"You fail again in your understanding of the issue. The issue is that ISPs are hiring a company to do deep packet inspection to spy on a user's browsing habits. Adblock plus cannot help with this issue."

This is the part that scares the hell out of me. I use a number of addons to stop websites from tracking me (Ghostery, AdBock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, etc.). But DPI is horrfying, and I don't understand why it's legal. The postal service isn't allowed to open our mail and read our letters. It's a felony for anyone to tamper with your mail at all. So why should ISPs be allowed to inspect our packets? It's no different.

This is why you need to use non-logging VPNs and TOR. Don't giver your ISP an opportunity to inspect your packets. Plus, for the love of FSM, DO NOT use your ISPs DNS servers, or your ISPs email.

This is the bit I don't understand. What makes ARM so inherrently different that it must be locked down? Why is MSFT pushing lockdown on ARM, with both software installation and UEFI restrictions? Why is it any different than x86/64?

It's not, in any way at all. MSFT is creating a false dichotmy so consumers will continue to think of ARM and other mobile devices as appliances that you have no control over, instead of the general purpose computers that they actually are. The last thing Apple and MSFT want is consumers realizing that tablets and smartphones are just as much computers as your desktop and laptop. They want people to see mobile devices differently so they can control them.

Gibberbot is an XMPP/Jabber client for Android that also supports OTR messaging.

If you were doing MAC filtering on an open network, then I could see how it might be possible to monitor for MACs (why one would have a ridiculous setup like that is beyond me). But if the network is secured with say WPA2, how would you be able to monitor it to get the MACs?

I think all consumer level routers should be secured by default and give big scary warnings if you try to turn it off (it shouldn't stop you, but it should make you well aware of the dangers). There should also be no WEP or WPA. WPA2+AES only. Consumer level routers don't need RADIUS or 802.1x. I know some ISPs who provide routers secure them by default, but a great many of them use WEP.

The AP setup for the non-technical person on a consumer level router should ask:
1) What do you want to call your wireless network?
2) What do you want your password to be (must be at least 8 characters, and contain a lower case, upper case, number, special character, and cannot contain the name of your network).
3) Done.

It also should not give you the option to turn off security during the setup wizard. That should be a well-guarded setting that takes work to find, but once again, shouldn't be impossible to do if the user chose.

Leaving an AP open is too dangerous. Non-technial people don't know any better, and technical people are able to make informed decisions.

Couple of seconds.

I've heard this one a lot, but I don't understand. Why is MAC filtering bad? I get that MACs can be spoofed. But if someone can't get into the router to see which MACs are allowed, how would spoofing work anyway?

WEP should be removed from routers as an option. it should either be open, or WPA2. WEP is 10 years out of date and cracakable in seconds. WPA was only ever meant to be a stop-gap until WPA2 was completed.

My Nexus S is rooted and running cyanogenmod and Netflix works just fine and dandy.

I used to feel the same way. But no one makes netbooks anymore. I've seen Acer Aspire One's in stores, but that's it. Browsing on the web to find older ones gets you prices where you might as well buy a full sized laptop.

I agree with this completely. I've had absolutely no luck at all with Dell's offerings. HP's laptops have been total crap for ages. And everything else just feels like bottom-of-the-barrel consumer grade options. Lenovo's ThinkPads are one of the most consistently amazing machines out there.

Precisely. This is the problem. No one wants to do what they enjoy, just for the sake of it. Everyone is just chasing money. To so many people, music is just another get rich quick scheme. They think they can cut a few tracks, get discovered, get a record deal, and make millions.But it doesn't work that way.

The current state of pop music is a bunch of pretty faces who can look good on magazine covers and on the red carpet. It doesn't matter if they can sing or not. They don't write their music, they don't write their lyrics. They're given the lyrics, put in front of a mic and told to sing. They auto-tune them so they actually sound good and then the record labels cash in.

It's sad to see art become a money game. It destroys everything art is. If you're not doing what to do because you love it and because you feel a deep desire to create something amazing, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Art isn't a clock punching cash machine. If that's what someone wants, then, like you said, they should do something else.

The thing is, the old model is nearly dead. There are not going to be "rock stars" and big record company profits anymore. Those days are done. And it's a good thing. The record companies kept a strangle hold on the distribution of music for decades. They used that hold to make millions of dollars and made it look like they were a good thing for artists. But they aren't. And their hold is now broken. But instead of trying to adapt, the labels are taking more and more money from the artists.

Are we going to see millionaire musicians anymore? Absolutely not. Those days are done. But is music dead? Certainly not. But the record labels are no longer needed. An artists can make it on their own. Will they make the same money? No. But this is the point: yes it's less money than before, but it's either that or nothing. The old days are gone and people are going to have to accept it. But it's good because now the artists will own their own creations and can sell directly to the fans and keep all of the profits.

A large number of my clients are medical offices/facilities that I've been working with for years. Right now, the biggest push is electronic medical records. And let me tell you, it's a nightmare. All of the doctors that I work with are computer illiterate and have no desire to work with computers. But when you go with an EMR system, you're using computers front to back, for every single task. And they balk. It diminishes patient care because the doctors are more worried about making typos and clicking the right boxes, rather than paying attention to the patients. The EMR that the doctors wanted deployed at one particular office required a specific Toshiba tablet for the doctors to use. These things were $2,500 tablets,. And they stopped using them after a month. They hated them because, well firstly they're terrible tablets, and secondly the doctors have no idea how to use a computer. Computer illiteracy in the medical field is a very big problem. Medical workers especially are going to have to become more knowledgeable about computers. They're going to have to be more flexible, and they're going to have to be able to adapt. If you can send an email in Outlook, you can send an email in Thunderbird. Look for "Inbox" to see your messages, look for "Compose" or "Write" or something like that to write a message. It's not difficult. Same with word processors. If you know the basics of one, just look for those things in the other. They're there. With medical increasingly becoming an electronic only field, medical employees (including doctors) are going to have to learn how to adapt.

But not only is computer literacy a problem, but EMR companies are the epitome of vendor lock-in and control. They specialize in holding back features and charging you $10,000 for implementing something incredibly simple and common sense. Data portability is also nearly non-existent. Even with HL7, interacting with other EMRs (and Odin forbid you have to interact with another office or provider), it's still a mess.

The medical field is a mess. The promise of EMR is not being realized. Greed has already destroyed everything good that EMR was supposed usher in, and has instead made a complete and total disaster of the industry. There is no data portability. There is no go-to-one-doctor-and-have-records-easily-transferred-to-another. That's the last thing EMR developers want. Not to mention that everything is harder, slower, and prone to failure. If the power goes out, or the server is down, or if your internet connection is down (a problem with cloud-based EMRs) then you're nearly dead in the water. An office can't function anymore without these things.

Precisely. I recently built a network for a surgical center. The owners wanted to keep costs down as much as they could, so i setup LibreOffice and Thunderbird for the users. Every single person there went nuts, calling me, yelling at me, yelling at the owners, wanting "the regular email program", meaning Outlook. Even though Thunderbird is, IMO, far easier to use than outlook, they apparently had no idea whatsoever how to use Thunderbird, even after I tought everyone how to use it. So we had to spend hundreds more dollars to supply each user with a copy of MS Office. User preference is a big deal. Of course, this office is the most computer illiterate bunch of people I have ever encountered in my entire life. So a different crowd might be more welcoming to applications that aren't from Microsoft.