Oh sure, use Xmarks. Then watch your Chrome bookmarks get duplicated folders over and over again, some empty, some full, some half-empty (or half-full if you're an optimist). Yes, even if you do what they say, which is to disable Chrome sync and Firefox Sync for your bookmarks. God help you if you do still use RSS and use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature: watch those become empty folders on Chrome, then circle back to Firefox and frak you over there.

There is a thread from Hades complaining about this on their support site, which they don't even run, it's a section, the abominable GetSatisfaction-dot-com, I spent more time cleaning up the frak-ups of using Xmarks cross-browser cross-machines weekly than it would have taken to just sync changes manually once every week or thereabouts. I let Mozilla sync handle syncing between PCs and intra-PC for Firefox, Aurora (alpha-test FF), Pale Moon, and synching with Firefox or Aurora on my Android phone/tablets. I let Chrome sync handle bookmark sync between various Chrome and Dragon instances on Windows and Linux, and on Android.

Once in a while I pick one Linux or Windows machine, one browser of each family (Chromium or Firefox-based, usually Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon), look at my most recent bookmark additions in each, and copy/paste them to the other. Then let their native syncs propagate them to all the other device/OS/browser instances I have.

I just don't let Xmarks go anywhere near any of them anymore.

Seriously, don't recommend Xmarks to people. It sucks to high hell.

It also is insecure, in that LastPass admits they analyze your bookmarks and use them for commercial purposes. Hell they have a "popular bookmarks" feature right on the site.

Chrome sync by default is scanned and used for marketing and targeting by Google, but they give you the option to encrypt with your own passphrase, not just your Google account. If you do that, they can't get at it for their own purposes, as even their decrypted clear version is still your in-browser encrypted version.

Mozilla sync works that way by default, in fact by your only choice. Your sync data is encrypted with your generated recovery key and they don't know it.

Peter F. Hamilton's OCTattos from his Commonwealth Saga become reality.

Problem is, running through another country, especially one that does not have an NSA-reciprocity deal, is itself most likely a marker to NSA to pay extra attention. Plus doesn't the NSA have full authority to monitor transmissions where at least one side is outside of the USA? Sure, they don't need no steenkin' warrants. But their surveillance becomes arguably even more legal (by US law) and less unconstitutional, if you have voluntarily routed outside of the USA.

I don't disagree with your advice; in fact I do the same thing often, VPNing to Venezuela, or Iceland, or random other countries first, when the sites/transactions I'm using do not require specific IP geolocation. It makes it harder to track, harder to decypher. But I don't think it is all that meaningful, because it puts in more on the NSA "radar". In part, I do it as a big FU to NSA, like a bumper sticker or political billboard. But I have little faith that it makes it all that much more difficult for NSA to determine patterns of my traffic, if they really want to do so. Sure, it keeps my ISP in the dark.

But my ISP is the freakin' government of Uruguay, via Antel, which is the fixed-internet monopoly in this "socialist" country. So I'm on the NSA radar anyhow, as one of those "evil Americans who leave the country". Though "Tio Pepe" Mujica, held for a dozen years in a US-funded jail, two at the bottom of a well, would probably tell them to FOAD anyhow. Just as he is doing to the toady EU countries that denied Evo Morales air overflight, by recalling Uruguay's ambassadors.

Hate to be your missing middle school Social Studies/Civics teacher, but there is no such thing as a "no confidence vote" in a congressional-type system. You are calling for something that exists in parliamentary systems, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, where a no confidence vote can "bring down the government". At least in theory.

Not in the USA. Even if the US Congress, especially the gerrymandered-for-permanence House, were not so bought off that your vote for Party A's vs Party B's candidate had any real meaning, you only get to make that choice every 2 years for the House and 6 for any given Senate seat. There are no do-overs, no recalls, for the US Congress. In practice, no impeachments of Representatives or Senators. Sanctions (e.g. Charlie Rangel) that mean nothing.

Correct, and the GP, Happy Canada Day.

The OP should either have used the commonly understood abbreviation, "WaPo", for the Washington Post, or used perhaps, "Wash. Post" which is a correct-US-English, though not US Postal Service, abbreviation for Washington, D.C.

"WA Post" makes it seem it might be out in Tacoma or Spokane or thereabouts.

Well yeah, compared to Omaha or Topeka or even Kansas-Google-Fiber-City, sure, it's exciting. Compared to a few miles away in SF itself it's boring as hell. And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store. Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in. Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio. Or join a group run training for a marathon.

It's not like those things, or their equivalents, aren't possible or arent' even available in the boonies. They are. Mostly. But they're all damn inconvenient and time-consuming to get to, require multiple transportation modes or at least costly long trips in your must-have car, and are all in different directions.

I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves. In Zonamerica in greater Montivideo, Uruguay, which is out in the frakking boonies north of the airport, half-hour or more by bus to anywhere interesting in Montevideo. 20 minutes at least by car, if I wanted to have one here, to anywhere interesting at all.

It's mind-numbingly boring. Mind-numbingly suburbanized. Horribly non-green, even with things like Google buses or the Zonamerica shuttles.

I've also worked on Wall Street iitsellf (literally, address on Wall St.) or right around the corner on Broadway, and up a few blocks on Greenwich. On 57th St and 5th Av in midtown Manhattan. In downtown Boston. In downtown Denver right on the 16th St. Pedestrian way with the vast amount of funky restaurants, shopping, entertainment. Almost worked in the Montevideo World Trade Center in Pocitos when they were moving out of Zonamerica, but bagged the job to start a venture with my wife based out of our casita 3 blocks from the beach in a funky small town that is a walkable micropolis urban village with fibre-to-home and a variety of walkable pleasures.

During times living/working in one of those places, it was very possible without hassle and without car to do pretty much all of the stuff I mentioned above.

Hell of a lot more fun, any of those places. Either the big city, or the self-contained micropolis. Out in the boonies of tech parks, everybody knows this is nowhere. Eventually the real talent who are at all multifaceted in their life preferences go somewhere more stimulating to their many wants and needs, not just their tech-and-money needs. Leaving the B-ship people. Yes, we need the B-ship too. But that's not where creativity happens. That's not the one the multii-talented multi-intelligenced people want to be in for their career and life journeys.

Great, Dice posts story from a corporate-software-industrial-complex advertorial mag, with a link to their so-called blog. Which ironically is running WordPress, along with a bunch of common plugins like "Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.7" and "All in One SEO Pack 1.6.14.6". Right there tells me how clueless they are about WordPress, because unless you have a damn good special reason, you do not want to be running two separate SEO plugins. LeadGen contact form plugin, a bunch of ad and analytics beyond the usual, and no apparent caching plugin. Oh, and no Google Authorship id done the correct way, despite both of those SEO plugins having "fill in the blank" prompting for it (they do have an XFN tag on their contact info but don't do the full Google social.)

For more laughs, their verison of All-In-One SEO is downlevel. Exactly what Checkmarx themselfes warn agansit. They are on 1.6.14.6, current version is 2.0.2.

Yeah, I'm gonna listen to them about WordPress security.

When you click through their blog to the actual PDF report, guess what? They redacted the names of all those "at-risk" plugins, noting only 6 by name. Four of which they claim took their advice and fixed the problem, and two (WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache) which I recall getting fixes for months ago. Hot news. I guess that even though their supposed expertise is in scanning for vulnerabilities, they are not going to tell you which are at risk in the current environment, because you didn't pay them. Classic dipstick move. Total and utter unawareness of the karmic and $$ benefits of internet "gift culture", such as, the whole damn open source movement and the specific WordPress ecosystem in which they are supposedly expert.

But we should listen to them, because: Checkmarx was recognized by Gartner as sole visionary in their latest SAST magic quadrant and as
Cool vendor in application security.

Right, and e-gold before it. Only criminals and terrorists have any need for an alternative, secure, somewhat anonymous, non-government-controlled (really non-Corporatocracy Bankster-controlling-government-controlled) currency. Think of the children. Think of the Homeland! Do the right thing, Citizen!

Oh really? Why don't you tell it to these people, threatened with arrest, or in fact arrested for trying to close accounts at Citi and BofA.

Cristina? Sra. Presidenta, está usted?

The only reason I'd want Apache Open Office to merge into / with / from LibreOffice is this: To get the overall better suite, LO, using some of the uniquely cool features in IBM's very different fork of OO.o into IBM Lotus Symphony. Which, for those who remember the end-of-CP/M-start-of-PC era, has nada to do with Lotus Symphony, Lotus Development's follow-on to Lotus 1-2-3, which never met with its predecessor's success. But, it was a very early attempt at an "office suite" (spreadsheet-centric, MS/PC-DOS-based). So IBM got the name/trademark when they bought Lotus.

Around 2010-ish, they released IBM Lotus Symphony, a Win32, Linux, and I think MacOS, office suite based on OO.o core code - but with a lot of differences. Differences in 3 big areas:
  1) Only the 3 major apps - Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentations. Nothing based on Draw, Math, Base.
  2) Very different and non-standard menu structure, that hearkens back to Lotus Windows products. For example, no Windows (and IBM SAA, and just normal)-standard "Insert" menu - most of what you expect there is in its "Create" menu.
  3) Everything is in a single window, tabbed interface, with multiple slide-out right sidebars: A wide, well-organized Properties panel, and some widget panels for add-ons. Based on the Lotus Expeditor framework for the devilspawn Lotus Notes. Yet sometimes the son of the devil can be a good guy (e.g. Hellboy).

Number 3 has made it my absolute favorite office suite. For the same reasons we all love tabbed browsers and trashed browsers back in the day that didn't have it. Everything is right there, in context, without too much window-hopping. The Properties panel exposes all the major properties without having to dig through menus and open different dialog boxes depending on if you're formatting colors, number types, custom cell formatting, etc., and without having to crap up a giant multiline toolbar or frakking ribbon to make functions discoverable.

I go back far enough to have been used to different word processors and different spreadsheet programs to have different interfaces and menu structures, even different keyboard shortcuts. Heck, I even remember some of the differences in that between WordStar (real WordStar, up through 3.3), its competitor NewWord that cloned it and then got HandSpringed into WordStar 4.0 (Yes, I still have WordStar 7.0 on my Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs). Then some time with Ami Pro, on both OS/2 and Windows 3.x, that later became Lotus WordPro (that one I didn't use), with a short sidetrip into WordPerfect for Windows, before being funneled into the Corporate Tool MS-Word world, and then slightly out to OO.o/LO. So I can make the mental shift between different menu structures pretty easily.

I love the property panel as well as the tabbed interface. Unfortunately, though IBM donated the entire codebase to Apache, they are not using the tabbed interface in AOO. They are starting to use, and announced they will fully implement, the Symphony-based property panels. That alone would make me likely go back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice, except that LibreOffice is so far ahead of AOO in functionality, stability, and killing off of Java.

For now, I still use Symphony, on both Windows and Linux. It continues to get the occasional FixPack (IBMese for service pack) and continues to Just Work. Especially on creative writing where I may have reference docs, character backgrounds, outlines all open, or similarly for technical writing, the tabbed interface really helps to keep everything accessible and surfaced. Also for projects involving a combo of word processing documents and spreadsheets, and [$DEITY] help me sometimes even presentations - it's a lot easier to work everything up if I have that clear context, rather than a cluster of windows.

I do keep LO installed, for when I want the other modules, and for dealing with editing documents in MS .docx, .xlsx, .pptx format. Symphony can open them, and in fact has IBM-coded improved filters compared to what was in OO.o that went into the Apache donation from Oracle of OO.o to become AOO. But it can't write to those formats. LO still handles that fine.

The only other significant issue, which may not matter to you one whit, is that Symphony's default word processing document style template uses sans-serif fonts, while OO.o, AOO, LO follow the MS-Word convention of serif. Obviously you can change that. But if you're a Corporate Tool that may be important. I'm now a Former Corporate Tool, so I don't care!

IBM Lotus Symphony is still available free from IBM for download if you want to try it - free as in beer, not 100% of it free as in freedom.

Wouldn't the obvious choice be Zephram? After all, he was from Alpha Centuri before he was from Montana.

Well, depending on your subjective timeline, that is.

Either that, or name it Londo.

That's odd, considering I'm replying on my 2004-vintage HP Compaq Presario X1000 Pentium M 1.7MHz laptop with 768M RAM, running Mint.

Mint XFCE works just dandy on low-resource early 2000s hardware. I had it happily running on a revitalized homebuilt-in-1999 tower whose last upgrade was in 2002 to a Pentium III 850MHz (from original Pentium II 350), with all of 448MB RAM. Used that one as my primary computer for months at my old place before moving out, nuking the drive, reinstalling it, and leaving it out by the condo dumpster with a note with the password.

On this laptop, I can happily run Firefox and Thunderbird together, while running a VNC client into my other machine, and supporting a VNC server to go the other way, and manage to use LibreOffice or the GIMP at the same time. It streams videos fine, runs jEdit fine for a decent universal code editor. Runs Chrome OK, but just like on Windows, modern Firefox is lower-memory than Chrome once a few tabs and extensions are loaded, so Chrome is non-optimal on this, and was non-optimal on the tower. But Chrome is non-optimal on my wife's Windows 7 netbook with a dual-core N570 Atom and 1GB RAM too. This 768MB laptop even runs IBM Lotus Symphony decently, which I happen to prefer over its LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org relatives due to its tabbed interface and preference panels, especially when doing creative writing or articles where I have lots of research and notes open. (Yes, ducking tomatoes for using non-free-as-in-beer variants, but IBM did give the whole thing to Apache, so now it is.)

If you're trying to use Mint Mate, or Mint Cinnamon, or Mint KDE editions on a sub-GB machine, just don't. You'll be lucky to be able to install, or even boot the Live DVD with those, and if you do, a lot of the window chrome either won't paint, or will paint while you go out to get lunch. But Mint XFCE edition works like a charm. The previous low-resource official versions of Mint that had LXDE also were great on this hardware. I am staying on the Mint 13 Maya Long-Term-Support version, but prior to that I was using Mint 12 Lisa LXDE Edition which was slightly faster. You can always install LXDE but I haven't really seen the need. I think if I still had that tower, which was even lower resource, I might have gone back to LXDE, but I did use the heck out of it with XFCE.

I have to get around to switching the netbook to Mint LXDE one of these days. Everything that my wife and I use is available for Linux. We do switch off using that or the new better laptop (Windows 8 with Start8 login-to-desktop) depending on any given day's respective workload and deadlines. If I upgrade the netbook to Mint, maybe I can get the fast laptop back!

Yes, TSA scans your boarding pass barcode, if it is a mobile boarding pass on a smartphone.

Sadly, there are a lot more of Honey Boo Boo folks than there are of us.