Completely irrelevant until the moment (could be days, could be months, could be never) someone develops an easy-to-use, effective way to exploit these flaws. Then, run for the hills.

For now they're hard to use, apply only in specific scenarios and aren't able to easily extract anything useful.

I'd prefer every chip maker developed their chips with security in mind by default - and MAYBE allowing the people that really knows what they're doing to disable that security for some extra performance.

I'd say that following your line of reasoning you won't buy anything - ever.

MY line of thought is "buy the best your budget allows". Since my budget (home, work, friends, friends-of-friends, etc - I recommend things to many people) is rarely that large, it always gets me (or them) a decent machine that lasts several years.

Sometimes it is Intel, sometimes AMD, for GPUs usually NVidia, but sometimes AMD because cheap, etc.

Oh, and learn to not worry about the next "shiny" thing that will, inevitably, come one week after my purchase.

That is, assuming your parents will let you keep living with them at this age, and assuming they'll let you keep all of your earnings (house expenses you know). That said, if they agree, I believe living with parents (but working to start a carreer soundly without too much debt) is a very sensible strategy.

You do not "waste" tons of money paying rent, full maintenance costs (electricity, etc), do not have to buy/finance lots of appliances and a zillions small things that are needed to fully equip a house, that are cheap when taken individually, but collectivelly they cost a lot.

I had the luck of being in agreement with my parents about these issues and got to live with them until my late 20s. When I moved, I had saved so much money that the house I purchased was paid almost entirely upfront, and I started with a mortgage that was less than 10% than my earnings at the time (after taxes). Had I chosen to not do some restoration/redecoration work, I would've paid it ALL upfront, no debt at all.

Also, I believe housing's first and foremost functions is to live within and NOT as an investment. You need a ceiling above your head _before_ you need "investments". Granted, houses _can_ be a nice and sound form of investment, but I think of them first as a place to live and then as investment. The related conclusion is that I'd _never_ compromise or risk the safety of having a place to live because of investment opportunities, nor ever risk it by being so much deep into debt that the loss of a job could push me into a foreclosure or such.

Here in Brazil, more than a few thousand ATMs were exploded in the last years. Using ordinary explosives, and in many cases, demolishing the entire building in the process.

Many times, it destroys the money completely in the process, but as it seems, usually enough remains that the practice continues. No need to be refined, using gas or thinking about the physics. The thieves sometimes hijack trucks and buses to close off the streets for a few minutes while others set up and detonate the ATMs. The police rarely has time to come to the scene and jail them. Also, sometimes, the police itself is involved.

The most effective measure taken to discourage the practice was to pack bags of dyes inside the ATM cassetes, so that the money is stained and rendered unusable. If you try to deposit stained money, it'll be confiscated on the spot.

In the last months, security measures got better in the larger cities, and the thieves moved to exploding the ATMs in smaller cities, or more remote locations in the suburbs.

When I said "another Sandy" I wanted to say another storm with a similar path, at a similar time, with similar destructive power, etc.

... when another Sandy hits next year (or the next)? I think we are all seeing too many "one-in-x years" climate-related events (where "x" is 50, 100 or 700 years) lately!

There is an excellent book by Cory Doctorow, of course a scientific fiction book, about a society where people simply doesn't die out.

Two small quotes from it:

"I lived enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages [...] to see the death of the workplace and of work"

and

"... the death of scarcity, the death of death, the struggle to rejug an economy thad had grown up focused on nothing but scarcity and death ..."

In the end, if people get living more and more, we'll have sometime to abandon most concepts that are tied to a (finite, short) lifespan. How it'll be done, for now, is the work of fiction. I recommend this book to anyone that could be interested in a radically different view on the society where no people die unless they choose to.