As this is as good a place for armchair philosophy as any, here's my take on it: I think both will probably be proven possible but not arbitrary - like wormholes of which the ends have to be positioned and opened "manually". For example, you can go FTL via a wormhole but first you need to carry the "other end" of the wormhole in a conventional way to wherever, and the same would work for time-based wormholes - you can time-travel but the "future" end of the wormhole will need to be "carried" to the future. The time-based wormhole would only be a single thing - not two things as would space-based wormholes be. This single opening would be "carried" to the future by simply existing for some duration. The analogy with space-based wormholes dictates that, as you can only travel between the portals to the wormhole and not, e.g. pop up into existence somewhere in between them, that you could only time-travel between "now" and whenever the time-based wormhole was first opened - which probably has something to do with causality. In any case, if at the very moment the wormhole gets opened you don't get a steady stream of grandfather-killing maniacs, you are probably safe forever :)

Any organization which is as openly against open access to scientific articles (journals, conference proceedings) yet continues to wave its clout as IEEE does deserves to die out in infamy.

If it weren't marketed as a "bright new idea" with an appropriate product, company and undoubtedly, patents, behind it, it could actually be useful if it was integrated into "normal" IM applications in approximately the same way the smileys are today. It would serve a purpose similar to "message macros" in IRC and others - a shorthand writing in situations where the messages are simple, with the default still being the "normal" way of typing messages. Using just the pictures is extremely constrained without elaborate support for creating new pictures and composing new pictures out of the old ones, but if one's workday is mainly centered over answering messages with "yes", "no", "coffee?" and "lunch?", it could be very convenient. :)

Actually, RC4 is not that much slower than Casear, mainly because is implemented sort of like Caesar with extra steps to modify the substitution table at runtime. OpenSSL can do RC4 on modern hardware faster than 300 MB/s. Even though it is as a "combiner" stream cipher and as such tricky to actually use securely, it would be much better than the probably ad-hoc implemented Caesar.

You mean like their official ones? They could have used their own crypto API, but they didn't.

You are right - this is 50% of the problem here. The other 50% is MS just being lazy.

Well? Can it predict the rest? :)

... is that you have all those other places to put stuff if they don't fit in just one place. Personally, stuff I like either goes into Wikipedia or tvtropes :)

"Computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes"

The question here is - how long will the eruption and the ash cloud last? Judging from historical records, it's not uncommon for eruptions to last decades. If - then what? New routes? Limit cross-atlantic flights endpoints to southern Spain or something?

That's a wrong way to do this conversation - you really need to pull something like: "I'm concerned the radiation levels of your wireless router are causing you all to have brain cancer" followed by "innocent" inquiries into if anyone on the office has headaches or problems sleeping, suggesting the AP might be the cause. It's bullshit of course but the only way to get people interested is to make it about *their* asses. If you're good enough (i.e. go through it in a really circumspect way) you may even get them to pay you to investigate and reconfigure the said AP :)

People will buy anything if the price is right. Offhand I'd say iPad needs to be a tiny bit cheaper to succeed widely but the crowd who thinks iPhones are affordable will buy them up regardless and the rest of us will wait for less extravagant alternatives (the Android looks like a no-brainer possible future competitor, in cheaper hardware).

Tablets are not niche, they were just unaffordable and without a good UI - at least the second problem will be solved by porting apps made for mobile phone touch interfaces. Time will solve the first one.

tin_hat_mode_on
Hmmm this is too convenient... maybe MS wanted the document to "leak", giving false assurances to the masses? In actuality, they are logging every single bit that passes through!
tin_hat_mode_off
nah... couldn't happen... or could it?
How could a document like this "leak" out? By whom? A law enforcement agency employee? A Microsoft employee? The document is actually pretty benign - it basically states that the data logged is that which is also logged by every web server in existence, nothing more serious than that. Pretty good-natured from MS.
Anyways... stay crunchy!

Yes, it's called "human nature" and by overwhelming agreement it's one of the worst things in the universe. Unfortunately, no two people agree on how to fix it...

This is really cool to read about - looks like an extremely interesting project from engineering POV. How they deal with latency alone must be damn impressive. I guess the drones must have some sort of autonomy and the pilot basically says "go west, kill spider" or something to the tone. Probably an AI-like engine similar to those in RTS games - point and click but the low-level details (like actual flying!) are handled locally. So cool...