:-)

Seriously, it's very, very unlikely that the NSA can break AES, because if they could they'd have to be concerned that someone else might be able to do it as well. The NSA's job is national security, which means protecting important national resources, including the economy, not just spying. So the only way they'd let us keep using AES all over the place after breaking it themselves is if they could be absolutely certain that no one else could do what they did, which would require an unimaginable level of arrogance -- and a very unspook-like way of thinking.

So let's say for the sake of argument that insurance companies didn't turn medical practice into medical industry. Are you saying that medical advances we see today simply wouldn't happen?

I'm sorry but if that's the case, I heartily disagree with you. Lately, the more the factors of research and production are put into homes of common people, we are seeing more an more "great things" emerge from sources which disprove the "big money only" theory. Certainly the demand brought on by public need was recognized and brought on by industrialists. That can't be disputed. But one of the things the industrialists brought with them is a way to protect their business model by making it more exclusive to them and their kind. Patents. Patents in medicine, I believe, result in more suffering than it helps to resolve. But that's not my point -- just a kind of tragic side-effect. But medical schools, publicly funded medical schools also do research into medical science. So instead of industry, I believe a tiny, tiny portion of our ridiculous defense spending could be placed in the hands of these researchers instead of industrialists to achieve the same results if not better as they wouldn't be quite so exclusive.

Medical practice should not be industry. That's what helps it to be so expensive, out of control and so incredibly dominating.

Water cooling would be a lot more useful if there were some genuinely nice, well-designed cases out there to put these water-cooling systems into. Even the high-end cases aren't very good; they're much too large, they're plasticky and cheap, they don't have toolless drive bays, they have way too many drive bays, etc. This isn't 1993 any more; we don't need cases with 10 5.25" drive bays. And why does anyone bother with full-size ATX motherboards any more? No one uses expansion cards any more, except for GPU cards; this isn't 1993 where every function on a system was on a separate expansion card.

Why can't someone make a really nice, metal, miniITX system with space for 2 hard drives that doesn't look like some cheap, gaudy plastic-front POS?

Nitpick: Nearly all ciphers are symmetric ciphers (except for the asymmetric ones :-)), and many of them are very vulnerable to known plaintext attacks. But there are plenty of symmetric ciphers which are, as far as we know, resistant to known plaintext, chosen plaintext and even more sophisticated attacks. Such as AES-256, which seems to be the cipher used here.

Bah.

# vgdisplay 5g
[...]
Free PE / Size 419390 / 1.60 TiB
# lvcreate -n wiki -L 1T 5g
Logical volume "wiki" created
# mkfs -t xfs /dev/5g/wiki
[...]
# mount /dev/5g/wiki /mnt

I started the torrents, but so far I'm only getting about 3 MBps. My connection should be able to manage close to 10 MBps, so hopefully that will pick up.

Yes, this is my home file server :)

Sorry, folks, but no Master's in CS is worth $45,000, and certainly not from Georgia Tech when better schools offer the same for half the tuition (Univ. of Texas comes to mind), and regional schools for a quarter of this. This seems to be nothing more than a marketing ploy to show what a good "deal" you could get if you went 100% online while at the same time inflating the quality of the on-campus program at Georgia Tech.

Papers, please.

Every time I hear that, I remember that old Impossible Mission episode where the team is infiltrating a Soviet agent training camp only for the Soviets to start demanding papers - which, as it turns out after the commercial break, is just a training regime to prepare the agents for the American environment where the proper response to that is an angry refusal and demanding to see warrants. Because, after all, that is a very stark difference between the Soviet and American systems.

My, how times change.

Can a nuclear power do anything? Yes, I think we can.

What, exactly speaking? Are you going to nuke Washington? That would be suicide. So what will that "nuclear power" do for you? Nothing whatsoever, unless you're already in World War III.

It works with both vi and emacs.

I dunno. I think typing is a lot like a handjob -- all fingers work a lot better than just two.

If you watch the video, he discusses that. He does about 40-60% of his coding with this system and he does keep voice-strain in mind (in fact, he was sucking on a hard candy during the demonstration to keep his voice from drying out). You may not do 100% of your work in it, but just imagine if you could cut the amount of typing you do down to about half of normal? Suddenly, you're spreading some of the load to your voice, keeping either from being excessively stressed.

I wasn't aware of that (I don't follow Windows development). If what they mean is that they'll release an annual update to the current operating system (ala service packs), then business as usual. If what they're talking about is OSX-style "tiny iterations for a decade", then that sounds awful. It barely works for OSX, because OSX is a pretty decent system (not perfect, by any means, but...). Doing that with Windows 8? Good grief. Essentially, I feel major version releases encourage rolling out new fundamental paradigms that can kick things forward a bit. Annually updating the same OS with point-releases seems like a fantastic way to drag-on a tired or even unwanted paradigm for far longer than would otherwise happen.

Currently, every police car is equipped with facilities to allow the tracking of license plates (cars) of citizens throughout the city.

Strapping cameras to their heads turns every cop into a non-stop surveillance machine in ways that would otherwise be difficult to implement in most cities (ie, throwing cameras up all over the place, UK-style).

It's a pretty sad statement on law-enforcement that they are either so commonly incompetent or corrupt that they and their encounters with the public need to be documented on video.

Have you ever observed the FCC reduce its regulator scope, or has it always been increasing its regulator scope?

Thanks for not accepting reality.