"Due to their size, atmospheric drag would slow them down..." No. Because their shape creates drag.

...but it's not a safe deposit box. It may actually be more like a storage unit or a bus station rental locker. In both cases, the owner of the container and the police can search at will, and you have no expectations of privacy from them. The only reasonable expectation is that the the owners of other lockers won't get your old sweat sox.

Yes, a wall. And if you listen closely, you can hear the neighbors arguing.

I would bet a small sum that there's a reenactment fan out there somewhere with a collection of these thing, plus a few buggy whips besides.

...I'm suing Fox, NY Times, Washington Post, etc. They've got REAL money.

Mainframes and large multiprocessor machines have been handling multi-billion row data sets on RDBMS systems for a very long time. Data warehouses are commonly into the billions of rows. What commodity clusters provide is not efficiency--they often make poorer use of available cycles and repeat work to achieve goals.

What large commodity clusters provide is a price per cycle low enough that the owner doesn't have to worry about efficiency. For example, Google's Dean and Ghemawat ("MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters") managed to successfully sort 10^10 100-byte records over 891 seconds, or about 6MB sorted per processor per second. Very fast overall, but hardly efficient use of modern hardware. There's an important place for the new big dataset system, but the argument is cost, not efficiency.

...would earn you contempt of court. Just sayin'...

Yeah, I have, and they don't change the fact that exposing information to people that don't need it is just stupid. You can avoid the risks of having your message decrypted or extracted by not exposing it to attack. You can avoid hostile signal analysis by not sending. Often, a recipient doesn't need to know the specific content of a message--just the simple fact that it was sent is useful, potentially damaging information. Ever heard of Tempest? Covert timing channels? Or a combination of both?

...don't broadcast it. "Secrets on the shortwave band" just seems like an oxymoron.

Also, the implications of 'hot pants' are not so positive....

I first used edlin on DOS 1.0 and was kept using it until better alternatives (norton edit, anyone?) appeared. Edlin makes vi seem like a walk in the park. I've used edlin for assembly and Pascal programming, and I say "curse you!" to anyone who jokes about those dark days.

And it is WAY better than losing 100% to the feds.

Doesn't anyone know how to launder money any more? Steal way more money than you need, run it through some partially legitimate business, take part of it as profit from the business, but be able to keep the remaining result in a bank. Crooks these days....

The problem with this sort of "everybody's evil" perspective is that it doesn't provide any constructive guidance. It just drives people toward cynicism and more complaining. OK, neither country is perfect, but what do we do now?

And the word 'authentic' in the headline means what, exactly?