How is even a malicious javascript code on one web page going to see the the content of a page that I have manuallly opened up in an entirely separate window?

It can't, but it can load that same page's URL in an iframe, and it will contain the same confidential information. Browsers try to prevent pages from reading the contents of cross-domain iframes, which is extremely difficult to do in a completely airtight manner. A much better solution would be not sending cookies on cross-domain requests and thus making it impossible for one site to load the secrets a different site is storing for you, but so far everybody is focused on treating the symptoms and not the disease.

This is the ITU, the same geniuses behind the "leap second" that crashed computer systems all over the world last June (because god forbid our clocks should ever be out of synch with the Earth's rotation by more than one second - never mind that given the way time zones are set up, many places are off by over an hour anyway). I'd be surprised if they even know what a patent is let alone why it's a bad thing to have on a standardized file format.

From the linked atariage.com post:

Press the fire button to jump.
Press Up to run and to shoot fireballs if you are FireMario.

The hosts file can only be modified by administrators. Any additional protection is useless because if malware has gotten itself running as administrator, it can just kill or modify windows defender anyway.

The designers of Java tried to do two things regarding security:
1. allow running untrusted code (applets) without letting it break out of its sandbox
2. prevent unsafe memory access by bounds checking, type checking on casts, no explicit deallocation

#2 is a prerequisite for #1, since if code can write to arbitrary memory locations then it can take over the Java runtime process. However, #1 is not a prerequisite for #2. Java has in practice done poorly at meeting goal #1 but has been quite solid at #2.

Finding a security vulnerability is not "making viruses". Would you prefer that this be first discovered by someone who's not so nice as to disclose their findings, so that insulin pumps just start mysteriously "malfunctioning" and killing patients?

Regardless of what you may think of the quality of McAfee's software, they're not being anything besides white-hat here.

That could have been believable back in the DOS days, when most viruses seemed to have no real purpose besides amusement, but today the vast majority of malware is written for profit. Selling antivirus software would be counterproductive if you're making a lot more money from owning a botnet and the antivirus would eat into that.

From the summary:

It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration

Your "small-government" Republicans are just as much on board with this as the "big-government" Democrats.

So-called "democracy" as it exists in countries like the US is a complete sham. The government can act against the public interest on literally every single issue and still stay in power: any individual is only going to be knowledgeable about a small fraction of what the government does, and a majority of people will just take the media's word for it that they're doing right on most everything else.

The only issues on which the public actually has any influence are those which our rulers recognize to be of relatively minor importance, so the parties can put on a show of virulently disagreeing on them, which makes people feel like they're actually making a difference when they throw out corporate-owned party A and put into power corporate-owned party B. On the most important issues, there's always bipartisan agreement on the wrong side.

TCP port numbers are unencrypted so a serious attacker will be able to find out your sequence anyway. All you're doing is wasting your own time by making legitimate connections take longer.

Only garbage websites don't work properly without javascript

I agree. But unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies - 90% of websites are garbage, so if you want to use the web you'll have to go "dumpster diving" (enabling JS) a lot.

I used to think of Flash as a CPU hog, but it pales in comparison to Javascript/HTML5. Even simple 2D games in Javascript will run at about 3 frames per second despite constantly using 100% CPU, and they often hog memory too (which Flash has never been all that bad about in my experience, unless you leave a dozen YouTube tabs open or something).

Annoying ads won't go away just because Flash does; they'll move to HTML5 and will be just as annoying, more resource hungry, and harder to block (disabling Javascript everywhere makes the Web unusable; a whitelist system like NoScript is going to be a necessity).

Are judges and jury members more likely to need organ transplants than anyone else? If not, it makes no sense to say there's a perverse incentive for them to order more executions; they have no more interest in it than the rest of the public does.

WebM supporters: Free Software Foundation, Participatory Culture Foundation, Xiph, Android, Codecian, Collabora, CoreCodec, Digital Rapids, FFmpeg, Adobe Flash Player, Flumotion Services, Google Chrome, Grab Networks, iLink, Inlet Technologies, Oracle Java, Matroska, Moovida, Mozilla, ooVoo, Opera, Oracle, Harmonic Rhozet, Skype, SightSpeed, Sorenson, Telestream, Tixeo, Ucentrik, VideoLAN, Wildform, Winamp Media Player, Wowza Media Server, XBMC Media Center, Allwinner Tech, AMD, Anyka, ARM, Broadcom, Chinachip, Chips&Media, C2 Microsystems, DSP Group, Freescale, GeneralPlus, Hisilicon, Hydra Control Freak, Imagination Technologies, Shanghai InfoTM Microelectronics, Leadcore Technology, Logitech, Marvell, MIPS, MStar Semiconductor, nVidia, Qualcomm, Rockchip Microelectronics, RayComm Group, SEUIC, Socle Technology Corp., ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Verisilicon, Videantis, ViewCast, ZiiLABS, ZTE Corporation, Anevia, Brightcove, Delve Networks, Encoding.com, EntropyWave, Flumotion Services, HD Cloud, HeyWatch.com, Kaltura, Media Core, MetaCDN, ooyala, Panda, Panvidea, Sorenson 360, thePlatform, VideoRX.com, VMIX, YouTube, Zencoder

Sure there is: e^(tau * i) + 0 = 1.

Hey, it's really not any more ridiculous than "... + 1 = 0".