It's not clear to me how that takes into consideration the vastly different security needs for different organizations, settings, and assets.

The way to prevent florida schools from installing retina scanners is for florida to pass a law saying that retina scanning without prior consent is illegal in public places. Simple as that.

Interesting work, and I appreciate the desire to build homes on the cheap.

However, I'd like you to read the work of Christopher Alexander, if you haven't (The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, etc).

Summary: optimizing homes and buildings towards what is efficient to mass produce isn't necessarily what's best for the people who live and work in them.

IMO, this is a terrible place for the feds to get involved. What is appropriate for middle schools in urban high-crime areas is not appropriate for elementary schools in rural North Dakota.

School violence is not historically higher now than it has ever been, and overall violence in the US is at an all-time low.

The centralization of education has been uniformly terrible for the US.

I never saw that. I saw the CDF SF troops portrayed as children, sure, but other than occasional references to previous careers, the old troops weren't portrayed as having bountiful wisdom or experience. Quite the opposite, in fact. Take, for example, the CDF rook who was a senator in real life, who hadn't learned shit.

Sole reason? No. Important reason? Yes. And it's not like he was an isolated case; Copernicus and Gallileo come rather forcefully to mind.

I enjoyed the entire series, but I also couldn't help but noticing that the 'old man' part was dropped even before the recruits got to basic. That plot point could have been left entirely out, and the entire last 3/4ths of the book would have required zero re-writing.

Lest we forget, Giordano Bruno was executed by the Catholic Church for daring to postulate that there might be life out in the universe.

I'd not be surprised at all if the discovery of alien life sparked a crusade/jihad/whatever or two.

Unless this was some special partnership, then Facebook will have a contract with a clearly stated MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity).

If they cannot make that commitment to purchase from HTC the amount stated then HTC will charge them to get out of the contract. This will be broken down into costs for the handsets already produced and unsold, materials already bought and some additional fee for lost revenue on the rest.

In short, HTC will be okay (they'll even make a bit of profit, although not as much as if the phone had been a success) however it will be Facebook who will be left with one expensive bill.

(been there and, sadly, done that)

Guns are constructive and pro-peace. People who think otherwise may not have the perspective of ever living in fear or under oppression.

Human nature exists; there are people that for, whatever reason, have poor impulse control, no ethics -- whatever. There are humans who are prone to preying on those whom they feel are weaker.

In the past, the law of nature was simple: the stronger prevailed over the weaker. The youth prevailed over the old. The men subjugated the women.

Ruthlessness, strength, youth, aggressiveness... these things decided the outcome of most human interactions, for most of human history.

The gun changed that.

Put a handgun (or preferably, a carbine) into the hands of both of them, and a 90 year old grandmother can now have a meaningful conflict with an 18 year old 300lb musclehead. The conclusion is no longer foregone. And the musclehead knows it.

Arm the common goodfolks in society, and total violence decreases. Data supports this conclusion.

(to say nothing of the _moral_ imperative that honest people not be denied the use of arms)

The bottom line is this: arming good people reduces the aggregate amount of evil in the world. It turns the history of victimization on its head. The number of bad people who are "more effective" at being evil because of _their_ use of firearms doesn't compare to the amount of good that results from arming the good guys and thereby preventing more victimization, both in better outcomes when victimization is attempted, and from "herd immunity" because thugs are less inclined to attack people who will be harder marks.

Finally, the article summary is especially ignorant for implicating that Ghandi wouldn't 3d print guns.

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. If we want the Arms Act to be repealed, if we want to learn the use of arms, here is a golden opportunity. If the middle classes render voluntary help to Government in the hour of its trial, distrust will disappear, and the ban on possessing arms will be withdrawn."

Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Chapter XXVII, Recruiting Campaign, Page 403, Dover paperback edition, 1983. This book was originally published by Public Affairs Press in 1948.

You could accomplish the same thing by having Alice's pad contain half of the full OTP, only the odd numbers, and Eve having only the even numbers.

Even better, use a third person with a third OTP to determine if the next sequence goes to Alice or Eve (i.e. Bob's pad is a string of numbers; if the number is odd, the next digit comes from Alice's pad, if even, Eve's pad.)

The pads are randomly generated, not random. Each pad needs to be longer than your message. No part of the pad is ever reused; if you have the first half of a pad, you can decrypt anything encrypted with that half, but it tells you absolutely nothing about the second half of the pad, because it's all random, not an algorithm. If you have the cleartext, you could not reverse-engineer the pad from it, and even if you could, you couldn't use that to determine the rest of the pad.

Here's how it works.

You generate a random pad. In the old days, when the term originated, it was literally a pad of paper with random letters.

The sender and receiver must have identical copies of each pad. For example, lets say you generate a pad for each day of a year, and distribute a copy to each embassy. So each pad has a master number, 1 through 365, and each embassy has it's own in that series.

Each and every one of those copies must be physically secure. If they are, the communications are unbreakable. If they are not, the communications are not.

In the above example, each day's pad might be on, in this day and age, a secure USB key, shink wrapped, with anti-tamper foil. If, in daily inspection, any key is missing, appears to have been altered in any way, the shrink wrap scratched or warped, whatever, every embassy is immediately directed to burn their copy of that pad. Once the pad is used, or at the end of the day, each copy is burned to prevent accidental reuse.

It's part of a cryptographic system, not a complete methodology in and of itself. And it's no different than the idea that, say, public/private key encryption is secure until you misplace your private key.

One of my personal favourites was one that took digital pictures of four different colored lava-lamps and used that to generate the random stream.

And before Blu-ray drives got fast enough to keep up with the rest of the system.

Google, Amazon and Apple are like those people who turn up to a "bring a bottle" party with a litre of supermarket own brand cola and then proceed to drink the Wyborowa vodka and Hendricks gin all night. They may upset a lot of people, but they've not technically broken any rules.

If governments feel that companies (that follow their rules) still manage to pay too little tax - then the onus should be on the government to change them. Anything else they do is just blowing hot air.

I've seen the same. I've even had iTunes 11 with current quicktime flat-out refuse to play a video as my 'computer is too slow, but WMP, VLC, ANY other program will play it without a hitch.

For reference, Apple claims an i7-3770 quad-core 3.4 ghz machine with GTX660 SLI and 32 gigs of ram can't play a file that an iPad will play fine.