The NSA *is* a criminal gang. And, it's a criminal gang that can put you in jail for breaking laws that you don't even realize you are breaking.

Or, that the very least, you should at least tell the tale of the time that a Møøse bit your sister.

Well said and makes me think of this quote from Fear and Loathing:

"We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

You joke but, earlier today there was a story about Starship Troopers on Slashdot. I know that if I still lived in Buenos Aires, I'd give serious thought to getting out of town for a while...

The fossil fuel power plants themselves are less of a danger but, the methods used to extract the fuel can and do render huge swaths of land uninhabitable. There are parts of the U.S. where previously habitable (and populated) land has become uninhabitable (or nearly so) due to the groundwater and air pollution effects of hydraulic fracturing.

When I was younger and didn't have a personal machine, when I got home from work I'd boot my employer laptop with an Ubuntu Live CD and all was well. They certainly weren't savvy enough to have put some sort of monitoring below the OS level and so my por^H^H^H browsing habits were safe and the machine was in no danger of being compromised at the OS level.

Why on earth would it do this while on battery? Can't it wait until the machine is plugged in again?

Again, why do this by default when on battery?

This will have almost no impact on battery life unless you are spending most of your time dragging around windows for your own amusement.

Why? If I'm not trying to print anything, who cares if the printer is there.

Why default to such an aggressive polls/second while on battery?

I certainly didn't schedule over 1000 tasks. Why are there over 1000 tasks scheduled and why are they scheduled to run while on battery?

Why? I'll know as soon as a webpage can't load.

If this has any effect on battery life then it is horribly, horribly written.

You have multiple users logged into your laptop while on battery? Sure, it's possible but, I find it highly unlikely that most people do.

See above.

That's the only potentially valid thing you've said so far. Well, the first sentence at least.

At this point I'm wondering if this is actually a troll.

I don't see how this could affect battery life at all.

Except for the disk access to read the DLLs, just having them in memory makes no difference at all.

You can find a good rundown of privacy and payment options for a lot of popular VPN services here: http://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-that-take-your-anonymity-seriously-2013-edition-130302/

Basically, if you so choose, you can use a VPN service very anonymously.

It may not be that old but, it's definitely of nostalgic value for a lot of people. 12 cores isn't mindblowing these days but, in 2001, cramming 12 processors (not 12 cores) into a single rack mountable computer was a very impressive feat. I worked at Sun in the late 90s and I'd love to own some brand new gear from that era because, in those days, Sun was doing really impressive things with hardware in an exciting time. It's like wanting to own a muscle car. It's probably not that fast, it handles like garbage, it uses too much gas, etc. But, damn, it's cool.

It's pretty simple what you can do about it: Don't buy subsidized phones. Not only do you end up paying more for a subsidized phone, you lose your rights to do whatever you want with it.

I really don't understand why people are so up in arms about this. I'm a card carrying member of the EFF and ACLU and, apart from the fact that this is a criminal offense instead of a civil issue, I'm not really that concerned because the "loophole" is so simple: Buy your fucking phone instead of renting it.

One of the problems I frequently notice with Python is that since whitespace has syntactic meaning, it seems like many Python programmers ONLY use whitespace for syntactic purposes. The language itself isn't too bad but, I can't count the number of times I've opened up a .py file and been greeted by a gigantic wall of nearly incomprehensible code. Now, sure, you can do that in most languages but, it seems especially prevalent in Python.

Even if it weren't highly objectionable to allow a web page to query the status of my ad blocker, browser based blocking is only one form of ad blocking. You can also use a hosts file, a proxy (like squid), or even your router (like untangle). In fact, on a public/company network, you may not even be aware of the fact that you are blocking ads because it may be done at a level that you aren't in control of.

You can also go the other way if you are willing to use Xen. You can run native (well, Dom0) linux and then run a Windows VM with a VGA-passthrough video card to it. It's non-trivial to setup but, I've played at least a dozen Windows big release games at max graphics on my linux workstation using this method.

Hint: You will also need to get a PCI USB controller and a KVM to do this. (And, oddly, ATI cards are what you want for the passthrough card).

I don't think most people want to control their own devices. For home users a computer is an appliance that they will use for a handful of tasks. As long as the hardware does those things, they don't really care how open it is. To use a car analogy, the software in your car likely makes the air to fuel ratios inaccessible to tinker with. Most people don't care as long as the car runs right. For the people that do care, there are after market engine management systems and even cars that have those things directly accessible.

I'm also not convinced that all computing will end up locked down. Even with a fairly dystopian view of the future, there are two things I think will prevent it: 1) Server grade hardware. It's one thing to lock down a consumer grade device but business will not stand for a locked down server and I can't imagine vendors thinking they would. 2) Hobby markets. Things like the Raspberry Pi and similar devices are going to keep getting better, cheaper and more common. The vendors of those types of hardware have no incentive to lock down the hardware. I understand that at the moment not all the drivers for these devices might be open source but, this is still a fairly new market and I think going forward, a lot of interesting things are going to happen with these types of devices.

That's completely incorrect. Modern CPU power savings uses a strategy called "race to idle". The deeper idle states (C-states) are so power efficient that the best power savings comes from doing everything as fast as possible and then returning to the deepest idle state. Waiting for information to come back from a spinning disk likely prevents the CPU from getting into the deepest idle states. If you are going to read a gigabyte of data, it's more power efficient to do it as fast as possible.