by round 2, in 2014, the robots will be moving much better.

Teams are provided with a .so file (no source) from Boston Dynamics which allows control of the robot and has some functions for basic walking behavior. But the code Boston Dynamics provides to teams is not the good stuff they use internally.