And that fits with the design experience MS goes for?

Hey, 3 questions during install.
  * Whats your name?
  * Whats the computer name?
  * We detected a 438-byte bootsector on your storage device with SHA-1 c12e41289e4a294e6bd182ea7eef8a0cf50e329e and MD5 6f33616ed73ca29926ef69670e1a9880. Would you like to overwrite this with the Windows 7 bootloader, or would you prefer to start up a hex editor so that you can locate the sectors where your bootloader configuration is and manually edit in an entry to load the BOOTMGR at sector 41290?

I look forward to this option being added in Windows 10. Its so much more reasonable than taking 2 minutes to reinstall the bootsector of your choice with a live CD!

Cant speak for IOS, but Android's voice recognition is fantastic even when in noisy environments like a car, over bluetooth, with radio on.

Ignoring the fact that the Psion Series 3a came out in 1993, the SSD in your Psion was ~10,000 times smaller than commonly available HDDs at the time, and would have been comparable to the flash in my TI-83. Performance wise it would have been generally worse than an equivalent HDD. Its a pretty dumb comparison all around; these days the difference in size between SSDs and HDDs is ~1/10, rather than 1/1000, and the SSDs outperform the HDDs in every single benchmark, sometimes by factors of 100 or more.

Not even sure what that means. Im sure the scientific research that goes on where I work does absolutely nothing with the cheaply available multicore CPUs; certainly the fact that a handful of nodes in our datacenter can consolidate hundreds of VMs during off-peak hours is worth something, though.

Im not sure if you're ignorant, cynical, or pining for some good old days that never really existed; but it kind of sounds like all 3.

Gonna need a source on that. I've written joke apps that intercept keystrokes (making them do strange things to screw with people) and they will simply not work if you do not have admin rights. Intercepting anything keyboard or hooking anything requires elevation.

Thats true as regards your personal data, but not as regards the system as a whole. If you're saying "any access to a system = root access", thats a pretty serious claim; I think the people running shared servers might take issue with that as would VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft.

Not without admin.

L2TP has nothing to do with OpenVPN. its IPSec.

So, not reliably. Thats the point. And the problem is some programs like skype auto-reconnect when theyre disconnected, which will be unprotected if your VPN resets. They can clearly see that you're using a VPN (hence the resets) and they can clearly kill the connection if they want. The thing is that enforcement varies from area to area, and time to time. See what happens around the Tianenmen Square anniversary-- Im willing to bet you'll be unable to connect.

The OpenVPN devs know its targetted, the Tor project guys know this, and so do a lot of VPN providers.

Its entirely possible your provider is using a form of obfuscated tunnel like Obfs3 or ScrambleSuite or another proprietary mod, like VyprVPN or ExpressVPN offer. Its technically not OpenVPN, but a modified form. Its also up in the air whether those modifications weaken the VPN as the providers often do not disclose the details of what they did to the client.

Because you're installing an operating system, and Microsoft does not make a multi-OS bootloader.

More to the point, people installing an OS have an expectation that it will be virus free. How is Windows supposed to differentiate between a benign non-MS bootloader and a viral one?

Debian isnt changing huge parts of the codebase all at once and calling it a security fix.

1) Google is blocked in china.
2) Thats partly because of the massive police state and strong net censorship they have going on over there-- but I'm sure YOUR data would be safe over there
3) Google is probably the only company formerly doing business in China that wont give your data up to the CPC. As a consequence of that, see #1.

There are maybe a small handful of places better than the US for hosting as regards privacy, and in any of them a court order will compel you to give up customer data.

Why especially? AFAIK Google is the only one of the big 3 webmail providers not currently bending over backwards for the Chinese Government. There was a warrant in this case; even the famed lavabit had to fold when given a warrant.

Its absurd to go after Google for following the terms of a court order; you'd do better to ask whether the order was justified, and if not ask why the courts issued it and who can be held accountable.

>court-issued warrant
>gag order

Do tell, what would you have done in their situation? Told the courts to go stuff themselves? Cause that almost never goes well.

Theres also the problem that if you were to predict that there was a 99% chance that the world blows up today, MAYBE someone will believe you. Predict that for the next 20 years, and youre sort of nuts if you think anyone will take you seriously.

The GFW is many years beyond port-based blocking; they use DPI to identify protocols regardless of the port used. Im glad you have TCP 443 OpenVPN working; I have never been able to get that to work with client/server certs-- only static-key tunnels worked.

At the moment, my experience has been that IPSec/ is the next best contender because its more of a corporatish vpn protocol. Im really surprised that you hear people recommend OpenVPN-- I have NEVER heard anyone recommend that in China because of how heavily it is targetted. Even googling "OpenVPN China GFW" you get stuff like this:
Which VPN Protocols To Use?
  * OpenVPN: Strangely, this is the least reliable protocol/client to use — you’ll find most ports are currently blocked (connection reset). The main cause appears to be spoofed RST packets.
  * L2TP: This is a fast protocol for China and currently it works quite well

And theres no shortage. OpenVPN may work for a bit, but my understanding is that about 20 minutes into the connection the remote server gets probed a bit, and then the connection gets reset. I wouldnt use PPTP because of its known security issues; it wouldnt surprise me if they had that nut cracked.