Around here (Salt Lake City, US) people can get inexpensive home connections in the 12Mbps-20Mbps range. The caps on many of these plans are about 1TB/month. As you mention, an individual can transfer quite a lot of data before hitting that kind of cap.

Businesses, especially tech businesses, tend to have much greater telecom requirements than a single residence.

The story isn't about capping SPEED, it is about capping BYTES TRANSFERRED. Critically missing from the stories are both of those numbers.

• * A setup that runs at 4Mbps can run for a month and struggle to hit a 1TB/month cap.
• * A setup that runs at 12Mbps will never hit a 4TB/month data cap, even if kept saturated.
• * A setup that has a 4Gbps can pass a 4TB limit in about 2.5 hours.

Equipment and infrastructure are not free. Even our business connection (fiber@4Gbps) has caps. We pay quite a lot for it, and are unlikely to ever hit them, but they exist.

Back when people were on kilobit connections there wasn't much point to a cap. Today when fiber to the premises can offer 10Gbps or more it wouldn't take much to saturate the telecom's equipment.

Usage policies and caps mean you can have your high speed connection so data comes to you quickly when you want it, but because the plan is very cheap you can't keep the line saturated. When it comes to bandwidth, transfer limits and costs, you only get to pick two. The third is dictated by the other choices.

Also on the list, a pony. Preferrably one with a frickin' laser beam on its head.

Unless the product has been certified for use with classified information, that's not much of an assurance. The government has its own internally-developed tools -- which presumably it has confidence in (SIPRNet, etc.) -- for protecting information that it deems sensitive. The NSA might well decide that subverting a commercial tool is worth the risk of compromising something that's used by the government, but only in relatively trivial ways.

I don't know enough to impugn Zimmerman et al, but I don't think "it's used by the government!" is necessarily a great seal of approval, unless it's a formal certification (e.g. NSA Type 1 listing) saying that it can be used to protect classified information. And I'm not aware of any COTS software products that are on the Type 1 list; the NSA only approves particular hardware implementations (at least that I've seen, though I'm happy to be corrected although I'd be surprised).

That is a red herring.

Will the security researchers be putting that level of scrutiny on evey desktop application?

Screw trying to backdoor the security software. It is much easier to simply backdoor something innocuous to get a foothold on the machine. Once it is compromised, just read all the encrypted stuff BEFORE IT GETS ENCRYPTED.

I'm more inclined to trust Bruce Schneier who says "I trust the mathematics," than the authors of this sensationalist NYTimes article

I trust the math, even though I don't understand it.

I don't necessarily trust the people who coded the math into a program.

I don't necessarily trust the computer that is running the program.

The very definition of FPGA. See Xilinx.

Also used repeatedly in the King James version of the Bible.

Yes, 2.25% for these type of patents is considered exorbitant, typical royalty rates would be a flat rate of a buck or less per unit for a bundle of hundreds of these standards required patents. If everyone in a standard required 2.25% for the handful of patents they have that are included in the standard every single device would double or triple in price.

Actually the people who discuss risk IN REAL LIFE do cover those things. In this /. discussion, not so much.

Risk is just one face of a many-faceted issue.

Other faces include responsibility, liability, and morality.

The liability facet is usually discussed by lawyers and financial groups. How much of the problems do we need to pay for? If we pay up front can we avoid paying later? These groups will often talk about reducing risks in an effort to cut bottom-line costs.

The responsibility and morality facets are usually discussed by social and humanitarian groups. Are we able to do something about it, and ought we do something about it? These groups will often talk about reducing risks in an effort to improve the lives of people.

Socialism and tyranny are orthogonal.

No I wouldn't, I had a Palm Pilot 15 years ago =)
More importantly I try to keep up with material science research to get an idea of where things will be in 10-15 years, and there's no supercap material in development that's going to replace fossil fuels in that timeframe, at best they'll be used as part of the regenerative system in hybrids.

GNI per capita in sub-saharan Africa is $2,019 as of June 2011, do you really think they're going to on average spend 17% of their income on phone service?

Look at average life expectancy, Somalia is in the bottom 10 while the top 27 are all socialist democracies (ok Qatar and Kuwait are socialist monarchies). I think I'll take the evil socialism over a free-society.

Do you think a couple hundred people with African GDP will be able to pay access rates high enough to justify that kind of investment? Of course not, which is the same reason you don't see coast to coast 4G coverage except along interstate routes, there's not a high enough population density to justify the infrastructure investment.