I am not in the US, so I do not know the whole story, but I agree with you. Giving benefits to certain customers spending more does not sound outrageous to me. I do not understand why all the negatives.

Sir, should I ever need a lawyer I will make sure to contact you. Yours, The Devil

On a SIM Card you have a real OS, which runs several applications. One of these happens to be the USIM application which does the authentication to the network and handles the file system containing configuration files, primitive databases (SMS, Addressbook), etc. Applications can be native or Javacard based depending on the card. You can install new applications (or delete them) on the SIM card by SMS or IP-based connections if you have the needed keys. The mobile network operators do this to provide additional services to their clients. Heck they even have a sort of GUI Toolkit to build menus and simple dialogs. On most phones you can find the SIM Menu if you look for it to see some examples of this.

This. Prison is an abused form of punishment which we for whatever reason perceive as normal. Actually prison is absolutely inhumane and ofter disproportionate punishment to most kind of crimes. I also doubt that someone comes back from prison less dangerous then they entered. I mean being in a closed space with only criminals and (sometimes violent) cops is not something that makes you turn to the good side, quite the opposite.

Economic punishment for all kinds of economic crimes makes much more sense, and it must be proportionate too. Heck, physical punishment is more humane if it does not leave permanent scars/disabilities and probably more effective, too.

Yandex.Browser is what I use. It is Chromium based, but has some features from Opera. If you go to the Extensions tab you already find a good Adblocker which you just need to activate and you can configure it to block plugins (like Flash). You can then activate Flash selectively (either on a one-off basis or permanently for a domain).

I am a native Italian speaker, but speak Russian, German and English daily. German is by no means the best language when it comes to being both precise and concise. The cup for that goes to Russian hands down. Both Germans and Russians express themselves very clearly and unambiguously (well, when they need to) but Russian sentences are shorter on average. Italian, on the other hand, is either ambiguous (relies on context a lot) or very verbose if you cannot allow yourself to be misunderstood.

Regarding how it sounds, German is terrible but at least is generally easier to understand than English for a foreigner (some Americans seem to have a damn frog in their throat). Unless you made the mistake to speak to an old Bayern, then you might as well pretend to be deaf. Italian is generally pleasant (even the dialects) and Russian can be very pleasant, if spoken by a well educated person, or extremely rude and unpleasant if spoken by a gopnik.

Or to release it under public domain.

In your majestic plan you forgot to mention how the hell is Microsoft going to force everyone to buy Surface laptops and PCs... they would have done that already if they could.

Try Yandex.Browser. It's based on Chromium, comes with an ad blocker and is snappier than Safari. I switched to that from Safari and never looked back. In settings you can set Google as default search engine if you do not like Yandex search (I don't).

But since the topic at hand has nothing to do with rape, let's get stop with unfitting analogies. A company that is offering HOSTING must take have a solid backup plan and security policies in place. Otherwise, even if the criminal who attacked them is solely responsible for the act, the attacked company is 100% responsible in front of their clients, just as it should be.

In the business world being totally incompetent to offer the service you want to offer is not justified. It has nothing to do with rape, burglary or anything else, really.

SmartCards actually mostly rely on symmetric algorithms for most applications. The only commonly used public key algorithm is RSA, which is not based on discrete logarithm. This leaves DSA, among the relatively common algorithms, but that is rarely used on SmartCards. What would be interesting to know, is how EC-DSA is affected, since it is slowly replacing RSA because of the reduced key size.

In principle, yes. But $32m? This means ruining this person's life forever, and all because he uploaded some sport shows. Sorry no, murderers have it easier, fraudsters (especially very big ones) have it much much easier, etc. Uploading shows, well it is somehow wrong, but it shouldn't cost you your life.

You know what emits a lot of infrared light? The sun. Nobody ever complained (if ever, we can "complain" about the emitted UV light).

Actually try this: take welder googles (not mask), remove the lenses and replace them with stacked sheets of red and blue light filter (Rosco was the brand I used). This will block almost all visible light but let near-infrared come through. Wear these glasses in bright daylight, just never ever stare at the sun, really just don't. However, the result is, that you will see in the near-IR spectrum. Your rods/cones are not very sensible to this frequencies, so it must be a bright sunny day, but it works.

Just don't look at the sun directly, while your pupils are completely open, you would burn your retina pretty quickly.

...what are the alternatives? Rolling your own crypto won't work well. Unfortunately answers to this question can only be speculation. I wouldn't be extremely paranoid, but still it depends what you are trying to protect.

For Mac it is quite unlikely, since all the standard directories are english only. They just happen to have file named ".localized" in them, and the Finder (but not "ls") will show their localized name. I find this to be actually a pretty good approach since you can change language at any moment and system-created folders will also magically get a localized name. To have the application fail if the locale is not english under Mac OS X you really need to go out of your way and do something contrived and stupid I guess. May DRM?