Stockfish is only slightly weaker, and is open source.

What's the point of closed source chess engines when a lot of engines are already far stronger than humans? Who's going to pay the money for a closed-source chess engine? Idiots? A grandmaster may want it to study its playing "style", and chess algorithm researchers might want it to study it, and other chess engine designers might want it to reverse engineer it, but there's no practical reason for even a strong chess player to buy chess engines anymore.

FIDO alliance 2-factor hardware tokens, like YubiKey Neo.

Until browsers roll out FIDO protocol support, a mobile app with normal OATH TOTP 2-factor (implementations include Authy, Duo Mobile, Google Authenticator, etc) is the way to go. And use a password manager for the 1st factor. When support gets baked in, the FIDO serviceclienthardware token protocol will dramatically improve usability of the 2nd factor.

Hi! I'm your Slashdot assistant! I see you have misused the word "advise".
"Advise" is a verb. You advise someone on some subject matter.
"Advice" is a noun. You give someone advice.

Except that it does work for some purposes in some cases, as long as you're not expecting it to be a literal "truth serum".

Anything that suppresses higher brain function will make someone more likely to self-incriminate. Anybody who has been to a party with alcohol knows this. It might also cause someone to make stuff up or engage in embarrassing behavior, but that's not the same as "truth serum doesn't work at all."

Or you could look at a 1-2 year reinstall cycle as a positive: it's an opportunity to test and optimize your backup strategy, since desktop users rarely do that. You do keep backups, right?

20GB is not enough.

A fairly clean Windows 7 Pro VM I have (basic Word/Excel/Outlook/PP office, firefox, chrome, acrobat reader) takes up over 20G, mainly because of winsxs.

I don't do much with that VM. IOW, it's not pristine, but it's a lot cleaner than most win7 systems.

Windirstat reports 22.9GB in C:\windows with 13GB of that in C:\windows\winsxs

Some of that might be ntfs's equivalent of symlinks, but properties on C: reports 24.1GB used, 4.5GB free (I need to resize the VM disk eventually). I don't believe the C: space usage is a lie, even if C:\windows is slightly overreported by windirstat.

People do not live in a vacuum. People who believe in imaginary friends and believe those imaginary friends have sent facts and instructions for how to live, usually want to make everyone else believe those facts and live according to those instructions.

evolution, or lack thereof
foreign policy with countries dominated by other religions
the legal status of a fertilized embryo - stem cell research and abortion
contraception, sex education
porn
many other social policies

Salts, which are mandatory for good password storage, torpedo your idea. Sorry. Passwords stored without salts are vulnerable to rainbow table attacks.

"It is always possible to recover a password."

This is not true. If a password has more entropy than the hash being used, there will be collisions that make it impossible to tell what the original password is.

This is a basic consequence of the fact that hash functions are irreversible and have fixed size. If you consider the space of all passwords of any length, there are infinitely many passwords (even if you limit passwords to those made of long strings of english words) that hash to a particular value.

For the vast majority of passwords in use, the entropy is lower than the entropy of the hash, so it's feasible to construct mappings of possible passwords to hashes and determine the most likely password that way. It is not *always* possible to recover a password, however.

Doesn't matter if you're not for it, you're getting subsidized anyway.

No health insurance company has an insurance class for vegans or paleo dieters who do 30+ minutes of cardio a day, because until there are cheap tech means of measuring compliance, implementing that would cause the insurers to hemorrhage profits due to cheaters claiming healthy habits, getting the discount, then having diabetes/etc when they eat sugar 24/7 and don't exercise.

The Ins companies tend to only screen for pathological conditions, so trying to be healthy has negligible immediate monetary benefit over being average or slightly below average.

I strongly believe that society needs to tackle the problem of convincing people to be healthy first, THEN move to a public healthcare system (for-profit insurers making money off of people's need/desire to be covered against catastrophic medical problems doesn't seem ethical to me).

Goes to credibility, your honor.

You think that cops should be allowed to detain you (you're placed under temporary arrest during a traffic stop) merely to give you helpful health and safety information?

Ghost in the Shell manga. You can find scans of the whole thing.

I thought all states technically require that.

However, it's unenforceable in most cases, so the only cases where someone usually pays it are:
a) They're a goodie-two-shoes.
b) They itemize the purchase when reporting to government. For instance, itemizing something to deduct it from taxes, without paying a use tax, could theoretically be noticed by the State.