Maybe the Kinect can be programmed to identify your age by the onion on your belt (as that was the style of the time) and automatically, for example, increase the font size on your screen. Stuff like that.

It's not as fast as /dev/null. Does /dev/null support sharding yet?

I think he means that they had the patch, or at least solid plans for how to do it, in place already. They pulled the trigger pretty fast after E3.

But that's what I don't get. Why all the hate for Microsoft doing exactly what was asked; listening to the customer base, and making changes? Microsoft is still in business because they've surprisingly agile for a large company, always have been. They've never had an issue turning 180 on a dime when warranted.

They tried something, consumers complained, they kept trying to push it, consumers declined, so they changed strategies. Why is this a bad thing?

Enuf said.

Fine. Then that's the answer. Not 'Can't be done,' but 'Sure, but here's the following caveats:'

What does A+ even involve these days? Not like you're setting IRQ and DMA slots to get your sound card to play nice, or optimizing the loadhigh entries in your autoexec.bat file, or getting your mscdex driver to work along side your memory extender.

So by refusing them access to the volumes and for refusing to hand over the passwords to the volumes AFTER one has been opened he is acting guilty and by that act assuming ownership of the material.

Wow. Just, wow.

A warrant does not compel you to let the police into your house to search; it allows the police into your house to search. You don't have to open the door, they'll bust it down.

Well, they can search your encryption all they want, if they can break it.

Even if the police know for a damn fact there's illegal materials in the encrypted volume, requiring him to unlock the volume is tantamount to requiring him to acknowledge ownership of the volume, which is self-incrimination.

"Is this your drive?"
"Fif."
"Unlock the drive."
"Okyday, here's the password."
"How would you know the password if it wasn't your drive?"
"Fif."
"Too late."

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.

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.