These guys are asking for the silver bullet to solve any cyber security problem in any system from any threat. The reward:, a measly 20 million.

It's a government contract - you don't actually have to deliver. /snark

But, yeah, for $20M my company could coordinate one hell of a automated crypto system (hardware & software) to layer on top of SCADA gear that would protect it from unauthorized use and of course it would be open source. I can think of a dozen grants that need to happen immediately on various open source networking and crypto software packages to make them better suited for the task. It would not be perfect (it cannot be) but it would be tremendously better than the status quo and it would all be free for deployment on commodity hardware or from an ecosystem of willing cooperators.

The trouble is, the requirements for government contracting self-select for companies that can't even do the paperwork for less than $20M.

management? They work on most meat-based targets

Thar's y'er problem - everybody knows management is entirely made of hot air.

Not that I'm a libertarian (far from it), but I've never really gotten the impression that they hate trademark laws. This is (arguably) a trademark case.

Ron Paul is a minarchist. He believes in government, and thinks he can keep a leash on it. I thought he'd gotten over the Constitutional fetish with his parting speech before Congress, but apparently he still likes IP.

Libertarians have legitimate debates over whether the use of trademarks are matters of Imaginary Property or measures of fraud/not-fraud.

The problem for Ron Paul in this situation, is that there is no fraud accusation here - RonPaul.com is not trying to pretend that it's Ron Paul.

So this is an intellectual property argument. Somebody needs to lock Ron Paul in a room with Stephan Kinsella for a few days until he's gotten over IP. IP infringes on real property rights, which is the foundation of modern libertarianism. The whole issue of the UN is a red herring (yeah, it's hypocritical, which is scandalous, but not the main issue for libertarian objection).

They aren't asking for millions, just a paltry 250K.

I suggested to one of the operators of the site that they host a money bomb. $250K has been less than the first 24 hours of most Ron Paul money bombs.

"Ron Paul needs your help to show him the power of the free market over government solutions." Yeah, I'd be in for $5.

thanks to the magic of psychology-driven Austrian economics, he can just forget about the economic problems before the Fed existed, because they were just so long ago.

Incorrect.

You know, if the government made me pay for a benefit, then I'm damn well going to use it.

They made you pay for somebody else's benefit, not yours. If you demand a benefit, they're just making somebody down the pyramid pay for yours.

That whole schlock about Social Security being a savings or insurance plan was deep-sixed by the Supreme Court more than thirty years ago. It's a tax and spend program, plain and simple (and SCOTUS concurs).

This is almost certainly the result of wanting some latest-and-greatest feature

That's the supposition, but let's hear it - what this feature that's in linux right now that wasn't there a couple years ago that Chrome needs? I guess the next Chromium build will make this clear (and I suspect an easy workaround will be had).

It seems more likely that somebody on the Chrome team got a hair across his ass about Redhat and with the frenetic pace of Chrome releases he was able to convince the whole team that they needed to drop support.

Happy to be proven wrong.

You mean, Mt. Dew wasn't ALREADY a breakfast drink???

If you stay up late enough on it, this becomes a matter of semantics.

What makes you think a federal holiday jacks up prices?

I know the Chinese buffets around here charge dinner prices all day on federal holidays. Price rationing, I suppose, but they're not usually that busy.

But I think the GP probably meant paying workers for not working means the cost of production is incrementally higher. Which might be true for machines.

Why are you so anxious to work more days than any other Western country at any time in history?

Our massive productivity improvements in the 20th Century should be rewarded with more labor and less pay! No, wait, that's not right.

How many systems have you flashed? Thousands?

I'm asking because, while I've probably only flashed hundreds, I haven't had the problems you're having.

Are you flashing from Windows? I always use the DOS flasher because of problems I've seen with Windows flashers (fortunately, man flashers have two banks, and they just hosed one of the two banks, so the DOS flasher could recover).

or the New Zealand Yahoo is not the only one compromised, just the only one to admit it.

Two of my friends on Facebook were talking about spam originating from their Yahoo! accounts yesterday and I received a spam from a third (or, I should say one made it through my spam filter). None of them have any ties to New Zealand, as far as I know.

I smell BS.

Scenario: this part 'failed', the relay was opened, and the power went out. Subsequently the power was restored.

Must be true: Either the relay was reset or the relay was bypassed.

Known fact: The HID lamps they have take 20 minutes for a full reset cycle, and power was out for 35 minutes. Lights could have come back on as soon as 20 minutes into the outage.

Conclusion: the faulty part was identified and handled just under 35 minutes into the power outage.

This all seems reasonable. But...

Now, a week later, they've 'discovered' why the power went out by "tracing the source with testing"? No. What they have is a dispute as to whether the protective relays were properly set. We know both relays were both set to the same settings but the manufacturer is saying that setting was too low and the energy company is dancing around that specific question, but insisting it's not their fault.

The reason for them not to admit to an error seems to be that New Orleans is bidding on the 2018 Superb Owl as well.

Except we've known for years that Bush said that it was both retaliation for the attempted assassination of his father and to ameliorate the risk he perceived to his daughters from the Hussein regime. The rest was just political posturing.

Many flash parts are set up so that if you short two adjacent pins, the flash chip will zero itself out.

Certainly non-trivial, though, and if the parts have any kind of water-proof coating, even more difficult. Once in a while a manufacturer will be kind enough to provide a surface-mount pushbutton momentary switch to make this easier.

It seems unlikely he is strapped for cash

That all depends on what level you set 'strapped' at. It seems likely that he won't be sitting on this money - it's much more likely that he has an investment in mind, probably a new company, with a faster growth rate potential than Google. Google can be completely financially sound and still have a slower growth rate than a risky startup.