That argument is bogus, insofar as an employee at Verizon could just as easily leak my call logs, yet few people take exception to Verizon storing such data.

You don't even have to do that. There's Free Fillable Forms, which are exactly what the title suggests. Electronic copies of all the relevant paper forms that you fill out online and E-File. It doesn't have the logic of Turbotax but it performs basic math checks and saves you the hassle of printing and mailing the forms.

I can't understand why anyone would pay a third party to do their taxes. The logic flow isn't that complicated, even when you throw capital gains and itemized deductions into the mix. I've filed the long form 1040 by hand in years when I had to deal with capital gains and losses and was able to complete it in under two hours. Who are the people who pay Intuit or H&R Block to do their 1040ez filings?

This bug would have been utterly trivial to detect when introduced had the OpenSSL developers bothered testing with a normal malloc (not even a security focused malloc, just one that frees memory every now and again). Instead, it lay dormant for years until I went looking for a way to disable their Heartbleed accelerating custom allocator.

it's a very good read.

Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What they shout is "One nation, one language, one fatherland. Hang the Russians".

Or here:
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvtXGMmrVB0"
"Cut the Russian's throats".

The metadata argument wears thin on me. If my phone number is two or three levels removed from a terrorist I really don't see why it's objectionable that the Government take a precursory look at my call logs. They'll quickly find that I'm a rather boring sort, whose connection with the terrorist was likely limited to ordering the same take out, and my privacy isn't significantly impacted by having someone review my call logs after obtaining a court order.

Traditional police investigative techniques would be at least as invasive, if not more so. Ever been interviewed by the police because you're one or two levels removed from a criminal suspect they're attempting to establish a case against?

Heh, as a native Russian speaker I can tell you that it is indeed easier to learn English :-)

But, but, but the poster behind the laptop has an AT-AT on it. Maybe they could build one of those instead?

Hmm, I look at the temperature outside, then I feel the temperature inside. When we're trying I'd say it works pretty good.

If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof. The NSA doesn't have to have a back door into AES (or the other algorithms) when they have an arsenal of zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques at their disposal. The average user should be far more concerned about these attack vectors (from any source, not just NSA) than the security of the underlying encryption algorithm.

The Diceware FAQ sums up the problem rather succinctly: "Of course, if you are worried about an organization that can break a seven word passphrase in order to read your e-mail, there are a number of other issues you should be concerned with -- such as how well you pay the team of armed guards that are protecting your computer 24 hours a day."

Gnome was never about that. Gnome was always about making the most FSF-compliant software. A true Stallmanite will tell you that making superior software is not as important as making "free" software. Gnu and the FSF have no room for pragmatism.

Gnome was, from the beginning, about politics first and technology second, It fell victim to the same bone-headed narrow focus that still plagues the FSF. Gnome came about not because anybody really needed it or asked for it, but because Miguel de Icaza was hot and bothered about the GPL. Its sole purpose was to be the anti-KDE (which was already usable, and based on a solid widget framework), because Stallmanites wanted to get their sanctimony on about Qt being distributed under a license that wasn't "free enough" for Richard Stallman and his fawning groupies. It was popular because the priesthood of the FSF got Red Hat to buy into their religion, which means that it was the default for many people's first Linux installs. It always felt a little bit fatter, uglier, slower, and clunkier than KDE. Its leaders were also always firm in their belief that they knew what you wanted better than you did, long before the "Gnome Shell" fiasco. I tried it once or twice in the 2.x days, and was really annoyed that there wasn't even a straightforward way to edit the stupid menu---evidently a deliberate design choice. It was like Apple, but worse. In short, Gnome was what you get when you cross the hubris of Steve Jobs with the hubris of Richard Stallman. I will not miss it.

Then what do we judge them on? What's going to happen in 1,000 years?