I have a workstation at home sporting a Phenom II X4 3.2GHz CPU and 8Gb 1333MHz RAM, running a Linux host OS using LUKS to provide FDE. This host OS is running VirtualBox to provide various VMs (Windows, Linux) and the performance of all VMs is pretty much instantaneous on all UI requests, and pretty damn zippy at workloads such as compiling.

The WinXP VMs (I give them 2Gb of "RAM" and 1 CPU core) are faster than any WinXP I've ever experienced on Real Hardware; boot to logon prompt takes 10 seconds, & shutdown from being logged in takes 8 seconds. I use one of those WinXP VMs for all my Youtube and DVD video watching needs, without any stutter of any kind. I run KDE4 in several of the Linux VMs, and it's very fast. I don't have any Win7, but a Win8 Preview VM takes 12 seconds to boot, and about 3 to shutdown [once you've figured out how to request shutdown that is :)]

Whatever the performance hit of the FDE is, I'm really not aware of it.

It's the least we can do to make up for the lousy moderation he's quite rightly complaining about.

I'm a physicist by education & training, and I'm anything but anti-science (I'm all in favour of the space programme, never mind the cost, because we need that off-world colony asap) - but the idea of fiddling with the oh-so subtle machinery of a species' DNA, which has taken at least 2 billion years to evolve (I'm not a flat-Earther Creationist) makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck. There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.

My objections to GE (and those of many others) have nothing to do with imagining that the resulting food will be in some way "unsafe to eat" or "bad for me" - that's just the way the anti crowd are painted with pitchfork'n'torches hysteria by the GE companies' PR teams. Protein is protein is protein. No, for me it's all about the rash folly of fiddling with that double helix and messing it up. It's a very clever molecule.

That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass .... in my book, anyway.

I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.

NB: I'm not dogmatic about this - I'm deadly serious, and I'm always willing to be educated, so teach me if you will - that's the scientific way :-)

[sigh] ... this is very simple: nuclear fission produces absolutely foul and disgustingly dangerous waste that we have no idea how to dispose of. That is far and away the most dangerous thing about it ... I'm sure the reactors themselves are operated in a reasonably safe manner these days (apart from at Fukushima of course :), but the waste by-product is a shocking legacy that we bestow on generations to come for tens of thousands of years. I for one am not willing to be party to that.

Nuclear *fusion*, on the other hand, produces no dangerous waste at all ... I'm prepared to wait till we've got all the wrinkles ironed out of that - it being slightly embarassing that we currently have to feed the fusion reaction with more energy than we get out of it :)

I feel exactly the same - I have no idea what an activity is, what it's for, or how to use it. But I have figured out (I think) that you have to edit activity settings in order to change the wallpaper or screensaver ..... wait a minute, was that KDE 4.4, or KDE 4.8 ? Confused I am, quite a bit.

Still, at least in 4.8 you can now edit the window decoration theme for the KDM login dialog without having to know the arcane binary name of the 'System Settings' utility to run via KDESU.

One of the key missing components in current KDE is some good documentation about many of the features. Maybe I need to get off my ass, learn, and then contribute docs back ...

Without getting deep into subtleties of their lawsuit against Google which I don't understand, what Oracle has effectively done is scare the pants off anyone who was contemplating using Java for any purpose ever again.

Perhaps that was their purpose .... maybe they just want to be rid of the burden of maintaining something they have to give away for the public good, without prospect of making megabucks from it. If that's the case, I just don't understand why they can't just hand the source to the community, and declare themselves to be no longer involved.

Imagine ... if Grace Hopper and the CODASYL Committee, or John Backus and colleagues at IBM, or Peter Naur, Donald Knuth and the ACM had been as pathetically venal and moronic as Oracle Corporation ... what kind of sadly crippled and fractured industry we'd be working in now.

Perhaps it's bye-bye-Java time. Sigh. What a bunch of slimy creeps there must be at Oracle Corp ... Whassamatter Larry ? Need a new yacht ?

Totally agree. SP3 bumped the requirement up to 1Gb for any real use case. WinXP on its own may start up reasonably in 512Mb, but as soon as you open a word processor, or a handful of tabs in any modern browser (and I include FF 3.6 in that) you're in a world of hourglass.

I've solved "my PC's started running really slowly" for a number of friends now by simply upgrading their WinXP machines from 256Mb or 512Mb to 1Gb (yes, that's after checking for malware first).

This handy fact may help when comparing the sizes of heathen litres to USofA liters :

miles-per-gallon are equivalent to furlongs-per-pint

Strangely (...) this works for both USofA gallons and Ye Olde British Imperial gallons (even though they have slightly different volumes), which just goes to show how very very wise The Ancients were when they dreamed up their weird, unpronounceable and difficult-to-manipulate-arithmetically system of units.

Of course this depends on American furlongs being the same length as Imperial furlongs ..... a British cricket pitch is one chain long, and as we all know, 10 chains make a furlong .... how many chains long is a baseball pitch ? :)

Why yes .. thanks very much ... I will have a drink for my trouble - I'll have 1/6th of a gill of your American sippin whisky tipped over an acre of ice please ;)

I think it's about time reference was made in this discussion to the statement of need made by Uncle Phil Zimmerman at the beginning of his original PGP 2.x User Manual :

Why Do You Need PGP ?

• Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.

  Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?

  What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

And much much more, of course. It all sounded like a very sane stance when I first read that, so I tried to do exactly what he recommended. Of course, almost nobody else tooled up to deal with my highly secure bar crawl plans, so it was a waste of time. PGP tools for email back then were very primitive, but they're a lot better now ... it shouldn't be beyond us all.

You're almost right, but you're wrong about the lack of need for verification. The fact that she can decrypt the email which was encrypted with her public key obtained from a keyserver simply means she is in possession of the corresponding private key, not that she really is [the right] "Jane Doe" ... you might be beginning a correspondence with a spook. To verify that she is the person she is supposed to be (and not some Black Ops team MITM'ing her), the public keys must be verified, either by exchanging them in person in the first place, or by reading out key fingerprints over the phone if you would recognise her voice.

If John and Jane both get each other's public keys from a repository, and fail to verify them, then both keys may be bogus keys uploaded by MITM Bad Guys. This was well described by Phil Zimmerman in the original PGP 2.x User Manual

This is the other part of the PGP web-of-trust concept that most geeks I know don't quite get. When I countersign your key, I'm signing it to say that you really are the person you say you are (or rather "this key really does belong to the person it claims to belong to"), and NOT you are a person who can be trusted. So I must NOT countersign your key unless/until I'm really sure it's your key - which needs the key verification step to have been performed.

Unfortunately, most IT people I know who've ever been persuaded to try PGP just merrily get busy countersigning all the public keys they acquire, whether or not they've verified them. It doesn't help that some PGP email client software insists that you only use 3rd party public keys you're certain of, and won't let you pick an unverified key - so users will often just sign the 3rd party key to say they're certain of it so they can click 'Send' on the email.

Relatedly, I often suspect my colleagues don't even read the question you get asked when signing a key, which says "How strongly do you believe this person knows how to use PGP properly ?"

It is actually quite tricky to use PGP carefully enough to gain the full web-of-trust benefit - although I agree you can do what many folks do, and just ignore all that key-signing stuff, and wing it :)

Sigh ...

It's not specifically Americans - it's capitalism (or "unhealthy love of money"). The problem with Americans (generalising like mad here of course) is that they sure do like the ostensible benefits of capitalism, and often fail to see the consequent drawbacks, but the same problem affects (infects) many other western countries these days.

I remember years ago watching an interview with the chairman of Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), in which he was being given a hard time about how RTZ was digging up aboriginal sacred burial grounds to look for uranium. His reply, with an apparently straight face, was "What we are doing is not illegal, and as chairman my responsibility is to my shareholders to deliver the maximum profit possible".

He simply couldn't see the immorality (or at least amorality) of the company's actions - or if he could then he simply didn't care, so long as the profit was good

Capitalism doesn't do morality - it just does money. Transcending this is an evolutionary step that must be made if humanity is to have any future.