I'm still waiting for an "Ask Slashdot: Once Slashdot beta has been foisted on me, what site should I use instead". I'm only partially joking. I actually want to know the answer.
I loathe to say this but, HTTPS Everywhere is security theater. It makes your browser have a green icon where it otherwise might not but, that green icon is just an illusion of security. Considering recent revelations about the NSA, I would assume all SSL certificates are compromised. Like, literally, all of them. If the trust chain has been compromised by one party (the NSA), I would assume it compromised by all parties.
Well, nowhere in the glowing reviews did I see that it would also bring back my dog so, country music still has its place.
I will admit that I was skeptical that a piece of software could cure my cancer, bring back my wife and prevent me from beating my daughter but, based on dozens of posts on Slashdot, I'm willing to give it a try.
Some of the big companies that are going to be essentially extorted money can actually prevent this from happening. If Google/Facebook/etc tell AT&T, "That's fine, we'll pay your extortion money. However, since we add so much value to your service, we've decided to no longer provide our services on your network unless you pay us slightly more than we are paying you". If major services started disappear off the AT&T network, I imagine they'd rethink this blatant violation of net-neutrality. I doubt the big internet companies would ever do something like this but, a guy can dream.
I'd take it a step further and say the real story is that people are idiots. On a scale between Dangerously Oblivious and Zombie Apocalypse Prepper, most people heavily lean towards the former. Whether that's dressing for the conditions, driving for the conditions, keeping some basic emergency supplies in your car, having enough food in the house, having an emergency alternative heat source, etc. I'm not saying everyone needs a Unimog and a hardened bunker with a years worth of MREs in their backyard but, a little common sense and a little preparation can make most extreme winter weather nearly a non-event.
The NSA *is* a criminal gang. And, it's a criminal gang that can put you in jail for breaking laws that you don't even realize you are breaking.
Or, that the very least, you should at least tell the tale of the time that a Møøse bit your sister.
Well said and makes me think of this quote from Fear and Loathing:
"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
You joke but, earlier today there was a story about Starship Troopers on Slashdot. I know that if I still lived in Buenos Aires, I'd give serious thought to getting out of town for a while...
The fossil fuel power plants themselves are less of a danger but, the methods used to extract the fuel can and do render huge swaths of land uninhabitable. There are parts of the U.S. where previously habitable (and populated) land has become uninhabitable (or nearly so) due to the groundwater and air pollution effects of hydraulic fracturing.
When I was younger and didn't have a personal machine, when I got home from work I'd boot my employer laptop with an Ubuntu Live CD and all was well. They certainly weren't savvy enough to have put some sort of monitoring below the OS level and so my por^H^H^H browsing habits were safe and the machine was in no danger of being compromised at the OS level.
Defragging a potentially huge disk, in the background, on-the-fly, so the disk never slows down.
Why on earth would it do this while on battery? Can't it wait until the machine is plugged in again?
File search index, in the background, on-the-fly, so you can search faster. You can turn this off.
Again, why do this by default when on battery?
Full window dragging, and many other graphics enhancements. You can turn these off.
This will have almost no impact on battery life unless you are spending most of your time dragging around windows for your own amusement.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Why? If I'm not trying to print anything, who cares if the printer is there.
Port polling, did you know that a USB port might gett polled 50'000 times per second? You can turn this down. A lot.
Why default to such an aggressive polls/second while on battery?
Scheduled tasks. Oh so many scheduled tasks. You probably have over 1'000 defined.
I certainly didn't schedule over 1000 tasks. Why are there over 1000 tasks scheduled and why are they scheduled to run while on battery?
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
Why? I'll know as soon as a webpage can't load.
An actual software Firewall. You can turn it off, or make it much simpler.
If this has any effect on battery life then it is horribly, horribly written.
Multi-user, multi-profile. Everything gets doubled.
You have multiple users logged into your laptop while on battery? Sure, it's possible but, I find it highly unlikely that most people do.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
See above.
Event logging. Windows knows what it's doing, because it takes the time to write it down.
That's the only potentially valid thing you've said so far. Well, the first sentence at least.
The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system. It's incredibly fast, always-on, used tens of thousands of times in a single moment by a any application -- my graphics suite writes 12'000 registry entries when I close the application. And you never need to worry about it getting corrupted.
At this point I'm wondering if this is actually a troll.
No fewer than eight different scripting languages available at any moment.
I don't see how this could affect battery life at all.
Twenty versions of a single DLL loaded concurrently, for cross-decade application compatibility.
Except for the disk access to read the DLLs, just having them in memory makes no difference at all.
You can find a good rundown of privacy and payment options for a lot of popular VPN services here: http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/
Basically, if you so choose, you can use a VPN service very anonymously.
Elegance and truth are inversely related. -- Becker's Razor
