oh come on - a white polar bear. but then it's much more likely that if you went to the trouble to setup and build such a silly room in the first place, you could import any kind of bear you wanted with the building materials.

If you're standing on the south pole, it is impossible to walk a mile south. So its gotta be starting on the frozen ice at the north pole.

Oh come on, Westlake probably meant that by describing the accused as a teenager you label him in a way to inspire thoughts of childhood vs adults.

Yes technically 19 is a "teen" age, but anyone accused of crimes that is older than 18 should be described as an adult. I would maybe extend the reasonability of extending the Teenager label to somebody still in high school even if 18 by calendar timing.

I was going to strongly disagree, but I didn't want to hear the Whoooosh of the Parent Post's Sarcasm passing over my head...

At least I hope it is sarcasm, I wouldn't put anything past Comcast
<forced meta-insert by Comcast net> but they are the most customer focused and patriotic company who only deserves further deregulation  </meta-insert>

Yeah Like you'd ever get a bill THAT passed...

Hmm interesting. I was a subscriber many years ago before ad and script blocking technology. Maybe my browser (Chrome) and its plug-ins is the cause or perhaps it's something about the legacy status of my account.

Not really. Even if your derivative work idea was valid and could be used to stop Verizon, they would just update their Terms of Service (TOS) to explicitly have you grant them this right and waive any claims.

Frankly, while i haven't checked, is very likely that their existing TOS grants them the right to make any change to your traffic they see fit, so it's likely that any derivative work would fail on it's face based on your existing contract.

Well I have a free (albeit older) Slashdot account and it doesn't redirect me to http when i follow the https link above.

I think they're just limiting non-logged in access to http, not subscriber (paid) only access.

-Harodotus

Uhm, Make that the last TWO times.

(I don't see how anyone could forget WW1)

I'd always wondered if someone's decryption passphrase was a short description of how he committed a crime like:

"I buried the murder weapon at gps xxx,yyy"

"I had premeditation in committing my illegal acts"

Then it would definitely be self-incriminating to reveal his passphrase, and if forced to, he could get the conviction overturned on appeal.

I'm afraid that your information is out of date, with the progression of Moore's Law, even ROT-39 now fails to today's botnet based distributed key cracking apps, i recommend using 128-bit ROT keys (or even-256 bit ROT keys for super secure data) despite the performance impact requirements.

Using just ROT-128bit (aka ROT-3.40282367e38 or ROT-340,282,367,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) should keep your data secure for years.

I might add the Swartz was charged with 13 felonies, with a maximum sentence of 65 years in felony lockup, effectively life in prison. Murder, even multiple murders, has no more harsh a punishment (except in death penalty states).

You're point is valid, but it's, at best,a Type D "crime" being punished as a type A "the most harsh society can inflict" and might not even be a good civil suit for mild contract violation.

At the risk of admitting to being "whoooshed", i have to wonder if this is sarcasm?

It's wrong in so many ways, i can't even being to start.

Well, it was mainly meant as a tongue-in-cheek dig at the folks in Redmund.

However, while it's not like I've gone to trouble of checking it, it's my understanding that modern password guessing dictionaries are incredibly extensive and have lengthy sections of common key combinations such as single letter repetitions of all acceptable lengths, numeric sequences, and keyboard patterns like qwerty, extended qwerty (qwertyuiop[]\asdfghjkl;'z), as well as many more folks have been dreaming up for decades now.

Of course the webpage is just a local javascript for simple complexity checking, but it's important to remember that it's not really a good simulation of a password's unguessability.

Some "best" password tested results from the Microsoft site:
  - aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
  - 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345
  - qwertyuiop[]\asdfghjkl;'z
  - `1234567890-=qwertyuiop[

I'm thinking they don't do dictionary attacks here...