Encrypting and decrypting are fundamentally the same operation, so whatever you say about one applies to the other as well.

Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

Who get's the $10 tip?

Volvo's new tiered purchase plan: and would you like tires with that? What about brakes? An engine?

Rote memorization is very important and is seriously undervalued. Try learning an instrument or a sport w/o rote memorization. Memorizing, and developing the capacity to memorize is important. We need more rote memorization, not less.

Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations? It's so dumb to have to search for a airplane to find the data, that should be the fallback plan. Hey FAA, you listening?

Actually, this raises a more interesting question (at least to me) which your little thought experiment approaches. What if my autonomous car decides that the action to take that is likely to cause the least harm is to kill the driver? For example, what if the car has the opportunity to swerve off the side of a mountain road and drop you 1000 feet onto some rocks to avoid a crash that would have killed far more people than simply you? Is my autonomous car required to act in my own best interest, or should it act in the best interests of everyone on the road?

I imagine that when we have really screwd the climate for us, we will have to come up with genetically engineered human beings that will drive heavily modified cars that are working OK when it's 60C.