I finally bit the bullet and switched from Eudora to Thunderbird this year, because everybody's post-Snowden improvements to their crypto meant that Eudora no longer could make an SSL connection to my main ISPs' mail servers. Thunderbird had the advantage that it could read Eudora's mailboxes, which were in basically traditional Unix mail format for most things, as well as the various address books and such. Now I've got to find something else.

(My mom's still using Eudora 1.4 on her Mac - with dialup modem, it's still good enough :-)

Mine came out much less unique than previous versions, because I had NoScript blocking much of it (even after I temporarily allowed evil-tracker.com and do-not-track.com or whatever their domains were called. User agent string was fairly unique. In the past, fonts have been the big surprise information leaker - my work machines all have a font loaded on them that's used to get $COMPANY_LOGO to render correctly, aside from any other fonts I've randomly added over the years.

Yup - that's the one. (And of course I read it just after I'd bought a couple of SD cards for my RPi and other devices :-)

Traveling Salesman Problem is NP-complete, so not only is this machine not going to solve it exactly, neither is Shor's model, even though that one does solve factoring, trashing most of the public-key crypto systems.

But there are lots of heuristics for approximate solutions to TSP, and many of them are "create some complete tour of the network, then randomly perturb it a bunch of times to see if you can get any better results", i.e., simulated annealing, so a quantum annealing machine might turn out to be quite helpful. Until about 5 years ago, Christofides's algorithm, which guarantees a solution that's no worse than 50% longer than the optimum (and usually does better than that) was about the best polynomial-time heuristic there was, so you'd start with that and anneal the results until you were bored.

Somewhere on the Internet(tm) I recently read an article comparing SD memory card speeds with the RPi. They varied by as much as 10x. For the most part, brand-name cards did better, and IIRC, medium-sized cards tended to be faster (small ones are usually cheap, large ones are trading speed for size), but it varied a lot - as long as the card's write speed was fast enough for a typical video-camera to record in real time, that's all the manufacturer cared about, and read speeds have bigger numbers so those are the ones they splash on to the packaging.

No, "Quantum Computer" isn't a really well-defined term - it's basically "Sufficiently Advanced Technology Using Handwavium". It's usually used to mean "Quantum Computer that can execute Shor's Algorithm", which can solve a few problems like factoring which would make it extremely disruptive to cryptography. D-Wave has been upfront for a long time about how their computer doesn't do that - it does something much more specialized and handwavy, and this is the first article I've seen that indicates that there's a problem it can actually solve that is significantly faster than conventional computer technology.

And no, a single-core process isn't the fastest way to solve something that's reasonably parallelizable - you can pile up lots of cores and get a proportional speedup (if you don't have dependencies or too much communication overhead.) But if this is 10**8 times as fast as a single core, and the biggest computers out there are around 10**4-10**5 cores and frightfully expensive, that says there's a problem space for which it might be worth some organization's money to actually buy one to use, instead of buying for speculative research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeSync. FreeSync is AMD's answer to nVidia's G-Sync. They're both something about doing dynamic refresh rates, so you can use most of your speed updating things that change quickly instead of updating whole screens including the pixels that aren't changing very fast. It works over DisplayPort, but if you want to use HDMI you'll probably need to buy a new monitor (almost certainly your TV doesn't support it yet.) It's apparently marketed toward gamers.

What Hillary's really looking for (besides speeches that sound good) is approaches like censorship, identifying politically incorrect users without the need for warrants, that sort of thing.

(I'm one of those annoying Libertarians, so I can pretend to be neutral between the two big-money parties, which I'll get around to after the Republicans clean up the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Koch/Norquist/NeoCons/GlobalWarmingDenialism/etc years. But I live in California, where right-wing bigotry against our largest ethnic groups pretty much guarantees a Democratic win, so rather than voting for Kodos\\\\\Hillary, I'll presumably vote for whoever my party comes up with, or if they choke or pick somebody unacceptable, I'll fall back to voting for the Greens or Peace&Freedom.)

A bunch of good people from the electronic privacy community have been at the FTC (and seem to keep recommending their friends as successors :-) Besides Lorrie and Ashkan, Ed Felten and Steve Bellovin (one of the authors of the original Usenet and the Firewall book), and probably other people we know have been there. Occasionally we also get people into the FCC (like Dave Farber some years ago.)

Oh, definitely. Ransomware is worse, because could get infected by making lots of different mistakes, not just by believing a phone call. But the defenses against it include good backups as well as good security, and you need backups anyway because hardware can fail and trash your system in lots of creative different ways.

I have lots of non-powered USB hubs and USB power supplies lying around, but the Pi and Pi0 really want a powered hub. Do I really need to go out and buy one, or can I do something like plug a USB power supply into one of the slave ports on a hub (with the Pi plugged into the master port), or plug the master port into a USB power supply and plug the Pi into a slave port (with or without OTG cable)? Thanks!

I kept one of the fake Microsoft Windows Support scammers busy for an hour that way. I neglected to mention to him that my VM was running Linux, though I did tell him that my work IT department made us use Firefox instead of IE (forgot to tell him I had NoScript running on it :-) and for some reason all the different remote operations tools he had me download either didn't work or couldn't download at all. Eventually he realized I was scamming him, spent a while trying to convince me that his business was legitimate, and then his boss came online and yelled at me for wasting his guy's time :-)

Many years ago I had a laptop disk drive fail. DriveSavers wanted $900 to recover what was on it, which was a highly reasonable price, but we decided not to - I had enough of my critical data on the mail server and backups, or places I could download from, so we just replaced the drive and reinstalled.

Most of the ransomware thugs charge a bit less than that, and you really need to have good backups or you're going to eventually end up paying DriverSavers or somebody like them.

I ended up spending about $100 to get all the parts I needed for my first Raspberry Pi, not counting the computer monitor which I wanted anyway. Adafruit has a Pi0 starter kit for about $30 that has most of what you'd want (which they're out of, because everybody's out of their Pi0 already), but you'd probably end up spending a few bucks more for cables, and $10-20 more for a powered USB hub anyway.)

Once you sort out the "mini HDMI to full-sized HDMI" cable connector issue, you can connect the Pi0 to your HDMI TV or computer monitor. (That's one difference between the Pi and the $9 C.H.I.P. computer, which has a composite connector but needs an extra $13 board to do HDMI.)

If you're trying to connect to an LCD display, you'll need to solder on the 2x20 headers and do something appropriate with them. (I assume the Pi0 supports that? The full-sized Pi and the C.H.I.P. have boards that interface with their connectors.)