Now I can flame them for abandoning their perfectly secure old sync method in favor of a "simpler" but much less secure username and password scheme.

To their credit, the move was widely praised on "tech sites"(1) as a welcome change.

(1): "tech sites" - Websites created or managed by hipsters with iPads that know what a partition is and wear NERD t-shirts. They also reformat their mom's computer from time to time. See: slashdot, arstechnica

Currently doing my part to slashdot the site. As of 10AM PST it is down.

My god this shit needs to stop. Affirmative action is just as ridiculous and hypocritical today as it was the day it was suggested. There is nothing to see here - Yahoo has a female CEO for crying out loud.

Your sarcasm is concerning. You should be far less eager to support that level of restrictive control.

I don't mean to offend, so let me first apologize if I do. But, I really don't like this defeatist attitude. We, the people, are supposed to have the power. Not the corporations, and certainly not the government. Through a combination of giving up, being apathetic, and being ignorant we are, day by day, forming our society to be well suited to a despot.

One of the main benefits of a capitalist society is that the real authority is money. Even though the government has carte blanche to print money whenever they want, the populace as a whole will still always have the power just by our sheer numbers. We have the purchasing power and we all need to start voting with our dollars.

I certainly don't have all the answers but here are some great places to start:

1) Stop supporting the cloud. The cloud does not benefit you. Say no to shit like Office 365, Google drive, and Chrome OS. Don't willingly make your life dependent on online services that care nothing for your privacy.

2) Don't support Apple, Google, or the new Microsoft. These companies all have a culture that values controlling the consumer and locking them into walled gardens. Say no to it, despite the minor conveniences they may provide. Buy an international phone and run Cyanogen mod. Use duck duck go. Granted it will be more difficult, but there are way around using these industry titans. If you have to choose one, stay away from Apple. They are, by far, the worst.

3) Bring your support back to local companies. If you're a sysadmin, programmer, or even just a regular consumer, outsource your infrastructure locally. Get a local VPS and put everything there. Stay away from the big guys.

4) Don't buy Cisco, Linksys, or anything American. The American companies, whether their fault or not, have proven to be the worst offenders as far as selling out to their government. Punish the American economy by spending your dollars elsewhere.

5) Get rid of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Google+, and any other software that insists on centralized control and exploitation of it's user base. If you can't get rid of social media, for the love of god don't use your social media accounts as your single sign on provider. If a website or service demands an account, get a throw-away email address and never give them your true identity. If they only support SSO from social media, refuse to use that website.

We can do it. There's no more new land to run to, colonize, and wipe the slate clean. Running and giving up is no longer an option. We have to stand and fight.

Leave the touch screen computer people to their delusions. Did you know they are completely replacing workstations and laptops any day now?

My thoughts exactly. Piracy is extremely easy on the DS. It's so easy you basically just need to know how to purchase a special cartridge and copy files to a micro sd card.

The DS' success can be attributed to their unique IP, the low price, or the high build quality, but personally I think all these features break down to one thing: kids. DS was/is the platform for kids aged 4-14. You'd be hard pressed to find a kid in this age bracket that doesn't own one. The device is cheap, the games are cheap, you can beat the shit out of the thing and it wont break. It has novelty features like a 3D screen, a wide variety of exclusive titles that directly appeal to kids, and easy to configure parental controls. It's the dream platform for kids... and for parents to buy for their kids. You know... so their not bothering you asking you questions or breaking your things.

Amongst all these trolls and flamebaiters perhaps you can explain this a little better.

I know there are containers (mp4, avi) and codecs (h.264, vp8) so where exactly does something like DASH or HLS fit in here? Is this the streaming protocol for the video? If so is it contained within the file like the codec is?

AFAIK the code to implement html5 video looks something like this:
<video>
<source src="video.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs="theora,vorbis""/>
<source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E,mp4a.40.2""/>
</video>

Nowhere in there is a streaming protocol defined.

I could be wrong, but isn't the Nexus 5 both 4G and LTE?

The wiki page for it claims:

GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
Model LG-D820 (North America)
CDMA band class: 0/1/10
WCDMA bands: 1/2/4/5/6/8/19
LTE bands: 1/2/4/5/17/19/25/26/41
Model LG-D821 (Rest of World)
WCDMA bands: 1/2/4/5/6/8
LTE bands: 1/3/5/7/8/20

So it looks like the LG-D821 would be her best option. She might not have LTE in North America but will still have GSM. I not an expert on this subject so definitely do some more research. Good luck!

Anyone who's used Samsung software knows it's a steaming pile of shit (touchwiz anyone). They need to stick to what their good at... Hardware.

I had it at 25. It wasn't that bad. Mild fever for about a day. Itched like hell though.

There's more to it than that. These libertarians all circle jerk each other over a revelation that money equals debt and inflation is a hidden tax on the people. It likely all started with the zeitgeist movement, which is merely an extension of the wild ramblings of Acharya S.

What all these new age libertarians fail to realize is that for most of history the world ran exactly how they are advocating. The invention of "easy credit" isn't a genius conspiracy perpetrated on the people by shadowy unknown figures, but rather an attempt to empower the common man with privileges like land ownership, and starting his own business. Banks, or anyone for that matter, wouldn't lend you hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy property if it had to come out of their own pocket. This means the only people able to buy land, would be those with the cash on hand, or more accurately, the rich. History is full of elite aristocracies of business' and land owners that existed actual tyrants over the common man. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to that times.

That being said, the banking system certainly isn't perfect. Allowing a private entity to have so much control over our money supply is probably a bad idea. At the very least the central bank should probably be government controlled and not for profit, with the sole ability to lend money through brokerage arms. Private banks would thus have to become brokers for the publicly owned central bank. Of course, given the titanic industry that is private banking, it would be a massive and messy undertaking to make a change like this.

I don't want to live here anymore. There's too much idiocy.

Sadly, I don't think the government has feared the people in quite some time. Even worse, I've noticed an increasing trend of this generation looking towards the government as a sort of surrogate parent to take care of them in their adult lives. We have big brother, because we've asked for it.

So, if I can sum up his entire speech in a sentence:

"Hey, we're not as evil as a lot of other countries out there! PS. Turrirrists"