That's why I avoid all this open-source hippie code and only use genuine RSA BSAFE.

I don't expect encryption to save me here in the US, not the way key disclosure law is going so far. There's no perfect solution possible here, and the trade-offs in only having a local copy aren't so great. You have to transport the data over a network to get real redundancy for your notes, which is one of the most important things electronic notes do better than handwritten ones. Recent news has shown in so many ways that you can't expect network privacy either.

I'm skeptical of people who believe their personal systems are beyond monitoring too. If you theorize a world where hostile prosecutors are empowered and interested enough in you to search your private notes, your problems are bigger than how exactly you protected them

It's easy enough to export Evernote data into a directory full of HTML files. I dump mine into the git repo I keep all my important files in. That even keeps formatting and linking, which is a big improvement over most text file oriented solutions. If you're more of a fan of wiki style for that, you can use something like Markdown conversion.

The main tie-breaker reason I ended up at Evernote is full read and write access to the repository on my phone. The days of losing an idea when I'm wandering around are gone. I type it into my phone, and by the time I'm on my desktop that note is stored with more redundancy that I ever achieved on my own.

Coverity has already come up with such a contruct warning. It is very hindsight oriented.

I'm not sure which part of your long post is the most optimistic. Belief in perfect test coverage? By definition bugs come from things you (and/or the fuzzing developers) didn't think to test. That's at least a noble goal. Can't say the same about deciding to build custom VPN software. You've got some hubris dude.

My Dynaco ST-70 tube amp from the early 60's is older than any of the toilets I use regularly.

Some of the models from 1993 and 1994 have a drainage channel for spills. See the Design section of Model M Keyboard to find out the model numbers. I consider those the peak of the Model M design. The quality dropped noticeably starting in 1995, due to cost cutting changes also mentioned there.

Lexmark ruined the design with a set of 1994 cost cutting changes. Models from 1995 and later have a noticeably worse typing feel to them. Unfortunately that lower quality 1995+ version is what Unicomp inherited. They make an OK descendent of the Model M design, but it's surely not the same keyboard as the classic design.

The Model M was redesigned by Lexmark in 1994 to use lighter, cheaper components. All of the units from 1995 and later are substandard compared to the earlier ones. The backplate is just one of the problems.

Engineered quality peaked with the 1993 and 1994 models that were updated to have a liquid drainage channel.

Amazon is in a death spiral, or is already dead to technical people? Dude, you know how to tell a funny story, I'll give you that. I am more troubled by Bezos's inconsistent stand on patents than knee-jerk characterization of his personal politics. Hint: is he a conservative Republican tool, or a super rich liberal? Labels are so tricky.

I am highly skeptical of claims toward the OSS router firmware scene being less useful than manufacturer provided ones. You're right that speed to support new features lags in OSS, but who cares? I buy the router based on the hardware compatibility list, not the other way around. Reliability and longevity is a lot more important to me than the new shiny. You're also right that today it may be difficult to meet all the requirements with open code, with AC support being a sore point. I'd use that as a reason to delay the purchase until i can though, not as an excuse to head any distance back toward less open development models.

I still have two Linksys WRT54GL units left in operation. Long after Cisco/Linksys stopped worrying about that hardware, I was happily served by the software communities around DD-WRT and then Tomato. Manufacturers like Ubiquiti are useful to me to the extent they embrace that philosophy. In the last year Linksys seems to be moving back in the right direction again. We'll see how that plays out.

I'm also skeptical that having two points of failure in a network can ever be more reliable than one, which complicates your flexibility argument. Whenever I decouple routing and wireless onto separate boxes, problem resolution is harder compared to having a single unit to swap out. One of the reasons I ended up with so many cheap WRT54GL units is that I could easily have a spare with a duplicated configuration for every install. At any scent of trouble, I just replaced the whole unit.

I don't know when you got your Netgear GS108T units at, but somewhere in that product's lifecycle it turned bad. My experience mirrors the highest rated critical review at Newegg, circa 2011 and talking about the decline. There are several reasons why the current version of the product only averages 3 stars there, and why 28% of buyers are giving this 1 star now. I have a good, older GS108T and a worthless newer one. Each firmware update is rolling the dice.

That's actually the core argument behind why I won't buy a manufacturer only firmware network product anymore. When the Netgear firmware on a Netgear product is broken and that's the only option, you now have a paperweight. The Tomato firmware upgrade scene for routers is more complicated than I'd like sometimes, but it always gives you multiple options. I'm using an Asus RT-N66 right now, and I don't ever expect its CPU performance is going to be a bottleneck for me. I'm using the Netgear switches only to add more wired ports than it supports.

It's not "simply" though. The interfaces in OpenSSL and GnuTLS are not swappable APIs. We went over this a few years ago for PostgreSQL, and one of the major issues was having too many OpenSSL-isms in our code to swap easily.

Those of us who dislike bad open source licenses have been trying to kick OpenSSL out of projects for years now, and it hasn't gone anywhere but upward in adoption. I've been amazed at how often I see its advertising clause in the credits of video games I play.

You're probably thinking of the 2011 Visa/Mastercard settlement, which explicitly allows variable prices based on form of payment. Not every state was involved in that lawsuit though, and there may very well be some that prohibit it.

The option of a class action lawsuit is being removed here in the US as fast as companies can rewrite contracts to do so, in favor of forced arbitration

Coin locked carts have been at US stores before. Here in Baltimore, the BJ's I used to shop at had them in their lot around 5 years ago. It was interesting to watch that unfold as a new social dynamic. I tried to hand over my activated cart with the quarter in it to parents wrangling smaller children when I left.