HVAC is too mechanical and homeowners are too persnickety. You'd get killed on break fix and maintenance overhead and labor. If you tried not to, your service would suck and people would quit paying the leases or deduct out of pocket repair costs from lease payments.

Plus, what happens when you want to move? "Oh there's this weird lease on the HVAC..." could make it harder to sell.

The bigger problem is that HR and everyone else who sees arrest records take a "where there's smoke, there's fire" attitude towards arrests, assuming that anyone who got arrested is of questionable character, a troublemaker. Maybe there's even some assumptions that a lot of minor arrestees might get the charges dropped or dismissed.

They have no subtlety, willingness to understand what happened or differentiate why you got arrested, just that you were arrested.

Personally, I think arrest records without charges ought to be sealed after six months and it should be illegal for employers to even look at them at all. The unsealed database should be public but controlled and audited access, and not resold to database providers.

Convictions are trickier, and probably have a greater public right to know angle.

Take SSL/TLS. Are they going to demand both parties stash the session key, or do their handshaking through a proxy logging each packet?

Probably not. You're thinking like a geek instead of a politician. Politicians don't get their way by understanding technology. They get their way by finding people who do and forcing them to obey their will.

In this case, what Cameron means by banning encryption is passing laws that say something like, "If your website is used by people in the UK, you must always be able to comply with a warrant demanding data and you must provide all data, even if it is encrypted". The exact details of how that works is neither here nor there to them.

Now of course the interesting thing is how this interacts with jurisdictions, and whether it would be enough to make GCHQ shut up (probably not). The UK may or may not be able to force the hands of Facebook/Google/etc because the UK is such a huge market and they all have offices there, but China was a huge market too and Google walked away from that anyway. So it's hard to know how things would play out. For companies that have no UK exposure it's not clear what they'd do - probably use ad-hoc blocking of any website they suspect might be used by The Evil Terrorists if it doesn't comply. Could be a mess depending on how heavily they enforce it.

All those figures say is that birds of a feather flock together. Tory voters tend to live near each other and because the UK has a political system designed a long time ago for resolving local issues, not surprisingly it doesn't translate votes to seats directly at the national level. As local politics becomes less and less relevant, of course, people feel this system no longer works well for them.

However, as you note, it would not have mattered if Labour had won, or any other party. There are NO parties in the UK that believe people should be able to keep secrets from the government. It's just not something that fits into the political worldview. And because the voting system collapses thousands of decisions down to just one every so many years, surveillance and encryption is simply not democratically decided at all. Basically the wheel of power is decided by the economy, and that's about it.

Unfortunately this is not specific to the UK and is true nearly everywhere, France is even worse for example, and the USA pretends to care but realistically lots of Congressmen would very much like total surveillance of Americans .... and only feel they can't demand it openly because of that darned constitution. That won't stop them doing it in secret though!

Ha ha, did you think he meant warrants?

He meant warrant. Unfortunately as is often the case with the Tories, they use words differently to how ordinary people do. By warrant he means a ministerial rubber-stamp. For instance Theresa May last year alone "signed" nearly 2,800 warrants, a number that clearly shows zero attempt to investigate their legitimacy and indeed almost certainly means some anonymous flunky is signing them on her behalf.

And I haven't been able to fly on any planet with a gravity.

If you put a caveat like "without taking my fingers off the keyboard", of course you can claim "victory". But, with a Keyboard Clit, you still have to take at least one hand out of the "typing position" to use the Clit; so it is just as "disruptive" to touch-typing as a Trackpad.

But Keyboard Clits suck much more.

Then you just plain don't like touchpads; because Apple is nearly universally-recognized as having the best Trackpad, by a very large margin.

So, you can do one of two things:

1. Get an external mouse. Done.

2. Use the most-excellent Keyboard Shortcuts built into OS X (and then you don't even have to remove your fingers from the keyboard!). Look at this list, and this list. If you can't find sufficient abilities in those two lists, you are truly unique in your text-manipulation requirements.

The only real authority over any IP block is in BGP announcements and who believes them.

Normally I wear protection, but then I thought, 'When am I gonna make it back to Haiti?'

It's really not hard to think of increased Fed control over fiber being a cover for NSA tapping activity. If the FBI is monitoring your fiber and something goes down, it's easy to say "we're on the job, nothing got cut, you must have an error in your network".

It used to be such ideas were tinfoil hat, but post-Snowden nothing seems tinfoil hat anymore.

That's a tad harsh. I have a 1680x1050 display connected as a third display via a USB-3 adapter and while I didn't expect much, it's worked pretty well for sysadmin tasks. I even occasionally throw full-screen Netflix/HBO/Amazon video on it without any serious problems.

I think the real benefit here isn't gee-whiz cutting edge display technology as much as it is a set of display(s) that are fairly seamless to carry around and use with a laptop to give you a triple head display.

It would be nicer, sure, to have displayport chaining and super high resolution display support but even without that you might get a more useful display resolution than 1366x768 and a pretty seamless mounting and portability setup than existing solutions.

And if they manage to use USB3.1 10 gig, it might lessen any lag effects, although it might be argued that displayport would be the more widely available interface.

I think you would probably make a lot of sacrifices for 252 square feet. That's a square 15 feet on a side, smaller than a standard 2 car garage. My dad lived in a 40 foot motorhome (8 ft x 40 ft) and that's 320 square feet and it felt small when I stayed in it; plus, most everything was motorhome-sized (stove, toilet/bath, etc) and a lot of built-ins & storage efficiencies.

This guy says he has a wife and 3 kids -- I think it might take some religious type orientation to live in a cold climate with 5 people in 250 sq ft of space.

The most bare necessities like a toilet, sink, tub, bed, stove, fridge, table, chairs add up pretty quickly. I didn't dig around enough in his web site to see if there were inside pictures, but I'd be curious to see how its arranged.

My biggest beef is just that the poster was disingenuous -- "I built a stone house for $7k". What he built is smaller than most garages and approaches a large shed in actual size. I'm also skeptical $7k can actually cover building, furnishing and decorating even that small space completely. Maybe if he moved in existing appliances. Maybe if he built all his own case goods. Maybe if the finish materials are like prison-basic (just coating the slab with a gloss topcoat instead of tile or carpet), white paint on the walls, etc

Actual Screenshots... But of what? Somebody's CONCEPT of what it MIGHT have looked like?

Show me the actual site that these came from; because I think even you would agree that they sure don't look like the screenshots on the Apple site, which are easily verified.

So, "source" for those pics, or STFU.