From the "Contact Us" page (which, among other things, lists a postal address in an Antarctic research base):

You're right, s/knowledge/artifact/. People have an attachment to the physical objects long after it's become obsolete, which is why I still buy hardcover books in this age encroaching e-books. The novel explores these themes well.

Vernor Vinge's 2006 novel Rainbow's End explained how a library was being digitized by shredding all the books, thus destroying the analog knowledge.

One step closer...

A while back, the Simtec Entropy Key was making the rounds among Debian Devs, and claims to be exploiting quantum effects in the P-N junctions to be a true RNG.

They seem serious and I tend to trust paranoid Debian developers' opinions, but ultimately I don't have enough knowledge myself to make a confident judgment call. I'd be curious about more opinions.

France has a power plant near Givet, which is situated in a "peninsula" of French territory going into Belgium. That's going to be pretty convenient when Belgium needs to buy massive amounts of power from abroad (hint: Belgium is very poorly endowed for hydro/solar/geothermal energy)

"Cuts of this scale will also be accomplished by a Paul Presidency abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels."
Source, his campaign website

I'll scream bloody murder for abolishing the Dept of Education and Energy, but I can see where Ron Paul-supporters are coming from.

As others have commented, Facebook probably has less than 40% active users. But that's not what keeps me on G+.

I use it as a sort of augmented twitter, Following a bunch of science bloggers I find interesting (Shared Circle). It started out as a small list from Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science blogger at BoingBoing, and slowly accumulated more people through recommendations (network effect!).

Nowadays, Facebook is for the silly friends' stuff, but G+ is slowly turning into a major science news source populated by authors I respect.

Perfect illustration of why we're resistant to change. And then some new company comes up with that change embedded in their process, and trounce the old one. Then the cycle repeats.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

My point is that maybe the features that the Kindle Fire is missing aren't worth it for the market they're aiming at. Kind of like the iPod in its day.

I really, really hate what Gigabyte does with their BIOSes, considering their BIOS backed itself up on the end on some of my disks, changed the OS-visible size of the disk using Host Protected Area (HPA), squashing the mdraid metadata that was happily living there.

By the time I understood what was happening, I had had 3 of my 6 RAID disks screwed, as I had swapped the disks around ignorantly thinking it was some controller error.

That feature was not advertised, and that version of the BIOS had a bug where this feature didn't properly detect which disks it could accomplish this on (it only looked for NTFS/VFAT partitions, natch) and could not be disabled. While I can understand the purpose and usefulness of the feature, releasing with such a bug has made me swear off Gigabyte.

For the reference, it was a GA-P35-DS3, with BIOS F12.

Marlinspike's approach, implemented in a Firefox extension presented at DefCon '11, is to do away with the notion of CAs altogether in SSL, replacing it with a distributed network that reports on the certificate they see. Basically, if the certificate you see agrees with the rest of the network, then you're not being spoofed.

He had previously explained the properties a replacement to the CA system had to demonstrate in order to be viable

Moxie Marlinspike, the author of Convergence mentioned in TFA, addressed that very problem in a post. Long story short: a DNSSEC system would worsen the rigidity and centralization of the current CA system.