And how long is that excuse valid for? It's not like Europe has been very peaceful and tripped Africa up on purpose, we've started two world wars in the last 100 years on our own turf. Yes, I realize problems don't go away in a day or a year or even a decade but look how far Europe has come in the last 70 years. How far has Africa come? How much aid money, emergency relief, how many education and healthcare programs have they gotten for free?

Still trotting out that old excuse and blaming the white man for all their woes is probably going to backfire. It only nourishes the people who think Africa is the way it is because they're primitive deadbeats who can't get anything done on their own. It's not that there's anything wrong with the people as such, take a black man and put him in a different environment and he might end up as President and a Harvard magna cum laude graduate.

My impression is that most of Africa's problems are cultural, like for example the response to Ebola. If they'd just stop touching their dead and seek medical help they'd do fine, but through ignorance and indifference and working against those trying to help them they'll just let it spread. Like HIV, there's a reason it's a huge problem south of Sahara and practically nowhere else and it's because for some cultural reason they just don't seem to value safe sex.

I have a Nexus 5 with a long boot time encryption password and a shorter unlock pin. Seems it was already fixed.

To what data are you referring? Google holds keys for some stuff like email, which is sent in plaintext anyway and which they need to offer webmail access. They claim not to have the keys to synced browser data though, and apart from some innuendo and "of course they do" you offer no evidence to the contrary.

Unlike Apple, Google can't recover your backups if you are completely locked out of your account and don't know the password. That suggests that they really don't have the key.

Besides which, local encryption on your phone is designed to frustrate thrives and other people trying to rape your phone like the police. It also makes wiping easy and effective when you want to sell it.

The language is very specific. Maybe they didn't get a request for bulk data, maybe they just had to provide a back door into everything so that law enforcement could serve itself. Then again, maybe not, we have no way of knowing, which makes all American company's claims that they resist the government worthless.

and Germany. And the Netherlands. And a tonne of other countries where Socialism works just fine thank you very much. What _doesn't_ work is mixing American Style right-wing Reagan-Thatcher politics in. See the UK's collapsing economy for that, or wealth inequality in the U.S. that's gone back to pre-Black Tuesday leves.

Also, there's this little think called progress. I'm too lazy to google for the Robert Reich infographic that show that productivity is up 80% since 1979 but wages are only up 8% (and that proves wages stopped growing in America in 1979). Forget all that. We're rapidly automating away just about every job. Even _China_ is replacing workers with robots. When robots are cheaper than Chinese slave labor you know you have a problem.

So, when we don't need people to work 20 hours a week let alone the 50 they're doing now (you can google the /. article on that one too) what the _heck_ do we do with 'em all. The world _doesn't_ need ditch diggers....

If you start with PHP, even Brainfuck looks fun and refreshing. Jesus pal, talk about damning a language with faint praise.

Another attempt by a vendor to try to lock in software development and make cross platform development incredibly difficult by introducing a new language.

Fuck, I do tire of the sociopathic tendencies of corporations.

Yeah, but I think he figured the punishment for denying the cops access was preferable to what he would have had to suffer if the cops had gotten at the content of that hard drive and they couldn't lock him up indefinitely for refusing to decrypt his hard drive. At least not in a modern European democracy.

Ok, I'll bite. The necktie is also called cravat in Englisch, cravate in French, krawaat in Dutch and Krawatte German. This is derived from "Croat" or "hrvat" (as the croatic word for Croat). See Wiktionary: cravat.

You can put a complex password on your iPhone:

1) Settings->Passcode, enter your 4 digit passcode.
2) Flip the "Simple Passcode" switch.
3) Set your new arbitrary length complex password.
4) Enable the "Erase Data" setting which wipes the device after 10 incorrect password inputs.
5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.

The encryption on these iDevices and the Macs is non trivial to crack. Combine this encryption with a properly strong password and that wipe feature and even the Police would be shit out of luck. I know of a case where a guy resolutely refused to provide police with the password and crypto-key for his MacBook. The cops shipped the laptop to Cupertino who sent it back after a few weeks having failed to crack the drive encryption. The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe. Your only hope of getting into a properly password protected and encrypted device be it an iDevice, an Android device or a Windows phone is if there happens to be some software vulnerability that enables you to bypass the login screen.

Indeed. And quite often even dead FOSS projects can be cannibalized. The difference between dead open source and dead closed source projects is that the bones of one sit in an open pit that anyone can pick at, and the other sits in a concrete bunker twenty miles underground.

Actually, the european history is full of peaceful separations and dissolutions of states. First the german kingdoms occupying the territories of the western part of the Roman Empire, which often were split up between the sons of the old king, then in the Middle Age the different estates which were bought, sold, or given as dowry into marriages, causing a constant change of borders. Switzerland officially left the Holy Roman Empire in 1648, Liechtenstein separated from Germany in 1815, Norway from Sweden in 1905, etc.pp, all without any violent acts, just by public votes or contracts.

No. Slovakia and the Czech Republic separated from the common state of Czechoslovakia in 1993 completely peaceful.

I guess you have not seen how people swipe through the gates at stations. It certainly would be more hassle so I can see people sticking with their NFC cards for the daily commute. Does it work even if the phone is locked?

Google Translate, or Bing if you are desperate.