Yeah, but the NIST recommendations suggest that 1024-bit keys aren't adequate any more, so it's just good security hygiene to upgrade, even if they're not actually the current weak point, which I agree is almost certainly at the user's end.

I tend to try to give people the benefit of the doubt, because it makes my life better than if I assumed the worst and walked around angry all of the time, but it's nice to get confirmation that the Volt owner most likely wasn't being rude.

I think maybe I'll print up a little sign to leave under my windshield wiper when I'm parked at the airport, explaining how to interpret the lights. Or maybe I can put it over the charging port; that would be even better.

Thanks for the information.

On the Leaf vs Volt access to the charging station, I think the Leaf owners have a point. Charging is optional for the Volt, not so for the Leaf.

Of course, I own a Leaf, and have had the experience of having a Volt owner unplug my car at the airport parking lot, 15 minutes after I plugged in. When I got back from my trip it was questionable if I had enough juice to get home. Well, to be fair, I don't know for sure that it was the Volt owner who unplugged me, but it was a day trip and the charger was plugged into a Volt when I got home in the evening. On the assumption the Volt owner was uninformed rather than rude, I left a nice note explaining that the Leaf does not have a gasoline engine, and how the blue lights on the dash indicate charge state, pointing out that when you see a car with a single blue light flashing, you should probably leave it plugged in.

Who said I (or anyone) needs to judge what constitutes creativity?

It seems like it would just change the design optimization criteria, making spatial distance dramatically between components dramatically more important than it is now. 3D chip design would become crucial, since it enables shorter paths. Of course, moving from flat or shallowly-layered designs to spherical construction would make heat dissipation an even bigger challenge than it is now, and would require completely new fabrication approaches.

Still "We have lots of really complex engineering problems to solve to make this work" is a better place to be than "Damn, we need to change the laws of physics".

Maybe I read slower than you do, but it takes me about two hours. I warn the title company in advance that I am going to read everything and ask questions about anything I don't understand, so they schedule a two-hour block for my closing.

The flaw in your thinking is that the ability to detect creativity matters.

The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.

In this case, some of the robot's paintings are quite artistic... but it's not the robot that selected the subject, captured the right feeling, chose a composition that accented it, etc. What happened here is that the robot reproduced some artistic images that were created by a human. Art? Sure. Robot art? Nope.

In the case of your hypothetical art Turing test, where only the end product is available, sure it's quite likely that we couldn't distinguish between the computer renderings and human work, and we'd call the computer renderings art... but the creator would be whoever provided the computer with the input -- code and/or data. Human-created art in the medium of computer-controlled paintbrush, for example.

He's not talking about root going away, he's talking about reducing the need for it, in order to have much of the freedom provided by a rooted phone without the associated security risks. Whether or not root is available is a separate, and orthogonal question, and he clearly never wants to lose the ability to root, just the need.

Yeah, probably not a good choice for a plastic gun.

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

I think you've got your answer right there.

From a technical perspective, of course, it's not an answer at all, but look at it from the perspective of big media companies: On general-purpose computing devices they have no real say other than deciding if they do or don't want to lock their content out of the devices. Making that choice lowers the value of the devices a little, but it's not like device makers will allow the media industry to drive all their decisions. With media devices, however, which have no value to consumers except to play media, the media companies can choose to render the device nearly useless which puts them in a much stronger bargaining position.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't have any inside information on this issue and don't know anything more about it than any other random geek, and probably less than many. The above is just my idle speculation, and is probably completely wrong. Maybe Google really does want to lock down everything so they can obtain complete control over every computing device in the universe and collect all the data to auction off to the highest bidder while feeding a copy to the NSA in exchange for use of CIA wetwork teams to take out competitors' key employees who refused to be assimilated, as well as any users who complain too loudly about being monetized against their will, and they're just using TV devices as the thin edge of the Control The World wedge -- but suck at it so badly that all the protections can be blown past with a few minutes' tinkering. But I doubt it.)

Fixed that for you.

Though, also, I disagree with your first sentence. The better we understand the use of passwords by larger numbers of real people, the better we can design systems that exploit the strengths of passwords which avoiding their weaknesses -- or perhaps it will motivate us to choose other approaches if it demonstrates that passwords simply do not provide sufficient security.

This is valuable information for people who want to build secure, privacy-preserving systems, which is the complete antithesis of "destroying the whole point of privacy."