So what? All you need is a couple of 5-minute periods when major appliances don't change their power consumption significantly. If everyone in the household is sitting watching television, then that's not too unlikely - you might find that the AC or fridge motor turns on or off, but those have a fairly long on-off period so could be handled; lighting and idle computer/hi-fi equipment will have a fairly constant power usage pattern. Of course, this will depend on the equipment in your house and the people using it, but it's not as implausible as it might at first seem.

Are you sure? Modern LCD TVs adjust the backlight brightness according to the image displayed, in order to improve the contrast, and this does appear to be measurable.

No, but this one does.

Basically, the meters read (or at t least, can read) the power consumption to a very fine degree of accuracy every 2 seconds. That's enough to figure out what TV channel you're watching (by watching power fluctuations caused by varying brightness levels of the TV). And with that level of detail it would also be fairly easy to make good guesses at: what time you leave for / get home from work (lights/kettle/coffee machine/cooker); when you're in the shower; how many people are in your house; whether you're on holiday... it all starts to get creepy pretty quickly...

Ummm... China does have a veto.

Yes. I call it "indentation" ;-)

"Undecidable in general" != "unprovable for any program". Or rather, just because it's not possible to write a general purpose algorithm that will tell you whether any given computer program {terminates, crashes, is secure against a particular threat} doesn't mean that, for any program I'm ever likely to write, there doesn't exist a proof. Or in other words - there exist billions of programs where it's difficult to know for certain whether they terminate - but those programs aren't relevant to determining whether my program terminates - and if I've got any sense I'll write my program in such a way that I can prove that it terminates (if that's the behaviour I want).

Your original comment said:

... which implies that you consider branch prediction to be a form of mitigation against errors, similar to error correction — i.e. that the reason branch prediction exists is to improve security.

A Branch Prediction Analysis attack makes use of branch prediction to break security, but that's irrelevant — it doesn't change the reasons why branch prediction existed in the first place, and it certainly doesn't turn branch prediction into a security feature.

Not according to the dictionary. One word can have more than one meaning :)

No it isn't.

Rubbish. The question doesn't mention its intended audience; it's perfectly valid and logical, and equivalent to "Is it true that none of you paid attention in English class?". If someone asks, "Did none of them arrive?", it's not addressed to "none", "none of them", nor to "them" - and nor is this question addressed to "none".

Superlatives of personal pronouns? If such a thing exists, it wasn't in the sentence in question...

But there's a difference between active and proactive. Someone who's active does a lot of stuff. If you're reactive you do stuff in response to issues that come up. Someone proactive does stuff anticipating issues that may otherwise come up. That's a useful distinction to be able to draw...

Something tells me you've never actually tried this with a live toddler. That, or you were using a different model of toddler to the ones I've encountered...

Or meerkats.

It can... but the difference is that, once I know my password is compromised, changing my password takes seconds—whereas analysing a code problem, coding a fix, testing it, distributing it to customers and having them deploy it can take months or even years.

I'm not really sure what you're saying. Sure, open and closed source software may both have security bugs - which may or may not get fixed. But this doesn't change the fact that there is a significant difference between security by obscurity and using passwords/keys.

No they're not. Sure, you have to keep them secret, but the key thing is that the security of the whole system doesn't pivotally depend on just your password: if you suspect your password has been compromised, you can very quickly and easily change it, and the system is then no less secure than it was before (give or take any damage done while your password was known). On the other hand, if security depends on your source code not being available (because it does uber-secret stuff), and it then gets leaked, there's nothing you can do to put the genie back in the box, short of rewriting your entire software...