While the NUCs are overkill for HTPC duty, the PIs are also not sufficiently there either. A PI just has problems keeping up with the user interface (XBMC).

Something like a Chromebox is the sweet spot. Decent enough GPU for video decoding and a CPU that's not ridiculously anemic.

You mean that Canadians have a nasty spending cap and get turned down for treatments that Americans take for granted? That kind of cheap?

Don't swim in the kool-aid.

Better yet, if people are re-inventing your work why do you even think you should be granted ownership of it? Chances are that you contributed nothing to the state of the art. You didn't publish anything that's actually useful. Patents are rubbish as documentation. So if that's all you've contributed to the world, then you didn't contribute anything really.

The fact that ANYONE could "re-invent" your stuff means the patent should be tossed.

Patents are evil that way. They allow patent holders to claim ownership of the work of others. It's legalized theft.

Since no on knows who owns VitnetX, it would be surprising if you did. The Technology appears to have been developed by SAIC under govt contract and has been licesenced to Microsoft and others. Now that jury award has been nullified on appeal. So either by liscening or not, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping people from using the technology. So if that's the NSA objective here it seems to have not succeeded or perhaps there nver was an NSA agenda and it was simply about making money off invented technology?

Nah, the screen lights up just fine.

You might not give a shit now but 15 years ago, the speed of S/MIME was so cripplingly slow it DID matter.

The first mistake made by email clients is they added support for a broken-by-design protocol called S/MIME which used asymmetric encryption through the entire message and was thus cripplingly slow. The ciphers were also covered by patents and had weak key lengths. Messages were signed with a cert like https, and were required to be signed by a CA. And you couldn't get a key unless you paid a CA for one. Oh and keys expired meaning you might have multiple dead keys to maintain if you wanted to open an old email. And no email client or ISP actually offered to give you a key or set you up with one so you had to figure this all out for yourself. And functionality like search / filtering broke on encrypted mail because the client never bothered to maintain an encrypted index of the plaintext that could have allowed it to work.

Then PGP / GPG solved a lot of this bullshit, starting with generating keys for free but email clients never bothered to give it proper support. Instead they offered up some plugin APIs and unsurprisingly PGP / GPG ended up with half assed implementations too. Even fairly good extensions like Enigmail didn't integrate with the client as closely as they should.

And by this point cloud based email took off and crypto fell by the way side. If you want to use crypto in GMail then you have to cut and paste and clearly it's too much effort.

So I really don't blame GPG here. If the first thing an email did during setup was ENCOURAGE a user to create a key; and by default published that key; and attached the key sig to outgoing emails; and automatically looked up incoming email addresses; and automatically encrypted content when all recipients had their own key; and didn't hobble functionality for any of this (e.g. search still worked). THEN this wouldn't even be a problem. Encryption would have been the default and it would be an irrelevance if it was PGP or GPG was under the covers.

Yes I find reaching into my pocket and fiddling with a phone to find out the time to be extremely liberating.

Damn right. I bought some tech books on my kindle and ended up buying the dead trees because I just can't get into poorly sized pictures (usually code blocks, etc) and what not. Granted, I don't buy any more dead tree *fiction* and love my ereader for that. I still prefer magazines over digital ezines (I subscribe to Interzone, for example, vs buying the e-version), too, and part of that is because I still like reading the ads.

but my LFR queue just popped.

I don't have to "imagine" anything. I have seen it firsthand. I have seen the no-talent schmucks from India used as scab labor and I have seen the overqualified and highly talented types from 1st world countries. Both were underpaid and in a vulnerable position.

Talent worth importing is talent worth importing with full status and no strings attached.

No. The H1B debate is about creating an easy to exploit underclass. Even the "talented types" get abused by corporations. Corporations get a free pass to rape pillage and plunder because that's just (Ayn Rand) trendy these days.

Corporations want people that are easy to exploit. People with full legal status are harder to abuse. They also have higher expecations and higher overhead.

I wouldn't even go that far. In all of the locations I looked at where I have some knowledge of the going rates, that data actually showed that the H1-Bs are on the low end of the scale.

This data doesn't appear to be anything to brag about really.

They already know what they say - "Software failure. Guru meditation #00000004.0000AAEF"

"I am the serenest!"