1: Compatible with OpenPGP (except for some reasonable caveats. Not bad.)

2: Some thought in building it, not just slinging a beta for download, wise.

3: Keys stored away from where the bad code can compromise a browser... smart.

So far, this seems to be something that can be useful for one who does use PGP or gpg often.

This is probably similar to how some call all digital audio players, "iPods", or any tablet an iPad. For example, someone looking at a tablet, and telling the clerk they wanted the "Samsung iPad".

Is buying an Android phone a "mistake"? To answer a question with a question, is buying a Ford F-350 over a Dodge 3500 a mistake?

Yesterday's WWDC had a lot of stuff being announced, I'd say one of the more useful announcements was the iCloud storage price drop and the fact that iCloud can be used directly as a drive similar to Dropbox. However, Google Drive has had this functionality for a while, and its price is about the same as Apple's offering.

As for Android being a "mistake", not really. I don't know any tasks that you can do on iOS that can't be done on Android unless it is due to Apple-specific stuff like iMessage. Vice-versa, the main thing Android can do over non-jailbroken iOS are fairly esoteric things like accessing a sshfs volume, something that isn't really an everyday thing for most people.

It really depends on the phone. The HTC phone I bought recently has ROMs available before it officially went on sale. In fact, some unofficial ROMs like CM can have support and updates for a long time after the phone has been discontinued. (I bought the HTC phone because it has plenty of disk space, and it had a MicroSD slot, and with a quick app, the SELinux profile allowed for older apps to work with the external card without issue.)

I wouldn't discount Android just yet. Instead, I'd just be careful what model I buy, and watch features/specs.

If a SD card doesn't matter, a Nexus or GPE (Google Play Experience) device almost certainly will have the ability to unlock the bootloader in the future, so that may be the way to go.

There are a lot of places here in the US, where even basic DSL or cellular service is fairly hard to come by, and if one goes with a conventional satellite provider, it becomes very expensive very fast.

This is something that I have high hopes for... done right, and assuming the uplink/downlink antennas are not too expensive, this would allow a baseline of Internet access in a whole region. Latency is "meh", but it is a lot better than what a lot of places have right now.

I tried my hand at sales once at one company... started telling prospective customers where the product is weak at and where they are going to have to throw man hours in order to get it working. Told them also where the advantage was for spending $BIGNUM for purchasing the product. Also told them the first three support calls they will be making when they start implementing.

Turns out, I gave them the only straight answer of any of the companies they were looking at... and they made the purchase... then found out that IT people didn't get commissions...

Even older setups, MIDI triggers and wiring keyboards and synths to fire off effects come to mind. Troubleshooting is key, and the one iron-clad skill you learn in IT is how to find, isolate, and maybe even solve a problem, especially things like intermittent ground loops.

Other companies in the computer industry, if you are a client, you can sign a NDA (blood optional, but likely asked), and they will hand you a roadmap for the next 3-5 years of where they plan to be with product launches.

Apple, there might be a few companies (like their upstream suppliers) who might get this privilege... but if one has a mid-range business and is trying to time budget issues with a refresh of MacBooks or new iPhones, it is impossible.

It is understandable that this type of stuff is good for the consumer circuit, but Apple should start looking at getting into the enterprise. Consumers are a fickle lot, and with Jobs gone, Cook has done a good job at keeping the legacy going, but Apple may end up in a bind in the next few years. Expand into too many markets, get spread thin. Stay in the same markets and get hammered by shareholders for not "growing".

A decent NAS isn't too expensive. Get a decent enclosure that has a number of 5.25" bays, power supply, a small SSD for the OS, trays for the 5.25" bays that allow hot plugging/unplugging of 2.5" drives, and your OS of choice, and you can have a good capacity with +2 redundancy for under a grand. (You want RAID1 or RAID-Z2 at a minimum these days because RAID-Z can detect bit rot, but can't fix it. RAID-Z2 and higher can not just find bit rot, but can fix it without the use of ditto blocks.)

Another product I've heard very good things about is something called un-RAID. You can add onto the RAID array dynamically, having the largest drive (if they are not all the same size) be dedicated to parity, another drive for write caches, and so on... so when you need more storage, tossing more drives in and hot-adding appears to be easy. Downside is that it is commercial, and I am leery of "magic voodoo" when it comes to RAID.

The income tax really doesn't hurt the top guys. They have their tax havens overseas.

A VAT would be useful, because you can't hide a Maybach like you can some bonds in an offshore account. However, sales taxes are regressive in general, and again, the burden of it would be on the shoulders of people buying basic stuff to survive.

A tax system is a debate into itself. You need a number of factors in it:

1: Some progressive-ness. People just getting by need a bit of help, so it can't just be taxing food, housing and other staples for survival. A percentage point or two on a luxury car might be better than taxing WIC goods.

2: Enforcability. You get to a certain wealth level in the US, you pay $0 in taxes. You don't want a "soak the rich" mentality, but there is always having people pay their fair share. If income taxes could be enforced, it would bring a better share of revenue.

3: Encouragement/discouragement. In some circumstances, it might be better to tax some good heavily rather than outright ban it. On the other hand, it might be better to have no taxes on certain goods in order to get people to go buy it. LED bulbs come to mind as something to encourage people to buy.

The Fair Tax sounds interesting, but it puts the tax burden on the people who can least afford it.

For RV-ing when I need LED bulbs to save the batteries, I end up ordering on eBay from Taiwan or the mainland for about a buck as well. Granted, it takes about 7-10 days to show up... but still. The light bulbs are a buck each with free shipping.

I wonder what I'm missing here because if I want to ship the same bulb to another state, it probably will cost far more than the bulb is worth.

I remember thinking there would be great future in Dallas Semiconductor "one wire" Java buttons, because they could be used to store RSA keys, and so on.

These days, the "one touch" Dallas Semiconductor iButtons seem to be very rare... although they would be nice to have as an alternative to a mechanical keyswitch in some situations.

It depends on use. A criminal could be well off with a small caliber firearm because the threat of the weapon is what he needs more than actual firepower. A legal owner is going to expect that what he has is going to last through thousands of rounds. A crook just needs it to fire a few times, and if it is used for firing, it will be at point-blank range.

I know this is anecdotal, but I'm the same way. A red LED isn't that big an issue, but blue or white? Something has to go completely over it for me to get any sleep, and even then, the secondary scatter is still notable.

Greens can be an issue, especially above a certain brightness.

This. The one thing that TrueCrypt brought to the table wasn't just decent security. It was the plausible deniability aspect of having a hidden volume.

With most programs, they leave breadcrumbs of where data is stored, so if there is an unmounted volume, some rubber hose work can get the data. However, if the volume has someone's pr0n collection (icky, but legal), there isn't much the bad guys can go forward with. They can try to beat the guy with the volume, but in reality, there is no proof anything other than the stuff on the outer volume exists. The breadcrumbs (history in Word, etc.) point to the volume, and it is accessible completely to the attacker.

There is nothing like that out there that is not a commercial program and closed source, except for the implementation of PhonebookFS, where it worked like CFS/EncFS, except one had different views with different passphrases entered, as well as "chaff" so no matter what, there were files that wouldn't decrypt no matter what.

Even more concerning is that both their code signing keys were used. If an Authenticode key got compromised, that is one thing. However, both their gpg and Authenticode keys were used to sign that last release, so it either was a very sophisticated intruder, or the TC Foundation dropped their cards on the table and stopped playing ball for some reason.