The USB 3.0 sticks are pretty fast and 128GB sticks are getting cheaper all the time, with cheap 256GB units on the horizon. They are light, small, have good retention, and make it easy to divide your data types into separate physical units so if you only want to retrieve the family photos you don't need to pick up the tax returns and such as well.

Everybody and his dog who happens to be an Excel whiz or a Word macro expert is arguably a coder. As are a lot of people who call themselves programmers. Do we want more of that skillset? Or do we want more people who can take a longer, more structured, project-oriented view and who write maintainable, extensible programs? I'm asking the question in all seriousness.

FTA:

By the Spanish judge's logic, closing the curtains in your house and owning a copy of Mein Kampf would also cause him to view you as a potential Nazi.

Perhaps those who control the police are the only ones who are allowed to be "against democracy"...

One thing I don't get - why is the West - Europe and Americas - continuing to poke their noses into other countries' business? Yes, terrorists need to be stopped - but how about we just stop creating terrorists? If the US and other countries hadn't been massively interfering in Middle East politics for decades, propping up dictators in the name of Big Oil, causing wars, and doing all sorts of other shitty things, do you really think even the batshit-craziest of Muslims would be so upset about some cartoons that they'd come to our countries to commit suicide just so they could kill us? I sincerely doubt it. No, we went out of our way repeatedly to make enemies in the Middle East long before Charlie Hebdo added one more insult to a long list of grievous injuries.

Have you ever read Frank Herbert's 'Dune'? The Fremen are an object lesson in what happens when people with an extreme religious streak whom you've oppressed for a long time finally acquire the wherewithal to fight back. And interestingly enough, Fremen culture was clearly modelled on Middle Eastern cultures.

Well spoken sir, and well thought out. I wish I had mod points.

I was getting ready to tell you that bullshit flag wasn't gonna fly, as I also was under the impression that Japan would have surrendered soon even if the bombs hadn't been dropped. But it seems there's still quite a bit of controversy regarding the point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

So your call of bullshit may or may not be correct, but we'll probably never know definitively one way or the other.

"...we'd like to make that available to the whole world."

Yup, they make your 'stuff' available to the world. Even when you don't want them to.

At least for automobiles, there's a simple legislative fix for this - if only government had the guts. Mandate that EVERY automotive engineer be forced to spend two months every year, (or one year in every four, or whatever), working in a dealership garage as an auto mechanic fixing the cars his company produced. A few experiences with having to lift an engine to replace an oil filter or a spark plug, (all the while listenening to the taunts of the 'real' mechanics he's working with), and that kind of design stupidity would stop right quick.

Yeah, I know it's a fantasy - but sometimes imagining a world where the government looks out for the interests of its citizens and the future of our planet by actually calling corporations to heel is all that keeps me going - especially when I'm faced with how determinedly stupid the human race can be...

I often want to see a new movie at the cinema. But then I think of the car and bank commercials, trivia games, and other assorted pre-movie corporate crap that has become part of the standard cinema experience, and I decide to wait for the DVD release. I gotta wonder how many other people are staying away for the same reasons.

I have had myopia since I was 12, and now have age-onset presbyopia aw well. I tried progressives for a week, then took them back and exchanged them for my normal ~-5.5 diopter prescription. Even for regular use just walking around, I found the weird distortions that varied drastically as I turned my head were just too obtrusive and disorienting. And I haven't been able to find contacts that don't make my eyes gum up and blur. But if I could wear contacts, I would have my optometrist prescribe them to under-correct for distance, so I could leave my glasses off for computer work and most casual situations. Then, for driving, or anything else that required good distance vision, I would have glasses with a small negative diopter value such that the combination of glasses and contacts would provide the necessary distance correction.

The more normal approach would be to have contacts to fully correct for distance and have reading glasses. But during the short time I wore contacts, I'd get panicky when I couldn't lay hands on my readers and was unable to see well up close, whereas being unable to see well at a distance bothers me much less. Now I just have two sets of glasses, and really need three sets. It sucks, but so far I've been unable to find a better solution.

Mod parent up! Whoever modded this comment down either hasn't investigated the matter, or sympathizes with those whose goal is the total destruction of privacy for average citizens.

A penalty that stands a chance of getting the offender's attention, rather than one that's considered simply a cost of doing business. The fine should have been higher though - perhaps an additional $90M as purely punitive damages. Companies need to learn that wilfully screwing over their customers really, really hurts their bottom line. Also, an award approaching a fifth of a billion would likely piss off enough shareholders that several heads would roll.

I don't use mobile email, and don't use Yahoo as my primary email anyway. But on the desktop Yahoo is pretty useable if you disable JavaScript. (In fact I find the non-JS version to be better than Gmail's incredibly annoying "we know what you want even though you don't think you want it" set of 'features'). You get a stupid warning on login and have to click a link to use the non-JS version. But after that, a lot of the annoying, bloated bling disappears. And as a bonus, you can have multiple emails open in multiple tabs - something the braindead JS version is incapable of.

Unfortunately, adding attachments to an email requires JavaScript. I just temporarily allow scripts for Yahoo, then revoke the permissions when I'm done.

Just stop with all the RFID bullshit on credit and debit cards! Really, is that extra few seconds taken to insert and enter a PIN such an onerous burden? People in that much of a hurry aren't likely to use that precious sliver of time to stop and smell the roses anyway.

For those worried about cell phones and the like, I suspect the new-style duds will do little or nothing to impede those signals. They're a couple of orders of magnitude higher in frequency than the current RFID payment systems, and they use far-field RF, whose intensity falls off with with the square of distance. The intensity of Near-Field Communications falls off with the cube of distance, and is more 'magnetic' than 'electro' in nature, so the shielding mechanism tends to be different.

For myself, I plan on de-activating all of my contactless payment cards by breaking the antenna loop with a drill, as soon as I can get them imaged so I know where the antenna traces are. I've already had my banks disable the feature, so in theory I shouldn't be able to make contactless payments, but that won't stop info theft via unauthorized readers.

And yes, I DO wear my tinfoil hat proudly...

Everbody knows that invading digital privacy across international boundaries is the job of corporations, not governments!