Good points. But then again remember that the NSA, having approved the cipher for use with classified documents, now has to use it themselves if they want to exchange top secret classified information with the rest of the US government! I think it's much more likely that they did apply even more of their vaunted cryptanalytic prowess to it when NIST gave their approval in 2000, and when by 2003 they found no significant weaknesses, they approved it for use with classified information. If they had found a significant weakness in AES and approved it anyway for such use, how arrogant and stupid would that make them? Their own supposedly secure communications with the rest of the government would be compromised as a result! As I said you can accuse the NSA of being many things, but I don't think stupidity is one of them.

Snowden himself said it: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on." Emphasis added. The real trouble is there are too many systems out there that use otherwise sound cryptographic primitives in insecure ways, either by incompetence or by design. The NSA has been known to pressure manufacturers of security equipment to do the latter, and naturally they will only certify equipment that hasn't been thus back-doored for government use.

And no, I don't think breaking AES would be career suicide for an academic cryptanalyst. Fermat's Last Theorem would also have been considered career suicide for centuries for the same reasons you cite, but now Andrew Wiles is one of the most famous mathematicians in the world. True, it's a hard problem, but if you manage to publish a workable break of AES you would become the most famous cryptographer in the world.

I highly doubt that Vincent Rijmen and Joan Daemen themselves were influenced by the NSA in any way in the design of Rijndael, unless you believe that they influenced all the AES entrants, including Ronald Rivest (RC6) and Bruce Schneier (Twofish). I think the only influence the NSA might have had was in perhaps influencing the NIST selection process that chose Rijndael as the Advanced Encryption Standard. And in the thirteen years since it was thus chosen it has been scrutinised more thoroughly than any algorithm by the best cryptographers in the world, and well, none of the open researchers anyway have found an attack on the cipher capable of breaking it significantly. The NSA might have, but then they approved the cipher for encrypting US government classified documents (a blessing that the NSA notably did not give the original Data Encryption Standard), so I'd consider it highly unlikely that they would have done that. The risk would be too great that their method of breaking the cipher have been obtained by espionage or independently discovered by some other intelligence agency's cryptanalysts. The NSA may be evil, but no one has ever accused them of stupidity.

Given that the best cryptanalysts of the world have had thirteen years to look at it and it remains solid, I'd trust it better than the other AES candidates which have had much less scrutiny, or worse yet, a newly designed cipher that no one who knows anything has bothered to even try analysing.

The other thing is that AES is incredibly efficient even on 8-bit microcontrollers. Around the time the AES contest was ongoing, I implemented Serpent, Twofish, and Rijndael on an 8051-series microcontroller, and Rijndael was consistently the best performing cipher, so I used it in the project, and wasn't surprised to learn that it eventually got selected.

As Hagbard Celine had famously said: "True communication is possible only between equals." Inferiors will be rewarded more often for telling pleasant lies and get punished for telling unpleasant truths.

Not all problems tractable on a quantum computer are so easily amenable to such verification. For example, the original problem that motivated the quantum computer, that of the simulation of quantum processes, is a case in point. All known algorithms for doing that on classical computers take exponential time. How do you verify the results of a complex simulation thus done on a quantum computer?

"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Hermann Göring.

Bruce Schneier once again hit the nail on the head: The Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse. "Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four."

Their domain int3.cc is an allusion to the one-byte software interrupt instruction on 16-bit x86 systems. Opcode 0xCC disassembles to int 3, and it's most frequently used by debuggers, which patch a single byte of code with it to make a breakpoint.

Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers.
Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: I see.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.

AES has gotten scrutiny from the best cryptanalytic minds in the world for well over a decade, and not one of them has been able to find an attack on it capable of breaking the algorithm significantly faster than brute force. If Edward Snowden is to be believed, not even the NSA's vaunted cryptanalytic ability has been able to find a sufficiently serious flaw in AES either. I agree that we need more algorithms, perhaps a dozen or so, but not hundreds. Too much diversity will have the effect of diffusing the pool of open experts that subject these algorithms to cryptanalytic scrutiny and the chances increase that one or more of the algorithms in use will have a serious flaw.

They're compared in terms of surface area. Both Olympus Mons and the Tamu Massif occupy an area approximately 300,000 square kilometres.

True. However, does Richard Stallman now seem so stupid for asking that everyone call "Linux" systems "GNU/Linux" systems? We now have Android/Linux as well as GNU/Linux, so the distinction actually turns out to be a rather important one to make. Everyone likes to joke about how RMS is a crackpot with bad hygeine, but it seems he's been right more often than not.

Once the discovery of the element is confirmed, the people who discovered it get dibs on naming the new element. The funny names like 'Ununpentium' are the temporary IUPAC systematic element names used for elements whose synthesis has not yet been confirmed. Of course, priority of discovery and confirmation of discovery can be a highly politicised process, so the systematic name remains in use until this gets settled.

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Why not just build a robot then? Then the world becomes its own best model. Or are sensors that allow a robot to experience the world as a human would still that hard? I don't think this is true for vision or hearing, though it probably is for other senses.

And that just goes to show how terrible a marketing misstep Microsoft made here. One device is an otherwise normal PC that can run every application ever written for the WinTel platform. The other has a rather paltry set of applications by third party developers and doesn't even have an x86 architecture processor. They're both called 'Microsoft Surface', and both run 'Windows 8'. Did Microsoft really expect that most people would be able to immediately tell that there was such a major difference between the Surface RT and Surface Pro?