I never use cloud resources. Too many users have been severely inconvenienced if not outright burned by cloud services that have been hacked, suppressed by some government, gone out of business, or gone down for several hours. I keep all my data where I can access it, either on my PC or on a removable hard drive that I store remotely from my PC but easily reached.

I encrypt my most sensitive data. No, I do not rely on some corporation's declaration: "Trust us. We are good. We will protect you." Instead, I use an OpenPGP application that has been reviewed by outside experts and that I have installed on my PC. The data on my removable hard drive are encrypted. Some of my PC files are also encrypted. My pass-phrase, without which my private key is useless for decryption, exists only in my head and in an envelope in my safe deposit box at a bank. My private key is on my PC in a non-standard location. If somehow someone else were to access my private key, I have a much greater problem than the compromise of my sensitive data.

See my http://www.rossde.com/PGP

I was going to ask the same question. It's bad enough that the earth's poles of rotation describe circles, loops, and spirals some meters across over a year. The earth's magnetic field is even more dynamic. Responding to solar storms, the magnetic field lines can shift many meters in a few hours.

In my lifetime, the north magnetic pole has shifted several kilometers, from an island in the Arctic Ocean to a peninsula in Canada. Furthermore, shifts by the south magnetic pole are not synchronized with shifts by the north magnetic pole.

From the description, the device would say that you are moving while you are actually standing still.

In the end, the administrator organization for Webster's pension plan was fined by the Australian government for not having proper security for its data, for not properly testing its system, and for not detecting Webster's intrusions (even though the intrusions were very visible in the system logs). Criminal charges against Webster were never pursued.

Historically, so-called "responsible disclosure" has resulted in delayed fixes. As long as the flaw is not public and causing a drum-beat of demands for a fix and a possible loss of customers, the developer organization too often treats security vulnerabilities the same as any other bug.

Worse, those who report security vulnerabilities responsibly and later go public because the fixes are excessively delayed often find themselves branded as villains instead of heroes. Consider the case of Michael Lynn and Cisco in 2005. Lynn informed Cisco of a vulnerability in Cisco's routers. When Cisco failed to fully inform its customers of the significance of the security patch, Lynn decided to go public at the 2005 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Cisco pressured Lynn's employer to fire him and also filed a lawsuit against Lynn.

Then there was the 2011 case of Patrick Webster, who notified the Pillar Administration (major administrator of retirement plans in Australia) of a security vulnerability in their server. When the Pillar Administration ignored Webster, he used the vulnerability to extract personal data from about 500 accounts from his own pension plan (a client of the Pillar Administration). Webster made no use of the extracted personal data, did not disseminate the data, and did not go public. He merely sent the data to the Pillar Administration to prove the existence of the vulnerability. As a result, the Pillar Administration notified Webster's own pension plan, which in turn filed a criminal complaint against Webster. Further, his pension plan then demanded that Webster reimburse them for the cost of fixing the vulnerability and sent letters to other account holders, implying that Webster caused the security vulnerability.

For more details, see my "Shoot the Messenger or Why Internet Security Eludes Us" at http://www.rossde.com/editoria....

I retired about a month before my 62nd birthday. I delayed taking Social Security until my wife retired 2.5 years later; she delayed to a month after I started. Instead, we lived on our investments and her meager wages. She had to continue working so that we would have group health insurance through her employer. Then, we paid for continuing her health insurance via COBRA (about 6 months for me and 18 months for her). This was all per a set of spreadsheets that I developed to determine the optimum time to retire and how to finance it.

We are now in our early 70s. Our retirement investments continue to grow faster than we spend them. Until this year, we did not even spend all the dividends and interest. I expect that, by the end of this year, we will again have underspent our dividends and interest.

I manage our investments myself, relying on mutual funds. Of course, this means I am really relying on the managers of those mutual funds. However, the choice of which funds and how much to allocate to each is my own choice. For anyone interested in my investment philosophy, see my http://www.rossde.com/invest2r....

We have a very comfortable retirement. No, I was not a corporate executive, entertainer, professional athlete, or hedge fund operator. For my entire career, I either created or tested software, primarily for use by the U.S. military to operate its earth-orbiting space satellites. No, I did not work for the government; I worked for defense contractors. (See my http://www.rossde.com/retired.... for a brief history of my career.) Our retirement is successful because I understand investing and choose to be somewhat conservative (despite my liberal politics) in how I handle money that might have to last another 30 years (being from a family that is very long lived).

U.S. and California

I have a degree in mathematics. Tax returns and their computations are merely a simple mathematical puzzle, which I easily solve.

I created two spreadsheets, one for federal income taxes and one for state income taxes. The latter is linked to the former because much of the California computations require inputs from the federal forms. Each year, I copy the prior year's spreadsheets into a new folder. I download the fill-in PDF forms for both governments and update the spreadsheets accordingly. I mark in yellow the spreadsheet cells that require new inputs; as I input those data, I remove the yellow.

California provides a Web site where I input my taxable income and filing status. The Web site tells me how much tax to pay. I wish the IRS would do the same. However, it is much easier to input into the IRS PDF files than into the California PDF files.

Since I have a large investment in a mutual fund, I can also get Turbotax for free. I download it and use it to check my spreadsheet results. I don't really like Turbotax because it requires too much irrelevant input and because it does not provide adequate capability to include explanatory attachments.

I print the PDFs and mail them via U.S. Postal Service. I never request certified or registered mail. I mailed my first tax returns when I was 16 years old. I am now 72. I have never had a mailed return go astray.

The Crimea is Putin's Sudetenland.
The Ukraine will be Putin's Czechoslovakia.
See http://www.rossde.com/editoria....

Don't change the phones. Don't change the cars. Instead, change the liability laws.

In an accident, a driver who was using a phone or other electronic communication device should be presumed to be grossly negligent. The presumption could be rebutable, but that would require the driver to prove he or she was not using any such device. With gross negligence, the law should require the automobile insurance company to cancel the driver's policy. The law should also prohibit a grossly negligent driver from collecting any insurance benefit but not prohibit the driver's victims from being compensated.

Yes, there are uninsured drivers. Where I live, the police will often confiscate their cars if they are stopped for even a minor traffic violation. Thus, there is serious incentive to be insured or else not drive.

By the way, the reason we have so many, many laws is that not enough people will do the right thing. Laws set the minimum standard for behavior. When too many individuals treat that as the maximum standard, they are inviting new laws to be passed to raise the standard.

Wrong! A good QA process prohibits the QA team from changing anything. QA can either approve the product or else send it back to the developers. In the end, QA is paid the same. Thus, QA has no vested interest in either approving or rejecting the product.

I very much like the old design. It "scans" very easily. (By "scans", I mean by the human eye and mind, not by an electronic device.)

One thing that needs to be fixed is your use of non-standard HTML and CSS. Your home page has 140 HTML errors. Your CSS has 28 errors.

Also, the yellow box that led me to this page (http://meta.slashdot.org/story/14/02/06/2329227/slashdot-tries-something-new-audience-responds) and is repeated to the top of this page says:
                        WE HEAR YOU We did tell you we wanted feedback. Hereâ€(TM)s our response.
Note the strange characters that appear in place of a simple apostrophe in "Here's".

Before you embark on a new design, make sure you are not propagating your errors.

In the University of California system 50+ years ago, a PhD candidate had to pass proficiency tests in TWO foreign languages. In the 1960s, that requirement was modified to allow the candidate to substitute a computer language for one of the foreign languages.

The more I read about dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe, the more I think about ether (also spelled "aether" or "æther"), which also was supposed to fill the universe. Dark matter and dark energy will never be found because they are as real as ether. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....

When I receive misdirected E-mail, it almost always results from someone selecting the wrong David or wrong Ross from their address book. That is, both the intended recipient and I are both known to the sender. The sender's address book is organized by names, not by E-mail addresses.

I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night for a David Ross who was an attorney, either in private practice or in the District Attorney's office. The caller would be drunk and picked out the wrong David Ross from the phone book. Again, this was a problem with my name, not with my phone number.

There are apparently many, many David Rosses. I have met two others face-to-face, both times in doctors' offices. I have exchanged E-mail with several others. I even created a Web page about this situation at http://www.rossde.com/Ross.html.

How do I handle misdirected E-mail? On the first occasion, I reply quoting the original message. I tell the sender they have the wrong David Ross. If there is one of those caveats about condfendiality and deleting misdirected messages, I also inform the sender that such warnings are unenforceable, that the sender must bear full responsibility for ensuring correct addressing of such messages.

On subsequent instances from the same sender, I use a small application that returns the message in a format that indicates the stated E-mail address is invalid. That is, the message will appear as if bounced. If that does not work, I finally threaten to make any subsequent messages public by posting them on a newsgroup.

I put an electric Hanukkah menorah in a front window. It is now put away, however, because Hanukkah ended over two weeks ago.

With both Firefox and SeaMonkey, it is very easy to spoof agent strings, to lie to Web servers by indicating I am using some browser that I have not installed. Actually, the default configuration of SeaMonkey has the user string
          Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 SeaMonkey/2.22.1
which says it is both Firefox and SeaMonkey.