"if they misuse that trust they can cause huge damage"

Odd the NSA didn't take that to heart themselves...

A researcher friend recently described how their PI handed them a paper from a former lab member from many years ago and said "review this, ok?" (and what was of course unsaid was "approve it.") Turns out the journal of the National Academy of Sciences is a joke - it's just a place for members to dump crap they can't get accepted for publishing anywhere else. It certainly is a joke if you can get someone in your own lab to accept a paper from a former lab member.

The NSA will probably next be cornering the market on high GPU count graphics cards.

What makes you think they don't have the private keys already, or can't get them?

At this point it's probably not unreasonable at all to assume that the NSA either has their foot in the door somehow, or simply National Security Letter's the CA into giving them any keys they want. Technically, all they'd need is the CA's keys, as that's all that protects *your* private key when it's in transit to you, since they're already snooping for everything else.

Really, the current CA system is a dream for the NSA - encryption that is controlled completely by a small group. It's now making a lot of sense why they went after Zimmerman for PGP. The peer-to-peer trust network and person-to-person encryption must've scared the shit out of them.

While we're on the subject of reasonable assumptions - it seems reasonable to assume that the NSA has worked to insert weaknesses and vulnerabilities in most open-source encryption software. Whether they've been successful or not is what we need to know. Remember the fuss a few years ago with IPSEC, OpenBSD, and the FBI?

Please explain how traveling to China and South Korea (the latter of which is a protected ally) constitute any reason for suspicion.

Let's not kid ourselves, it probably helps that he's white and privileged, too.

The vast majority of the US prison population is white and male. Women have significantly lower arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates - with significantly lower sentencing lengths, higher probation rates, etc. Women are enormously privileged when it comes to the criminal justice system, and that includes when they're victims; males are victims of violent crime at a ratio of 3:1 men:women, and case clearance rates for female victims are higher than case clearance rates for men.

While we're on the subject of privilege: women are more likely to finish high school, more likely to go to college, more likely to finish, more likely to pursue an advanced degree. Worldwide, basic literacy rates are far lower for men...because they're out doing the menial, tough, hard labor jobs women can't/won't/don't want to do. 99% of workplace deaths in the US are men, by the way...because women can't, won't, or don't want to do the brutal, dangerous manual labor jobs.

Most of the homeless population in the US is male. Unemployment is higher for men than women. Life expectancy is significantly lower for men than women, and in every category of disease, men are afflicted more than women and are more likely to die from said disease. The draft is still male-only, and our armed forces are predominantly male...

Nice job parroting the social justice crap, though.

Hands free technologies are not less distracting; in some cases, they're the worst. The cell phone lobby is desperately trying to focus on "hands free" stuff to sidetrack the issue.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012900053.html

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/12/autos/aaa-voice-to-text/index.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/even-hands-free-you-shouldnt-talk-or-text-while-driving/2013/07/29/4d7214ec-f3d0-11e2-aa2e-4088616498b4_story.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/opinion/hands-free-distractions.html?_r=0 ...and on and on, if you just google things like "hands free driving distracting"

Having your hands on the wheel simply increases your control of the car. It does not do ANYTHING about your brain being more preoccupied with the conversation or task.

Your job in your car is to DRIVE. Not to eat, not to put on makeup or comb your hair, not to text, not to read, not to talk to someone who isn't in the car. You're piloting 2-3 tons of metal that can and do injure, maim, and kill. People driving cars kill 30,000+ a year in the US alone. Take the responsibility seriously and stop faffing about trying to carry on your life in your car. If you need to get things done while traveling, RIDE THE BUS.

Don't forget their cheapest desktop that can hold two hard drives and an optical drive is the Mac Pro.

The operative word being "holds". With USB and Thunderbolt, there is *zero* reason to have more than one hard drive slot inside a Mac.

The next Mac Pro doesn't have *any* internal drive bays. None of the creative pros, whom the machines are targeted at, are complaining. They're happily going to connect multi-terabyte RAID arrays to it via any of its six thunderbolt 2 ports, each of which offers more bandwidth than a multilane 6Gbps SAS port.

Apple charges for upgrades; that is not 'charging for the OS"; OS is not available "for purchase." It can be made to run on hardware not offered by Apple, but to do so is against the license.

Apple's machines are not built using commodity hardware. They have commodity components like hard drives, memory, and in some cases, graphics cards.

Apple develops all aspects of their computers in-house.

"The best solution" has nothing to do with "the apple tax." Yes, they're interested in maximizing profit - so is every company, in case you hadn't noticed, fuckwit. That they don't offer what *you* want doesn't mean that there is an "apple tax."

The Mac Pro serves a market for creative professionals whose applications are by and large GPU accelerated, and newer GPUs slot into it just fine. That the processors are older Xeons doesn't really matter. However, in case you hadn't noticed, the Mac Pro just got a complete redesign.

"Facts", indeed.

"So... you can buy twice the amount of ram at -retail- for 30% less than Apple will charge you just to upgrade. THAT is the 'mac premium'."

Odd then, that Dell, Lenovo, and HP all charge this "mac premium" on their computers.

Seriously, you do realize *all* vendors do this, right? They're taking advantage of people who a)don't know they can get it cheaper elsewhere, or don't want to be bothered with the hassle of ordering, don't know how to install the component, or don't have the time b)don't want to be hassled with fingerpointing when something breaks c)are financing the purchase and thus want it all rolled into one d)are purchasing for non-personal use and are limited in terms of suppliers and whatnot.

The NTSB also appears to not be considering that there are people on motorcycles, foot, and bicycle.

That's particularly poor, given that motor vehicle occupant safety has gone up, while pedestrian and cyclist safety has plunged. Why? Cars are increasingly safe for occupants, yet nothing is being done to stop drivers from plowing into other people.

All the safety has simply made people less careful. Why should they be careful? They're unlikely to be seriously injured, insurance will cover the damage and injuries, and they sure as hell aren't going to get charged with any crimes.

You can drive into a storefront and injure half a dozen people and not even get a ticket.

Kill a cyclist and the police will term it an "accident" - all you have to do is say the sun was in your eyes or you were changing the radio station. A little girl in Texas lost both her parents because a guy in a pickup truck slammed into her parents. His excuse: he'd looked down to change the station (and somehow drifted several feet onto the road shoulder.)

The myth of the "apple tax" or "mac premium" has always been based on pretending that the largest distinguishing feature (the operating system) doesn't exist, or isn't worth anything to people in the market for a new computer. Windows 7 closed the gap a bit, but OS X is still less virus-prone, has better backup integration, doesn't use a registry, and benefits from less platform diversity / hardware+OS from the same vendor.

It also ignores the fact that for years, whenever PC magazines have tested Macs, they've consistently found them to be amongst the best-performing machines money can buy at time-of-release. Boot Camp changed things dramatically, in the sense that suddenly PC magazines could directly compare them to PC hardware with the same benchmark tools.

Apple is reaping the benefit of in-house design (instead of "show me what you got that we can slap our label on"), top-notch system architects, and aggressively securing rights with suppliers for major components to get the best stuff before everyone else.

parked in a way that they think nobody can see them

Psht. Some cops have hiding down to an art form. I remember driving along the highway and thinking "Why does that snowbank have a police light bar...."

As I drove by, I saw he'd precisely trimmed the snowbank with a shovel, flat-topping it just enough to see over and for his radar unit.

That said, we don't need speed enforcement. We need illegal/improper/unsafe operation enforcement, proper crash investigation, and criminal penalties for negligence that results in property damage or injury.

Cats are a product of their upbringing and environment, like many critters, people included.

Cats that grow up in very active households tend to be very sociable towards strangers (same for "shop" cats). Cats that grow up spending their lives with someone who doesn't socialize much, tend to be more skittish of strangers. Cats that grow up by themselves tend to be more sociable towards humans; cats that grow up with another cat tend to be more social with the other cats (playing, following, snoozing, etc.) and more aloof to humans.

Cats can be passive, cats can be assertive. I dated someone whose cat decided that when we were making out on the couch, that was a swell time to climb up and sit on her back and purr and knead her back.

I've known people who had cats who would play fetch; it's not that unusual - and my cat came when he was called, usually because he knew that it meant he'd get a warm lap, petting, or ear/chin scratching.

You know how hard the plane accelerates when it's full of fuel, you + all the other passengers, luggage, cargo, etc on take off? Enough to push you back into the seat preeeeeeetty hard, right?

Imagine that same force, but in a plane with no passengers, no cargo or luggage, and a light fuel load.

It won't do 62,000 feet a minute like a F-16 will, but I've heard pilots describe unladen performance as breathtaking, and at airshows, they can buzz the runway and do a HARD climb.

I have a Nexus 4, not a Nexus 7, and yes, according to the scanner tool, it's still unpatched.